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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28224 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 23, 2023

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(can move to the Israel/Palestine thread, but thought I'd post here as it's not geopolitics)

Looks like donors of elite schools are starting to pause their donations to schools due to the Israel/Palestine situation.

Well, rather, by the reaction and statements from some students at those schools, combined with the lack of reaction/statement by the school presidents condemning the initial Hamas attack. It seems donors, like Ken Griffin, are either pressuring the school to change tact, or stopping donations altogether.

Just today, apparently [some Jewish students at Cooper Union] were blocked in a library due to a pro-Palestine/anti-Israel rally](https://twitter.com/stopantisemites/status/1717300476524322969?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ). Not sure why the library only had Jewish students (Hillel meeting?), but seems bad if true.

George Washington Uni. got pro-Hamas projections saying things like "glory to our martyrs" (!!) on school buildings (ironically with donors like "Gelman" right underneath the projections). Protests that shout "from the river to the sea" all over every elite school, from Brown to NYU to UCLA, you name it. And on and on...

Social media wasn't that developed, and I wasn't paying attention, last time the large Israel/Palestine hostage situation happened in 2014, or the situation in 2008. Was it always been like this, pro-Hamas/anti-Israel/ and I just didn't notice? Or is it noticeably larger now, more organized, more tolerated? It's not just US either, it's also in UK, it's in Berlin and Vienna and Paris. Obviously there's big protests in Jordan or whatever, as they are closer and have millions of Palestinians, so I'd expect protests there. But it almost seems kind of shocking how brazen many people are, in NYC!?

Seems like influential folks, even sjw/leftist-friendly (?) youtubers, are realizing the changing cultural winds, and perhaps political winds downstream.

The donors' using their money to cause change is not new, but seems like there is urgency from them to change some of the culture in universities. Will this actually change things, though? My bet is no, Griffin's $300mil will not change how Harvard students think and say. What do you guys think?

edit:

This was an interesting thing, that I was trying to but failing to reference/get at:

In the 1960s, the radical left and black militants engaged in terrorism and mass violence for several years. During that period, a disproportionate amount of money and leadership on the left came from Jews and Jewish organizations. Then the Panthers took the movement by storm and imposed a Third World, anti-imperialist focus on the left, which turned hard against Israel after the Six Day War in ‘67. The Panthers’ anti-Zionism bled over into plain anti-Semitism, and many disillusioned Jews began to back away from the movement. Then, in ‘69, black militants in NYC picked a fight w/the mostly Jewish NYC teachers’ union, and the virulent antisemitism that had been just beneath the surface burst out into the open. The Jewish Defense League was actually formed in the aftermath of the conflict, to protect and retaliate on behalf of Jews who were being harassed and attacked by black militants.

The loss of Jewish support was the end of the ‘60s radical left as a serious movement, and the long march on the institutions began. Now that it’s had a half decade to regroup, it’s back on the streets causing mayhem. As before, Jewish organizers and groups played a disproportionate leadership role w/BLM, campus radicals, and other militant groups, and as before, the movement has turned against Israel and Jews more generally. If the rest of the cycle repeats, turning against the Jews will mark the beginning of the end of this round of left wing madness…

Hopefully we all learn a more lasting lesson this time.

George Washington Uni. got pro-Hamas projections on school buildings

Considering one of those statements was ‘glory to our martyrs’, that’s understating it a bit. The rough equivalent in Russia-Ukraine would be praising Russian soldiers with an inappropriate letter z.

Now personally while Israelis having that patch of land seems mildly preferable because they’re better at running it, I don’t give two shits whether the area is controlled by Muslims, Jews, Hindus, jehovahs witnesses, some new age hippies, etc. It does seem like this is a revelation of the activist left, not just in the sense of them having extreme views but in the sense of institutions being unable to just tell them to take a hike.

True! I will edit and add that. It is pretty egregious. added link to twitter too. Thanks

The Cooper Union event is interesting. It’s common for student protests to enter large faculty buildings or libraries. Are we supposed to believe that they “besieged” the library specifically to strike fear in the hearts of Jewish students that they knew were present? This is an enormous accusation that would require enormous evidence. Online it says Cooper Union is 25% Jewish, so there would be Jewish students everywhere, including present in the protest. From the short video being circulated, I see a Jewish student casually smiling saying “we locked them out”, to which another says “I’m fine with that”. That would indicate that a few Jewish students purposely locked them from entering the library, rather than that they were compelled to lock themselves in for fear of injury / harassment.

Yeah that's why I'm a bit confused about what the students were doing inside the library / why the rally outside was doing this.

Not the same vibe as rallies going into libraries where they seem to draw attention by trying to disrupt people studying.

Shrug

Not my fault the NPCs didn't realize the box was being built around them until they were already in it. I see people rallying around Beri Weiss, like she's some sort of reformed progressive because she keeps calling out anti-Semitism from the left. But she was perfectly happy to push anti-white demoralization propaganda at the NYT. Most of the people aghast now at how the left is treating them regularly promoted blood libel against my people, and promoted policies that have rendered the country of my birth virtually unrecognizable to me, to say nothing of the open institutionally hostility towards me. Go watch the shameless progressive talking points Beri Weiss shills when she goes on Joe Rogan 3 or 4 years ago.

What's especially galling is that all the rhetoric about "whiteness", statistically, was always more true of Jews than it ever was about whites. The wealth inequality, the disproportionate positions of power, the over representation in narrative crafting organizations. Every story ever told about how white supremacy works, if you believed their facile reasoning, was always more true of Jews than of white people. Shit, I remember a BLM meme that went around about how many white people control media organizations, that someone else went back over pointing out all the ones that were Jewish. Naturally, the latter was hate speech and the former wasn't. Because reasons.

Overwhelmingly, the Beri Weiss's of the world got the country they inflicted on the rest of us. Zero sympathy what so ever.

I guess the only thing I’d say is that Bari seemed to be heading in the right direction even prior to the Hamas terrorism. It wasn’t so much “I can’t believe the leopards would eat my face” as someone who was changing.

I'd just say, watch the clip I linked. She spends the first half complaining about the rise in anti Semitism, and how she never thought it could happen here. Then she immediately spends the second half smearing immigration restrictionist. She simply does not have the cognitive toolkit to put two and two together. "Heading in the right direction" will merely manifest as her somehow acquiring even more social and institutional protections for herself and hers, and continuing to throw me and mine to the mob she's imported and riled up against me.

Edit: Furthermore, an editorial she wrote 3 years ago, that she reshared, presumably because she still stands by every word of it.

Stop Being Shocked - American liberalism is in danger from a new ideology—one with dangerous implications for Jews

There is also the X factor of Donald Trump, which is impossible to overstate. Understandable hostility toward him has prevented many Jews from seeing the problem on the other side. To even look away from the obscenity in the White House for a moment strikes many, as they have told me, as irresponsible or beside the point. I share with the majority of American Jews’ disgust toward Trump and Trumpism, which has normalized bigotry and cruelty in ways that have crippled American society.

Some paragraphs later

By simply existing as ourselves, Jews undermine the vision of a world without difference. And so the things about us that make us different must be demonized, so that they can be erased or destroyed: Zionism is refashioned as colonialism; government officials justify the murder of innocent Jews in Jersey City; Jewish businesses can be looted because Jews “are the face of capital.” Jews are flattened into “white people,” our living history obliterated, so that someone with a straight face can suggest that the Holocaust was merely “white on white crime.”

It is why California attempted to pass an ethnic studies curriculum whose only mention of Jews was to explain how they, along with Irish immigrants, were invited into whiteness.

“It’s hard to overstate how suffocating this worldview is to specifically Jewish college students,” Blake Flayton, a progressive Jewish student at GW, wrote me recently. “We don’t fit into ‘oppressor’ or ‘oppressed’ categories. We are both privileged and marginalized, protected by those in power and yet targeted by the same racist lunatics as those who target people of color. The hatred we experience on campus has nothing to do with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It’s because Jews defy anti-racist ideology simply by existing. So it’s not so much that Zionism is racism. It’s that Jewishness is.”

Let me pull that out for you. This isn’t about Zionism or landlords or capitalism or AIPAC. We live in a world in which everyone is being told to side either with the “racists” or the “anti-racists.” Jews who refuse to erase what makes us different will increasingly be defined as racists, often with the help of other Jews desperate to be accepted by the cool kids.

You can read the whole thing, but the snippets I pulled out should make it clear. Whatever mouth sounds Bari makes decrying wokeness, it's only because of how it's effecting Jews now. She hasn't, doesn't, and won't call out the effect wokeness has had on white people. She has only minor quibbles with categorizing everyone as either an oppressor or an oppressed, in that she doesn't agree with how Jews have been categorized. White people are still getting what they deserve.

Please excuse the following rambling.

The way I see it this goes back to the cold war, when Israel was a proxy for the West and the muslim countries were getting cozy with the soviets. Now, regardless of whether it was actual soviet manipulation or just an organic development, somehow Western youths and students ended up getting on board the anti-imperialist, socialist and pro-soviet train, and backing palestine over israel is just part and parcel of that. And while elements of the far-left, especially in Germany, have been pro-israel probably as an outgrowth of being anti-nazi and thus anti-antisemitic, the majority still gets their geopolitics from ye olde colde warre thinking. Add to that the timeless but boosted-in-modernity fixation on promoting the interests of the weak and oppressed, and the degraded cultural immune system of the West that's no longer able to defend itself against leftist narratives which leads to increasingly drastic purity spirals in leftism as well as the marginalization of other lines of thinking that leave this kind of leftism in control of most discourse and media, and there you go, the youth and the students and many of those who have some sort of platform to speak from are now pro-palestinian by default, and even if they'd like to denounce what hamas are doing they can't without betraying their side in the culture war.

Now, the German left very quickly shut up and toed the line to support Israel, since you cannot be anti-zionist in this country without putting yourself dangerously close to the nazi area, but America doesn't have quite the same mechanisms in place, so your youth and students can fully enjoy their ideology.

This was an interesting thing, that I was trying to but failing to reference/get at:

In the 1960s, the radical left and black militants engaged in terrorism and mass violence for several years. During that period, a disproportionate amount of money and leadership on the left came from Jews and Jewish organizations. Then the Panthers took the movement by storm and imposed a Third World, anti-imperialist focus on the left, which turned hard against Israel after the Six Day War in ‘67. The Panthers’ anti-Zionism bled over into plain anti-Semitism, and many disillusioned Jews began to back away from the movement. Then, in ‘69, black militants in NYC picked a fight w/the mostly Jewish NYC teachers’ union, and the virulent antisemitism that had been just beneath the surface burst out into the open. The Jewish Defense League was actually formed in the aftermath of the conflict, to protect and retaliate on behalf of Jews who were being harassed and attacked by black militants.

The loss of Jewish support was the end of the ‘60s radical left as a serious movement, and the long march on the institutions began. Now that it’s had a half decade to regroup, it’s back on the streets causing mayhem. As before, Jewish organizers and groups played a disproportionate leadership role w/BLM, campus radicals, and other militant groups, and as before, the movement has turned against Israel and Jews more generally. If the rest of the cycle repeats, turning against the Jews will mark the beginning of the end of this round of left wing madness…

Hopefully we all learn a more lasting lesson this time.

Your points about purity cycles and lack of immunity to leftist narratives also rings true to me

The opposition probably has little to do with cold war era politics today and more to do with failed neocon policy. In Europe we have seen the consequences of warmonger in the middle east with large waves of refugees. The enthusiasm for more bombing, fighting and occupying in the middle east is not high when it has been a failure for 22 years with the only tangible result being massive blowback. People don't want 2 million arabs to flee Gaza, people don't want to waste military resources on forever wars and people question the morality of these wars.

Israel has had large immigration from Eastern Europe. Forcefully moving arabs from their home so Belorussian's can build a new house in Palestine is hard to justify. The naval blockade against Gaza, the continuous mistreatment of Palestinians and the creeping expansion of Israel isn't popular.

Furthermore, Israel hasn't really provided any benefit to Europe while continuously causing tremendous headache.

The proximate cause of large waves of refugees flooding Europe is your liberal governments accepting them, not "neocons" in America. It's not George Bush's fault that your country doesn't deport them like it should.

We have no massimmigration from Jordan, the emirates or Saudi araba. We had no mass immigration from Libya before the war. Mass immigration from Syria and Iraq started with the neocon wars. Afghans pretty much didn't exist before the war in Europe. The force pushing them into Europe is the US war machine.

I think the main reason that the German left remained partially (not wholly obviously as you say, see the RAF and the Munich attacks, various radical leftist groups to this day) zionist is that the ‘68 culture in Germany specifically involved the whole Vergangenheitsbewältigung thing, ie a lot of performative anger by young people at parents or elders who had been party members or had variously moved on from the third reich without ever discussing it. That creates a kind of inoculation against hardcore anti-Zionism, at least for a few decades. The second thing was obviously that Germany was a divided country with a huge US and allied military presence, polling showed that a substantial minority of Germans would hide an RAF member from the police, and so the CIA’s (and domestic West German government’s) anticommunist efforts were most staunchly focused on young West Germans and driving a wedge between West German leftists and Soviet-funded leftist movements (arguably an origin story for the success of the modern Green movement in in Western Europe).

"polling showed that a substantial minority of Germans would hide an RAF member from the police"

Until I looked it up I thought you were talking about a poll taken during or after the war that said that a substantial minority of Germans would hide a downed British pilot (Royal Air Force) during the war if they had encountered one. Which seemed like a crazy poll to me. Then I figured out that it stood for Red Army Faction.

What's interesting to me here is that the brutality of the terrorism, and the filming of it, seems to have resulted in increased support for Hamas in the West, rather than less. It has energized those who already sympathized with the Palestinians, and recruited some new fans.

Anyone care to hypothesize around why?

Some tentative bullet points from me:

Blood in the water - the enemy has shown weakness, is bleeding. Time to strike.

Just world fallacy (selectively). If the Israelis were tortured it must have meant they deserved it.

Edit: And the flipside: If people see someone doing something horrible, expressing great hate, they think it's justified, according to blank slate + cultural relativism. "The Palestinian terrorist must have been a great person just like me, not a complete antisemite, until they were grievously wronged and the vengeance they inflict is just"... I dunno.

seems

Ay, there’s the rub.

It is quite possible that the same terror attacks, but without self-incrimination, would have yielded far more support than we’re getting. We can’t tell for sure, but might be able to find a proxy. How many people have actually watched the videos or seen hard evidence, and does that correlate with support for the perpetrators?

There is definitely some countersignaling potential: defending poor oppressed Palestinians is old news, while defending radical murderers is edgy enough to get attention. I find it unlikely that the average supporter thinks this way. Then again, people organizing Gaza-themed protests probably aren’t median.

Re: edgy enough. Maybe I'm making a strange connection here, but it reminds me a little of BLM. Was it coincidence that many of the victims of police brutality, who received loud public support, in fact had criminal records?

Walking in a protest march for a criminal, or indeed a Hamas terrorist, is more edgy and intense, more polarized, and thus will make you stand out more as giving unquestioning support to the aggrieved group or person in question. It gives you clout within the group of sympathizers. It also makes the cause harder to swallow for ideological opponents, which may be part of the motivation. Forcing the political opponent, e.g. conservatives to eat crow is more fun than having them gladly joining in. It inflicts some emotional pain and humiliation behind the mask of public support they have to put on.

What's interesting to me here is that the brutality of the terrorism, and the filming of it, seems to have resulted in increased support for Hamas in the West, rather than less

You are making a causal claim here, but in order to determine whether it is actually true, you need to have:

  1. Actual data, not just anecdotes re support for Hamas (not Palestine) before the attack
  2. Actual data, not just anecdotes re support for Hamas (not Palestine) after the attack
  3. The ability to control for the effect of the subsequent and ongoing air raids by Israel on Gaza

I am guessing that you don't have any of those.

I'd be interested to hear about how many New York protests between January and September of this year named themselves with a reference to a terror attack killing over a thousand civilians. I get that plural of anecdote isn't data, but I'd have estimated it at pretty close to zero.

Wait, is the “flood” bit specific? The rest seems generic to the Gaza Strip.

The 10/7 attacks were called "Operation al-Aqsa Flood" by Hamas.

Yowch. That’s really poor taste.

That is definately enough to flip my view from "I have no idea what you're talking about" to "that is an obvious statement of solidarity to a terror attack".

Yes, that is my point. That is the best "evidence" that we have, and as you note, it is worthless.

Eh, I agree with /u/gattsuru. "Flood Brooklyn" is an odd turn of phrase unless you're trying to evoke "Operation al-Aqsa Flood"

Yes, obviously. That is not the point. The point is that that sort of anecdotal data has almost no value. Among other things, a pro- Hamas event held a month ago would have gotten no news coverage. And even actual data that includes only the post-attack incidents obviously cannot tell us anything about how attitudes have changed since before the attack. It is no different from someone claiming that, because there were x incidents of anti-black racism in 2022, that therefore nothing has changed since 1960. It is literally impossible to make a claim when half the data is missing.

And that doesn't even include the issue I mentioned of controlling for the effect of Israeli air raids.

Hamas, specifically, I'd have to go back a year ago for something explicit, though the famous Tufts one is kinda telling on itself when the protestors start to insult the Palestinian peace advocate. More broadly, I can show anti-Israeli/pro-Palestine protests in March, anti-anti-anti-Semites in April, commencement speakers in May, so on.

Sometimes this got to equivalent extremes: SJP affiliates promoting literal spree-shooters was a January-this-year-thing.

That's also... notably not what I asked. Maybe there genuinely was a pro-Hamas protest named referencing a thousand-plus fatality attack on civilians, shortly after a separate pro-Hamas protest by the same group has some protestors turn violent in September I and the rest of the internet missed. I can't prove a negative, after all.

But it's a data point that hints and waggles its eyebrows, and I don't think it's the only one.

Your link to the "Flood Brooklyn for Gaza" seems to reinforce my point about the methodological challenges that OP's claim ignores. Gaza is not Hamas. A rally calling for support for Gaza at a time when a hundreds or more civilians in Gaza are dying each day cannot be assumed to be pro-Hamas, and even if it is, the causal relationship between the attack and the level of support for that protest is obviously confounded by the effect of Israel's response.

And if, as you note, there were all those pre-attack events you link, where is the evidence for OP's assumption that the attack led to an increase in support?

Edit: And, btw, I don't give a damn about the "right to return" or adjacent ideas like nationalism, or self-determination, or anti-imperialism, because none of those things have any intrinsic value for actual, individual human beings, which is all that matters. They are claims about the "rights" of groups, and hence they are illegitimate claims, as far as I am concerned.

More comments

What's interesting to me here is that the brutality of the terrorism, and the filming of it, seems to have resulted in increased support for Hamas in the West, rather than less. It has energized those who already sympathized with the Palestinians, and recruited some new fans.

"When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse." -- Osama bin Laden.

Of course, this also requires that people are fools and see strength where there is only brutality; how'd that work out for e.g. ISIS/Daesh (or bin Laden) in the end? But people being fools is also nothing new.

I don't think it's possible to know that Hamas's self-promotions using videos directly showing their terrorism in action had a net positive or negative effect for their support in the West, but I think it's at least clear that it didn't cause some major backlash. Which is still interesting in itself.

As someone who had a similar mentality on September 12, 2001, I think there's some truth to the "blank slate" explanation. The thinking was immediately, "How badly did Osama Bin Laden and his Musli compatriots be abused by the American empire that they felt helpless to do anything but to hijack planes and murder thousands of people? The depths of evil to which these people were pushed to do shows just how evil America is to the rest of the world, and perhaps those individuals who were murdered didn't deserve it, but America as a whole clearly deserved what happened yesterday." I see something similar happening with the narrative here.

But I don't think it's right to call it "blank slate," because that implies some sort of genetic explanation. I don't think it's a matter of genetics, but of religion. What I think I was missing as a teenager back then was the religious context and the understanding that many people take their religion VERY seriously, in a way that's almost beyond comprehension for someone like me who was raised atheist in a secular environment. That plus cultural relativism makes it easy to characterize anyone as a freedom fighter.

I'm also wondering what it would have been like if 9/11 happened in this era of smartphones and cheap Internet on planes. What if Al Qaeda livestreamed the events, including in-cockpit views of the planes all the way to the moments of the crashes? And passengers too would have livestreamed so many streams with different angles and such. It would also include the whole "Let's roll" incident that I believe led to the crash of one of the planes before it could hit a Washington DC target. I could see these being morale boosters both for the doves and the hawks immediately following the attacks, and I'm not sure what direction things would've changed, if at all.

I didn't mean to imply a genetic explanation. It's clearly about religion. What I meant by blank slate is that if the sympathizer assumes that the average Gazan is blank of bigotry, in that case they aren't taking the antisemitism into account in the equation. If you simply assume that the Muslims that surround Israel aren't opposed to Jewry on a general basis, that their grievances with Israel are purely political, then it's a lot more reasonable to side with them. As you say, they may be missing that understanding of the depth and seriousness in which Muslims take their religion.

What's interesting to me here is that the brutality of the terrorism, and the filming of it, seems to have resulted in increased support for Hamas in the West, rather than less.

With the exception of support directly resulting from a larger Muslim population (ie not the result of ‘ideological conversion’ so much as ‘ideological import’), has Western support for Palestine really risen since 2014 or even 2004? I don’t know that it has, it’s essentially been a progressive cause célèbre since the ideological realignment in the 1970s (when much of the radical left switched from Zionist to Palestinian liberationist ideas).

Nothing the student types have chanted at US colleges in the last couple of weeks has been different to what they were chanting when I was at college in the early 2010s.

The ‘Corbynite’ sympathy for Hamas stuff was always less pronounced in the US than Europe, because the former had a smaller Muslim population and a much larger Jewish one, but in either case it’s been a thing for more than 40 years now. Younger people poll as more hostile to Israel than older people, because younger people are almost uniformly more progressive than older people, certainly in the Anglo countries. In France, the radical right is as skeptical about Zionism as the radical left, but again the French hard right is strongly tied to a specific kind of at-least-mildly antisemitic Vichyite right, and to counterrevolutionary ultra-Catholicism of the SSPX school which often blames variably Masons, Jews, Protestants and so on for the decline of France (since 1789).

has Western support for Palestine really risen since 2014

Not according to this.

The question here is different. On the 2nd on it's Hamas, not Palestinians.

That's true, but it still doesn't show basically any sort of support for Hamas in the US.

I don't think we have sufficient data to conclude that the brutality and the filming actually directionally increased support, not having access to the counterfactual (what should the counterfactual even be? No brutality but similar media coverage? No brutality but similar volume of media coverage? No brutality and the expected attendant lower volume of media coverage?). Assuming it did, though, two theories would jump out at me:

  1. taking the "this is what decolonization looks like" tweets seriously: in the context of BLM, genuine radicalization on the left has increased and inched closer to the Overton window. If you want armed revolution at home and understand what armed revolution actually looks like, it's not hard to see this as armed revolution as narrated from the perspective of the old regime.

  2. media savvy: however savage the attacks were, the media is remarkably crude and shameless in deploying the entire gamut of tricks to milk them in defense of IL's cause (Russell-conjugating any belligerent action, human interest sob stories, contrived clipping of historical context, social attacks against those who would merely fail to fall in line with these narrative techniques). Especially leftist activists by now would have extensive experience with deploying the same techniques for their own causes, often doing so with much greater finesse; they would recognise that and how they are being played and if they were already tending pro-Palestine this would probably make them bristle as much as a ChatGPT-polished essay about the intersectional oppressions of inceldom and Appalachian origin would.

Osama bin Laden was definitely right about one thing – if people see a strong horse and a weak horse, they instinctively like the strong horse.

The problem is that even the elite republicans like Griffin still want to hire Harvard grads. If he actually wanted to make a ‘conservative’ college successful, he’d say “from now on, Citadel is going to hire primarily from Notre Dame” or Claremont or whatever. But that’s a business risk.

So it’s a chicken and egg problem. Conservative elites want ‘the best’, they’re not willing to compromise candidate quality for ideology, so they are ultimately reliant on Harvard’s admissions team for recruitment.

Citadel does hire at all those places, and MIT and Berkeley and every place. Their interviews are pretty intense, so "dumber" people don't usually get in, or most likely don't interview in the first place (in my experience)

Harvard’s admissions doesn't let in the best though were are fighting in court to keep doing so

Imagine if any other foreign group were so outright in tying financing to their state interests. Israeli/jewish control over the US isn't even hidden at this point.

As for support there really only are two support bases for Israel in the world, zionist jews and American evangelical boomers. Israel has never been popular in Europe, latin America or Asia. The support base for neoconservatism is largely a generational thing. Young Americans are equally split between favoring Hamas and Israel and that is in a country that is more hardcore zionist than Israel.

The almost fanatical support for a foreign nation that is culturally alien was never organic. It hinged on carefully controlled media narratives. Once people in Palestine got phones and their images could be spread around the world Israel was inevitably going to lose public support.

The lack of support in Europe is more of a symptom of declining Christianity. When Jodan was in charge of the west bank they didn't allow Chrstian pilgrims, and that dispute goes all the way back to the crusades.

Anti-BDS laws are definitely evidence that they do exert policy power. But perhaps just not overwhelming. And definitely not today, when Dems are in charge, it seems.

But still, two carrier groups to that area, more munitions to Israel, etc. the US has her own interests in the ME (that are already being targeted and hit by Iranian-backed militias), so there's that reason too.

And definitely not today, when Dems are in charge, it seems.

What are you talking about? A recent symbolic Senate resolution:

H.Res.771 - Standing with Israel as it defends itself against the barbaric war launched by Hamas and other terrorists.

Passed 97-0. Passed the House 412-10 (6 voted present).

And also meanwhile: "President Biden has asked lawmakers for almost $106 billion in funding for Israel, Ukraine, countering China in the Indo-Pacific, and operations on the southern U.S. border."

Israel: $14.3 billion. In Tel Aviv, Biden promised an "unprecedented" package of aid to support Israel after the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7. The request includes funding for air and missile defense, military financing and embassy support

Humanitarian aid: $9.15 billion. This includes support for Israel, Gaza and Ukraine. The breakdown of this funding is "flexible," White House budget director Shalanda Young told reporters, depending on where the need is greatest.

The mainstream Democrats and the American deep state are ridiculously in the tank for Israel.

If Zionists control the US, they're doing a shit job of steering our foreign policy. The Israelis can't even invade Gaza, the people responsible for breaking into their country to rape and mutilate women and children on video, without daddy's approval.

Antony Blinken is basically embedded in the Israeli government at this point. The American insistence for Israel to delay ground invasion is reportedly so America can move "defenses" into position in the case of a regional outbreak of war. The delay is to allow America to become directly involved.

Then the Israelis basically get to decide if America gets involved in a regional war with how they escalate the conflict.

Perhaps the influence is two-way, much like the factory staffed by only a man and a dog. Israel can pull the US into a quagmire, but the US gets to insist they hold their horses.

They get more foreign aid than any other country. All politicians more or less have to bow to Israel. Lots of American politicians openly say they are Israel firsters. There is an absurd overrepresntation of jews in the american elite and people have gotten fired for not supporting Israel. American aggression toward Syria, destabilizing Iraq and decades of involvement in the middle east has been a tremendous gift to Israel. Even when Israel is mass bombing cvilian areas the US is flying in weapons and stationing air craft carriers off their coast.

The relationship is unidirectional. The US politicians go the wailing wall and bow to their rulers. Blinken is openly running policy for his ethnic interest.

Lots of American politicians openly say they are Israel firsters.

Like who?

If you want to do things without daddy's approval, stop asking for daddy's money and daddy's protection? How many countries get a carrier battle group deployed to their neighborhood as a token of solidarity, following a terrorist attack?

I'm on your side of this particular spat, but trying to paint Israel as an underdog with no support is ridiculous.

US troops are being hit in Iraq, Syria, etc by Iranian-backed groups, so it's not just Israel. Though the US isn't exactly doing a lot here to respond.

Israel as an underdog

To be fair, it is a small country, both geographically and in terms of population, and surrounded by hostile nations. It may be the bigger dog when looking purely at an Israel-VS-Palestine fight, but there are many tens of millions of muslims in the neighborhood who can pick up the pieces if Gaza should be wiped out, whereas if the same happens to Israel it's gone for good, unless you expect the Brits to manage a second Zionist nation-founding.

IMO both sides have good reasons to see their situation as precarious and themselves as the underdog, little sense as that makes.

The carrier battle group is not there as "a token of solidarity." It is there to dissuade other actors in the region from expanding the conflict, by reinforcing the idea that Israel remains formidable, in part because it has powerful friends who are willing to act.

Potato - potahto. They're pretty much the same picture.

No, they're not. The US has an interest in preserving the economic stability that would be threatened by a broader conflict in the Middle East which is independent of any interest in protecting Israel per se. Not to mention that, if the claims commonly repeated on here about the terrible effects of higher gas prices on the well-being of US citizens are true, preventing a wider conflict serves the interests of those citizens.

Not to mention that, if the claims commonly repeated on here about the terrible effects of higher gas prices on the well-being of US citizens are true, preventing a wider conflict serves the interests of those citizens.

Imagine still trying to shill the "US military Intervention in the Middle East is due to oil, it's not about Israel" talking point at this point.

Okay. I'm imagining it. Your point?

And in case my point is too subtle, it's this: this is a snide and consensus-building way to assert "Actually, it's all about Israel." You may make the argument that it's all about Israel. You may not simply assert that anyone who thinks it's not all about Israel is simply a "shill."

So, I had to think about whether to warn you or give you a ban for this. The comment in itself is only slightly bad. But you've been tip-toeing up to that line for as long as you've been here, and you've been repeatedly warned about being a one-note piano, and your response has been to try to make the Joo-posting a little more sneakier but still, it's really all you ever post about, and you're frequently antagonistic when you do.

You have a fan club, and some people will be pissed off if we ban you and complain that we're just protecting Da Joos.

The fact is, you've actually been getting extra slack just because of your particular niche viewpoint and us bending over backwards to be fair-minded. So one more time: you can deny the Holocaust, Notice(tm)-post, and talk about (((whatever else you want))), but you need to follow the same rules of charity and civility as everyone else, and the more you keep banging that one note, the more we are going to notice (and respond) when you choose to be obnoxious about it.

Banned for two weeks.

(ETA: Typoed 13 days, but fine, you get a free 1-day reduction.)

How about engaging substantively, rather using perjoratives like "shill"?

Unless you're writing all of this to imply the US would sell out Israel in a heartbeat, if it was in it's geopolitical interest, nothing you said seems to contradict my point?

While most of the unis in question are sitting on endowments that make them richer than God, I'm sure they're sweating when the money tap turns off, especially if it makes the administration look bad.

Even if it doesn't directly change what the students say or protest, it should have some effect on how much the administration lets them get away with, at least at the edges of the Overton Window. Not much, because I don't imagine Peter Thiel giving Harvard a billion will do more than get his name on a few plaques and buildings, but good for people who put their money where their mouth is, or just suck it up with a straw I guess.

What else are you supposed to do with fuck you money except tell your ideological opponents to fuck off?

I am starting to think Jews are going to be in a bad place. I had a belief a decade ago that when there was some crazy college protest it was no big deal. The kids will grow up, get a job, get pregnant and go about the life grind. College idealism and learning half an issue dissipates once your grinding out life. Now it seems as though they have taken over everything.

If things continue on this path then the next Democratic administration will probably cut off Israel and do nothing if Israel is attacked. Israel will have to stand alone in the world surrounded by a lot of people who hate them.

The only real counter to this feeling is the Jews own too much of the media and think tanks etc and will be able to cut this virus down.

And a part me laughs a bit. They fucked around and found out. They didn’t do anything when the other white ethnicities were getting blasted and some orgs like the ADL promote white hate. And then the gun was turned on them.

I am starting to think Jews are going to be in a bad place.

They'll be in the same place white people have been in the last 5-10 years. Pulled out of their cars and beaten, their homes attacked by mobs, their tormentors given slaps on the wrist in the name of "restorative justice".

Vanishingly few of the Jews terrified at what happens to them now that the worm has turned spoke out on my behalf, though my sympathy goes to the few (Gad Saad, Bret Wienstein, etc), that did. I see no reason to care what happens to them. I have my own fucking problems now. Like acquiring guns and ammo because this is the world I live in

College idealism and learning half an issue dissipates once your grinding out life. Now it seems as though they have taken over everything.

Right. The movement of people to more conservative positions as they age stopped some years ago.

And a part me laughs a bit. They fucked around and found out. They didn’t do anything when the other white ethnicities were getting blasted and some orgs like the ADL promote white hate. And then the gun was turned on them.

Not only did they do nothing, not only was it some orgs; subversive anti-white ideology has always been highly disproportionality Jewish. There is a reason things like the early life Wikipedia section and the coincidence detection triple parenthesis echo became memes.

Frankenstein is finally getting attacked by his own monster.

To be fair the rebellion is Jewish led too.

https://twitter.com/piedmontian11/status/1715856464969912364?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ

Not only did they do nothing, not only was it some orgs; subversive anti-white ideology has always been highly disproportionality Jewish.

The pushback to it was also highly disproportionally Jewish. It doesn't take an Ashkenazi IQ to see the more than passing resemblance of the privilege discourse in 2010's America to the privilege discourse in 1930's Europe, and a lot of them pointed it out early on, so I don't really care about the disproportional support.

What I do care about is that some of the very specific Jewish people that were on board for each and every step of this crazy ride, are suddenly aghast now that they're on the receiving end of it. You can easily find people who's complaint is literally "we were there for BLM, we were there for MeToo, we were there for trans people, but no one is there for us!". The ones with comparatively less self respect even append a "and we will still support these progressive causes" at the end of that. Then there are outright slimeballs like Ethan Klein (of the linked-by-OP video) who rode the Anti-SJW wave high when that was the top trend, backstabbed people like Jordan Peterson and became buddy-buddy with Hasan Piker when he thought there's more hay to be made on the other side, and is now crying about the support for Hamas in his discord. I was already biting my tongue around TERFs that went full surprised Picachu when they were told they have to wax feminine balls, I don't know how much of that I can do anymore.

I actually kind of hope all these theories about Jewish influence over everything around us are true, so they can find their balls and end this madness, because if they don't, I'll leave you with this: given where we started 10 years ago, and where we are now, how do you think there world is going to look like 10 years from now?

I actually kind of hope all these theories about Jewish influence over everything around us are true, so they can find their balls and end this madness, because if they don't, I'll leave you with this: given where we started 10 years ago, and where we are now, how do you think there world is going to look like 10 years from now?

Well, that would be the greatest blackpill, wouldn't it? That there is no one who can save us, no one in control of the machine. There were people who could control it, and/or thought they could control it, but they've failed (assuming they ever actually could), or are just gone now.

I think a bunch of sci-fi horror video games use this kind of trope.

There are people in control or at least having a lot of influence over people, but they don't understand the forces that they are playing with and think that they can just stir up anti-white hatred, but set limits where people are not supposed to notice that the arguments for anti-white hatred are even more applicable to Jews.

The pushback to it was also highly disproportionally Jewish. It doesn't take an Ashkenazi IQ to see the more than passing resemblance of the privilege discourse in 2010's America to the privilege discourse in 1930's Europe, and a lot of them pointed it out early on, so I don't really care about the disproportional support.

Has it? IMHO it's been token Jewish. And what Jewish resistance to the remaking of my country exists, it's dwarfed by the power of the ADL to dictate narrative, policy, and get people removed. Even now the ADL is running cover, pretending this enormous groundswell of anti-Semitism is from "far right white nationalist", despite the obvious falsehood of it being evident from watching literally any video. They are too deeply invested in labelling any anti-immigration organization a hate group.

The ADL being Quislings (Czerniakóws?) is a bad thing, but if you make enemies of an entire demographic due to the bad acts of one particularly high-profile activist organization being suicidally leftist, you're going to run out of demographic groups real quick.

Who said anything about making enemies? More like leaving them to the consequences of their own actions. I'm staying out of it.

Has it? IMHO it's been token Jewish. And what Jewish resistance to the remaking of my country exists, it's dwarfed by the power of the ADL to dictate narrative, policy, and get people removed.

Sure. One side is winning, and the other is losing. There's a disproportionate number of Jewish people on both sides.

Even now the ADL is running cover, pretending this enormous groundswell of anti-Semitism is from "far right white nationalist", despite the obvious falsehood of it being evident from watching literally any video.

Yeah, and feminists insist the transgender movement is a men's rights movement despite the obvious falsehood of that idea. It would still be factually wrong to lay the blame for it on women as a whole, or even on average.

The pushback to it was also highly disproportionally Jewish.

How much of it is the Jewish idpol card kinda sticking you in a state of quasi-whiteness that allows rallying back against intersectionalism without getting immediately cancelled yourself, though?

I have no idea who the non-Harvey-related Weinstein brothers are, but I'd have pointed out Curtis Yarvin. Not only did he still get cancelled, but when "he's a monarchist" tried to get through his cancelers' brains and ended up as "DOES NOT COMPUTE" (with which I admit I sympathize), they fell right back on "he must be a Nazi!" without noticing the irony (which was ... less sympathetic).

Scott Alexander got doxxed by the New York Times for being part of the pushback. The article naming him seemed most concerned by the idea that biological differences might have something to do with intelligence, and I do see how that frightens normal people who are scrupulously concerned about the bad inferences one might too-easily make from such a belief, but now that we've discovered the Times hires people who they know have a history of literally praising Hitler to do primary-source reporting on Israel I'm less inclined to give them a pass as "normal" or "scrupulous".

I have no idea who the non-Harvey-related Weinstein brothers are

I think it's a reference to Bret and Eric Weinstein (pronounced "Wine-Stine," in contrast to Harvey's "Wine-steen"). Eric has been a public intellectual for a while, whereas Bret came into prominence as a biology professor at Evergreen college some ago, where he pushed back against the college's annual "Day of Absence" which requested that white people remain off-campus for the day. IIRC, part of Bret's argument mentioned how his Jewish heritage made him more sensitive to policies where people are asked to not be present purely on the basis of their ethnicity or race. This led to some viral videos of him being confronted by angry students, eventually leading to him and his wife (another biology professor at Evergreen) resigning. They went on a bunch of podcasts afterward, and I believe they started their own podcast, becoming public intellectuals like Eric.

Didn't seem to help the Weinstein brothers (no relation to Harvey) to not get immediately cancelled.

Harvard’s endowment is huge, and everyone could stop donating right now and Harvard wouldn’t notice. If Griffin or Ackman or whatever Twitter busybody billionaire thinks Harvard cares about them, or even notices who they are, they are seriously high on their own supply.

There’s also a less public issue where a lot of these donations are shadily (though not-publicly) invested via the endowment management company into the donors’ PE or VC or hedge funds at exorbitant fees (for a hint of this, check out the composition of Stanford’s board) so their pulling out isn’t costless from the donor’s perspective.

i got the sense that majority of endowment growth is through investments, like how David Swensen ran the Yale endowment, or how much money Stanford makes from VC funds.

This is also true of public pensions, like CALPERS, or Ontario teachers union, or any of these big money funds that need to grow (though VC usually is not like, 50% of their investments).

Coupled with how well Griffin's Citadel grows the pile, it makes sense to invest in them (if harvard does invest in citadel funds - im not sure)

If it’s already big then yes most of the growth is through growth of the investments. Despite what they say, and despite a lot of smoothing and fudging, VC/PE/hedge funds make money when equity markets go up and lose money when equity markets go down, so investing into that stuff isn’t really a secret sauce.

On the other hand, university endowments are a huge slice of business for these funds, so Harvard & similar pulling out of Pershing Square is way way worse for Pershing Square than Bill Ackman taking his (relatively small) ball and going home is bad for Harvard.

Harvard isn’t prestigious if it’s just an activist shop. Those rich people checks don’t just back Harvard’s bankroll. They are prestigious because people like Zuck went to Harvard, created a giant company from scratch, and then provides well paid jobs to Harvard grads. I’m very skeptical that activist Harvard grads are going to be the hiring managers and law firm partners doling out big checks to recent grads.

I don’t know the end game here but if all the Milton Friedman (and the 30-35% of Nobel Prize winners who are Jews) types quit going to Harvard and started going to Eastern Kentucky State then I am fairly certain in a generation Eastern Kentucky State would be considered a top 3-5 global university.

I don’t know the end game here but if all the Milton Friedman (and the 30-35% of Nobel Prize winners who are Jews) types quit going to Harvard and started going to Eastern Kentucky State then I am fairly certain in a generation Eastern Kentucky State would be considered a top 3-5 global university.

It'll never happen, though. Prestige begets prestige, and there hasn't been a new prestigious university created since Stanford. You can't compete with Harvard unless you destroy it first, and it's always going to look easier to take it back over.

Stanford wasn't internationally prestigious until what, 1960s or 70s? It wasn't obviously a competitor to the Ivies until DoD investments and silicon valley started taking shape in that time, no?

Nobel Prized and billionaire graduates especially mostly self made billionaires begets prestige. Jews are very good at both of those things.

If the Jews got some stones and boycotted the Ivy League and came up with an approved set of institutions the Ivy League would be toast in a generation.

there hasn't been a new prestigious university created since Stanford

CMU was founded 15 years later and is very prestigious in the CS world. As AI becomes more important its profile should rise even higher

That's not the kind of prestige they're talking about. No one is going to become president / a senator / congressman / have any real decision power, really, because they got a tech degree.

We've had presidents from institutions as illustrious as Texas State, UMich, U of Delaware, UNC chapel hill, and Georgia southwestern state. I haven't checked congresspeople but I presume there's even more dubious institutions there. The supreme Court is much more exclusive to prestigious institutions, although there are still some notable recent exceptions (Barrett, who attended a law school ranked 27th).

Social media wasn't that developed, and I wasn't paying attention, last time the large Israel/Palestine hostage situation happened in 2014, or the situation in 2008. Was it always been like this, pro-Hamas/anti-Israel/ and I just didn't notice?

I don't know, I have no real data either way, but I do know that "Corbynization" of the media and academia has been a popular talking point in right leaning spaces since at least 2010, as it was one of the secondary grievances raised by many of the original Tea-Party candidates.

When the awokening started taking off there was the old "you don't join, you get thrown into the pit with the rest of us" idea. For years I had a welcoming attitude, but man, the new arrivals are starting wear down my patience.

My bet is no, Griffin's $300mil will not change how Harvard students think and say. What do you guys think?

I tend to agree, the pro-palestine movement wouldn't make the move, if they thought it would mean some critical loss for them. But even plain old fashioned war is hard to predict, with it's easily measurable things like soldiers, tanks, and shells, let alone the much more intangible culture war.

Help! I'm old and not keeping up

you don't join

Who is you and what do they not join?

into the pit with the rest of us

Who is us? What is the pit?

Help! I'm old and not keeping up

That's weird, because that saying is pretty old. Ancient by internet standards, in fact.

Who is you and what do they not join?

You is literally you, and Gamergate is the thing you don't join.

Who is us? What is the pit?

Gamergate and Gamergate again.

The saying expresses a certain feeling of having the rug pulled from under you, when you considered yourself to be a good liberal all your life, and are suddenly being called a Nazi by people that used to be your friends just a moment ago, and the only source of comfort are the people you considered Nazis just a moment ago.

What I'm struggling with is that as someone who has received comfort, I want to give it to others as well, but at the same time this whole dynamic is starting to feel rather tired. I don't know how many more rounds of "this time the Left has gone too far..." I can take.

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