To quote the mostly absent Trumwill, "This won't end well."
Believe me, I absolutely I get where the CO Supreme Court is coming from, but none the less I feel like I'm hearing a load-bearing that norm that we didn't even know we had starting to buckle under the strain.
Hummus is often seen as an unofficial "national dish" of Israel, reflecting its huge popularity and significance among the entire Israeli population,[35] which Israel's critics describe as an appropriation of Lebanese,[59] Palestinian or Arab culture.[60] According to Ofra Tene and Dafna Hirsch, the dispute over ownership of hummus, exposes nationalism through food and the important role played by the industrialization of hummus made by Israeli private companies in 1958.[61][62]
However Arab flat refusal to let Israel exist predates those policies and that flat refusal opened the door to much of the current situation.
True, but Arab flat refusal to let Israel exist had been on the wane since the end of the Yom Kippur War. A lot of that is due to US efforts.
I feel like we're seeing this stepwise series of projections where we start with an extremely reasonable assumption about Hamas' motives--that they won't rest until Israel's destroyed--and then project it onto all Palestians, and from the Palestians we project it onto the Arab states.
But Arab states actually don't care that much about Palestinians either. They can live with Israel and even work with Israel as a (at least de facto) ally against a common enemy (namely Iran).
We’re told that if Israel pulled back to it’s 1967 boarders we’d have peace, but we didn’t have peace in 1967 and the PLO was founded three years before that to “end the occupation”.
Yup. A lot happened in the intervening 60 years, including Israel winning two major wars against its neighbors and then normalizing relations with most of them.
Anyway, unilaterally pulling back to the '67 borders is probably not going to create peace. But ceding most of the West Bank is going to be part of any imaginable negotiated settlement for peace.
There is a private right to be a Jew but a communal and private right to be a Muslim, Palestinian, LGBT, etc. It is almost like acknowledging Jewish communal identity would cheapen and destroy their communal identity.
I'm also an American Jew and I have to say this is absolutely bizarre.
We have just as much communal right to be Jews as any other minority, subculture, or identity. We have our individual First Amendment rights to religion, speech, and association, which actually, just observationally, provide a hell of a lot.
We've also largely if not entirely free of state suspicion and harassment since the '50s. I want to be cautious and avoid misery poker, but Muslim communities in the US are subjected to far worse from law enforcement and immigration authorities.
I'm not trying to say it's all perfect. American Jews are perennial targets of hate crimes and anti-semitism spans across the Far Right and Far Left the way other bigotries don't. You're right that a lot of SJ activists (including ones who aren't wild Hamas apologists or whatever) doesn't really notice Jews as having marked identities worthy of particular attention, and that kind of sucks too.
Protestations about parts of the Trump administration while praising others comes off like Nikki Haley wanting to speak to the manager, only to arrive at her own desk in management and become confused if she should stand in front of it, take a seat behind it, or oscillate between the two for her very serious and well-crafted complaints.
Israel has a large, mobilized military, tons of materiel, and no small amount of willingness to keep fighting.
The idea that they need to try every crazy thing no matter what the consequences in order to defeat Hamas makes no sense. You yourself have been arguing vigorously (and entirely correctly) that Hamas doesn't pose an existential threat to Israel.
The Israeli government is apparently expected to care about its citizens and also the Palestinians while Hamas gets to ibe psychotic towards both Israelis and the Palestinians while getting treated as a serious international political force.
On the other hand, Israel gets, like, an air force and tanks and stuff.
War is a lot of things, but "fair" isn't one of them.
More importantly though it shouldn’t go down the path of anti-journalism, or allow its mission to be destroyed by strange beurecratic capture.
Like there are obviously parts of Bennet's piece that I disagree with, and parts where I think he's naive or just missed the boat, but the whole chaotic "corporate governance by Slack revolt" part is an insane way to run any sort of organization.
It's almost shocking that the Times managed to get anything right at all.
The other thing he talked about--with the breakdown of the division between news and opinion, which I hadn't really registered--is also something that was never going to end well.
I note that all of pillsy’s comments so far have misrepresented the incident, or at least Bennett’s version of it. They did publish the editorial. It wasn’t about crushing protesters; it distinguished explicitly between protesters and criminals. They didn’t present it unchallenged. It didn’t give Cotton preferential treatment, as it was fully fact-checked.
You know what, you're right, my comments were bad and I completely misrepresented one critical aspect of the incident: that they ran it unchallenged. Bennet stated that they ran it alongside another editorial excoriating it, which is absolutely challenging it.
I missed that part due to sloppy reading, but worse an unwillingness to even pause and check Bennet's piece and the actual record, because it was convenient for my argument. Sloppiness is bad enough, but that was also intellectually dishonest of me, and I should not have written it once, let alone twice.
I'll stick by my other points and maybe defend them later, but that part was simply indefensible.
By contrast, the old newsroom ideology seems cynical on its surface. It used to bug me that my editors at the Times assumed every word out of the mouth of any person in power was a lie.
Assume every word out of the mouth of any person in power is a lie, as long as that person isn't Tom Cotton!
My other response is in moderation hell because I was swearing a bit, but I'll just say that if the Times thinks an idea is worthy of explication or even debate, there are alternatives to presenting it on the editorial page.
For example, if you think Cotton's ideas need to be presented to your audience so they understand where he and his supporters are coming from, they could consider interviewing him. Like push him and ask him questions on stuff, instead of just blithely letting Cotton expand the permission structure for using the military against protesters by showing that even the Times thinks his argument should be presented without them challenging or questioning it.
Bennet complains about the Times becoming a place where progressive elites only talk to themselves, and then defends decisions that only make sense if it's a place where progressive elites only talk to themselves.
The fundamental premise--and maybe he'll refine it as I read more--is that the Times demonstrated a commitment to illiberalism by refusing to run an editorial endorsing the use of the military to crush protesters.
This is fucking for virginity.
If they wanted to report on the debate and its popularity on the Right, there are ways of doing it that don't actually endorse it.
I don't think we have ever come up with a truly convincing resolution to the Paradox of Tolerance, but I'm pretty sure that elevating illiberals to freely spread their message in your extremely precious and prestigious newspaper, one you yourself believe to be a bastion of liberalism, is not part of it.
I believe that Hamas are fanatics, but I don't believe for a second that they are too fanatical to want to expand their own power, or, you know, figure out ways to inflict damage on Israel that falls short of its destruction.
Israel's style of proportional representation prevents its government from having a single unified vision even more than most democracies.
But the varied visions promulgated by the constituent members of its governing coalition lean heavily to the self-serving, the stupid, the fanatical, and the bloodthirsty.
It been working out about as well as you expect, and I'm pretty sure they're going to wind up losing their justified war against Hamas by fighting it in an unjustifiably brutal way.
Israel might well be open to a ceasefire as it gains control of more territory in Gaza, but it takes two to make a ceasefire and Hamas has shown no willingness to stop fighting in order to spare the lives of innocent Arab civilians.
This is absolutely true, and unless Israeli military and political leaders figure out why this is true in, like, the next couple days, they're going to be facing a much worse set of choices when it comes to the endgame.
To clarify my point, Hamas isn’t going to get their dream scenario where they kill all the Jews in the Middle East or the world comes swooping down and takes all the Jews in Israel away and leaves them that area to create their Islamic theocracy.
Yeah, they aren't.
But while I'm skeptical that Hamas' leaders have the "geniuses" part of "evil geniuses" nailed down, I'm pretty sure they know that they are not going to push all the Jews into the sea.
That doesn't mean they can't accomplish a lot:
* preventing Israel from continuing rapprochement with Arab states (especially Saudi Arabia);
* eroding support for Israel among its key allies;
* demonstrating the ineffectiveness of Israel's security apparatus;
* and forcing better terms for the inevitable end of hostilities.
All of these seem to be happening. Their ability to fight is being degraded, but, again, I don't think they're such idiots that they thought they'd beat the IDF in a stand-up fight.
"Wait for the Israeli response to cause a sufficiently dire humanitarian crisis, and the IDF to slaughter enough Palestinians, and get caught committing enough war crimes[1] that they're required to stop slaughtering Palestinians," is monstrous, and it surely leaves the Palestinian people[2] as a whole much, much worse off. But it leaves Hamas much better off.
The Iron Law of Institutions doesn't just apply to well-intentioned bureaucracies. It also applies to terrorist gangs.
[1] Beyond being awful in its own right, the fact that Israeli forces murdered three hostages who were waving a white flag in defiance of their own rules of engagement, is damning evidence that they haven't been coming remotely close to living up to their obligations under the rules of war, and have murdered many, many more Palestinians. This is just the one the IDF itself has had to show happened unambiguously.
On “Open Mic for the week of 12/18/2023”
To quote the mostly absent Trumwill, "This won't end well."
Believe me, I absolutely I get where the CO Supreme Court is coming from, but none the less I feel like I'm hearing a load-bearing that norm that we didn't even know we had starting to buckle under the strain.
On “What is Israel’s Endgame in Gaza?”
Israel has many supporters that tell Israel it needs to be humane and sensible with the Palestinians.
It must be reassuring that Israel ignores our advice so consistently!
"
I don't think Israel's Right is even mostly responsible for it... but they sure as hell haven't been helping.
"
Do you not like hummus?
I don't know whether this joke is intentional, but either way it's hilarious.
Take it away Wikipedia:
Hummus is often seen as an unofficial "national dish" of Israel, reflecting its huge popularity and significance among the entire Israeli population,[35] which Israel's critics describe as an appropriation of Lebanese,[59] Palestinian or Arab culture.[60] According to Ofra Tene and Dafna Hirsch, the dispute over ownership of hummus, exposes nationalism through food and the important role played by the industrialization of hummus made by Israeli private companies in 1958.[61][62]
"
However Arab flat refusal to let Israel exist predates those policies and that flat refusal opened the door to much of the current situation.
True, but Arab flat refusal to let Israel exist had been on the wane since the end of the Yom Kippur War. A lot of that is due to US efforts.
I feel like we're seeing this stepwise series of projections where we start with an extremely reasonable assumption about Hamas' motives--that they won't rest until Israel's destroyed--and then project it onto all Palestians, and from the Palestians we project it onto the Arab states.
But Arab states actually don't care that much about Palestinians either. They can live with Israel and even work with Israel as a (at least de facto) ally against a common enemy (namely Iran).
We’re told that if Israel pulled back to it’s 1967 boarders we’d have peace, but we didn’t have peace in 1967 and the PLO was founded three years before that to “end the occupation”.
Yup. A lot happened in the intervening 60 years, including Israel winning two major wars against its neighbors and then normalizing relations with most of them.
Anyway, unilaterally pulling back to the '67 borders is probably not going to create peace. But ceding most of the West Bank is going to be part of any imaginable negotiated settlement for peace.
"
There is a private right to be a Jew but a communal and private right to be a Muslim, Palestinian, LGBT, etc. It is almost like acknowledging Jewish communal identity would cheapen and destroy their communal identity.
I'm also an American Jew and I have to say this is absolutely bizarre.
We have just as much communal right to be Jews as any other minority, subculture, or identity. We have our individual First Amendment rights to religion, speech, and association, which actually, just observationally, provide a hell of a lot.
We've also largely if not entirely free of state suspicion and harassment since the '50s. I want to be cautious and avoid misery poker, but Muslim communities in the US are subjected to far worse from law enforcement and immigration authorities.
I'm not trying to say it's all perfect. American Jews are perennial targets of hate crimes and anti-semitism spans across the Far Right and Far Left the way other bigotries don't. You're right that a lot of SJ activists (including ones who aren't wild Hamas apologists or whatever) doesn't really notice Jews as having marked identities worthy of particular attention, and that kind of sucks too.
But all in all, we get what everyone else gets.
"
Israel is basically insane at the moment. They’re the US the week after 911. We blew up wedding parties in Afghanistan for years.
Yeah, agreed.
On “Sloshing Is Not Surging: Adventures In Nikki Haley Polling”
Protestations about parts of the Trump administration while praising others comes off like Nikki Haley wanting to speak to the manager, only to arrive at her own desk in management and become confused if she should stand in front of it, take a seat behind it, or oscillate between the two for her very serious and well-crafted complaints.
Beautiful.
On “What is Israel’s Endgame in Gaza?”
Israel has a large, mobilized military, tons of materiel, and no small amount of willingness to keep fighting.
The idea that they need to try every crazy thing no matter what the consequences in order to defeat Hamas makes no sense. You yourself have been arguing vigorously (and entirely correctly) that Hamas doesn't pose an existential threat to Israel.
"
The Israeli government is apparently expected to care about its citizens and also the Palestinians while Hamas gets to ibe psychotic towards both Israelis and the Palestinians while getting treated as a serious international political force.
On the other hand, Israel gets, like, an air force and tanks and stuff.
War is a lot of things, but "fair" isn't one of them.
"
Hamas' refusal to surrender does not justify every possible tactic that Israel can dream up.
On “Sloshing Is Not Surging: Adventures In Nikki Haley Polling”
But they can direct their vote elsewhere and deny Trump the Presidency that way.
Same. A vote for Biden is twice as good as a vote for Trump, and I’ll meet them halfway.
On “Open Mic for the week of 12/11/2023”
More importantly though it shouldn’t go down the path of anti-journalism, or allow its mission to be destroyed by strange beurecratic capture.
Like there are obviously parts of Bennet's piece that I disagree with, and parts where I think he's naive or just missed the boat, but the whole chaotic "corporate governance by Slack revolt" part is an insane way to run any sort of organization.
It's almost shocking that the Times managed to get anything right at all.
The other thing he talked about--with the breakdown of the division between news and opinion, which I hadn't really registered--is also something that was never going to end well.
"
I note that all of pillsy’s comments so far have misrepresented the incident, or at least Bennett’s version of it. They did publish the editorial. It wasn’t about crushing protesters; it distinguished explicitly between protesters and criminals. They didn’t present it unchallenged. It didn’t give Cotton preferential treatment, as it was fully fact-checked.
You know what, you're right, my comments were bad and I completely misrepresented one critical aspect of the incident: that they ran it unchallenged. Bennet stated that they ran it alongside another editorial excoriating it, which is absolutely challenging it.
I missed that part due to sloppy reading, but worse an unwillingness to even pause and check Bennet's piece and the actual record, because it was convenient for my argument. Sloppiness is bad enough, but that was also intellectually dishonest of me, and I should not have written it once, let alone twice.
I'll stick by my other points and maybe defend them later, but that part was simply indefensible.
Apologies to all.
"
Or there was this:
By contrast, the old newsroom ideology seems cynical on its surface. It used to bug me that my editors at the Times assumed every word out of the mouth of any person in power was a lie.
Assume every word out of the mouth of any person in power is a lie, as long as that person isn't Tom Cotton!
"
My other response is in moderation hell because I was swearing a bit, but I'll just say that if the Times thinks an idea is worthy of explication or even debate, there are alternatives to presenting it on the editorial page.
For example, if you think Cotton's ideas need to be presented to your audience so they understand where he and his supporters are coming from, they could consider interviewing him. Like push him and ask him questions on stuff, instead of just blithely letting Cotton expand the permission structure for using the military against protesters by showing that even the Times thinks his argument should be presented without them challenging or questioning it.
Bennet complains about the Times becoming a place where progressive elites only talk to themselves, and then defends decisions that only make sense if it's a place where progressive elites only talk to themselves.
"
The fundamental premise--and maybe he'll refine it as I read more--is that the Times demonstrated a commitment to illiberalism by refusing to run an editorial endorsing the use of the military to crush protesters.
This is fucking for virginity.
If they wanted to report on the debate and its popularity on the Right, there are ways of doing it that don't actually endorse it.
I don't think we have ever come up with a truly convincing resolution to the Paradox of Tolerance, but I'm pretty sure that elevating illiberals to freely spread their message in your extremely precious and prestigious newspaper, one you yourself believe to be a bastion of liberalism, is not part of it.
On “What is Israel’s Endgame in Gaza?”
I believe that Hamas are fanatics, but I don't believe for a second that they are too fanatical to want to expand their own power, or, you know, figure out ways to inflict damage on Israel that falls short of its destruction.
"
Member of the Knesset
"
They have fought each other to a stalemate for several generations and are no closer to a permanent peace than they were when they started.
This isn't quite right--Israel is at pease with most of its Arab neighbors and was about to expand on that significantly/
This has a lot to do with why Hamas started this war in the first place.
"
Israel's style of proportional representation prevents its government from having a single unified vision even more than most democracies.
But the varied visions promulgated by the constituent members of its governing coalition lean heavily to the self-serving, the stupid, the fanatical, and the bloodthirsty.
It been working out about as well as you expect, and I'm pretty sure they're going to wind up losing their justified war against Hamas by fighting it in an unjustifiably brutal way.
"
Israel might well be open to a ceasefire as it gains control of more territory in Gaza, but it takes two to make a ceasefire and Hamas has shown no willingness to stop fighting in order to spare the lives of innocent Arab civilians.
This is absolutely true, and unless Israeli military and political leaders figure out why this is true in, like, the next couple days, they're going to be facing a much worse set of choices when it comes to the endgame.
"
To clarify my point, Hamas isn’t going to get their dream scenario where they kill all the Jews in the Middle East or the world comes swooping down and takes all the Jews in Israel away and leaves them that area to create their Islamic theocracy.
Yeah, they aren't.
But while I'm skeptical that Hamas' leaders have the "geniuses" part of "evil geniuses" nailed down, I'm pretty sure they know that they are not going to push all the Jews into the sea.
That doesn't mean they can't accomplish a lot:
* preventing Israel from continuing rapprochement with Arab states (especially Saudi Arabia);
* eroding support for Israel among its key allies;
* demonstrating the ineffectiveness of Israel's security apparatus;
* and forcing better terms for the inevitable end of hostilities.
All of these seem to be happening. Their ability to fight is being degraded, but, again, I don't think they're such idiots that they thought they'd beat the IDF in a stand-up fight.
"Wait for the Israeli response to cause a sufficiently dire humanitarian crisis, and the IDF to slaughter enough Palestinians, and get caught committing enough war crimes[1] that they're required to stop slaughtering Palestinians," is monstrous, and it surely leaves the Palestinian people[2] as a whole much, much worse off. But it leaves Hamas much better off.
The Iron Law of Institutions doesn't just apply to well-intentioned bureaucracies. It also applies to terrorist gangs.
[1] Beyond being awful in its own right, the fact that Israeli forces murdered three hostages who were waving a white flag in defiance of their own rules of engagement, is damning evidence that they haven't been coming remotely close to living up to their obligations under the rules of war, and have murdered many, many more Palestinians. This is just the one the IDF itself has had to show happened unambiguously.
[2] The ones that survive, anyway.
"
Hamas could always surrender and admit it lost but Hamas is not the type of organization that will surrender for a variety of reasons.
One reason that they haven't surrendered is it's not clear they're losing the war.
On “Fighting Satan for Fame, Fortune, and Jesus, Or Something”
I will say that since I quit Twitter [1], I do get a lot less incredibly dumb tailored-for-libs content filtering into my infosphere.
[1] Well before Elon. I quit Twitter before it was a scene, man!
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.