• 0 Posts
  • 16 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 6th, 2023

help-circle


  • That’s not at all what the quote is and neither is the top level commenter’s interpretation, and I think it not being these is pretty obvious if you read No Exit. The point that he was making (and this is putting it crassly because I know jack shit about his Heidegger-based phenomenology) is the presence of other people forces us to be self-conscious, to regard ourselves as the object of someone else’s perception and judgement. That’s why Sartre goes out of his way to say the room (their jail cell in Hell, effectively) had no reflective surfaces, so that the character’s perception of themselves could only come from the people they are stuck with (this doesn’t entirely make sense, but I am pretty sure it’s what he meant). You can read him talk about some of the premises informing this by checking out his writing on “The Look,” like is quoted below this comic.

    So it’s a slightly obtuse point about intersubjectivity that people have turned into a cutesy way of talking about their own misanthropy. It’s probably more emblematic of the meaning of the quote how people in this thread, original commenter especially, are talking about silently judging people for this and that action.



  • The highly racial framing you are using is one that even Hamas rejects. Palestine is an Arab country in the sense that it’s mostly Arab, it is not Arab in the sense of being an ethnostate like Israel. Likewise, the point of conflict here is not that the Israelis are Jews, but that they are former colonizers, aside from the second-class citizen Arab (etc.) Israelis. Jews do alright in Palestine right now.

    Even if it just stopped there, the fact that there would be some hate crimes as blowback from the genocide committed by Israel is a much smaller and more manageable problem than having a rogue state launching hellfire missiles indiscriminately at cities.

    But I think there are other factors to consider, first among them being that people of Palestine have the much more important jobs of a) reconstruction and b) the extensive trials that will be required, along with their associated fact-finding missions. There’s a lot of shit to do and most of it is for the direct benefit of Palestinians, plus any spite they have can be satisfied by the just convictions of countless Israeli criminals. It’s not like they are some racist savages who won’t be satisfied until the last Jew has been bled dry, contrary to their hasbara depiction. Overwhelmingly, what they want is to live in peace, because so many of them have spent their whole lives living under violence.

    So nothing about this seems like it would be an equivalent problem to leveling one of the most densely populated cities in the world, plus all the other shit that is going on. It is, in function, just a refusal to allow any blowback Israelis caused to actually hit them, no matter how many Arabs get slaughtered in the meantime.

    I do agree with the other commenter that it would be good for some NATO-sphere country or countries to set aside land and migrate out those non-criminal Israelis who want to leave, but that’s almost certainly not ever going to happen. I acknowledge that it’s possible, but the use of Israelis to these states is as a ranks of a militarist state terrorizing its neighbors. What use would Israelis be to the imperial project in Alberta, Canada?




  • Dissolving Israel doesn’t mean kicking every Jewish person out. There are Jewish people in Palestine already, and the point is to make a multiethnic state, not replace one ethnostate with another. Many Israelis would definitely leave for a number of reasons, very much like how a meaningful part of the white population fled South Africa in the wake of Apartheid being defeated, but there are houses where there are no other claimants and, God forbid, the remaining former Israelis can also just buy or rent homes instead of stealing them. There would be a big population shift, but there is absolutely no need to build a 10-million-person-ark.


  • compromising on social policy (especially immigration . . . )

    That compromise has already happened. Harris is currently campaigning on a hardline border policy and touting that she tried to get essentially Trump’s 2020 border policy through the legislature.

    If the Dems lose, they will move right. If they win, they will move right. Without a strong leftist opposition (not just voice, but opposition), they will keep moving right term after term after term while touting superficial bullshit to try to please people who have a conscience but very little political education.

    There was a thread just yesterday about why the Democrats haven’t done anything progressive in so long, and people were seriously touting Harris being black like that at all matters in the face of her being a cop, or like it’s actual policy and not just the incidental identity of their prospective President. I wrote a whole thing on it before deleting it because I just can’t stand to talk to people like that anymore.


  • Bibi is evil, but he’s absolutely a scapegoat for the evil of the Israeli government and even the people, as it is basically never reported in the west how his approval went up after escalating against Lebanon, and he generally is pushed to take more severe (and heinous) action by the bulk of the Israeli people. That’s not to say every one of them is a bad person or Bibi is less evil, but every single one who is good is an anti-zionist.

    Destroying the state of Israel, contrary to Zionist propaganda, does not mean killing all the Israelis, nor imprisoning them or otherwise punishing them. It means destroying the government apparatus that, from the beginning of its very existence, has been a racial-supremacist settler-colonial entity, and investigating what evidence is turned up in its records and punishing the actual criminals accordingly. Oh, and returning stolen homes where there’s anyone still surviving to reclaim them.





  • Whether the podcast is relevant or not has nothing to do with what I said. Whether it is credible or not has nothing to do with what I said. Whether you are justified in feeling offended over it? Nothing to do with what I said.

    For my own mental health I’m going to just not take the bait which is that parenthetical. Instead, I would like to focus on how “I refuse to listen to even two minutes of this podcast because I don’t like its pedigree” is not actually a go-ahead to blindly presume things about it like the conspiracy theory I initially pointed out. You can refuse to listen to it, that’s fine, but that puts you in a position of lacking a lot of information for making assertions about it. What that means is that what you can do is ignore it, or say you don’t want to engage with it for such and such a reason that you actually have good reason to believe and then leave it there. That’s how epistemology works.