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.
There's enough variance in the results that I suspect a fair bit of bias in some or all of the polling (as well as shifts). But those caveats aside, it seems there are a couple of themes:
There's fairly decent support for the right of Israel to exist (even as a Jewish state) among Israeli Arabs, varying between around 30% and 85% depending on the poll and the exact question. A couple of polls had solid majority support for personally remaining citizens of Israel vs any other country, including a future possible Palestinian state.
On the other hand, it's quite remarkable (though not really in hindsight) how large proportions of both communities hold views that would be considered way outside the Overton Window in places like the US, especially if you said the same thing about a different ethnic group. For example:
Multiple polls have about 40% of Arab citizens denying the Holocaust.
One poll showed 75% of Israeli Jews would not want to live in a building with Arabs, and around half would be in favour of "transferring or expelling" the Arab population.
On the one hand, it seems like most Israeli Arabs, while not Israel's biggest fans, are generally pretty okay with it. And presumably, that number would go up if Israel were more conciliatory. So that lends credence to the dove worldview that Israel wouldn't be destroyed by allowing Palestinians to return.
On the other hand, a June 2015 poll had 84% of Palestinians in Gaza with a favourable view of Islamic Jihad, who are responsible for many terrorist attacks. Maybe a more dovish Israel would lower this number somewhat, and maybe this would moderate over time. But I think it's pretty likely that allowing a whole lot of current Gaza residents into Israel would result in at least a short-term significant increase in strife.
Finally, there's no way that a majority of Israeli Jews would be happy with living in a state with a significantly higher Arabic population.
I think polls are fairly useless for issues like this. Israeli Arabs live in a society where they are a minority closely scrutinized by a distrustful majority. If you changed that society in a way that greatly increases the proportion that is Arab, new possibilities emerge for the people you previously polled - where before they had to reconcile themselves to a Jewish state, now they might not be so restricted. It's hard to blame Israeli Jews for refusing the right of return when the only reward is likely going to be the meager satisfaction of getting to say "I told you so" later.
There's fairly decent support for the right of Israel to exist (even as a Jewish state) among Israeli Arabs, varying between around 30% and 85% depending on the poll and the exact question. A couple of polls had solid majority support for personally remaining citizens of Israel vs any other country, including a future possible Palestinian state.
So anywhere from 15-70% of one class of citizen are against the country they are a citizen of even existing and you're suggesting this is good news for making into citizens in millions more of that class of person, members of that class who are NOT selected for friendliness to the nation? This is not good news.
It's interesting that despite explicit favoritism towards Jews, Israel treats its Arab citizens pretty well from the government level- after all, Arab Christians have the best outcomes of any group in Israel, which is probably close to predictable on an IQ basis- and reserves most of the actual state mistreatment for non-citizen palestinians.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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).
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.
One general observation, not directly connected to middle eastern affairs, but not entirely unconnected.
Big Twitter OSINT accounts watching Ukraine war are being deleted, one by one. Including the big one, the master of the lists, Oryx.
The reason given (if any is given) is that they are "too tired", that they are dirt poor and their work will not make them any money, that Pentagon and CIA keep profiting from their effort - and it is more threadbare than "dog ate my homework" excuse from your school days.
These people claimed to be hobbyists, observing wars in Syria and Ukraine just from pure interest and rejected with contempt any suspicions that they are something else, that they are somewhat connected to US/NATO military and three letter organization.
Not implausible in itself - bird watchers and train spotters dedicate their lives to their passion without being paid by Big Bird or Big Rail, and war can be nearly as interesting and fascinating.
Except that hobbyist will not destroy his life work in a fit of pique. You will not see rail fan threatening to smash his model trains and throw away his collections if railroad company does not pay him, and then following on his threat. But you will easily see paid employee closing down his office and shredding his archives when his rail branch is closed and he is reassigned to other work elsewhere.
So what to expect? If the dead bird site is true reality and material world just follows what happens there, we can expect that the whole Ukraine affair is going to wind down, all the way to (official or unofficial) cease fire, and all "happenings" will be once again happening in the Middle East.
Indeed. I heavily doubt Zelensky is speaking less; he's a politician after all, and they never shut up. But they rely on other people to put their words in front of your eyes.
I don't think the tide of public opinion can turn for Russia, but there is a recess from the high tide a year ago. And for the war - I have long stated that it is competition who will lose faster. Could as well be Ukraine.
Especially when Ukrainian men can just have to get to one of the borders to be free of subscription
"Tide of public opinion" was creation of mass media that decided in Feb 2022 to play up this war as much as possible (instead of ignoring it like, for example, contemporary war in Ethiopia)
We can imagine alternate world where, on February 24, newspapers of record dedicated front pages to latest controversy about drag queens and somewhere on corner of page six was report:
KIEV: Today, Russian forces crossed border of Ukraine in territory disputed between Russia and Ukraine.
Situation is unclear, some local sources report about fights between Russian army and Ukrainian militias.
Russian government says it is involved in limited operation against Jewish Nazi Satanist homosexual terrorists based in disputed territory, and claims it holds no aggressive intent against Ukraine.
Ukrainian government denies presence of Jewish Nazi Satanist homosexual terrorists on Ukraine soil and denounces Russian actions as aggression against Ukraine.
World leaders call for cease-fire and negotiations between all involved parties.
In this world, only people who would be watching Ukraine would be people with relatives in the area and OSINT/war fans, "public opinion" would have different concerns.
I dunno. I kind of like it when Russia doesn’t get what it wants. Not particularly strongly, but more than I care about miscellaneous civil wars. Imagine how the Westerners who actually lived through the Cold War might feel.
Could be that the tide is turning in favor of russia.
We do not know.
We (for value of "we" consisting of open source users) can have good idea about Russian overall strength and losses, because Russia is decrepit gangster shithole open and free society that is incapable of keeping secrets and leakes info like sieve.
In contrast, Ukraine is black hole, fully proficient in OPSEC. Very little info comes out, as Teixeira leaks show, even Pentagon relies on official Ukrainian (and Oryx) data in their analysis.
Whatever you say about SBU, they know their work, they are true heirs of Cheka, NKVD and KGB, they deserve the Dzerzhinsky statue kept by Petrov and Boshirov clown team.
Except that hobbyist will not destroy his life work in a fit of pique. You will not see rail fan threatening to smash his model trains and throw away his collections if railroad company does not pay him, and then following on his threat. But you will easily see paid employee closing down his office and shredding his archives when his rail branch is closed and he is reassigned to other work elsewhere.
I would take this more seriously if I hadn't seen some very talented and prolific video game modders delete all of their work in a fit of pique. It does happen, not that I have a strong opinion of whether that's the case in the OSINT community.
Edit: It literally happened again in Total War Warhammer 3. The creator is (justifiably) mad at the game dev, but they've decided to express that by halting work on their mods and even promising to take them down soon. At least they're letting others continue their work.
Edit: It literally happened again in Total War Warhammer 3. The creator is (justifiably) mad at the game dev, but they've decided to express that by halting work on their mods and even promising to take them down soon. At least they're letting others continue their work.
I stand corrected, it is possible that several major OSINT accounts just burned out and decided to shut it down at the same time.
Now is the moment for Israel to return to its founding premise: the Jewish State has an absolute right to exist. A Divine gift, gifted to a Divine nation, charged with a Divine purpose.
Very strange for professing Hindu to say.
Yes, technically, all life has a divine soul and divine essence, but we know Vivek does not wanted to say it, we know he wanted to say: "Hello my fellow Evangelicals, I am one of you! Vote for me!"
And, judging from bird site, it does not work. Every Vivek's tweet talking about God is followed by numerous Christians posting pics of many armed Hindu deities and asking "What God, Vivek? WHAT GOD?"
It is just so inauthentic. I do wonder why pols get such bad advice. Trump has a following because he is his true self. It isn’t entirely what he says but that you believe he is the person saying it.
Every Vivek's tweet talking about God is followed by numerous Christians posting pics of many armed Hindu deities and asking "What God, Vivek? WHAT GOD?"
Those tend not to be boomer evangelical Christians, lol.
And if Vivek was a serious threat to Trump, he would lose his boomer evangelical support when Trump challenged him to eat a steak and then asked if it was because "kali has blood coming out of her whatever".
sarker
Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?
Eetan 6mo ago
Every Vivek's tweet talking about God is followed by numerous Christians posting pics of many armed Hindu deities and asking "What God, Vivek? WHAT GOD?"
This tweet is certainly pandering, but I've known several religious Hindus who talk about God singular. There's enough wiggle room in Hindu theology for that notion too, as well as the notion of a pantheon of many armed gods.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
Eetan 6mo ago
And, judging from bird site, it does not work. Every Vivek's tweet talking about God is followed by numerous Christians posting pics of many armed Hindu deities and asking "What God, Vivek? WHAT GOD?"
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Regarding Western liberal narratives on the Gaza war, I’m noticing something I find somewhat odd. I see mainstream liberals arguing that clueless college students are indoctrinated by loony leftist propagandists to be rabid enemies of Israel, our greatest ally, the only democracy in the Middle East etc. And they seem to be saying this without any reflection on the past, where conservatives they hate, like Ben Shapiro and others, have been warning everyone of the same trend for basically two decades, at least since the early years of Bush Jr’s presidency. Now that the true extent of anti-Zionist agitation on Western college campuses is revealed on prime TV for the first time in almost a decade (the last major Israeli military operation in Gaza was in 2014, I reckon, not counting the mass shootings at the border in 2018 or so), targeted at a nation and a people they actually care about, suddenly it’s a real problem, a real concern to be tackled.
Now I understand that one can come up with all sorts of cynical and mundane interpretations as to why this is, how it’s unsurprising and so on, and I get that. But then I remember that there were violent anti-police protests in the summer of 2020, the campaign to remove Confederate monuments, the various protests against Trump’s rallies, and in these cases the tone of the protests were, as far as I can tell, pretty much set by the same leftist college agitators who initiate the current anti-Zionist protests, the ones who call themselves anticolonialists, social justice advocates, antiracists and so on. And the big difference was that they weren’t criticized by mainstream liberals the way they are now, even though all their agitation and messaging stems from the same ideological tenets.
One thing you arguably haven’t considered is that the US ‘Lib’ reaction to what Israel is doing in Gaza might have been very different if this was October 2020 instead of October 2023.
In the last three years violent crime has surged upward in major cities, some ‘restorative justice’ prosecutors like Chesa have been removed or have had impeachment proceedings start against them, Adams won as the ‘tough on crime’ Democrat in New York, many bail reform laws have been adjusted or reversed, a lot of ‘defund the police’ stuff faded away or was cancelled, stuff like the Smollett thing and the BLM corruption filtered through to mainstream NYT liberals, ordinary urban American PMC progressives now hate the homeless drug addicts in their cities with a fury they certainly couldn’t muster in 2020 in the days of the CHAZ etc. In 2020, the hard left ran roughshod over the ‘center’ because Trump was in power and this was ‘the resistance’ and centrists had zero message other than total acquiescence to the activist fringe plan.
In 2023 there’s a much more firm divide between the ‘center left’ and the activist left. That’s because of higher crime rates, illegal immigration now affecting liberal cities like NYC in a more major way, homeless crime spirally out of control and - of course - the fact that Biden is in power. It’s in this climate that we see the divide between ‘center left’ and ‘far left’ (or activist left) on Israel and Gaza. The more conservative wing of the Democratic aligned movement has reasserted itself - Biden celebrating Columbus Day (cancelled by activists in 2020) is one example. By contrast the more radical student/activist fringe doesn’t seem to have moderated its message and is similarly zealous on Palestine as it was on BLM.
Thanks for the detailed reply. Actually I did consider all that; that's what I was referring to when mentioning "cynical and mundane interpretations". No offense meant, but that's what they are.
I'll only nitpick on two issues. As far as I know, it's indeed true that 'in the last three years violent crime has surged upward in major cities', but this trend didn't start in 2020 (although it did escalate after that) but much earlier, before the Trump presidency, in fact, around 2012-15. And the same applies to the problems with the mentally ill homeless, I'm sure.
I'll only nitpick on two issues. As far as I know, it's indeed true that 'in the last three years violent crime has surged upward in major cities', but this trend didn't start in 2020 (although it did escalate after that) but much earlier, before the Trump presidency, in fact, around 2012-15.
At least where I’m from in New York, it really was 2020 when violent crime rose after a very long, mostly steady decline.
No, because I don't have the habit of saving the URL of articles I read in a database in case someone asks me for the source on an online form 8 years later.
I remember that Trump brought up the rising violent crime rate as an issue during the campaign, and liberals were denying it out of hand. Earlier, in 2014 and 2015, I've seen articles on the issue, and there were people debating whether it can be indeed explained by the Ferguson effect or not.
The U.S. murder rate reached a low in 2014 and has increased by 75% since (as of 2021 - probably higher now).
Any other crime data is a joke. Do you think crime-ridden cities like San Francisco and Baltimore are accurately tallying anything that's not murder? And even if they did, crime reporting tools like the ones offered by the FBI have been gimped since Biden took over.
Given what we know about murder, and how people who commit murders tend to have also committed a litany of other violent crimes, the murder rate is best proxy for the overall crime rate we have. If anything, it undersells the problem as advances in medical care turn would-be murder victims into attempted murder victims.
Thanks, that’s exactly what I was looking for. I was really frustrated by the BJS toolset, which I am sure contains that information. It’s also supposed to have the FBI’s murder data, but really didn’t want to display it to me.
As for the accuracy of non-murder crimes, I don’t know why we should expect a bias to change in any particular year. I could rationalize a dip, but it’d be post-hoc.
If you have X murder and Y petty thefts, an increase in X will likely reduce policing re petty thefts. So assuming resources are constant increased murders would likely lead to less reporting of petty thefts.
If all you want to say is that the Palestinian attack, and the following protests are worse, that's fine by me. I think BLM actually still managed to deal out more damage, and result in more deaths, but whatever, it's normal for people to have different reactions to ordered vs disordered violence.
But if you think the difference is big enough to justify not having noticed how radical the social justice activism was, or worse that all of it was fine until this specific issue... well, have fun standing against it on your own.
?? The estimates I've seen were something like an extra 1600 homicides per year across certain cities. You think that is more deaths than we are going to see out of this war?
Eh. My cynical view is that BLM's attitude towards black deaths is pretty similar to Hamas's attitude towards Palestinian deaths - they're a rhetorical weapon to be wielded more than a problem to be solved.
I'm having trouble finding exact numbers but the Guardian had an article saying 5,000 extra murders in 2020 and the FBI stats seem to back that up. From what I've seen since then the increased murder rate is the new normal so roughly an extra 5k per year indefinitely. It's arguable what percentage of that is attributable to BLM and related movements, personally I would guess that almost all of it is, but there's no way to prove that conclusively.
That is good news, I was having trouble finding numbers past 2021. Looks like it was 5.1/100k in 2019, then shot up to 6.8/100k in 2021 and in 2022 it was 6.3 so declining but still much higher than 2019. In 2014, before the Ferguson Effect kicked in, we were at 4.4. I guess we'll see in coming years if it declines back to 2019 levels or settles below the peak but at a still elevated rate.
Of course there is also the possibility that BLM will have another resurgence and drive murder levels higher again. That's roughly where we were in 2019, murder levels had declined slightly from their peak in 2016 and looked to be leveling off until the 2020 riots and defund the police movements kicked into gear.
Emphasis on "per year". Don't know what's going to be the score when this round of Israel vs. Palestine is over, but a single year of BLM killed more people than Hamas killed Israelis so far, and I'd say there are good chances Israeli casualties are not going to go above 2 years of BLM.
Colleges have always been super anti-Zionist. You don’t have to be a Ben Shapiro weirdo to know that.
The only thing that seems different now is that the Nikki Haleys of the world are explicitly saying that anti-Zionism is anti-semitism, so the activist college students are saying “ok guess I’m anti-Semitic too.”
It’s the same phenomenon that people talk about here re: racism. You call everything racist and eventually people start saying “ok guess I’m racist.”
In modern times, anti-Zionism has always been some flavor of anti-Semitism. At the least it's "let's end the nation of Israel and physically remove the Jews to somewhere else", at the most it's ordinary universal anti-Semitism that someone is playing search-and-replace games with.
As for the colleges, it appears this time people on the left are finding out that "it's just a few kids on college campuses" is not really reassuring in the slightest. As when the conservative-leaning normies found out, it's likely too late for them.
That’s really a wild assertion about what anti-zionists want especially considering how many of them are liberal Jews. Having spent an unusually high amount of time on college campuses, 99% of anti-Zionism there falls somewhere between “the Israeli state should stop allowing settlements in the West Bank” and “Israel shouldn’t be an explicitly ethno-religious Jewish state.” If you want to call things on that spectrum “anti-semitism,” fine, but it means you’re going to dramatically over-worry about the number of “anti-semites.”
I think there's a strong parallel between "woke" allegations of racism and white supremacy, and pro-Israel allegations of anti-Semitism.
In both cases there is a real phenomenon, but because it's such a good rhetorical weapon it gets significantly over-diagnosed.
There's even a parallel of the anti-SJW term "Kafka-trapping" - for instance, see how leftist Nathan Robinson complains that Jeremy Corbyn was forced out as UK Labour leader not because of any anti-Semitic comments on his behalf, but because he believed that claims that Labour had an anti-Semitism problem were exaggerated.
At the least it's "let's end the nation of Israel and physically remove the Jews to somewhere else", at the most it's ordinary universal anti-Semitism that someone is playing search-and-replace games with.
The mainstream western anti-zionist position is that jews would not be removed. The most popular anti-zionist position is a one-state solution where Palestinians get full citizenship in Israel, often alongside Palestinian right-of-return. Now, zionists would argue that such an outcome would cause problems such as a group like Hamas being elected as the government of Israel and ethnically cleansing jewish people, or at least committing terrorist attacks once they are all Israeli citizens with freedom of movement. But the standard anti-zionist position is that this wouldn't happen, that palestinians are resorting to violent resistance against oppression and would no longer need to do so once they are no longer oppressed. The standard comparison is to South Africa, where terrorist leaders such as Nelson Mandela became the new government but didn't outright ethnically cleanse white people. (The South African government discriminates against white people through heavy affirmative action, is now failing to keep reliable electricity and clean water going, has the 3rd highest murder rate in the world, and sometimes has the leaders of political parties talk about mass-murdering white people. But they haven't actually done it and many anti-zionists would be unaware of these things anyway.)
I think this is an important distinction because otherwise you don't appreciate the extent to which anti-zionism is an extension of standard anti-racist positions. They believe Israel would do fine even if it was majority palestinians just like they they believe majority-white countries would be fine if they opened the floodgates for arabic/african/etc. immigration. They believe ethnic conflicts generally have a good weak side (the oppressed) and a bad powerful side (the oppressor). They believe violence by an oppressed group is ultimately the result of their oppression, like how "riots are the language of the unheard" and thus the BLM riots indicated how badly african-americans are being mistreated by the police. Even if they got their one-state solution and there was continued conflict, they would advocate not for ethnically cleansing jews to make a more homogeneous state but for affirmative-action policies and reparations favoring non-jews until they are no longer oppressed (which would at minimum require they have equal outcomes to jewish Israelis).
The most popular anti-zionist position is a one-state solution where Palestinians get full citizenship in Israel, often alongside Palestinian right-of-return.
Yes, but anti-zionists get no credit for obvious impossibilities. "Palestinians get full citizenship in Israel with right of return and the Israeli Jews don't end up in a very bad place in a very short time" is such an impossibility.
It's not about giving credit, it's about understanding and engaging with what people actually believe. Saying they want to ethnically cleanse the jews just gets denial because it's not true, arguing that a one-state solution would inevitably result in ethnic cleansing might result in an actual conversation.
Furthermore unthinkingly dismissing "obvious impossibilities" is lazy thinking that tends to just make people slaves to their local overton window. There are plenty of people to whom it is obvious that historical opponents of racial integration were just racist villains with no motive besides hate, while simultaneously dismissing palestinian citizenship as an impossibility and never even considering that those historical figures might have had their own well-thought-out reasons. Take Thomas Jefferson's reasons for calling for slaves to emancipated but also deported:
It will probably be asked, Why not retain and incorporate the blacks into the state, and thus save the expence of supplying, by importation of white settlers, the vacancies they will leave? Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race. To these objections, which are political, may be added others...
The point isn't that the situation with the palestinians is necessarily the same as those historical analogues. It is that actually considering the matter leads to understanding and perspective based on something better than what your social environment considers "obvious". If the anti-zionists win and Israel becomes yet another failed post-colonial state but doesn't have actual ethnic cleansing besides largely voluntary "jewish flight", "the zionists were right" could easily become the unthinkable opinion even as events validate some of their concerns.
For an unrelated example, take the following question. Which of the following exist as "real" distinct and inborn traits and which are just social phenomenon: transgender, non-binary, demisexual, otherkin, plurality? (And of the ones that exist, are the "real" cases currently outnumbered by the social ones?) It can be very frustrating to watch someone act like the answer is obvious based on an overton window popularized in their community a handful of years ago when I saw how the sausage got made.
It's not about giving credit, it's about understanding and engaging with what people actually believe.
If they believe in the "one non-Jewish state where Jews will not be persecuted" thing, they are incorrigibly naive and not worth engaging with. If, as is more likely, they realize their desired policies will lead to expulsion or killing of the Israeli Jews and they use the impossible position as a way of avoiding responsibility for advocating that, then they don't believe what they say.
Take Thomas Jefferson's reasons for calling for slaves to emancipated but also deported:
I believe the past few years have demonstrated he was more than half right. The whites may have (mostly) dropped their prejudices, but blacks have retained the recollections of the injuries and there indeed have been "new provocations". Certainly the convulsions have not ended, though extermination seems at least far away.
It was funny citing TJ as if he was wrong. I would think both the whites and blacks would’ve been better off with a clean divorce (with blacks provided sufficient supplies etc to survive for a number of years until they could be fully established).
I believe the past few years have demonstrated he was more than half right.
Yes, I remembered that passage because it seemed prophetic. But of course both denying citizenship based on race and his later discussion of the black-white intelligence gap are now outside the mainstream overton window, something to be cited as proof of generic racism and justification for tearing down statues but not actually engaged with. Including by those who simultaneously find it obvious that Israel can't give palestinians citizenship. The point is that resorting to the "obvious" lets incongruous views pass by completely unexamined. The intent of anti-zionists in comparing Israel to other ethno-nationalist projects is that Israel should be opposed, but other outcomes of taking that idea seriously would include becoming more sympathetic to ethno-nationalism in general or thinking more rigorously about what you think separates Israel from the others. It's not that those views can't be reconciled, it's that people should have to at least realize they're doing so. And perhaps become more understanding of the views that they currently view as cartoon villainy, whether those views are "racism" or the people who think there is a moral mandate for Israel to give up on being a jewish state and give citizenship to the palestinians in the hope that this will result in living together in peace.
popular anti-zionist position is a one-state solution where Palestinians get full citizenship in Israel, often alongside Palestinian right-of-return. Now, zionists would argue that such an outcome would cause problems such as a group like Hamas being elected as the government of Israel and ethnically cleansing jewish people, or at least committing terrorist attacks once they are all Israeli citizens with freedom of movement. But the standard anti-zionist position is that this wouldn't happen, that palestinians are resorting to violent resistance against oppression and would no longer need to do so once they are no longer oppressed. The standard comparison is to South Africa, where terrorist leaders such as Nelson Mandela became the new government but didn't outright ethnically cleanse white people. (The South African government discriminates against white people through heavy affirmative action, is now failing to keep reliable electricity and clean water going, has the 3rd highest murder rate in the world, and sometimes has the leaders of political parties talk about mass-murdering white people. But they haven't actually done it and many anti-zionists would be unaware of these things anyway.)
The zionists are right. I don’t see any solution to this that doesn’t eventually look like a Zionism transposed to some other location. The historic record here is pretty clear — a stateless Jewish minority is going to be the target of either states looking for a scapegoat or angry mobs taking matters into their own hands. In most Muslim countries, non Muslims are second class citizens at best. So in order to protect Jews you absolutely need a Jewish state somewhere. If that’s the case, you need to create a continuous land area in which Jews are given complete control. And you’re now displacing whoever lives there now. It ends up looking almost exactly like Israel except now we’re building in South America or Montana or Wales or something. There aren’t really good answers.
There is no actual reason to suppose that if every Israeli Jew were granted the right to live in the US or Australia or the Netherlands or someplace, they would be vulnerable to scapegoating or pogroms. Sure, in Saudi they would, but granting Jews the right of return to Australia would not actually make them vulnerable to discrimination- they just wouldn't have their own country.
Australia is an immigration friendly place, but even so 7 million people all at once would be stretching the friendship a bit.
Edit: Also, we did just have a big crowd in Sydney chanting "gas the jews". Such people are an extreme fringe, but can anyone guarantee they will remain a fringe?
That was just an example, you know. No doubt a 1-state solution where the Palestinians are full citizens, backstopped by the CANZUK nations pledging to accept any Israeli Jewish immigrant who applies, would not result in a Jewish genocide(although it might well result in far fewer Jews in a generation as some of the conditions leading to a high Israeli-Jewish birthrate are probably unique to Israel).
So in order to protect Jews you absolutely need a Jewish state somewhere.
I feel like it is important to point out that however valid this argument may be, making it forever forecloses your ability to criticise Trump, the alt-right and white nationalists. Once you cross this line you lose the ethical and moral ground which allows you to say that white nationalism/ethnonationalism is bad at all. There simply aren't any real arguments for why the Jews need to be protected and get their own ethnostate that don't also apply to white or yellow people beyond blatant ethnic supremacy (that would sound something like "The Jews get to have their own nation because they're God's chosen people and above all others").
And while this is the motte and hence nobody cares that a pseudonymous Zensunni wanderer can't exactly condemn Trump anymore, these concerns become much bigger in the real world where people make political statements tied to their identity. All these public arguments, discussions and comments about what's happening are going to be remembered, and the left is famous for digging into people's past comments in order to discredit them in arguments so this isn't exactly a purely academic concern.
Honestly when you saw the riots in Paris and the marches and London maybe it isn’t unreasonable to keep France for the French or England for the English.
Personally I thought the Rotherham case was a far greater argument for keeping England for the English. I'm not even going to feign a lack of disgust at people who think protests in favour of Hamas are where the line was crossed as opposed to Rotherham (though to clarify I'm not accusing you of this right now).
Jews get to have an ethnostate because they’ve been genocided several times. I don’t think that’s identical to other arguments. I’m not worried about other states wanting to have an ethnostate if they want one.
White people have also been genocided several times through history as well (European history is surprisingly brutal). They're still around, but if that's an argument against them getting an ethnostate then it also applies to the jews.
There simply aren't any real arguments for why the Jews need to be protected and get their own ethnostate that don't also apply to white or yellow people beyond blatant ethnic supremacy
That's not true. E.g. whites are much more numerous. It's not realistic to imagine that whites in the USA could suffer the same fate as Jews in Germany - there's too many of them.
White people are vanishingly small as a percentage of the total population on Earth, so all you're saying is that we just have to wait a bit longer before they can have their own ethnostate? Would you also support Israel ceasing to be an ethnostate once the jewish diaspora population gets a bit bigger? How you slice the salami matters a lot too - do the Boers get to have their own ethnostate, given that they are a tiny minority on the verge of being wiped out and far smaller in population than the jews? I'm struggling to see the actual principle here - "you only get an ethnostate if you could plausibly be wiped out" is a contradictory and self-defeating argument anyway because it means that the moment you have the ethnostate you're protected and hence no longer deserve it... and if the ethnostate DOESN'T protect you, then there's no point tying it to numbers like that.
I think each people group is well served to have at least one country where they are a majority. Whether or not a country exists for the explicit purpose of giving them a majority is pretty much immaterial. E.g. Egypt is not a country formed for the purpose of giving Arabs a state of their own, but it nonetheless functions perfectly well as an Arab-majority country, such that the establishment of an Arab ethnostate is unnecessary. Whites don't need an ethnostate because we already have the thing that an ethnostate would exist to give us. E.g. when white Zimbabweans were a persecuted minority, they had somewhere to flee to that opened the doors for them.
And yes, this does mean I would like the Boers to have their own land - ideally they would have beaten the British and the Orange Free State would have survived. Alas.
Everything to the left of Ayn Rand is socialist, none of you are free of sin socialism. Government intervention in economy create distortions which create demand for further interventions to adress (thesis of "Road to serfdom").
I think it's important to remember that while conservatives and the right have complained about college campuses for a long time, they really didn't do anything to address it until the past few years. Liberals were still in the coping stage of they'll grow up and become more reasonable once they get a job and a family that conservatives had for a very long time. Plus that kind of activism was useful to them. However, now they are in the stage where they are realizing that this is a real problem and are freaking out, but they can't admit the right was right because the Trump threat is looming. Politicians are in the habit of letting things get so bad and continually kicking them down the road until it gets so bad they can't ignore it. I think this is one of those moments for them. I don't think there's much they can do though because this has been a problem since the 1960's. Nobody has the stones to do what would actually need to be done to root this out of our institutions.
That would be to bring back loco parentis. And in turn that would entail cracking down on the idea of universities as 1-star resorts that also have classes which everyone is entitled to go to for four years.
The implication is that irresponsible parents are offloading parenting to institutions which aren’t up for the task. If only they’d chosen traditional marriage instead of (dual-income/single parenthood/homosexuality/etc.), we wouldn’t be in this mess.
I think there are some obvious holes in the theory, starting perhaps with the Beat generation. But it has a certain appeal.
If you don't know, Duck Duck Go is just an https call away. It's a legal phrase that means that the schools have broader authority and act in place of the parents since the parents aren't there.
The legal principle(now abolished) that colleges have some parental rights and responsibilities over their students(and even in the west parents usually have some added rights of control over very young adult children).
College kids do not jump at these extreme ideologies because the adults not supervising them push it, they do it because they're unsupervised teenagers being catered to in a compound full of unsupervised teenagers who are following peer pressure. And fixing that requires going back to the prior legal regime granting universities wide latitude in regulating student's personal lives.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
hydroacetylene 6mo ago
You should never hand someone a gun unless you're sure where they'll point it. While in this one highly-specific case universities would probably act as you want, out of fear of the Zionist lobby getting their donations pulled, outside of that they have no real interest in stopping SJ lunacy and a huge amount of interest in purging themselves of rightists.
And the academy didn’t used to be so left. In fact the lurch to the left came when in loco parentis became illegal.
This is because it is much more appealing for unsupervised leisure class teenagers(which is what college kids are) to join up with the ideology that lets them fornicate and experiment with substances. The lurch to the left is entirely predictable on that basis when you add peer pressure and signaling dynamics. Even in Greece and Rome the conservative elites of the day complained about the unsupervised leisure class teens of the day shifting in ways that are certainly reminiscent of university leftism even if they don’t match 100%.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
hydroacetylene 6mo ago
And the academy didn’t used to be so left. In fact the lurch to the left came when in loco parentis became illegal.
That doesn't mean that reinstating ILP will cause a reversal of the academy's politics!
This is a loaded analogy, but I can't think of a better one, so: if there are rabbits in the east and no rabbits in the west due to a fence, you tear the fence down, and then you put it back up fifty years later, that won't disintegrate the rabbits that are now in the west.
No, it does not, but in order to make your eradication of rabbits in the west stick you need that fence- as NZ's quixotic obsession with getting rid of invasive species has found. ILP is the fence; not sufficient in itself, but very definitely the precondition for making any of your efforts work.
No, the only way to deal with "this" would be to completely replace the entire teaching staff, most of the curriculums, and vast swathes of left-wing political theory. Opposition to Israel is the logical and inevitable outcome of taking left-wing politics seriously - left-wingers don't actually like ethnostates in general, and ones that that murder brown people even less so. This isn't some weird bug in education, but the logical outcome of the political ideas and doctrines which motivate the left.
If you want to stop the left from being anti-Israel, you're going to have to completely rework their entire belief system. Israel is a white supremacist ethnostate that was founded with the help of a brutal terrorist campaign (ever read what Irgun and Lehi got up to?) and continues to enact racist, conservative and nationalist policies. The current leader of Israel was famously a huge fan of Donald Trump(who is not particularly well-liked in left-wing politics) and support for Israel is a famously republican priority. Even if you got rid of every single muslim on the left, every single person who had a direct, personal and nonpolitical reason to hate Israel, the left would oppose Israel anyway due to their own political values.
The mirror here would be mainstream conservatives saying that KKK/Neo-Nazi types are a negligible % of the right. If you're a mainstream conservative, you find these people embarrassing and don't want to be associated with them. It's psychologically easier to pretend they just don't exist rather than acknowledging that a troubling group that votes the same way you do.
A problem here is the disparate treatment in mainstream culture. After Charlottesville, nobody on the right defended the tiki torch people. Media falsely attributed the Fine People quote to Neo-Nazis in an effort to tie them into the broader political right. Contrast that with rediscovered staunch free speech principles and special support groups set up for people literally celebrating terrorism and cheering on Hamas. "Stupid college kids" are a very important group when it comes to mobilization, so in theory it should be easier to albatross the political left with their existence.
Nobody? I remember there being an awful lot of people insisting that tiki torches were completely innocent and/or very protected expression. Perhaps that was only around here?
Saying that it's protected expression is correct in both cases. This is different than celebrating the guy who ran over Heather Heyer, which is the equivalent of what many on the pro-Hamas side ("this is what decolonization looks like" sentiments) did the day after the 10/7 attacks. I'm sure you can find people who supported the Charlottesville driver, and I agree they shouldn't get jobs at big law firms and should be deplatformed from social media.
I thought there was a decent argument his actions were self defense. Someone hit his car moments before. I don’t know anyone who defended him if he ran over an innocent civilian for no reason.
We'll never know, because he was systematically denied representation in order to spare the Virginia legal system the embarrassment of not convicting a "Nazi" of murder.
The mirror here would be mainstream conservatives saying that KKK/Neo-Nazi types are a negligible % of the right.
If some large percentage of the prestigious right was, in fact, those things. Harvard is basically elite left incarnate. The right has a problem when people notice its outliers. The left has a problem when people are able to see their leaders.
And they seem to be saying this without any reflection on the past, where conservatives they hate, like Ben Shapiro and others, have been warning everyone of the same trend for basically two decades, at least since the early years of Bush Jr’s presidency.
I've previously commented on this pattern where even relatively moderate left-wing commentators will refuse to acknowledge when conservatives have been right about something even while they agree with them. It's strange. I don't know how to describe being so overwhelmingly certain in your own beliefs that you refuse to consider the possibility you were wrong about conservatives on a topic even as you simultaneously switch to agreeing with them. The only guess I have is that young, politically active progressives have a uniformity of political views that simply doesn't exist in any other large political group within society, which there is some weak evidence for in the UK.
God, I hate to play the “both sides” card, but…who actually does this? Are there center-right Fox News hosts or Shapiro types saying “wow, that thing the libs said five years ago was totally right! Guess we didn’t own them after all.”?
I don’t think so. In most situations, there’s no alpha in public apology. This isn’t partisan; it’s bog-standard tribalism. Few groups want to signal accuracy so badly that they let the outgroup score free points.
It's not necessarily about a public apology, but rather admitting where the 'new' idea you are bringing in comes from. Something akin to "This is an idea that's been popular in right wing circles for a long time, and I think there's something we can learn from those ideas." There's a difference to suddenly saying you believe that college students have been indoctrinated to hate Israel as if it's an idea that came out of the void, and saying while also noting that some right-wing commentators have been banging that drum for years.
The right wing seems much more willing to take ideas from the left while acknowledging the origin of them, whereas left wing will take the ideas sometimes but without acknowledging the origin of them. Not that I have stats on it, of course.
From my own political experience, this topic does cut across partisan lines. Seeing antisemitism firsthand when I went to university was a moment of "mugging by reality" that made me pull out of the reflexively in, hip, progressive left-wing whatever you want to call it that most people of that age group in higher education automatically gravitated towards. It's one of the three major experiences that formulated my political beliefs.
But for many of them, the "new" idea wouldn't come from conservatives but from the previous generations and iterations of moderate/pro-Israel liberalism, which have historically been a notable institution, and still are, and many of whom have also bashed the anti-Israel movement many times before.
That sort of admission does strike me as more plausible, but it’s still not something I expect to see. Not outside of Gray Tribe weirdos trying to calibrate their predictions.
Maybe as countersignaling, or an attempt to claim horseshoe theory? I could imagine Moldbug saying “the Cathedral is so wrong, they’re right about such-and-such.” But I don’t really know if that counts, since reaction is pretty open about looting the reasonable stuff from mainstream society.
Do you have any anecdotes in mind, where the right wing made such an acknowledgment?
I think you can find examples of Trump supporters saying Bernie and the far left in general were "right" about certain topics, like tariffs and economic protectionism, that used to be extremely unpopular among Republicans.
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Notes -
I've found it quite interesting to parse polls on intercommunal relations between Israeli Arabs and Israeli Jews.
There's enough variance in the results that I suspect a fair bit of bias in some or all of the polling (as well as shifts). But those caveats aside, it seems there are a couple of themes:
This seems quite relevant to determining what the consequences of a future peace deal would be, especially one closer to what Palestinian activists might like (e.g. a one-state solution with right of return for Palestinian refugees).
On the one hand, it seems like most Israeli Arabs, while not Israel's biggest fans, are generally pretty okay with it. And presumably, that number would go up if Israel were more conciliatory. So that lends credence to the dove worldview that Israel wouldn't be destroyed by allowing Palestinians to return.
On the other hand, a June 2015 poll had 84% of Palestinians in Gaza with a favourable view of Islamic Jihad, who are responsible for many terrorist attacks. Maybe a more dovish Israel would lower this number somewhat, and maybe this would moderate over time. But I think it's pretty likely that allowing a whole lot of current Gaza residents into Israel would result in at least a short-term significant increase in strife.
Finally, there's no way that a majority of Israeli Jews would be happy with living in a state with a significantly higher Arabic population.
I think polls are fairly useless for issues like this. Israeli Arabs live in a society where they are a minority closely scrutinized by a distrustful majority. If you changed that society in a way that greatly increases the proportion that is Arab, new possibilities emerge for the people you previously polled - where before they had to reconcile themselves to a Jewish state, now they might not be so restricted. It's hard to blame Israeli Jews for refusing the right of return when the only reward is likely going to be the meager satisfaction of getting to say "I told you so" later.
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So anywhere from 15-70% of one class of citizen are against the country they are a citizen of even existing and you're suggesting this is good news for making into citizens in millions more of that class of person, members of that class who are NOT selected for friendliness to the nation? This is not good news.
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It's interesting that despite explicit favoritism towards Jews, Israel treats its Arab citizens pretty well from the government level- after all, Arab Christians have the best outcomes of any group in Israel, which is probably close to predictable on an IQ basis- and reserves most of the actual state mistreatment for non-citizen palestinians.
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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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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.
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.
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.
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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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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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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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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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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One general observation, not directly connected to middle eastern affairs, but not entirely unconnected.
Big Twitter OSINT accounts watching Ukraine war are being deleted, one by one. Including the big one, the master of the lists, Oryx.
The reason given (if any is given) is that they are "too tired", that they are dirt poor and their work will not make them any money, that Pentagon and CIA keep profiting from their effort - and it is more threadbare than "dog ate my homework" excuse from your school days.
These people claimed to be hobbyists, observing wars in Syria and Ukraine just from pure interest and rejected with contempt any suspicions that they are something else, that they are somewhat connected to US/NATO military and three letter organization.
Not implausible in itself - bird watchers and train spotters dedicate their lives to their passion without being paid by Big Bird or Big Rail, and war can be nearly as interesting and fascinating.
Except that hobbyist will not destroy his life work in a fit of pique. You will not see rail fan threatening to smash his model trains and throw away his collections if railroad company does not pay him, and then following on his threat. But you will easily see paid employee closing down his office and shredding his archives when his rail branch is closed and he is reassigned to other work elsewhere.
So what to expect? If the dead bird site is true reality and material world just follows what happens there, we can expect that the whole Ukraine affair is going to wind down, all the way to (official or unofficial) cease fire, and all "happenings" will be once again happening in the Middle East.
And even Zelensky has shut his mouth lately. Could be that the tide is turning in favor of russia.
I am pretty sure that it is rather effect of media focusing less on that topic.
Indeed. I heavily doubt Zelensky is speaking less; he's a politician after all, and they never shut up. But they rely on other people to put their words in front of your eyes.
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“It’s a day that ends in Y, could be the tide turning in favor of Russia!”
Do you mean the tide of the war, or the tide of public opinion?
I don't think the tide of public opinion can turn for Russia, but there is a recess from the high tide a year ago. And for the war - I have long stated that it is competition who will lose faster. Could as well be Ukraine. Especially when Ukrainian men can just have to get to one of the borders to be free of subscription
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"Tide of public opinion" was creation of mass media that decided in Feb 2022 to play up this war as much as possible (instead of ignoring it like, for example, contemporary war in Ethiopia)
We can imagine alternate world where, on February 24, newspapers of record dedicated front pages to latest controversy about drag queens and somewhere on corner of page six was report:
In this world, only people who would be watching Ukraine would be people with relatives in the area and OSINT/war fans, "public opinion" would have different concerns.
Alternatively, "major historical enemy catastrophically fails to invade tiny neighbor" doesn't require a conspiracy to be a captivating news story.
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I dunno. I kind of like it when Russia doesn’t get what it wants. Not particularly strongly, but more than I care about miscellaneous civil wars. Imagine how the Westerners who actually lived through the Cold War might feel.
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We do not know.
We (for value of "we" consisting of open source users) can have good idea about Russian overall strength and losses, because Russia is
decrepit gangster shitholeopen and free society that is incapable of keeping secrets and leakes info like sieve.In contrast, Ukraine is black hole, fully proficient in OPSEC. Very little info comes out, as Teixeira leaks show, even Pentagon relies on official Ukrainian (and Oryx) data in their analysis.
Whatever you say about SBU, they know their work, they are true heirs of Cheka, NKVD and KGB, they deserve the Dzerzhinsky statue kept by Petrov and Boshirov clown team.
edit: link
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I would take this more seriously if I hadn't seen some very talented and prolific video game modders delete all of their work in a fit of pique. It does happen, not that I have a strong opinion of whether that's the case in the OSINT community.
Edit: It literally happened again in Total War Warhammer 3. The creator is (justifiably) mad at the game dev, but they've decided to express that by halting work on their mods and even promising to take them down soon. At least they're letting others continue their work.
I stand corrected, it is possible that several major OSINT accounts just burned out and decided to shut it down at the same time.
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Oryx gave announcement months in advance and alternative maintainers were found.
It happened many times with exposure-focused hobbyists. Especially with writers.
Also, Oryx website is up last time I checked, they terminated only dead bird account and started doing other stuff.
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In another related dead bird news, Vivek goes into full Hindu Zionist mode.
2000's Onion satire again becomes 2020's reality.
Very strange for professing Hindu to say.
Yes, technically, all life has a divine soul and divine essence, but we know Vivek does not wanted to say it, we know he wanted to say: "Hello my fellow Evangelicals, I am one of you! Vote for me!"
And, judging from bird site, it does not work. Every Vivek's tweet talking about God is followed by numerous Christians posting pics of many armed Hindu deities and asking "What God, Vivek? WHAT GOD?"
It is just so inauthentic. I do wonder why pols get such bad advice. Trump has a following because he is his true self. It isn’t entirely what he says but that you believe he is the person saying it.
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Those tend not to be boomer evangelical Christians, lol.
And if Vivek was a serious threat to Trump, he would lose his boomer evangelical support when Trump challenged him to eat a steak and then asked if it was because "kali has blood coming out of her whatever".
Vivek would just eat the steak, he isn’t particularly religious and I know a lot of wealthy lay Hindus who eat beef.
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This tweet is certainly pandering, but I've known several religious Hindus who talk about God singular. There's enough wiggle room in Hindu theology for that notion too, as well as the notion of a pantheon of many armed gods.
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Hell, I didn't even have to make the goose meme myself.
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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'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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Muslims are a tiny minority aren't they? What are they going to do, vote Republican?
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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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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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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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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Anecdotally. Just pure red hot rage and goalpost shifting and whataboutism.
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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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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 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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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".
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.
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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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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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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I think I'm also against being trigger happy with bans, but how about an unremovable "suspected alt" flair?
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Regarding Western liberal narratives on the Gaza war, I’m noticing something I find somewhat odd. I see mainstream liberals arguing that clueless college students are indoctrinated by loony leftist propagandists to be rabid enemies of Israel, our greatest ally, the only democracy in the Middle East etc. And they seem to be saying this without any reflection on the past, where conservatives they hate, like Ben Shapiro and others, have been warning everyone of the same trend for basically two decades, at least since the early years of Bush Jr’s presidency. Now that the true extent of anti-Zionist agitation on Western college campuses is revealed on prime TV for the first time in almost a decade (the last major Israeli military operation in Gaza was in 2014, I reckon, not counting the mass shootings at the border in 2018 or so), targeted at a nation and a people they actually care about, suddenly it’s a real problem, a real concern to be tackled.
Now I understand that one can come up with all sorts of cynical and mundane interpretations as to why this is, how it’s unsurprising and so on, and I get that. But then I remember that there were violent anti-police protests in the summer of 2020, the campaign to remove Confederate monuments, the various protests against Trump’s rallies, and in these cases the tone of the protests were, as far as I can tell, pretty much set by the same leftist college agitators who initiate the current anti-Zionist protests, the ones who call themselves anticolonialists, social justice advocates, antiracists and so on. And the big difference was that they weren’t criticized by mainstream liberals the way they are now, even though all their agitation and messaging stems from the same ideological tenets.
One thing you arguably haven’t considered is that the US ‘Lib’ reaction to what Israel is doing in Gaza might have been very different if this was October 2020 instead of October 2023.
In the last three years violent crime has surged upward in major cities, some ‘restorative justice’ prosecutors like Chesa have been removed or have had impeachment proceedings start against them, Adams won as the ‘tough on crime’ Democrat in New York, many bail reform laws have been adjusted or reversed, a lot of ‘defund the police’ stuff faded away or was cancelled, stuff like the Smollett thing and the BLM corruption filtered through to mainstream NYT liberals, ordinary urban American PMC progressives now hate the homeless drug addicts in their cities with a fury they certainly couldn’t muster in 2020 in the days of the CHAZ etc. In 2020, the hard left ran roughshod over the ‘center’ because Trump was in power and this was ‘the resistance’ and centrists had zero message other than total acquiescence to the activist fringe plan.
In 2023 there’s a much more firm divide between the ‘center left’ and the activist left. That’s because of higher crime rates, illegal immigration now affecting liberal cities like NYC in a more major way, homeless crime spirally out of control and - of course - the fact that Biden is in power. It’s in this climate that we see the divide between ‘center left’ and ‘far left’ (or activist left) on Israel and Gaza. The more conservative wing of the Democratic aligned movement has reasserted itself - Biden celebrating Columbus Day (cancelled by activists in 2020) is one example. By contrast the more radical student/activist fringe doesn’t seem to have moderated its message and is similarly zealous on Palestine as it was on BLM.
Thanks for the detailed reply. Actually I did consider all that; that's what I was referring to when mentioning "cynical and mundane interpretations". No offense meant, but that's what they are.
I'll only nitpick on two issues. As far as I know, it's indeed true that 'in the last three years violent crime has surged upward in major cities', but this trend didn't start in 2020 (although it did escalate after that) but much earlier, before the Trump presidency, in fact, around 2012-15. And the same applies to the problems with the mentally ill homeless, I'm sure.
At least where I’m from in New York, it really was 2020 when violent crime rose after a very long, mostly steady decline.
That may very well be true. I'm talking about the national rate of violent crime.
Do you have any hard numbers to back that claim?
Murder rate reached a local minimum in 2014. Increased 75% since.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/VC.IHR.PSRC.P5?locations=US
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No, because I don't have the habit of saving the URL of articles I read in a database in case someone asks me for the source on an online form 8 years later.
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What makes you say it started pre-Trump?
I’m having some trouble with their tool, but the BJS data gives me the impression we still haven’t gotten back to 2012 levels.
I remember that Trump brought up the rising violent crime rate as an issue during the campaign, and liberals were denying it out of hand. Earlier, in 2014 and 2015, I've seen articles on the issue, and there were people debating whether it can be indeed explained by the Ferguson effect or not.
Sure, but was he right?
As far as i know, yes.
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The U.S. murder rate reached a low in 2014 and has increased by 75% since (as of 2021 - probably higher now).
Any other crime data is a joke. Do you think crime-ridden cities like San Francisco and Baltimore are accurately tallying anything that's not murder? And even if they did, crime reporting tools like the ones offered by the FBI have been gimped since Biden took over.
Given what we know about murder, and how people who commit murders tend to have also committed a litany of other violent crimes, the murder rate is best proxy for the overall crime rate we have. If anything, it undersells the problem as advances in medical care turn would-be murder victims into attempted murder victims.
The murder rate has actually decreased since 2021.
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Thanks, that’s exactly what I was looking for. I was really frustrated by the BJS toolset, which I am sure contains that information. It’s also supposed to have the FBI’s murder data, but really didn’t want to display it to me.
As for the accuracy of non-murder crimes, I don’t know why we should expect a bias to change in any particular year. I could rationalize a dip, but it’d be post-hoc.
If you have X murder and Y petty thefts, an increase in X will likely reduce policing re petty thefts. So assuming resources are constant increased murders would likely lead to less reporting of petty thefts.
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SF's murder rate is about 1/9 that of Baltimore and lower than that of Dallas, Houston, Cincinnati and most other major cities other than NYC.
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The homicide rate in ‘shithole’ cities rose since 2014, but in NYC (America’s first city) declined to 2018/2019 before shooting up.
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If all you want to say is that the Palestinian attack, and the following protests are worse, that's fine by me. I think BLM actually still managed to deal out more damage, and result in more deaths, but whatever, it's normal for people to have different reactions to ordered vs disordered violence.
But if you think the difference is big enough to justify not having noticed how radical the social justice activism was, or worse that all of it was fine until this specific issue... well, have fun standing against it on your own.
?? The estimates I've seen were something like an extra 1600 homicides per year across certain cities. You think that is more deaths than we are going to see out of this war?
Eh. My cynical view is that BLM's attitude towards black deaths is pretty similar to Hamas's attitude towards Palestinian deaths - they're a rhetorical weapon to be wielded more than a problem to be solved.
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I'm having trouble finding exact numbers but the Guardian had an article saying 5,000 extra murders in 2020 and the FBI stats seem to back that up. From what I've seen since then the increased murder rate is the new normal so roughly an extra 5k per year indefinitely. It's arguable what percentage of that is attributable to BLM and related movements, personally I would guess that almost all of it is, but there's no way to prove that conclusively.
The murder rate dropped in 2022 and is slated to drop more in 2023.
https://www.latimes.com/politics/newsletter/2023-10-20/killings-in-the-u-s-are-dropping-at-an-historic-rate-will-anyone-notice-essential-politics
That is good news, I was having trouble finding numbers past 2021. Looks like it was 5.1/100k in 2019, then shot up to 6.8/100k in 2021 and in 2022 it was 6.3 so declining but still much higher than 2019. In 2014, before the Ferguson Effect kicked in, we were at 4.4. I guess we'll see in coming years if it declines back to 2019 levels or settles below the peak but at a still elevated rate.
Of course there is also the possibility that BLM will have another resurgence and drive murder levels higher again. That's roughly where we were in 2019, murder levels had declined slightly from their peak in 2016 and looked to be leveling off until the 2020 riots and defund the police movements kicked into gear.
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Emphasis on "per year". Don't know what's going to be the score when this round of Israel vs. Palestine is over, but a single year of BLM killed more people than Hamas killed Israelis so far, and I'd say there are good chances Israeli casualties are not going to go above 2 years of BLM.
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Colleges have always been super anti-Zionist. You don’t have to be a Ben Shapiro weirdo to know that.
The only thing that seems different now is that the Nikki Haleys of the world are explicitly saying that anti-Zionism is anti-semitism, so the activist college students are saying “ok guess I’m anti-Semitic too.”
It’s the same phenomenon that people talk about here re: racism. You call everything racist and eventually people start saying “ok guess I’m racist.”
In modern times, anti-Zionism has always been some flavor of anti-Semitism. At the least it's "let's end the nation of Israel and physically remove the Jews to somewhere else", at the most it's ordinary universal anti-Semitism that someone is playing search-and-replace games with.
As for the colleges, it appears this time people on the left are finding out that "it's just a few kids on college campuses" is not really reassuring in the slightest. As when the conservative-leaning normies found out, it's likely too late for them.
That’s really a wild assertion about what anti-zionists want especially considering how many of them are liberal Jews. Having spent an unusually high amount of time on college campuses, 99% of anti-Zionism there falls somewhere between “the Israeli state should stop allowing settlements in the West Bank” and “Israel shouldn’t be an explicitly ethno-religious Jewish state.” If you want to call things on that spectrum “anti-semitism,” fine, but it means you’re going to dramatically over-worry about the number of “anti-semites.”
I think there's a strong parallel between "woke" allegations of racism and white supremacy, and pro-Israel allegations of anti-Semitism.
In both cases there is a real phenomenon, but because it's such a good rhetorical weapon it gets significantly over-diagnosed.
There's even a parallel of the anti-SJW term "Kafka-trapping" - for instance, see how leftist Nathan Robinson complains that Jeremy Corbyn was forced out as UK Labour leader not because of any anti-Semitic comments on his behalf, but because he believed that claims that Labour had an anti-Semitism problem were exaggerated.
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The mainstream western anti-zionist position is that jews would not be removed. The most popular anti-zionist position is a one-state solution where Palestinians get full citizenship in Israel, often alongside Palestinian right-of-return. Now, zionists would argue that such an outcome would cause problems such as a group like Hamas being elected as the government of Israel and ethnically cleansing jewish people, or at least committing terrorist attacks once they are all Israeli citizens with freedom of movement. But the standard anti-zionist position is that this wouldn't happen, that palestinians are resorting to violent resistance against oppression and would no longer need to do so once they are no longer oppressed. The standard comparison is to South Africa, where terrorist leaders such as Nelson Mandela became the new government but didn't outright ethnically cleanse white people. (The South African government discriminates against white people through heavy affirmative action, is now failing to keep reliable electricity and clean water going, has the 3rd highest murder rate in the world, and sometimes has the leaders of political parties talk about mass-murdering white people. But they haven't actually done it and many anti-zionists would be unaware of these things anyway.)
I think this is an important distinction because otherwise you don't appreciate the extent to which anti-zionism is an extension of standard anti-racist positions. They believe Israel would do fine even if it was majority palestinians just like they they believe majority-white countries would be fine if they opened the floodgates for arabic/african/etc. immigration. They believe ethnic conflicts generally have a good weak side (the oppressed) and a bad powerful side (the oppressor). They believe violence by an oppressed group is ultimately the result of their oppression, like how "riots are the language of the unheard" and thus the BLM riots indicated how badly african-americans are being mistreated by the police. Even if they got their one-state solution and there was continued conflict, they would advocate not for ethnically cleansing jews to make a more homogeneous state but for affirmative-action policies and reparations favoring non-jews until they are no longer oppressed (which would at minimum require they have equal outcomes to jewish Israelis).
Yes, but anti-zionists get no credit for obvious impossibilities. "Palestinians get full citizenship in Israel with right of return and the Israeli Jews don't end up in a very bad place in a very short time" is such an impossibility.
It's not about giving credit, it's about understanding and engaging with what people actually believe. Saying they want to ethnically cleanse the jews just gets denial because it's not true, arguing that a one-state solution would inevitably result in ethnic cleansing might result in an actual conversation.
Furthermore unthinkingly dismissing "obvious impossibilities" is lazy thinking that tends to just make people slaves to their local overton window. There are plenty of people to whom it is obvious that historical opponents of racial integration were just racist villains with no motive besides hate, while simultaneously dismissing palestinian citizenship as an impossibility and never even considering that those historical figures might have had their own well-thought-out reasons. Take Thomas Jefferson's reasons for calling for slaves to emancipated but also deported:
The point isn't that the situation with the palestinians is necessarily the same as those historical analogues. It is that actually considering the matter leads to understanding and perspective based on something better than what your social environment considers "obvious". If the anti-zionists win and Israel becomes yet another failed post-colonial state but doesn't have actual ethnic cleansing besides largely voluntary "jewish flight", "the zionists were right" could easily become the unthinkable opinion even as events validate some of their concerns.
For an unrelated example, take the following question. Which of the following exist as "real" distinct and inborn traits and which are just social phenomenon: transgender, non-binary, demisexual, otherkin, plurality? (And of the ones that exist, are the "real" cases currently outnumbered by the social ones?) It can be very frustrating to watch someone act like the answer is obvious based on an overton window popularized in their community a handful of years ago when I saw how the sausage got made.
If they believe in the "one non-Jewish state where Jews will not be persecuted" thing, they are incorrigibly naive and not worth engaging with. If, as is more likely, they realize their desired policies will lead to expulsion or killing of the Israeli Jews and they use the impossible position as a way of avoiding responsibility for advocating that, then they don't believe what they say.
I believe the past few years have demonstrated he was more than half right. The whites may have (mostly) dropped their prejudices, but blacks have retained the recollections of the injuries and there indeed have been "new provocations". Certainly the convulsions have not ended, though extermination seems at least far away.
It was funny citing TJ as if he was wrong. I would think both the whites and blacks would’ve been better off with a clean divorce (with blacks provided sufficient supplies etc to survive for a number of years until they could be fully established).
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Yes, I remembered that passage because it seemed prophetic. But of course both denying citizenship based on race and his later discussion of the black-white intelligence gap are now outside the mainstream overton window, something to be cited as proof of generic racism and justification for tearing down statues but not actually engaged with. Including by those who simultaneously find it obvious that Israel can't give palestinians citizenship. The point is that resorting to the "obvious" lets incongruous views pass by completely unexamined. The intent of anti-zionists in comparing Israel to other ethno-nationalist projects is that Israel should be opposed, but other outcomes of taking that idea seriously would include becoming more sympathetic to ethno-nationalism in general or thinking more rigorously about what you think separates Israel from the others. It's not that those views can't be reconciled, it's that people should have to at least realize they're doing so. And perhaps become more understanding of the views that they currently view as cartoon villainy, whether those views are "racism" or the people who think there is a moral mandate for Israel to give up on being a jewish state and give citizenship to the palestinians in the hope that this will result in living together in peace.
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Interestingly, Arab Christians do, despite evidence of discrimination. Arab Muslims do not.
Probably a lesson in there somewhere.
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The zionists are right. I don’t see any solution to this that doesn’t eventually look like a Zionism transposed to some other location. The historic record here is pretty clear — a stateless Jewish minority is going to be the target of either states looking for a scapegoat or angry mobs taking matters into their own hands. In most Muslim countries, non Muslims are second class citizens at best. So in order to protect Jews you absolutely need a Jewish state somewhere. If that’s the case, you need to create a continuous land area in which Jews are given complete control. And you’re now displacing whoever lives there now. It ends up looking almost exactly like Israel except now we’re building in South America or Montana or Wales or something. There aren’t really good answers.
There is no actual reason to suppose that if every Israeli Jew were granted the right to live in the US or Australia or the Netherlands or someplace, they would be vulnerable to scapegoating or pogroms. Sure, in Saudi they would, but granting Jews the right of return to Australia would not actually make them vulnerable to discrimination- they just wouldn't have their own country.
Australia is an immigration friendly place, but even so 7 million people all at once would be stretching the friendship a bit.
Edit: Also, we did just have a big crowd in Sydney chanting "gas the jews". Such people are an extreme fringe, but can anyone guarantee they will remain a fringe?
That was just an example, you know. No doubt a 1-state solution where the Palestinians are full citizens, backstopped by the CANZUK nations pledging to accept any Israeli Jewish immigrant who applies, would not result in a Jewish genocide(although it might well result in far fewer Jews in a generation as some of the conditions leading to a high Israeli-Jewish birthrate are probably unique to Israel).
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I feel like it is important to point out that however valid this argument may be, making it forever forecloses your ability to criticise Trump, the alt-right and white nationalists. Once you cross this line you lose the ethical and moral ground which allows you to say that white nationalism/ethnonationalism is bad at all. There simply aren't any real arguments for why the Jews need to be protected and get their own ethnostate that don't also apply to white or yellow people beyond blatant ethnic supremacy (that would sound something like "The Jews get to have their own nation because they're God's chosen people and above all others").
And while this is the motte and hence nobody cares that a pseudonymous Zensunni wanderer can't exactly condemn Trump anymore, these concerns become much bigger in the real world where people make political statements tied to their identity. All these public arguments, discussions and comments about what's happening are going to be remembered, and the left is famous for digging into people's past comments in order to discredit them in arguments so this isn't exactly a purely academic concern.
Honestly when you saw the riots in Paris and the marches and London maybe it isn’t unreasonable to keep France for the French or England for the English.
Personally I thought the Rotherham case was a far greater argument for keeping England for the English. I'm not even going to feign a lack of disgust at people who think protests in favour of Hamas are where the line was crossed as opposed to Rotherham (though to clarify I'm not accusing you of this right now).
Agreed. Rotherham is disgusting. Basically “sure we let them rape white girls because we don’t want to be called racist”
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Jews get to have an ethnostate because they’ve been genocided several times. I don’t think that’s identical to other arguments. I’m not worried about other states wanting to have an ethnostate if they want one.
White people have also been genocided several times through history as well (European history is surprisingly brutal). They're still around, but if that's an argument against them getting an ethnostate then it also applies to the jews.
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That's not true. E.g. whites are much more numerous. It's not realistic to imagine that whites in the USA could suffer the same fate as Jews in Germany - there's too many of them.
White people are vanishingly small as a percentage of the total population on Earth, so all you're saying is that we just have to wait a bit longer before they can have their own ethnostate? Would you also support Israel ceasing to be an ethnostate once the jewish diaspora population gets a bit bigger? How you slice the salami matters a lot too - do the Boers get to have their own ethnostate, given that they are a tiny minority on the verge of being wiped out and far smaller in population than the jews? I'm struggling to see the actual principle here - "you only get an ethnostate if you could plausibly be wiped out" is a contradictory and self-defeating argument anyway because it means that the moment you have the ethnostate you're protected and hence no longer deserve it... and if the ethnostate DOESN'T protect you, then there's no point tying it to numbers like that.
I think each people group is well served to have at least one country where they are a majority. Whether or not a country exists for the explicit purpose of giving them a majority is pretty much immaterial. E.g. Egypt is not a country formed for the purpose of giving Arabs a state of their own, but it nonetheless functions perfectly well as an Arab-majority country, such that the establishment of an Arab ethnostate is unnecessary. Whites don't need an ethnostate because we already have the thing that an ethnostate would exist to give us. E.g. when white Zimbabweans were a persecuted minority, they had somewhere to flee to that opened the doors for them.
And yes, this does mean I would like the Boers to have their own land - ideally they would have beaten the British and the Orange Free State would have survived. Alas.
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Or the right calling everything to the left of Ayn Rand 'socialist/communist' and people on the left reacting similarly.
Everything to the left of Ayn Rand is socialist, none of you are free of
sinsocialism. Government intervention in economy create distortions which create demand for further interventions to adress (thesis of "Road to serfdom").More options
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I think it's important to remember that while conservatives and the right have complained about college campuses for a long time, they really didn't do anything to address it until the past few years. Liberals were still in the coping stage of they'll grow up and become more reasonable once they get a job and a family that conservatives had for a very long time. Plus that kind of activism was useful to them. However, now they are in the stage where they are realizing that this is a real problem and are freaking out, but they can't admit the right was right because the Trump threat is looming. Politicians are in the habit of letting things get so bad and continually kicking them down the road until it gets so bad they can't ignore it. I think this is one of those moments for them. I don't think there's much they can do though because this has been a problem since the 1960's. Nobody has the stones to do what would actually need to be done to root this out of our institutions.
That would be to bring back loco parentis. And in turn that would entail cracking down on the idea of universities as 1-star resorts that also have classes which everyone is entitled to go to for four years.
Not going to happen.
What is loco parentis? Why would it help?
It means that their parents are just as crazy?
The implication is that irresponsible parents are offloading parenting to institutions which aren’t up for the task. If only they’d chosen traditional marriage instead of (dual-income/single parenthood/homosexuality/etc.), we wouldn’t be in this mess.
I think there are some obvious holes in the theory, starting perhaps with the Beat generation. But it has a certain appeal.
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If you don't know, Duck Duck Go is just an https call away. It's a legal phrase that means that the schools have broader authority and act in place of the parents since the parents aren't there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_loco_parentis
This means no authority at all, students over 18 are adults and their parents have no longer any (legal) power over them.
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In loco parentis.
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The legal principle(now abolished) that colleges have some parental rights and responsibilities over their students(and even in the west parents usually have some added rights of control over very young adult children).
College kids do not jump at these extreme ideologies because the adults not supervising them push it, they do it because they're unsupervised teenagers being catered to in a compound full of unsupervised teenagers who are following peer pressure. And fixing that requires going back to the prior legal regime granting universities wide latitude in regulating student's personal lives.
You should never hand someone a gun unless you're sure where they'll point it. While in this one highly-specific case universities would probably act as you want, out of fear of the Zionist lobby getting their donations pulled, outside of that they have no real interest in stopping SJ lunacy and a huge amount of interest in purging themselves of rightists.
And the academy didn’t used to be so left. In fact the lurch to the left came when in loco parentis became illegal.
This is because it is much more appealing for unsupervised leisure class teenagers(which is what college kids are) to join up with the ideology that lets them fornicate and experiment with substances. The lurch to the left is entirely predictable on that basis when you add peer pressure and signaling dynamics. Even in Greece and Rome the conservative elites of the day complained about the unsupervised leisure class teens of the day shifting in ways that are certainly reminiscent of university leftism even if they don’t match 100%.
That doesn't mean that reinstating ILP will cause a reversal of the academy's politics!
This is a loaded analogy, but I can't think of a better one, so: if there are rabbits in the east and no rabbits in the west due to a fence, you tear the fence down, and then you put it back up fifty years later, that won't disintegrate the rabbits that are now in the west.
No, it does not, but in order to make your eradication of rabbits in the west stick you need that fence- as NZ's quixotic obsession with getting rid of invasive species has found. ILP is the fence; not sufficient in itself, but very definitely the precondition for making any of your efforts work.
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No, the only way to deal with "this" would be to completely replace the entire teaching staff, most of the curriculums, and vast swathes of left-wing political theory. Opposition to Israel is the logical and inevitable outcome of taking left-wing politics seriously - left-wingers don't actually like ethnostates in general, and ones that that murder brown people even less so. This isn't some weird bug in education, but the logical outcome of the political ideas and doctrines which motivate the left.
If you want to stop the left from being anti-Israel, you're going to have to completely rework their entire belief system. Israel is a white supremacist ethnostate that was founded with the help of a brutal terrorist campaign (ever read what Irgun and Lehi got up to?) and continues to enact racist, conservative and nationalist policies. The current leader of Israel was famously a huge fan of Donald Trump(who is not particularly well-liked in left-wing politics) and support for Israel is a famously republican priority. Even if you got rid of every single muslim on the left, every single person who had a direct, personal and nonpolitical reason to hate Israel, the left would oppose Israel anyway due to their own political values.
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The mirror here would be mainstream conservatives saying that KKK/Neo-Nazi types are a negligible % of the right. If you're a mainstream conservative, you find these people embarrassing and don't want to be associated with them. It's psychologically easier to pretend they just don't exist rather than acknowledging that a troubling group that votes the same way you do.
A problem here is the disparate treatment in mainstream culture. After Charlottesville, nobody on the right defended the tiki torch people. Media falsely attributed the Fine People quote to Neo-Nazis in an effort to tie them into the broader political right. Contrast that with rediscovered staunch free speech principles and special support groups set up for people literally celebrating terrorism and cheering on Hamas. "Stupid college kids" are a very important group when it comes to mobilization, so in theory it should be easier to albatross the political left with their existence.
Nobody? I remember there being an awful lot of people insisting that tiki torches were completely innocent and/or very protected expression. Perhaps that was only around here?
Saying that it's protected expression is correct in both cases. This is different than celebrating the guy who ran over Heather Heyer, which is the equivalent of what many on the pro-Hamas side ("this is what decolonization looks like" sentiments) did the day after the 10/7 attacks. I'm sure you can find people who supported the Charlottesville driver, and I agree they shouldn't get jobs at big law firms and should be deplatformed from social media.
Yeah, I know it’s weird and unsettling to have people defending the driver equivalents. I was talking about the people defending those defenders.
I thought there was a decent argument his actions were self defense. Someone hit his car moments before. I don’t know anyone who defended him if he ran over an innocent civilian for no reason.
We'll never know, because he was systematically denied representation in order to spare the Virginia legal system the embarrassment of not convicting a "Nazi" of murder.
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If some large percentage of the prestigious right was, in fact, those things. Harvard is basically elite left incarnate. The right has a problem when people notice its outliers. The left has a problem when people are able to see their leaders.
it's why the crazies in the right are found dumpster diving while the ones on the left are in yachts.
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I've previously commented on this pattern where even relatively moderate left-wing commentators will refuse to acknowledge when conservatives have been right about something even while they agree with them. It's strange. I don't know how to describe being so overwhelmingly certain in your own beliefs that you refuse to consider the possibility you were wrong about conservatives on a topic even as you simultaneously switch to agreeing with them. The only guess I have is that young, politically active progressives have a uniformity of political views that simply doesn't exist in any other large political group within society, which there is some weak evidence for in the UK.
God, I hate to play the “both sides” card, but…who actually does this? Are there center-right Fox News hosts or Shapiro types saying “wow, that thing the libs said five years ago was totally right! Guess we didn’t own them after all.”?
I don’t think so. In most situations, there’s no alpha in public apology. This isn’t partisan; it’s bog-standard tribalism. Few groups want to signal accuracy so badly that they let the outgroup score free points.
It's not necessarily about a public apology, but rather admitting where the 'new' idea you are bringing in comes from. Something akin to "This is an idea that's been popular in right wing circles for a long time, and I think there's something we can learn from those ideas." There's a difference to suddenly saying you believe that college students have been indoctrinated to hate Israel as if it's an idea that came out of the void, and saying while also noting that some right-wing commentators have been banging that drum for years.
The right wing seems much more willing to take ideas from the left while acknowledging the origin of them, whereas left wing will take the ideas sometimes but without acknowledging the origin of them. Not that I have stats on it, of course.
From my own political experience, this topic does cut across partisan lines. Seeing antisemitism firsthand when I went to university was a moment of "mugging by reality" that made me pull out of the reflexively in, hip, progressive left-wing whatever you want to call it that most people of that age group in higher education automatically gravitated towards. It's one of the three major experiences that formulated my political beliefs.
But for many of them, the "new" idea wouldn't come from conservatives but from the previous generations and iterations of moderate/pro-Israel liberalism, which have historically been a notable institution, and still are, and many of whom have also bashed the anti-Israel movement many times before.
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That sort of admission does strike me as more plausible, but it’s still not something I expect to see. Not outside of Gray Tribe weirdos trying to calibrate their predictions.
Maybe as countersignaling, or an attempt to claim horseshoe theory? I could imagine Moldbug saying “the Cathedral is so wrong, they’re right about such-and-such.” But I don’t really know if that counts, since reaction is pretty open about looting the reasonable stuff from mainstream society.
Do you have any anecdotes in mind, where the right wing made such an acknowledgment?
I think you can find examples of Trump supporters saying Bernie and the far left in general were "right" about certain topics, like tariffs and economic protectionism, that used to be extremely unpopular among Republicans.
Also the isolationist right will say similar about left-wing anti-war positions.
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