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?

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?

https://www.jta.org/archive/ben-gurion-reveals-suggestion-of-north-vietnams-communist-leader https://www.jta.org/2014/11/02/culture/from-the-archive-israels-friend-in-hanoi https://richardpollock.substack.com/p/two-unlikely-national-liberation (pro-Israel blog)

This seems kind of disappointing.

My parents have had a terrible marriage for basically as long as I can remember. I have been anticipating their divorce on some level since I was about 11 (I'm now in my late 20s), and I don't know why they don't just pull the plug. In fact, I don't even know why they got married in the first place; they don't enjoy each other's company, they don't have congruent ideas or tastes on basically anything, they're basically incompatible in every way.

I think they both would have been better off if they had split up early, never gotten married and never had children together. They should have married different people, or just not gotten married at all.

The obvious implication of this, of course, is that I shouldn't have been born. This does cause me some existential discomfort. Thoughts occur to me like, "Why do I care so much about the future? Why do I pay so much attention to politics? What's the point of advocating for socialism or trying to work towards a better future? I don't have kids, I can't have kids\*, I don't think I should have kids, and I don't even think my parents should have had me. In a better timeline, I wouldn't even be here anyway."

\*(I had a vasectomy a few years ago)

I would like to feel a bit more assured about all of this. What do you think?

"we'll never be able to accomplish fascism in the US because our base of suburban Fox News watchers are stupid and incurious about political theory" is a pretty amusing premise

I have seen some leftists stand by this statement as entirely true, and I have also seen some leftists dismiss this idea as cope on the part of liberal Zionists who dislike Netanyahu/Likud (and who would like to delegitimize both Likud and Hamas together).

The following are some relevant articles that support this idea:

https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up-hamas-now-its-blown-up-in-our-faces/amp/

https://theintercept.com/2018/02/19/hamas-israel-palestine-conflict/

https://www.thenation.com/article/world/why-netanyahu-bolstered-hamas/

What is clear is that Israel has allowed Qatar to fund Hamas on numerous occasions without much interference. However, whether Israel has ever actually funded Hamas specifically with Israeli money is not as well-established (although many of the people who support the general “Israel propped up Hamas” idea definitely imply that this has happened). So as a corollary question, how important of a difference is this?

I currently live with my parents. If I moved to a part of the country with lower cost of living (which I could feasibly do since I have a remote job) I could definitely afford to rent an apartment or even buy a condo by myself, but I know from previous experience that I don’t enjoy living alone and would probably get depressed.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/2017860

> Just to clarify, I don't believe any of the following arguments and I'm fairly sure they're all bullshit, but I'd like to bolster my understanding of how to refute them the next time I see them. > > These are all paraphrased or "steelmanned" (as opposed to strawmanned) versions of arguments I've encountered elsewhere on the internet. > > 1. Israel does not unilaterally blockade the Gaza strip all by themselves; Egypt also has a border with Gaza and also participates in the blockade, and yet pro-Palestinians never seem to allocate any of the blame to Egypt, they always put it entirely on Israel. This is unfair and possibly antisemitic. > 2. In 1948, the Zionists allowed Arabs who didn't fight against them to stay in their homes and become citizens of Israel. This population of Arabs became known as the "48-Arabs", and they and their descendants are still citizens of Israel today. The fact that the Zionists accepted these people into their new state proves that the Zionists were not aiming to ethnically cleanse all Arabs and that Israel is not a racist state, or at least not a foundationally racist one. If the Arab Palestinian militants of 1948 had just done what the 48-Arabs had done instead of starting a war, they and their descendants would also be full citizens of Israel today. > 3. Western pro-Palestinian advocates make a critical error when they assume that Palestinians are primarily concerned with "civil rights". The main thing that motivates Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza (as opposed to Arab Muslim citizens of Green Line ‘48 Israel) is not their lack of "civil rights" (which are a largely Western notion, after all), it's that they resent Israel's existence as a non-Muslim-dominated society in what they see as "Muslim lands". They do not desire a secular democratic state with equal civil rights for all, they desire a Muslim controlled, sharia law state in which they can dominate Jews as a persecuted minority of second class citizens (dhimmi, infidels) or just drive Jews out entirely at their whim. Maybe in 1948 the Arab population of Palestine would have been satisfied with a secular, democratic state, but unfortunately extremist Islam has become a much more prevalent ideology since then and has changed the political equation. > 4. During the period of the British Mandate of Palestine (roughly 1910s to 1940s), Jewish immigrants improved the living standards of the region and initiated a lot of new economic activity. As a result, many Arab Muslims from neighboring regions like Egypt, Syria, and Jordan immigrated to the Mandate of Palestine because they were attracted by the new economic opportunities, and today's Palestinians in Gaza & the West Bank are largely descended from these Mandate-era Arab immigrants. Given that their ancestors came to Palestine at about the same time that Zionist Jews did (and in some cases later), their claims of having a superior right to the land of Palestine over Israeli Jews don't make sense. (example of this argument can be found here and here) > 5. Often pro-Palestinian advocates say that "Western countries should have accepted Jewish refugees in the 20th century instead of pressuring them to go to Palestine." This is true on a surface level, indeed a lot of things would have gone better if powerful Western countries had done that. But alas, they didn't, and that wasn't something that the Jews of the time had control over either way. Therefore the Jews who settled in Palestine at that time can't really be blamed for what they did, they were just looking out for themselves in the absence of any benevolent world power who would take them in. > 6. Pro-Palestinians misunderstand the Haavara agreement and overstate its importance. The fact that the Haavara agreement occurred does not prove that Zionists supported Nazism, or vice versa. If the Haavara agreement "proves" anything, it is simply that for a few years the Zionists had just enough political leverage with the Nazis & British to help out some fraction of German Jews as their situation in Germany was becoming more precarious, and the Zionists took the opportunity to do this while they could. This does not at all prove that the Zionists "supported the Holocaust/allowed it to happen" or anything like that, and the fact that some pro-Palestinians interpret it that way is really rather disappointing.

https://twitter.com/eean/status/926892649096740866?lang=en