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therattle posted:Re leftwing antisemitism, my brother is a very committed Zionist. He, for example, believes that the threat to Jews is far greater from the left than the right (I feel pretty strongly otherwise). He brought up this as an example (and while searching I also found the second example, which is a bit more nuanced) Your brother sounds like he's a bit silly. The reason Israel gets specific attention in the West is not because of anti-semitism* but because it is the only country in the world that is 1) a de-facto (and increasingly de jure) race state, 2) actively pursuing apartheid policies towards an ethnic minority population that it considers, at best, to have effectively zero equal rights within its borders, and at worst to be outright subhuman, and 3) is a colonial project with its roots firmly in euro-american imperialism, which our countries directly enable and benefit from. Honestly, the view we get of Israel is, if anything, extremely sanitised, and I'm not just talking about the gratuitous clips you see of war crimes being committed. It's somehow even more disturbing to see things like mass rallies on prestigious university campuses, with huge numbers of the country's most educated and (supposedly) thoughtful people waving Israeli flags and literally calling for the mass expulsion and/or murder of Arabs. Yes, other countries are also doing bad things, but I can't think of any other nation-state that is so self-consciously built on weird race science that, ironically enough, you'd think we'd have put on ice after the second world war. Even the US pays lip service to the rhetoric of racial equality, however hollow it might be. What Turkey is doing in Kurdistan and what China is doing in Xinjiang are both aggressively authoritarian responses to perceived separatist threats. The main opposition ideologies to central government (national liberation PKK stuff in Turkey, Islamic radicalism in Xinjiang) lead to the conflict developing a racialised subtext, for sure, and suppressive policies affect ethnic minorities disproportionately as a result, which obviously can potentially spiral in very unfortunate ways. However, neither conflict originates in the genuine ideological belief that X ethnic group is, by definition, inferior at an existential level. * Though I accept that there are small pockets of anti-semitism, explicit and otherwise, on the left. You do see for example some very sus conflation between 'Israeli' and 'Jewish' interests from some of the more tin-foil hat lefties, though ofc this is deliberately encouraged by the former to implicitly undermine criticism and I genuinely do believe a significant portion of the people who do this are just lazy dumbasses who don't think sufficiently before they speak rather than active racists. ThomasPaine fucked around with this message at 13:46 on Dec 1, 2021 |
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Dec 1, 2021 13:36
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Isomermaid posted:If it's the guy I'm thinking of he also does an occasional series where he tries to cross a country in a completely straight line, completely disregarding any land borders in his way. I liked the Scottish one where he managed to near enough clamber over a working, guarded factory like Solid Snake through sheer luck then nearly got lifted and had to give up because some farmer lost his mind thinking they were going to give his old wife Covid by camping in the woods a kilometre from their house.
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Dec 1, 2021 14:28
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therattle posted:Sorry, saw this after I wrote my previous post. True, but my point was more that Israel is built like that from the ground up. By incorporating race-state ideology into the fabric of the country you by definition create a group of second-class citizens. Other governments may persecute minorities, but that persecution isn't often hardwired into the state apparatus. therattle posted:With regard to Turkey, China etc I think that to separate the separatist threat and the racial subtext is not right, and that the racist subtext (or text) has been present for a very long time. in Xinjiang I think it can be argued that state repression has fuelled conflict far more effectively than any separatist movements did, and that there is widespread Han prejudice against Uighur. I also believe that there is a long history of Turkish racial discrimination against Kurds. Possibly. I agree there's certainly a degree of cultural chauvinism involved, particularly with regards to Han Chinese - even Mao acknowledged that. They certainly consider themselves the superior culture, but I don't think that necessarily translates to inherent racialisation much less widespread genocidal intent. Looks far more like the kind of regional bigotry you get in almost every country (haha the Welsh are dumb and like to shag sheep lol). There are countless different ethnicities in China, there's no reason the government would decide that it detested one of them just because. There's no ideological basis for it, and there continue to be Uyghur members of the CCP, which is completely incompatible with that theory. I think it's much more likely that, and we agree here, current events in Xinjiang probably have sadly fuelled both anti-Uyghur prejudice amongst Han Chinese and, very understandably, the reverse. Beijing's policy has been heavy-handed and counterproductive. therattle posted:I also think that you are overstating the degree to which the conflation of Israel and Judaism among far-left tinfoil hats is encouraged. Possibly, I'd also like to see some actual research on this. It's quite difficult because I can't think of any comparable context in which race and state have been so deliberately bound together. e: Miftan posted:Honestly I don't care. I don't care if they're racists because they're idiots or because they're actively malicious since the end result is frequently the same for me. Oh, for sure, but it's important to understand the difference I think. You can educate an idiot, you can't educate an ideologically committed fascist.
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Dec 1, 2021 14:51
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bessantj posted:Re: Anti-Semitim and the left. I think it was Richard Littlejohn (or possibly Rod Liddle) in the mid 2000s that did a documentary about how Anti-Semitic Britain is and decided that it was because of the left. And Muslims. This kind of stuff should really be all the evidence needed to read between the lines on the topic. There is widespread anti-semitism on the left because it benefits the right for mainstream consensus to believe there is.
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Dec 1, 2021 15:57
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OwlFancier posted:I find it hard to characterise that argument as "being in good faith" when it necessarily involves being deliberately blind to the actual reality of the situation which is that "the jewish state" that actually exists just does the same monstrous poo poo to a different ethnic minority. So either it involves some spectacularly contorted thinking or it is just some sort of lovely ethnic supremacist poo poo where they literally do not care if it happens to other people as long as it isn't happening to them. It does sometimes feel like for some Zionists the outcome of the Holocaust was to double down on the weird race science stuff but try to ensure that in future they'd be the ones doing the stomping, which all in all seems like the complete opposite of any lesson anyone should have been taking from the experience.
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Dec 1, 2021 16:47
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I imagine that's definitely a thing that happens now but I do wonder about the ideological thinking of the early Israeli settlers towards the indigenous population. It all gets very confusing because from the sounds of it a lot of the Kibbutz were near enough socialist in operation. I wonder if they were always solely open to Jews or if you had some early peaceful collaboration/integration between the communities. e: This perhaps applies double to the many secular Soviet Jews who migrated in the 1990s, lots of whom were actually probably still somewhat committed to the socialist project to one extent or another. ThomasPaine fucked around with this message at 17:03 on Dec 1, 2021 |
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Dec 1, 2021 17:00
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Lungboy posted:https://twitter.com/shefsolgroup/status/1466047807077470208 lmao I don't know if this is funnier than that time Tristram Hunt crossed a picket line to go deliver a lecture on Karl Marx then got indignant about it
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Dec 1, 2021 17:48
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Albinator posted:This is very addictive Why do some of these have this border?
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Dec 2, 2021 02:38
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I don't even know why anyone pretends these kind of revelations matter. Yeah, tories will be tories. They'll keep being tories. Nothing matters, no one cares, they will suffer no consequences because we're a nation of cowards.
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Dec 2, 2021 03:17
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therattle posted:I totally agree with that (and with the assessment of prison officers. I have always wondered who the hell becomes one, unless people are just desperate for work) . But I wasn't the one asking for non-Western sources. That's why I mentioned first-0hand accounts in the NYer piece and the report referred to in the ALJ article which was based on scraping publicly-available Chinese sources. I think the reason people get so defensive on this subject is that if feels like 95% of the time everyone has clearly made up their own mind already and is just trying to spin whatever new 'evidence' comes out to suit their own ends. One side thinks criticising sources that have almost all been produced by rabidly anti-communist US think tanks and insane weirdos like Zenz makes you a genocide apologist, the other thinks saying 'oh hey china might be doing a bad thing' makes you a CIA-funded psyop. It's a pointless argument honestly because it's just people yelling at each other and, weirdly enough, is very very rarely actually about the welfare of Uyghurs. It's pure ideological grandstanding. As far as I'm concerned, this is the sequence of events: 1. China is an authoritarian country doing authoritarian country things 2. Chinese policy is disproportionately affecting Uyghur Muslims, because they as a group have become associated with separatist politics 3. There is a broad cultural trend of Han chauvinism which means most people don't much care about 2 4. Some people speak out about 1, China responds by doing more of 1, because 1. 5. The USA, which could not give a drat about 2 but very much wants to cultivate hostility towards China senses an opportunity to manipulate popular opinion. 6. US think-tanks produce research that uses selective evidence to massively exaggerate the extent of the issue. 7. This encourages the anti-china crowd to go balls to the wall, social media is filled with disturbing footage and photographs allegedly from Xinjiang. Some of this is real, some of it trivial to discredit. 8. 4 find 6 very receptive to their genuine stories about 1, are happy someone is listening. 9. 6 discovers that many of 4 don't much like China either, and are more than happy to co-operate, while others are so desperate to be heard that they are easy to manipulate into saying whatever the interviewer leads them to. 10. 6 is now comfortable claiming that China is now literally doing a Holocaust, using a variety of 'evidence' from 4 and 7 to back up this conclusion. Some of their sources are legit, many are not, or are highly exaggerated - often because 6 deliberately manufactured the most highly inflammatory testimonies they could. 11. The Western media and institutions eat up 10 because 6 are highly influential, and it becomes an accepted truth within some international organisations. Going against it is perceived as outright genocide denial, dissuading much mainstream criticism and reinforcing the story. 12. Some people realise that certain pieces of evidence and testimony are completely full of holes. 13. Most people steer well clear because 6 is now a self-evident truth and they don't want to be ostracised. 14. Tankies, being no strangers to ostracism, take this to mean that the whole thing is a fabrication and insist China is a utopia among other insane tankie things. 15. This actually benefits the the narrative of 10, because the only people rejecting the conclusion are utter weirdoes. 16. China also uses 12 to cover itself, claiming that 10 is bullshit (probably correct), and that following on from that 1, 2, and 3 are also bullshit (probably very much incorrect). 17. 16 being a dumb claim, Western institutions take it as further proof of 10. 18. We are stuck in a stupid rut where there are basically no good faith actors whatsover. Hey, maybe years down the line I'll have my own Noam Chomsky moment, but right now I see no reason to just swallow what the PR wing of a country known for pulling this poo poo time and time again when they want to manufacture consent to intervene in foreign affairs tells me wholesale.
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Dec 3, 2021 18:05
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OwlFancier posted:You can just be an anarchist and put your sunglasses on while saying all states are bad and they can all gently caress off. True but I also like the NHS and trains this is a joke I know there are theoretical ways collective things could function under an anarchist system
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Dec 3, 2021 18:19
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OwlFancier posted:If it were a choice between the NHS and states then I would probably suggest that the NHS does not seem to protect or offset very well the problems that states cause. If I have to live in a state I would rather live in one with a healthcare service, but I can't say that on the whole I find that situation very pleasant. This is rather more of a hot button issue when you have a lifelong health condition that means you die in a few days without constant access to expensive biosynthetic drugs
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Dec 3, 2021 18:31
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I mean the state didn't kill them by virtue of being a State, the state killed them because it was governed by people who wanted them dead (or didn't care)
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Dec 3, 2021 18:33
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This is just standard anarchist-ML beef lol, I guess we're not going to resolve the schism on this dead gay comedy forum
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Dec 3, 2021 18:38
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kecske posted:over 40s still isn't it? I'm working round the corner from there tomorrow but am only a sprightly 35. Pretty sure it's pretty much anyone who's eligible for a flu vaccine
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Dec 3, 2021 18:44
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Borrovan posted:I thought we did resolve it & the stalinists were wrong. Maybe I'm misremembering Yes because all MLs are outright unreformed Stalinists, obviously.
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Dec 3, 2021 19:03
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But then we just end up going around in the same circles. Yes, hierarchies are frequently abused, but I cannot imagine a situation in which human beings do not exist in some sort of hierarchical relationship with one another. They exist even down at the level of social groups! Some people end up cultivating more authority than others, subtle though it may be. You can remove formal hierarchies at the state level, but that doesn't get rid of power structures, it just makes them implicit and potentially even more insidious as a result, particularly in a world where some people have considerably more resources than others. Even if you then tear them down and redistribute the lot, how do you decide who decides how things are doled out because that person then by definition has a role of authority? What happens when you do anything that needs complex co-operation between lots of people like industrial production or infrastructure? How do you fund collective projects? Taxes and laws are all a form of state coercion, so can't be enforced. What happens when one person starts realising they have a bunch more stuff than another person and can pay that person to do labour for them then keep the product and sell it for profit? By jettisoning the state as a concept you're getting rid of the few good things it can do while in reality doing very little to prevent exploitation and abuse, if not outright making it easier, and in the end you just create the conditions for capitalism to develop once again. I just don't think living in Rapture would be any great victory, and that's where anarchism will always ends up despite the best intentions as certain individuals accumulate more power than others. Obviously the dictatorship of the proletariat is the ideal state, but I'll take one that guarantees some rights and protections over being paid in BezosBucks and being thrown in the gutter to die the second I'm unable to work an 80 hour week in the bitcoin factories. Borrovan posted:(disclaimer: I'm drunk, apologies if I was being a dick TP it's been a long day) No worries mate I plan to also be very soon! ThomasPaine fucked around with this message at 19:55 on Dec 3, 2021 |
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Dec 3, 2021 19:53
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therattle posted:That’s a great analysis, although I think there is now a pretty large and incontrovertible body of evidence that China is doing a lot of awful stuff in Xinjiang. And I don’t think that the US is planning an invasion of China anytime soon. I don't think anyone but the most terminally online tankie is refuting the idea that China is getting up to some shady stuff in Xinjiang. That can be true at the same time as 'things are being deliberately exaggerated by Western interests to manufacture consent'. Intervention doesn't have to take the form of an outright military invasion. There is clearly an ongoing effort to drum up hostility to China and isolate it on the international stage.
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Dec 3, 2021 21:52
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Graham Linehan is just the dictionary definition of 'she's not going to sleep with you bro' isn't he Years of his life wasted blowing smoke up the arses of mumsnet terfs who despise him
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Dec 4, 2021 13:50
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TACD posted:Vaccine question: what’s the point of the little cards? My understanding is they don’t actually count as proof of vaccination for anywhere that matters, are they just like a receipt or in case a restaurant or somewhere wants to check vaccination status? They're solely for use in pious social media posts imo Which honestly isn't actually a bad idea, people getting vaccinated for the likes are still getting vaccinated
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Dec 4, 2021 16:23
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We never got them at all in Scotland 
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Dec 4, 2021 16:42
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Convex posted:I'm really glad I bought that Father Ted boxset second hand so glinner didn't get any money. Weirdly I don't find myself having trouble rewatching it given his radical terf meltdown seems so utterly divorced from the nature of his earlier shows, I guess because he made it before going completely insane. I choose to believe that Arthur Matthews did most of the heavy lifting on Father Ted E: though actually was glinner not actually reasonably sound on most issues until his weird terf meltdown?
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Dec 4, 2021 18:28
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fuctifino posted:I hope people realise that by taking away the passports and driving licenses, they are effectively also removing their right to vote. How so?
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Dec 5, 2021 13:40
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Oh, did that go through in the end? Lol
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Dec 5, 2021 13:47
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I know there are good arguments against them but I do sometimes feel like ID cards were one of new labour's more reasonable authoritarian policies and I'm surprised they recieved as much pushback as they did especially as afaik it's pretty standard practice in many countries
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Dec 5, 2021 13:56
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the ladies who sung the famous 'ketchup song'
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Dec 5, 2021 14:09
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Guavanaut posted:The messaging on them was absolute dogshit though. Oh yeah I agree with all of that, but as you say a well implemented system that tied together all your public sector accounts etc and streamlined everything would actually be very cool
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Dec 5, 2021 14:21
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happyhippy posted:That's the paradox, if it was cheap it would be easy to fake. Sure they're always going to be expensive to produce but ideally that cost would be covered or at least heavily subsidised by the government OwlFancier posted:Do you imagine that any UK government would have any interest in doing that, though? Well, yeah, fair point E: oh, I discovered this YouTube channel earlier today and holy poo poo I can't recommend it enough, it's Louis Theroux's weird weekends turned up to 11 and an extremely good way of wasting half an hour https://youtube.com/c/Channel5YouTube ThomasPaine fucked around with this message at 14:34 on Dec 5, 2021 |
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Dec 5, 2021 14:30
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Strom Cuzewon posted:I don't like trains Mods????
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Dec 6, 2021 18:05
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Failed Imagineer posted:extrapolating from the early stage of an infection wave from a country with such different demographics is stupid, at best This applies both ways
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Dec 8, 2021 13:41
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Deketh posted:I'd say keep on posting friend, yes there's been a lot of doomposting but life is rough these days and people need to vent sometimes. Maybe spoiler tags and trigger warnings from people could be useful. Booster didn't touch me really
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Dec 8, 2021 13:55
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Yeah I honestly struggle to understand the outrage on this, as if Tories openly laughing in our faces hasn't been standard practice for over a decade.
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Dec 8, 2021 15:45
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Crazy to think that a mass murdering blobfish gets more action most of us ever will but that's life for ya
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Dec 8, 2021 16:28
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forkboy84 posted:(Also, gently caress all you who chased Barry Foster out for "doomposting". If you can't be a pessimist about how the government has handled this pandemic after 21 months of this poo poo then when can you be? I disagree with BF's overwhelmingly negative take on this but I agree that it's not right to chase them out of the thread. They're obviously genuinely anxious about everything and if posting is cathartic then what the hell, they should go for it. Otoh, this thread has at certain points become page after page of people earnestly agreeing that we're all going to die choking on our entrails if we don't board up the windows and stock up on corned beef, and that nothing good will ever happen again. That's quite obviously an overreaction (though probably an understandable one given how exhausted and disoriented we all are) and in any case it's really doing no-one any favours.
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Dec 8, 2021 17:43
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Tarnop posted:The answer to that is to have a conversation with them, not to chase them out of the thread because your anxiety is more important than theirs. Also this hyperbole helps no-one I agree, that's literally what I said. Post away, don't chase them out. But also don't dismiss those who suggest things might not be quite as bad as all that out of hand. I just want to avoid getting into the same spot we were in a while back where the thread was just bleak and hopeless for weeks on end and frankly at its worst a miserable chore to bother reading.
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Dec 8, 2021 17:58
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Calling another full lockdown in a country with >80% vaccination and pretty much every vulnerable person having been offered a booster would, imho, be loving nuts overkill and would probably do more harm than good.
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Dec 8, 2021 18:19
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TACD posted:They've done some outrageous things before but trying to ban gatherings on today of all days would be hilarious Yeah, 100%. Plenty of people totally ignored the first lockdown anyway, if you call a second one after just being caught doing so yourself many more will pay no attention whatsoever, and that's without even taking into account how unwilling lots of folk are to sacrifice another Christmas with their friends and families/spend another winter alone indoors with no social contact that isn't over a computer.
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Dec 8, 2021 18:33
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Failed Imagineer posted:You definitely should not bother with Cursed Christmas, just chill out man 
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Dec 8, 2021 19:47
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WhatEvil posted:I'm not voting Labour. I think that if you do you're legitimising Keith.. He's not going to get in, and the wider margin he crashes and burns by, the better. I haven't decided what I'm actually going to do yet but I'm increasingly of the opinion that a narrow Labour win under Starmer would be the absolute worst long-term result. On a scale of most to least likely I have: 1. Tory win: Nothing changes. Labour make noises about Corbyn. Humiliating, but probably not sufficiently to cause any major internal upsets. Same old same old, maybe a small chance that the left gets its act together (lol). 2. Tory landslide: Nothing changes. Labour make noises about Corbyn, but the humiliating scale of the defeat leaves some real room for a left counteroffensive. 3. Labour win: Yay, Labour wins. Very little changes. Labour proceeds to wax lyrical about the power of sensible grown up politics, proceeds to implement Tory-lite policies. Maybe they use PFI to open a few Sure Start centres. They lose at the next election, obviously, and nothing changes, but the awful leadership is completely secure for a good while as the first to win an election in over a decade. 4. Labour landslide: Very little changes immediately (see above), but the scale of the victory, maybe, just maybe, encourage a few bolder policies that actually benefit society.
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Dec 9, 2021 00:39
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I will never understand why anyone drives through London unless their job relies on it
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Dec 9, 2021 00:52
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