It is insane to me that blue-haired trans, queer/nonbinary people think someone whose wife wears niqab wouldn’t just stab them in the back the moment the people he must regard as degenerate fags are no longer politically useful to him.
Reminds me of what happened after the Iranian Revolution. Secular liberals and socialists teamed up with Islamists to overthrow the Shah. Afterward, they were betrayed by the Islamists and executed. The secular liberals and socialists were just useful idiots to them.
This is why "the enemy of my enemy is my friend," is flawed logic. When two people who disagree on literally everything else form a coalition based on a single issue, it's only a matter of time before something goes awry. Jesse made the same about the gender critical space: if your tent is for everyone who knows what a woman is, it's too big of a tent. Bottom line: be very careful about who you ally yourself with, because a person can have the right beliefs for the wrong reasons.
The left in Iran, the Communists at least, intended to turn on the Islamists once the revolution was solidified. Unfortunately they were arrogant and completely underestimated them.
Those blue hairs seem to have an extraordinary belief system. I've never had a conversation with them about the whole Islamists clearly hate gays thing. Maybe I'll ask chat GPT how that works. I'm a bit scared to in case it tells my employer in ten years time or something.
I have. Their response is basically to say that discussing the misogyny and homophobia of Islam is always bad faith. They point to how women's rights was used as a justification for U.S. intervention in the middle east after 9/11 (even though the war would've happened regardless of how feminists felt about it), or how being supportive of gay people is just Israel attempting to launder its reputation.
But it's just factually true that Islam is bad for women and LGB people. This is the case for most Abrahamic religions to varying degrees. Identitarians on the left just cannot grasp the idea that marginalized groups can have conflicting interests, so they often don't even consider the possibility of conflict between a gay Jew and a devout Muslim.
Spot on about Abrahamic religions generally. But also I think the tendency in all of these traditions is to move towards acceptance as economics improve and politics liberalize. I've certainly known gay and gay-accepting and liberal Muslims in the US.
I pared it down before I posted it, but my comment originally had some throat-clearing about this. Those folks certainly exist in decent numbers, and I don't want to imply that they don't. I think it's important to note that the adoption of these accepting attitudes speaks to how the U.S. is surprisingly effective at cultural integration. About half of American Muslims support gay marriage, and the majority of that half is second or third generation immigrants from MENA countries. The FOTB folks tend to be more conservative.
I can't speak to what this sort of integration looks like in the U.K., but I know it's a controversial subject. From the outside looking in, there seems to be a larger issue with self-segregation and a lower desire to assimilate. That's the rub with this sort of thing; the pressure to assimilate has a lot of negative tradeoffs, but it's also the reason younger Muslim Americans tend to be more socially progressive.
From my outside-looking-in perspective, Euros (which includes Britain), for all their anti-hate/anti-speech laws, are just more racist and thereby make it harder to assimilate. When people hate you the the natural impulse is to turn inward, stick to your own folkways. High-control groups often even use claims of "us against the world" to maintain internal order, but if "they" are actually all against you that works too.
I don't know about that, I think assimilation is pretty good in the UK. The places where it's not so good tend to be more recent immigrants. I was in south Carolina a while back and I was the only white guy on the bus. Maybe the only white guy those people had ever seen take the bus. They stared, in a curious way. That level of segregation is not something I've seen in the UK. People say there are pockets of muslims only areas, but there's also overwhelming cultural integration among second and third gen immigrants. Islam might make it different.
Honestly right now it feels like the small minority of racists we've always had, people like Tommy Robinson or Rupert Lowe, are being funded to whip things up by Elon Musk, who shows up advocating violence. As a British person online it feels like there are constant attacks on us by Americans for having let in too many immigrants. One American commenting on the Atlantic a few nights ago told me in a long tirade the UK had fallen to immigrants from "filthy countries" or words like that. That happens a lot at the moment. I think it is about race, not just immigration.
Well I think if you are interested in injustice a good place to start is probably child sex abuse over whatsapp from the Philipinnes. What are you doing about that? Really we should all just down tools and get that sorted before we worry about anything else. The world is chock full of injustice. A vast number of people live almost intolerable lives all over the world. Palestine is just a very visible example. I don't think the Israelis should have hammered Gaza as hard as they have, but I think Western leftists would condemn Israel and support Palestine either way. I don't think it's about the scale of the injustice, or the attack. They are aligned ideologically over what they see as "white colonialism".
The issue at hand is ideology, not injustice. But some gay, and trans people are supporting an ideology that would literally see them put to death if it had its way. They don't put people to death for being gay in Israel. That liberal ideology is a part of what they are fighting for, against a less tolerant one.
Justice is a tricky thing, and my opinion is that people who believe they know for sure that their side is just and the other is not are the most likely to perpetrate injustice in the long run. There's quite a bit of historical precedence for that, and quite a bit has been written about it. That is why liberalism works better to keep people free than other more certain or prescriptive ideologies.
All these recent leftist ideologies in the West *assume* a default position of liberalism. But that isn't the default. The default is oppression, which young Westerners have mostly not experienced in a serious way. You have to fight for a liberal world, and sadly that does mean war, as it always has.
Don't bother replying to him. He's doctrinaire to the point that I sometimes wonder whether he's an AI trained on Bluesky posts.
I already made this comparison in a reply to someone else, but I'm sure the communists and secular leftists who helped the Islamists overthrow the Shah had the same mindset: "once we've overthrown the Shah, we'll establish a communist state." They could not have been more wrong, and it cost them their lives. That's obviously an extreme example, but it's a good illustration of why you shouldn't collaborate with people who hate you just because you both happen to hate someone else more.
Your point about ideology vs. justice is right on. I can condemn war crimes against a group while also opposing the group's ideology. The Branch Davidians were a nutty death cult, but the U.S. government should be ashamed of how it handled Waco nonetheless. Islam is fundamentally opposed to democracy and civil liberties, and we don't have to pretend that it isn't to also hold the position that no civilian, no matter how awful their religion is, deserves to be treated the way Gazans have.
Your observation about ideological alignment over white colonialism, though true, is a bit of an oversimplification. Young Brits and Americans are also particularly mobilized about Gaza because it's a crisis their own countries have more blatant political and historical ties to. Leftist Americans feel deeply guilty that their tax dollars are indirectly funding the war in Palestine, so their reaction to it could reasonably seen as a kind of atonement. That's why, out of several humanitarian crises going on right now, that's the one they choose to focus on, despite it affecting a comparatively smaller group of people.
Maybe it's atonement. It's a valid point. But that might imply they take responsibility for their values. It seems to me like it's a rejection of their own liberal values, while still assuming those rules will always be there to take care of them. Like children rejecting their parents, then calling them up asking for money a month later.
I'm very clear about what most conservatives, including Islamic ones, think of me, but I want no part in whatever system allowed Israel to do what they did and continue to do to Palestinians.
It's one or the other. Your own culture, that has sustained your life, and that can and does permit its enemies to practice whatever beliefs they please, or a different one that wants you dead and me enslaved to it. Fighting for your life in an ethically complex world is adult life. There is no purity, our system is as close as it humanity has come. There is huge a mosque outside my apartment. We literally take in all the dispossessed Palestinians and house them. Liberals will have failed only when you have succeeded in destroying us.
Frankly they refuse to consider the logical conclusions of any of their beliefs or positions. It's the same method of thinking that allows them to believe that radical medical intervention as a response to gender nonconformity somehow helps to dismantle sexism and gender stereotypes. They're not deep thinkers.
So the left is more concerned with protecting a regime where homosexuality is punishable by death and women have fewer rights than animals than being outraged that the regime punishes homosexuality with death and treats women worse than animals?
Far left and radical Islam are more natural and long-standing partners than you’d think. A lot of modern Free Palestine rhetoric was invented by Soviet propagandists during the Cold War, when the US and the USSR were angling for power in the Middle East.
By "far left" the dude you're replying to means "leftist" in the classical sense, i.e., communists. There's some overlap between that set and the western identitiarian left, especially among Zillenials online, but your average Democrat voter is a neoliberal who supports an expanded welfare state, and that's not a group that would be "natural partners" with Islamists.
The whole argot of anti-Zionism was a Soviet KGB project, which was laundered through academia and newspapers. The Soviets had originally backed the Israeli project, seeing it as a socialist project. There was a kernel of truth—many of the founding fathers of Israel were Eastern European socialists. But when it became clear the Israelis were friendly to the United States, and they weren’t going to be a reliable satellite, the USSR stopped playing both sides and went all in on supporting the Arabs. The Arab armies were trained and armed with massive Soviet support, and had huge manpower advantages. And they lost, multiple times, in humiliating fashion…to Jews! It’s one thing to lose to Christians- there are billions of them. But to a group of Jews? Jews who were refugees just a decade or two ago? That is humiliating. The most. spectacular Arab defeats were before the United Staes became a major backer. In fact, we had an embargo in 1948 and didn’t approve weapons sales until the 1960s.
These losses helped kill Arab nationalism as a political force. The 70s saw the rise of islamism, but the argot of anti-Zionism (I.e. Zionism as racism) was very useful to these groups too!
The UK wasn’t about to ban cousin marriage. It wasn’t banned, in large because it wasn’t a big problem until recently. The one-off cousin marriage, or more common 2nd or 3rd cousins marriage, in a society where that is rare, isn’t a huge deal genetically. Within small towns or isolated communities, it happens, but even then, it wasn’t common to marry your first cousin, when your parents were first cousins, and so on…
But when it’s a generational practice (so your first cousin might also be a second cousin, maybe also an aunt or uncle), it’s really bad. The rate of birth defects and cognitive issues is like 2x that of the UK as a whole.
The immediate incest taboo is strong, but the Catholic Church played a major role in the early medieval world in reducing the practice among cousins and other relatives. Repeated cousin marriages are what you see in kinship, or clan based societies, which are disastrous for development. They also become alternatives sources of power, which the church did not like. Clan based societies, with rich kinship networks as the basic unit of society, are terrible places to live. Basically a list of places you want to leave.
>The UK wasn’t about to ban cousin marriage. It wasn’t banned, in large because it wasn’t a big problem until recently. The one-off cousin marriage, or more common 2nd or 3rd cousins marriage, in a society where that is rare, isn’t a huge deal genetically. Within small towns or isolated communities, it happens, but even then, it wasn’t common to marry your first cousin, when your parents were first cousins, and so on…
>But when it’s a generational practice (so your first cousin might also be a second cousin, maybe also an aunt or uncle), it’s really bad. The rate of birth defects and cognitive issues is like 2x that of the UK as a whole.
Exactly all this. Marrying you first cousin isn't a huge deal at all if this is the first time that has happened recently. When half of all marriages or more are first or second cousins you get into hot water quickly in terms of defects.
Would be less of a problem if we used infanticide more, but we have largely moved away from that practice.
Inbreeding also creates a lot of health problems, so all else being equal, there will be more infant mortality and shortened lifespan. It’s practically dysgenics! In the end, you end up with Charles II of Spain, so inbred he was infertile, mentally challenged, and with a jaw so deformed he could barely chew. They also marry kids off young - often, too young to legally marry in the UK, so the family travels back to Pakistan and the marriage is performed there.
The family tree of a lot of these families will look more like a bush.
The reason for this intermarriage is to create strong family networks and keeps resources (like dowries) in the family. In corrupt, undeveloped or just incompetent places with weak rule of law, the family network becomes a social unit that internal acts to enforce rules and act as a social safety net. It’s a lot harder to scam your cousin, who is also your wife’s brother, and deal with the social consequence, than some guy. Makes family events unpleasant. Similarly, you probably have someone I the family who can hire the idiot nephew. Much easier to give him a job where he can’t do much damage than deal with the wrath of all your relatives!
In WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) societies, these things don’t matter that much. For instance, if I were to ask someone to marry me, she is the only person whose answer matter.
Absolutely. Ultimately third-worldism, upon which a lot of the postures and narratives that fuel the pro Palestine movement (and broadly the decolonial & anti-western ) is just the natural extension of Marxism-leninism:
Seeing how disastrous and blood drenched the ideology was in the 1960s, leftists started looking for another Great Redemptor for Mankind: not the worker (nerd!) but the “colonized”.
Now all leftists swear by is degenerate third worldist intellectuals that perhaps made sense in the 1960 but are just completely out of touch how: Fanon, Césaire etc…
RE: connecting LGBTQ rights with climate change. I saw a similar formulation with regard to Greta Thunberg. In my mind she totally discredited herself by dropping climate change to focus on Gaza - how can you be an activist that claims that climate change is an existential issue that affects 100% of the population and is literally going to result in mass death almost to the level of human extinction and then a few years later be like: "all right enough of that, now I'm going to focus on a regional conflict that affects maybe 0.1% of the global population"? If she truly believed what she was saying on climate change, no other issue could possibly override it. So she didn't really believe what she was saying. But leftists tried to square that circle by saying Gaza activism was a continuation of climate activism because er....um....it's like...all facets of the real problem which is like capitalism and greed and stuff, man.
Perhaps a little tangential but I would love some enterprising investigative journo to do a deep dive into where exactly Thunberg came from, the evolution of her message over the years, and who is funding/supporting her these days.
Especially right now. We're back to an orange-green alliance.
Thinking about it, it's kind of hilarious how "green" in the UK can mean either environmental lefty (or whatever it is now), Islamist, or sectarian Catholic
Although I note that Jessie very tangentially touched on it in his Keffels maxi-series, as the protagonist of that story stayed in Belfast with someone who ran as a candidate for the NI branch of the Green Party.
Not the focus of the episode, I know, but I was surprised to hear nationalisation of water utilities described as an "out there" idea. The UK is the only country on the planet where water is fully privatised to begin with. Even something like 85% of America's water system is still nationalised. Nationalising water is not only not "out there", it's one of the most boring normie centrist policy ideas you can conceive of. It would just bring us back to the status quo that you have in the US! Especially since there is pretty much a consensus over here that water privatisation has been a disaster, with constant reports of raw sewage being released into rivers and the sea and the infrastructure falling apart while the companies continue to make huge profits.
Yeah the water systems here are (as with so so many things) run by states and localities, but in the case of water it's mostly localities. The city I'm from (Birmingham—the one in Alabama, not the one in England) has had a weird, long-running, hard-to-describe series of corruption scandals surrounding the BWWB (Birmingham Water Works Board), which everyone in B'ham bitches about all the time but I dunno, the water always tasted good to me and it's not like people were getting poisoned—unlike the poor SOBs in Jackson, Mississippi...
But anyway your point is fair enough. It's weird what is and isn't publicly owned though. In the case of electric, for instance, I live in New York now and we have a private entity called Con Ed (short for Consolidated Edison); the rates are unbelievably high (hundreds of dollars a month for my 1,000 ft² apartment in Queens) but the state is allowed to step in and regulate rates. I don't understand the details of it, though. I dunno, like everything in this EU of a country, it's really a giant patchwork more than something you can describe at a nationwide level.
Yeah I get that. People seem to think that by "nationalised" I mean that it's all one big federal centralised government organisation controlling all of it. But in my book it's not relevant what level of government controls it in whatever district. Local government is still government.
I also don't expect that reversing the privatisation of water will magically fix everything, either. But I think it's pretty clear that the water supply is definitely a case where the profit motive does far more harm than good.
Youa re very wrong about the US generally, and then it also has incredibly different system east and west of Mississippi River, because the west is so much dryer. but very little of it is nationalized. Most of it is local governmental control a bit state controlled, and a lot NGO or privately controlled.
Well yeah By nationalised, I don't mean that it's all run by one federal centralised government department. I know it's a mish-mash of districts with different systems. But where it's under state or local government control, that still counts as nationalised. Government control is government control, whatever level of government it is.
I had a recurring dream in my teens to my early 20s where my theoretical wife died in childbirth. They usually ended with me being handed the baby with the shadow of her body somewhere nearby. I solved this by being unattractive to women so that such a theoretical thing became an obvious impossibility. So now I live unloved and alone, but at least I don’t have that fucking dream.
For much of the Western Left, "Jews don't count" is very prevalent. "It's terrible to be racist, to be xenophobic, to judge people by their identity...except for Jews."
It's not new, antisemitism has been a problem forever. The Right have an antisemitism problem too, but the hypocrisy isn't really there because we aren't constantly talking about inclusiveness and tolerance.
Jews and Asians - in the US, at least. If your people have a higher median income than the WASPs and your kids score higher on standardized tests, you are banished from the intersection. At least until right-wing bigots target you for something, then you're temporarily back in until that blows over.
Yep, East and South Asians simply do not count, and in fact it's fun and hilarious to mock and demean them and their cultures. This is because they have never actually experienced any real racism in the West. I am very smart.
Sure. I'm talking about minority groups that have been historically discriminated against. Intersectional social justice style politics doesn't pretend to fight for the dignity of oppressed whites. It does pretend to fight for the dignity of oppressed minorities, which by its own standards should include Jews and Asians.
Leftists teaming up with islamists confirm for me they dngaf about women or gays or personal liberty or actual justice. It's just an obsession with supporting whomever is the underdog at the moment.
"Haringey Green sounds like a made up place name" - it is. By you! The slogan "Turn Haringey Green" means vote for the Green Party in the London Borough of Haringey (pronounced Haringay). Haringey Green doesn't exist...
Jesse said “[the rape gangs] was a massive scandal”. A lot of especially foreign commentators get this quite wrong. This is still happening today, the scandal and the scale of it isn’t over. Not by a long shot.
Thats a good Tweet. Its a tactic for those who are using child rape for political gain make up an absolutely absurd statistic and accuse anybody who points out its absurdity of being too woke to care about rape or whatever.
But, actually living through this shit here in the rainy island, you hit many nails on the head. Have a look at what (amazing) MP, Jess Phillips says about the misogynist Islamicist hostility she faced in the 2024 General Election.
I knew her briefly when she was young. She's shown incredible fortitude and determination to build a career 1000x more successful than mine. Not envious at all. But seriously not envious of the abuse. I don't know how people deal with that.
No, neither do I. Lucky you to know her! I wish she'd been in the position to make a credible go of standing for Labour leader (and PM).
I've just watched Keir Starmer's resignation. I've done enough leadership roles in my profession (at a much lowlier level!) to have a bit of an inkling of how tough & lonely it is.
So the Green Party's strategy is to trash the long standing policy they are known for (ecology) by the majority of voters to appeal to 6.5% of voters by supporting Gaza and leaning in to antisemitism. What am I missing?
It is insane to me that blue-haired trans, queer/nonbinary people think someone whose wife wears niqab wouldn’t just stab them in the back the moment the people he must regard as degenerate fags are no longer politically useful to him.
It's easy. Those blue-haired "trans"/queer/non-binary people can just go back to being straight the moment the vibe shifts.
Reminds me of what happened after the Iranian Revolution. Secular liberals and socialists teamed up with Islamists to overthrow the Shah. Afterward, they were betrayed by the Islamists and executed. The secular liberals and socialists were just useful idiots to them.
This is why "the enemy of my enemy is my friend," is flawed logic. When two people who disagree on literally everything else form a coalition based on a single issue, it's only a matter of time before something goes awry. Jesse made the same about the gender critical space: if your tent is for everyone who knows what a woman is, it's too big of a tent. Bottom line: be very careful about who you ally yourself with, because a person can have the right beliefs for the wrong reasons.
The left in Iran, the Communists at least, intended to turn on the Islamists once the revolution was solidified. Unfortunately they were arrogant and completely underestimated them.
Those blue hairs seem to have an extraordinary belief system. I've never had a conversation with them about the whole Islamists clearly hate gays thing. Maybe I'll ask chat GPT how that works. I'm a bit scared to in case it tells my employer in ten years time or something.
I have. Their response is basically to say that discussing the misogyny and homophobia of Islam is always bad faith. They point to how women's rights was used as a justification for U.S. intervention in the middle east after 9/11 (even though the war would've happened regardless of how feminists felt about it), or how being supportive of gay people is just Israel attempting to launder its reputation.
But it's just factually true that Islam is bad for women and LGB people. This is the case for most Abrahamic religions to varying degrees. Identitarians on the left just cannot grasp the idea that marginalized groups can have conflicting interests, so they often don't even consider the possibility of conflict between a gay Jew and a devout Muslim.
Intersectional stack-ranking to the rescue: skin color-test the pairing and Bob's your aunt
"Bob's your aunt." I'm definitely stealing that.
I’ve actually heard people say the homophobia is a myth.
Or blame it on colonialism.
Spot on about Abrahamic religions generally. But also I think the tendency in all of these traditions is to move towards acceptance as economics improve and politics liberalize. I've certainly known gay and gay-accepting and liberal Muslims in the US.
I pared it down before I posted it, but my comment originally had some throat-clearing about this. Those folks certainly exist in decent numbers, and I don't want to imply that they don't. I think it's important to note that the adoption of these accepting attitudes speaks to how the U.S. is surprisingly effective at cultural integration. About half of American Muslims support gay marriage, and the majority of that half is second or third generation immigrants from MENA countries. The FOTB folks tend to be more conservative.
I can't speak to what this sort of integration looks like in the U.K., but I know it's a controversial subject. From the outside looking in, there seems to be a larger issue with self-segregation and a lower desire to assimilate. That's the rub with this sort of thing; the pressure to assimilate has a lot of negative tradeoffs, but it's also the reason younger Muslim Americans tend to be more socially progressive.
From my outside-looking-in perspective, Euros (which includes Britain), for all their anti-hate/anti-speech laws, are just more racist and thereby make it harder to assimilate. When people hate you the the natural impulse is to turn inward, stick to your own folkways. High-control groups often even use claims of "us against the world" to maintain internal order, but if "they" are actually all against you that works too.
I don't know about that, I think assimilation is pretty good in the UK. The places where it's not so good tend to be more recent immigrants. I was in south Carolina a while back and I was the only white guy on the bus. Maybe the only white guy those people had ever seen take the bus. They stared, in a curious way. That level of segregation is not something I've seen in the UK. People say there are pockets of muslims only areas, but there's also overwhelming cultural integration among second and third gen immigrants. Islam might make it different.
Honestly right now it feels like the small minority of racists we've always had, people like Tommy Robinson or Rupert Lowe, are being funded to whip things up by Elon Musk, who shows up advocating violence. As a British person online it feels like there are constant attacks on us by Americans for having let in too many immigrants. One American commenting on the Atlantic a few nights ago told me in a long tirade the UK had fallen to immigrants from "filthy countries" or words like that. That happens a lot at the moment. I think it is about race, not just immigration.
It's rather simple: the injustice faced by Palestinians is greater than the injustice we face.
Once we have a resolution on Israel/Palestine we'll start fighting for gay rights.
Well I think if you are interested in injustice a good place to start is probably child sex abuse over whatsapp from the Philipinnes. What are you doing about that? Really we should all just down tools and get that sorted before we worry about anything else. The world is chock full of injustice. A vast number of people live almost intolerable lives all over the world. Palestine is just a very visible example. I don't think the Israelis should have hammered Gaza as hard as they have, but I think Western leftists would condemn Israel and support Palestine either way. I don't think it's about the scale of the injustice, or the attack. They are aligned ideologically over what they see as "white colonialism".
The issue at hand is ideology, not injustice. But some gay, and trans people are supporting an ideology that would literally see them put to death if it had its way. They don't put people to death for being gay in Israel. That liberal ideology is a part of what they are fighting for, against a less tolerant one.
Justice is a tricky thing, and my opinion is that people who believe they know for sure that their side is just and the other is not are the most likely to perpetrate injustice in the long run. There's quite a bit of historical precedence for that, and quite a bit has been written about it. That is why liberalism works better to keep people free than other more certain or prescriptive ideologies.
All these recent leftist ideologies in the West *assume* a default position of liberalism. But that isn't the default. The default is oppression, which young Westerners have mostly not experienced in a serious way. You have to fight for a liberal world, and sadly that does mean war, as it always has.
Don't bother replying to him. He's doctrinaire to the point that I sometimes wonder whether he's an AI trained on Bluesky posts.
I already made this comparison in a reply to someone else, but I'm sure the communists and secular leftists who helped the Islamists overthrow the Shah had the same mindset: "once we've overthrown the Shah, we'll establish a communist state." They could not have been more wrong, and it cost them their lives. That's obviously an extreme example, but it's a good illustration of why you shouldn't collaborate with people who hate you just because you both happen to hate someone else more.
Your point about ideology vs. justice is right on. I can condemn war crimes against a group while also opposing the group's ideology. The Branch Davidians were a nutty death cult, but the U.S. government should be ashamed of how it handled Waco nonetheless. Islam is fundamentally opposed to democracy and civil liberties, and we don't have to pretend that it isn't to also hold the position that no civilian, no matter how awful their religion is, deserves to be treated the way Gazans have.
Your observation about ideological alignment over white colonialism, though true, is a bit of an oversimplification. Young Brits and Americans are also particularly mobilized about Gaza because it's a crisis their own countries have more blatant political and historical ties to. Leftist Americans feel deeply guilty that their tax dollars are indirectly funding the war in Palestine, so their reaction to it could reasonably seen as a kind of atonement. That's why, out of several humanitarian crises going on right now, that's the one they choose to focus on, despite it affecting a comparatively smaller group of people.
Maybe it's atonement. It's a valid point. But that might imply they take responsibility for their values. It seems to me like it's a rejection of their own liberal values, while still assuming those rules will always be there to take care of them. Like children rejecting their parents, then calling them up asking for money a month later.
I'm very clear about what most conservatives, including Islamic ones, think of me, but I want no part in whatever system allowed Israel to do what they did and continue to do to Palestinians.
If that's liberalism then it has failed.
It's one or the other. Your own culture, that has sustained your life, and that can and does permit its enemies to practice whatever beliefs they please, or a different one that wants you dead and me enslaved to it. Fighting for your life in an ethically complex world is adult life. There is no purity, our system is as close as it humanity has come. There is huge a mosque outside my apartment. We literally take in all the dispossessed Palestinians and house them. Liberals will have failed only when you have succeeded in destroying us.
I'm so fucking sick of this shit hijacking any political discourse
Frankly they refuse to consider the logical conclusions of any of their beliefs or positions. It's the same method of thinking that allows them to believe that radical medical intervention as a response to gender nonconformity somehow helps to dismantle sexism and gender stereotypes. They're not deep thinkers.
Well this works both ways. Each side is uncomfortable with the other but they share a common, overriding concern.
So the left is more concerned with protecting a regime where homosexuality is punishable by death and women have fewer rights than animals than being outraged that the regime punishes homosexuality with death and treats women worse than animals?
Far left and radical Islam are more natural and long-standing partners than you’d think. A lot of modern Free Palestine rhetoric was invented by Soviet propagandists during the Cold War, when the US and the USSR were angling for power in the Middle East.
Ya, they both largely hate the West and Western values. The Western Left and Islamists are culturally very different, but they have shared enemies.
By "far left" the dude you're replying to means "leftist" in the classical sense, i.e., communists. There's some overlap between that set and the western identitiarian left, especially among Zillenials online, but your average Democrat voter is a neoliberal who supports an expanded welfare state, and that's not a group that would be "natural partners" with Islamists.
And they are both view sex negatively.
The whole argot of anti-Zionism was a Soviet KGB project, which was laundered through academia and newspapers. The Soviets had originally backed the Israeli project, seeing it as a socialist project. There was a kernel of truth—many of the founding fathers of Israel were Eastern European socialists. But when it became clear the Israelis were friendly to the United States, and they weren’t going to be a reliable satellite, the USSR stopped playing both sides and went all in on supporting the Arabs. The Arab armies were trained and armed with massive Soviet support, and had huge manpower advantages. And they lost, multiple times, in humiliating fashion…to Jews! It’s one thing to lose to Christians- there are billions of them. But to a group of Jews? Jews who were refugees just a decade or two ago? That is humiliating. The most. spectacular Arab defeats were before the United Staes became a major backer. In fact, we had an embargo in 1948 and didn’t approve weapons sales until the 1960s.
These losses helped kill Arab nationalism as a political force. The 70s saw the rise of islamism, but the argot of anti-Zionism (I.e. Zionism as racism) was very useful to these groups too!
The UK wasn’t about to ban cousin marriage. It wasn’t banned, in large because it wasn’t a big problem until recently. The one-off cousin marriage, or more common 2nd or 3rd cousins marriage, in a society where that is rare, isn’t a huge deal genetically. Within small towns or isolated communities, it happens, but even then, it wasn’t common to marry your first cousin, when your parents were first cousins, and so on…
But when it’s a generational practice (so your first cousin might also be a second cousin, maybe also an aunt or uncle), it’s really bad. The rate of birth defects and cognitive issues is like 2x that of the UK as a whole.
The immediate incest taboo is strong, but the Catholic Church played a major role in the early medieval world in reducing the practice among cousins and other relatives. Repeated cousin marriages are what you see in kinship, or clan based societies, which are disastrous for development. They also become alternatives sources of power, which the church did not like. Clan based societies, with rich kinship networks as the basic unit of society, are terrible places to live. Basically a list of places you want to leave.
>The UK wasn’t about to ban cousin marriage. It wasn’t banned, in large because it wasn’t a big problem until recently. The one-off cousin marriage, or more common 2nd or 3rd cousins marriage, in a society where that is rare, isn’t a huge deal genetically. Within small towns or isolated communities, it happens, but even then, it wasn’t common to marry your first cousin, when your parents were first cousins, and so on…
>But when it’s a generational practice (so your first cousin might also be a second cousin, maybe also an aunt or uncle), it’s really bad. The rate of birth defects and cognitive issues is like 2x that of the UK as a whole.
Exactly all this. Marrying you first cousin isn't a huge deal at all if this is the first time that has happened recently. When half of all marriages or more are first or second cousins you get into hot water quickly in terms of defects.
Would be less of a problem if we used infanticide more, but we have largely moved away from that practice.
Inbreeding also creates a lot of health problems, so all else being equal, there will be more infant mortality and shortened lifespan. It’s practically dysgenics! In the end, you end up with Charles II of Spain, so inbred he was infertile, mentally challenged, and with a jaw so deformed he could barely chew. They also marry kids off young - often, too young to legally marry in the UK, so the family travels back to Pakistan and the marriage is performed there.
The family tree of a lot of these families will look more like a bush.
The reason for this intermarriage is to create strong family networks and keeps resources (like dowries) in the family. In corrupt, undeveloped or just incompetent places with weak rule of law, the family network becomes a social unit that internal acts to enforce rules and act as a social safety net. It’s a lot harder to scam your cousin, who is also your wife’s brother, and deal with the social consequence, than some guy. Makes family events unpleasant. Similarly, you probably have someone I the family who can hire the idiot nephew. Much easier to give him a job where he can’t do much damage than deal with the wrath of all your relatives!
In WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) societies, these things don’t matter that much. For instance, if I were to ask someone to marry me, she is the only person whose answer matter.
https://davidoks.substack.com/p/how-funerals-keep-africa-poor?r=1hadm&utm_medium=ios
Absolutely. Ultimately third-worldism, upon which a lot of the postures and narratives that fuel the pro Palestine movement (and broadly the decolonial & anti-western ) is just the natural extension of Marxism-leninism:
Seeing how disastrous and blood drenched the ideology was in the 1960s, leftists started looking for another Great Redemptor for Mankind: not the worker (nerd!) but the “colonized”.
Now all leftists swear by is degenerate third worldist intellectuals that perhaps made sense in the 1960 but are just completely out of touch how: Fanon, Césaire etc…
The fact that the predominant funders of premier US universities are Saudi Arabia and Qatar should frighten everyone.
RE: connecting LGBTQ rights with climate change. I saw a similar formulation with regard to Greta Thunberg. In my mind she totally discredited herself by dropping climate change to focus on Gaza - how can you be an activist that claims that climate change is an existential issue that affects 100% of the population and is literally going to result in mass death almost to the level of human extinction and then a few years later be like: "all right enough of that, now I'm going to focus on a regional conflict that affects maybe 0.1% of the global population"? If she truly believed what she was saying on climate change, no other issue could possibly override it. So she didn't really believe what she was saying. But leftists tried to square that circle by saying Gaza activism was a continuation of climate activism because er....um....it's like...all facets of the real problem which is like capitalism and greed and stuff, man.
Almost none of these people actually believe any of this shit as it crystal clear from their actions.
Just tribalism and religion all the way down.
Perhaps a little tangential but I would love some enterprising investigative journo to do a deep dive into where exactly Thunberg came from, the evolution of her message over the years, and who is funding/supporting her these days.
“I’m not going to get into the clusterf*** that is Northern Irish politics”.
Oh, go on. PLEASE. There’s so much potential material.
Especially right now. We're back to an orange-green alliance.
Thinking about it, it's kind of hilarious how "green" in the UK can mean either environmental lefty (or whatever it is now), Islamist, or sectarian Catholic
Green is associated with paradise (Heaven) in Islam.
The more you know lol.
Although I note that Jessie very tangentially touched on it in his Keffels maxi-series, as the protagonist of that story stayed in Belfast with someone who ran as a candidate for the NI branch of the Green Party.
Not the focus of the episode, I know, but I was surprised to hear nationalisation of water utilities described as an "out there" idea. The UK is the only country on the planet where water is fully privatised to begin with. Even something like 85% of America's water system is still nationalised. Nationalising water is not only not "out there", it's one of the most boring normie centrist policy ideas you can conceive of. It would just bring us back to the status quo that you have in the US! Especially since there is pretty much a consensus over here that water privatisation has been a disaster, with constant reports of raw sewage being released into rivers and the sea and the infrastructure falling apart while the companies continue to make huge profits.
From the river to the sea, water rates will be free
That's not how nationalization works, but the rhyme is cute.
Yeah the water systems here are (as with so so many things) run by states and localities, but in the case of water it's mostly localities. The city I'm from (Birmingham—the one in Alabama, not the one in England) has had a weird, long-running, hard-to-describe series of corruption scandals surrounding the BWWB (Birmingham Water Works Board), which everyone in B'ham bitches about all the time but I dunno, the water always tasted good to me and it's not like people were getting poisoned—unlike the poor SOBs in Jackson, Mississippi...
But anyway your point is fair enough. It's weird what is and isn't publicly owned though. In the case of electric, for instance, I live in New York now and we have a private entity called Con Ed (short for Consolidated Edison); the rates are unbelievably high (hundreds of dollars a month for my 1,000 ft² apartment in Queens) but the state is allowed to step in and regulate rates. I don't understand the details of it, though. I dunno, like everything in this EU of a country, it's really a giant patchwork more than something you can describe at a nationwide level.
Yeah I get that. People seem to think that by "nationalised" I mean that it's all one big federal centralised government organisation controlling all of it. But in my book it's not relevant what level of government controls it in whatever district. Local government is still government.
I also don't expect that reversing the privatisation of water will magically fix everything, either. But I think it's pretty clear that the water supply is definitely a case where the profit motive does far more harm than good.
Not nationalized. Water districts and state run stuff… different.
Youa re very wrong about the US generally, and then it also has incredibly different system east and west of Mississippi River, because the west is so much dryer. but very little of it is nationalized. Most of it is local governmental control a bit state controlled, and a lot NGO or privately controlled.
Well yeah By nationalised, I don't mean that it's all run by one federal centralised government department. I know it's a mish-mash of districts with different systems. But where it's under state or local government control, that still counts as nationalised. Government control is government control, whatever level of government it is.
The picture is Germany's Eurovision entry for 2031.
I had a recurring dream in my teens to my early 20s where my theoretical wife died in childbirth. They usually ended with me being handed the baby with the shadow of her body somewhere nearby. I solved this by being unattractive to women so that such a theoretical thing became an obvious impossibility. So now I live unloved and alone, but at least I don’t have that fucking dream.
For much of the Western Left, "Jews don't count" is very prevalent. "It's terrible to be racist, to be xenophobic, to judge people by their identity...except for Jews."
It's not new, antisemitism has been a problem forever. The Right have an antisemitism problem too, but the hypocrisy isn't really there because we aren't constantly talking about inclusiveness and tolerance.
Jews and Asians - in the US, at least. If your people have a higher median income than the WASPs and your kids score higher on standardized tests, you are banished from the intersection. At least until right-wing bigots target you for something, then you're temporarily back in until that blows over.
Yep, East and South Asians simply do not count, and in fact it's fun and hilarious to mock and demean them and their cultures. This is because they have never actually experienced any real racism in the West. I am very smart.
and whites, let's be honest
Sure. I'm talking about minority groups that have been historically discriminated against. Intersectional social justice style politics doesn't pretend to fight for the dignity of oppressed whites. It does pretend to fight for the dignity of oppressed minorities, which by its own standards should include Jews and Asians.
Well and whites and men.
Leftists teaming up with islamists confirm for me they dngaf about women or gays or personal liberty or actual justice. It's just an obsession with supporting whomever is the underdog at the moment.
Islam certainly isn't an "underdog". It has a billion adherents, and control over 50 countries. What drives them is a (self-)hatred of the West.
True. I mean the Gazans as the underdog. And they're so important as the underdog that no Muslim nation will ever actually help them.
I agree, but they tend to support all of Islam. They'll always counter antisemitism with "but what about Islamophobia."
It's different from, say, the now quaint progressive support of Tibet in the 80s. (Remember all those Free Tibet bumper stickers?)
Anti-Westernism is more important to them than those things
My take is that they just REALLY hate women.
"Haringey Green sounds like a made up place name" - it is. By you! The slogan "Turn Haringey Green" means vote for the Green Party in the London Borough of Haringey (pronounced Haringay). Haringey Green doesn't exist...
To really blow their minds, wait until they find out that there’s a place in Haringey called Harringay.
I’m a Haringey resident and my mind is permanently blown by Harringay.
Nothing says ‘I know my beans’ like repeatedly massively misnaming the location of the story.
And wait till Jesse finds out what Windy Millar has been up to in Trumpton.
Katie, you are absolutely not a Lib Dem. Have some self respect.
This might be up there for most interesting episode title...
Jesse said “[the rape gangs] was a massive scandal”. A lot of especially foreign commentators get this quite wrong. This is still happening today, the scandal and the scale of it isn’t over. Not by a long shot.
He is making an absolute mess of this on Twitter as well. Disgraceful.
Thats a good Tweet. Its a tactic for those who are using child rape for political gain make up an absolutely absurd statistic and accuse anybody who points out its absurdity of being too woke to care about rape or whatever.
Yeah. I'd argue that makes it a really bad tweet.
Because you don't understand satire?
Oh Jesse no… 🫣
You had me at boob hypnotherapist
But, actually living through this shit here in the rainy island, you hit many nails on the head. Have a look at what (amazing) MP, Jess Phillips says about the misogynist Islamicist hostility she faced in the 2024 General Election.
I knew her briefly when she was young. She's shown incredible fortitude and determination to build a career 1000x more successful than mine. Not envious at all. But seriously not envious of the abuse. I don't know how people deal with that.
No, neither do I. Lucky you to know her! I wish she'd been in the position to make a credible go of standing for Labour leader (and PM).
I've just watched Keir Starmer's resignation. I've done enough leadership roles in my profession (at a much lowlier level!) to have a bit of an inkling of how tough & lonely it is.
She's a tremendously unlikeable person, so she's probably used to it.
So the Green Party's strategy is to trash the long standing policy they are known for (ecology) by the majority of voters to appeal to 6.5% of voters by supporting Gaza and leaning in to antisemitism. What am I missing?
The people involved's general idiocy and lack of principles?
They're doing extremely well in the polls