naraburns nihil supernum
1yr ago
(text post)
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Israel-Gaza Megathread #3
This is a refreshed megathread for any posts on the conflict between (so far, and so far as I know) Hamas and the Israeli government, as well as related geopolitics. Culture War thread rules apply.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
1yr ago
E.g. whites are much more numerous.
White people are vanishingly small as a percentage of the total population on Earth, so all you're saying is that we just have to wait a bit longer before they can have their own ethnostate? Would you also support Israel ceasing to be an ethnostate once the jewish diaspora population gets a bit bigger? How you slice the salami matters a lot too - do the Boers get to have their own ethnostate, given that they are a tiny minority on the verge of being wiped out and far smaller in population than the jews? I'm struggling to see the actual principle here - "you only get an ethnostate if you could plausibly be wiped out" is a contradictory and self-defeating argument anyway because it means that the moment you have the ethnostate you're protected and hence no longer deserve it... and if the ethnostate DOESN'T protect you, then there's no point tying it to numbers like that.
I think each people group is well served to have at least one country where they are a majority. Whether or not a country exists for the explicit purpose of giving them a majority is pretty much immaterial. E.g. Egypt is not a country formed for the purpose of giving Arabs a state of their own, but it nonetheless functions perfectly well as an Arab-majority country, such that the establishment of an Arab ethnostate is unnecessary. Whites don't need an ethnostate because we already have the thing that an ethnostate would exist to give us. E.g. when white Zimbabweans were a persecuted minority, they had somewhere to flee to that opened the doors for them.
And yes, this does mean I would like the Boers to have their own land - ideally they would have beaten the British and the Orange Free State would have survived. Alas.
Whites don't need an ethnostate because we already have the thing that an ethnostate would exist to give us. E.g. when white Zimbabweans were a persecuted minority, they had somewhere to flee to that opened the doors for them.
Heterosexual white men are not protected from affirmative action (discrimination) in most of the West, so what is that elusive 'the thing that an ethnostate would give exist to give us'?
This makes me think that one way for Israel to resolve that Hamas conundrum would be to offer Palestinians female-only visas, scholarships and massive cash bonuses to study and work in Israel and elsewhere.
Something like what the Americans tried in Afghanistan but actually effective.
I think the poorly defined and murky phrase "people group" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. This position makes you a firm supporter of Kurdish nationalism and Catalan separatism, but it unfortunately doesn't actually do anything to give you the solid ground you need to actually condemn white nationalists. What exactly is it that makes Jews a "people group" worthy of their own apartheid regime and ethnostate? I don't think you've defined that clearly enough to avoid also endorsing white nationalism, and you have also opened yourself up to a bunch of really dumb borderline questions like whether the Scots-Irish population in the USA deserves their own homeland.
My rule is any group of people that constitutes a majority in a defined geographical area of a city or larger should be able to form their own state if they want to. The lines that separate us are arbitrary and malleable, if people choose to care about being Hispanic or Saxon or Catalan or Appalachians then so be it.
I'm not particularly invested in condemning white nationalism. I don't support it on an object level, but I don't see it as being somehow illegitimate for a country to decide its own immigration policy or whatever.
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Notes -
White people are vanishingly small as a percentage of the total population on Earth, so all you're saying is that we just have to wait a bit longer before they can have their own ethnostate? Would you also support Israel ceasing to be an ethnostate once the jewish diaspora population gets a bit bigger? How you slice the salami matters a lot too - do the Boers get to have their own ethnostate, given that they are a tiny minority on the verge of being wiped out and far smaller in population than the jews? I'm struggling to see the actual principle here - "you only get an ethnostate if you could plausibly be wiped out" is a contradictory and self-defeating argument anyway because it means that the moment you have the ethnostate you're protected and hence no longer deserve it... and if the ethnostate DOESN'T protect you, then there's no point tying it to numbers like that.
I think each people group is well served to have at least one country where they are a majority. Whether or not a country exists for the explicit purpose of giving them a majority is pretty much immaterial. E.g. Egypt is not a country formed for the purpose of giving Arabs a state of their own, but it nonetheless functions perfectly well as an Arab-majority country, such that the establishment of an Arab ethnostate is unnecessary. Whites don't need an ethnostate because we already have the thing that an ethnostate would exist to give us. E.g. when white Zimbabweans were a persecuted minority, they had somewhere to flee to that opened the doors for them.
And yes, this does mean I would like the Boers to have their own land - ideally they would have beaten the British and the Orange Free State would have survived. Alas.
Heterosexual white men are not protected from affirmative action (discrimination) in most of the West, so what is that elusive 'the thing that an ethnostate would give exist to give us'?
I mean if you want to form a "heterosexual white male" ethno/gender/sexualstate, go right ahead. But personally I'd like to have women in my country.
That is not what I am suggesting.
This makes me think that one way for Israel to resolve that Hamas conundrum would be to offer Palestinians female-only visas, scholarships and massive cash bonuses to study and work in Israel and elsewhere. Something like what the Americans tried in Afghanistan but actually effective.
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I think the poorly defined and murky phrase "people group" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. This position makes you a firm supporter of Kurdish nationalism and Catalan separatism, but it unfortunately doesn't actually do anything to give you the solid ground you need to actually condemn white nationalists. What exactly is it that makes Jews a "people group" worthy of their own apartheid regime and ethnostate? I don't think you've defined that clearly enough to avoid also endorsing white nationalism, and you have also opened yourself up to a bunch of really dumb borderline questions like whether the Scots-Irish population in the USA deserves their own homeland.
My rule is any group of people that constitutes a majority in a defined geographical area of a city or larger should be able to form their own state if they want to. The lines that separate us are arbitrary and malleable, if people choose to care about being Hispanic or Saxon or Catalan or Appalachians then so be it.
I'm not particularly invested in condemning white nationalism. I don't support it on an object level, but I don't see it as being somehow illegitimate for a country to decide its own immigration policy or whatever.
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