as @phillmv.bsky.social points out, though, part of the problem with engaging sea lions is they will just waste your time. 1/

i think "no platforming" and gatekeeping is a failed project, and it is absolutely on us to engage the public in opposition to viewpoints and ideas, and outright lies and propaganda, they won't in any sense be protected from. 2/

but it is on us to be strategic about how we engage. often taking the bait to debate is a poor use of our time. 3/

i was listening to the recent "Know Your Enemies" podcast on minority voters moving right. know-your-enemy-1682b684.simplecast.com/episodes/w-d... 4/

it struck me how the TPUSA crowd engaged people not in the context of hostile debates, but in circumstances where they could be friendly, hosts, providers of connection. 5/

it's our responsibility to make the case for a decent and civilized world. we can't prevent grifting barbarians from spreading their worldview. but pitched battles on terms set by the grifting barbarians may not be the best way to meet our responsibilities. /fin

right. there was this neoliberal intuition that corporations could be forces for good. they are managed and dominated by educated professionals! Marx i think has been vindicated a bit. as power shifted, the same corporations that boycotted North Carolina now build their new data centers in Texas. 1/

capitalist corporations are not moral actors, and it was foolish of liberals to imagine that they could be other than by ensuring that their financial incentives were always to be. /fin

oh, to the degree the word genocide has any productive meaning i'm very willing to apply it, as are i think nearly all honest interlocutors at this point. (i know a prominent poster here says otherwise, but whatever.) 1/

i don't think there was anything inevitable about Israel/Palestine arriving at this juncture. you can find plenty of fascists at Israel's founding and plenty of Arab fascists around an before if you look, but there are always fascists in and for every community. 2/

there really were moments when some kind of civilized accommodation might have been possible. assassinating Rabin really mattered. 3/

it's true that for three decades now Israel's ruling coalition has mostly been fascist, but that fact is not independent of how the miserable national projects played out on the ground. having your kids blown up on school buses and in shopping malls may make a fascist of anyone. 4/

fascism is a contagious illness. when one group of fascists casts you as the enemy preventing the flourishing of the people, those so identified tend understandably to adopt an obverse view, and then whoever wins, the fascists do. 5/

what's worth noting about Israel/Palestine is how unexceptional a story it is. this is what happens when ethnonational identity trumps formal identity in a state that provides for the rights of all of its residents. avoiding this story is why formal territorial states and should be supported. 6/

also unexceptional is that devoted ethnonational partisans outside the zone of conflict or the nascent state that must integrate to resolve the conflict do terrible mischief. 7/

by supporting the cause of their side while not suffering the consequences of failing to find a path towards peace and integration, they fan the flames. 8/

any nascent state more identified with one side than another perceives outside partisans of the other side as foreign actors seeking to weaken and undermine the state, so those who support accommodation risk being perceived as traitors. 9/

Israel/Palestine is so normal, so predictable, so straightforward a case of why prior, sentimental, an ethnicity-is-like-an-extension-of-family tribal groups are a terrible thing at attach rights to or define states around. 10/

It's not an unusual story. It's the most usual. It's just in the spotlight, and being so in the spotlight with such emotionally involved audience members has made reaching a settlement all the more difficult, and that has made the scale of the tragedy much greater than it might have been. /fin

to the degree it is effective, yes, the people who own the platforms will be most effective at it. which gets us back to @sjshancoxli.liberalcurrents.com's original point, some progressive version of "we" imagined that we governed, controlled in some sense, the platforms so it could work… 1/

but it turns out that fascist plutocrats do, and the old "free speech" story that people at the bottom of social hierarchies are most vulnerable to gatekeeping do hold some water after all. /fin

What do you mean by sensitive? The situation is ubiquitous. Usually, when it comes to this point, it is in fact resolved by ethnic cleansing. See Nagorno-Karabakh, 2023. See the aftermath of constant civil wars throughout Africa. See the aftermath of WWII. 1/

What makes Israel/Palestine so sensitive is that the rest of the world has wound itself up in the conflict, external partisans on both sides have emboldened and entrenched the two absolutely disgusting ethnonational projects. 2/

That has helped bring the situation to the point where any sort of integrated state (which might encompasses anything from French imperialism of internal neutality to US-style pluralism to Franco-Canadian style internal accommodationism to UK/Belgium-style regionalism) is impossible. 3/

Well meaning outsiders, whether diasporic liberal Zionists, or Arab nationalists who insisted Palestinians maintain permanent refugee status rather than be resettled, have made the conflict infinitely worse, helped to prevent any earlier human and humane settlement. 4/

In any case, the conflict has reached the point where the only likely settlement will be some kind of population transfer. Perhaps morally it ought to be the Jews of Israel that leave, but I suspect that's less likely. 5/

The language first of "national rights" — both of Jews, then of Palestinians — made this problem, and then the language of "international law" kept it simmering by absurdly keeping "a people" stuck in limbo when conflicts in fact end only by integrating the populations made refugees elsewhere. 6/

And now it will be a very hard pill to swallow, after all of the foolish, useless "sacrifice" and "martyrdom" for both detestable national projects, that "ethnic cleansing" will be the solution. Or it won't, and the Palestinian population will continue to be immiserated. 7/

Or Iran or someone else will throw in a monkey wrench, and a big war will become a regional etch-a-sketch. 8/

And if we collectively survive that war (only an if), the population transfers that will inevitable result at its end will be an afterthought, we'll have stopped worrying about "ethnic cleansing". /fin

Perhaps part of the issue is the same people who defined both genocide and ethnic cleansing as crimes in legalistic terms had just engaged in mass ethnic cleansing throughout Europe, which they felt was necessary after WWII. 1/

They then called both these things crimes, but left extermination and murder a lesser thing. 2/

So when we reason about these things, we often fail to notice that ethnic cleansing and extermination are both miserable things, both should be absolutely avoided, but if one has to give, ethnic cleansing is preferable to extermination. 3/

The State of Israel, a miserable ethnonational project, has decided that it can no longer live with or even beside another miserable ethnonational project, the Palestinians. 4/

Given the prohibition of both options to achieve that goal, Israel adopts a superposition, placing the population it will no longer live beside in conditions that will slowly exterminate it unless somehow the other option is made available. 5/

This is the outcome of foolish legalism based on national rights, rather than making hard decisions that privilege the welfare of actual living but perhaps soon-to-be killed humans. /fin

so. if you live in a town that can't or doesn't pay for fire service you might have moral rights against arson, but they won't be very effective. the first project is building a town government that is actually protective. 1/

internal mass violence by states is usually (not always, but much much more commonly than not) imposed in large part along "sectional" lines. an effective state requires a degree of integration, even assimilation, paradoxically even in order to accommodate and even celebrate group difference. 2/

in success cases, assimilation and accommodation are complements, not substitutes. 3/

however, when nationalists (that is the right term for what you advocate) seek to grant rights to nations independent of, orthogonal to, states, it becomes difficult for states to manage a project of integration. 4/

is it okay to insist that schools be taught in the state's official language, even if a minority community would prefer their kids taught in their own national tongue? or is that genocide? (calling that genocide was part of Russia's pretext for invading Ukraine.) 5/

in general, evidence is strong that when outside actors support national or group rights of minorities in other states, that increases risk of thr "exclusion" (a word encompassing everything from discrimination to ethnic cleansing to extermin8n). politicalscience.columbian.gwu.edu/politics-nat... 6/

the project of building and sustaining a civilized state is *hard*. but in practice, all rights derive from state. as Hannah Arendt put it, protection by an organized state amounts to "the right to have rights" at all. 7/

placing abstract, external constraints how on the project of state consolidation — forming an "artificial" nation that coincides to a great degree with the full diversity encompassed by the territory of a state — is prosecuted… 8/

with respect to the profoundly difficult problem of integrating (and then hopefully celebrating!) diverse identities (celebration happens only in very confident states) is counterproductive. 9/

but counterproductive is too anodyne a word. because the real life consequence is frequently horror and atrocity. 10/

Israel/Palestine is in practice a single territory on which two groups, neither of whom have formed a successful state that integrates all the residents of the territories, demand individual national rights. we have seen the results over decades. really blossoming now. /fin