Especially people who, just a few years ago, were all about #BelieveWomen and victims in general!
However, to make a *nuanced* point (bear in mind, I'm a religious Jewish person who lives in Israel about 4 months/year):
I do not like it when people--even well-intentioned ones--repost things that aren't quite true. So *I* wasn't retweeting the trending "40 Babies Decapitated" because I didn't see any confirmation of this in reputable newspapers (even very biased ones like the NY Times). Certainly, babies were slaughtered with their familes.
And I saw worse things, like people--well intentioned--posting misattributed photos from carnage from other wars! I block these people, even if I generally liked them, because spreading false information is always wrong: It gives ammunition to the deniers.
It reminds me of my friends who absolutely panicked over Trump during his presidency. My stance was, his insufficiencies are bad enough and glaring enough without having to lie about him being Russian James Bond going around peeing on hookers. You can just watch him speak and go, oh, right, of course he shouldn’t be president.
Same here. I suppose the fact that X or Y could easily be true is bad enough though. If we’re at the point of going “we’ll actually…” over how babies were slaughtered, we may have lost our way a bit.
It's crazy because these same people will defend misinformation on every subject from biological sex to Police shootings, but if the baby was actually beheaded after it was brutally murdered then we can't believe anything the zionists say about anything.
We should be circumspect in the extreme to rhetoric from the Israeli government that has the potential to incite overreaction and not get distracted by entirely predictable left-wing derangement such that *we* become hypocrites as well.
Everybody focuses the part where they're dismembering babies, but nobody pays attention to when they return home to redistribute the baby heads to the community, smh
Thank you for pointing this out. And in the case of dismembered Jewish women being dragged through the streets, are we to blame Hamas for trying to give their village a parade? If you discount the slaughter of innocent people and the horror they unleashed, most of their day wasn’t actually spent killing. Mostly non murderous terrorists!
(This is a horrible joke and yet I’m certain someone is making this point online somewhere in earnest )
If you think about it, MOST of the assassins spent a majority of their time paragliding and only a fraction of their time executing Jews, so it’s probably more accurate to just call them air sport enthusiasts.
True, the IDF didn’t release the photos. They definitely killed babies, and beheading is kind of a jihad hobby. It’s kinda like suspecting the hamburgler of burgling hamburgers.
I suspect you're being facetious but on the off chance you're not and to hose down unsuspecting blind-with-rage-AND-kill-them-all B&RT subscribers, *surely* you see the logical flaws in your statement. You beg the question (the IDF has photos???) then you create a false analogy, i.e. jihadists have beheaded innocents in the past, therefore we don't need objective proof to believe reports of infant headings.
What's maddening here is that the veracity of this report is both incredibly important and worthless in this debate.
It's worthless in that it's not necessary to believe this before condemning in total the actions of Hamas AND offering Israel full-throated support of Israel's right to secure their people and eliminate the possibility of a second act by these demented fiends, i.e. the elimination of the Hamas threat with reasonable force.
It's incredibly important that we recognize when a claim in unsubstantiated because it can be use to justify action beyond what is reasonable.
What I do in horrific times is make stupid jokes. Helps me cope.
Is your argument that…
A: it’s incredibly important that the claims being made are verified.
B: the claims aren’t important, because they shouldn’t make the moral difference in your calculation?
The IDF claims to have the proof in photos that they won’t release out of respect for the grieving families. This is the time for war propaganda, for sure, so they could be lying to gain sympathy for their reprisal. I’ve also seen a small creator on social media (not necessarily reliable either) who is part of the remediation crew in Israel talk about what he’s seeing in the aftermath. This, plus the images that Hamas themselves have released to the victims own social media accounts gives me the preponderance of evidence I need to believe the reports, but I’ll update my belief if it turns out to be wrong.
When I break down what I think is maddening *here*, I'm talking about how unverified claims are treated by the media, media consumers and belligerents. So (A), as you stated, remains the same, verification is paramount.
But I would alter (B) to say that so much repugnant behavior by Hamas has been verified that it's worthless to waste time -- as we are doing now, I recognize -- working ourselves up into a lather over something that might turn out to be bunk or even a simple misunderstanding. If it *is* verified, then okay, add it to the list and we keep making our respective cases with that much more knowledge. But until it is, its only value is cloud our judgement and engage the worse impulses in a deeply wounded population and the darkest desires of the least moral pols and military commanders.
We've already cross the Rubicon into war. What's left are questions of how the war will be conducted and thus, each and every casus belli should be as clear and well-argued as can be.
Journalists should definitely investigate claims like this, but what's your point? That no report at all should be made until the claims are verified? That's not how news has ever worked.
Or are you saying that this level of detail is actually material to the big picture? Like say maybe half of the babies were beheaded and the others were killed in other ways. Is that going to change Israeli politics or military strategy?
I certainly don't think journalists should be making, or even repeating, inflammatory claims prior to verifying them!
Like, there's this podcast called "Blocked & Reported" that often satirizes journalists who do this sort of thing. Have you ever listened to it by chance?
The atrocities Hamas has committed since the invasion are sufficient for the IDF to justify invading Gaza and eliminating Hamas as an effective localized entity. The baby-beheading thing, if true, absolutely should be reported, far and wide, and cited when arguing against calls for a cease-fire as those being made this week by the various and sundry groups who tend to favor an neo-communist-revolutionary approach to the Middle East.
But since it can't be falsified at this point, we have to deal with the fact that we are stuck in a state uncertainty. In such a case, it is incumbent on the media to make it crystal clear that the reports have not been verified and hold leaders accountable who defend their actions on that basis. We NEVER should relax laws and journalistic standards when things get muddy; that is the logic of #MeToo, anti-TERFs, three-strikes sentencing proponents, the neoconservatives who led us into Iraq and, in general, wannabe, self-important benevolent dictators with terminal tunnel vision.
I dipped into The Majority Report today for a few minutes to see if Emma and Matt had reverted to their supercilious neo-communist form after initially seeming to moderate their stances in the immediate wake of the invasion. Answer.... YEP! But what does that form look like? How does it present?
Uncritically peppering their language with talk of genocide and apartheid by Israel.
To me, asserting the baby-beheading in an uncritical way is equally insincere. If and when that changes... okay. Yet another horrible thing that Hamas has done will have been exposed.
Sure. That sounds awesome. And -- since you're taking my point so seriously -- please include a Blu-Ray copy of "Cuties" and a dog-eared copy of "A Tale of Two Cities".
Such an important point! I’m glad someone is willing to make this bold stance. If I don’t see at LEAST ten dead babies without heads (whose heads being removed were the cause of death! No post mortem beheadings!) I am going to lose my shit, people.
Some of those people listen to this podcast, though! I succumbed to the temptation to snark at one of them in the open thread yesterday, and s/he quite rightly told me to eff off. I may think that hairsplitting over exactly how Israeli babies were killed is sickening and morally obtuse, but I'm not going to change anyone's mind by leading with that sentiment.
I have never once in my life ever defended misinformation. I am against transgender ideology and I believe it to be the highest form of commodity fetishization, just as I believe imperialism to be the highest form of capitalism. I decried the Summer 2020 riots; my neighborhood was blockaded while buildings around me burned. I have my own opinions on how and why the riots began (the peaceful protestors were barricaded on the Parkway & gassed by cops while my neighborhood was allowed to be looted and burned. Then Developers moved in months later.)
I called out covid and Vax misinformation and I STILL do to this day.
I don't stereotype or assume anything about anyone because they have one opinion about one thing. The death of any innocent, anywhere, is a tragedy. I have always advocated for Israel to end its unethical occupation of Palestine once I, in my early twenties, became cognizant of what was actually going on there. I am friends with Jews and with Muslims. I am not an antisemite.
What I am is old enough to remember the "sick babies slaughtered in their incubators by Saddam's shock troops" from 30 years ago. That turned out to be untrue and was used to justify war crimes in Iraq. My heart breaks for the dead Israeli children & the dead Palestinian children. But I will not repeat a headline just as I did not repeat "black lives matter" (as I believe All Lives Matter) or "Transwomen are women" (they are not; they are men who prefer to be seen as women and addressed as such).
I hope my saying that I was "quite rightly" told off clarified my position, but for the record: my comments yesterday were obnoxious, childish and wrong, and I succeeded only in embarrassing myself. I shouldn't have done it, and I'm sorry that I did.
My reply wasn't so much to you as it was to a poster above you who stated that all people who think X must also think Y and Z. I provided (admittedly anecdotal) evidence to refute that claim. I also contextualized why I stated what I did about some of Bibi Netanyahu's claims. You owe me no further apology and I hold no ill will toward you.
It's time to name and shame. I don't believe in doxxing, especially if you are under 18 or the event was years ago. But for the students of our "elite" university who celebrate Hamas and sign their positions, they need to take responsibility for the results of their actions.
I don’t know if anyone else is seeing this amongst super wokies but they say “nobody is condoning the killing of innocents”, while they just endlessly post about how zionists are the devil etc. — it just kind of sounds like they’re trying to justify it but not explicitly saying they are. Thankfully most takes I’ve seen are of the “this tragedy is awful and civilian deaths need to be mourned no matter what side they’re on” variety. It’s because of that that the more crazy content stands out I guess
Katie and Jesse touched on what one of my most frequent refrains was when I actually discussed progressive politics IRL: the radical islamists don’t want any of you, they barely want to keep most devout Muslim women alive, no one who is progressive, moderate or even conservative has any genuine rationale to support that cause aside from an assumption that when the underdog is brown and not Christian, they must be right.
If you are queer, a woman, educated or at least intellectual, disabled, not Muslim, or a million other things, radical Islam does not want you and you need not support it its terrorism. It is the #1 reason why I left the faith.
This is something I wonder about too - these people are supporting people who have contempt for them. They really have no idea. I spent half a year on a kibbutz in 1982, I was able to go to Egypt because I dragged an Englishman along (during the hottest month of the year, bless him for agreeing). I would have love to visit ancient sites in other surrounding countries, a photographer friend of mine did that on his own, but I was traveling alone and, not being suicidal, I didn't go. I think there are a lot of people in the west who truly don't understand what fundamentally different worldviews we have.
I think supporters in the West are well aware that Hamas is a theocratic right-wing group but Hamas and Islamists does not equate to Palestine. Think of Malcom X. Before his trip to Mecca, he was very anti-white. Blisteringly anti-white. But even despite that, many whites supported Civil Rights and Voting Rights and the end of Jim Crow not because they thought Malcolm X liked them, but the issues transcend him. And the issues here very much transcend Hamas. This is not a referendum on Hamas.
Maybe if it were the case that a small percent of the population were imposing their extremism on a generally moderate populous. But this isn’t the case at all.
The majority support Hamas explicitly. And the overwhelming majority align far closer to Hamas on social norms than to anything close to western ideals of equality.
If we disarmed Israel today, it’d be a genocide. In the actual, literal, WWII meaning of that word. By popular support.
If Hamas and Palestine were disarmed today, there’d be peace.
And that’s the fundamental difference in this conflict.
No doubt you made the right choice by not venturing out on your own into that part of the world. And to think that that was forty years ago, when the world seemed much, much safer than it does now.
I spent 93/94 backpacking in east & southern Africa, and more recently have spent many years in Central America. I often think about the incredible difference between places like that, where there's music and laughter and dancing and women can wear what they want, and the absolute repressiveness of other places. Bizarre.
Yes yes yes. As the terrorists say, "We love death even more than you love life." They have to, in order to suppress all human instincts toward any sort of alloyed joy, laughter, or kindness.
I feel like a lot of it just comes from partisan contraryism. This used to drive me bonkers when trying to discuss Iran with my more progressive friends. The GOP wants to bomb them, so Iran must be... good?
So true. Asra Nomani just published a book about the capture of leftist institutions by radical Islamists. I haven’t read that but I’ve read her other pieces and watched her interviews. It’s interesting.
And, on the rapid adoption of a Hamas terrorist in a paraglider as a symbol for the Democrat Socialists, she said:
"The obvious new symbol for members of the Democratic Socialists of America is a Hamas soldier. I can’t believe I never thought of it myself. Who would respect your pronouns more than a Hamas paraglider? Who would agree with the progressive prosecutor movement more than a Hamas paraglider? Hamas paragliders wait to be called out and called in. When I think of straight allies who support my gay rights and dignity, I obviously think of Hamas paragliders. This Is What A Feminist Looks Like (hint: it’s a Hamas paraglider, dummy!). Strong, rebellious, and arriving with panache to do an ethnic cleansing of the Jews? The Hamas paraglider has it all for the modern American left. "
To be fair to the Red-Green Alliance, hardcore Islamists in the West have a tendency to become bleeding-heart civil rights activists when it comes to the horrors of Islamophobia, and will diligently vote for whichever local socialist candidate conveniently manages to recognise their plight, though they do also seem curiously absent when the time comes to march for anyone else...
The "good Islamic" people everyone loves to talk about are mostly excited to get the fuck away from Islamic countries. I know several of them.
The ones who are economic "refugees" for reasons other than escaping repressive middle eastern regimes are generally a lot less good/laudable in their views and serious about the backward parts of Islam.
Islam, bring a bit of the 1800s (or 800s) tribal nomad viewpoint to your neighborhood today!
Islam is a lot more true to what it is than Christianity, and in many things such honesty and consistency is laudable.
On the other hand when it is a worldview literally out of the "Dark Ages"...well.
It’s quite funny that the left brushed off all information about how Muslims were less supportive of things such as women’s equality or LGBT rights a decade ago because they were so intent on making Muslims into perfect pet victims who were so unjustly targeted by those meanies on the right to now realize that the detractors were correct. My response is “serves you right, you should have just not stuck up for them in the first place. Pick which group gets your sympathy because it can’t be both”.
As an am upper-middle class liberal who's never actually talked to the average euro-moroccan teen, I'm shocked. I thought they were all about adding harissa to quirky tapas dishes.
Any right of center substack tends to eventually attract absolutely insane commenters. It doesn't happen to slightly left of center substacks. Probably there are a broader spectrum of left of center publications and the audience is able to self select at a more granular level? I'm not really sure
I don’t think that BW is right of center - I’d say Obama Democrat. I agree with your point about right of center substacks. If you look at Hanania’s stack, you can sometimes see users calling for the genocide of black people.
I guess I'm not super invested in where bari's site falls on the political spectrum but it's clear that her *audience* is right of center and they must be getting something out of it
Bari Weiss is definitely the right messenger for this particular message, given her long and entirely uncontroversial history of suppressing pro-Palestinian wrongthink.
This is the natural consequence of telling people that an oppressed group is literally unable to cause harm. It’s not just that there’s a binary, but that there’s an attempt to systematically redefine words like racism or sexism to exempt certain groups from being held to account for being bigoted.
Yep, and (not that it should matter when we're talking about murdering children and other civilians, BUT) genetic research does indicate that Ashkenazi Jews trace their ancestry back to populations in the Middle East in the days of the Roman Empire, especially in the paternal lines: https://www.razibkhan.com/p/ashkenazi-jewish-genetics-a-match.
As Sarah Isgur said on a recent Advisory Opinions episode (paraphrased from memory), "Where do these people think Jews come from? Europe?" I think the answer is "Yes, because the dumbest people making the dumbest arguments have—surprise, surprise—the least knowledge of Jewish history."
`genetic research does indicate that Ashkenazi Jews trace their ancestry back to populations in the Middle East'
Sure. That doesn't mean they had control over the land that constitutes the modern state of Israel (disregarding the fact that any control they had was thousands of years ago).
They were part of a multi-ethnic population thousands of years ago. They can be once again.
Israeli Jews are majority Mizrahi which is why many of these victims we are seeing don’t look white. Weird how that is completely lost on so many people.
As always, it must be emphasized that race is a social construct with no biological validity. If society treats the Irish as non-white, then non-white they are.
That being said, one of the sad ironies of this situation is that strictly in terms of genetic/chromosomal similarity, Jews and Arabs are such closely linked population groups (even after a thousand years of occasional intermarriage with other groups) that they might as well be cousins.
Yes, and whereas race is a largely meaningless way of categorizing humans, language is a profoundly meaningful one., and when it comes to language, these two Semitic peoples are indeed cousins. The biblical story of Abraham, Ishmael, and Isaac may be mere allegory, but it's a beautiful way of showing how the two came from a common root--and how they were destined for eternal enmity.
At least 50% of the Jews in Israel today had no family that ever lived in Europe. They're from the surrounding nations (Syria, Iraq, Iran, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt)
This is a canard. Colonizers are colonizers---this is the leftist position.
And the historical evidence clearly shows that Jews were but one of many populations from the Middle East and clearly not the dominant one. Most of the land of current Israel never was and never has been theirs.
Hamas is bad. We should be able to condemn wholeheartedly people who behead babies and rape women before murdering them, without qualifiers, without blaming innocent people for being slaughtered, without chin stroking and umming and ahhing. It's not complicated and we seem to be able to do it when any other country whose government has engaged in questionable foreign policy choices suffers a horrifying terror attack by Islamic militants. Why can't we do it for Israel?
I'm having a hard time with the tiptoeing around the antisemitism on the left. Jesse is sticking up for this socialist group because they do some good social justice things? But they don't like Jews. Is it hard to choose here??
And regarding the law firm rescinding a job offer: Jesse says he would understand not hiring someone who said he couldn't stand black people....but he's not sure it's OK in the case of someone who doesn't like Jews?? This has nothing to do with the first amendment or with cancel culture. It is about whether people are willing to work with a person who despises an ethnic group.
A big problem here is that Katie admits to ignorance of the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and Jesse may himself not be fully-informed; then they find themselves in the position of feeling as though they may have to give a pass to people celebrating the massacre of civilians because those people believe that the Palestinians are oppressed by Israeli colonizers? No. There is no justification for murdering babies, raping women, kidapping old people. If you are having a hard time holding people responsible for supporting terrorists you have somehow thought yourself into a corner--like the Harvard students you are laughing at--and you really need to think yourself back out. Learn about the history of the conflict. Learn about Arab leaders who supported Hitler. Learn about how hatred of Jews in the region predated the state of Israel. Learn about how antisemitism continues to thrive as the oldest and only universally acceptable form of hatred. Learn about these things and *then* go on the air and categorically reject any excuse for those who support these monstrous acts.
Contrary to what Jesse and Katie said, it's not "cancel culture" when pro-Hamas college students lose out on job opportunities. Cancel culture is when someone is severely punished for some relatively trivial crime, but endorsing violence and cruelty against unarmed people is not trivial. I wouldn't hire someone who professed admiration for Dahmer or the Manson murderers, and I wouldn't hire someone who admired Hamas. Not for a law firm, not to plunge my toilet. Such a person is at best irresponsible, at worst a psycho. However, I will grant Jesse and Katie one point: it is indeed unfair to blacklist someone simply b/c they belonged to an organization that signed a pro-Hamas statement, as opposed to someone who directly signed their own name to such a statement.
It's rather... let's say, convenient... that your side just so happens to be the one endorsing ideas of only trivial contentiousness, while the other side's ideas are beyond the pale and worthy of blacklisting.
You're assuming a great deal when you say "your side," but let's just go with that. You're saying that I'm on the side that regards it as worse to rape a woman and drag her bloodied body through the street than it would be to wear an insensitive Halloween costume, to which I will respond "Guilty as charged." Opposition to the moral absolutism of the woke left doesn't mean that moral absolutes don't exist; it just means that *their* moral absolutes are bullshit. Don't forget that these were the same people getting offended about pronouns and other microaggressions five minutes ago, now screaming for Jews to be gassed. And yes, you can employ some kind of sophistry regarding the fact that the people clutching pearls over pronouns at Harvard aren't the same ones calling for gassing Jews at the Sydney Opera House, but anyone who's not lying to themself would recognize that the two serve the same cause.
You might have heard of Shani Louk. But I suspect that like anyone else who's straining at gnats here ("Were the babies really decapitated and not just murdered?") your interest is not so much the truth as it is distraction from the truth.
Yes, so symmetrical, "AA is wrong" (hate speech at many campuses) vs. "beheading babies and raping women is wrong, as is murdering people at a pro peace music festivals" -- eh, they deserved it (according to a shocking number of the lefties).
You say that that's a straw man, but how so? There really are people out there who are happy to see a person lose their whole career simply for using a word that sounds like a racial slur, yet are fine with those who call for the blood of Jews. Is that so difficult for you to see? I'm all for not making straw men, and for checking out rumors and not believing the first thing you hear; but sometimes things aren't that hard to understand.
We ought not to be surprised that right-leaning and pro-Israel people are willing to redefine cancel culture to allow this. Persecuting leftists over anti-Zionist/criticisms of Israel was the original cancel culture.
At least people are being consistent in their hypocrisy. Also, we can disregard right/liberal critiques of cancel culture because it's obviously not made in good faith. Bari Weiss did pioneer this approach, remember.
Oh, to be clear, I am exactly zero percent surprised by this. But the fact that someone's hypocrisy is predictable does not make it any less contemptible; if anything, it's more so.
It's always interesting how supporters of totalitarianism use the standards of liberal democracy against its adherents. Just because western society values open-mindedness a good deal more than you would like doesn't mean we have to be open to everything, including pressure from people who would like to see the Jews removed from the face of the earth.
Would students get "canceled" for expressing allegiance to Hitler? They almost certainly would, in the sense that no decent person would want to hire them. The same is true of students who support Hamas, which, like the Nazis before them, puts the destruction of the Jews/Israel above all other priorities. No need to shed too many crocodile tears, though: there are plenty of like-minded people who will give them employment.
`Just because western society values open-mindedness a good deal more than you would like'
Where did I imply this? I'm advocating a minority position here, so of course I value open mindedness! I've especially valued it since I noticed anti-Zionists being `cancelled' by both political parties going back decades.
Among other things I don't think these BigLaw firms got flooded by the piccrew mafia informing them that the statements were akshully very problematic to a population that amounted to less than 1 in 40,000 people (if harmful at all), I'm pretty sure they saw them for their self and said "Is this who we really want working with our significant Jewish employee and client base? Do WE want to be working with her/them?"
I’ve always said what makes cancel culture is not accountability for public statements, but companies depriving people of employment without due process. Companies should be able to withhold employment opportunities from people who espouse things like white nationalism. The issue was that people were imposing financial consequences for unproven accusations or positions that are relatively mainstream, just to placate the mob. (Donald McNeil for referring to a racial slur, the Seattle guy for saying mao was probably worse than hitler thought we can all agree both were terrible, etc.)
In the absence of a mob, would the board of directors at a company decide to hire someone who, as a student, stated the responsibility for a terror attack was Israel’s? How many years has it been? Did they change their view? Did they have all the context?
But the point is it’s not the speech per se but the mob being the decider.
I would argue there are almost always "trouble makers" on the margins that point out things most people don't want to hear when it comes to Islamic terror. Sometimes they're not super helpful, like in the aftermath of Charlie Hebdo, but other times they're really on to something, like when Ron Paul observed the existence of "blow back" from reckless US foreign policy in the aftermath of 9/11, or when Norman Finkelstein and other dissident voices gave their thoughts on the recent attacks in Israel. Offering an explanation as to why these things happen is too often conflated with blaming the innocent (not to say that's what you're doing) and it sure as hell isn't the same as offering justification.
Acknowledging the criminal lack of regard for human life on the part of the Israeli leaders, or the US, or any country for that matter is critical at this moment in history. Although with that being said, I fear it's reasonable to conclude the predators at the top will continue doing what they're doing, and will not stop to give a single fuck about the destruction their actions have wrought. The unhinged, tin-foil-hat rant has now concluded.
"If we honor John Brown’s armed resistance to slavery; if we honor the Jews who revolted in the Warsaw Ghetto—then moral consistency commands that we honor the heroic resistance in Gaza. I, for one, will never begrudge—on the contrary, it warms every fiber of my soul—the scenes of Gaza’s smiling children as their arrogant Jewish supremacist oppressors have, finally, been humbled. "
Yeah, that Norm Finkelstein. Really on to something. Just casually comparing a terrorist attack to Jewish rebellion in Warsaw.
The Warsaw Ghetto fighters fought soldiers. They did not fire upon dancing teenagers. There is no better example of direct self-defense against immediate threat than the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. They were heroes. Period.
And if the occasional Warsaw Ghetto Fighter committed some horrific and unnecessary act of violence against a civilian, I’d happily condemn that specific act.
There is NO GENUINE COMPARISON to be made with civilian directed terrorism like what was carried out by Hamas last week.
Even if we were to accept the premise of Hamas's defenders and say that Israel is *literally* Nazi Germany, that still wouldn't justify the deeds of 10/7. Suppose a group of Jews had broken out of Dachau in 1942 and slaughtered a village full of defenseless Germans who weren't even part of the Nazi regime: for all the Nazis' cruelty, no decent human being could endorse such a wanton act of retaliation. Literally nothing can excuse what Hamas did to those civilians, and that's why Israel's punishment is going to be swift, severe, and decisive.
This is true, but we also would readily accept that the Nazi regime bore some substantial degree of responsibility for that massacre, just as it in our reality bore and continues to bear a substantial responsibility for the expulsion of the German communities of Eastern Europe. Those expulsions were appalling and unjust-- if not for Allied hypocrisy, they would have easily been recognized as acts of genocide-- but that's kind of what happens when you behave monstrously toward people.
Sounds like you got really caught up in the premise of Israel as actually being comparable in any way to Nazi Germany, a preposterous notion that I was pretending to be true simply because the kind of nonsense that ignorant or mendacious people tell themselves.
Yes, we also celebrate the bold and utterly vicious Comanches for their violent resistance against white settlers. They murdered babies and scalped and gang raped women. Violent oppression and conquest necessitates a violent response, not because it is morally right, as that is a secondary factor, but because it is only natural to human beings.
Maybe in 150 years or so, kids will have gone from playing cowboys and Indians to IDF and Hamas. The span of time has a way of sanitizing the horrors of the present.
Comanches, the most fearsome horse warriors in all of human history, were so friggin cool and I'll die on that hill.
Read Empire of the Summer Moon and get back to me. We as a nation totally celebrate the Comanches, their last chief was held in high regard in American media at the time and was buried with honors.
I kind of doubt the "most fearsome horse warriors in all history" were the ones that Americans happened to most recently fight. "All history" is a big place, even for something as recent as horse warriors (only a couple thousand years old).
This is the type of thing that actually does reek of Amero-centrism.
So only historical groups that have achieved gains through peaceful means deserve admiration?
The Comanches are forever embedded into the mythos of the American frontier because of their tenacity. You can't allow yourself, even a little bit, to admire a group of people, comprised only of a few thousand individuals, who were able to slow, and indeed push back, westward expansion into the American frontier for decades? That is an incredible achievement and is comparable to nothing else in all of human history.
"Hey let's blockade this incredibly dense urban environment for decades, deprive the inhabitants of enough food to sustain good health (i.e. the "starvation diet" https://tinyurl.com/3t2732up), blow them up constantly, and have our snipers kneecap them when they try to peacefully protest (https://tinyurl.com/248xn5mr)."
"Oh and I have another idea! Let's deprive our citizens of the natural right to armed self-defense, and then have the military force that we've been touting as elite and unfuckwitable for decades completely abandon them when they are needed most, so they are indiscriminately slaughtered in their homes by a bunch of crazed militants."
The people at the top are fucking ghouls and to think otherwise is simply wrong. Bears almost no relation to reality my butt yo.
Just as a matter of using my eyes, since I am not an expert on the region, I can see that people aren't starving in Gaza. The situation there is being exaggerated to justify the terrorists' actions and their world view. I wouldn't want to live there, but I've seen worse. The terrorists all looked well-fed, well-dressed and drove late model trucks. My husband and I both have advanced degrees and both work, in the US, and we can't afford nice trucks like that. Hell, I can't afford a paraglider. So, I'm not buying it.
Yeah, frankly I’m having a hard time squaring what I’ve read and heard about the distribution of resources through the blockade on Gaza with the rather… husky gentleman I saw in the invasion footy. What’s your take on that? Do you think the reports of calculated caloric allowances are fabricated or over blown? Is it possible the higher ups and the members of the political/militant class hoard resources and whatnot?
She's not a journalist, but she does collect and translate social media from Gaza, and some of it is pretty shocking. Yes, there is tremendous inequality there. Hamas steals a lot of money from humanitarian efforts (as does the PA)
"and have our snipers kneecap them when they try to peacefully protest"
Yes. Shooting at peaceful protesters is abhorrent. But, you know. From the article:
"during most protests dozens have approached the fence attempting to damage it, burning tires, throwing stones and Molotov cocktails towards Israeli forces and flying incendiary kites and balloons into Israeli territory; the latter resulted in extensive damage to agricultural land and nature reserves inside Israel and risked the lives of Israeli civilians. Some incidents of shooting and throwing of explosive devices have also been reported."
And:
"There are no indications that the Hamas authorities have taken any measure to ensure accountability for the failure to provide adequate protection and the possible instrumentalization of children during the GMR."
Even when the Palestinians do the right thing and have a chance to unambiguously paint Israel as wrong Hamas finds a way to punch themselves in the head.
They're a bunch of fucking monsters that rather have their people martyred so they can wave a bloody shirt in the face of Israel and the rest of the world. I saw a vid yesterday of a Palestinian father trying to goad his little boy into shot by IDF soldiers, he just toddled up to them and one of the soldiers took his hand briefly as if to shake it. I got no love for Hamas.
But yes, you make several fair points. I'm not sure how much the raising of Gaza's border with Egypt matters though. I mean, yes, they are partly culpable for the wretched conditions in Gaza as well.
The fact that Hamas consistently bungles shit and is terrible could very well be part of the reason why they were aided and abetted by the US and Israeli gov'ts...
Regarding the Gaza border with Egypt, that's more impregnable than the one with Israel, so that matters hugely. Like Jordan, Egypt does NOT want the Palestinians. Way back when, in a much earlier chapter of this 75-year conflict, the Arab nations refused to take in the Palestinians b/c they saw them as a wedge against Israel. They were happy for the Palestinians to remain as refugees while they stoked their hatred. Over the course of time, though, the Egyptians and other Arab nations tired of their war against Israel; but by then, the anti-Israel forces having morphed into a new creature under Iranian tutelage, they wanted nothing to do with the monster they'd helped create.
Palestinians chose to be a threat. Not all of them, maybe not even most, but enough so that they were a genuine security threat that necessitated restrictions. And refused peace offers, some not unreasonable. Israel did not enact these measures just to be cruel.
I'm not sure if this significantly addresses the points I've made.
But yes, some Palestinians have established themselves as legitimate threats to the Israeli populace. Those same Palestinians that were aided by the Israeli and US government for decades.
"Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas. This is part of our strategy." - Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu in March 2019
"Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel's creation." - Israeli Historian Avner Cohen
There's also a 2009 piece from the WSJ entitled "How Israel Helped to Spawn Hamas." It's paywalled, but if you have a subscription, it's prolly worth a read.
This goes all the way back to the 1970s, when the Israeli gov't started funding radical Islamist groups who eventually coalesced into what is now Hamas. So I suppose this warrants a question. Would Palestinians have chosen to be a threat had they not been goaded into this position over the course of almost 50 years?
Not tin-foiles at all. Plenty of American and Israeli Jewish scholars, reporters, a d the like have documented the crimes against the Palestinians, and the US supports it. In fact, King Bibi and his allies, and the U.S., wanted Hamas to take the reigns from the PLO, in other words, they wanted a religious fundamentalist group that would be easily provoked to attack every time Israel expanded beyond the Oslo Accords - nothing better to detract your crimes than to point to the enemy retaliating and day, "Look, they're attacking us!"
Hamas and the PLO have made it quite clear from the beginning of those groups' existence their goal is to wipe out Israel and build an Arab Muslim state of Palestine on Israel's corpse. The "crimes against the Palestinians" are the necessary evil intended to prevent the kinds of murderous crimes we all witnessed last weekend.
The same PLO that signed up to and has, broadly stuck the Oslo Accords that Israel abandoned in favour of increasing annexation? why do people say this absolutely fabricated nonsense?
The old feminist line is that "men are dogs" but I always found that strange. "Men are loyal, caring, tireless, joyful creatures with an occasional tendency to hump inanimate objects" doesn't strike me as being that bad of an insult.
Harvard student groups complain about feeling “unsafe” because of mean Tweets while supporting literal massacre - Jesse, the word you’re looking for is “chutzpah”.
In publishing there have been a number of our junior staffers saying pretty unhinged stuff about this conflict online, and these young folks seem to be entirely oblivious to, or insensitive to, the fact that they have many Jewish colleagues in the office with them, sometimes working *directly* with them. To make matters worse, the posts I see from young self-righteous Leftists are all the usual talking points they vomit all year long, and the ones I see from Jewish colleagues are about BEING SCARED FOR THEIR ACTUAL RELATIVES.
But the folks in publishing won't need to advertise the names of these young employees with a truck of shame, because THEY ARE ADVERTISING THEMSELVES! These are NAMED ACCOUNTS!
I've seen this so much in this industry, there is this entrenched self-righteousness among those who have subscribed to the copypasta politics of the too-online Left, and my coworkers will willy-nilly jukebox this crap, and think it won't land on them later.
I personally think their politics are fetishistic, shallow, and intermittently vile. But here's the thing: even if someone *agreed* with the politics, the fact that they choose to express them in a 100% public manner, and insist that everybody subscribe to their one-sided views of issues, means they *obviously can't advance in an organization where they will need to make even-handed management decisions that satisfy broad swaths of employees.*
Like...who would be dumb enough to promote any of these employees? They have shown they have no restraint and no ability to publicly speak to these issues. They can't lead anything but a group of people who already agree with them, and that is not in the job description of someone hoping to advance in a company that has to publish across the ideological spectrum TO FINANCIALLY SURVIVE.
I'm very interested to see who walks in the doors of this industry over the next ten years, because several people who have walked into them during the previous ten are in the process of flaming out before my eyes. It's like Ionesco's "Rhinoceros" if the whole thing took place in an office.
`the fact that they have many Jewish colleagues in the office with them'
And? They aren't Israelis; they're in no danger here. Please stop conflating Jews in general with Israel---that's exactly what the anti-Semites do.
`Jewish colleagues are about BEING SCARED FOR THEIR ACTUAL RELATIVES'
I've been very concerned about the lives of my Palestinian friends and acquittances for a couple of decades now. No one seems to have tempered their rhetoric about Palestinians due to my feelings or the feelings of their family members.
Maybe not. If it was a comment on young people expressing full-throated copypasta opinions on the terrorist attacks and expecting their coworkers with relatives in Israel to be chill with it, then it's in the right thread!
It hits me from two sides, because I think it's both wrong AND DUMB! Like, I don't actually think a lot of these employees have strong personal opinions, because their opinions are so matchy-matchy? It's more like couture than an opinion. BUT EVEN IF IT REALLY WERE THEIR OPINION, to share it out loud in a public named forum is bananas, from a human standpoint--but also from a careerist creep standpoint! I think these posters are starved for a particularly empty form of validation that they haven't quite realized goes nowhere. That what they're saying is awful isn't even something they're aware of, because they go wherever the mirror exercise guides them.
Cancel culture is going back 10 years to find something “wrong” about someone. Such as using a slur 10 years ago on Facebook. Like the Emu girl.
Quite literally cheering on Hamas and being fired for it, or employers wanting to know who not to hire, is not cancel culture y’all.
Jesus Christ
If my colleges college republican’s signed a letter affirming Dylan fucking Roof and the fight against “White genocide”, I, as an employer now, would like to know who signed that letter, so I don’t have to hire them by mistake.
That’s not fucking cancel culture. Give me a break Jesse and Katie
In that letter, there is no condemnation of the murder, of the rape, of the kidnapping of thousands of unarmed Israeli citizens.
From young men and women kidnapped, and brought back to Gaza for God knows what. To the butchering of Holocaust survivors and the uploading of their dead bodies to their own Facebook profiles so their families can witness the carnage. To the beheading and the incineration of infants. Not to mention the innocents of other nations, including Arabs butchered in the massacre.
Zilch. No condemnation of those. When you refused to condemn those acts, and put the blame squarely on the Israelis themselves, you are saying that they were asking for it. It is no different than saying how short was her skirt.
When you do not condemn violence, such as this, and you put the blame on the innocents, that, along with all the antisemitism we have seen from the so-called Palestinian rallies. They are saying what many others are saying, this is, what decolonization looks like.
Since 2015, I have seen the left, particularly the online left. Label anything they don’t like as Nazism, Racism, and antisemitism.
From school choice, the gun rights, you name it.
I’ve been called the worst of the worst by simply saying that Possibly the DAs in New York, Seattle, Memphis, etc. are not doing a good job.
But here, right now, we have actual Nazis chanting from the river to the sea in New York City, to gas the Jews in Sydney Australia. To rape their mothers in rape, their daughters in London.
Jewish schools across the planet are having to close today, and synagogues are barricading their doors tomorrow for fear of a wave of antisemitic attacks.
I live in a pretty Jewish neighborhood, I see more Israeli flags than American flags at times. My neighbors are terrified, the local BLM shit stirrer re-tweeted the call for global jihad.
And where are all these progressive groups?Partying with those saying gas the Jews, the Nazis were simply in the mirror.
Just playing the game they’ve been playing for years I guess
I don’t know I hate the phrase, but the last week has been a bit of a “black/red-pilling” for me.
If someone doesn’t say a damn word of sympathy for the murder of Jews both in Israel and abroad, but then starts to speak up about the Palestinians... or even worse say that the violence against Gaza was unprompted, then yeah
I along with a lot of other people are going to draw conclusions.
Suppose this.... If someone was loudly condemning the bombing of Dresden or Tokyo in 1945, but was suspiciously quiet during the axis offensive in the years before, those complaints might be seen a little differently.
Just my take. Are used to be really really sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, But now I don’t know man..... I still haven’t heard from a friend of mine in Israel.
That's sophistry. Silence in this case is complicity, and (again in this case) that means complicity with violence. But that's not the same as "silence is violence," a nonsense statement in any case.
`In that letter, there is no condemnation of the murder, of the rape, of the kidnapping of thousands of unarmed Israeli citizens.'
The situation is bad enough so please stop exaggerating as it will only fuel more hatred towards Palestinians.
Thousands of civilians weren't killed in Israel (although Israel has killed thousands of Palestinian civilians...approaching 10,000 over the last fifteen years). Latest estimates I'm aware of had 900 Israeli civilians killed; the rest were military/security personnel.
Overall a good episode, but I don't know if I agree with the "18-year-olds are stupid and so their statements aren't a big deal" take.
The people running student orgs on campus and responsible for the pro-Hamas statements likely aren't naive freshmen who have been on campus for two months, like in Katie's example. They're seniors, so they're 21+, and in less than a year they're off in the world working. They can vote, they can drink, they have all the rights and privileges of adults. They're adults, and their actions have consequences. They certainly have consequences for all the people who hate Israel and are going to read their statements and think the students share their views.
Yup, all of my female ancestors (and most of my male ones) were married by age 22. Forget this "College students are babies" stuff. I feel like there's a class element here; we don't excuse the actions of our local movers, Amazon drivers, or pest-control guys this way, even when they are in their late teens/early twenties.
Absolutely a class element. I was married and had a kid at 22. Friends had kids at 16-17. No one excuses the actions of people where I grew up. Generational poverty, opioid crisis, rural isolation? Nope, still contemptible MAGA scum. Awfully hard to give grace to those who are privileged enough to expect it.
Yep, if you are old enough to have voting rights, get a job, and serve in the military (even if you might never in a million years do this last one), you are old enough to spend 15 minutes reading up on a terrorist organization before you sign onto statements supporting it and/or march on its behalf.
As someone who's taught a lot of college students, I have always, always argued against their infantilization. They are adults and should be treated that way, both in the classroom and out on the quad.
I was an idiot in college too, but that mostly meant I badly regurgitated philosophers I didn't really understand, spent longer than I'm proud of on 4chan, lived off of Monster occasionally spliced with silver tequila, and really liked Ron Paul. I do not recall any overwhelming desire to, y'know, publicly support massacres committed by terrorist organizations. Sure, on 4chan, behind the curtain of anonymity, I said some incredibly fucked-up edgelord shit. But even then, my underdeveloped, caffeine-wracked brain understood there was nothing morally righteous about that -- the appeal was that it was quite the opposite -- and recognized behaving that way in polite society was a no-go.
As someone who's spent a lot of time in a field where you could make yourself unemployable by making one false remark, I am always shocked when people like 3Ls suddenly discover that you can get fired for saying the wrong thing.
Maybe it shouldn't be that way; I do think ideological conformity appears to be hurting big-law culture, just as it's long hurt academia. But on the other hand, do we really expect a major law firm to tell its Jewish and other ethically concerned clients that it's standing by the Hamas-defending student who spent last summer in its offices? I really can't blame Winston & Strawn for washing its hands of their new hire as quickly as possible.
Agree. And I think a lot of law firms - or employers across industries - are sick of hiring people who would rather be activists than just do their jobs. Every industry was wracked with this in 2020. She used her position as president of the student bar association to send out an activist political message. Not only was the message abhorrent, but it was an unprofessional use of her position. I imagine the conversation among the hiring partners was more "oh god, another one who'd rather be a fucking activist than be a lawyer."
`They're adults, and their actions have consequences'
Hopefully on this substack we can apply this principle uniformly.
For example, the detransitioners who had surgery after they were +18 can't be used as a reason to disallow treatment for others. Being adults, they just should have known better. So we can agree that it's definitely Keira Bell's fault that she had a mastectomy at 20 and now regrets it?
(This isn't necessarily directed at you, Anonymous, as I don't recall your stance on this issue. Just a reminder for all of the gender critical people condemning the students.)
Hindus have to deal with the exact same shit as you're seeing now and get labeled as "Nazis" just like the Israelis are. Spend any time around Muslim twitter or read any of the leftist main stream media's take on Indian politics and you'll see for yourself.
Example, there was a time when I saw a BBC article that covered an event where Muslims slaughtered a bunch of unarmed peaceful Hindu pilgrims and blamed Modi for "weaponizing the pilgrims."
Ah yes, the classic "why are you caring so much about this issue, you should really care less" argument. It's like people are literally determined to deploy every single logical fallacy they normally accuse left-wing activists of employing.
(Also, like... a lot of them literally ARE involved in protests against those countries? You're vastly more likely to find fighters for international freedom and solidarity in left-wing activist circles than in the general populace.)
Stephen L. Miller, friend of Katie, and the pod, made this point on his podcast.
A lot of people have been asking why are people so determined to dispute the number of sexual assaults by Hamas, and why are they so determined to falsify whether or not 40 babies were beheaded, even when photos are shown to them.
And he said it’s exactly the same playbook as holocaust denial.
They are trying to sow doubts now, so that in 5 years or so... they can say “ the Jews are conflating the number of people that died in the event. 1200 is way too high a number, maybe 500 die, and they were probably all IDF. If civilians died they were caught in the cross fire.
Given that the previous standard for presuming someone guilty of rape was "someone half remembered an incident several decades ago that may or may not have been kind of creepy and even though there's no evidence the accused was ever anywhere near the alleged victim but that doesn't matter because #believewomen", it's quite a turnaround.
What an odd thing to say. You seem to believe that everyone who turns a jaundiced eye to the "40 beheaded babies " claim was a rabid #me-too acolyte. This is simply false.
You guys can't keep making the mistake of "everyone who thinks z also thinks y and x and a and b." It's a lazy way to think, as well as a dangerous one.
I remember Kuwait lying about the "sick babies slaughtered in their incubators" 30 years ago. I remember "Palestinians used babies as shields" claim from Israel, repeated by Dubya during the American-backed shelling campaign of the West Bank in 2006 AND I remember the IDF deliberately targeting children playing on the beach during the Gaza War of 2014, and lying about it. Finally, I remember Israeli sniper fire killing journalist Sharee Abu Kahleh last May, and Israel lying and denying for fourth months until they finally admitted that they DID shoot her, but accidentally. They had previously blamed Palestinian Militants.
I didn't jump on the me, too bandwagon (and I could have, as I suspect most women can.) I do not support transgenderism or transhumanism. If you would like my opinions on other subjects, ask. I think you'll find ascribing ideology where there is none to be a fool's errand.
This why I precisely worded my statement to "the standard" as a general matter rather than anyone's individual opinion. I don't know who you are and I don't really care what your stance was on X issue.
And it's not even so much that I have some strong opinions about specific claims coming out of Israel. It's the media distortion, the way our information is filtered. That's why this show exists.
"Cancel Culture" is seeing an out of context video of a crying nurse pulling a bicycle away from a young black man and calling her employer to demand she be fired -- and then the employer firing her.
If a person -- a fully informed, smart person -- signs a proclamation declaring "I supoort murdering innocent families", he should be prepared to stand by that proclamation and to have to defend this position in the future.
Truthfully, I'm actually ambivalent on your point!
I'm sure that the students will be fine, having gone to Harvard, and that sort of money does provide quite a bit of social insulation that likely makes them reckless and unreflective of their views or in voicing them.
Overall, I am unhappy about being driven to defend the children of the rich and entitled, especially those at Harvard (which I would really like to see taxed until its endowment is a quarter of its current size or they admitted many more students).
Suppose I'll just have to find solace and consolation in the Wedding Cake-based THCP vape procured over the weekend.
I don't deny that there's been a lot of sick leftist bullshit about Israel people calling Jewish refugees American tourists saying Hamas is full of moral freedom fighters and of course the BLMchicago glider art. The people that say this stuff should absolutely face career repercussions just as someone supporting ISIS would. That said the Harvard student groups engaged in normal political argument about the root causes of terrorism, the idea that anti-terror tactics that amount to collective punishment feed extremist groups should not be controversial they shouldn't face career repercussions.
But they weren’t doxxing the signatories themselves- it was signed by anonymous reps of whole student orgs and they were aiming to list all members of those clubs, whether they personally agreed with the letter or not.
Feel bad for most of these Harvard students. These groups included basic cultural or national ones, I think one was "Bangladesh Student Association", ones you might join by default freshman year. Their leadership which might be just 1-2 people put your name on this list without asking you.
I am mostly annoyed by the selective use of “they’re just children,” we have seen many instances of people being cancelled for edgy shit they said when they were 14 but when it’s convenient a 22-year-old has a developing brain and can’t be held to account for anything.
Also has any institution shredded their credibly more thoroughly in the last few years than Harvard+Yale? Between the Christakis incident, the psychology professor that faked data, the “trap house” incident at Yale law, and the “personality” scores used for admission, we should be treating these more like junior colleges than august institutions.
Apparently the poor dears feel unsafe. Maybe they should feel as unsafe as Jews hiding in a safe room from homicidal maniacs. I have zero sympathy for these moral idiots and I don’t agree with Jesse and Katie.
"we have seen many instances of people being cancelled for edgy shit they said when they were 14 but when it’s convenient a 22-year-old has a developing brain and can’t be held to account for anything."
Late to this party(?) but this is spot on. Yes, the young folk often have radical views that they later outgrow and everyone can spew whatever bs they want on their twitter accounts. However, signing on to a public letter espousing a particular worldview is not a mistake made by children, it's a choice and anyone who actually signed and agrees with the letters should face whatever (constitutionally legal) consequences that follow.
Or more simply: If you want the benefits of signing the letter, deal with the related consequences.
I'm a little disappointed in Katie at the end waffling about free speech and should the law student have been fired from the firm. Katie said "I'm not going to say there isn't a line..." but there very much IS a line - and it's a line the employer gets to draw! *Especially* for law firms - this student (based in NY) could very likely be representing Jewish clients - how would you feel if you were that client spending $300/hour on a lawyer that has made these comments? Do you feel they would be working their hardest to represent you?
Also, let's not pretend this person's career is over; they've got a good degree and they'll get a job but it might not be their dream job. The left *loves* to remind the right that freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences; let this be a reminder of that for everyone.
And there's a difference between a dumb freshman and someone about to graduate Yale law school and work at a prestigious company with tightly managed reputation. The student and very soon to be lawyer in question hasn't learned the difference in consequences between college and the real world.
Also, I think there's a difference between voicing opinions on one's own personal accounts and acting as the leader of an apolitical student group. Sure, they were her own views, but she wrote them on the front page of an SBA newsletter, in her capacity as president. I wouldn't take away her job or position just for expressing an opinion, but expressing it in that forum seems like really poor judgment. [Edited for grammar. I'm so ashamed.]
I was scrolling through to raise a similar issue. Unfortunately, I don't have the link, but someone made what I thought was a great point on Twitter.
If the firm had said they were rescinding their offer because they thought the author demonstrated poor judgment and felt it was likely to have implications for their future ability to represent clients effectively, there would be no (rounded down to allow for outrage junkies) controversy about that decision.
Instead they tied it to the content of protected speech and opened up a 1st Amendment issue, which ironically demonstrates poor judgment...
Like the Harvard student that didn't read the statement before signing it. You are a Harvard law student and you don't know to read a document before signing it? Poor judgement, indeed.
I think what happened to some of these Harvard students was that the leadership of their groups signed onto the letter without the knowledge or consent of the entire group.
Agreed. Some groups may have had some type of policy about membership voting or not for officials statements but the reality is a handful of folks desperately wanted to join in on the virtue signaling.
That said: I didn't see a single student renounce the statement *until after* that CEO said he wanted to know the student names so he wouldn't hire them and a bunch of CEOs agreed.
Yes, I can say that as a member of a number of professional organizations that have in recent years spewed out their views on Donald Trump, George Floyd, COVID, Ukraine, Refugees, LGBTQ, Dobbs, and frankly anything else that comes down the pike, I've never been told about the statement before it goes up on the website.
It's not a free speech issue. As the line goes, free speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences. And this isn't a case of "cancel culture"--i.e., meting out severe punishments for relatively trivial statements. To endorse, or even fail to condemn, the actions of 10/7 is to present oneself as a psychopath. To be fair, there are law firms that would consider just such a person an ideal fit, so these morally stunted scholars probably won't go hungry.
I agree with that critique, though perhaps the “values” with which this person’s comments were misaligned are “not alienating our clients and/or colleagues.”
I have no problem whatsoever with rescinding someone’s job offer because they do something that reveals they’re going to be lousy at the job.
I think Katie got this right. In my view it's difficult to draw these kinds of lines, so I try to be humble about where other people draw them.
Where I think Winston & Strawn mostly went wrong was in saying the withdrawal of their offer was based on the contant of Workman's speech. Not that they can't take that stand--the firm can take whatever political position the partners like--but I don't think it's wise for institutions to take political stands at all. W&S could simply have said, "Mx. Workman's comments were ill-advised and lacked judgment, and we have no desire to hire someone like that."
At the end of the day, Workman seems to have forgotten that most attorneys rely heavily on their reputation, and cheerleading terrorist acts is NOT the kind of reputation most firms want to develop.
W&S probably dodged a bullet anyway. Workman seems like just the type to start a bunch of trouble over pronouns, and who needs that drama?
$300 an hour? Um, I would be surprised if even the billing rate for summer students at a major NYC firm is that low, never mind lawyers. These days you might get a first year lawyer billed out at $300/hour at a large firm in Toronto, but not in NYC.
I said this in the other thread, but it is still my position:
I think you can try to thread a needle here in terms of the type of behavior. She wasn't overheard at a rally or something, she used organizational resources of an organization she was a leader of to spread her own fairly non-mainstream political take on something. I have less "first amendment" concerns there.
This isn't her getting in an argument in the elevator of her apartment and someone recording it, it was actively considering and sending out a public statement of support as the leader of an organization.
From that angle she seems very worthy of consequences.
Still, I am not actually 100% sure where I stand on it honestly. On the one hand people should be free to fire and hire who they like. On the other hand, people should be able to have non-work-related private/political lives without feeling their job is in danger. How do those two things interface exactly when they conflict is tricky.
I don't think "you can never be punished for speech" and "fire whoever you want" are good solutions, or rather they are but they conflict with each other and the border of the compromise shouldn't be all on one side or the other.
I certainly cannot get involved in local politics or school board issues because of the danger it would pose to my career in a super lefty dominated industry (at least not without courting serious consequences). I don't like that, but then again I am not sure exactly what remedy I would recommend. I wouldn't want to be forced to hire someone who said a bunch of shit I thought was bonkers just because I saw them do it at a school board meeting and it was illegal to use school board meeting (or other utterances) in a hiring decision.
It’s also strange to call this cancel culture--which is best defined to involve mobs going after someone for making controversial statements within the Overton window--when it’s just a private employer saying, “it’s not good for our business to keep this person employed.” I suppose another way to loom at it is that we all support “cancel culture” in some instances, the general push against it (and usage) invokes people getting upset over statements about which reasonable people can agree.
This law firm would certainly lose clients if they retained this person--whose statements aren’t that far from Jesses nazi example!--and the student has demonstrated profound lack of judgment that is also relevant to her employer. Katie’s blanket statement about private employers not punishing employee for political speech doesn’t respect the employers rights and interests (be more libertarian, Katie!). The only persons I can think of who should be protected from professional consequences of their political speech are tenured academics, that being the point. But even there, there can be some consequences. That CO professor who slandered 911 victims should not be fired, but hopefully never invited to conferences again, or teach required classes, or published by major publisher, etc.
To take another example, Skokie was a free speech victory because it involves public spaces and the government. But would we think it violates free speech principles or culture if an employer found out that their employee was marching and decided Tom fire them? Of course not. Those marchers should face consequences for their reprehensible behavior.
Yeah, as someone mentions elsewhere on this thread, cancel culture is going and looking for a comment made by a person 10 years in the past in order to silence their viewpoint now. This is just a company - or society in general - maintaining a standard that, as you say, "reasonable people" can agree to. I mean, we can come up with a billion examples - should the law firm be chided for not hiring an actual skinhead nazi with swastika tattoos on their face? "It's just freedom of speech..."
I was quite struck by that too. Although I think many of the individuals publicly supporting Hamas are genuinely naive/ ill informed, they are still supporting an organisation that believes the only acceptable foundation for a future Palestinian state would be the genocide, or I suppose optimistically, forced displacement, of millions of Jews. On Saturday that same organisation went house to house to slaughter men, women and children, whole families who were both the descendants and survivors of previous genocide and mass displacements. I feel a bit through the looking-glass on this point. I just can't think of another example where openly supporting and celebrating an anti-democratic organisation of genocidal militants would fall within the boundaries of accepted political thought/ debate and wouldn't jeopardise your chances of having a high-profile career in a mainstream organisation.
Per my comment elsewhere on this thread, the appropriate solution is to "level up" employee free speech, not "level down." People's jobs should be outside the bounds of acceptable retaliation for pure speech in a way that social stigma and other "consequences" should not be.
If an employer decides no Trump voters, they just lost half the country for possible employees. And other people - like me, not a Trump voter - will also leave because that company sucks; I won't tolerate garbage like that.
Elsewhere in this thread someone mentioned having a standard that "reasonable people" could agree to. I think that's great legalese because it sounds like something a jury could discuss in a lawsuit. I think getting rid of Trump voters is not reasonable; I think not hiring skinhead nazis with swastikas tattooed on their faces is reasonable, even though the nazis will say it's just political speech.
There would undoubtedly be plenty of far-left law firms in the William Kunstler tradition that would be thrilled to hire someone who'd put themselves out there on behalf of a terrorist organization.
I am pretty ignorant about this issue, so forgive any stupid things I say in this comment, but one cognitive dissonance that I’ll never understand about the far left/critical theory/whatever you want to call it perspective on Israel and Jewish people is how they so easily dismiss the lasting impact of the holocaust. Everything these days is a genocide, we(white Americans) have to continually apologize and make amends for collective acts of violence in the past (often the very remote past, ie colonization of native lands) and yet there are still people living who were in concentration camps and fled to Israel and have somehow become some of the worst white colonizers, according to this worldview? Does generational trauma not apply to this group or something? Their philosophy isn’t even internally consistent
Talking about or even learning basic facts about the Shoah is passé and for normies and not nearly counter-cultural/radically anti-imperialist enough. Plus it's harder to relate to material conditions or white western colonialism or whatever.
I don't understand the analogy to American colonization. it's not like there were a bunch of Cherokee who decided to flee the Trail of Tears and go found a colony in Madagascar or something. If they had, I presume the Malagasy residents would have had something to say about it.
No, its as though a persecuted religious minority of pilgrims left their home and founded a colony on Native American land and refuse to give it back. And so do all the current citizens of that nation who reap the spoils and speak hypocritically about “colonizers” and accuse others of “occupation” from the safety the “stolen land” they themselves “occupy”.
You've completely lost the plot. The OP complained about precisely that form of demand that Americans give back stolen land:
"Everything these days is a genocide, we(white Americans) have to continually apologize and make amends for collective acts of violence in the past (often the very remote past, ie colonization of native lands)"
So clearly there does exist a substantial minority group of people who non-hypocritically want to return stolen land to Native Americans.
Meanwhile, there's another group of people (and I would be among this group) who think that rectifying the injustices of genocidal colonialism through land reclamation is hopeless beyond a certain time window (and, concomitantly, triggers other moral obligations to improve the lives of the victims of past genocides), but that time window obviously is not "yesterday," and many of the land seizures and expulsions for which Israel is responsible have occurred within the last 30 years. You don't get to claim adverse possession on something that happened during the period when the Simpsons was on air.
And, again, there's nothing "hypocritical" about recognizing that genociders can sometimes create unfixable facts on the ground that can only be dealt with by means other than direct restitution of lost property. Obviously, however, the international community has a very strong incentive to not permit that sort of thing to happen very often, else it creates a moral hazard that rogue states like Israel try to squeeze themselves through.
Yes, OP was talking about the ridiculous “stolen land” BS and the hypocrites who “really do” want to give the land back aren’t starting with their own property or their family’s, so no they don’t really want to give it back just like those white morons talking abiut greater representation in their field don’t mean their own jobs, because their hypocrites mouthing platitudes.
I’m glad you don’t think returning land is a good idea but your timetable for when return is unfeasible is completely arbitrary and nonsense because when they talk about “occupation” they mean Jerusalem and Haifa and thats well beyond your Simpsons mark.
And it is hypocrisy when talking about others commiting restitution when one is themsleves guilt of the same “crimes” but doing nothing to redress them besides mouthing platitudes.
Anyone who wants to talk that stolen land shit can start with their own house, car and property. They can be an example to us all or it’s just hypocrisy.
This comment is precisely as sensical as complaining about someone who wants to raise taxes by saying "well, if you're so happy, why don't you pay all your own income to the government, huh?" It's obvious to anyone but a moron (query whether you fall into that category) that people are often willing to take actions as part of a society-wide shift in legal requirements that they are not willing to take as uncompensated volunteers.
No, its not money is fungible, land is not. If one wants to give the spoils of being a “colonizer” back but don’t mean their own property, they do mean someone elses, they are a hypocrite (query whether you fall into that category)
Much like the “sanctuary city” morons who never believed it would impact them personally, then when immigrants were shipped to their city to spread the resource burden they began to change their tune. If one wants open borders start by opening your home. You want to give back “stolen land”, start with your home otherwise, its rank hypocrisy.
Yeah, I can understand your point. I was more speaking to the dismissal of the Jews as an aggrieved group, rather than commenting on the rightness or wrongness of their claim to the land itself
He understands, he just doesn’t like where the apt native American comparison leads. Its why I made it too.
And you’re right the need to devalue Jewish victimhood so they can be fitted for a black hat without the accuser being called antisemetic is logically inconsistent but Ideologically spot on for woke BS.
The literal point of intersectional analysis is that people have multiple identities existing in relationships with multiple other identities, some of which can be privileged in a particular set of facts while others are oppressed under another (or the same) set of facts.
It's not just making charts labeled "Whom Can Talk Over Whom." There are genuine sociological points that people have made that get buried under avalanches of Tiktok bullshit.
>The literal point of intersectional analysis is that people have multiple identities existing in relationships with multiple other identities, some of which can be privileged in a particular set of facts while others are oppressed under another (or the same) set of facts.
It's not just making charts labeled "Whom Can Talk Over Whom." There are genuine sociological points that people have made that get buried under avalanches of Tiktok bullshit.
yeah but the charts thing is the only thing anyone ever actually uses it for, that and for exercising power over people they very often don't intersectionally actually know shit about.
The whole project is so morally bankrupt that it is impossible to take seriously, Something that is in theory good, but is in practice always complete horseshit.
The next time I see someone interested in "intersectionality" really make an effort to be intersectional will be the first. It literally NEVER happens in my experience.
It is always the Marxist "African American" lesbo daughter of a Christian Nigerian elite immigrant doctor talking about "white privilege" while sneering at the white rednecks who grew up in trailer parks with parents hooked on meth.
Sometimes stereotypes are true!
Like I said it is the type of thing that sounds great in theory, and has such a horrible reputation because it earned it.
There is this constant sneering at "white culture" aimed at poor whites, but where the intersectional people point at the WASP elites in Connecticut. The fucking WASP Connecticut elite they set up as bogeymen are their own allies.
Jesse sounded puzzled about why people on the left would endorse terrorism. As someone once married to a Leninist it's obvious to me. I totally repudiate these views but when I was younger I heard a lot of these views.
Lenin argued that power must be attained by any means necessary. Terror is a key tool. If we define terrorism as murdering civilians in noncombat circumstances, that is merely asymmetrical warfare. This is a belief in the ends justifying the means. The ends, in this case, also happen to be nihilistic, but those supporting the recent massacres are often sure that no other means exist.
This ex of mine was also active in Palestinian activism for a while. He was disdainful of liberals or anyone who thought negotiation and compromise was valid. Like other intellectuals, he saw it all as a power game, and the oppressed must injure the oppressor.
This article on Lenin's strategies might be useful here:
I think that the modern leftist view is also heavily informed by Derrida and his Deconstructionism, which is descended directly from Marxism. Everything has to be a battle between oppressor and oppressed, even language. You always have to be rebelling against the oppressor, even if it's language itself. 😖 And once someone gets into this mindset, they are automatically looking for the "good guys" in any discussion. It's so braindead and black and white.
Oh, and if somehow you enter into power? You are now the oppressor, so you have to rebel against yourself and your own party! Which is why they can't resist attacking the center left.
This is ludicrous "cultural Marxism" ranting (albeit entirely typical of the "my politics are neither conventionally left nor right" crowd)-- stop reading Conceptual Jimmy. Nobody cares about Derrida.
I have no idea what you are talking about. Conceptual who? I do know what the Cultural Marxism thing is though...
You're like one of those braindead obnoxious ultra leftist dipshits who calls anyone farther to the right of them a Nazi. The same people Jesse and Katie make fun of all the time. The same people I know in real life who go to Antifa, DSA, etc, meetings, and absolutely talk about Marx, Derrida and Foucault all the time.
"Conceptual Jimmy" is a reference to the Twitter handle of James Lindsay (Conceptual James). His New Discourses podcast, YouTube channel and website is a wealth of information about this sort of thing.
Here's his glossary entry describing the origins of the term "Cultural Marxism," along with its various conflicting definitions and attendant controversies.
(Note that the first paragraph is a quote from the cited source -- it should really have formatting or quote marks to indicate this more clearly.)
On the rationale for the term "cultural Marxism: "the underlying oppressor-versus-oppressed analytical dynamic utilized in Marxism proper is re-appropriated out of the economic context and into the cultural context...In many regards, this application of Marxian conflict theory to cultural phenomena is, in fact, what neo-Marxism is about and is also what Critical Social Justice is about."
On problems with using this term: "For one thing, “cultural Marxism” might imply to many hearers that “Marxism” is the relevant part of the phrase, which is somewhat inaccurate where both neo-Marxism and Critical Social Justice are concerned. Both of these ideologies are highly critical of Marxism, in fact, in their own fashion...."
He also addresses the "conspiracy theory" meaning of the term: "Complicating matters further, because many of the members of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory were Jewish, a genuinely anti-Semitic conspiracy theory known as “cultural Marxism” has arisen....who believe the Frankfurt School to be yet another attempt by (evil) Jews to destabilize Western society for their own gain...."
It doesn't matter whether people have heard of a particular philosopher. If a particular thinker influences the shape of society to a sufficent extent, eventually their ideas will trickle down to the everyday level. Re "cultural Marxism," that's one of the best canards out there, promoted by the kind of people who would say that it's anti-Semitic to criticize a group of men who were ethnically Jewish but whose ideas had nothing to do with being Jewish, but it's *not* anti-Semitic to call for Jews' extermination if it's for the right cause.
The term "Cultural Marxism" refers to a far-right antisemitic conspiracy theory which misrepresents the Frankfurt School as being responsible for modern progressive movements, identity politics, and political correctness.
The depth of your analysis is impressive. But "full of shit" describes that Wiki entry, which is written from the perspective of what I call the *actual* "Cultural Marxism" conspiracy theory: to wit, that any critique of the Frankfurt School agenda as "Cultural Marxism" is a dog whistle for anti-Semitism.
In reality the fact that the men of the Frankfurt School happened to be Jewish is not important, especially b/c Judaism played very little role in their lives and virtually none in their thought; in fact, their Jewishness is important only to anti-Semites and to people who use that accident of birth as a protection against criticism. It's true that the Nazis and other far-right groups in Germany used the term "cultural Bolshevism," but that has nothing to do with any serious present-day anti-Marxist critique of the FS men and their values. There's also the fact, often cited, that the mass murderer in Norway in 2011 blathered about "cultural Marxism" in his manifesto. So what? The Unabomber critiqued environmental destruction, but his crimes don't invalidate the fact that environmental destruction deserves to be critiqued.
In fact, if the term "cultural Marxism" were used in a positive way and had a more celebrated history, I imagine many intellectuals would embrace the notion. It's a good way to describe an objective the men from the Frankfurt School articulated many times and many ways: making Marxism viable in the West, not as a political system but rather through the culture.
I suppose that's fair, I shouldn't crap all over Deconstructionism as a whole. I was thinking specifically about later Derrida and how he actually applied his philosophy to sovereignty in Rogues, and how anarcho-socialists view his messaging.
He didn't have to be "a Marxist" to think very much in line with Marx. Marx wasn't "a Hegelian" either, but Hegel had huge influence on him. And Derrida would no doubt approve of Marx's famous exhortation to "criticize all that exists."
I can't say that I'm too upset about the dude wanting the Harvard students names so he could not hire them in the future. I actually kinda love it, not necessarily in it being followed through on, but at least to nudge these assholes back towards the previously standard moral norm of not supporting terrorist groups attempting a Jewish genocide. I dunno. And college students do think/say some dumb shit, which is why there needs to be individuals, or better yet, a society that will check that dumb shit for them.
Totally. I'm against trying to privately doxx people and especially that weird truck, but if you belong to an organization that issues a controversial political statement you have 4 choices:
1. Say you agree with the statement and it represents your beliefs. Give your name and own your beliefs.
2. Say you don't, or only partially, agree with the statement and explain. Again give your name and stand by your beliefs.
3. Do nothing publicly and deal with the reasonable assumption that people reading the statement will assume you agree due to your membership in said group.
Yes, it's unfair that it appears that many of these groups issued statements without informing their constituents. However, the cat is out of the bag and maybe some folks need to reexamine the organizations they choose to associate with.
The people splitting hairs over dead babies are deranged
Especially people who, just a few years ago, were all about #BelieveWomen and victims in general!
However, to make a *nuanced* point (bear in mind, I'm a religious Jewish person who lives in Israel about 4 months/year):
I do not like it when people--even well-intentioned ones--repost things that aren't quite true. So *I* wasn't retweeting the trending "40 Babies Decapitated" because I didn't see any confirmation of this in reputable newspapers (even very biased ones like the NY Times). Certainly, babies were slaughtered with their familes.
And I saw worse things, like people--well intentioned--posting misattributed photos from carnage from other wars! I block these people, even if I generally liked them, because spreading false information is always wrong: It gives ammunition to the deniers.
It reminds me of my friends who absolutely panicked over Trump during his presidency. My stance was, his insufficiencies are bad enough and glaring enough without having to lie about him being Russian James Bond going around peeing on hookers. You can just watch him speak and go, oh, right, of course he shouldn’t be president.
Same here. I suppose the fact that X or Y could easily be true is bad enough though. If we’re at the point of going “we’ll actually…” over how babies were slaughtered, we may have lost our way a bit.
lying about Trump to defeat Trump completely misses what is bad about Trump.
It's crazy because these same people will defend misinformation on every subject from biological sex to Police shootings, but if the baby was actually beheaded after it was brutally murdered then we can't believe anything the zionists say about anything.
We should be circumspect in the extreme to rhetoric from the Israeli government that has the potential to incite overreaction and not get distracted by entirely predictable left-wing derangement such that *we* become hypocrites as well.
Hey hey hey now, I think we can all agree they were mostly peaceful baby killings!
Most of the militants the militants weren't committing violence at all a lot of the time. They were flying paragliders or running or praising god!
Everybody focuses the part where they're dismembering babies, but nobody pays attention to when they return home to redistribute the baby heads to the community, smh
Thank you for pointing this out. And in the case of dismembered Jewish women being dragged through the streets, are we to blame Hamas for trying to give their village a parade? If you discount the slaughter of innocent people and the horror they unleashed, most of their day wasn’t actually spent killing. Mostly non murderous terrorists!
(This is a horrible joke and yet I’m certain someone is making this point online somewhere in earnest )
If you think about it, MOST of the assassins spent a majority of their time paragliding and only a fraction of their time executing Jews, so it’s probably more accurate to just call them air sport enthusiasts.
“They weren’t ‘beheaded,’ their heads simply FELL off after being shot 37 times.”
Still unverified though.
True, the IDF didn’t release the photos. They definitely killed babies, and beheading is kind of a jihad hobby. It’s kinda like suspecting the hamburgler of burgling hamburgers.
I suspect you're being facetious but on the off chance you're not and to hose down unsuspecting blind-with-rage-AND-kill-them-all B&RT subscribers, *surely* you see the logical flaws in your statement. You beg the question (the IDF has photos???) then you create a false analogy, i.e. jihadists have beheaded innocents in the past, therefore we don't need objective proof to believe reports of infant headings.
What's maddening here is that the veracity of this report is both incredibly important and worthless in this debate.
It's worthless in that it's not necessary to believe this before condemning in total the actions of Hamas AND offering Israel full-throated support of Israel's right to secure their people and eliminate the possibility of a second act by these demented fiends, i.e. the elimination of the Hamas threat with reasonable force.
It's incredibly important that we recognize when a claim in unsubstantiated because it can be use to justify action beyond what is reasonable.
What I do in horrific times is make stupid jokes. Helps me cope.
Is your argument that…
A: it’s incredibly important that the claims being made are verified.
B: the claims aren’t important, because they shouldn’t make the moral difference in your calculation?
The IDF claims to have the proof in photos that they won’t release out of respect for the grieving families. This is the time for war propaganda, for sure, so they could be lying to gain sympathy for their reprisal. I’ve also seen a small creator on social media (not necessarily reliable either) who is part of the remediation crew in Israel talk about what he’s seeing in the aftermath. This, plus the images that Hamas themselves have released to the victims own social media accounts gives me the preponderance of evidence I need to believe the reports, but I’ll update my belief if it turns out to be wrong.
When I break down what I think is maddening *here*, I'm talking about how unverified claims are treated by the media, media consumers and belligerents. So (A), as you stated, remains the same, verification is paramount.
But I would alter (B) to say that so much repugnant behavior by Hamas has been verified that it's worthless to waste time -- as we are doing now, I recognize -- working ourselves up into a lather over something that might turn out to be bunk or even a simple misunderstanding. If it *is* verified, then okay, add it to the list and we keep making our respective cases with that much more knowledge. But until it is, its only value is cloud our judgement and engage the worse impulses in a deeply wounded population and the darkest desires of the least moral pols and military commanders.
We've already cross the Rubicon into war. What's left are questions of how the war will be conducted and thus, each and every casus belli should be as clear and well-argued as can be.
Journalists should definitely investigate claims like this, but what's your point? That no report at all should be made until the claims are verified? That's not how news has ever worked.
Or are you saying that this level of detail is actually material to the big picture? Like say maybe half of the babies were beheaded and the others were killed in other ways. Is that going to change Israeli politics or military strategy?
I certainly don't think journalists should be making, or even repeating, inflammatory claims prior to verifying them!
Like, there's this podcast called "Blocked & Reported" that often satirizes journalists who do this sort of thing. Have you ever listened to it by chance?
That is not my point.
The atrocities Hamas has committed since the invasion are sufficient for the IDF to justify invading Gaza and eliminating Hamas as an effective localized entity. The baby-beheading thing, if true, absolutely should be reported, far and wide, and cited when arguing against calls for a cease-fire as those being made this week by the various and sundry groups who tend to favor an neo-communist-revolutionary approach to the Middle East.
But since it can't be falsified at this point, we have to deal with the fact that we are stuck in a state uncertainty. In such a case, it is incumbent on the media to make it crystal clear that the reports have not been verified and hold leaders accountable who defend their actions on that basis. We NEVER should relax laws and journalistic standards when things get muddy; that is the logic of #MeToo, anti-TERFs, three-strikes sentencing proponents, the neoconservatives who led us into Iraq and, in general, wannabe, self-important benevolent dictators with terminal tunnel vision.
I dipped into The Majority Report today for a few minutes to see if Emma and Matt had reverted to their supercilious neo-communist form after initially seeming to moderate their stances in the immediate wake of the invasion. Answer.... YEP! But what does that form look like? How does it present?
Uncritically peppering their language with talk of genocide and apartheid by Israel.
To me, asserting the baby-beheading in an uncritical way is equally insincere. If and when that changes... okay. Yet another horrible thing that Hamas has done will have been exposed.
I appreciate your point. Thank you for taking the time to write it.
do you want me to send you the photo of the bloody baby car seat, or maybe of the very burnt toddler corpse?
Sure. That sounds awesome. And -- since you're taking my point so seriously -- please include a Blu-Ray copy of "Cuties" and a dog-eared copy of "A Tale of Two Cities".
Such an important point! I’m glad someone is willing to make this bold stance. If I don’t see at LEAST ten dead babies without heads (whose heads being removed were the cause of death! No post mortem beheadings!) I am going to lose my shit, people.
Some of those people listen to this podcast, though! I succumbed to the temptation to snark at one of them in the open thread yesterday, and s/he quite rightly told me to eff off. I may think that hairsplitting over exactly how Israeli babies were killed is sickening and morally obtuse, but I'm not going to change anyone's mind by leading with that sentiment.
Hi, I'm that person.
I have never once in my life ever defended misinformation. I am against transgender ideology and I believe it to be the highest form of commodity fetishization, just as I believe imperialism to be the highest form of capitalism. I decried the Summer 2020 riots; my neighborhood was blockaded while buildings around me burned. I have my own opinions on how and why the riots began (the peaceful protestors were barricaded on the Parkway & gassed by cops while my neighborhood was allowed to be looted and burned. Then Developers moved in months later.)
I called out covid and Vax misinformation and I STILL do to this day.
I don't stereotype or assume anything about anyone because they have one opinion about one thing. The death of any innocent, anywhere, is a tragedy. I have always advocated for Israel to end its unethical occupation of Palestine once I, in my early twenties, became cognizant of what was actually going on there. I am friends with Jews and with Muslims. I am not an antisemite.
What I am is old enough to remember the "sick babies slaughtered in their incubators by Saddam's shock troops" from 30 years ago. That turned out to be untrue and was used to justify war crimes in Iraq. My heart breaks for the dead Israeli children & the dead Palestinian children. But I will not repeat a headline just as I did not repeat "black lives matter" (as I believe All Lives Matter) or "Transwomen are women" (they are not; they are men who prefer to be seen as women and addressed as such).
I hope this clarifies my position.
I hope my saying that I was "quite rightly" told off clarified my position, but for the record: my comments yesterday were obnoxious, childish and wrong, and I succeeded only in embarrassing myself. I shouldn't have done it, and I'm sorry that I did.
My reply wasn't so much to you as it was to a poster above you who stated that all people who think X must also think Y and Z. I provided (admittedly anecdotal) evidence to refute that claim. I also contextualized why I stated what I did about some of Bibi Netanyahu's claims. You owe me no further apology and I hold no ill will toward you.
It's time to name and shame. I don't believe in doxxing, especially if you are under 18 or the event was years ago. But for the students of our "elite" university who celebrate Hamas and sign their positions, they need to take responsibility for the results of their actions.
List of DSA board members
*Ashik Siddique, Wilmington, NC, Chair
Ahmed Husain
*Alex Pellitteri, Brooklyn, NY
*Amy Wilhelm, Seattle, WA, Secretary
Cara Tobe, Louisville, KY
Colleen Johnston, Denver, CO
Frances Gill, Los Angeles, CA
*John Lewis, Kenner, LA, Treasurer
Kristin Schall, Beacon, NY
Laura Wadlin, Portland, OR
Luisa M., Vancouver, WA
Megan Romer, Moravia, NY
Rashad X
*Renée Paradis, Oakland, CA
Rose DuBois, Portland, ME
Sam Heft-Luthy, San Francisco, CA
*Evan Caldwell, YDSA Co-Chair
*Aron Ali-McClory, YDSA Co-Chair
Young Democratic Socialists of America National Coordinating Committee
*Evan Caldwell, Co-Chair
*Aron Ali-McClory, Co-Chair
I don’t know if anyone else is seeing this amongst super wokies but they say “nobody is condoning the killing of innocents”, while they just endlessly post about how zionists are the devil etc. — it just kind of sounds like they’re trying to justify it but not explicitly saying they are. Thankfully most takes I’ve seen are of the “this tragedy is awful and civilian deaths need to be mourned no matter what side they’re on” variety. It’s because of that that the more crazy content stands out I guess
Especially difficult too considering how fine baby hair is.
They just wanted to make sure the babies could join the headless hunt
Katie and Jesse touched on what one of my most frequent refrains was when I actually discussed progressive politics IRL: the radical islamists don’t want any of you, they barely want to keep most devout Muslim women alive, no one who is progressive, moderate or even conservative has any genuine rationale to support that cause aside from an assumption that when the underdog is brown and not Christian, they must be right.
If you are queer, a woman, educated or at least intellectual, disabled, not Muslim, or a million other things, radical Islam does not want you and you need not support it its terrorism. It is the #1 reason why I left the faith.
This is something I wonder about too - these people are supporting people who have contempt for them. They really have no idea. I spent half a year on a kibbutz in 1982, I was able to go to Egypt because I dragged an Englishman along (during the hottest month of the year, bless him for agreeing). I would have love to visit ancient sites in other surrounding countries, a photographer friend of mine did that on his own, but I was traveling alone and, not being suicidal, I didn't go. I think there are a lot of people in the west who truly don't understand what fundamentally different worldviews we have.
I think supporters in the West are well aware that Hamas is a theocratic right-wing group but Hamas and Islamists does not equate to Palestine. Think of Malcom X. Before his trip to Mecca, he was very anti-white. Blisteringly anti-white. But even despite that, many whites supported Civil Rights and Voting Rights and the end of Jim Crow not because they thought Malcolm X liked them, but the issues transcend him. And the issues here very much transcend Hamas. This is not a referendum on Hamas.
Maybe if it were the case that a small percent of the population were imposing their extremism on a generally moderate populous. But this isn’t the case at all.
The majority support Hamas explicitly. And the overwhelming majority align far closer to Hamas on social norms than to anything close to western ideals of equality.
If we disarmed Israel today, it’d be a genocide. In the actual, literal, WWII meaning of that word. By popular support.
If Hamas and Palestine were disarmed today, there’d be peace.
And that’s the fundamental difference in this conflict.
Weren’t hamas democratically elected in the 20-teens?
Try 2007. There hasn’t been an election since.
No doubt you made the right choice by not venturing out on your own into that part of the world. And to think that that was forty years ago, when the world seemed much, much safer than it does now.
I spent 93/94 backpacking in east & southern Africa, and more recently have spent many years in Central America. I often think about the incredible difference between places like that, where there's music and laughter and dancing and women can wear what they want, and the absolute repressiveness of other places. Bizarre.
Yes yes yes. As the terrorists say, "We love death even more than you love life." They have to, in order to suppress all human instincts toward any sort of alloyed joy, laughter, or kindness.
It's like the Mencken quote about Puritans - "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, is having a good time".
I feel like a lot of it just comes from partisan contraryism. This used to drive me bonkers when trying to discuss Iran with my more progressive friends. The GOP wants to bomb them, so Iran must be... good?
So true. Asra Nomani just published a book about the capture of leftist institutions by radical Islamists. I haven’t read that but I’ve read her other pieces and watched her interviews. It’s interesting.
`If you are queer, a woman, educated or at least intellectual, disabled, not Muslim, or a million other things, radical Islam does not want you'
Absolutely.
End the occupation and we can defeat Hamas as we did ISIS. Until that happens they will have popular support and will be ineradicable.
Nellie Bowles had a good quip: "Students offended by the phrase ‘master bedroom’ chant ‘glory to the martyrs." (https://www.thefp.com/p/tgif-hot-takes-on-hamas-terrorism)
And, on the rapid adoption of a Hamas terrorist in a paraglider as a symbol for the Democrat Socialists, she said:
"The obvious new symbol for members of the Democratic Socialists of America is a Hamas soldier. I can’t believe I never thought of it myself. Who would respect your pronouns more than a Hamas paraglider? Who would agree with the progressive prosecutor movement more than a Hamas paraglider? Hamas paragliders wait to be called out and called in. When I think of straight allies who support my gay rights and dignity, I obviously think of Hamas paragliders. This Is What A Feminist Looks Like (hint: it’s a Hamas paraglider, dummy!). Strong, rebellious, and arriving with panache to do an ethnic cleansing of the Jews? The Hamas paraglider has it all for the modern American left. "
To be fair to the Red-Green Alliance, hardcore Islamists in the West have a tendency to become bleeding-heart civil rights activists when it comes to the horrors of Islamophobia, and will diligently vote for whichever local socialist candidate conveniently manages to recognise their plight, though they do also seem curiously absent when the time comes to march for anyone else...
The "good Islamic" people everyone loves to talk about are mostly excited to get the fuck away from Islamic countries. I know several of them.
The ones who are economic "refugees" for reasons other than escaping repressive middle eastern regimes are generally a lot less good/laudable in their views and serious about the backward parts of Islam.
Islam, bring a bit of the 1800s (or 800s) tribal nomad viewpoint to your neighborhood today!
Islam is a lot more true to what it is than Christianity, and in many things such honesty and consistency is laudable.
On the other hand when it is a worldview literally out of the "Dark Ages"...well.
It’s quite funny that the left brushed off all information about how Muslims were less supportive of things such as women’s equality or LGBT rights a decade ago because they were so intent on making Muslims into perfect pet victims who were so unjustly targeted by those meanies on the right to now realize that the detractors were correct. My response is “serves you right, you should have just not stuck up for them in the first place. Pick which group gets your sympathy because it can’t be both”.
And curiously willing to immediately crack down on gays, women, etc whenever they manage to secure a slice of political power, cf. Hamtramck.
As an am upper-middle class liberal who's never actually talked to the average euro-moroccan teen, I'm shocked. I thought they were all about adding harissa to quirky tapas dishes.
I don’t pay for FP (yet?) but the preview of this week’s TGIF might have gotten me. So good.
Good articles just don't read the comments
The comments are absolutely insane. It’s not a MAGA rag, why are so many boomers there?
Any right of center substack tends to eventually attract absolutely insane commenters. It doesn't happen to slightly left of center substacks. Probably there are a broader spectrum of left of center publications and the audience is able to self select at a more granular level? I'm not really sure
I don’t think that BW is right of center - I’d say Obama Democrat. I agree with your point about right of center substacks. If you look at Hanania’s stack, you can sometimes see users calling for the genocide of black people.
Bari is not "right of center." It's just that nowadays ANYTHING to the right of Absolute Left is cast as being "on the Right"
I guess I'm not super invested in where bari's site falls on the political spectrum but it's clear that her *audience* is right of center and they must be getting something out of it
The comments are like the bulk of primary voters - reactionaries who are are on the right or left poles.
Bari Weiss is definitely the right messenger for this particular message, given her long and entirely uncontroversial history of suppressing pro-Palestinian wrongthink.
I am distressed that Bari Weiss has that war criminal Condelezza Rice on her podcast.
Oh did she? I used to listen to her podcast until she had Bibi on and fawned over him the whole time. Like, have some respect Bari.
I heard that episode with Netanyahu. Perhaps she was told to act like that or he wouldn’t do her podcast.
"war criminal", Honestly...(pun intended)
Oh, the misogynoir.
No misogynoir on my part. If Bari Weiss had any of the other war criminals of the Bush regime, I would say the same thing.
Whatever, it was a great interview.
Yeah. Condy is a charmer. The Bush family loved her. Tens of Thousands of Iraqis died partly because of her efforts.
This is the natural consequence of telling people that an oppressed group is literally unable to cause harm. It’s not just that there’s a binary, but that there’s an attempt to systematically redefine words like racism or sexism to exempt certain groups from being held to account for being bigoted.
Also, on the point of Jews being white.
I believe of the Jews that they know, the majority of Westerners have only interacted with Ashkenazi Jews, a.k.a. the European Jews.
this feeds into their white versus people of color viewpoint
Now this ignores two things, one, the other 50% of Jews, and you know where those European Jews originally emigrated from.
Yep, and (not that it should matter when we're talking about murdering children and other civilians, BUT) genetic research does indicate that Ashkenazi Jews trace their ancestry back to populations in the Middle East in the days of the Roman Empire, especially in the paternal lines: https://www.razibkhan.com/p/ashkenazi-jewish-genetics-a-match.
As Sarah Isgur said on a recent Advisory Opinions episode (paraphrased from memory), "Where do these people think Jews come from? Europe?" I think the answer is "Yes, because the dumbest people making the dumbest arguments have—surprise, surprise—the least knowledge of Jewish history."
`genetic research does indicate that Ashkenazi Jews trace their ancestry back to populations in the Middle East'
Sure. That doesn't mean they had control over the land that constitutes the modern state of Israel (disregarding the fact that any control they had was thousands of years ago).
They were part of a multi-ethnic population thousands of years ago. They can be once again.
Israeli Jews are majority Mizrahi which is why many of these victims we are seeing don’t look white. Weird how that is completely lost on so many people.
As always, it must be emphasized that race is a social construct with no biological validity. If society treats the Irish as non-white, then non-white they are.
That being said, one of the sad ironies of this situation is that strictly in terms of genetic/chromosomal similarity, Jews and Arabs are such closely linked population groups (even after a thousand years of occasional intermarriage with other groups) that they might as well be cousins.
Yes, and whereas race is a largely meaningless way of categorizing humans, language is a profoundly meaningful one., and when it comes to language, these two Semitic peoples are indeed cousins. The biblical story of Abraham, Ishmael, and Isaac may be mere allegory, but it's a beautiful way of showing how the two came from a common root--and how they were destined for eternal enmity.
Exactly, just Ethiopian jews are 2% of the Israeli population
At least 50% of the Jews in Israel today had no family that ever lived in Europe. They're from the surrounding nations (Syria, Iraq, Iran, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt)
And 20% of Israel's population is Arab, etc.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mizrahi_Jews_in_Israel
Jews only came to be regarded as white once being white ceased to be a genuine advantage in the world.
I think it’s closer to “the other 15%” by global Jewish population.
This is a canard. Colonizers are colonizers---this is the leftist position.
And the historical evidence clearly shows that Jews were but one of many populations from the Middle East and clearly not the dominant one. Most of the land of current Israel never was and never has been theirs.
Hamas is bad. We should be able to condemn wholeheartedly people who behead babies and rape women before murdering them, without qualifiers, without blaming innocent people for being slaughtered, without chin stroking and umming and ahhing. It's not complicated and we seem to be able to do it when any other country whose government has engaged in questionable foreign policy choices suffers a horrifying terror attack by Islamic militants. Why can't we do it for Israel?
I'm having a hard time with the tiptoeing around the antisemitism on the left. Jesse is sticking up for this socialist group because they do some good social justice things? But they don't like Jews. Is it hard to choose here??
And regarding the law firm rescinding a job offer: Jesse says he would understand not hiring someone who said he couldn't stand black people....but he's not sure it's OK in the case of someone who doesn't like Jews?? This has nothing to do with the first amendment or with cancel culture. It is about whether people are willing to work with a person who despises an ethnic group.
A big problem here is that Katie admits to ignorance of the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and Jesse may himself not be fully-informed; then they find themselves in the position of feeling as though they may have to give a pass to people celebrating the massacre of civilians because those people believe that the Palestinians are oppressed by Israeli colonizers? No. There is no justification for murdering babies, raping women, kidapping old people. If you are having a hard time holding people responsible for supporting terrorists you have somehow thought yourself into a corner--like the Harvard students you are laughing at--and you really need to think yourself back out. Learn about the history of the conflict. Learn about Arab leaders who supported Hitler. Learn about how hatred of Jews in the region predated the state of Israel. Learn about how antisemitism continues to thrive as the oldest and only universally acceptable form of hatred. Learn about these things and *then* go on the air and categorically reject any excuse for those who support these monstrous acts.
Contrary to what Jesse and Katie said, it's not "cancel culture" when pro-Hamas college students lose out on job opportunities. Cancel culture is when someone is severely punished for some relatively trivial crime, but endorsing violence and cruelty against unarmed people is not trivial. I wouldn't hire someone who professed admiration for Dahmer or the Manson murderers, and I wouldn't hire someone who admired Hamas. Not for a law firm, not to plunge my toilet. Such a person is at best irresponsible, at worst a psycho. However, I will grant Jesse and Katie one point: it is indeed unfair to blacklist someone simply b/c they belonged to an organization that signed a pro-Hamas statement, as opposed to someone who directly signed their own name to such a statement.
It's rather... let's say, convenient... that your side just so happens to be the one endorsing ideas of only trivial contentiousness, while the other side's ideas are beyond the pale and worthy of blacklisting.
You're assuming a great deal when you say "your side," but let's just go with that. You're saying that I'm on the side that regards it as worse to rape a woman and drag her bloodied body through the street than it would be to wear an insensitive Halloween costume, to which I will respond "Guilty as charged." Opposition to the moral absolutism of the woke left doesn't mean that moral absolutes don't exist; it just means that *their* moral absolutes are bullshit. Don't forget that these were the same people getting offended about pronouns and other microaggressions five minutes ago, now screaming for Jews to be gassed. And yes, you can employ some kind of sophistry regarding the fact that the people clutching pearls over pronouns at Harvard aren't the same ones calling for gassing Jews at the Sydney Opera House, but anyone who's not lying to themself would recognize that the two serve the same cause.
PREACH
🔥
`worse to rape a woman and drag her bloodied body through the street'
Which incident are you referring to? The woman on the back of that truck was not dragged through the street. She was paraded on the back of the truck.
Let's try not to exaggerate.
You might have heard of Shani Louk. But I suspect that like anyone else who's straining at gnats here ("Were the babies really decapitated and not just murdered?") your interest is not so much the truth as it is distraction from the truth.
I'm assuming that someone who advocates on behalf of far-right conspiracy theories is a fascist, yes.
Wild, that.
I'm at a loss to discern what "far-right conspiracy theories" are being advanced here.
Yes, so symmetrical, "AA is wrong" (hate speech at many campuses) vs. "beheading babies and raping women is wrong, as is murdering people at a pro peace music festivals" -- eh, they deserved it (according to a shocking number of the lefties).
You know what this discussion really needs? More straw man parodies of opposing positions!
You say that that's a straw man, but how so? There really are people out there who are happy to see a person lose their whole career simply for using a word that sounds like a racial slur, yet are fine with those who call for the blood of Jews. Is that so difficult for you to see? I'm all for not making straw men, and for checking out rumors and not believing the first thing you hear; but sometimes things aren't that hard to understand.
We ought not to be surprised that right-leaning and pro-Israel people are willing to redefine cancel culture to allow this. Persecuting leftists over anti-Zionist/criticisms of Israel was the original cancel culture.
At least people are being consistent in their hypocrisy. Also, we can disregard right/liberal critiques of cancel culture because it's obviously not made in good faith. Bari Weiss did pioneer this approach, remember.
Oh, to be clear, I am exactly zero percent surprised by this. But the fact that someone's hypocrisy is predictable does not make it any less contemptible; if anything, it's more so.
It's always interesting how supporters of totalitarianism use the standards of liberal democracy against its adherents. Just because western society values open-mindedness a good deal more than you would like doesn't mean we have to be open to everything, including pressure from people who would like to see the Jews removed from the face of the earth.
Would students get "canceled" for expressing allegiance to Hitler? They almost certainly would, in the sense that no decent person would want to hire them. The same is true of students who support Hamas, which, like the Nazis before them, puts the destruction of the Jews/Israel above all other priorities. No need to shed too many crocodile tears, though: there are plenty of like-minded people who will give them employment.
`Just because western society values open-mindedness a good deal more than you would like'
Where did I imply this? I'm advocating a minority position here, so of course I value open mindedness! I've especially valued it since I noticed anti-Zionists being `cancelled' by both political parties going back decades.
Among other things I don't think these BigLaw firms got flooded by the piccrew mafia informing them that the statements were akshully very problematic to a population that amounted to less than 1 in 40,000 people (if harmful at all), I'm pretty sure they saw them for their self and said "Is this who we really want working with our significant Jewish employee and client base? Do WE want to be working with her/them?"
I’ve always said what makes cancel culture is not accountability for public statements, but companies depriving people of employment without due process. Companies should be able to withhold employment opportunities from people who espouse things like white nationalism. The issue was that people were imposing financial consequences for unproven accusations or positions that are relatively mainstream, just to placate the mob. (Donald McNeil for referring to a racial slur, the Seattle guy for saying mao was probably worse than hitler thought we can all agree both were terrible, etc.)
In the absence of a mob, would the board of directors at a company decide to hire someone who, as a student, stated the responsibility for a terror attack was Israel’s? How many years has it been? Did they change their view? Did they have all the context?
But the point is it’s not the speech per se but the mob being the decider.
I would argue there are almost always "trouble makers" on the margins that point out things most people don't want to hear when it comes to Islamic terror. Sometimes they're not super helpful, like in the aftermath of Charlie Hebdo, but other times they're really on to something, like when Ron Paul observed the existence of "blow back" from reckless US foreign policy in the aftermath of 9/11, or when Norman Finkelstein and other dissident voices gave their thoughts on the recent attacks in Israel. Offering an explanation as to why these things happen is too often conflated with blaming the innocent (not to say that's what you're doing) and it sure as hell isn't the same as offering justification.
Acknowledging the criminal lack of regard for human life on the part of the Israeli leaders, or the US, or any country for that matter is critical at this moment in history. Although with that being said, I fear it's reasonable to conclude the predators at the top will continue doing what they're doing, and will not stop to give a single fuck about the destruction their actions have wrought. The unhinged, tin-foil-hat rant has now concluded.
"If we honor John Brown’s armed resistance to slavery; if we honor the Jews who revolted in the Warsaw Ghetto—then moral consistency commands that we honor the heroic resistance in Gaza. I, for one, will never begrudge—on the contrary, it warms every fiber of my soul—the scenes of Gaza’s smiling children as their arrogant Jewish supremacist oppressors have, finally, been humbled. "
Yeah, that Norm Finkelstein. Really on to something. Just casually comparing a terrorist attack to Jewish rebellion in Warsaw.
The Warsaw Ghetto fighters fought soldiers. They did not fire upon dancing teenagers. There is no better example of direct self-defense against immediate threat than the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. They were heroes. Period.
And if the occasional Warsaw Ghetto Fighter committed some horrific and unnecessary act of violence against a civilian, I’d happily condemn that specific act.
There is NO GENUINE COMPARISON to be made with civilian directed terrorism like what was carried out by Hamas last week.
Even if we were to accept the premise of Hamas's defenders and say that Israel is *literally* Nazi Germany, that still wouldn't justify the deeds of 10/7. Suppose a group of Jews had broken out of Dachau in 1942 and slaughtered a village full of defenseless Germans who weren't even part of the Nazi regime: for all the Nazis' cruelty, no decent human being could endorse such a wanton act of retaliation. Literally nothing can excuse what Hamas did to those civilians, and that's why Israel's punishment is going to be swift, severe, and decisive.
This is true, but we also would readily accept that the Nazi regime bore some substantial degree of responsibility for that massacre, just as it in our reality bore and continues to bear a substantial responsibility for the expulsion of the German communities of Eastern Europe. Those expulsions were appalling and unjust-- if not for Allied hypocrisy, they would have easily been recognized as acts of genocide-- but that's kind of what happens when you behave monstrously toward people.
Sounds like you got really caught up in the premise of Israel as actually being comparable in any way to Nazi Germany, a preposterous notion that I was pretending to be true simply because the kind of nonsense that ignorant or mendacious people tell themselves.
Yes, we also celebrate the bold and utterly vicious Comanches for their violent resistance against white settlers. They murdered babies and scalped and gang raped women. Violent oppression and conquest necessitates a violent response, not because it is morally right, as that is a secondary factor, but because it is only natural to human beings.
Maybe in 150 years or so, kids will have gone from playing cowboys and Indians to IDF and Hamas. The span of time has a way of sanitizing the horrors of the present.
>Yes, we also celebrate the bold and utterly vicious Comanches for their violent resistance against white settlers.
I think most sane people really don't.
Comanches, the most fearsome horse warriors in all of human history, were so friggin cool and I'll die on that hill.
Read Empire of the Summer Moon and get back to me. We as a nation totally celebrate the Comanches, their last chief was held in high regard in American media at the time and was buried with honors.
I kind of doubt the "most fearsome horse warriors in all history" were the ones that Americans happened to most recently fight. "All history" is a big place, even for something as recent as horse warriors (only a couple thousand years old).
This is the type of thing that actually does reek of Amero-centrism.
I really don't, because it's not like the Comanches got their land through peaceful negotiation. They were just the current violent settlers.
So only historical groups that have achieved gains through peaceful means deserve admiration?
The Comanches are forever embedded into the mythos of the American frontier because of their tenacity. You can't allow yourself, even a little bit, to admire a group of people, comprised only of a few thousand individuals, who were able to slow, and indeed push back, westward expansion into the American frontier for decades? That is an incredible achievement and is comparable to nothing else in all of human history.
"So only historical groups that have achieved gains through peaceful means deserve admiration?"
Nope.
Find someone else to argue with.
Sure that's technically true but there's a reason it takes 150 years.
No kidding.
>Acknowledging the criminal lack of regard for human life on the part of the Israeli leaders
Yeah except this comment bears almost no relation to reality.
"Hey let's blockade this incredibly dense urban environment for decades, deprive the inhabitants of enough food to sustain good health (i.e. the "starvation diet" https://tinyurl.com/3t2732up), blow them up constantly, and have our snipers kneecap them when they try to peacefully protest (https://tinyurl.com/248xn5mr)."
"Oh and I have another idea! Let's deprive our citizens of the natural right to armed self-defense, and then have the military force that we've been touting as elite and unfuckwitable for decades completely abandon them when they are needed most, so they are indiscriminately slaughtered in their homes by a bunch of crazed militants."
The people at the top are fucking ghouls and to think otherwise is simply wrong. Bears almost no relation to reality my butt yo.
Just as a matter of using my eyes, since I am not an expert on the region, I can see that people aren't starving in Gaza. The situation there is being exaggerated to justify the terrorists' actions and their world view. I wouldn't want to live there, but I've seen worse. The terrorists all looked well-fed, well-dressed and drove late model trucks. My husband and I both have advanced degrees and both work, in the US, and we can't afford nice trucks like that. Hell, I can't afford a paraglider. So, I'm not buying it.
Yeah, frankly I’m having a hard time squaring what I’ve read and heard about the distribution of resources through the blockade on Gaza with the rather… husky gentleman I saw in the invasion footy. What’s your take on that? Do you think the reports of calculated caloric allowances are fabricated or over blown? Is it possible the higher ups and the members of the political/militant class hoard resources and whatnot?
Go check out https://twitter.com/imshin
She's not a journalist, but she does collect and translate social media from Gaza, and some of it is pretty shocking. Yes, there is tremendous inequality there. Hamas steals a lot of money from humanitarian efforts (as does the PA)
"Hey let's blockade this incredibly dense urban environment for decades,"
They have a border with another country, funnily enough.
"deprive the inhabitants of enough food to sustain good health"
https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna9331863
"blow them up constantly"
Is it random or is there a reason for it?
"and have our snipers kneecap them when they try to peacefully protest"
Yes. Shooting at peaceful protesters is abhorrent. But, you know. From the article:
"during most protests dozens have approached the fence attempting to damage it, burning tires, throwing stones and Molotov cocktails towards Israeli forces and flying incendiary kites and balloons into Israeli territory; the latter resulted in extensive damage to agricultural land and nature reserves inside Israel and risked the lives of Israeli civilians. Some incidents of shooting and throwing of explosive devices have also been reported."
And:
"There are no indications that the Hamas authorities have taken any measure to ensure accountability for the failure to provide adequate protection and the possible instrumentalization of children during the GMR."
Even when the Palestinians do the right thing and have a chance to unambiguously paint Israel as wrong Hamas finds a way to punch themselves in the head.
They're a bunch of fucking monsters that rather have their people martyred so they can wave a bloody shirt in the face of Israel and the rest of the world. I saw a vid yesterday of a Palestinian father trying to goad his little boy into shot by IDF soldiers, he just toddled up to them and one of the soldiers took his hand briefly as if to shake it. I got no love for Hamas.
But yes, you make several fair points. I'm not sure how much the raising of Gaza's border with Egypt matters though. I mean, yes, they are partly culpable for the wretched conditions in Gaza as well.
The fact that Hamas consistently bungles shit and is terrible could very well be part of the reason why they were aided and abetted by the US and Israeli gov'ts...
" I got no love for Hamas."
You do have a lot of hate for Israel.
And exactly zero criticism of Hamas.
Regarding the Gaza border with Egypt, that's more impregnable than the one with Israel, so that matters hugely. Like Jordan, Egypt does NOT want the Palestinians. Way back when, in a much earlier chapter of this 75-year conflict, the Arab nations refused to take in the Palestinians b/c they saw them as a wedge against Israel. They were happy for the Palestinians to remain as refugees while they stoked their hatred. Over the course of time, though, the Egyptians and other Arab nations tired of their war against Israel; but by then, the anti-Israel forces having morphed into a new creature under Iranian tutelage, they wanted nothing to do with the monster they'd helped create.
Palestinians chose to be a threat. Not all of them, maybe not even most, but enough so that they were a genuine security threat that necessitated restrictions. And refused peace offers, some not unreasonable. Israel did not enact these measures just to be cruel.
I'm not sure if this significantly addresses the points I've made.
But yes, some Palestinians have established themselves as legitimate threats to the Israeli populace. Those same Palestinians that were aided by the Israeli and US government for decades.
"Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas. This is part of our strategy." - Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu in March 2019
"Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel's creation." - Israeli Historian Avner Cohen
There's also a 2009 piece from the WSJ entitled "How Israel Helped to Spawn Hamas." It's paywalled, but if you have a subscription, it's prolly worth a read.
This goes all the way back to the 1970s, when the Israeli gov't started funding radical Islamist groups who eventually coalesced into what is now Hamas. So I suppose this warrants a question. Would Palestinians have chosen to be a threat had they not been goaded into this position over the course of almost 50 years?
They were, since the beginning, so obviously. When were they open to a peaceful 2 state solution?
Dan, with respect, its Israel, not the PLO that has abandoned Oslo and peaceful negotiation...
Also collective punishment by race is, surely, an abhorrence?
Not tin-foiles at all. Plenty of American and Israeli Jewish scholars, reporters, a d the like have documented the crimes against the Palestinians, and the US supports it. In fact, King Bibi and his allies, and the U.S., wanted Hamas to take the reigns from the PLO, in other words, they wanted a religious fundamentalist group that would be easily provoked to attack every time Israel expanded beyond the Oslo Accords - nothing better to detract your crimes than to point to the enemy retaliating and day, "Look, they're attacking us!"
Hamas and the PLO have made it quite clear from the beginning of those groups' existence their goal is to wipe out Israel and build an Arab Muslim state of Palestine on Israel's corpse. The "crimes against the Palestinians" are the necessary evil intended to prevent the kinds of murderous crimes we all witnessed last weekend.
The same PLO that signed up to and has, broadly stuck the Oslo Accords that Israel abandoned in favour of increasing annexation? why do people say this absolutely fabricated nonsense?
The dog I kick every day and refuse to feed just bit me!
They aren't our dogs. It's not up to us to feed them. We are not in charge of them. We don't own them.
This isn’t really supposed to be taken as a 1 to 1 comparison, sorry for the confusion.
It doesn't work as a comparison at all, unless you're trying to say that these people are incapable of taking care of themselves.
Palestinians are dogs, eh? Interesting take.
The old feminist line is that "men are dogs" but I always found that strange. "Men are loyal, caring, tireless, joyful creatures with an occasional tendency to hump inanimate objects" doesn't strike me as being that bad of an insult.
whoops lol
it's an innocently made metaphor I swear, I swear!
Harvard student groups complain about feeling “unsafe” because of mean Tweets while supporting literal massacre - Jesse, the word you’re looking for is “chutzpah”.
In publishing there have been a number of our junior staffers saying pretty unhinged stuff about this conflict online, and these young folks seem to be entirely oblivious to, or insensitive to, the fact that they have many Jewish colleagues in the office with them, sometimes working *directly* with them. To make matters worse, the posts I see from young self-righteous Leftists are all the usual talking points they vomit all year long, and the ones I see from Jewish colleagues are about BEING SCARED FOR THEIR ACTUAL RELATIVES.
But the folks in publishing won't need to advertise the names of these young employees with a truck of shame, because THEY ARE ADVERTISING THEMSELVES! These are NAMED ACCOUNTS!
I've seen this so much in this industry, there is this entrenched self-righteousness among those who have subscribed to the copypasta politics of the too-online Left, and my coworkers will willy-nilly jukebox this crap, and think it won't land on them later.
I personally think their politics are fetishistic, shallow, and intermittently vile. But here's the thing: even if someone *agreed* with the politics, the fact that they choose to express them in a 100% public manner, and insist that everybody subscribe to their one-sided views of issues, means they *obviously can't advance in an organization where they will need to make even-handed management decisions that satisfy broad swaths of employees.*
Like...who would be dumb enough to promote any of these employees? They have shown they have no restraint and no ability to publicly speak to these issues. They can't lead anything but a group of people who already agree with them, and that is not in the job description of someone hoping to advance in a company that has to publish across the ideological spectrum TO FINANCIALLY SURVIVE.
I'm very interested to see who walks in the doors of this industry over the next ten years, because several people who have walked into them during the previous ten are in the process of flaming out before my eyes. It's like Ionesco's "Rhinoceros" if the whole thing took place in an office.
`the fact that they have many Jewish colleagues in the office with them'
And? They aren't Israelis; they're in no danger here. Please stop conflating Jews in general with Israel---that's exactly what the anti-Semites do.
`Jewish colleagues are about BEING SCARED FOR THEIR ACTUAL RELATIVES'
I've been very concerned about the lives of my Palestinian friends and acquittances for a couple of decades now. No one seems to have tempered their rhetoric about Palestinians due to my feelings or the feelings of their family members.
I think Substack put this comment in the wrong thread!
My comment?
Maybe not. If it was a comment on young people expressing full-throated copypasta opinions on the terrorist attacks and expecting their coworkers with relatives in Israel to be chill with it, then it's in the right thread!
Ah sorry I think I misunderstood your comment sorry! Absolutely wrong and despicable!
It hits me from two sides, because I think it's both wrong AND DUMB! Like, I don't actually think a lot of these employees have strong personal opinions, because their opinions are so matchy-matchy? It's more like couture than an opinion. BUT EVEN IF IT REALLY WERE THEIR OPINION, to share it out loud in a public named forum is bananas, from a human standpoint--but also from a careerist creep standpoint! I think these posters are starved for a particularly empty form of validation that they haven't quite realized goes nowhere. That what they're saying is awful isn't even something they're aware of, because they go wherever the mirror exercise guides them.
Cancel culture is going back 10 years to find something “wrong” about someone. Such as using a slur 10 years ago on Facebook. Like the Emu girl.
Quite literally cheering on Hamas and being fired for it, or employers wanting to know who not to hire, is not cancel culture y’all.
Jesus Christ
If my colleges college republican’s signed a letter affirming Dylan fucking Roof and the fight against “White genocide”, I, as an employer now, would like to know who signed that letter, so I don’t have to hire them by mistake.
That’s not fucking cancel culture. Give me a break Jesse and Katie
And I’m drawing a line
Yes, I will draw a line on that we should not give Nazi’s and Islamic extremists jobs
And I’m not talking about Donald Trump or Mitch McConnell Nazi-whatever that means
I’m talking saying: kidnapping, raping, and beheading and burning infants alive is necessary Nazi’s.
Quick question, have you read the PSC letter?
Yes I have
I'm surprised that you could read that and say that they were 'rooting for hamas'.
In that letter, there is no condemnation of the murder, of the rape, of the kidnapping of thousands of unarmed Israeli citizens.
From young men and women kidnapped, and brought back to Gaza for God knows what. To the butchering of Holocaust survivors and the uploading of their dead bodies to their own Facebook profiles so their families can witness the carnage. To the beheading and the incineration of infants. Not to mention the innocents of other nations, including Arabs butchered in the massacre.
Zilch. No condemnation of those. When you refused to condemn those acts, and put the blame squarely on the Israelis themselves, you are saying that they were asking for it. It is no different than saying how short was her skirt.
When you do not condemn violence, such as this, and you put the blame on the innocents, that, along with all the antisemitism we have seen from the so-called Palestinian rallies. They are saying what many others are saying, this is, what decolonization looks like.
If the shoe fits.
I am so done with these talking points.
Since 2015, I have seen the left, particularly the online left. Label anything they don’t like as Nazism, Racism, and antisemitism.
From school choice, the gun rights, you name it.
I’ve been called the worst of the worst by simply saying that Possibly the DAs in New York, Seattle, Memphis, etc. are not doing a good job.
But here, right now, we have actual Nazis chanting from the river to the sea in New York City, to gas the Jews in Sydney Australia. To rape their mothers in rape, their daughters in London.
Jewish schools across the planet are having to close today, and synagogues are barricading their doors tomorrow for fear of a wave of antisemitic attacks.
I live in a pretty Jewish neighborhood, I see more Israeli flags than American flags at times. My neighbors are terrified, the local BLM shit stirrer re-tweeted the call for global jihad.
And where are all these progressive groups?Partying with those saying gas the Jews, the Nazis were simply in the mirror.
You argue that the absence of a condemnation is approval? So 'Silence is violence'?
Just playing the game they’ve been playing for years I guess
I don’t know I hate the phrase, but the last week has been a bit of a “black/red-pilling” for me.
If someone doesn’t say a damn word of sympathy for the murder of Jews both in Israel and abroad, but then starts to speak up about the Palestinians... or even worse say that the violence against Gaza was unprompted, then yeah
I along with a lot of other people are going to draw conclusions.
Suppose this.... If someone was loudly condemning the bombing of Dresden or Tokyo in 1945, but was suspiciously quiet during the axis offensive in the years before, those complaints might be seen a little differently.
Just my take. Are used to be really really sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, But now I don’t know man..... I still haven’t heard from a friend of mine in Israel.
I’m just done.
That's sophistry. Silence in this case is complicity, and (again in this case) that means complicity with violence. But that's not the same as "silence is violence," a nonsense statement in any case.
`In that letter, there is no condemnation of the murder, of the rape, of the kidnapping of thousands of unarmed Israeli citizens.'
The situation is bad enough so please stop exaggerating as it will only fuel more hatred towards Palestinians.
Thousands of civilians weren't killed in Israel (although Israel has killed thousands of Palestinian civilians...approaching 10,000 over the last fifteen years). Latest estimates I'm aware of had 900 Israeli civilians killed; the rest were military/security personnel.
Overall a good episode, but I don't know if I agree with the "18-year-olds are stupid and so their statements aren't a big deal" take.
The people running student orgs on campus and responsible for the pro-Hamas statements likely aren't naive freshmen who have been on campus for two months, like in Katie's example. They're seniors, so they're 21+, and in less than a year they're off in the world working. They can vote, they can drink, they have all the rights and privileges of adults. They're adults, and their actions have consequences. They certainly have consequences for all the people who hate Israel and are going to read their statements and think the students share their views.
Lets not forget that in the not-too-distant-past most people in their early 20's were married and had kids.
Yup, all of my female ancestors (and most of my male ones) were married by age 22. Forget this "College students are babies" stuff. I feel like there's a class element here; we don't excuse the actions of our local movers, Amazon drivers, or pest-control guys this way, even when they are in their late teens/early twenties.
Absolutely a class element. I was married and had a kid at 22. Friends had kids at 16-17. No one excuses the actions of people where I grew up. Generational poverty, opioid crisis, rural isolation? Nope, still contemptible MAGA scum. Awfully hard to give grace to those who are privileged enough to expect it.
Now they are asexual enbys and still kids!
They're doing their part for the future of society by not reproducing.
Yep, if you are old enough to have voting rights, get a job, and serve in the military (even if you might never in a million years do this last one), you are old enough to spend 15 minutes reading up on a terrorist organization before you sign onto statements supporting it and/or march on its behalf.
As someone who's taught a lot of college students, I have always, always argued against their infantilization. They are adults and should be treated that way, both in the classroom and out on the quad.
I was an idiot in college too, but that mostly meant I badly regurgitated philosophers I didn't really understand, spent longer than I'm proud of on 4chan, lived off of Monster occasionally spliced with silver tequila, and really liked Ron Paul. I do not recall any overwhelming desire to, y'know, publicly support massacres committed by terrorist organizations. Sure, on 4chan, behind the curtain of anonymity, I said some incredibly fucked-up edgelord shit. But even then, my underdeveloped, caffeine-wracked brain understood there was nothing morally righteous about that -- the appeal was that it was quite the opposite -- and recognized behaving that way in polite society was a no-go.
Exactly. And some are grad students.
As someone who's spent a lot of time in a field where you could make yourself unemployable by making one false remark, I am always shocked when people like 3Ls suddenly discover that you can get fired for saying the wrong thing.
Maybe it shouldn't be that way; I do think ideological conformity appears to be hurting big-law culture, just as it's long hurt academia. But on the other hand, do we really expect a major law firm to tell its Jewish and other ethically concerned clients that it's standing by the Hamas-defending student who spent last summer in its offices? I really can't blame Winston & Strawn for washing its hands of their new hire as quickly as possible.
Agree. And I think a lot of law firms - or employers across industries - are sick of hiring people who would rather be activists than just do their jobs. Every industry was wracked with this in 2020. She used her position as president of the student bar association to send out an activist political message. Not only was the message abhorrent, but it was an unprofessional use of her position. I imagine the conversation among the hiring partners was more "oh god, another one who'd rather be a fucking activist than be a lawyer."
Couldn’t look more like a Trojan horse if she was 15 feet tall and made of maple. You don’t want one of those in your city.
This is the first thing I've applauded W&S for.
`They're adults, and their actions have consequences'
Hopefully on this substack we can apply this principle uniformly.
For example, the detransitioners who had surgery after they were +18 can't be used as a reason to disallow treatment for others. Being adults, they just should have known better. So we can agree that it's definitely Keira Bell's fault that she had a mastectomy at 20 and now regrets it?
(This isn't necessarily directed at you, Anonymous, as I don't recall your stance on this issue. Just a reminder for all of the gender critical people condemning the students.)
It's especially disqualifying that a *law* student would claim to have signed something without carefully reviewing the language.
I've never heard any of these "revolutionaries" chant "death to China" for what they're doing to the Uyghurs.
I've never heard them gloat over the death of Indian Hindu nationalists.
I've never heard them call Myanmar an apartheid state - even during the height of the Rohingya genocide.
I've never heard anyone of them expressing hatred for Serbians or mentioning Srebrenica.
You'd almost be tempted to think they're not fighting for the rights of Muslims but against Jews.
When Israel, outside the US itself, is the only nation these kids protest and get mad at.....
It’s antisemitism people
They are telling us who they are
Hindus have to deal with the exact same shit as you're seeing now and get labeled as "Nazis" just like the Israelis are. Spend any time around Muslim twitter or read any of the leftist main stream media's take on Indian politics and you'll see for yourself.
Example, there was a time when I saw a BBC article that covered an event where Muslims slaughtered a bunch of unarmed peaceful Hindu pilgrims and blamed Modi for "weaponizing the pilgrims."
Ah yes, the classic "why are you caring so much about this issue, you should really care less" argument. It's like people are literally determined to deploy every single logical fallacy they normally accuse left-wing activists of employing.
(Also, like... a lot of them literally ARE involved in protests against those countries? You're vastly more likely to find fighters for international freedom and solidarity in left-wing activist circles than in the general populace.)
Stephen L. Miller, friend of Katie, and the pod, made this point on his podcast.
A lot of people have been asking why are people so determined to dispute the number of sexual assaults by Hamas, and why are they so determined to falsify whether or not 40 babies were beheaded, even when photos are shown to them.
And he said it’s exactly the same playbook as holocaust denial.
They are trying to sow doubts now, so that in 5 years or so... they can say “ the Jews are conflating the number of people that died in the event. 1200 is way too high a number, maybe 500 die, and they were probably all IDF. If civilians died they were caught in the cross fire.
It’s holocaust denial all over again
Given that the previous standard for presuming someone guilty of rape was "someone half remembered an incident several decades ago that may or may not have been kind of creepy and even though there's no evidence the accused was ever anywhere near the alleged victim but that doesn't matter because #believewomen", it's quite a turnaround.
What an odd thing to say. You seem to believe that everyone who turns a jaundiced eye to the "40 beheaded babies " claim was a rabid #me-too acolyte. This is simply false.
You guys can't keep making the mistake of "everyone who thinks z also thinks y and x and a and b." It's a lazy way to think, as well as a dangerous one.
I remember Kuwait lying about the "sick babies slaughtered in their incubators" 30 years ago. I remember "Palestinians used babies as shields" claim from Israel, repeated by Dubya during the American-backed shelling campaign of the West Bank in 2006 AND I remember the IDF deliberately targeting children playing on the beach during the Gaza War of 2014, and lying about it. Finally, I remember Israeli sniper fire killing journalist Sharee Abu Kahleh last May, and Israel lying and denying for fourth months until they finally admitted that they DID shoot her, but accidentally. They had previously blamed Palestinian Militants.
I didn't jump on the me, too bandwagon (and I could have, as I suspect most women can.) I do not support transgenderism or transhumanism. If you would like my opinions on other subjects, ask. I think you'll find ascribing ideology where there is none to be a fool's errand.
This why I precisely worded my statement to "the standard" as a general matter rather than anyone's individual opinion. I don't know who you are and I don't really care what your stance was on X issue.
And it's not even so much that I have some strong opinions about specific claims coming out of Israel. It's the media distortion, the way our information is filtered. That's why this show exists.
Trying to accurately gauge the casualties in an ongoing conflict is not "Holocaust denial." It's basic fact-checking.
No, but denying things that have happened when we have direct evidence to the contrary is.
This might be plausible except every time a claim is "debunked" (even when it isn't) we get a lot of chortling about "hasbara," "Zio-lies," etc etc.
You too nice to Harvard students. If they are so proud of their ideology they should be held to account.
Yes. This is not "cancel culture."
"Cancel Culture" is seeing an out of context video of a crying nurse pulling a bicycle away from a young black man and calling her employer to demand she be fired -- and then the employer firing her.
If a person -- a fully informed, smart person -- signs a proclamation declaring "I supoort murdering innocent families", he should be prepared to stand by that proclamation and to have to defend this position in the future.
Particularly when those students have probably have parents making 500K +.
I think that we can all agree the kulaks definitely had it coming.
Well, OK. Point taken! I’m dialing down harsh mode about 30 degrees.
Truthfully, I'm actually ambivalent on your point!
I'm sure that the students will be fine, having gone to Harvard, and that sort of money does provide quite a bit of social insulation that likely makes them reckless and unreflective of their views or in voicing them.
Overall, I am unhappy about being driven to defend the children of the rich and entitled, especially those at Harvard (which I would really like to see taxed until its endowment is a quarter of its current size or they admitted many more students).
Suppose I'll just have to find solace and consolation in the Wedding Cake-based THCP vape procured over the weekend.
Ooh! That sounds like awesome consolation! Let’s have a virtual smile together in ambivalent solidarity.
I don't deny that there's been a lot of sick leftist bullshit about Israel people calling Jewish refugees American tourists saying Hamas is full of moral freedom fighters and of course the BLMchicago glider art. The people that say this stuff should absolutely face career repercussions just as someone supporting ISIS would. That said the Harvard student groups engaged in normal political argument about the root causes of terrorism, the idea that anti-terror tactics that amount to collective punishment feed extremist groups should not be controversial they shouldn't face career repercussions.
Not normal to blame people for their own deaths. Exception. Jews.
But they weren’t doxxing the signatories themselves- it was signed by anonymous reps of whole student orgs and they were aiming to list all members of those clubs, whether they personally agreed with the letter or not.
The "doxxing" I've seen was restricted to the leaders of these groups:
See https://canarymission.org/students
Leaders are fair game. Overall vibe of this site though… not good.
So sad that they are being held accountable for depravity.
Also, many of those students are in graduate school, meaning they are closer to 30 than 18.
Feel bad for most of these Harvard students. These groups included basic cultural or national ones, I think one was "Bangladesh Student Association", ones you might join by default freshman year. Their leadership which might be just 1-2 people put your name on this list without asking you.
People should then resign and point out the leader was unauthorized. The leader deserves the criticism.
I am mostly annoyed by the selective use of “they’re just children,” we have seen many instances of people being cancelled for edgy shit they said when they were 14 but when it’s convenient a 22-year-old has a developing brain and can’t be held to account for anything.
Also has any institution shredded their credibly more thoroughly in the last few years than Harvard+Yale? Between the Christakis incident, the psychology professor that faked data, the “trap house” incident at Yale law, and the “personality” scores used for admission, we should be treating these more like junior colleges than august institutions.
Apparently the poor dears feel unsafe. Maybe they should feel as unsafe as Jews hiding in a safe room from homicidal maniacs. I have zero sympathy for these moral idiots and I don’t agree with Jesse and Katie.
"we have seen many instances of people being cancelled for edgy shit they said when they were 14 but when it’s convenient a 22-year-old has a developing brain and can’t be held to account for anything."
Late to this party(?) but this is spot on. Yes, the young folk often have radical views that they later outgrow and everyone can spew whatever bs they want on their twitter accounts. However, signing on to a public letter espousing a particular worldview is not a mistake made by children, it's a choice and anyone who actually signed and agrees with the letters should face whatever (constitutionally legal) consequences that follow.
Or more simply: If you want the benefits of signing the letter, deal with the related consequences.
I'm a little disappointed in Katie at the end waffling about free speech and should the law student have been fired from the firm. Katie said "I'm not going to say there isn't a line..." but there very much IS a line - and it's a line the employer gets to draw! *Especially* for law firms - this student (based in NY) could very likely be representing Jewish clients - how would you feel if you were that client spending $300/hour on a lawyer that has made these comments? Do you feel they would be working their hardest to represent you?
Also, let's not pretend this person's career is over; they've got a good degree and they'll get a job but it might not be their dream job. The left *loves* to remind the right that freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences; let this be a reminder of that for everyone.
And there's a difference between a dumb freshman and someone about to graduate Yale law school and work at a prestigious company with tightly managed reputation. The student and very soon to be lawyer in question hasn't learned the difference in consequences between college and the real world.
Also, I think there's a difference between voicing opinions on one's own personal accounts and acting as the leader of an apolitical student group. Sure, they were her own views, but she wrote them on the front page of an SBA newsletter, in her capacity as president. I wouldn't take away her job or position just for expressing an opinion, but expressing it in that forum seems like really poor judgment. [Edited for grammar. I'm so ashamed.]
I was scrolling through to raise a similar issue. Unfortunately, I don't have the link, but someone made what I thought was a great point on Twitter.
If the firm had said they were rescinding their offer because they thought the author demonstrated poor judgment and felt it was likely to have implications for their future ability to represent clients effectively, there would be no (rounded down to allow for outrage junkies) controversy about that decision.
Instead they tied it to the content of protected speech and opened up a 1st Amendment issue, which ironically demonstrates poor judgment...
Like the Harvard student that didn't read the statement before signing it. You are a Harvard law student and you don't know to read a document before signing it? Poor judgement, indeed.
I think what happened to some of these Harvard students was that the leadership of their groups signed onto the letter without the knowledge or consent of the entire group.
Agreed. Some groups may have had some type of policy about membership voting or not for officials statements but the reality is a handful of folks desperately wanted to join in on the virtue signaling.
That said: I didn't see a single student renounce the statement *until after* that CEO said he wanted to know the student names so he wouldn't hire them and a bunch of CEOs agreed.
Yes, I can say that as a member of a number of professional organizations that have in recent years spewed out their views on Donald Trump, George Floyd, COVID, Ukraine, Refugees, LGBTQ, Dobbs, and frankly anything else that comes down the pike, I've never been told about the statement before it goes up on the website.
It's not a free speech issue. As the line goes, free speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences. And this isn't a case of "cancel culture"--i.e., meting out severe punishments for relatively trivial statements. To endorse, or even fail to condemn, the actions of 10/7 is to present oneself as a psychopath. To be fair, there are law firms that would consider just such a person an ideal fit, so these morally stunted scholars probably won't go hungry.
I agree with that critique, though perhaps the “values” with which this person’s comments were misaligned are “not alienating our clients and/or colleagues.”
I have no problem whatsoever with rescinding someone’s job offer because they do something that reveals they’re going to be lousy at the job.
I think Katie got this right. In my view it's difficult to draw these kinds of lines, so I try to be humble about where other people draw them.
Where I think Winston & Strawn mostly went wrong was in saying the withdrawal of their offer was based on the contant of Workman's speech. Not that they can't take that stand--the firm can take whatever political position the partners like--but I don't think it's wise for institutions to take political stands at all. W&S could simply have said, "Mx. Workman's comments were ill-advised and lacked judgment, and we have no desire to hire someone like that."
At the end of the day, Workman seems to have forgotten that most attorneys rely heavily on their reputation, and cheerleading terrorist acts is NOT the kind of reputation most firms want to develop.
W&S probably dodged a bullet anyway. Workman seems like just the type to start a bunch of trouble over pronouns, and who needs that drama?
$300 an hour? Um, I would be surprised if even the billing rate for summer students at a major NYC firm is that low, never mind lawyers. These days you might get a first year lawyer billed out at $300/hour at a large firm in Toronto, but not in NYC.
https://abovethelaw.com/2019/03/ncaas-latest-march-madness-winston-strawns-bills/
I said this in the other thread, but it is still my position:
I think you can try to thread a needle here in terms of the type of behavior. She wasn't overheard at a rally or something, she used organizational resources of an organization she was a leader of to spread her own fairly non-mainstream political take on something. I have less "first amendment" concerns there.
This isn't her getting in an argument in the elevator of her apartment and someone recording it, it was actively considering and sending out a public statement of support as the leader of an organization.
From that angle she seems very worthy of consequences.
Still, I am not actually 100% sure where I stand on it honestly. On the one hand people should be free to fire and hire who they like. On the other hand, people should be able to have non-work-related private/political lives without feeling their job is in danger. How do those two things interface exactly when they conflict is tricky.
I don't think "you can never be punished for speech" and "fire whoever you want" are good solutions, or rather they are but they conflict with each other and the border of the compromise shouldn't be all on one side or the other.
I certainly cannot get involved in local politics or school board issues because of the danger it would pose to my career in a super lefty dominated industry (at least not without courting serious consequences). I don't like that, but then again I am not sure exactly what remedy I would recommend. I wouldn't want to be forced to hire someone who said a bunch of shit I thought was bonkers just because I saw them do it at a school board meeting and it was illegal to use school board meeting (or other utterances) in a hiring decision.
I would be livid if I was sued over that.
It’s also strange to call this cancel culture--which is best defined to involve mobs going after someone for making controversial statements within the Overton window--when it’s just a private employer saying, “it’s not good for our business to keep this person employed.” I suppose another way to loom at it is that we all support “cancel culture” in some instances, the general push against it (and usage) invokes people getting upset over statements about which reasonable people can agree.
This law firm would certainly lose clients if they retained this person--whose statements aren’t that far from Jesses nazi example!--and the student has demonstrated profound lack of judgment that is also relevant to her employer. Katie’s blanket statement about private employers not punishing employee for political speech doesn’t respect the employers rights and interests (be more libertarian, Katie!). The only persons I can think of who should be protected from professional consequences of their political speech are tenured academics, that being the point. But even there, there can be some consequences. That CO professor who slandered 911 victims should not be fired, but hopefully never invited to conferences again, or teach required classes, or published by major publisher, etc.
To take another example, Skokie was a free speech victory because it involves public spaces and the government. But would we think it violates free speech principles or culture if an employer found out that their employee was marching and decided Tom fire them? Of course not. Those marchers should face consequences for their reprehensible behavior.
Yeah, as someone mentions elsewhere on this thread, cancel culture is going and looking for a comment made by a person 10 years in the past in order to silence their viewpoint now. This is just a company - or society in general - maintaining a standard that, as you say, "reasonable people" can agree to. I mean, we can come up with a billion examples - should the law firm be chided for not hiring an actual skinhead nazi with swastika tattoos on their face? "It's just freedom of speech..."
I was quite struck by that too. Although I think many of the individuals publicly supporting Hamas are genuinely naive/ ill informed, they are still supporting an organisation that believes the only acceptable foundation for a future Palestinian state would be the genocide, or I suppose optimistically, forced displacement, of millions of Jews. On Saturday that same organisation went house to house to slaughter men, women and children, whole families who were both the descendants and survivors of previous genocide and mass displacements. I feel a bit through the looking-glass on this point. I just can't think of another example where openly supporting and celebrating an anti-democratic organisation of genocidal militants would fall within the boundaries of accepted political thought/ debate and wouldn't jeopardise your chances of having a high-profile career in a mainstream organisation.
Per my comment elsewhere on this thread, the appropriate solution is to "level up" employee free speech, not "level down." People's jobs should be outside the bounds of acceptable retaliation for pure speech in a way that social stigma and other "consequences" should not be.
Ok so then are you OK if another employer decides “no trump voters, no TERFs”?
The point is that the more this line keeps creeping back on either end of the political spectrum the less free speech will be. Which is bad.
If an employer decides no Trump voters, they just lost half the country for possible employees. And other people - like me, not a Trump voter - will also leave because that company sucks; I won't tolerate garbage like that.
Elsewhere in this thread someone mentioned having a standard that "reasonable people" could agree to. I think that's great legalese because it sounds like something a jury could discuss in a lawsuit. I think getting rid of Trump voters is not reasonable; I think not hiring skinhead nazis with swastikas tattooed on their faces is reasonable, even though the nazis will say it's just political speech.
There would undoubtedly be plenty of far-left law firms in the William Kunstler tradition that would be thrilled to hire someone who'd put themselves out there on behalf of a terrorist organization.
I am pretty ignorant about this issue, so forgive any stupid things I say in this comment, but one cognitive dissonance that I’ll never understand about the far left/critical theory/whatever you want to call it perspective on Israel and Jewish people is how they so easily dismiss the lasting impact of the holocaust. Everything these days is a genocide, we(white Americans) have to continually apologize and make amends for collective acts of violence in the past (often the very remote past, ie colonization of native lands) and yet there are still people living who were in concentration camps and fled to Israel and have somehow become some of the worst white colonizers, according to this worldview? Does generational trauma not apply to this group or something? Their philosophy isn’t even internally consistent
Talking about or even learning basic facts about the Shoah is passé and for normies and not nearly counter-cultural/radically anti-imperialist enough. Plus it's harder to relate to material conditions or white western colonialism or whatever.
Welcome to antisemitism
I don't understand the analogy to American colonization. it's not like there were a bunch of Cherokee who decided to flee the Trail of Tears and go found a colony in Madagascar or something. If they had, I presume the Malagasy residents would have had something to say about it.
But what if half the people were from North Madagascar and the other half had been forced off Madagascar by sword years before. does that matter?
No, its as though a persecuted religious minority of pilgrims left their home and founded a colony on Native American land and refuse to give it back. And so do all the current citizens of that nation who reap the spoils and speak hypocritically about “colonizers” and accuse others of “occupation” from the safety the “stolen land” they themselves “occupy”.
You've completely lost the plot. The OP complained about precisely that form of demand that Americans give back stolen land:
"Everything these days is a genocide, we(white Americans) have to continually apologize and make amends for collective acts of violence in the past (often the very remote past, ie colonization of native lands)"
So clearly there does exist a substantial minority group of people who non-hypocritically want to return stolen land to Native Americans.
Meanwhile, there's another group of people (and I would be among this group) who think that rectifying the injustices of genocidal colonialism through land reclamation is hopeless beyond a certain time window (and, concomitantly, triggers other moral obligations to improve the lives of the victims of past genocides), but that time window obviously is not "yesterday," and many of the land seizures and expulsions for which Israel is responsible have occurred within the last 30 years. You don't get to claim adverse possession on something that happened during the period when the Simpsons was on air.
And, again, there's nothing "hypocritical" about recognizing that genociders can sometimes create unfixable facts on the ground that can only be dealt with by means other than direct restitution of lost property. Obviously, however, the international community has a very strong incentive to not permit that sort of thing to happen very often, else it creates a moral hazard that rogue states like Israel try to squeeze themselves through.
Yes, OP was talking about the ridiculous “stolen land” BS and the hypocrites who “really do” want to give the land back aren’t starting with their own property or their family’s, so no they don’t really want to give it back just like those white morons talking abiut greater representation in their field don’t mean their own jobs, because their hypocrites mouthing platitudes.
I’m glad you don’t think returning land is a good idea but your timetable for when return is unfeasible is completely arbitrary and nonsense because when they talk about “occupation” they mean Jerusalem and Haifa and thats well beyond your Simpsons mark.
And it is hypocrisy when talking about others commiting restitution when one is themsleves guilt of the same “crimes” but doing nothing to redress them besides mouthing platitudes.
Anyone who wants to talk that stolen land shit can start with their own house, car and property. They can be an example to us all or it’s just hypocrisy.
This comment is precisely as sensical as complaining about someone who wants to raise taxes by saying "well, if you're so happy, why don't you pay all your own income to the government, huh?" It's obvious to anyone but a moron (query whether you fall into that category) that people are often willing to take actions as part of a society-wide shift in legal requirements that they are not willing to take as uncompensated volunteers.
No, its not money is fungible, land is not. If one wants to give the spoils of being a “colonizer” back but don’t mean their own property, they do mean someone elses, they are a hypocrite (query whether you fall into that category)
Much like the “sanctuary city” morons who never believed it would impact them personally, then when immigrants were shipped to their city to spread the resource burden they began to change their tune. If one wants open borders start by opening your home. You want to give back “stolen land”, start with your home otherwise, its rank hypocrisy.
Yeah, I can understand your point. I was more speaking to the dismissal of the Jews as an aggrieved group, rather than commenting on the rightness or wrongness of their claim to the land itself
He understands, he just doesn’t like where the apt native American comparison leads. Its why I made it too.
And you’re right the need to devalue Jewish victimhood so they can be fitted for a black hat without the accuser being called antisemetic is logically inconsistent but Ideologically spot on for woke BS.
The literal point of intersectional analysis is that people have multiple identities existing in relationships with multiple other identities, some of which can be privileged in a particular set of facts while others are oppressed under another (or the same) set of facts.
It's not just making charts labeled "Whom Can Talk Over Whom." There are genuine sociological points that people have made that get buried under avalanches of Tiktok bullshit.
>The literal point of intersectional analysis is that people have multiple identities existing in relationships with multiple other identities, some of which can be privileged in a particular set of facts while others are oppressed under another (or the same) set of facts.
It's not just making charts labeled "Whom Can Talk Over Whom." There are genuine sociological points that people have made that get buried under avalanches of Tiktok bullshit.
yeah but the charts thing is the only thing anyone ever actually uses it for, that and for exercising power over people they very often don't intersectionally actually know shit about.
The whole project is so morally bankrupt that it is impossible to take seriously, Something that is in theory good, but is in practice always complete horseshit.
Well, I'm glad that you're not making sweeping generalizations or anything.
The next time I see someone interested in "intersectionality" really make an effort to be intersectional will be the first. It literally NEVER happens in my experience.
It is always the Marxist "African American" lesbo daughter of a Christian Nigerian elite immigrant doctor talking about "white privilege" while sneering at the white rednecks who grew up in trailer parks with parents hooked on meth.
Sometimes stereotypes are true!
Like I said it is the type of thing that sounds great in theory, and has such a horrible reputation because it earned it.
There is this constant sneering at "white culture" aimed at poor whites, but where the intersectional people point at the WASP elites in Connecticut. The fucking WASP Connecticut elite they set up as bogeymen are their own allies.
Jesse sounded puzzled about why people on the left would endorse terrorism. As someone once married to a Leninist it's obvious to me. I totally repudiate these views but when I was younger I heard a lot of these views.
Lenin argued that power must be attained by any means necessary. Terror is a key tool. If we define terrorism as murdering civilians in noncombat circumstances, that is merely asymmetrical warfare. This is a belief in the ends justifying the means. The ends, in this case, also happen to be nihilistic, but those supporting the recent massacres are often sure that no other means exist.
This ex of mine was also active in Palestinian activism for a while. He was disdainful of liberals or anyone who thought negotiation and compromise was valid. Like other intellectuals, he saw it all as a power game, and the oppressed must injure the oppressor.
This article on Lenin's strategies might be useful here:
https://newcriterion.com/issues/2019/10/leninthink
I think that the modern leftist view is also heavily informed by Derrida and his Deconstructionism, which is descended directly from Marxism. Everything has to be a battle between oppressor and oppressed, even language. You always have to be rebelling against the oppressor, even if it's language itself. 😖 And once someone gets into this mindset, they are automatically looking for the "good guys" in any discussion. It's so braindead and black and white.
Oh, and if somehow you enter into power? You are now the oppressor, so you have to rebel against yourself and your own party! Which is why they can't resist attacking the center left.
This is ludicrous "cultural Marxism" ranting (albeit entirely typical of the "my politics are neither conventionally left nor right" crowd)-- stop reading Conceptual Jimmy. Nobody cares about Derrida.
As someone who went to college, people care a lot about Derrida.
As someone who also went to college, you're completely full of shit.
I have no idea what you are talking about. Conceptual who? I do know what the Cultural Marxism thing is though...
You're like one of those braindead obnoxious ultra leftist dipshits who calls anyone farther to the right of them a Nazi. The same people Jesse and Katie make fun of all the time. The same people I know in real life who go to Antifa, DSA, etc, meetings, and absolutely talk about Marx, Derrida and Foucault all the time.
"Conceptual Jimmy" is a reference to the Twitter handle of James Lindsay (Conceptual James). His New Discourses podcast, YouTube channel and website is a wealth of information about this sort of thing.
Here's his glossary entry describing the origins of the term "Cultural Marxism," along with its various conflicting definitions and attendant controversies.
https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-cultural-marxism/
(Note that the first paragraph is a quote from the cited source -- it should really have formatting or quote marks to indicate this more clearly.)
On the rationale for the term "cultural Marxism: "the underlying oppressor-versus-oppressed analytical dynamic utilized in Marxism proper is re-appropriated out of the economic context and into the cultural context...In many regards, this application of Marxian conflict theory to cultural phenomena is, in fact, what neo-Marxism is about and is also what Critical Social Justice is about."
On problems with using this term: "For one thing, “cultural Marxism” might imply to many hearers that “Marxism” is the relevant part of the phrase, which is somewhat inaccurate where both neo-Marxism and Critical Social Justice are concerned. Both of these ideologies are highly critical of Marxism, in fact, in their own fashion...."
He also addresses the "conspiracy theory" meaning of the term: "Complicating matters further, because many of the members of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory were Jewish, a genuinely anti-Semitic conspiracy theory known as “cultural Marxism” has arisen....who believe the Frankfurt School to be yet another attempt by (evil) Jews to destabilize Western society for their own gain...."
It doesn't matter whether people have heard of a particular philosopher. If a particular thinker influences the shape of society to a sufficent extent, eventually their ideas will trickle down to the everyday level. Re "cultural Marxism," that's one of the best canards out there, promoted by the kind of people who would say that it's anti-Semitic to criticize a group of men who were ethnically Jewish but whose ideas had nothing to do with being Jewish, but it's *not* anti-Semitic to call for Jews' extermination if it's for the right cause.
Wikipedia:
The term "Cultural Marxism" refers to a far-right antisemitic conspiracy theory which misrepresents the Frankfurt School as being responsible for modern progressive movements, identity politics, and political correctness.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_theory
You are also completely full of shit.
The depth of your analysis is impressive. But "full of shit" describes that Wiki entry, which is written from the perspective of what I call the *actual* "Cultural Marxism" conspiracy theory: to wit, that any critique of the Frankfurt School agenda as "Cultural Marxism" is a dog whistle for anti-Semitism.
In reality the fact that the men of the Frankfurt School happened to be Jewish is not important, especially b/c Judaism played very little role in their lives and virtually none in their thought; in fact, their Jewishness is important only to anti-Semites and to people who use that accident of birth as a protection against criticism. It's true that the Nazis and other far-right groups in Germany used the term "cultural Bolshevism," but that has nothing to do with any serious present-day anti-Marxist critique of the FS men and their values. There's also the fact, often cited, that the mass murderer in Norway in 2011 blathered about "cultural Marxism" in his manifesto. So what? The Unabomber critiqued environmental destruction, but his crimes don't invalidate the fact that environmental destruction deserves to be critiqued.
In fact, if the term "cultural Marxism" were used in a positive way and had a more celebrated history, I imagine many intellectuals would embrace the notion. It's a good way to describe an objective the men from the Frankfurt School articulated many times and many ways: making Marxism viable in the West, not as a political system but rather through the culture.
Have you actually read Of Grammatology? I have. Your summation of his thesis therein seems reductive to me.
I suppose that's fair, I shouldn't crap all over Deconstructionism as a whole. I was thinking specifically about later Derrida and how he actually applied his philosophy to sovereignty in Rogues, and how anarcho-socialists view his messaging.
That's definitely not what Derrida was about (he was never a Marxist, btw), but ok.
He didn't have to be "a Marxist" to think very much in line with Marx. Marx wasn't "a Hegelian" either, but Hegel had huge influence on him. And Derrida would no doubt approve of Marx's famous exhortation to "criticize all that exists."
I just happened to watch this video of Chomsky on Lenin (from way back) yesterday afternoon:
https://youtu.be/jxhT9EVj9Kk?si=HZCMEepguSF10nht
I can't say that I'm too upset about the dude wanting the Harvard students names so he could not hire them in the future. I actually kinda love it, not necessarily in it being followed through on, but at least to nudge these assholes back towards the previously standard moral norm of not supporting terrorist groups attempting a Jewish genocide. I dunno. And college students do think/say some dumb shit, which is why there needs to be individuals, or better yet, a society that will check that dumb shit for them.
It's really nice to see consequences for people who are normally insulated from them.
Totally. I'm against trying to privately doxx people and especially that weird truck, but if you belong to an organization that issues a controversial political statement you have 4 choices:
1. Say you agree with the statement and it represents your beliefs. Give your name and own your beliefs.
2. Say you don't, or only partially, agree with the statement and explain. Again give your name and stand by your beliefs.
3. Do nothing publicly and deal with the reasonable assumption that people reading the statement will assume you agree due to your membership in said group.
Yes, it's unfair that it appears that many of these groups issued statements without informing their constituents. However, the cat is out of the bag and maybe some folks need to reexamine the organizations they choose to associate with.