ZanarkandAbesFan
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User ID: 2935
ZanarkandAbesFan
4d ago
Something I've wanted to ask you for a while is how much of the Irish obsession with Israel you think can be explained by Jew hatred (probably at least some) vs widespread Irish enthusiasm for horrific gratuitous violence as some sort of spectator sport. The fact that a band like Kneecap can name themselves after a torture procedure and have backing from the country's elites is pretty remarkable to me as someone not from the country - I can't imagine even the most gung-ho Americans would want to be publicly associated with a band called something like "Waterboarding".
ZanarkandAbesFan
6d ago
I will admit that it’s difficult to directly link all the events over last year or two, but some of it sure seems memetic. Attempted assassination of a presidential candidate, his lackey, a healthcare ceo, to name a few. What’s it gonna take for people to notice?
If you're a committed progressive, i.e. most journalists, what's the incentive to notice?
but I don't want to be ruled over and shut out of good positions by a cabal of people who don't like me much, especially when nobody else gets to play the same game.
I mean, some UK MPs have Jewish backgrounds but I don't see them advocating for particularly ethnocentric positions. The highest profile Jewish MP, Zack Polanski, is an example of the opposite.
Regarding getting shut out of good positions, if that's been your professional experience then I can't say otherwise, but I've literally never heard of this happening in the UK (not to say it's never happened, but I would think it's exceptionally rare). There simply aren't enough Jews for them to be regularly hiring each other over everyone else.
ZanarkandAbesFan
12d ago
"It didn't happen and it's good that it did"
ZanarkandAbesFan
13d ago
Pretty sure OLD = Online Dating
ZanarkandAbesFan
13d ago
How would you suggest he do that?
ZanarkandAbesFan
13d ago
Over here in Sweden subcontinentals aren't a very big group but despite this they're still easily the most disliked and made fun of group in workplace environments.
I'd have said MENA Muslims are more disliked.
ZanarkandAbesFan
14d ago
I'm pretty sure they liked Obama.
ZanarkandAbesFan
18d ago
Well obviously, the Israeli Arabs are just a well-off subset of the oppressed Palestinian people, in the anti-Israeli view. That's not exactly unreasonable, the Israeli Arabs aren't enthusiastic participants in the Zionist project.
This doesn't change the fact that hating Israelis and hating specifically Israeli Jews are meaningfully different positions.
I'm not sure that view is that common.
I stand by my position, with the caveat that by "leftist" I'm not referring to normal people who typically vote Labour/Democrat and only get their news from the BBC/NYT. I'm talking about the sort of left-wing people who put flags/pronouns in social media bios, usually very online and of the sort who show up to LGBTQ/BLM/Palestine marches. I'd estimate that about significant proportion of them literally want every Israeli Jew dead. If you've got evidence against this, I'd be happy to hear it. It would definitely restore my faith in humanity somewhat.
I enjoyed it. I'd definitely recommend it to someone who's already got an interest in the conflict more generally.
ZanarkandAbesFan
19d ago
My own mother (generally a very sensible woman) recently saw a movie about the Israeli hostage situation in 1972 and immediately jumped to the conclusion that those monstrous Jews Zionists had financed the movie's production in order to curry favour for their genocide in Gaza. A cursory Google quickly showed that the movie went into production months prior to the October 7th attacks – but then, I suppose those were staged by Shin Bet and Mossad as a false flag, weren't they? It never bottoms out.
Has she seen Munich?
ZanarkandAbesFan
19d ago
These people don't hate Jews, they hate Israelis
My feeling is that what they particularly hate is Israeli Jews. If you asked them about their opinion on Israeli Arabs (assuming they know they exist), they'd probably be neutral to positively inclined.
Regardless, I find the arguments about whether or not all of this counts as anti-semitism to be a distraction. The common leftist position that every Israeli Jew deserves to be brutally murdered would be equally horrific in an alternative universe where everyone in Israel was Hindu.
To what extent do the Saudis project power? I imagine they have an on-paper good military but I haven't heard of any conflicts in which they've performed particularly impressively.
ZanarkandAbesFan
22d ago
If you want more like Piranesi, I would strongly recommend Madeline Miller's novels based on Homeric classics.
I'll definitely check those out, thanks for the suggestion!
ZanarkandAbesFan
23d ago
I recently read and finished Piranesi by Susanna Clarke. I loved it - probably the most memorable book I've read in years. I decided to try her other (and much better known) major work: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. Christ I've been finding it boring. I've gotten through just over 100 pages and I don't think I can manage any more. I get that it was a deliberate stylistic decision to write in the style of someone from the early 19th century but it doesn't work for me at all. That being said, I respect authors trying something radically different from whatever everyone else is doing and given all the plaudits it clearly impressed plenty of people. Interested in what anyone here who's tried to read it thinks.
ZanarkandAbesFan
1mo ago
For the avoidance of doubt, I'm not on the side of people telling you to check your privilege.
ZanarkandAbesFan
1mo ago
Use it for compost. Not even the hippies will be able to complain!
ZanarkandAbesFan
1mo ago
That's a very fair position.
I don't think Corbyn is antisemitic. I think he's just simple-minded enough to believe the narrative "Hamas are freedom fighters, therefore they are good" and isn't capable of reasoning about it more deeply (not that I think this is a good reason to support Hamas, but that's another topic). It's the same way he was probably exposed to the idea that capitalism is bad because of inequality or something when he was a teenager and therefore decided the USSR is good, and hasn't been able to update his thinking since then.
There is also the famous 'white people rule the world' left-wing meme complaining how almost all top CEOs, media people, politicians etc. are white, and then the far-Right got hold of it and pointed out that almost all of those are Jewish and if anything gentile whites are underrepresented.
As an aside, while it's entirely fair to point out such disparities much if not most of the online right really tell on themselves by being unable to stomach that the reason whites outperform blacks - average IQ differences - is most likely behind their own underperformance relative to Ashkenazis. Watching these people tie themselves in knots trying to avoid this conclusion looks a lot like a progressive journalist reaching for esoteric theories of structural racism to explain why there aren't more black professors at MIT.
ZanarkandAbesFan
1mo ago
I'm not the guy you responded to, but the most enlightening explanation I've heard given of right-wing antisemitism is given in this substack article (sorry for the long text-dump, but I think it's very informative)
Anyway, perhaps we should get on with it. The first characteristic of the Far-Right mind is the desire for anthropomorphic theories of socioeconomic reality. What I mean by that is the need to fit the data of reality into a shape that makes sense in terms of a consciously conceived plan to move that reality in a particular direction.
This mindset is commonly given the term ‘conspiracy theorist’, but, on the whole, I think that is usually too generous. A conspiracy theory involves an attempt to tell a story in which the various pieces of data fit into place. Doing so inevitably leads to spiralling layers of complication in which anomalous information can only be accommodated at the cost of creating yet more anomalous data points that can’t be made to fit. Hence this meme:
The typical Rightoid doesn’t bother with any of that. What he does instead is notice some apparently contradictory information, then use innuendo and rhetorical questions to assert that this can only be explained by they planning it. He believes not in conspiracy ‘theories’, but conspiracy deities, shapelessly malleable and borderline omnipotent entities whose mere existence is enough, by their own terms of definition, to explain any kink in the matrix you might observe (and, Heaven knows, the matrix is kinky enough you can do this all day).
To this day, a good portion of my friends are Rightoids. Most of them are good people, and none of them are wholly devoid of positive qualities. The need to anthropomorphise complex social structures exists in them to various degrees of extremity, a product of how frequently they indulge it, but, in all cases, is central to their entire engagement with politics. What I learned after many years is that it’s an act of pure self-harm to try and argue them out of this. You can sit with them, as patiently as you can, for literally hours on end, forcing them to stop changing the subject and actually explain how the different parts of their ‘theory’ fit together, to verbalise each step and watch as it dissolves into undeniable incoherence, and then later the same week they’ll be back with the exact same thing. This is how they want to be. Some people like crackers, and some people like crack. No point in getting aggravated about it (another thing I wish I could go back 10 years and point out to myself).
To recap, the essential quality of the Far Right mind is the desire to explain the world around him in terms of the plan of a conscious intelligence. You therefore need a they; this is the whole point. Once we understand this, it’s pretty obvious why antisemitism exerts this queer magnetic attraction to all who enter the walls of the Far-Right asylum. If you have already decided that someone is behind the curtain driving everything going wrong around you, then who else it is supposed to be? The Yoruba? Inuits? The Jews are an obvious candidate not just because they are genuinely a big deal, but also because there is 150 years of antisemitic literature that you can read explaining how Jews do it and a small army of salesman eager to initiate you into their pyramid scheme. For years, I couldn’t understand why almost any dissident Right article on practically any subject would have at least one comment beneath with a fresh insight like ‘why do they call it the Cathedral, more like the SYNAGOGUE if you ask me!!!!’, but, when you think about it, it’s just good marketing. There’s always someone new who took a fistful of red pills and is looking for the next dose.
ZanarkandAbesFan
1mo ago
I was very against Brexit at the time. But much of the behaviour of the EU* since then has done a lot to disabuse me of the notion that "European" is a synonym for enlightened/benevolent/compassionate. I'm not sure I'd support rejoining.
*To be fair, it mostly seems to be France.
Sucks for the guy in question obviously.
That being said:
That's the real shocking aspect of this: the Americans are:
- punishing a European citizen
- for doing his job in Europe
- applying laws Europe officially supports
- at an institution based in Europe
- that Europe helped create and fund
Lol, lmao even. Imagine replacing "Europe" with "Russia" and trying to use an otherwise identical argument to feign shock about the US sanctioning someone high up in the Russian military.
This is an obvious case of the ICC flying too close to the sun. Whether they like it or not, Israel is considered by the US to be a close ally. Making direct threats against them is obviously going to risk incurring the US's displeasure.
ZanarkandAbesFan
1mo ago
Do you not have your own ginger converts in Germany?
ZanarkandAbesFan
1mo ago
Now I'm just baffled as to why, knowing this, we're still attempting to import infinity people.
1/ Blind faith in the belief that more immigration = economic growth (see the Boriswave)
2/ Any attempt to do something about it being frustrated by the NGO/Civil service/Human Rights Lawyer complex (see Rwanda)
3/ Any attempt to do something about it leading the people involved to be condemned as racist pariahs in the eyes of the rest of elite society
Sure, but is this disagreeing with my point? The fact that there's plenty of support for the IRA and Sinn Féin suggests a lot of the Irish openly favour extreme violence against their perceived enemies in a way that I don't see as usual in other first world nations. My question is whether the fact that the typical Irish person's attitude towards Israel seems indistinguishable from that of Hamas/Hezbollah is a consequence of this type of attitude being redirected towards an easy new target more than a consequence of anti-semitism per se.
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