The war

Take your pick.

Comments

[Donald]

Hamas wrecked any chance of a just solution for the forseeable future. I am not excusing the apartheid state. They are war criminals and so are the Western governments that have enabled them for years. Both sides are terrible, though Hamas has now managed to pull off one of the greatest single massacres of civilians in recent history. 1ss or 2ss--fairy tales. All one can hope for is a bodycount that isn't stratospheric

Israel will probably end up killing far more civilians and last I read have cut electricity and water. War crimes. They probably want as little reporting as possible from Gaza.

From the pro-Palestinian side, there was very slow progress towards the West seeing them as humans with equal rights. Not really there yet. There was a NYT editorial (on top of the four opinion pieces I mentioned) in May 2018 that said they found the Israeli case for using live ammo on unarmed demonstrators unconvincing and suggested using tear gas and watercannons instead. I might look it up, cut and paste the actual words. But that was a close paraphrase. You say that about people you don't fully see as people compared to the shooters. Gosh, you killed some people there. You didn't have to do that. Use water cannons in the future would be our advice.

Anyway, what little progress is gone, destroyed by Hamas going full ISIS. And some pro-Palestinian demonstrators are celebrating Hamas, because they are (insert string of curse words) stupid.

The Harvard kids (not sure if anyone is following this) are morons. But college radicals often are. Some are Palestinian. I would cut them slack--they know people who live there or might come from there themselves. But it is stupid to say that all blame falls on Israel. Hamas could have planned a daring attack focused solely on military targets that would have humiliated the Israelis, Bibi especially, and won over much of the world. But nope. They carefully planned for mass slaughter. Juan Cole thinks it was an ISIS-like calculation to start a regional conflict. Israel will react with enormous brutality and this will supposedly bring in Hezbollah (it might) and then others. People used to thinking of Israel as a happy prosperous place to live and visit won't see it that way.

Brilliant idea if you want to be king of the ashes.

If Israel is allowed to go as far as some people suspect they will go, then take everything I just said about Hamas and apply it to Israel. And any Western government that continues to back them.

We should never have pandered to Israel this much anyway. Even if there was no peace agreement, the settlements continued to expand, the low-level (compared to what is happening now) violence against civilians was the norm, all the major human rights groups called it apartheid. Didn't matter to the US or any of the other "civilized" Western countries. Jake Sullivan said just over a week ago that the Middle East was relatively calm. Won't go into the intelligence failures. Don't give a crap.

[nous]

I usually try to stay out of discussions about I/P for the simple reason that I have friends and colleagues on either side of that wretched conflict, and all of them, too, are torn as to what can be done even as they worry for the fate of their relatives and loved ones with every new terror attack or escalation of settler politics.

All I can add, myself, is that the one thing I have found that really summarizes how I feel in this moment is going back and reading Book 24 of The Iliad with Priam going to Achilles seeking the release of Hector's body.

That's it. It's worth a re-read. It captures so much.

And neither the siege, nor the war, nor the seething rage are close to being done.

[Donald]

Jewish Currents has a summary of the current situation--

https://jewishcurrents.org/the-hamas-attacks-and-israeli-response-an-explainer

Here is an essay from last year about apartheid--

https://jewishcurrents.org/understanding-apartheid

[CharlesWT]

The whole thing seems ripe for a lot of conspiracy theories. A captured Hamas operative claimed that the operation had been in development for a year. And they were surprised when they met so little resistance.

Perhaps the original intention was to create some chaos and capture some hostages. And when they met no resistance, the Hamas operatives decided to engage in some mission creep in the form of letting their inner demons out to play.

[Donald]

From what little I have read, the civilian killing seemed well planned. Either way, the inner demons were there.

[Girl from the North Country]

Goddamit, I just lost a long comment. I might reformulate in time, but in the first instance:

Janie's comment about the hobgoblins in McK's head was not "moral cowardice", as he said. It referred to his longtime behaviour here of using us liberal/lefties as punching bags for attitudes which none of us hold.

I look forward the the contextualization of why Israeli civilians, particularly children, had this coming.

Not a single person here (I believe, and contrary to McK's previous comments, I have a pretty good memory) has ever said, or thought, this. I realise he cannot get his head around this concept, but it is perfectly possible to

a) condemn the actions of the Netanyahu and some previous governments regarding Palestine and the Palestinians

and at the same time

b) condemn and be horrified by the terrorist activities of e.g. Hamas.

I am a Jew, and perhaps not the only one here. I have friends and relatives in Israel, some of whom are holocaust survivors, and all of whom are patriotic and serve or have served in the IDF, and many of them are lefty/liberals. It is perfectly possible to condemn e.g. the extension of the settlements, and the anti-democratic feelers of the Netanyahu government, while also condemning the likes of Hamas.

This does remind me of when McK tried to say we were apologists for the PRC, and pulled one of his famous disappearing tricks after various forms of pushback, including my reminding him that I had numerous friends and loved ones in Hong Kong whose safety and freedom I hugely feared for, in the place in which I grew up.

Why does it take personal stories to begin to put this across? Why is it so impossible to believe that people can hold several ideas in their minds at the same time? Why is nuance so impossible to comprehend?

As for the reactions of Palestinians, why is it so impossible to understand that if you have lived under oppression and occupation for decades, it breeds resentment and/or hatred? Before this latest crisis, 250 Palestinians had been killed this year. There are very few saints, or people as disciplined or controlled as a Mandela, who can conquer their rage and hurt enough to try to find an actual solution.

[JanieM]

McKinney: You post, you invite comment.

I invite comment, not dishonest, bullying, simple-minded trollery.

I'll comment whenever and wherever I like.

No, you won’t. No elaboration needed.

I am unblocking you, but unless/until I change my mind, if you show up in one of my threads again I’ll apply the overall block until I can have a conversation with the other front-pagers.

[Girl from the North Country]

McKinney, since you seem to be unblocked for the moment, I invite you to explain why you decided that your initial comment/question on this topic should be quite so aggressive and combative? You may have been frustrated that on a blog which normally comments on topical political matters, no comments had been posted for three days, but still, why on earth do you think it OK to behave in quite so boorish and insulting a manner, let alone one so misguided in its premise?

I further invite you to consider the fact that your characterisation of the attitudes and opinions of us on this blog is frequently wrong: whenever one of us proves this to you (using personal stories, or not), you disappear. Only think how interesting it could be if you engaged with us in good faith, and tried to find out what our opinions were, instead of telling us (wrongly) what they are.

[GftNC]

From today's Guardian, by an Israeli who was in the country when it happened:

But this was only half the reckoning.

The other hit most Israelis much harder: the apparatus of the state had failed. People in the south were hiding in safe rooms, under beds and in wardrobes, hoping and believing that help was coming; that in this kind of situation, the army and police would come to their rescue within minutes. But no one came. They had to wait for a whole day, calling television newsrooms and whispering their cries for help; many did not survive. The army was nowhere in sight. A few units were obliterated by the invading Palestinian forces, but most of the army was stationed far away in the West Bank, securing settlers’ provocations at the heart of Palestinian villages.

The prime minister appeared on television promising vengeance, rivers of blood and balls of fire, to people who were still being held captive and whose loved ones were taken hostage – without even mentioning what he was going to do to save them from this plight. Ever since, the huge mismanagement of the country under his reckless government has been exposed. Reserve soldiers complain of a lack of supplies, civilians volunteer to prepare food for them and others who were uprooted and abandoned. The government is after a victorious image of destruction in Gaza, as if we have not been shown the outcomes of such massacres thousands of times, to no avail.

I have bolded the phrase which conveys how much the actions of the Netanyahu government, with their appalling rightwing religious allies and concentration on the settlements, have contributed to some of the failure of the army to respond to the attrocity in time.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/11/israel-hamas-benjamin-netanyahu-peace

[Pro Bono]

My father's parents came to England from the Pale of Settlement as children. I have no living relatives in continental Europe. None. I profoundly understand the reasons for Israel's existence.

I'm against killing people, almost always.

The bell tolls for us all.

[Donald]

If you pop up here, McKT, my responses to you are in the other thread. You absolutely suck as a mindreader is part of it, but there's more.

[Girl from the North Country]

As a side note, I should say that my relative in her safe room told me on the telephone that Netanyahu's cabinet were all idiots, or in her words "nitwits", because of the necessity for him to include his far right religious allies despite their lack of expertise. Whether that was responsible or not for Israel ignoring the Egyptians' warning three days before the assault, we will no doubt discover in time. But according to her, and to a retired Mossad officer I just saw on C4 News, the new unity government now has some very good, competent people in it. Let's hope they have some effect in ensuring the Israeli response becomes more strategically (and in a humanitarian way) sensible.

[CharlesWT]

I suspect Mossad may spend a decade quietly dispatching various individuals in the Hamas leadership.

[CharlesWT]

"After an hour of non-stop sirens and explosions, we heard for the first time the blood-curdling sound of automatic gunfire. At first, we heard it from a distance, from the fields. Then, the sound was much closer, coming from the road. And then, it was right inside our neighborhood, near the window of our house. We also heard shouting in Arabic and understood immediately what was going on: It was our worst nightmare playing out. Armed Hamas militants had infiltrated our kibbutz and were literally on our doorstep, while we were locked inside with our two little girls."
My 62-year-old Dad Fought Hamas Terrorists to Free My Family. The Israeli State Failed Us: We were living the dream. On October 7, we woke up to a nightmare. After hours in the bomb shelter with armed terrorists on the other side of the wall, at 4 P.M., we heard a knock on the window. 'Sabba's here,' my daughter said, and we all burst into tears

[Girl from the North Country]

Further to which, another retired general, proving how absurd and puerile is any such notion as rightwing=good, lefties=bad (or, indeed, the obverse):

If you don't live in Israel or consume Israeli media, you don't know who Yair Golan is. He is a 61-year-old retired Major General in the Israel army and a former parliament MK.

Yesterday, when IDF and the police were in complete chaos, Golan put on his old uniform, took his weapon, and drove into the war zone multiple times to rescue civilians under fire. He rescued two young adults hiding under a bush after 260 of their friends were murdered at an outdoor party. He answered a call from a journalist that his son was hiding under fire and simply said, "Give me his location, and I will bring him back home." An hour later, the son called his father from Golan's car.

Golan collected a small crew and went in and out of the war zone, rescuing dozens of people while exchanging fire with Hamas terrorists. He is 61, he could have stayed home, but he chose to risk his life for people he does not know.

Golan is one of the strongest voices from the Israeli left and was constantly attacked by the right wing in Israel. But when the time came, he was first fighting the barbaric attack. The same brain wiring that supports peace, is often the same wiring that drives people to do the right thing.

[hairshirthedonist]

The Harvard kids (not sure if anyone is following this) are morons.

It seems that in McKinney's mind, we're all just like the Harvard kids, only without the the guts to put our thoughts to words within whatever unspecified timeframe he had in mind.

Whatever...

[nous]

The Harvard kids are kids, and are missing large swaths of information and experience that might help them to not be awful in this moment. I hope they someday get there. Right now, though, they are being insensitive fools in ways that are counterproductive to their human rights goals.

The passage that GftNC excerpted from the Guardian sounds almost word-for-word like an account from one of our mass shootings, especially one from a school like Uvalde or Marjory Stoneman Douglas where everyone believed there was a plan in place to protect them all.

I'm not drawing any larger conclusions from the comparison, that's just something that I noticed right away as a scholar of the rhetoric of violence and conflict.

[liberal japonicus]

I had been trying to write a post to open up a thread to talk about this since this started, so I'll just copy and paste
======
The wikipedia page on the conflict covers most of the points.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Israel%E2%80%93Hamas_war
Looking at the talk page gives you an idea of things that are contested, and but this appears to be the first major test of the wikipedia policy on contentious topics (if the page edits are anything to go by), which seems to have been amalgamated in late 2022. I'm not sure if this set of policies is connected to Saudi attempts to control content on Wikipedia
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jan/05/saudi-arabia-jails-two-wikipedia-staff-in-bid-to-control-content

though the timing seems linked. At any rate, this is to say caveat lector, but I think it is better than trying to sort out hidden biases in the flood of articles that are out there.

Here in Japan, there is not a lot of reporting on the conflict and any reporting we have is muted. Part of that is because war reportage has not been something that Japanese public really wants (there has been a similar situation with the Russia-Ukraine conflict). The Japanese government, in a similar manner, is rather hesitant, opting to not sign the G7 statement supporting Israel.

Fortunately for Japan, China's response, a studied call for neutrality which is filtered through whatever reporting you see it, is drawing a lot more attention. I think this Aljazeera article gives a rundown of the reactions of various countries and serves as a reasonable summary.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/7/we-are-at-war-reactions-to-palestinian-hamas-surprise-attack-in-israel

This link is excerpts from Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) bluebooks about Palestine-Japan relations.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/resrep42597?seq=16

Japan has been a long and consistent supporter of a two state solution. China has been a consistent supporter of Palestine, but, because of the repression of the Uyghurs, who are primarily Muslim, the hypocrisy of supporting one while suppressing the other leads them to be circumspect. Furthermore, China has wanted to strengthen ties with Saudi Arabia, especially through the Belt and Road initiative as well as deepen ties with Israel, so any statement on the current conflict is going to be like walking on eggshells.

A number of pieces I've read discuss how the success of the Hamas offensive represents a total failure of Israeli intelligence, with some pieces wondering if Netanyahu can fob off the responsibility elsewhere. As I understand it, the potential rapproachment between Saudi Arabia and Israel was a big motivating factor for the offensive, which probably leads some to push Iranian organization, but given the operational secrecy, while I'm sure Iran gave logistic support, I can't imagine that the secrecy could have been maintained with Iran knowing it was going off.

There are also some articles about how this is Israel's 9-11, which actually has a deeper truth, given that early on, Israel supported Islamic fundamentalists in general (and perhaps Hamas in particular, though there is a lot of questions about this) as a divide and rule strategy to undercut the secular nationalism of the PLO. This strategy dates much further back, but it is a mirror of some of the factors that led to 9-11.

There is a distinct possibility of this thread going off the rails, so I hope we can keep the discussion informative and civil.

[CharlesWT]

A number of pieces I've read discuss how the success of the Hamas offensive represents a total failure of Israeli intelligence, ...

Some pundits have claimed that Hamas has been avoiding electronic communication for sensitive communications.

...with some pieces wondering if Netanyahu can fob off the responsibility elsewhere.

And pundits point out that Bush the Younger was reelected after 9/11.

[Fraud Guy]

Rooting for the civilians.

[liberal japonicus]

pundits point out that Bush the Younger was reelected after 9/11.

Well, Israel has a history of turfing out politicians who make these kinds of screw ups, cf Golda Meir and the Yom Kippur war.

[wj]

As I understand it, the potential rapproachment between Saudi Arabia and Israel was a big motivating factor for the offensive

I've seen that opinion. But I've also seen reports the Hamas had been planning this attack for two years. Was there been anything about an Israel/Saudi Arabia peace deal that far back? (I don't recall anything. But I don't follow day to day maneuverings in the Middle East all that closely.

At most, I suppose it could have been a motivation to attack just now. But it seems like Hamas was ready to go, so how much longer would they have waited, absent a possible agreement?

I rather think a likelier explanation for the timing is opportunism. Bibi pulled out most of his troops, to go defend settler provocations in Palestinian villages in the West Bank. It was just way too tempting an opening for Hamas to pass up. Hamas would have moved sooner or later. But to much less effect with the IDF troops actually on scene.

[Donald]

A lot of people think it was at least in part the Saudi deal. Biden was building off Trump’s Abraham Accords. Hell, I think the Abraham Accords and Biden’s obession with an Israeli Saudi deal was a kick in the teeth to Palestinians. They were negotiating to get Bonesaw to accept some vague promise to the Palestinians. If we spent a bit more time genuinely working for peace and something at least a bit just, there would be less incentive for people to support fanatics

Which is not an excuse for the fanatics committing a crime against humanity.

[Donald]

Didn’t finish my thought. The Palestinians felt they were losing their support from the Arab rulers ( not the people under those rulers) and so Israel would no longer see a minimally just solution with the Palestinians as necessary to have peace and prosperity with their neighbors. They could continue to take as much land as they wanted, keep the Gazans in their cage, and get their peace agreements and nobody would are, except for the usual pro forms BS proclamations by US state department spokespeople that we remain committed to a 2ss that nobody really believed was possible. That has been a theme that started with Trump. In fact, I don’t recall if they even bothered to pretend to support a 2ss. With Democrats, it is still a mantra they use. To brush off criticisms.

Some left wingers started pointing out that if a 2ss wasn’t in the cards, people should push fior one man one vote. I like that too but it is a nonstarter with Israelis and Palestinians who see Israelis mainly as soldiers or settlers ( and in Gaza, as snipers) were not necessarily enthusiastic.

But then Hamas went on their murder spree and Israel is doing its collective punishment thing, so it is impossible to imagine any choice except between a bloodbath and a ceasefire. In either case, what comes after?

[wj]

it is impossible to imagine any choice except between a bloodbath and a ceasefire. In either case, what comes after?

On the evidence of the past few decades: (eventual) ceasefire, continued gradual expansion of settlements (including those nominally illegal under Israeli law) and continued misery and hopelessness in Gaza, another bloodbath, another (eventual) ceasefire. Repeat endlessly.

If there is a way to break out of the pattern, one which could be supported by a majority of Israelis and of Palestinians, nobody has dreamed it up yet. Let alone figured out how to ram it down the throats of the ultra-Orthodox and Hamas. And it would have to be rammed down their throats, brutally and effectively -- anything less would just get ignored by both, in their determination to destroy the other population.

[liberal japonicus]

The Abraham accords date from 2020, so it actually fits in the timeline
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Accords

It seems to me that all of this was set in motion when Rabin was assassinated in 1995. Maybe even set in stone.

[Donald]

Hamas itself says it did this because of attacks on Palestinians in the WB and the Mosque ( forgot spelling) but they probably have multiple reasons and some hope it will become a wider war.

But the Accords aand now the attempt at a Saudi deal have been a concern even for the more moderate Palestinians. They feel abandoned.

[Hartmut]

Maybe one day my plan will get adopted to solve the problem once and for all by moving Israel to Cyprus and Palestine to Eastern Germany (Greek Cypriots will get settled in Greece and Turkish Cypriots in Turkey thus solving another old and almost forgotten problem). Cyprus being an island is ideal for defensive purposes and the location is favorable in general. Putting Palestine between Germany and Poland also serves other purposes. Population density in those parts of Eastern Germany is very low and could use a large influx of people, in particular people as industrious as the Palestinans are said to be if given the opportunity. Climate change is steppifying those regions, so people used to arid agriculture will feel quite at home. A buffer between Poland and Germany could finally put a stop to the constant propaganda by the Polish rightwingers that Germany is just itching to get back the territories lost after 1945. And settling a majority Muslim population (I know that there are many Christian Palestinians too) on the left bank of the Oder river would drive those same rightwingers mad and apoplectic (Poland is notoriously opposed to any Muslim refugees anywhere in Europe but very open to white Christian ones e.g. from Ukraine even at home). I'd see that as a bonus.
The territory of Israel or at least the 'holy' sites would then be permanently removed from the map, if necessary by dropping a few very dirty nukes on the Temple Mount. China or - even better - North Korea (a rare neutral party in that conflict) could do that part. Maybe Ukraine could provide large quantities of topsoil from Chernobyl to 'salt the Earth' effectively on a longterm basis. Take the toy away from the three Abrahamic kids for good since they have proven that they will not find a solution that will by satisfying for all of them (since it seems important to them not just to have the toy but for the other to NOT have it). The 'Holy' part of that land is a cancer and cancer that can't be treated otherwise has to be removed.

Btw, even the old Prussian electors and kings considered Muslims as settlers in the depopulated
areas of Eastern Brandenburg after the 30 Year War provied they were industrious, hard-working and morally upright. Friedrich Wilhelm I - the Soldier King - even had a building rededicated as a mosque for the Muslim soldiers that had come as refugees to Prussia and he openly declared that he would start to build more mosques or even pagan temples, if that would bring more needed settlers into the country. And he got quite angry when the Christian clerics opposed the idea.
(on the other hand there was admittedly a constant anti-Judaist strain in the house of Hohenzollern too).

[Donald]

I was thinking Houston Texas would be a good place for your plan, Hartmut. The problem with Europe is that it is the heartland of antisemitism and has people there, but Houston is a land without a people for the people who’ve lost their land.

Now on a more serious note— I can never stay in character— MckT asked for context. Here is some—

https://www.yahoo.com/news/not-hamas-gaza-residents-airstrikes-223635896.html

Note what the children are saying—“ The Jews are bombing us. “ The vast majority of children in Gaza have never seen a Jew except maybe a soldier or sniper. The blockade started in 2007. There have been numerous bombing campaigns, wars of various sizes. Unarmed protestors are shot if they protest near the wall. Gazans remember 2018 even if nobody else does. It wasn’t perfectly nonviolent — the idiots always show up—but the civil rights movement and BLM here wasn’t either, Unarmed Gazans were gunned down like rabid dogs.

The Hamas leaders are on the moral level of ISIS. But their younger followers were raised in a walled ghetto and if they are more than two years old experienced the last bombing campaign. A lot of people in our culture find it pretty easy to dehumanize other groups for no good reason at all. Hamas leaders have it easy.

I don’t understand why people growing up privileged have such extreme difficulty understanding something this obvious, except that privilege and power and ethnocentrism seems to have a negative effect on some people’s ability to empathize.

[Girl from the North Country]

Don't have much time, but FWIW most informed people I have read or spoken to seem to agree with what Donald says at 10.54 and 11.11 above. Doesn't mean there wasn't a plan for how to do it, when they decided it was the right time to do it, whether 2 years ago or not. And clearly, this kind of coordinated plan with the drones blowing up the satellite towers, and the paragliders etc, would have needed some time to put together, particularly while evading Israeli surveillance.

The whole thing is too terrible to contemplate, and the current Israeli response looks unbelievably heavy handed and (in the end) counter-productive. Counter-productive, that is, if what you want to produce is an eventual peace process and an end to the occupation, the settlements and the killings. Which the Bibi government clearly have not wanted to produce lo these many years, with enthusiastic backing from their loony overseas orthodox funders.

[Nigel]

The responsibility for Hamas's terrorist action lies entirely with Hamas - but this Israeli editorial calls out Netanyahu as an enabler.

https://www.haaretz.com/ty-WRITER/0000017f-da25-d42c-afff-dff7a1c10000
...His life’s work was to turn the ship of state from the course steered by his predecessors, from Yitzhak Rabin to Ehud Olmert, and make the two-state solution impossible. En route to this goal, he found a partner in Hamas.

“Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas,” he told a meeting of his Likud party’s Knesset members in March 2019. “This is part of our strategy – to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.”..

[Pro Bono]

pundits point out that Bush the Younger was reelected after 9/11

Before the Falklands/Malvinas war, Margaret Thatcher was the least popular Prime Minister in polling history. After it she won a landslide victory. And it would probably never have happened had the UK sent the right signals about its determination to hold on to the islands.

[Girl from the North Country]

but Houston is a land without a people for the people who’ve lost their land.

Made me smile. Apart from that, Nigel's comment is a really excellent reminder, and so succinct. Ehud Olmert was on C4 News the other night, and when asked what he would do in this situation he tried to be diplomatic, but ended up saying : "I would not have got into this situation."

[Donald]

My joke got garbled— I was thinking of Palestinians moving to Houston, but then inexplicably brought up antisemitism. Anti- immigrant sentiment would be more relevant. Now I am explaining it. This is why I usually don’t tell jokes.

[Donald]

Tangential, but Hamas was on the opposite side from Iran and Hezbollah in the Syrian civil war and broke with them for awhile. Jake Sullivan in a Wikileaks email said Al Qaeda was on our side.

https://wikileaks.org/clinton-emails/emailid/23225

Some Syrians who wanted democracy sided with groups, including Al Qaeda, because they were the more effective fighters. In the US people often took a brutal civil war and turned it into a fairy tale of pure evil vs pure good. But we were supporting the exact moral equivalent of Hamas, so was Hamas.

[novakant]

If one is willing to step back from the gruesome realities on the ground - which is hard - here is a good analysis:

https://www.nybooks.com/online/2023/10/11/gaza-without-pretenses/

Since the right-wing coalition formed last year, and escpecially since both the rhetoric and the attacks by settlers became more and more brazen this year, while the Palestinians and Iranians were sidelined in the Arab-Israeli talks, I had a feeling that this wasn't going to end well.

[Girl from the North Country]

I think your joke worked anyway, Donald!

Meanwhile, anybody notice that McKinney, having thrown a completely misconceived grenade, has disappeared before having to deal with actual facts and information, not only about our views but also about serious analysis from Israel and elsewhere?

[hairshirthedonist]

I'll give McKinney credit for starting the conversation, even if he did it hamfistedly (putting it mildly). I was stopping by since the attacks to see if anyone had anything to say while having nothing to say myself. It was obvious to me what Janie meant in her "Keeping an Eye on Things" post when she wrote:

Hard to know where to start, so I won't.

So he got us back to being the horrible people we're supposed to be.

[McKinneyTexas]

I am unblocking you, but unless/until I change my mind, if you show up in one of my threads again I’ll apply the overall block until I can have a conversation with the other front-pagers.

I have to say, I'm pretty indifferent to you and LJ's opinions and even less concerned about being blocked. Like many on the left these days, you're all about free speech as long as its free speech which meets your standards.

My tone and tenor is unchanged since I started commenting here in 2008. For years, many of the former commenters and I (and others to the right) had great exchanges. Not so much anymore. Rather, it's dismissal or not particularly effective mockery and not worth a response.

Now, this from GFTNC:

McKinney, since you seem to be unblocked for the moment, I invite you to explain why you decided that your initial comment/question on this topic should be quite so aggressive and combative? You may have been frustrated that on a blog which normally comments on topical political matters, no comments had been posted for three days, but still, why on earth do you think it OK to behave in quite so boorish and insulting a manner, let alone one so misguided in its premise?

I could begin anywhere, but let's start with the usual fare one sees here regarding the American right. It is standard fare here to refer to conservatives as fascists, racists, misogynists and, my personal favorite "MAGATS", meaning "maggots". And you whine about my tone? Damn.

Another repeat trope here is "why won't the good conservatives stand up to (fill in the blank, the NRA, Trump, racism, etc.) I waited over three days for some brave soul here to put something out there, drawing a line between fairness to Palestinians and, by design, murdering civilians, men, women and children.

In case you haven't noticed, the internet is on fire with lefties contextualizing Hamas with some few on the left pushing back, e.g. Lanny Davis and Donald (who I will address shortly). But there is a lot of quibbling, e.g. "they are just college kids"--fuck that. Suppose they were calling for white supremacy--I imagine Nous and others would find a little less nuance if that were the case. You realize, do you not, they are celebrating mass murder as a matter of political policy?

Here is what I said that GFTNC objects to:

This is all bullshit. This site--not at all shy when it comes to moral preening and self-identifying as the good people--has been silent for over three full days.

IIRC, OBWI's current, much diminished presence in the blogosphere is populated mostly by people who lean if not outright support the Palestinian position. The silence, given the last few days news, is deafening, if not much worse.

This is not the first time--JanieM is consistent--that the complaint is "McKinney is a meanie." There was a discussion a while back about snowflakes, in which the lefty commentariat here was uniformly offended by the term ("it's mean!"), yet oblivious to it's own marginalizing (with zero introspective analysis) of the half of the country that disagrees with them, see constant referrals to MAGATS, white supremacists, privileged white males, and all of the other labels the left uses in place of giving others the dignity of simply being humans who disagree.

This brings me to Donald.

If you pop up here, McKT, my responses to you are in the other thread. You absolutely suck as a mindreader is part of it, but there's more.

Donald, if you were a headliner here, we would have seen something in the three and half days of silence. You--and a few others on the left--are saying what the leadership here should have said but did not. We disagree on just about everything but your initial comment on the previous thread (which I wish I'd copied) was exactly what I would have expected from you as an intellectually honest, lefty outlier.

With that said, here are some topics on which I would appreciate your insight:

1. BDS--you support this group, IIRC. Here's my issues:

A. Why Israel and not a host of other countries that are, in many ways, far worse?

B. What does the BDS movement expect from Israel: dissolution, be nicer to Gaza?, what?

C. Do you agree that BDS gives cover to anti-Semites, i.e. even though you and others you know are entirely free of anti-Semitism, is that true for others under the BDS umbrella?

2. Do you concede Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state? If you do, how should Israel accommodate entities that openly work toward it's destruction?

HSH--yes, in some ways the lefties here are like the Harvard students, depending on the issues. As this site has evolved more and more into an echo chamber, it has lost much of its intellectual rigor. It has certainly lost any pretense for consistency. For example, you have to blind--sorry Donald--not to see the cover that BDS gives to anti-Semites yet no one here has ever commented on that. Yet, it is an article of faith that conservatives knowingly or implicitly give shade to white supremacists--a notion that is easily disproved by moving out of your zone and exploring non-lefties are thinking and writing these days.

The responsibility for Hamas's terrorist action lies entirely with Hamas - but this Israeli editorial calls out Netanyahu as an enabler.

Netanyahu has a lot to answer for, but the flaw in the editorial is the belief that Hamas and Palestinians in general favor a two state solution. I've seen no evidence of a Palestinian consensus for a two state solution with a commitment to peaceful co-existence, but I'm open to proof otherwise.

Meanwhile, anybody notice that McKinney, having thrown a completely misconceived grenade, has disappeared before having to deal with actual facts and information, not only about our views but also about serious analysis from Israel and elsewhere?

LOL, too funny. See above. It took me so long to write and proof that I had to copy and repost. FYI, I work pretty much full time (self-employed, on my own, etc) and I like to hang out with my wife and friends. Since, you've made this complaint before, very few here engage anymore, so there really isn't much to stick around for. I'm not going to quibble with mockery or dismissal. Also, I often am tied up continually on other matters and usually the thread has moved on and any comments I might otherwise have have gone stale.

But, the good news is that JanieM and LJ, champions of lively and reasoned engagement both, are contemplating blocking me.

HSH, not horrible. Just selectively "brave" and intellectually flabby, for the most part.

Maybe I'll block myself.

[wj]

Deftly done, McKinney! You managed all that without taking notice that I had taken the trouble to actually answer your questions.

Maybe you thought I got everything right, which would be amazing. More likely, on the evidence, you weren't actually interested in having one of those discussions you talk about. Color me underwhelmed.

[Hartmut]

An open thread seemed not the proper place to start the discussion and I would not have wanted to be the one to start it either, so I waited for an on-topic thread. I have a certain suspicion that the meagre posting here in the last few days was for the same reason. Who wants to be the first to notice the in-door pachyderm?
As for pachyderms, naturally parts of the GOP see this as a chance to please Ras Putin by calling for transfer of all help for Ukraine to Israel since there is an "existential threat" to the latter. No, there currently is not. As nasty as the affair in Palestine is, it does not threaten the very existence of the state of Israel. The very existence of the Ukraine on the other hand is at stake once they run out of money and ammo. Israel is not lacking money but at worst some types of ammo (Iron Dome reserves must be running out given the constant barrage). And the supply of these projectiles is afaik completely independent of ammo supply for Ukraine. So, it's all just another pretense from the usual suspects.

[Girl from the North Country]

Honestly, McKinney, talk about intellectually incoherent! In your initial, grenade-throwing comment, you said you were waiting for "us" to provide:

the contextualization of why Israeli civilians, particularly children, had this coming.

Like almost every other attitude you have accused "us" of having (e.g. agreeing that the halloween costumes were cultural appropriation, and the academics should have been cancelled), it has turned out that NOBODY commenting on this site has the views you were accusing us of holding. On the contrary, many many patriotic, IDF-serving Israeli lefties hold the kinds of views that many of "us" on this site have been expressing.

This is why Janie accused you of addressing the hobgoblins in your mind, not us. And why, less poetically, you have often been accused of setting us up as strawmen.

You thought we should have been commenting on the war earlier: many of us had better, and more distressing, things to do. Or were processing, or (unbelievable concept) thinking. You think MAGAts means maggots; I think hanging out with people who reluctantly support Trump because they are so horrified by the "extreme progessive left" (I can't remember your actual phrase, although I notice on US media that some MAGAts are now calling the Dems communists) is rotting your (presumably once decent) brain. Get a grip, and own up to your own behaviour, for heaven's sake.

[Hartmut]

I notice on US media that some MAGAts are now calling the Dems communists

What do you mean with 'now'?
That has been a rightwing sthick at least since the Russian revolution. Even Otto von effing Bismarck has been accused by USian rightwingers to be a commie.
The only thing that seems new is that they now call liberals commies and nazis in the same breath all the time (and adding a few epitheths from the current list of approved insults like 'groomer' most of the time).

[Donald]

McKT--

I agree that ObiWi is only a faint shadow of what it was and I really miss the old days 15 years or so ago where you had rightwingers, centrist slightly right (wj). centrist libs, far lefties, and really far lefties all hashing it out. I don't like the fact that it is mostly a monoculture here. Unfortunately it is that way in most places.

But you made a claim about us. It was false. The claim is actually true or truish about some people I read. But the fact is as I said in the other thread--there's always been this group of far leftists who romanticize "freedom fighters" no matter how murderous and disgusting their actions. One phrase that is often used that lets you know what you are dealing with is "by any means necessary'. Just looked it up. I couldn't remember if it came from Fanon or Malcolm X. Turns out both used it and Sartre before them.

Anyway, it is used to excuse every brutal thing a "liberation movement" chooses to do. The history of the 20th century clearly demonstrates what those movements turn into once the liberation is successful. Meet the new boss, basically.

So apparently we can all say, including me, that we all think Hamas is a ghastly organization as bad as ISIS and that you made false assumptions about all our views and it doesn't matter to you. Well, you were wrong. It happens. There are some places online where you would have been partly right. Though these sorts of lefties were saying the same about Algeria, Vietnam, and now Israel-Palestine, so it's mostly about the freedom fighter worship. The right isn't exactly immune, since it did this in Afghanistan when the freedom fighters against the Russians were throwing acid into the faces of women who didn't cover their face. And they did it with the contra terrorists. A lot of Westerners supported the Syrian freedom fighters, who were the ideological allies of Hamas and it was precisely that issue that caused the temporary rift between Hamas and Iran. The US government that if those freedom fighters we supported won, there would be a genocide of Alawites and maybe Christians, which is why many Christians and most Alawites supported Asad. Alawites in particular died in massive numbers defending the regime--it was that or run or die. You knew all this, right?

Anyway, I happen to agree that there are some tendencies to shut down speech on the left, broadly speaking. We know the truth about X, so we need to make sure false things aren't spread on social media seems to be the idea. I am not at all comfortable with that. Pro-Palestinian activists have been complaining about this kind of pressure forever. You may not like your allies on that subject, but here we are.

[Girl from the North Country]

A perfect illustration of why Donald is worth reading and listening to.

I imagine all of us miss the old ObWi days, with Hilzoy et al. Maybe we (and most others) have become a monoculture because of how very poisonous the polarised debate has become. But accusing people, or groups, of holding views which they not only do not hold, but are often the diametric opposite of views they do hold, hardly helps. And doing it in offensive ways is not very helpful either.

I agree that sometimes McK has been taunted in ways I find (although, he apparently does not) objectionable. But that is a game where each side then feels perfectly justified in being more and more insulting, and certainly McK has demonstrated that in recent years.

As I said before, it would take much of the unpleasantness out if people (let's say McKinney for now) asked what other people's views are, rather than setting up wrong, insulting straw men to attack. Once people have given a view, there is plenty of time and opportunity to attack it, or disagree with it.

You may not like your allies on that subject, but here we are.

Good luck with that! But here's hoping....

[Donald]

I will answer the Israel-Palestine questions specifically later, when I have time. Actually, I might have time now, so will start.

1. Why Israel? I think it is because Israel is seen by itself and others as a Western democracy and lefties tend to focus on those for good and bad reasons. The good reason is getting rid of the mote in one's own eye. Bad reasons can be intellectual dishonesty. I think antisemitism sometimes, but a great many of the leading anti-Israel activists are Jewish and no, not self-hating. Their reasoning is the same--take care of your own stench first.

There was one guy, Gilad Atzmon, who I used to see quoted a bit because he was antizionist, but if you read a bit further he was a genuine self-hating antisemitic Jew. Really loathsome. I forgot the details--it was 10 years or more when I was looking up some of what he said. It had to do with Nazis having reasons for picking on Jews. I know of at least one person who cited him on his antizionist arguments not knowing about the really vile stuff. I also remember seeing people being made aware of the vile stuff and still defending him. So that's crossing the line.

I think genuine antisemites usually let the cat out of the bag in some such way. Just being intensely critical of Israel means nothing. Okay, there might be some Bayesian argument against that--it does mean something, but by itself it is only a weak indicator.

The IHRA definition of antisemitism included some examples of possible indicators which were antizionist. If you took this at face value, every Palestinian would have to be an antisemite unless he endorsed his own expulsion.

But it turned out that Kenneth Stern, the author of it, only meant that people who said this or that about Israel might be possible antisemites. I don't like that much either, but yeah, it could be. Stern, a Zionist, is very critical of attempts to make the IHRA an official definition used by governments.

I think I will post this first part now.

[russell]

Like many on the left these days, you're all about free speech as long as its free speech which meets your standards.

McK, you basically jumped in on a thread totally unrelated to the current Israeli / Hamas war to scold us all for not commenting on it in a timeframe that you found appropriate. Then made a bunch of inflammatory generalized statements about "us lefties", ascribing to us points of view that were not in evidence and are not universally or even generally held by folks here.

All accompanied by a list of questions with a demand that we reply.

Not the first time this has happened, and not the first time folks here have asked that you try a different approach.

It was a combatative and provocative opening salvo. If you are actually interested in engaging the subject, there are better ways to go about it. If you're just interested in yelling at a bunch of "lefties", you have achieved your goal.

If you come to a party and crap in the punchbowl, it's likely that you'll be asked to leave. If that's how it plays out, that's on you.

[Donald]

What does BDS expect?

It's a hard question to answer because there is no one answer. Norman Finkelstein, a rather ferocious critic of Israel ( who lost most of his family as many did in the Holocaust) also criticized the BDS movement for various reasons. I think part of it was that sometimes it was for a single democratic state for both , but most often the goals were vague.

It is supposed to be a rights-based movement. The idea is that as it stands, Palestinians have no rights. This should change and we should boycott Israel until that changes. Change in what way? Their stated principle on the front page doesn't say what the end goal is--just that Israel violates international law and that should stop.

Sometimes in practice that means a 1ss , a secular state with equal rights for everyone. Or a binantional state --I'm a little confused on that one. Or just, stop doing the things Israel is doing.

Personally I support it with caveats. If the sanctions ever became the harsh ones we impose on Iran or Venezuela or even worse, like the Gaza blockade, it would be immoral. Also, I would prefer that the US just stop giving them a blank check. People say "why do you single out Israel?" and I answer, yes, why do we blather on about their wonderful democratic values and give them billions per year to buy weapons (so it is also a subsidy to the MIC) when they democratically choose to practice apartheid? People seem to think being a democracy in itself somehow sprinkles magic morality dust on whatever a country does.

So I support BDS as symbolic pressure. It drives Israel nuts, or did, which is good. The solution could be 1SS, a binational state (??) or a 2ss. Not for me to push.

It's probably dead for the forseeable future. States will probably pass even more laws trampling on people's rights to protest.

[Donald]

Does BDS provide cover for antisemitism?

Mostly answered. You never know the purity of people's motives, but I think the majority of us, the vast majority, are not antisemites. I see a few people who probably are. Sometimes it is unmistakeable. People who defend Atzmon's statements about the Holocaust, for example. Easy call. I go to rightwing sites too. It's nearly always easy to pick out the antisemites there, because they are just blatant about it. Not talking about the average rightwinger there. Just the ones who clearly have a thing up their butts about Jews.

[Donald]

Do I concede Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state?

Nope. Now as a practical matter, it is, just as many countries are Muslim states and some are nominally Christian, though hopefully that doesn't mean anything anymore except that Sunday is the main day most people get off (before the Labor movement added Saturday).

Countries should not be ethnically or religously based. There can be some past legacy of this,but it should be mostly meaningless.

Israel is a majority Jewish state because hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forcibly expelled, so it is wrong to say this was justified.

But it happened and most countries have disgusting histories. Ideally there would be a 1ss with equal rights for all. If the majority of Palestinians aren't willing to endorse that and engage in a peaceful MLK style movement to reach it, then I am not going to waste much time on it. Not that this matters. It just won't happen or even have a chance of happening. And whatever slight chance it had was massacred along with 1000 civilians by Hamas.

A 2ss also seems very remote. I would have said dead before Oct 7, because it was. The 1ss actually seemed as plausible with Bibi basically on the way to annexing the WB.

But maybe, whatever happens in Gaza, people will realize that we absolutely have to settle this issue without another ethnic cleansing or genocide or ever more violent murder sprees. Since a 1ss has zero chance, maybe the outside will impose a 2ss, which I assume Wj was suggesting. The details will be a huge problem, but settlements absolutely have to stop, and really, most or all of them should go or join the Paletinian state or else some desirable parts of Israel be given to the Palestinians.

[wj]

Why Israel? I think it is because Israel is seen by itself and others as a Western democracy and lefties tend to focus on those for good and bad reasons.

I think, even more, it is a reflection of when Israel actually was a Western democracy. Whether is still is seems to me to be debatable. (Although the prevalence of religious zealots in American politics these days could be argued to make it in line with current levels of Western democracy.)

Back in the late 60s, during the 6 Day War, a humorist named Art Hoppe wrote a column (I saw it in the San Francisco Chronicle; don't know if it spread more widely) called "A Guide for Neutral Thinkers."** This in response to the American government spokesman saying that we would be "neutral in thought, word, and deed." One of his lines which I remember was:

Israel is so small and so democratic, and the Arab states are, to put it neutrally, Arab states.

I think that mindset is still informing our policy on Israel today. Even though the world, in the Middle East as elsewhere, has evolved enormously in the past half century.

** I was hoping that is had been put online somewhere. But if it has, I have been unable to find it.

[Donald]

I hope you apologize, McKT. I do think we need more conservatives around, and more people to my left, for that matter, so that I appear reasonable and centrist.

[Donald]

" srael is so small and so democratic,"

The Palestinians who hadn't been expelled in 48 were under military rule inside Israel until 1966.

Westerners tend to see the problem starting in 67. It got worse then.

And since I am bashing the Israelis, the Palestinian side had its first anti-zionist pogrom in the early 20's. There was another in the late 20's when the mob massacred Jewish families who were native to the region. (To be fair, some of their Palestinian neighbors rescued some of them from the mob, or so I remember reading.) Palestinian "resistance" when violent always seemed to involve terrorism, though many or most "resistance" movements seem to be like this. The Zionist ones started using terrorism in the late 30's, I think.

But anyway, democratic states can democratically decide to do things that aren't wonderful. There were no good old days, just days that weren't quite so bad at times.

[wj]

settlements absolutely have to stop, and really, most or all of them should go or join the Palestinian state or else some desirable parts of Israel be given to the Palestinians.

Unfortunately, most of the settlers are there on the West Bank precisely because they want to "reclaim" it for Israel, driving out the Palestinians in the process. There's absolutely no way they would join a Palestinian state. Nor that they would stop expanding and proliferating the settlements as fast as they can, unless prevented by main force.

Which means that part of any solution (at least, one which doesn't involve wholesale relocation of the Palestinians) will require breaking the settler movement. Which will not be trivial for any Israeli government.

[novakant]

I agree that ObiWi is only a faint shadow of what it was and I really miss the old days 15 years or so ago where you had rightwingers, centrist slightly right (wj). centrist libs, far lefties, and really far lefties all hashing it out.

Actually, I don't miss being lectured by people on what a great idea, or at least how necessary, the Iraq or Afghanistan wars were, and how we would sort the ME out once and for all - it actually fills me with sadness how we talked about these countries almost daily, non-stop for years and now they are almost completely forgotten. It feels like a frivolous parlour game in retrospect.

I miss hilzoy and a few others, though.

Btw, Fanon is actually very much worth reading and he had an extremely interesting life as well.

[nous]

But there is a lot of quibbling, e.g. "they are just college kids"--fuck that. Suppose they were calling for white supremacy--I imagine Nous and others would find a little less nuance if that were the case. You realize, do you not, they are celebrating mass murder as a matter of political policy?

Because I assume that McKinney can still read, even if he cannot comment, and because it's worth working through this set of assumptions.

Suppose they were calling for white supremacy. That, too, happens on my campus in various ways and during inflammatory times. We have a pretty full gamut of political views here on campus (and in my classroom).

Yep, still kids with limited information, and limited experience.

I taught a class about children in armed conflict for almost a decade. Many of my students wanted to write about the various "schools" being run by terrorist organizations as a tool for indoctrination and recruitment. I've had liberal kids, conservative kids, and Chinese nationalist kids write about this (and a few islamic kids, but -understandably - no Jewish kids). Not a lot of white supremacy in these papers, but certainly a large helping of islamophobia and dehumanizing going on.

Yep, still kids with limited information, and limited experience.

College kids treat college like a magic circle a lot of the time. It's a place to play with ideas and identities. They are mostly performing for each other and not thinking at all about the larger world being an audience. And for the most part, adults treat college as just that as well. We certainly don't take commentary from 20-year-olds as serious policy proposals. That and their lack of emotional baffles leads to some pretty stupid rhetoric.

If you want them to learn, rather than just get defensive and combative, you have to start by asking questions and digging past their performance art to their actual intentions and concerns, then you have to ask them to think about how their mode of presentation works or doesn't work to actually support their concerns. Then you need to get them thinking about who they want to actually listen to their concerns. Then you restate what they said to you and point them in that direction where they are actually trying to talk to those people.

That's pretty much my teaching method for any difficult topic. Learning has to start with the students' actual questions and concerns. You have to ignore the performances*.

Because they are just kids and I want them to learn.

I've also been in rooms where actual skinheads were trying to actually injure and drive out actual minority targets (complete with a couple of people getting stabbed).

Those skinheads were not kids. I didn't try to talk to them. I tried to help stop them.

I don't conflate those two different situations. They seem pretty clearly different to me, and I find attempts to conflate them transparently manipulative and simplistic.

*There's also a need to create a non-threatening classroom environment, so you do have to intervene to keep things civil there. But if you want to actually inform the offender and steer them towards justice and compassion, you have to follow that up with listening during conferences and office hours and do the guiding away from their audience.

[Hartmut]

The modern car bomb got perfected by the (future) Israelis to fight the British in Palestine. The Palestinians just adopted it.

The Nazis tried to use antisemitism to get the Palestinians as allies against the British (by telling them that the British would hand Palestine over to the Jews). It was only moderately successful at the time but it laid the seeds for a lot of modern Arab antisemitism (as a racial not religious thing).

[nous]

But the fact is as I said in the other thread--there's always been this group of far leftists who romanticize "freedom fighters" no matter how murderous and disgusting their actions. One phrase that is often used that lets you know what you are dealing with is "by any means necessary'. Just looked it up. I couldn't remember if it came from Fanon or Malcolm X. Turns out both used it and Sartre before them.

Yep, the Harvard kids have likely read a bit of Fanon, and of Said, and maybe a bit of Ngūgī or Bhabha, got all drunk on the ideas, and ran right out to play Plato's Cave Puppet Theatre with the ideas.

Most of them have very little actual understanding of the actual world or experiences of oppressed peoples. Others do have some experience, but come from enough privilege that they were insulated from the worst of it and are trying to atone for their privilege by acts of radical solidarity, hoping the backlash against them will lend them some legitimacy and let them stop feeling like tourists and impostors.

It's a mistake to treat them the same as one would treat an actual Hamas member. Doing so just legitimates their fantasy of authenticity.

[Ugh]

geez McKinney

[Donald]

Never heard of Ngugi or Bhabha. Will look them up, if only via wikipedia.

I read a biography of Fanon that came out years ago and may reread someday. I think I read his famous book once, but forgot all of it, even including the name.

[nous]

I think I read his famous book once, but forgot all of it, even including the name.

Probably The Wretched of the Earth, though Black Skin, White Masks would also qualify as a famous book.

Ngūgī's most influential book is Decolonizing the Mind.

I'm not really up to speed on Bhabha, but his name comes up a lot amongst my anti-colonialist colleagues.

Also Achille Mbembé's Necropolitics, which is directly engaged with the situation in Israel and Palestine.

[Donald]

"Unfortunately, most of the settlers are there on the West Bank precisely because they want to "reclaim" it for Israel, driving out the Palestinians in the process."

Yeah, that's why I and others argued for a 1ss, though for me at least October 7 has destroyed that idea. But the argument was/is that you can't take the land without taking the people and the rest follows. And the Gazans should not be left in a prison camp.

Hamas--well as Juan Cole pointed out a day or two ago, Hamas has had its pragmatic periods. Evidently they reverted back to crime against humanity mode.

Which is what is going to make a ceasefire hard to envision as politically possible. I haven't followed the news since early this morning, but the bombing of Gaza is horrific.

[JanieM]

Donald: Anyway, I happen to agree that there are some tendencies to shut down speech on the left, broadly speaking. We know the truth about X, so we need to make sure false things aren't spread on social media seems to be the idea. I am not at all comfortable with that.

Response 1: Like those famous lefties Moms for Liberty, the liberty consisting of their freedom to make sure my kids (well, grandkids) can’t read anything the Moms don’t want their kids to read (if they even have kids), all in the service of shutting down word of my very existence as a gay person, among other topics. The new closet is being legislated in places like Florida and rammed through local school boards all over the country by shouting ... lefties? (oh, wait) ... instead of being tacitly enforced by social stigma and pressure as in the old days. (The shouting, of course, is in no way meant to shut down the speech of people who disagree with them. Nope, not in the slightest.)

Response 2: there are some tendencies to shut down speech on the left among humans, broadly speaking

[JanieM]

Donald again: But anyway, democratic states can democratically decide to do things that aren't wonderful. There were no good old days, just days that weren't quite so bad at times.

Just as there were no good old days at ObWi, just days that weren't quite so bad at times.

No one now posting has any illusions of being able to fill Hilzoy's shoes; I don't think anyone I've ever run across online or in real life could do that.

But that just makes it all the more necessary that the people who do comment here help make it a relatively safe place for arguments across various political dividing lines. There's only so much bomb-throwing nastiness that's going to be tolerated. All of the tiny handful of people who've been blocked since I started writing posts were blocked for that reason: making civil discourse for all practical purposes impossible.

[Donald]

JanieM.

I don't have a problem with civility controls. In fact, I vaguely remember one or two bombthrowers on the very far left getting banned for bad behavior. I've no problem with that. I miss the wider range of views though.

On censorship, I should have been clearer. Censorship attempts on the right are a given. I visit a site populated by mostly the right and tend to snicker to myself at their claims that censorship and anti-free speech is entirely a leftwing thing. I think some of the advocacy for information control on the liberal side is a new thing. Or newer. I usually don't agree with the substance of rightwing positions, just their right to express it.

So yeah, it's humans. Personally I would censor every member of that species.

[Girl from the North Country]

Good point on where a lot of the most dramatic and consequential censorship is taking place.

Long live civil discourse! It is perfectly possible to disagree very vehemently, without resorting to insult or straw-manning. It's an art, actually, and when done right all the more devastating and convincing.

On the Israel/Gaza situation: there are no good solutions. Everywhere you turn it's terrible, and likely to remain so for a long time.

I do think we need more conservatives around, and more people to my left, for that matter, so that I appear reasonable and centrist.

I agree, but not for the same (jokey) reason. Let a thousand flowers bloom (to misquote that intensely humane figure Mao), as long as their representatives are capable of conducting the conversation in a civilised and good faith manner.

[Donald]

https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/hamas-deputy-chief-lies-we-dont-target-civilians-we-only-attacked-idf-israel-planned-gaza-offensive/

Well, this is some area of commonality. Hamas lies about its own atrocities and claims it only targets the military. Usually they just brag about them.

I think I saw something like this at the beginning one one of the sites I read and had some faint hope they meant it, that they had learned something. That didn't last long.

[JanieM]

I think some of the advocacy for information control on the liberal side is a new thing. Or newer. I usually don't agree with the substance of rightwing positions, just their right to express it.

I have always worried about this problem in relation to free speech and I don't have a solution, any more than I have a solution to Israel/Palestine. And behind my sarcasm, such as it was, what I'm really thinking of is not the right of individual human beings to express their opinions on, let's say, social media, but the challenge posed by (dis)information spread by bots, believed and amplified by humans, and picked up by news media as valid because after all, people are thinking such and such. And so on around the cycle.

But I don't even know if it's worse now that we have social media. I read a historically-based novel with a plot strand involving the Nazi removal of French Jews to camps, and a lot of preparation of the population for that was (apparently) done on the radio. The mass (if not social) media of the day.

[JanieM]

By "preparation of the population" I mean turning the non-Jewish population against the Jews, so that the removals could proceed with the support of everyone else.

[nous]

I actually think that our speech problems have nothing to do with free speech and everything to do with our media algorithms for what sorts of speech get boosted or promoted. I don't think that the enlightenment philosophy surrounding freedom of speech are robust enough to deal with the sort of mass media insurgencies we are having to contend with today.

[novakant]

The radio also played a significant role in the Rwanda genocide.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_T%C3%A9l%C3%A9vision_Libre_des_Mille_Collines#:~:text=exterminate%22%20the%20Tutsis.-,During%20the%20genocide%20against%20Tutsis%20in%20Rwanda,of%20all%20Tutsis%20in%20Rwanda.

[wj]

I actually think that our speech problems have nothing to do with free speech and everything to do with our media algorithms for what sorts of speech get boosted or promoted.

Eventually, I expect we will have to resurrect some version of the Fairness Doctrine that covers both traditional media and online (mass) media. Not sure how that will be managed, starting with how to define "mass media" for the online world. Nor how we deal with fact checking -- since alternative realities are a big part of the problem.

But we're going to have to come up with something. IMHO

[nous]

Agree. It's like overdriving your headlights. None of our societal media safeties are built for this sort of speed or density of traffic.

[nous]

And with all the attacks on public education, we're also driving with the dims on all the time.

[Girl from the North Country]

Eventually, I expect we will have to resurrect some version of the Fairness Doctrine that covers both traditional media and online (mass) media.

I very much agree. Longtime ObWiers will know that the Fairness Doctrine has long been an obsession of mine. I thought, in a list of things vying for the title, abolishing it was one of the worst things Reagan did. When I lamented it, and blamed it partly for Fox News, well-informed people here told me (I did not know) that it would not have applied to Fox News because Fox is on cable. But that is the kind of adjustment that could, and should, have been made. Whether a resurrection will work, when the genie has been so long out of the bottle, is an open question.

[nous]

The Fairness Doctrine existed because bandwidth was limited and its space was overseen by the federal government.

With cable, and then massively and transformatively with the Web, those bandwidth restrictions were rendered inconsequential. I, and other technolibertarian utopianists in the Web 1.0 days saw this as a golden opportunity to democratize access to media.

Sadly, we were wrong, and I have repented that optimism and naïveté. What we got was a DDoS attack on the protocols of civility and on institutional expertise.

I'm not sure that the Fairness Doctrine would make a dent in this, though. What we need is not better curation, or even weeding; we need to slow the information cycle to give more opportunities to interrupt cybercascades.

[liberal japonicus]

Morning all, just a note, it was the three of us as we couldn't get a hold of Russell, but he has signed off on the course of action. The email for the site isn't my main email, but it is open, if anyone else has a concern that they would like to pass on, feel free. I'd also point out that it wasn't because this was attack on the front pagers: If the same kind of vitriol was directed at another commenter, regardless of where they stood, the bomb-thrower should expect to be kicked out.

[Donald]

I have never known what liberals are talking about on this. It seems to have started with claims about Russian social media interference in the 2016 election,but there were studies that found basically no evidence that it mattered. And it seemed absurd to me at the time, a kind of liberal attempt to find a way to explain the idiot’s victory. It was Boris and Natasha. Unfortunately Rocky and Bulkwinkle had slacked off on the job.

People have always told massive lies about various things, especially the Israeli- Palestinian conflict. I am going to give that a rest for now— want to do something else tonight besides this blog, but I have two specific things in mind. And on a completely different subject, creationists built an entire alternative to mainstream science built on BS. Being Christian myself, I used to follow that closely, before finally getting bored by it, but it was all designed to protect fundamentalists from believing things that could threaten them. You could keep creationism out of public school science classes with some court cases, but not out of people’s minds.

I grew up after age 8 in Memphis. People had some real brain worms in their head about race. Long before the internet. You are going to have to look long and hard to find any social media lie that did as much harm as racism promulgated in the old fashioned days before communication technology had advanced beyond the newspaper and later the telegraph.

More generally, I don’t trust any authority to keep things honest in any way other than persuasion. Sometimes the authority figures are wrong.

It is rare for me to say this, but the thread has been thread jacked. Not that I had anything I wanted to say on I- P tonight.

[Girl from the North Country]

I feel like I currently don't understand what's going on.

How has the thread been threadjacked? Surely the question of mis/disinformation and whether it can or should be censored is also central to much about the I-P war? My beloved but all-in rightwing American friend ranted to me about the beheading of scores of Israeli babies, and told me that Gaza should be bombed into oblivion, and a (liberal) friend here also talked about 50 babies having been beheaded at the kibbutz. As far as I can tell from the cagey respectable news reports, this has still not been verified, although some babies were killed and maybe had their throats slit. It reminds me of the horror stories about babies in incubators in the Iraq invasion of Kuwait, which turned out to be pure propaganda. This kind of thing (horrific, over-the-top atrocities, as if what happened isn't bad enough) is generated to inflame public opinion, and render it more tolerant of disproportionate responses.

Also, sorry to dwell on unpleasantness, but has McK been kicked out? I thought he was just banned from Janie's threads. I have noticed that he sometimes comes in for a fair amount of personal flak around here, although he has said it doesn't bother him (belied I think by today's "McKinney is mean!" shtick) and it seemed to me that although he did casually insult Janie, and also nous (he often does, and lj too), he was really generally spraying his strawman idiocy around at all of us. I hope it is not illegit to ask exactly what his current status is?

[JanieM]

I have never known what liberals are talking about on this. It seems to have started with claims about Russian social media interference in the 2016 election,but there were studies that found basically no evidence that it mattered. And it seemed absurd to me at the time, a kind of liberal attempt to find a way to explain the idiot’s victory.

Adam Silverman talks about Russian misinformation efforts fairly regularly in his nightly Ukraine posts at BJ. Since it's related to his line of work, I do put some stock into what he says, though on the other hand I take him with at least one grain of salt, because he has bees in his bonnet like everyone else.

I have argued to nous fairly recently that, in effect, there's nothing new under the sun -- bias and ethnic hatreds have been around forever, only the technology changes. I guess provisionally I feel that the undergirding human darkness has always been there, but every new era finds a new way to exploit it, and every new way of exploiting it is a new and scary challenge.

As for thread-jacking -- there's nothing to prevent anyone from adding more comments about the (or any) war. Threads almost always wander, and maybe it's all one war anyhow.

[JanieM]

GftNC -- look at the next post.

[Girl from the North Country]

Oh, thanks Janie, I had completely missed that.

[Girl from the North Country]

Just read it. Absolutely fair enough.

[nous]

At no point in 1993 could I have produced a photorealistic deepfake to back my conspiracy theory, share that with 14 million people, and have a media ecology that automatically steered those 14 million people to other sites that reinforced my claims with their own faked and recycled content. Nor would I be making $2k per video, five videos a week, off of the channel traffic.

[russell]

It seems to have started with claims about Russian social media interference in the 2016 election,but there were studies that found basically no evidence that it mattered.

"It had no significant effect" is not the same as "it didn't happen".

And, to me, if it happened, it matters, whether it tipped the scale or not.

Not looking for an argument, just my POV.

[Donald]

The fact that anything can be photographically faked in a convincing way is new, but again, people successfully told gigantic lies long before with deep consequences. And now people are starting to realize photos can be convincingly faked. People always had to make decisions on who they could trust. This was true with atrocity stories, for example. Sometimes you only get the definitive forensic analysis, if at all, much later, when it might be irrelevant except for historians.

[nous]

Yep, in 1993 I could have faked evidence, but getting that evidence to a mass audience would have been much harder, the information would have spread much slower, there would be fewer inputs into the information loop pushing the signal higher, and the gatekeepers in the media would have bigger inputs into the information loop to counter the trend sooner.

All the inputs make it a lot harder, especially when the inputs are taking advantage of the algorithms to get more of a boost.

Shock and awe. Overwhelm the system. Maneuver warfare.

It's not a change in types of information, it's a change in the information ecology.

[wj]

It's not a change in types of information, it's a change in the information ecology.

My first thought is that the new ecology needs to evolve a top predator. With the caveat that it not be focused on taking down the weak.

[Donald]

I’m going to reply to some things tomorrow, maybe. But there have been some pretty gigantic lies in the near and distant past. Possibly the biggest of all with the largest of all consequences is the denial of human caused climate change and that doesn’t really require anything except the usual self- interested tribalism and a lot of money. Nothing high tech needed. Just good old fashioned political and corporate BS.

But as it is a war thread, I could talk about war- related lies instead. But not now. Got a new fantasy novel to try.

[JanieM]

Lies: the tobacco industry comes to mind. Not as consequential as climate change, but bad enough.

[Donald]

Goldberg just wrote what I said about the subset of the far left Hamas boosters.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/12/opinion/columnists/israel-gaza-massacre-left.html

I agree and yet the column infuriated me. Rant coming tomorrow., I guess.

Still haven’t started my fantasy novel, darn it.

[nous]

I'm looking forward to that rant. I see several things in the op ed that are worth critique even while I share her sense of frustration with the people who would celebrate anything about this moment.

And, at least to my way of thinking, discussing the difficulties with media and free speech in this moment parallels the other discussion. Clausewitz's "war is a continuation of politics/policy with other means" and his explanations of what he means there clearly puts war as a subset of political discourse, and many of the same game theory models apply to both armed warfare and information warfare.

It's not the size or the danger of the misinformation that has changed with our media ecology, it's the challenge of trying to defend against and neutralize it. Disinformation and propaganda is more contagious, spreads faster, hides itself better, and mutates more quickly than do our defenses against them.

That's going to require different approaches to preventative measures.

[Hartmut]

It's literally the same people that push climate denial for the fossil fuel industry that worked for Big Tobacco. And they simply apply the same successful techniques they developed for that purpose.

[liberal japonicus]

Looking forward to the rant as well. I haven't seen the outpouring of support from the US left, but I'm not in a position to claim it doesn't exist and I can't really speak to it without knowing more about who is saying it and who they represent. But the opening of Goldberg's piece seemed really off.

On Tuesday evening, I was drinking on the porch of my friend and neighbor Misha Shulman, the Israel-born rabbi of a progressive New York synagogue called the New Shul. All day, he’d been on the phone with congregants deeply distraught over the massacres and mass kidnappings in Israel.

Hey, I'm sitting with a drink at my good friend who has all these people at first and second separation in fear for the lives, could you pass the red wine? Of course, this validates my opinion because, though I don't know anyone over there, I'm with someone who is.

Perhaps this is why I would never be a good op-ed writer, you have to treat everyone you are with as a transactional relationship that may let you open an op-ed like this. If Taiwan is invaded, maybe I can start by talking about eating at the Taiwanese restaurant and how the owners are panic filled while I eat my stinky tofu.

[novakant]

Ok, now Israel has demanded that 1.1 million people move from the northern Gaza to southern Gaza within 24 hours or else they will be doomed. This is of course impossible and both the UN and the WHO have told Israel to change course.

If the goal of Hamas was to escalate tensions and have Israel overreact so that public opinion turns against them, they might have succeeded (well, maybe not as far as public opinion is concerned, at least not yet).

[Girl from the North Country]

If the goal of Hamas was to escalate tensions and have Israel overreact so that public opinion turns against them

I think this was indeed one of their main goals. And I think they have succeeded, so far at least. Whether the wiser heads in the new government of national unity will prevail, and come up with a response that is less like a crudely wielded hammer on an anvil, and more strategic, remains to be seen, but so far it's not good. And it will probably be too late anyway.

[Girl from the North Country]

Hamas don't give a fuck about the Palestinian loss of life. Israel have (unbelievably) asked 1.1 million people (half Gaza's total population) to vacate northern Gaza ahead of a ground action. Latest headline from the Guardian:

Israel-Hamas war live: Hamas tells people to stay put after Israeli military tells Gaza City residents to evacuate

They are daring the Israelis to do it with the people still there, and the Israelis may well do so. So, if that happens, which of them is responsible for the slaughter? The hideousness of this situation only increases....

[Snarki, child of Loki]

Given the history of the 1948 "you Palestinians better move away for your safety!" it not surprising that a demand that northern Gaza be evacuated faces resistance.

[Girl from the North Country]

Yes, that does seem to be their rationale, at least on the face of it. But I also believe it is the most horrific game of chicken, on both sides.

[Donald]

“ They are daring the Israelis to do it with the people still there, and the Israelis may well do so. So, if that happens, which of them is responsible for the slaughter? The hideousness of this situation only increases....”

Israel will be responsible. Hamas is disgracing itself and is a secondary villain in this case. But each side is primarily responsible for their own crimes and secondarily responsible for how they either incite or react to what the other does. But yeah, Hamas sucks.

Both the Israeli government and Hamas need to be brought up to the ICC and while in the past I have said things like this knowing full well it was a fantasy, if this Israeli action goes through, it needs to happen here. How could there be peace without justice for both sides?

Alternatively, Israel could be the new Syria. I used to make that analogy that if Hamas posed a real threat, you could do an almost one to one mapping between the various factions in the two countries and how they behave and line up.. people fearing a terrible enemy will line up with the side that they see as less likely to kill them.