Same goes if you start your argument from #3.

Again, cute thought experiment, but there's nothing 'necessary' about Isreali apartheid and settler colonialism.

War is unethical through and through. War makes monsters of all who participate in it - whether or not they have a choice, no matter the end to which they fight for. That's among the worst parts of it.

In any case while this is a cute hypothetical let's get back to how Isreali apartheid is finally being shown for what it is.

If that were true then every general or commander would be a war criminal because civilian casualties are inevitable in war. Bombing of German industrial targets? War crime. Bombing on Japan? War crime. — BitconnectCarlos

Yes.

Obviously it's awful that Palestinian children have been killed, but this is not intentional. Do you agree that intention matters? — BitconnectCarlos

No. You don't get to excuse one of the most sophisticated militaries on earth with opposie doopsy we made a whoopise.

Other regimes in the region are even worse at covering up authoritarian action. — Count Timothy von Icarus

This is true, but most of those other regimes are not held up as shining beacons of democracy with 'best pal' status with the US. We will have gone some way if we began to speak about Israel in the same terms as we do those other nations who you cite: as governed by dubious 'regimes', willing and ready to exercise violence upon both its own populations and those around it, as it indeed it does.

Thanks.

With 'arguments' so vacuous that's really all it takes.

As opposed to what exactly? The extensive tracts of 'non-civilian' land available to - oh wait, there isn't any, because Isreal is an imperialist land grabber which has confined an entire population to a shoebox, which it continues to eat away at, illegally and immorally, all the while pleading victim. It's not working any more, and the utter depravity of the Isreali state is becoming clear to anyone with a working set of eyes and lungs.

But by all means, continue to defend the murder of children so that such land grabs may continue.

I wonder which of the 9 children Isreal bombed to pulp the other day contributed to its self defense?

You missed the bit where you read it so badly that you failed elementary grammar while doing so. Even the OP, who presumably read only the limited excepts you yourself quoted, had to correct you.

You would rest on that case. Or is it that you would case on that rest? More in line with your comprehension ability.

"This is the most mainstream that criticism of Israeli apartheid oppression has ever been in my lifetime, and as more and more mainstream human rights groups begin acknowledging the reality of that oppression it’s only getting more so.... Seeing is believing, and a video is difficult to narrative manage. The dominant narrative is no longer solely in the hands of propaganda outlets like The New York Times which can spin everything that happens with a pro-Israel slant, it’s being spread all over the internet in a medium that is far more objective than print.

This is so effective because, unlike so many other ugly aspects of the US-centralized power alliance, Israeli apartheid is not some covert government operation being run by highly trained agents and manipulators. Those responsible for carrying out its day-to-day abuses are just ordinary civilians, police and soldiers who have not been trained on the sinister craft of perception management. Who aren’t acutely aware that it’s bad optics to tell a Palestinian family on camera that if you don’t steal their house then someone else will. Who don’t have bad PR at the forefront of their attention when they’re cheering as they shoot Palestinian protesters. Who just react to the racist nationalist propaganda they’ve been ingesting all their lives instead of considering how difficult it will be to narrative manage a video of them cheering and chanting “may their names be erased” at the sight of flames.

Awareness is spreading of Israeli apartheid brutality for the same reason awareness is spreading of US police brutality: the internet combined with smartphone cameras. Seeing is believing. Seeing brings change."

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2021/05/11/the-israel-narrative-is-crumbling-because-of-phone-cameras-and-the-internet/

Says the dude who is defending people's inability to cite 'the actual issues' - or when they do, misread them so egregiously that even basic subject-object grammar goes out the window.

Moron's way to go.

As to be expected from an apartheid state going mask-off, under pressure of a government that is so beseiged by corruption and incapacity that it's electoral strategy has been to accelerate racial hatreds and hypernationalism as compensation.

Interesting to see the usual defense mechanisms crumbling beneath the weight of the murderous reality it has fostered in its settler colonies.

So when did you stop beating your wife?

[citation not needed, and if you ask for one, you're peculiar]

nobody actually has defended CRT by correcting the views presented — ssu

No one is under any obligation to 'correct' views which are pulled out of nowhere. Otherwise, perhaps you can tell me when you stopped beating your wife?

A theorist can simply deny his or her influence in anything (that is negative), yet it's the influence that typically is important. — ssu

An idiot can simply make up a line of influence for anything (that is positive), yet they're still an idiot whom no one has to 'defend' anything from other than to point out they they made shit up.

You were insinuating that I was a waffle, which is clearly an insult.

Found in the forum wild, in reply to @Banno.

Glorious.

This is what happens when people have nothing to say on the topic at hand, because entirely unfamiliar - it spirals into adjacent effloresces. I wouldn't pin this on philosophy, considering most of this is amateur discussion.

There's no need. No one here is actually talking about CRT - they're using the name of CRT to talk about a loose association of 'discussions around race' absorbed from the general atmosphere - mostly from social media - and then imputed to an entity called 'CRT' so as to have some kind of foil for discussion. David Theo Goldberg, in the article I cited, put it best:

"It is true that anti-racism today has been turned into something of an industry. But “diversity training,” “racial equity,” “systemic” and “institutional” racism, and indeed “anti-racism” itself are not the inventions of CRT; all but diversity training predate it. Like “diversity” over the past decade and “multiculturalism” before that, critical race theory is being made the bag now carrying the load long critical of racism. The foolishness sometimes said and done in its name—including some genuinely wince-worthy—is being used as a sledgehammer to bash any effort to discuss and remedy racial injustice. Attempts to turn these into a manual, largely by those looking to advance personal, professional, or pecuniary standing, are doomed to ridicule, which in turn unleashes the conservative caricatures."

This is a fun thread. So far the only person who has actually cited a single line of anything remotely resembling CRT has been @ssu - from an essay written 30 years ago, before he or anyone who can't stop talking about CRT even knew the term - even though he could not even paraphrase what was said in a grammatically coherent manner. Robin DiAngelo has been mentioned too, but she's a corporate grifter exploiting the self-serving guilt of white liberals who milk catharsis from having their 'guilty feelings' recognized and acknowledged so they can feel like they have a part to play in combating racism - so that she can sell diversity workshops to companies that will still pay poverty wages to workers in the global south.

Literally everything else, of course, has been made up on the spot. Nice to see the imagination at work.

The great thing about 'rights' of course, is that they are obligations. Obligations for everyone else, upon you. The audacity!

The unit of analysis that is implict in any notion of rights is the group, and not the individual. Although 'individualists' like to forget this. Which says something too about the poverty of individualism. Its issue is not that that it elevates 'the indvidual' above the group: it's that it reifies an entirely false conception of the individual which leaves actual individuals worse off in every sense.

It's telling that a lot of leftists who indeed are leftists do oppose the theory, unlike ↪StreetlightX
who seems to think that it's just a red scare issue while the theory itself is just fine. — ssu

Huh? I don't believe I said that. The state of the current discourse around CRT is definitely a red (brown and black?) scare issue, but that CRT is itself somehow unimpeachable or something is not at all what I said. And of course 'leftists oppose the theory' - not even those counted among CRT scholars all agree with each other. But of course, the portrayal of CRT as 'a' theory - and not a whole set of discussions with various positions staked out by various participants motivated by similar themes - is just the kind of silly thing that attests to the utterly garbage state of discourse around it.

And it should be noted that your reading of the quotes you provide is quite wrong. Harris's point - which is literally in the title of the article you're quoting from - is that whiteness counts as a form of property, not that 'property rights are whiteness' - which doesn't mean anything at all and doesn't even make grammatical sense. This may or may not be a good way to think about it, but gosh, at least get the minimal content of the claim grammatically correct, let alone substantially so.

Moreoever, the fact that you had to quote an article from 1993 - nearly 30 years ago at this point - is exactly testament to the fact that the panic around CRT is precisely a fantasy in search for a target of relevance. Digging in whatever obscure archive to justify it's own need for validation.

To be clear, my comment was not directed at Toothy himself, but at the wider discourse around CRT in general.

I would love to do more reading but I'm a peasant with no access to scholarly articles. — ToothyMaw

Which I assume is indeed the situation with a great majority of people - which begs the question: why is it the case that every second political dabbler now has an opinion on critical race theory? Honest to God I don't think 95% of the people who have uttered the phrase have read a single word of CRT scholarship outside it's invocation in some Heritage Foundation scare piece. There's definitely a conversation to be had about the accessibility of scholarship to the wider populace, but for the most part the conversation around it is Red Scare discourse transposed into a different color. Boogymen under the bed kinda thing.

Here's a trick for this thread. Every time a claim is advanced in the name of CRT, quote the scholar (not blog or random twitter account or BLM activist) that said it. In the meantime, here is David Theo Goldberg, just in case people would rather not just, I dunno, make stuff up:

http://bostonreview.net/race-politics/david-theo-goldberg-war-critical-race-theory

I'm not holding my breath though.

Also liberalism sucks, so if it's claims are indeed being disputed, good.

All very well. I still fully encourage everyone to treat him like shit.

I feel no need to psychologize this. He has a political position and is holding to it. It is profoundly harmful and stupid and destructive and it should be called out every time. It's heartening to see that it largely is, and I can only hope people continue to do it. I have no time for this 'we all have our stories/holding hands' hippie shit. You don't be nice to people who are spreading harm. You actively put them down, and encourage it.

If you weigh up the profound suffering caused by positions held by people like NOS and then find that your concern inclines to some anonymous moron on the internet, then you need to revaluate your priorities.

Anyways, often finding myself maligned and isolated, what I can tell you about that is that in no ways does being mocked make you so inclined to take any other person's opinion, no matter how well articulated or reasoned, into any form of consideration whatsoever. — thewonder

I hope he doesn't change his opinions. He's an inspiration. Fuck him.

No fuck that little shit treat him like the trash he is.

We're a scared, petty nation.

The Feds had two jobs: Quarantine, which they left to the states, so that now we can't look after returning Australians, and vaccination... now that's going well, hey? — Banno

What I don't understand is how these are not easy wins for the coalition? Like, who says 'we don't have a plan', rather than just fudge it and say 'yes, here's our plan'? (and if it doesn't work out, then I dunno, keep doing what these shits do and shunt responsibility elsewhere?). Like, these guys lie for breakfast - what's keeping them from lying here? Is it a tacit acknowledgement of their utter incompetence? Or are they really so comfortable that they really reckon 'nah, we'll wing it' is really OK with the electorate? And are they right about that? I don't get the politics of what they are doing (maybe I'm naïve?). Like, what's the angle here?

Hah, it's as if they had an art attack and stuck a bunch of Malevich's Black Squares there at the end.

Meanwhile, our not-at-all guilty of sexually-assaulting-women-minister for industry, science, and tech:

That fucking man ughhh

Useless, corrupt, self-satisfied wanker.

And yet I do not trust Australians to do anything about it.

a critique of how modern political systems, or ideologies, deny or negate (the autonomy? sovereignty? of) phenomenal subjectivity. — 180 Proof

Ah, ok, I can see how that would work for him. Cool.

Neil Davidson - How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions? An 800 page doorstop. Gonna be on this for a while.

How are you finding Henry? I've only read bits of his phenomenology which seems miles removed from politics, so I've been intrigued. Does he square the one with the other, or are they relatively independent?

Any recommendations? — Maw

Mike Davis, Andras Malm, Wolfgang Streeck, Erik Olin Wright, Gindin and Panitch! I think I'm going to pick up The People's Republic of Walmart next week.

In a capitalist society, is financial independence a morally acceptable goal for an adult in your view? What do you think about an adult striving to go from financial dependence to financial independence? — BitconnectCarlos

Sure, why not.

I'll take a monkey over a tyrant any day. :kiss: — Tzeentch

The tyranny of existence, apparently.

I wish it were just rhetoric. But these people really think life is a video-game where you're parachuted in, fully-formed, and you go around making 'yes-no' choices until you die. And the only metric of 'freedom' then becomes 'dId I VoLuNTaRiLiY ChOsEe?'. It's a metaphysics of and for monkeys.

Even a moment's reflection is going to reveal to anyone with half a brain that its our existential lot to be dependent, in ways almost never of our own choosing, to things, people, environments, and systems around us which enbale (as much as constrain) any exercise of freedom. Yet these morons model freedom on a limit-case scenario that is so abstract that it converges, in last analysis, to non-existence as freedom's ultimate expression (if you don't exist, you're totally free!). These people need to go outside and stop modeling existence on Dungeons and Dragons.

Man, at the very least initially, does not choose to exist. — Tzeentch

This is a meaningless statement. A grammar mistake elevated to metaphysical significance.

"A fish did not choose to be a tree" makes as much sense.

This is the 'individualist' philosophy: you tether 'freedom' to a standard that cannot conceivably exist, and then whine about how everything is oppressing you because the only thing able to meet that standard of 'freedom' would be literal nonexistence. Hence this rubbish, which is this logic pushed to its natural conclusion:

nor does he choose to exist at all. — Tzeentch

This is metaphysical rubbish in the worst sense of the term. It's a 'philosophy' designed for no one who exists on this Earth. Philosophical LARPing.