@BenRossTransit why were Americans all “Free Tibet” 30 years ago and hardly thinks about Tibet today? there is no content to demands for consistency in people’s indignation and attention. if it soothes you that you can scry in these inconsistencies some bigotry if those which criticize a party you sympathize with, maybe that’s psychologically useful, but it has no normative content other should defer to.
@BenRossTransit (the obvious answer by the way with Arab obsession with Israel is that they consider it theft of “their” dominion, not merely oppression of coreligionists in random places. indeed we’d probably agree that Arab countries have worked assiduously to ensure the conditions of oppression are not relieved in a way that might diffuse the conflict rather than freeze it in a position of transgenerational agony.)
@BenRossTransit (i consider this Arab irredentism as illegitimate as all irredentisms, and view the UNs complicity in it as a perhaps fatal wound to that organization’s already flagging hopes for legitimacy. but irredentism is distinct from antisemitism, the implicit charge that usually lies behind calling attention to an “obsession” with Israel and its atrocities.)
There’s that quote (usually attributed to a 1970s IBM presentation), “A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision.”
Isn’t that the precise opposite of our lived experience of management though? Doesn’t the management consulting industry exist, paid billions primarily to relieve managers of accountability for their own decisions? Wouldn’t purchasing deniability by computerization instead be a tremendous cost savings?
@BenRossTransit i won’t speak for Philippe, but one answer is that “ethnic cleansings” sort and segregate while colonizations mix. often the “cleansing” is a consequence of the colonization — the mixture is unstable or unsupportable — but they are nevertheless distinct. the mid 20th C abjured colonization but embraced ethnic cleansing settle hostilities resulting from past mixing. Israel’s founding was out of phase, as is its clear desire to “cleanse” now.
@BenRossTransit i think Philippe’s piece is, whatever else you want to say about it, refreshingly nonnormative. he is — correctly in my view — neither sympathetic nor unsympathetic to either party, but traces a theory about how they arrive at the pickle they are in, under which both parties’ behavior is pretty understandable.
“a farmer grew a potato, he had no idea who he’d sell it to, he hoped he’d find a buyer later.”
“d’ya know what they call that?”
“a spec tater”
@failedLyndonLaRouchite the box is very annoying. do you not think there are some pretty unique aspects about the founding of Israel, its timing and circumstances? simultaneously an example of ethnic cleansing (by Europe, of Jewish refugees) and an example of colonialism, at the very moment that the normative basis for colonialism had collapsed and very aggressive forms of nationalism overtook both Zionism and its objectors.
@admitsWrongIfProven i'm not sure i can identify a mistake, in such general terms! i may be missing, may not know the medium you are talking about. i don't know whether you are right but i am sure you are not pretentious!
"the Zionist movement was in a sense anachronistic, a colonial project that reached maturity just as colonialism was collapsing everywhere. But unlike the French or British colonialists, the Jews in Palestine didn’t have a state of their own to return to, so they persisted and the state of Israel is still here." #PhilippeLemoine https://www.philippelemoine.com/p/the-zionist-dilemma
@admitsWrongIfProven my god he writes a lot! but though i often disagree, he is also often quite insightful, and though i'm not a huge fan of the rationalists and their pretensions, i do think he does a pretty good job — often, not always — of trying to understand and fairly present views that are not his own.
@eyesquash I don't know that I'd know better than that you don't know what you don't know yourself!
"Substackism is…a kind of center-right enclosure ideology with a vaguely benign-monarchist, as opposed to anarchist, disposition, and a tendency to capture rather than curate the commons… This is not a criticism of Substack in particular, or even really a criticism at all. It is what it is. All Web 2.0 platforms have something like a center-right monarchist enclosure ideology… It is no coincidence…the rise of a politics, neoreaction, sympathetic to it." #vgr https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2023/11/02/the-future-of-the-blogosphere/
@admitsWrongIfProven It should be, initially I intended to include that too. But it got long, so I kept to the dometic policy that the Yglesias piece I was responding to focused upon. I think a lot of damage was done to US moral and military credibility during the Obama administration, as well as the poor domestic economics.
@admitsWrongIfProven he's the most prominent exponent of "the virtue of nationalism" https://www.yoramhazony.org/tvn/
@admitsWrongIfProven ha! he deleted it. paraphrasing from memory, he basically said that israel and gaza both want war so let's just have it and let the chips fall where they may.
"israel" and "gaza" both omit distinctions, like between catastrophic "patriots" and people who just want to live their own lives among friends and family in peace and safety.
i don’t like it when bad things happen to bad people, although i agree that it is necessary sometimes for reasons of accountability and deterrence.
i don’t like it when bad things happen to people.
@perfect_brains the work of states is to conjure nationalisms consistent with stability and internal peace (which often means pluralism). nationalism untethered to a state that incorporates as full citizens all of the residents of the territory it controls is indeed a pestilence, in my view. https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2023/10/13/national-self-determination-is-a-vicious-idea/index.html
@realcaseyrollins that is the horror.
"It is the bleakest of historical ironies that a people hounded from country to country, and eventually into camps, by the pestilence of nationalism should seize on nationalism as our saviour, our birth right, our vengeance." #SamAdlerBell https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2023/11/jews-resist-inhumanity-israel
@phillmv as a 2016 Bernie-ite it has been a bit jarring having been pilloried by people especially at his publication as excusing racism and denying science for preferring Bernie's materialist politics to Hillary's material apologism and identity-baiting only to watch so many of those "serious liberals" now join a coalition complaining about that politics once they realized it was meant seriously enough to affect them.
@realcaseyrollins just because there is no points on which to compromise doesn't mean the form of competition needs to be war. humans have lots of irreconcilable claims and aspirations. we argue, we go to court, sometimes police intervene sometimes we set up some kind of challenge or competition to decide the issue (like who gets to live in a nice house and who doesn't). we don't pull knives, we find other paths, 'cuz knives are bad for everyone. even moreso war.
the chips are corpses.
it's a hard situation. i am not on either side. in fact i have warm feelings for neither.
but war is bad. you can't just opt out but you should always be striving for circumstances under which it can stop without entirely subordinating the interests of one belligerent to another.
that people so feted tweet so glib.