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I've experienced much the same, most of the really active Palestine posters are women. Maybe a part of the explanation is this poem from the 70s that the local ones like to quote (translated by me from Finnish):
When someone has been born a mother
Who has once been born as a mother,
is a mother to all children,
and all the children of the world
she has held to her chest.
And the cry of the children of the world,
she has started to hear in her ears,
as all the children of the world,
speak with her own child's mouth.
This particular war has really featured a lot of pictures of dead or seriously hurt Palestinian children and babies. If you're even vaguely affliated to lefty people on social media you'll be bombarded with dozens of them every week unless you start hiding or blocking. I'm not particularly emotional (well, duh, I post here), but some of them really get to me, too. They must be playing a particularly merry havoc on maternal instincts, even with women who don't have kids themselves.
One reason why it might have taken a bit of time for this effect to start working was that during the first month or so there were equivalent pics of Israeli kids being killed or having been kidnapped, but that petered out since it was related to one dramatic one-time event, not a continuous supply of new examples.
It's compounded by social network effects, of course.
Do you mind posting the poem in Finnish
Jos on kerran äidiksi syntynyt
Joka kerran on äidiksi syntynyt,
hän äiti on kaikkien lasten,
ja kaikkia maailman lapsia
hän on painanut rintaansa vasten,
ja maailman lasten itkua
hän on korvissaan alkanut kuulla,
sillä maailman lapset puhuvat
hänen omien lastensa suulla.
-Anne-Mari Kaskinen –
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The pictures of dead jewish kids and rapes being circulated in Arab telegram don't seem to have inspired any maternal or feminine sympathy in progressive women. Mothers (I lead a baking workshop so I deal with women quite often) generally have mutual sympathy for dead kids, with more professional mothers understanding Palestines less than innocent role in fomenting violence. It is only childless women who are Extremely Online that spout pro-palestine platitudes mindlessly, and from there comes the simps who pretend to care about Palestine just in the hope of getting into some young naive girls pants.
...do you think those women are in those Telegrams?
Like /u/Armin said, it took some time for the actual pro-Palestine mill to start really functioning after Oct 7, and the reason for this was probably that there was a large amount of grisly material from those attacks circulating. The amount of new material on that front eventually tapered out, but the "grisly Palestine material" keeps chugging on and on.
Also, anecdotally, the most insistent pro-Palestine social media activists I know are mothers with exactly one child, though this just might reflect my age class.
True, progressives would not have looked for evidence of their pet palestinians having done any wrong. However some of my proggy friends did ask me if the Palestine stuff was true, and I shared with them the shit gazanow and (weird arabic script) was sharing gleefully till the admins realized it was a bad look and nuked the chats. Your point about mothers on social media being virulently progressive is an interesting one and I wonder if it is the 'social media' rather than the 'mother' bit that is the determining variable. My maternal circles largely abandoned social media, so I am lost here.
My wife (who has cut back on her social media quite radically recently) said that especially mothers with young children are suspectible to social media, since they are so attached to their children 24/7 that when they get a little break they have little time or energy to do anything else than browse a bit of Instagram.
I guess thats the difference. It is better for young mothers to get onto live shopping. Not nearly as inane and more gratifying, if potentially financially onerous.
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And because the most determined pro-Palestine activists made sure to tear down all the posters of abducted Israeli children, in an effort to quell the associated cognitive dissonance.
Even if they hadn't done it, a bleeding or otherwise clearly shellshocked kid would still be emotionally more directly affecting than a wanted poster. And, again, there's a lot of bleeding Palestinian kids.
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Thanks for the poem and the translation.
Yes, it looks like something that we as civilization have not yet understood, and maybe we knew but we have forgotten, is the different moral framework of women in comparison to men. We notice it now way more because women has enormous political power, and this translates to a change in ethics in our political and cultural class.
From a political perspective, it makes very hard to dislodsge young women and the left, because, by nature, the modern left is based on the oppressor/oppressed moral framework. The only thing you can use it to introduce another oppressor/oppressed moral framework that is stronger.
It also make me think how the liberal civilization will fare in the future if we adopt women's moral framework, especially on foreign policy. And I think here there is a case of "wokes more correct than the mainstream" when they say that Imperialism is born from the Patriarchy.
The thing is, though, as I will not tire of mentioning, is that "left votes for women" is a very recent concept. In most European countries, until the 80s, the left voted for conservative parties more than the left-wing ones - there might have been a fair few more countries within the Eastern sphere if it hadn't been for women's suffrage! - and in UK the women voted more for Tories until 2017.
Most oppressor/oppressed frameworks that we have had already been introduced to politics before the 80s, of course, and a huge amount of men sympathized with the one that has had the most political strength by far - "we are workers, the bosses are taking from us, let's get ours". What really changed was the loss of strength of Christianity as the main, or one of the main, political frameworks behind conservative thought, particularly with its pro-maternal themes.
I wonder if declining fertility/maternity among women have a role to play here. Sure, being a mother kicks maternal instinct into overdrive, but it also channels and focuses it on your offspring. By contrast, if you're 35 and childless, you don't have a proximal locus for it. Instead, it might be channeled into forms of high-visibility compassion-driven benevolence (no! not like that!) of the kind that progressivism strongly seeks to identify itself with.
There's something to this. Most unmarried men, married men and married women vote Republican. Most unmarried women vote Democrat.
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Every woman I know who was a bleeding heart hippie turned into Phyllis Schafer once they had kids. A really fun thing to do at playdates is to let slip that 'boys play so differently from girls' and see how long the waters warm up before the hatred of trans shit pops up. Race takes longer to bring up, but it comes up quickly if the topic of school choice occurs.
Did you mean Phyllis Schlafly here? Because googling "Phyllis Schafer" gives me a landscape painter.
Thanks for the clarification. I didn't really pay attention of the specific spelling. Good catch!
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I agree - similar to men, who seek an outlet for their competitive and violent drives, women seek an outlet for their maternal and social drives. The problem is that while society is appropriately - sometimes overly - wary of toxic masculinity that results from not channeling these drives into something non-destructive or even constructive, society is completely in denial about the entire concept of toxic femininity; You can't reign in something you deny exists. The only remotely close concept I've heard in the mainstream was the "Karen", and even there it AFAIK only took off because a woman misjudged her position in the progressive stack, and it is generally not used by the mainstream in a way that fundamentally calls into question the feminine worldview.
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Anecdote: my mother was a hippie liberal commie until she had children, then she has gradually drifted right, but she apparently became very conservative on law-and-order issues more or less as soon as she had her first child. Lifestyle wise, she ended up going 75% tradwife and 100% Christian, having been a classic careerist feminist. Talk about a "transformative experience."
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I completely agree with you.
What i was saying is that indeed there have been a replacement of the moral framework, and in order to change ideas, you need to change the moral framework of women again, making the "persuade them on the market of ideas" less useful.
And I am talking from a country where, still last election at least, women still vote right as the men.
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