A lot of stuff--including the alliance between libertarians and social conservatives--worked extremely well when you were looking to unite a political movement (and ultimately, the nation as a whole) against Communism.
It suppressed the suspicion social conservatives felt about the disruptive and atomizing nature of laissez-faire capitalism because, sure, it may disrupt the social order, but much less than the Cultural Revolution did.
But if the alternative is, I dunno, sectoral bargaining and single-payer healthcare, a lot of that natural suspicion disappears. We're left with the argument that we need to get rid of welfare states to keep poor people from sliding into "social deviance", but, well, it doesn't seem to have worked terribly well, and the social conservative definition of social deviance is so incredibly stupid that it also needs the Red Menace to look good by comparison.
"Any Israeli PM would basically do the same thing that Netanyahu is doing in Gaza in response to the Simchat Torah massacre."
Sure.
"The people protesting Israel’s actions would howl ever louder if Israel did what needs to be done to gut Hamas."
Different people are protesting different actions, and those actions have different relationships to successfully gutting Hamas.
For example, I doubt Israeli and US officials objecting to letting settlers turn the West Bank into a third front in the war by murdering Palestinians would protest just as hard against Israeli air strikes into Gaza, for extremely obvious reasons.
Destroying Hamas' ability to launch further attacks against Israel, which in practice almost surely means destroying Hamas by killing or securing the surrender of its leaders, and many of its rank and file fighters.
This seems to be roughly the line where you see the worst fractures between Israel and its allies, and for that matter internally in Israel's governing coalition, between the government and the opposition, and within Israel's security establishment. E.g., https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-officials-coalitions-west-bank-policy-rhetoric-harming-us-support-for-war/
"A war of secession by the people of a country (Which is completely in line with the UN’s principles of self-determination) is not the same as one country with set, treaty-agreed-to-borders ending up with the land of some other nation they are at war with, and keeping it against the wishes of the country they took it from. Regardless of who starts it."
This doesn't really apply to either Gaza (Egypt doesn't want it) or Jordan (Jordan probably doesn't want it and it wasn't Jordan's in the first place, as you noted).
Maybe it does apply to the Golan Heights, but unlike Jordan and Egypt, Israel is still officially at war with Syria, and is periodically still conducting air strikes against targets in Syria.
Whatever long term prospect there is for a peaceful resolution of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is not going to work along the lines of Israel returning land to some other country. What's going on in the West Bank neither fits clearly into the "inter-state" bucket or the "intra-state" bucket.
The one objection to this plan is that it's not a plan, it's a wish, which depends on every involved actor suddenly deciding to would be call if everybody just got along.
It's MattY's Middle East Peace Plan, but unironically.
Which, well, if they wanted to do that, they would have done it a long time ago.
Not clear Israelis do a tremendously better job delivering water to Palestinians in the West Bank. At least they don't turn the water-delivering infrastructure they destroy into rockets.
For real Israel is hell-bent on destroying Hamas because Hamas murdered over a thousand Israelis and kidnapped hundreds more.
But Israel was mostly content to leave Hamas in place before that, and keep turning that infrastructure into single-use weaponry as long as the weaponry didn't work terribly well.
Israel doesn't have (or, crucially, need) a more high-minded justification to wage war on Hamas than ensuring that Hamas can't massacre more Israelis.
Egypt (which owned Gaza prior to the Six Days War) is at peace with Israel. They even got the Sinai Peninsula back, as described in Mr Thornton described.
They have also been helping Israel blockade Gaza for almost 20 years.
The "land for peace" thing with the Arab states mostly happened already, and it left the West Bank under Israeli occupation and Gaza as a sorta-independent, perpetually-blockaded enclave run by a terrorist gang.[1]
So we're left with a question of Palestinian intransigence in the face of a potential deal to give them the land they are already mostly living on, and, well, it's not like there hasn't been a ton of that, from the Second Intifada to the ongoing existence and dominance of Hamas, but it's far from only that.
Also, it's a little weird to point to the assassination of Sadat as a reason that Arab leaders are unwilling to consider peace while ignoring the impact that the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin had on Israel less than 20 years later.
Or the fact that one of the driving motives for the recent Hamas atrocities was derailing seemingly imminent normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia.
I'm mostly picking on Mr Thornton here because he wrote this front page article, and this means that I keep coming back to the weird distortions you get from pro-Israel voices that are necessary to cast decades of Israeli abuses in the Occupied Territories as entirely legitimate security policies made in the face of Arab intransigence, but the I-P discourse is very much an existence proof for BSDI.
The motives of the actual protagonists of the conflict are not compatible with the ideals of the Western Left (for Hamas) or the Western Center and Right (for Israel), so everybody ends up editing reality in ways that let them pretend otherwise.
In the case of the Western Left [1], this editing often stumbles, and sometimes gleefully dives, into anti-Semitism.
[1] And a fringe of weirdo paleocons, but these days the Far Right is pretty cool with the idea of all the Jews moving to the Levant and engaging in mutual slaughter with Muslims.
For example, I am not sure you can kill the obligation to hold oneself to some minimal standards of decency and decorum in public without doing very serious damage to the idea that we owe a duty to care for the wellbeing of others, no matter their circumstances.
Maybe, except it's hard to ignore the fact that the most ardent defenders of decorum and decency from at least the 1950s were the exact same people who argued most vehemently against owing a duty to care for the wellbeing of others.
It’s also worth pointing out that Israeli possession of the occupied territories isn’t colonization.
This is arguably true post-2005... if you don't count the West Bank, and the ongoing expansion of settlements there, along with the accompanying displacement and violence of Palestinians living there.
This is a bizarre blindspot on the part of most pro-Israel people.
I mean it's not like it's a unique feature of the pro-Israel side. You certainly have an opposite, equally bizarre, and even more odious blind spot towards the fact that Hamas poses a genuine security threat towards Israel, which they proved to the tune of 1400 dead just under a month ago.
Usually attempts to point this out are answered with a deep dive into something that happened in Mandatory Palestine in 1929, which are of course extremely relevant and justify anything and everything.
This article started off promising, by raising the examples of Brown and Turner for comparison with Hamas. Upon reading that initial section, I was thinking I was reading something that was challenging and might well piss me off and/or persuade me to reconsider some of my views--as someone who is inclined to give the Brown and Turner considerable leeway and thinks Hamas is a reprehensible gang.
Then it veered off into a litany of more recent and largely unknown events that supposedly are in some way analogous to either Brown, Turner, and/or Hamas. You may think people have bad and wrong opinions on Brown and Turner [1], but at least they know who the fuck they are.
But soon we're off to talking about CHAZ or a gunman identified solely by the fact that he quoted AOC[2] and suddenly we're in territory where I was no longer wondering if my views were wrong and started wondering why you were talking about stuff I no view on at all because I'd never heard of it.
I guess it's supposed to be bad because the liberal media didn't adequately inform me about this shit, but in the end I'm just relieved and reassured that I can return to the security of a low-stakes partisan food fight, leaving potential flaws with my worldview comfortably intact.
[1] And for Brown especially, those opinions you hold in such low regard are hardly limited to the Left.
[2] Gonna be honest, it didn't ring a bell and I didn't follow the link to dispel my ignorance.
The "planet of cops" approach is all about people reacting to (often terrible) speech with even more (often terrible) speech.
"You shouldn't hire this guy because he wrote a letter only an asshole would write!" is very much speech, and not actually hiring the guy is a pretty close cousin of speech, and none of that really changes even if you think the letter wasn't so bad, or if "writing the letter" in this case consisted of joining a student group without being able to predict how its leadership would react to literally unimaginable atrocities committed by Hamas.
There have definitely been cases where you can lay the consequences at the feet of the administration, but there's only so much they can (and should) do to protect their students from the consequences of their own misguided enthusiasm.
Getting married is not a matter of simply deciding, one day, to get married, and then going out and picking a marriage off the marriage tree. You generally need to find another person who you want to marry, and who wants to marry you, and then get married. If you want a marriage that brings all the benefits that Kearney describes in a book, the person who you marry needs to be able to up to the task of providing the emotional, practical, and economic contributions that make those benefits happen.
Finding the right partner is not entirely trivial. A lot of the social concerns that conservatives have been quick to point out in recent decades, and which land more heavily on people with lower incomes, make finding that sort of partner even harder.
If you're bowling alone, you aren't going to be meeting a future spouse at the bowling alley.
The underlying assumption of a lot of the pro-marriage discourse assumes that marriage would provide the same sort of benefit to everyone that gets married, but this is not a foregone conclusion, and it might well be that the people who would benefit the least overlap greatly with the people who choose not to get married. Indeed, it would be kinda weird if those people weren't less likely to get married!
The deteriorating social norm against having kids outside of marriage is doubtless connected with the increase in single women having kids, but how many of the marriages that aren't happening are the ones that would have happened not due to practical or economic benefits, but simply due to the need to avoid social stigma?
The case that gun control reduces suicide is, in my understanding, much stronger than the case it reduces homicide. But people aren't generally terrified of suicide the way they are of homicide, so it doesn't provide nearly as much traction for gun control advocates.
Imagine instead a different seed question that has nothing to do with SSM. Does that change your view?
Unless the other seed somehow clarifies what exactly we mean by "poly marriage", and what giving it legal recognition would accomplish, the answer is no.
On the slippery slope question the question is this: What is the Secular Argument against Poly?
The most critical argument is that there's no concerted push for them, and without that push, there's no one pointing our a clear policy problem that they would solve.
This stands in stark contrast to gay marriage, which was pushed by activists who wanted straightforward things for obvious reasons.
Pretty much all of the other slippery slope arguments founder for the same reason.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “About Last Night: Election 2023 Edition”
A lot of stuff--including the alliance between libertarians and social conservatives--worked extremely well when you were looking to unite a political movement (and ultimately, the nation as a whole) against Communism.
It suppressed the suspicion social conservatives felt about the disruptive and atomizing nature of laissez-faire capitalism because, sure, it may disrupt the social order, but much less than the Cultural Revolution did.
But if the alternative is, I dunno, sectoral bargaining and single-payer healthcare, a lot of that natural suspicion disappears. We're left with the argument that we need to get rid of welfare states to keep poor people from sliding into "social deviance", but, well, it doesn't seem to have worked terribly well, and the social conservative definition of social deviance is so incredibly stupid that it also needs the Red Menace to look good by comparison.
On “From Under A Rock”
"Any Israeli PM would basically do the same thing that Netanyahu is doing in Gaza in response to the Simchat Torah massacre."
Sure.
"The people protesting Israel’s actions would howl ever louder if Israel did what needs to be done to gut Hamas."
Different people are protesting different actions, and those actions have different relationships to successfully gutting Hamas.
For example, I doubt Israeli and US officials objecting to letting settlers turn the West Bank into a third front in the war by murdering Palestinians would protest just as hard against Israeli air strikes into Gaza, for extremely obvious reasons.
"
Destroying Hamas' ability to launch further attacks against Israel, which in practice almost surely means destroying Hamas by killing or securing the surrender of its leaders, and many of its rank and file fighters.
This seems to be roughly the line where you see the worst fractures between Israel and its allies, and for that matter internally in Israel's governing coalition, between the government and the opposition, and within Israel's security establishment. E.g., https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-officials-coalitions-west-bank-policy-rhetoric-harming-us-support-for-war/
"
Quoting DavidTC:
"A war of secession by the people of a country (Which is completely in line with the UN’s principles of self-determination) is not the same as one country with set, treaty-agreed-to-borders ending up with the land of some other nation they are at war with, and keeping it against the wishes of the country they took it from. Regardless of who starts it."
This doesn't really apply to either Gaza (Egypt doesn't want it) or Jordan (Jordan probably doesn't want it and it wasn't Jordan's in the first place, as you noted).
Maybe it does apply to the Golan Heights, but unlike Jordan and Egypt, Israel is still officially at war with Syria, and is periodically still conducting air strikes against targets in Syria.
Whatever long term prospect there is for a peaceful resolution of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is not going to work along the lines of Israel returning land to some other country. What's going on in the West Bank neither fits clearly into the "inter-state" bucket or the "intra-state" bucket.
"
Who said anything about "genocidal colonization"?
"
The one objection to this plan is that it's not a plan, it's a wish, which depends on every involved actor suddenly deciding to would be call if everybody just got along.
It's MattY's Middle East Peace Plan, but unironically.
Which, well, if they wanted to do that, they would have done it a long time ago.
"
It's MattY's Middle East Peace Plan.
Once the Israelis and Palestinians all completely change their preferences, a solution is trivial!
"
Not clear Israelis do a tremendously better job delivering water to Palestinians in the West Bank. At least they don't turn the water-delivering infrastructure they destroy into rockets.
https://apnews.com/article/water-climate-change-drought-occupation-israel-palestinians-30cb8949bdb45cf90ed14b6b992b5b42
"
For real Israel is hell-bent on destroying Hamas because Hamas murdered over a thousand Israelis and kidnapped hundreds more.
But Israel was mostly content to leave Hamas in place before that, and keep turning that infrastructure into single-use weaponry as long as the weaponry didn't work terribly well.
Israel doesn't have (or, crucially, need) a more high-minded justification to wage war on Hamas than ensuring that Hamas can't massacre more Israelis.
"
We have a natural experiment in the form of the West Bank, and I don't think it really backs you up.
"
Egypt (which owned Gaza prior to the Six Days War) is at peace with Israel. They even got the Sinai Peninsula back, as described in Mr Thornton described.
They have also been helping Israel blockade Gaza for almost 20 years.
The "land for peace" thing with the Arab states mostly happened already, and it left the West Bank under Israeli occupation and Gaza as a sorta-independent, perpetually-blockaded enclave run by a terrorist gang.[1]
So we're left with a question of Palestinian intransigence in the face of a potential deal to give them the land they are already mostly living on, and, well, it's not like there hasn't been a ton of that, from the Second Intifada to the ongoing existence and dominance of Hamas, but it's far from only that.
"
Also, it's a little weird to point to the assassination of Sadat as a reason that Arab leaders are unwilling to consider peace while ignoring the impact that the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin had on Israel less than 20 years later.
Or the fact that one of the driving motives for the recent Hamas atrocities was derailing seemingly imminent normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia.
I'm mostly picking on Mr Thornton here because he wrote this front page article, and this means that I keep coming back to the weird distortions you get from pro-Israel voices that are necessary to cast decades of Israeli abuses in the Occupied Territories as entirely legitimate security policies made in the face of Arab intransigence, but the I-P discourse is very much an existence proof for BSDI.
The motives of the actual protagonists of the conflict are not compatible with the ideals of the Western Left (for Hamas) or the Western Center and Right (for Israel), so everybody ends up editing reality in ways that let them pretend otherwise.
In the case of the Western Left [1], this editing often stumbles, and sometimes gleefully dives, into anti-Semitism.
[1] And a fringe of weirdo paleocons, but these days the Far Right is pretty cool with the idea of all the Jews moving to the Levant and engaging in mutual slaughter with Muslims.
On “Open Mic for the week of 10/30/2023”
Maybe, except it's hard to ignore the fact that the most ardent defenders of decorum and decency from at least the 1950s were the exact same people who argued most vehemently against owing a duty to care for the wellbeing of others.
"
Mental illness and substance abuse are indeed correlated with economic distress... but they often effects of that distress, rather than its cause.
Lacking a home is not exactly conducive to recovery of any sort.
On “From Under A Rock”
This is arguably true post-2005... if you don't count the West Bank, and the ongoing expansion of settlements there, along with the accompanying displacement and violence of Palestinians living there.
This is a bizarre blindspot on the part of most pro-Israel people.
I mean it's not like it's a unique feature of the pro-Israel side. You certainly have an opposite, equally bizarre, and even more odious blind spot towards the fact that Hamas poses a genuine security threat towards Israel, which they proved to the tune of 1400 dead just under a month ago.
Usually attempts to point this out are answered with a deep dive into something that happened in Mandatory Palestine in 1929, which are of course extremely relevant and justify anything and everything.
On “Of Course They Cheered The Murders”
This article started off promising, by raising the examples of Brown and Turner for comparison with Hamas. Upon reading that initial section, I was thinking I was reading something that was challenging and might well piss me off and/or persuade me to reconsider some of my views--as someone who is inclined to give the Brown and Turner considerable leeway and thinks Hamas is a reprehensible gang.
Then it veered off into a litany of more recent and largely unknown events that supposedly are in some way analogous to either Brown, Turner, and/or Hamas. You may think people have bad and wrong opinions on Brown and Turner [1], but at least they know who the fuck they are.
But soon we're off to talking about CHAZ or a gunman identified solely by the fact that he quoted AOC[2] and suddenly we're in territory where I was no longer wondering if my views were wrong and started wondering why you were talking about stuff I no view on at all because I'd never heard of it.
I guess it's supposed to be bad because the liberal media didn't adequately inform me about this shit, but in the end I'm just relieved and reassured that I can return to the security of a low-stakes partisan food fight, leaving potential flaws with my worldview comfortably intact.
[1] And for Brown especially, those opinions you hold in such low regard are hardly limited to the Left.
[2] Gonna be honest, it didn't ring a bell and I didn't follow the link to dispel my ignorance.
On “Brief Aside On Cancel Culture”
The "planet of cops" approach is all about people reacting to (often terrible) speech with even more (often terrible) speech.
"You shouldn't hire this guy because he wrote a letter only an asshole would write!" is very much speech, and not actually hiring the guy is a pretty close cousin of speech, and none of that really changes even if you think the letter wasn't so bad, or if "writing the letter" in this case consisted of joining a student group without being able to predict how its leadership would react to literally unimaginable atrocities committed by Hamas.
"
There have definitely been cases where you can lay the consequences at the feet of the administration, but there's only so much they can (and should) do to protect their students from the consequences of their own misguided enthusiasm.
"
The stupid games and stupid prizes involved differ in nuanced ways, but the underlying principle remains the same.
On “The Marriage Privilege”
Getting married is not a matter of simply deciding, one day, to get married, and then going out and picking a marriage off the marriage tree. You generally need to find another person who you want to marry, and who wants to marry you, and then get married. If you want a marriage that brings all the benefits that Kearney describes in a book, the person who you marry needs to be able to up to the task of providing the emotional, practical, and economic contributions that make those benefits happen.
Finding the right partner is not entirely trivial. A lot of the social concerns that conservatives have been quick to point out in recent decades, and which land more heavily on people with lower incomes, make finding that sort of partner even harder.
If you're bowling alone, you aren't going to be meeting a future spouse at the bowling alley.
The underlying assumption of a lot of the pro-marriage discourse assumes that marriage would provide the same sort of benefit to everyone that gets married, but this is not a foregone conclusion, and it might well be that the people who would benefit the least overlap greatly with the people who choose not to get married. Indeed, it would be kinda weird if those people weren't less likely to get married!
The deteriorating social norm against having kids outside of marriage is doubtless connected with the increase in single women having kids, but how many of the marriages that aren't happening are the ones that would have happened not due to practical or economic benefits, but simply due to the need to avoid social stigma?
At a certain point, "Why don't you
On “Can She Do That? New Mexico Governor Suspends Gun Carry Laws”
The case that gun control reduces suicide is, in my understanding, much stronger than the case it reduces homicide. But people aren't generally terrified of suicide the way they are of homicide, so it doesn't provide nearly as much traction for gun control advocates.
"
Imagine instead a different seed question that has nothing to do with SSM. Does that change your view?
Unless the other seed somehow clarifies what exactly we mean by "poly marriage", and what giving it legal recognition would accomplish, the answer is no.
"
It's one thing to predict that M (or N, or even Q) will follow L.
It's another thing entirely to invent a horrifying new letter called "flarg" and insist that it will follow L.
"
Turing Police, arrest this man...
"
The most critical argument is that there's no concerted push for them, and without that push, there's no one pointing our a clear policy problem that they would solve.
This stands in stark contrast to gay marriage, which was pushed by activists who wanted straightforward things for obvious reasons.
Pretty much all of the other slippery slope arguments founder for the same reason.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.