join_the_iww

Like what if I want help formulating counterarguments to liberal/conservative stuff that I see elsewhere, and/or I want to discuss leftist ideas/stances that feel to me like they're a bit weak and need shoring up, and/or I want to clarify/examine my own more problematic ideas?

I mean, I guess I could post to librehab, but I've already authored the most recent three posts there and I'm starting to feel like, you know, that guy.

So about the CW: this author is an Israeli neoreactionary, a "race realist", and a seeming Ashkenazi supremacist. I am not looking to downplay that, and I am posting this with some caution. (In particular, there is a racist barb in this article against Candace Owens and Kanye West.)

Having said that, they are also fairly knowledgeable about Jewish history, including Zionism, antisemitism, the Holocaust, etc. and as far as I can tell they are relatively intellectually honest about these things - certainly more intellectually honest than the Israeli goverment's propaganda vessels, or pro-Israel American politicians, etc. I'd be lying if I said I haven't learned anything from reading this guy's stuff.

In addition to the article linked above, they also wrote two follow-up posts:

Antisemitism as the Resting State of the Far Right

Wrapping things up on antisemitism

The last article, if you can look past the predictable communist-bashing stuff, includes a point that I think is fairly useful and important:

There is a stupid belief common to both antisemites and the antisemitism industry, which is that America, and white countries in general, are always one step away from breaking out into antisemitism... In the 1930 Federal German election, the NSDAP won 107 out of 557 seats, so any German Jew under the impression that everything was hunky dory on the antisemitism front must have been on some pretty strong opium. More than that, though, there had been explicitly antisemitic parties, including ones that had antisemitism in their name, in the German parliament for 50 years. Hell, the German Conservative party officially included antisemitism in its electoral programme in 1892. The idea that one day ‘for no reason at all’ Germans became antisemitic and elected the Nazis has literally no basis in fact at all; it was the product of nearly a century of dedicated propaganda.

This is the kind of stupidity that comes from seeing antisemitism as a ‘virus’ rather than an ideology. You could get a virus at any moment; you might get Covid tomorrow and be bedridden for literally minutes. Ideologies aren’t like that though. How likely is it that Libertarians will take over America three years from now? Not very, but they have had a party getting 2 or 3% in elections for decades and a whole nonprofit ecosystem promoting their beliefs. Do antisemites have that? So what are you even talking about?

It's pretty interesting, and definitely useful for dispelling the common notion of him in the West as merely a crazy, violent, Jew-hating religious nutcase.

A lot of good stuff, but I'd say this is the money quote:

What was [the occupation's] purpose? Raising killers? Have you watched the video where a soldier shoots at us as if we were bowling pins? And he laughs, laughs. They (the Jewish people) were people like Freud, Einstein, Kafka. Experts of maths and philosophy. Now they are experts of drones, of extrajudicial executions.

I have been semi-aware of the civil war and the attendant humanitarian crisis in Yemen for the last eight years or so, and I recall it being particularly bad in 2017 and 2018. However, I've never really understood what the actual contours of the conflict are. I don't know what the two opposing sides or ideologies are; in fact, I don't even know if there are just two. (I do know that the Houthis are one of the involved groups, but even there I don't really know what they're about, e.g. their vision and objectives; and the same goes for whomever they're fighting against.) I recall that a few years ago there was a lot of left discourse about how the (USA-supported) Saudi intervention in Yemen was bad, and I guess I'm willing to take other leftists' word on that, but I'd still like to understand why that intervention was bad.

I'm asking about this because I came across this post recently on Substack, in which the writer implies that the Saudi intervention in Yemen was done for good reasons and gets unfairly criticized. Now, that person is an odious Israeli racist, so I don't trust that their account of the situation in Yemen is particularly fair, but I do feel a bit stumped; I don't know much about Yemen, this guy seems to know more than I do, and I don't know what the counterargument is.

Is there a good article/explainer/blog that I could read about this?

I see this become apparent on social media every so often and it's really just depressing how widespread the misunderstanding is.

51% of Americans who were polled in a 2021 survey agreed with the statement that "You pay your marginal tax rate on all of your income".

If so, what did you think of it?

I'm curious about it, but I have too much other stuff I want to read first.

I was raised reform Jewish and am half Jewish by family history. I have ancestors who were victims of the pogroms in the Russian pale of settlement – specifically, all four of my great-grandparents on my father’s side, along with their parents (my great-great-grandparents). When they were children their families fled and eventually resettled in the USA.

There is another place that they could have gone instead: Palestine. At that time it was still part of the Ottoman Empire, and some of the displaced Jews of that time did elect to go to Palestine. As it happens, my ancestors chose the US, but they could have gone to Palestine if they’d wanted to.

The fashionable posture on the left to take towards Israeli Jews recently has basically been a combination of glibness and vitriolic hatred, often reaching the point of wishing death upon them (examples: 1 2). I don’t know… I just can’t really feel good about stuff like that. The fact that my family ended up in the US and not Palestine is really just a quirk of fate. I don’t think that my ancestors were, like, morally better people for choosing the US over Ottoman-era Palestine. (And given the recent uptick in “Turtle Island” discourse, it seems like a fair number of leftists believe my ancestors shouldn’t have been allowed to resettle in the US either.)

I think that Zionism (with the possible exception of cultural Zionism) has generally been a noxious idea throughout its history. I don’t think the state of Israel should continue to exist as it is currently constituted, and I think the near-ubiquitous racism among Israelis is shameful. But I also don't think that every Jewish person who moved to Palestine in the last 150 years was a bad person for doing that, and I’m not prepared to circle-jerk over the deaths of people that I have a fair amount in common with historically.

Am I missing something? Have I been hoodwinked by Zionist propaganda?