FtttG
User ID: 1175
FtttG
4hr ago
Last week I also read Jack Kerouac's Tristessa, his account of his platonic relationship with a Mexican prostitute and morphine addict. I'd never read anything by Kerouac, and on paper his writing style (stream-of-consciousness narration peppered with overwrought religious adjectives and a lackadaisical attitude towards punctuation) sounds like everything I hate about experimental prose. But I was surprised to find it oddly compelling, such that I read this (admittedly very short) book in two days. It helps that, unlike in On the Road, Kerouac doesn't commit any serious misdeeds or act as an accessory to anyone else's: he comes off as genuinely protective of the title character, and it's darkly amusing how this bumbling gringo gets exploited and ripped off by just about every Mexican he meets.
FtttG
15hr ago
I love supermarkets, but I get DeLillo's point that they can be a bit weird if you approach them from a virgin point of view. But this point should have been made once.
FtttG
16hr ago
God, I hated White Noise. "Wow, supermarkets are kind of weird and alienating huh?" Yes, Don, I suppose so. I don't think you needed to devote a quarter of your novel to making that point.
FtttG
16hr ago
Seven years ago, I stopped at a petrol station in Italy and found a discarded copy of Robert Gutwillig's After Long Silence. I decided to take it with me, and it sat unread on my bookshelf ever since.
On my morning commute the other day, I finally decided to give it a go. After ten pages I was already bored, and gave up.
Luckily I'd prepared for this eventuality, and also brought A Canticle for Leibowitz with me. It's a very old, battered copy with extremely fine print, and I'm only about five pages into it. The prose is a bit baroque for my liking, but I'm interested to see what happens next, which is more than can be said for the previous book.
FtttG
18hr ago
I was thinking about this comic earlier and it occurred to me that it's sort of a neat encapsulation of why Israel exists.
FtttG
2d ago
It's more of a chronological categorisation than an ethnic one. Ashkenazim who emigrated to Israel around 1948 would presumably have a lot of ancestry in common with Russian Jews, but the Russian Jews are mostly those who emigrated from the USSR in a large influx around 1989. Because of this, they're a distinct cohort in terms of culture, language and history, if not ethnicity.
It is surprising that they don't mention Sephardim etc. anywhere in the article. Maybe there really aren't that many of them?
FtttG
2d ago
Second attempt: 288/320.
FtttG
2d ago
I've been banging this drum for a long time.
FtttG
2d ago
When you post a comment, select the rightmost icon below the text window. It goes bold–italics–quote–link–image.
FtttG
2d ago
I think the typos are deliberate foil questions, under the assumption that a person genuinely familiar with the topic would notice that the word was misspelled.
My results: 280/320.
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I only noticed afterwards that exactly five answers are correct and five false. Curious if I can improve my score armed with this knowledge.
FtttG
2d ago
In this way they carry water for the actual anti-semites.
@ymeskhout drew an evocative comparison:
Getting on a soapbox with "We demand that Israel stop trying to get its hostages back from insane terrorists!" is not a winning message, and so they tried to falsely moderate their Jihadi simping. The unabashed loons braying for the complete destruction of Israel could take cover behind the normies who showed up to protests simply because they hated seeing pictures of dead kids on their Instagram feed. Kind of like human shields.
FtttG
2d ago
if one day the shoe is on the other foot and the Palestinians achieve military supremacy?
I'll believe it when I see it.
Ashkenazi (European) Jews, who make up most of the Israeli population
Untrue. Ashkenazi Jews only make up 32% of Israeli Jews, or 23% of Israel's population. The single biggest Jewish demographic in Israel are the Mizrahi Jews, representing 45% of Israeli Jews or 33% of the population of the country.
European and good at science you say?
Among Israeli Jews, 45% are Mizrahi, who are about as European as the Arabs are. I'd hazard a guess that if I conducted a survey in which I showed respondents a photo of a Mizrahi Jew and a Palestinian Arab without telling them which was which, people would perform no better than chance. 3% of Israeli Jews are Ethiopian. Less than half are Ashkenazi or Russian.
The idea that the Israel-Palestine conflict reduces to anything as simple as "white settler-colonialists oppressing brown people" is a ludicrous fantasy.
The Nakba is estimated to have expelled 750k Palestinians from their land i.e. 7.4% of the current total population of Israel. From a purely pragmatic, logistical perspective, expelling 10 million people is going to be a lot harder than expelling 750k people.
FtttG
3d ago
First, there's this idea that Israel is the primary/principle cause of all instability in the region, and that if we suddenly removed all the Jews and gave back the land to the Palestinians, we would have peace. This is absurd. The violence in Lebanon between shiites/sunnis/christians, the question of the Kurds, and the Sunni/Shiite Cold (I guess hot now) war are all conflicts that have their origins long before the founding of Israel. Heck if Israel wasn't there to focus hatred on, the Arabs would probably fight among themselves even more.
As I pointed out 8 months ago, since the end of the second world war, the average Middle Eastern state has been involved in 10 conflicts, including civil wars and revolutions. My interlocutor characterised Israel as a state which is in constant conflict with everyone and everything around them, but this seems to describe pretty much every Middle Eastern state, and Israel is actually the outlier in having undergone zero civil wars or revolutions since its founding.
FtttG
3d ago
Israel has repeatedly offered Gaza back to Egypt, and Egypt has always refused. They don't want millions of dysfunctional and violent Palestinians inside their borders any more than Lebanon did.
FtttG
3d ago
There is a criticism of ethnonationalism that since every ethnic group considers itself God’s gift to humanity, ethnostates will be especially prone to lash-out and start wars when they don’t get the respect they think they deserve.
How many wars have Japan, Korea and Liberia been involved in recently?
Even if Israel is an ethnostate, it's more diverse than several of these nations e.g. the 2 million Arab Israelis.
I think it's rather telling that apologists for the Cuban regime always point to the American blockade as the ultimate cause of Cuba's economic woes. It's hardly a ringing endorsement of communism that communist regimes can function perfectly well, provided they can freely trade with their capitalist neighbours. Communism isn't just parasitic at an individual or societal level: it's fractally parasitical, no matter at what resolution you examine it.
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