Chris, there are somewhere between 7.4 million to 7.7 million Israeli Jews. They have a government, army, most likely the bomb, and a long history of showing that they are going to stay and fight to stay. Every attempt at physical force or military force to get the Jews out since 1920 failed even when the power levels were more equivalent.
The Israelis aren't going anywhere. The Palestinians aren't going anywhere but everybody seems intent on acting out a repeated bad Greek tragedy again and again. The alleged allies of both groups encourage the most obstinate and unrealistic thinking rather than something that could result in a functional but cold peace.
What good does a bunch of activists and college students yelling genocide and settler-colonialism and Jews go home to Poland do for the Palestinians? The world isn't going to come down swooping in to resolve the I/P conflict anymore than they do for other ethnic conflicts? This is like a weird area where Saudi Arabia is being the most sensible.
I do not get the strategy of the Pro-Palestinian side at all. Attempts to use force to defeat Jews/Israelis have basically failed since 1920 but they idea of actual negotiations to resolve the situation seem intolerable to contemplate. The times where Israeli governments were willing to negotiate an end of the Occupation including taking the Settlers away were just deemed to be not real because the Israeli governments had some demands of their own like no return flood of refugees that would basically be a back door one-state solution. There seems to be a real emotional need for Israel to be defeated in someway.
The Pro-Palestinian movement in the West seems to use Palestinians in the same way that Evangelicals use Israelis. As a way to fulfill their fantasies. They have adopted rhetoric that alienates both the hundreds of thousands of Israelis that were protesting Netanyahu before 10/7 and after 10/7 and also the majority of Diaspora Jews. People who might be useful allies but have Greenline Israel gets to exist. Instead, they went all in on settler-colonialism and Israel needs to be destroyed with the Jews needing to go arguments.
It makes sense when you realize that a lot of these people don't care for Palestinians per se but mainly take up the Pro-Palestinian stance because it fits into the anti-capitalist, anti-American, and anti-West narrative running in their heads. Some or many of them also believe that the Democratic Party is the only thing preventing too true leftism from breaking out in American politics.
Harvard's report on anti-Semitism and Islamophobia in the wake of 10/7 is out:
he antisemitism report was produced by a task force made up mainly of faculty, but that also included students, a former Hillel director and Harvard’s chief community and campus life officer, whose title was changed from chief diversity and inclusion officer on Tuesday. The report said that bias incidents had been occurring before the Hamas attack and were intensified by the war in Gaza. It found that antisemitism seemed to be more pronounced in branches of the university with a social justice bent, including the graduate school of education, the divinity school and the school of public health.
A similar task force held hundreds of conversations with Muslim, Arab and Palestinian students, staff and faculty members about anti-Muslim bias. That task force summed up the feelings expressed by many of those people in two words: “abandoned and silenced.”
The antisemitism report recounted an episode in which a student asked not to work with an Israeli partner, and an instructor granted the request because “in their view, a student who supported the cause of an oppressed group should not be forced to work with a student identified as a member of an ‘oppressor group.’”
In another episode in the report, a recently admitted medical student recounted arriving for a visitation day and encountering students yelling “Free Palestine” from a walkway, apparently to discourage Zionists from attending the school.
The report said that some courses on Israel and Palestine were partisan and politicized. These courses were disproportionately taught by nontenure track faculty members, who were not as carefully vetted as more senior faculty are, the report said.
I still think that a big reason for the current problems is the decline of malls and hangout culture teaching teens in general and young men in particular how to socialize.
The allegedly Pro-Palestinian protestors apparently have no regret about going against Biden and latter Harris despite the fact that the people in the White House are egging Netanyahu on in his worse and things would be very different if Harris was President. These people don't care about the Palestinians accept as totems for their self-actualization and their rants against America and capitalism. I live in an area that was thick with Pro-Palestinian protests from 10/8/2023 to 11/5/2024. After Trump got elected they all just went away despite the fact that Trump is persecuting real actual Palestinians in the United States and talked about America annexing Gaza. They will re-emerge in 2026 when "Anybody but Kamala" becomes "anybody but a Democratic politician."
I have a friend from my hometown who I knew since elementary school who is a Mason. He's only two years older than me. The fraternal orders gained a reputation of being dodgy and uncool during the 1960s. They weren't replaced with much as a replacement though.
I actually have a bar where I am a regular. It's nice. From what I've read, the English pub is undergoing a crisis that started because of high land prices and got worse because of COVID. The increased social intolerance against casual drinking and the fact that there are easier ways to earn a living, especially if big breweries can't legally subsidize pubs, doesn't help.
Ha. That's a lot of cynicism. This is UK Pride. I'm not sure if it is as commercialized as American Pride. I guess Pride in most Western developed democracies is more like an ethnic day event but that doesn't make it a joke.
There is nothing wrong with Pride requiring universal message discipline and telling both factions on this issue or factions on other non-LGBT issues to cut it out for Pride. As you point out this is something different.
The Jewish Press is reporting that Keshet UK's request was: "KeshetUK, which led the Jewish bloc in the gay parade for close to a decade, said it had no choice but to withdraw after parade organizers refused repeated appeals for protective measures, including antisemitism awareness training for Pride officials."
Yes, Jews have a long history of supporting pluralism and multiculturalism for obvious reasons. Sometime recently, the current champions of multiculturalism decided that Jews don't count for diversity purposes and we aren't a real minority.
For the recored, I do expect a certain amount of conformity and assimilation from immigrants rather than believing it will happen naturally and organically over time. That some groups are given all the benefits of liberalism but none of the requirements is galling.
I am rather touchy on this subject because there is a big increase in global anti-Semitism from all quarters; the White Right, the Further Left, and the Islamists but a lot of my fellow Jews are blind to this. You have further right Jews and further left Jews playing footsie with a lot of people they shouldn't. You have the Right and the Left passing the "no, you're the anti-Semite" ball between them when really both sides are filled with anti-Semites.
I have spent the past year plus, well really more, but especially in the past year plus, struggling to understand the cosmology of anti-Zionist Jews and the Pro-Palestinian Left and I don't get it. Palestinian leadership and other Muslim leadership has always been very clear that they want "Arab Muslim Palestine" and that there really isn't a place for the Jews in their independent Palestine or really the rest of the Middle East but you would think that they are using multicultural ANC style rhetoric though and the rest of the world is filled with multicultural paradises except Israel. I just don't get this level of willing blindness.
From what I can tell, a lot of anti-Zionists, Jewish or Gentile, act is that anti-Semitism from Non-Whites is only because of Jewish bad behavior and if Jews behave well by their understanding, there would be no anti-Semitism. This is so contrary to how they treat racism and bigotry towards other groups or really reality just defies belief. I don't get it. I don't get how people who can be so smart about all other forms of hatred get really dumb and stupid with anti-Semitism.
I expect that Jews be included in multiculturalism but apparently Jews are expecting to support multiculturalism because of our history while at the same time only being wypipo doing wypipo things. We get the worst of both worlds.
In today's "we are merely anti-Zionist not anti-Semitic, yeah right", the United Kingdom's largest LGBT group forced to pull out of London Pride because of safety concerns.
Way back in Obama's first term, Julian Sanchez wrote how the American Right was ending up in a system of epistemic closure because they are only exposed to people that agree with them. Being very online did that with large swathes of the liberal to left side of politics in the United States.
They are only talking to people they agree with and use the same jargon that they do. This turned a lot of social justice causes into something of a quasi-religion in how people approach them. When you point out that things like land acknowledgements or gender is a social construct is not how normies speak or see things, you can get a lot of push back from them. They don't know how to speak to people who aren't already in agreement and know the correct verbiage.
What a lot of very political 21st century people don't remember is that politics and news used to be a big source of entertainment for people. During the French Revolution, people went to the National Assembly not only because they were interested in what is going on but because it was the best theater show in Paris at the time. Likewise, the Golden Age of the Metropolitan Daily (TM) was because newspapers were a big source of entertainment. What we now call lifestyle sections always existed and they were always a lot more popular than the hard hitting news. Since people have many more entertainment options now, they don't need politics or the news to be a source of entertainment. This is why you get so many people without the faintest ideas of what is going on.
On LGM, another poster also pointed a related problem that society in most developed democracies is so high up on Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs that politics becomes more about self-expression than forming policy. This is true for the entirety of the political spectrum even if it manifests differently on the left and right.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Open Mic for the Week of 5/5/2025”
Chris, there are somewhere between 7.4 million to 7.7 million Israeli Jews. They have a government, army, most likely the bomb, and a long history of showing that they are going to stay and fight to stay. Every attempt at physical force or military force to get the Jews out since 1920 failed even when the power levels were more equivalent.
The Israelis aren't going anywhere. The Palestinians aren't going anywhere but everybody seems intent on acting out a repeated bad Greek tragedy again and again. The alleged allies of both groups encourage the most obstinate and unrealistic thinking rather than something that could result in a functional but cold peace.
What good does a bunch of activists and college students yelling genocide and settler-colonialism and Jews go home to Poland do for the Palestinians? The world isn't going to come down swooping in to resolve the I/P conflict anymore than they do for other ethnic conflicts? This is like a weird area where Saudi Arabia is being the most sensible.
"
I do not get the strategy of the Pro-Palestinian side at all. Attempts to use force to defeat Jews/Israelis have basically failed since 1920 but they idea of actual negotiations to resolve the situation seem intolerable to contemplate. The times where Israeli governments were willing to negotiate an end of the Occupation including taking the Settlers away were just deemed to be not real because the Israeli governments had some demands of their own like no return flood of refugees that would basically be a back door one-state solution. There seems to be a real emotional need for Israel to be defeated in someway.
The Pro-Palestinian movement in the West seems to use Palestinians in the same way that Evangelicals use Israelis. As a way to fulfill their fantasies. They have adopted rhetoric that alienates both the hundreds of thousands of Israelis that were protesting Netanyahu before 10/7 and after 10/7 and also the majority of Diaspora Jews. People who might be useful allies but have Greenline Israel gets to exist. Instead, they went all in on settler-colonialism and Israel needs to be destroyed with the Jews needing to go arguments.
"
It makes sense when you realize that a lot of these people don't care for Palestinians per se but mainly take up the Pro-Palestinian stance because it fits into the anti-capitalist, anti-American, and anti-West narrative running in their heads. Some or many of them also believe that the Democratic Party is the only thing preventing too true leftism from breaking out in American politics.
"
Harvard's report on anti-Semitism and Islamophobia in the wake of 10/7 is out:
he antisemitism report was produced by a task force made up mainly of faculty, but that also included students, a former Hillel director and Harvard’s chief community and campus life officer, whose title was changed from chief diversity and inclusion officer on Tuesday. The report said that bias incidents had been occurring before the Hamas attack and were intensified by the war in Gaza. It found that antisemitism seemed to be more pronounced in branches of the university with a social justice bent, including the graduate school of education, the divinity school and the school of public health.
A similar task force held hundreds of conversations with Muslim, Arab and Palestinian students, staff and faculty members about anti-Muslim bias. That task force summed up the feelings expressed by many of those people in two words: “abandoned and silenced.”
The antisemitism report recounted an episode in which a student asked not to work with an Israeli partner, and an instructor granted the request because “in their view, a student who supported the cause of an oppressed group should not be forced to work with a student identified as a member of an ‘oppressor group.’”
In another episode in the report, a recently admitted medical student recounted arriving for a visitation day and encountering students yelling “Free Palestine” from a walkway, apparently to discourage Zionists from attending the school.
The report said that some courses on Israel and Palestine were partisan and politicized. These courses were disproportionately taught by nontenure track faculty members, who were not as carefully vetted as more senior faculty are, the report said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/29/us/harvard-antisemitism-islamophobia-reports.html
On the other blog, my brother pointed out that non-tenure track faculty feeling more free to be extremely partisan seems counterintuitive.
"
I still think that a big reason for the current problems is the decline of malls and hangout culture teaching teens in general and young men in particular how to socialize.
"
It occurs to me that the Protestors care about Palestinians in the same way that Evangelicals care about Israelis.
"
The allegedly Pro-Palestinian protestors apparently have no regret about going against Biden and latter Harris despite the fact that the people in the White House are egging Netanyahu on in his worse and things would be very different if Harris was President. These people don't care about the Palestinians accept as totems for their self-actualization and their rants against America and capitalism. I live in an area that was thick with Pro-Palestinian protests from 10/8/2023 to 11/5/2024. After Trump got elected they all just went away despite the fact that Trump is persecuting real actual Palestinians in the United States and talked about America annexing Gaza. They will re-emerge in 2026 when "Anybody but Kamala" becomes "anybody but a Democratic politician."
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/pro-palestinian-activists-gave-trump-boost-no-2024-regrets-biden-harris-gaza-israel
"
I have a friend from my hometown who I knew since elementary school who is a Mason. He's only two years older than me. The fraternal orders gained a reputation of being dodgy and uncool during the 1960s. They weren't replaced with much as a replacement though.
"
I actually have a bar where I am a regular. It's nice. From what I've read, the English pub is undergoing a crisis that started because of high land prices and got worse because of COVID. The increased social intolerance against casual drinking and the fact that there are easier ways to earn a living, especially if big breweries can't legally subsidize pubs, doesn't help.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/dec/30/number-of-pubs-in-england-and-wales-falls-below-39000-for-first-time
"
Left without commment:
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:4llrhdclvdlmmynkwsmg5tdc/post/3lof5h56yus2r?ref_src=embed&ref_url=https%253A%252F%252Fwww.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com%252F2025%252F05%252Fthe-cognitive-fitness-and-in-touch-with-the-working-american-candidate
On “Open Mic for the Week of 4/28/2025”
Ha. That's a lot of cynicism. This is UK Pride. I'm not sure if it is as commercialized as American Pride. I guess Pride in most Western developed democracies is more like an ethnic day event but that doesn't make it a joke.
"
There is nothing wrong with Pride requiring universal message discipline and telling both factions on this issue or factions on other non-LGBT issues to cut it out for Pride. As you point out this is something different.
The Jewish Press is reporting that Keshet UK's request was: "KeshetUK, which led the Jewish bloc in the gay parade for close to a decade, said it had no choice but to withdraw after parade organizers refused repeated appeals for protective measures, including antisemitism awareness training for Pride officials."
https://www.jewishpress.com/news/israel/boycott/gay-jews-ousted-from-london-pride-parade-for-second-consecutive-year/2025/05/05/
"
Yes, Jews have a long history of supporting pluralism and multiculturalism for obvious reasons. Sometime recently, the current champions of multiculturalism decided that Jews don't count for diversity purposes and we aren't a real minority.
"
Trump wants to reopen Alcatraz. I suppose you have to put domestic political enemies somewhere if the Supreme Court won't let you deport them:
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/04/trump-alcatraz-movies-tariffs-00326220
"
For the recored, I do expect a certain amount of conformity and assimilation from immigrants rather than believing it will happen naturally and organically over time. That some groups are given all the benefits of liberalism but none of the requirements is galling.
"
I am rather touchy on this subject because there is a big increase in global anti-Semitism from all quarters; the White Right, the Further Left, and the Islamists but a lot of my fellow Jews are blind to this. You have further right Jews and further left Jews playing footsie with a lot of people they shouldn't. You have the Right and the Left passing the "no, you're the anti-Semite" ball between them when really both sides are filled with anti-Semites.
I have spent the past year plus, well really more, but especially in the past year plus, struggling to understand the cosmology of anti-Zionist Jews and the Pro-Palestinian Left and I don't get it. Palestinian leadership and other Muslim leadership has always been very clear that they want "Arab Muslim Palestine" and that there really isn't a place for the Jews in their independent Palestine or really the rest of the Middle East but you would think that they are using multicultural ANC style rhetoric though and the rest of the world is filled with multicultural paradises except Israel. I just don't get this level of willing blindness.
From what I can tell, a lot of anti-Zionists, Jewish or Gentile, act is that anti-Semitism from Non-Whites is only because of Jewish bad behavior and if Jews behave well by their understanding, there would be no anti-Semitism. This is so contrary to how they treat racism and bigotry towards other groups or really reality just defies belief. I don't get it. I don't get how people who can be so smart about all other forms of hatred get really dumb and stupid with anti-Semitism.
"
I expect that Jews be included in multiculturalism but apparently Jews are expecting to support multiculturalism because of our history while at the same time only being wypipo doing wypipo things. We get the worst of both worlds.
"
I'm not but I sometimes feel the need to visibly express frustration.
"
I forgot the link:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/lgbt-jewish-charity-forced-to-pull-out-of-pride-over-safety-fears/ar-AA1E6G1u?ocid=socialshare&pc=HCTS&cvid=11f91002fcb94a508cfa50a7dcf6edce&ei=30&fbclid=IwY2xjawKE9FhleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBicmlkETF2aXlGWDRxM3JZNHU1STdjAR6DTIkZ7-gmsF9YhZ742mmqzmExB-YLQTcE6eJSSQWPR50WAPCeWb-An0M8bg_aem_geayahfvZacOgFZ90ryUDQ
"
Are you even capable of giving a clear answer or serious response?
"
Trump imposes 100% tariff on foreign movies. Anime fans join the resistance:
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:t6ubj2wlhc34awzcymh3qpur/post/3loeysijf522m?ref_src=embed&ref_url=https%253A%252F%252Fwww.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com%252F2025%252F05%252Fvery-stable-much-genius
"
In today's "we are merely anti-Zionist not anti-Semitic, yeah right", the United Kingdom's largest LGBT group forced to pull out of London Pride because of safety concerns.
"
Houthis fire a missile at Israel that hits near Ben-Gurion International Airport:
https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/04/middleeast/flights-halted-at-israel-airport-yemen-strike-intl
On “A Backlash Is Coming”
Way back in Obama's first term, Julian Sanchez wrote how the American Right was ending up in a system of epistemic closure because they are only exposed to people that agree with them. Being very online did that with large swathes of the liberal to left side of politics in the United States.
They are only talking to people they agree with and use the same jargon that they do. This turned a lot of social justice causes into something of a quasi-religion in how people approach them. When you point out that things like land acknowledgements or gender is a social construct is not how normies speak or see things, you can get a lot of push back from them. They don't know how to speak to people who aren't already in agreement and know the correct verbiage.
"
What a lot of very political 21st century people don't remember is that politics and news used to be a big source of entertainment for people. During the French Revolution, people went to the National Assembly not only because they were interested in what is going on but because it was the best theater show in Paris at the time. Likewise, the Golden Age of the Metropolitan Daily (TM) was because newspapers were a big source of entertainment. What we now call lifestyle sections always existed and they were always a lot more popular than the hard hitting news. Since people have many more entertainment options now, they don't need politics or the news to be a source of entertainment. This is why you get so many people without the faintest ideas of what is going on.
On LGM, another poster also pointed a related problem that society in most developed democracies is so high up on Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs that politics becomes more about self-expression than forming policy. This is true for the entirety of the political spectrum even if it manifests differently on the left and right.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.