FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
User ID: 1175
I thought I replied to this but it seems my internet connection was spotty.
I do think that, in a very basic sense, the Israelis do have more agency, because to begin with, unlike the Palestinians they have a very plausible option to simply abandon their project of conquest and gtfo. If they used a fraction of the lobbying power that they have accumulated, they could secure citizenship in a rich Western country of their choosing for every one of their people, generous starting package of funds included.
You know, even leaving aside the logistics associated with securing foreign citizenship for 7 million people (9 million if you include the Arabs) and uprooting them from their homes – I think it only requires a very cursory understanding of the last nine decades of European history to appreciate why Jews might be reluctant to put themselves at the mercy of one or more Western governments. "Fool me once" etc.
It's this constant two-step with Jew-haters. They order the Jews to leave the Middle East and move to Europe or the US where they belong – then as soon as they do so, they start complaining about how many Jews there are in Europe or the US. Someone on Substack noted that people spent well over a millennium ordering European Jews to go back where they came from – but as soon as they did, these same people still weren't happy and immediately began accusing them of founding an illegitimate genocidal settler-colonial state. (Curiously, it's usually the only state they so characterise, the only state whose name is followed by the slogan "does not have a right to exist". Wow, what a crazy coincidence huh? The only state that doesn't have a right to exist is the one meant to be a safe haven for Jews? Who'da thunk it?) Wherever Jews go, Jew-haters aren't happy and wish they'd go somewhere else. Sometimes I wish Jew-haters would be honest and admit that the place they want Jews to live is not Israel or Madagascar or Europe or the US, but simply "nowhere".
Yes, I'm invoking the memory of the Holocaust to explain why Jews are uncomfortable about the prospect of abandoning their self-determination project and leaving themselves at the mercy of Western governments who might turn on them and scapegoat them at any time. Maybe you'll say that's tasteless and unfair, that nothing like that Holocaust will ever recur and that Westerners have learned their lesson. But have they, really? In most Western countries, antisemitic hate crimes are one of the most common kind per capita (cue the Joo-posters saying that these hate crimes are an understandable response to Israel's "genocide" in Gaza, a logic they conspicuously do not apply to hate crimes targeting Muslims). A significant proportion of Westerners deny that the Holocaust ever happened, or think it's been greatly exaggerated, and the proportion tends to be higher among young people than old (how can you learn the lessons of something you don't think took place?). There was a mass exodus of Jews from Poland beginning in the sixties in response to persistent ostracisation and scapegoating, with government leaders blaming things that went wrong in Poland on "Zionists" (wink wink nudge nudge). In your honest opinion, has the modal Pole become more or less friendly to Jews in the intervening six decades? And perhaps the most frightening thing is, this phenomenon is not restricted to Westerners of a particular political persuasion. Jew-hatred is a pathology which transcends ideology. Jews are blamed both for rapacious capitalism and surreptitious socialism. There is simply no Western political block that Jews can reasonably trust to be any more than temporary allies of convenience.
"Abandon the country you spent the better part of a century building and scatter its citizens to the winds, to be left at the mercy of governments who barely even pretend not to despise them" is not a serious proposal. It is either the product of staggering naiveté, or a proposal made in bad faith.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
14hr ago
But there's nothing intrinsically bad about holding the belief that black people have lower IQs, on average, than white people. It's analogous to saying that believing in gravity is bad, because it might lead people to the decision to push someone off a cliff. Factual statements and beliefs are morally inert.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
14hr ago
The belief that black people on average have lower IQs than white people in no way leads inevitably to the decision not to bother interviewing black people for an intellectually demanding role, any more than the belief that Kenyans and Ethiopians have a massive advantage in long-distance running leads inevitably to the decision to ban Caucasians from competing in marathons.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
18hr ago
Nick Fuentes
There's nothing surprising about a closeted gay man who hates women.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
19hr ago
Maybe you only did it for rhetorical effect but the word "history" is not a portmanteau of "his story".
That is to say: openly, unapologetically sexist men, who don't even try to hide it or justify it.
I think we need to be careful about how we use this word, and disambiguate it the same way we would "racist". In "Against Murderism", Scott argued that the word "racist" is generally assigned three mutually exclusive definitions:
- Definition by Belief (belief that races are different from one another)
- Definition by Motivation (a desire to bring harm to races other than one's own)
- Definition by Consequences (racist things or beliefs are those which cause harm to people of other races, even if that was not their intention)
Of these, the only one that really makes any sense to me is the second one.
Along the same lines, I don't think most chuds actively wish harm on women. I think when these men are accused of being "sexist", it's based on the first definition: the belief that men and women are different. Spoiler alert: they are, and the belief that they aren't (or that they would be, if not for the patriarchy/social conditioning/culture) is one of the silliest beliefs the human race has ever produced. Stereotypes exist for a reason, and most stereotypes about women (and men!) are true far more often than not.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
20hr ago
Seconded, Nice Guys is pretty good but Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is one of my favourite comedies ever.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
23hr ago
My "type" was established from a very young age.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
Can you show me where you think I said they have no moral responsibility?
The fact that, in your first reply to me, you described the October 7th attacks as having "happened", the exact kind of evasive euphemistic language I decried in the OP.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
@hydroacetylene: conservatives tend to have much more agency (emphasis mine)
you: a couple of examples of progressives actively doing things
This seems very "but I know a woman who's really tall!" or "I know an Asian guy who's bad at maths!"
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
I want to be in Ravenclaw so I can hang out with Cho Chang.
I feel like I'm losing my mind here. You have Hamas commanders (Yahya Sinwar among them) openly stating that the purpose of the October 7th attacks was to escalate the conflict by provoking Israel into a more aggressive response than they had thitherto been using. You had some of these fine gentlemen explicitly contemplating the possibility that the October 7th attacks might be so gruesome and horrific that Israel would use nuclear weapons in response. And yet you still refuse to assign any moral responsibility for the escalation in hostilities to Hamas. Everything is ultimately Israel's fault, because of something something 1948 right of return.
This seems like a tremendous example of the hypoagentic framing I was complaining about in the OP.
But how about I propose some admittedly arbitrary cutoffs to demonstrate that the October 7th attacks represented a major discontinuity in the conflict up to that point in 2023:
- It was the first time 1,000+ civilians were killed as part of the conflict in a single day in 2023.
- It was the first time 500+ civilians were killed as part of the conflict in a single day in 2023.
- It was the first time 100+ civilians were killed as part of the conflict in a single day in 2023.
- It was the first time 50+ civilians were killed as part of the conflict in a single day in 2023.
Do you dispute any of these figures?
This also illustrates why your invocation of the 71k figure is a cheat. Israel did not kill 71k Palestinians all at once, but over the course of three years, during which they sustained considerable casualties of their own.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
To define the "most recent conflict" as starting on Oct 7th, you either have to assert that there was no conflict before that date
I have to do no such thing. I simply have to stipulate that there was a low-level conflict prior to October 2023, and a sudden and dramatic escalation of hostilities in October 2023. I genuinely don't see how anyone could contradict such a claim in all seriousness.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
He had so many memorable quotes! Some choice bangers:
- In a right triangle, the square on the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides.
- ax2 + bx + c = 0.
- y = mx + b.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
I was referring to the most recent "hot war" in Gaza, not to the broader Israel-Palestine conflict. I think this was abundantly obvious from context.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
I had a maths teacher called Mr. Fox. He was fantastic.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
Yes, I agree that these labels are confusing and outmoded. A long time ago, I pointed out that white nationalists who want to transform the US into a white ethnostate are habitually characterised as "conservative". But to conserve things means to keep things the way they are. The US isn't a white ethnostate, so by definition anyone who wants to turn it into one can't be a conservative. Rather, white nationalists are reactionaries.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
I was tempted to mention the people who've claimed in all seriousness that Hamas killed zero civilians on October 7th, and all the footage depicting them doing that is AI-generated. But I decided I've banged that drum plenty of times already.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
never met a JFK conspiracist
Well, I certainly haven't met one who seriously claimed that no one assassinated JFK. But I suppose such a person must exist.
In any case, I suppose strictly speaking it would be "consensus-building" to claim that it's not up for debate that two planes crashed into the Twin Towers and that the buildings were not destroyed by explosives. But I view that as "consensus-building" on a par with the claim that "it's not open for debate that heliocentrism is true".
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
Is a blockade not an ongoing military action that kind of complicates the whole idea of Hamas striking first out of nowhere?
I don't recall ever claiming that Hamas struck "out of nowhere". I agree that a blockade constitutes an ongoing military action. Another example of a military action is "firing a missile at another country", something Hamas did somewhere in the region of twelve or thirteen thousand times (source 1, source 2, source 3) between the end of the previous "hot war" and the beginning of the most recent one. No one disputes that Israel and Palestine were engaged in an ongoing conflict prior to October 2023, but it's equally indisputable that there was a sudden and dramatic escalation of hostilities in October 2023. I think the most parsimonious framing of the above is that the immediate catalyst for the escalation in hostilities was Hamas's invasion of Israel on October 7th.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
One can characterise the Israel-Palestine conflict as a cold war which periodically gets hot. I don't think anyone is disputing that there was a war in Gaza in 2014, and that the situation in Gaza looked very different before that war began and afterwards. I don't think anyone in Gaza would claim that they didn't notice any difference in their day-to-day experiences before and after that war began. Equally, I don't think anyone would dispute that the 2014 war was just the latest instance of a cold war going hot in a long, long line of them.
By the same logic, I don't think it's controversial to state that the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict went hot in October 2023 and the catalyst for it going hot was the invasion of Israel by Hamas squaddies. Accepting that fact does not require you to sympathise with Israel, believe that Israel aren't committing a genocide, believe that Israel has the right to defend itself, believe that Israel has a right to exist etc. But I don't think it's open to dispute that the most recent instance of this cold conflict going hot was prompted by an action freely undertaken by Hamas.
Yeah, that's fair. But Scott was quick to point out that, even if this is the definition you're ostensibly using, it's not applied at all consistently. No one would be accused of racism for asserting that Ethiopians and Kenyans have an innate advantage over white Europeans in long-distance running.
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