this is a side blog of @wowbright. I created it as a place to let my negativity shine. here is where i reblog politics, correct people, post and reblog bad news, and do other things that may be perceived as downers. liberal. intersectional feminist. trans rights. black lives matter. human rights. former pacifist. if you use your leftism to justify being antisemitic you're just a dick. (I also sometimes post politics on my main blog, but there I focus on things that are actionable. this page will probably include things that are not clearly actionable.)
because someone decided to drop the word 'ethostate' in the comments of a post about israel again, i thought we could play around with some numbers.
According to a 2023 statistic Jews make up about 73 % of Israel's population. Let's compare that with some other countries. (While ethnostate actually refers to racial or ethnic groups and Judaism isn't 'just a religion', I will also give examples for the demographics of religions in countries)
Let's start with the EU: According to statistics from 2019 about 64% of the EU's population were Christian, a decline from 72% in 2012. So what? In 2012 the EU was actually a Christian ethnostate? Or at least consisted of ethnostates? I mean if we think about it, we have to follow the Christian calendar, Christian holidays are mandated by the state while other religious groups have to fight every year to be able to observe their most sacred days. Hell, where I live (in Germany) one of the currently ruling parties is called the Christian Democratic Union and our Grundgesetz (basic law) is built upon Christian roots. They even invoke God in the preamble!
Here some further statistics about Religion in Europe.
As you can see even just looking at individual Christian denominations, there are about 6 countries for which the religious majority makes up more than 3/4th of the population. IN THESE COUNTRIES ONE DENOMINATION OF CHRISTIANITY HAS A HIGHER POPULATION PERCENTAGE THAN JEWS IN ISRAEL. So I hope this shows that 'Israel is an ethnostate cause there is just one religion determining everything' is utter bullshit not just because Judaism is not just a religion but also because I can name 6 countries in Europe alone for which there is a higher percentage of people of a certain religion.
So now to actually look at specific countries. Ireland especially seems to have an antisemitism problem, so how about we focus on them.
As of 2022 the amount of Catholics in Ireland has decreased so that they actually make up 69.1% of the population as opposed to the over 75% from 2019. But the definition of ethnostates actually specifically looks at ethnic or racial groups. Let's see. As of 2022 the largest ethnic group in were White Irish, making up a whole 76.5% of the Irish population. Including other white people in this, this number increases to 87.4% of the population. That is 14% more than the 73% that Jews make up of the Israeli population. The next largest group in Ireland are Asians with 3.7% (or depending on how you'd like to spin it, the 6.16% who did not state their ethnicity. This still doesn't make Ireland an ethnostate though.
And some more examples:
China: 91.11% Han Chinese (2020)
Russia: 71.73% ethnic Russians (2021)
Saudi Arabia: 90% Arabs, 10% Afro-Arabs (2021)
USA: 57.84% White (2020)
Canada: 69.8% White (2022)
Germany: 71.3% Germans (2022)
Democratic Republic of Congo: no dominant ethnic group
South Africa: 81.4% Black
Just so it is completely clear: It is not my intention to call any of the countries listed here an ethnostate, rather I want to detail the absurdity of calling Israel an ethnostate, when you can look at demographics and see many other countries with similar or higher percentages of ethnic (or racial or religious) majorities.
Poland's ethnic makeup today: 99% white, with 98% being ethnic Poles
Poland in 1931, before the Holocaust: Polish, 69% of the population, Ukrainian, 15%, Jews 8.5%, Belarusian, 4.70%, German, 2.2%, Russian 0.25%, Lithuanian, 0.25%, Czech 0.09%
Please explain to me why Poland isn't blamed for their massive ethnic cleansing and the fact that their country is nearly homogenous.
Question that I'm asking in good faith because I really do want to know about it: why does Herzl describe israel as a colony if it isn't one?
(All good faith questions are welcome, Anon - thanks for this one!)
TLDR: Because words change meanings over time and Herzl wasn't psychic.
In the 1890s, "colony" just meant a planned settlement or concentrated community. This included Jewish agricultural colonies in the Pale, temperance colonies in Colorado, and utopian communes everywhere.
It was basically the Victorian word for "intentional community," with absolutely no imperial baggage required.
The specific meaning activists now deploy (colony as racial domination, metropole extraction, indigenous suppression) is a 20th century framework that didn't exist when Herzl was writing in 1896.
So a reader of the 21st century finds the word "colony" in an old text and assumes it carries a technical definition that was coined decades later.
It's a little like finding the word "trauma" in a Civil War field report and concluding the surgeon was diagnosing PTSD.
Meanwhile, 'settler colonialism' as applied to Israel isn't a neutral analytical tool that happens to fit badly. It's a framework specifically constructed to exclude the features that distinguish Jewish return from actual settler colonialism...and it still fails on its own stated terms.
Jewish immigrants to the Levant were never agents of any empire. They were overwhelmingly refugees from empires who were fleeing Russian pogroms, Eastern European persecution, and later Nazi Germany. No metropole sent them. No metropole would take them back if the project failed.
That's not a minor quibble about definitions, either - it's the primary distinction between settler colonialism and every other form of large population movement in history.
There's also the matter of indigeneity. The Jews returning to the Levant weren't arriving in a place with which they had no connection.
Jewish presence in the region is documented continuously from ancient history, including in Egyptian records dating to roughly 1210 BCE.
The religious, linguistic, and ancestral connection to the land is what distinguishes this case from the British in Kenya or the French in Algeria, who had no such ties - and it is some of the best-documented, most indisputable history humans have ever gathered. (This is why they're so constantly engaged in historical revisionism.)
So when proponents of the settler colonialism framework of accusation encounter these objections, what do they do?
They move the goalposts.
The absence of a metropole gets explained away as an "exception."
The indigenous origin of the Jewish people to the Levant gets ahistorically dismissed or ignored, despite the fact that the Jewish people are the only group whose national identity, language, and religion originated in and remained oriented toward that specific land throughout their entire existence.
The framework gets rewritten and the history is revised until Israel fits the allegation.
So, one word in Der Judenstaat doesn't settle* any of this.
From The Atlantic: The False Narrative of Settler Colonialism (paywall bypassed)
Scotland's children's commissioner warns that a social media ban "WON'T keep children safe."
Scotland's children's commissioner has warned a social media ban could drive children to less regulated or riskier parts of the internet.
“There is insufficient evidence to suggest a social media ban for under‑16s would help keep children safer online, Scotland's children's commissioner has said.”
“Nicola Killean warned a ban could drive children to less regulated or riskier parts of the internet, and said the focus should instead be on holding social media companies to account.
She was responding to the UK government's consultation on whether to introduce a minimum age for accessing online platforms, including social media.
"A ban does little to address underlying issues such as exploitative algorithms, and business models that drive harmful content and engagement," she said.”
“Ahead of submitting her response, the commissioner's office carried out a children's rights impact assessment examining how the proposals could affect children and young people, both positively and negatively.”
“Her team also worked with a group of young advisers aged between 12 and 17 from across Scotland.”
She said that are dangers like cyber bullying, harmful content, and exploitation”
But she also pointed out the benefits of social media and the way it impacts these teens lives, saying
"by supporting communication, self-expression, access to information, participation, play, and connection with communities and support networks".
She added "The evidence so far on bans is limited, mixed, and still emerging.
"Blanket restrictions can risk shifting responsibility away from platforms and onto children."
“Killean also warned a ban could impact on some youngsters more than others.
The commissioner said it could more negatively impact those in rural and remote areas, those with family overseas, disabled children and those who rely on online communities for support with their identity.”
“In her recommendations, Killean called for greater focus on platform design and accountability, and a crack-down on harmful features.
She also said rules should reflect children's age and maturity, and that young people should be directly involved in shaping future policy.
Any new age limit should not weaken existing safeguards, she added.”
When people pay cowardly, half arsed lip service to supporting Jews and being against antisemitism, they might as well not bother.
"Oh, I love Jews, but Zionists and Israelis are not welcome here."
If your "support" for a minority group rests on members of the group loudly dismissing and condemning literally half of their people on the planet because of where they live, pretending that their connection to the land where their entire culture and traditions were born doesn't exist,denying centuries of historical facts and evidence in order to assuage the "river to the sea" brigade, or honestly expecting them to stay an eternal defenseless minority in countries that have, in living memory, almost wiped them out entirely because their self determination, strength, and ability to defend themselves in their homeland discomforts you, your "support" means fuck all.
Incessant obsessive conspiracy theories about Jews that are thousands of years old, occasionally updated with fun modern talking points. (Soros Space Lasers, Starbucks, Spotify)
Fetishization of Jews (Sounds contradictory, isn't)
Obsessed with supercessionism
Blame Jews for their life not working out the way they wanted it to and also every social ill that occurs to them really
Enjoy and justify cutting Jews out of public life (Bar tokens you'll turn on later)
Enjoy and justify lighting Jews on fire
Enjoy shooting Jews outside Jewish buildings (And inside too but hey)
Failure to realize that with the Jews dead the regime needs new enemies to justify its existence... and has also been going after said other enemies the whole time.
Has turned all of this into a fandom with religious aspects that is self-radicalizing at a dangerous pace with a tangible death toll.
Neo-Nazis obsess about Jews murdering white babies, while Leftists obsess about Jews murdering Black and Brown babies. Also, Neo-Nazis think Jews are working with Muslims and Catholics to destroy White people, and Leftists think Jews are working with Christians and the West to destroy Islam.
So far as I can tell, those are the only differences.
Yes. Quite simply, genocide means something--the deliberate effort to wipe out a people by killing them or targeting their way of life and keeping them from continuing on.
If Israel was intending to commit genocide...
Then why isn't everyone in Gaza already dead?
They have the means, the ability, and the tools to do so.
The only answers that Jew-haters can come up to explain how 98% of the population of Gaza was still alive after two years of intense urban warfare--when the fighting in Mariopol, Ukraine, had a higher death toll despite taking less time--tend to fall into one of three categories:
Incompetence--the IDF intends to kill them all, but just somehow is too stupid to manage it.
Conspiratorial--the IDF intends to kill them all, but is being sneaky about it, in order to distract... somehow. Which is just "Untrustworthy Jews" in a different package.
Abject denial--"La la, la, The Jews are trying to kill them all! Hitler was right! I can't hear you and your evidence and details! I know in my heart that the Genocide is Real, just like how my parents know that Jesus is their Lord and Savior!"
And given that the "genocide scholars" in this case include a woman who has claimed a higher death toll and that the Israelis eat Palestinians and feed the leftovers to dogs, and a "genocide scholar group" that has no requirements for joining, and thus has "Emperor Palpatine" as a listed member... and several NGOs and states admitted that they would have to alter the definition of "genocide" to make what happened in Gaza count...
Yeah, there was a "broad consensus" in Nazi Germany that Jews were subhuman creatures that needed to be exterminated for the safety of the human race. Doesn't make it right.
Furthermore, in answer to the question...
No, it's how the Right and the Left have shaken hands and agreed that Jews Are The Problem And There Is One (Final) Solution that is acceptable. Going back to the original post, when a Leftist African-American politician was promoting a Jew-hating propaganda piece created by the KKK that claimed that Jews were responsible for 9/11.
Of course, the fact that the Left now loves the KKK-coined anti-Jew slur of "Zio" says everything.
the legal definition (UN Genocide Convention, 1948) doesn't require total extermination. it requires acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or IN PART, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group
i'm not gonna argue genocidal intent, since that would require convincing you that there was intent which is clearly impossible, but we can talk about ethnic cleansing:
"The UN Commission of Experts described (United Nations) ethnic cleansing as "a purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the civilian population of another ethnic or religious group from certain geographic areas," and stated that the coercive practices used can include "murder, torture, arbitrary arrest and detention... forcible removal, displacement and deportation of civilian population... wanton destruction of property."
so forcible displacement is part of the UN definition of ethnic cleansing
"Nearly all of Gaza's current population of 2.1 million people has been displaced, lacking access to sufficient shelter, food, life-saving medical services, clean water, education and livelihoods."
"More than 60% of the population had lost their homes... Gaza's economy has contracted by 84%... 'The scale and extent of deprivation across living conditions, livelihoods/income, food security, gender equality, and social inclusion, have pushed back human development in the Gaza Strip by 77 years,'" the assessment said.
"Over 371,888 housing units have been destroyed or damaged, more than 50% of hospitals are non-functional, nearly all schools destroyed or damaged, and the economy has contracted by 84% in Gaza."
"Approximately 81% of all structures in the Gaza Strip are damaged... An estimated 320,622 housing units have been damaged." -- based on publicly available satellite imagery
it's not "sneaky" to not just literally nuke the strip and kill every single person inside. you can ethnically cleanse a group of people by destroying all their housing, their education, their economy, access to food, their healthcare, etc., and generally make the place unlivable. this has historically been an ethnic cleansing tactic, such as in the case of the holodomor in ukraine, and i would not say this is unique to israel or jews
it's also very weird to project all these anti-semitic tropes onto me; i didn't say any of that and i think they're gross, and i'm sorry if people have said stuff like that to you in the past
And we have a Goalpost Move and a Denial of Antisemitism/Accusation of Projection twofer! That's Category Three, baaaaaybeee! -_-
So, to summarize:
You came onto a post talking about the Jewish experience with how chummy Leftists and Neo-Nazis have become over the last several years when it comes to hating Jews--to the point that Leftists are now endorsing Marjorie Taylor "Jewish Space Lasers" Greene--and basically went, "Well, have you considered that the consensus is that Jews are actually the bad guys and are doing what the Nazis did to them?"
And when I pushed back on that, pointing out the bias of the sources and how the situation does not show a genocide, you basically went, "Nuh uh" and shifted the topic, refused to engage with the discussion of antisemitism, and accused me of projecting antisemitism onto you, when you are engaging in antisemitism.
(And people have said that stuff to me this past week. This past day. It is constant, and if you exist as a Jew in public, your fellow "antizionists" make sure to attack you at every turn for daring to exist as a Jew.)
but you're not disputing the ethnic cleansing, right? clearly, you don't agree that it's a genocide, but are you saying my sources are wrong and it doesn't fit the UN definition of ethnic cleansing? or do we agree on that?
You're the one who barged in here and demanded that I turn out my pockets in a tone that screamed bad faith, accusing me of conspiratorial thinking. Why do I have to answer you when your response to seeing "Hey, Leftists and Neo-Nazis are becoming indistinguishable from a Jewish perspective" is "But, but, but... Da Jooz ARE EBIL! Everyone Agrees!"
I owe you and your entire Jew-hating movement nothing until you police your own. At a fucking minimum, kick out the people who call Jews "inbred" (Piker), cannibals (Albanese), and the like... instead of, yanno, elevating them to be speakers of the movement. Until then, all I see is an old quote from Sartre:
*holds a candle up to your right ear and blows through your left ear. The candle goes out. The extinguished wick is still brighter than the intelligence and comprehension in your eyes, though*
Why is it so important to you that you get me to agree with you on this?
it's not important; i don't think you're going to agree with me. i just presented a good case that you're defending ethnic cleansing and you didn't dispute it. we can stop talking here and you can just block me if you want
Ah yes. Because this is the perfect thread to have that discussion. You were literally just fishing for "proof" that "Jews are evil and engaging in genocide ethnic cleansing, and this random Jew I found online didn't dispute it! See, they admit it!" ...on a post regarding how Jews are treated by both the Far-Right and Far-Left as evil, murderous, and subhuman."
I need antizionists like the person above to realize that the Nazis also believed the Jews were committing genocide. They didn't have that word in their vocabulary, obviously, but in Himmler's speech from 1943 he literally says:
"We know how difficult things would be, if today in every city during the bomb attacks, the burdens of war and the privations, we still had Jews as secret saboteurs, agitators and instigators... We have the moral right, we had the duty to our people to do it, to kill this people who would kill us."
Shockingly, people who hate Jews make up lies to justify why killing them is a moral necessity. And you idiots fell for it. Again.
On top of all this, the claim that “the Israel-Hamas war was a genocide” is the “consensus” of Genocide scholarship is just false.
This claim is based on a misrepresentation of a resolution put out by the organization IAGS. The problem with using this resolution as evidence of “consensus” in the field of Genocide scholarship is
IAGS has been somewhat controversial within the field for a while. While it is still the largest body of its kind, a lot of scholars do not take the org all that seriously for a number of reasons, one of which is emphasizing statements (such as this) over actual peer-reviewed research
Only 129 of its estimated 500 members even voted on the resolution
Membership is not limited to genocide scholars; being interdisciplinary isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but the fact anyone with a credit card can join, and a lack of transparency by IAGS, means we can’t know how many (if any) of the members who voted are even in Genocide Studies, and that the IAGS’s statements cannot be taken as the authoritative voice of Genocide Scholarship
After this resolution, more than 500 scholars & experts in the field (i.e., a larger amount than IAGS even has members) signed an open letter condemning the resolution & demanding IAGS retract it
On September 1, the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) drew international headlines by declaring that Israel is committin
So, to recap, an overwhelmingly higher amount of genocide scholars & legal experts who are willing to publicly put their full legal names & stake their professional reputations behind a statement have refutes the claim that the Israel-Hamas war is a genocide, vs. an anonymous vote made by a fraction of members of an org that is open to literally anyone. If one of these statements had to be taken as consensus on this topic, it wouldn’t be the IAGS’s.
Amnesty International's report on genocide, by the way, cites Ghassan Alian's words as evidence of intent to genocide, without noting the somewhat critical caveat that Mr Alian is, by legal standards, Palestinian.
And here's the thing: I think that there is an argument to be made that what happened in Gaza was a genocide, at least by the UN's standards. And I think that's because the UN's standards are very broad, and if we accept Gaza as a genocide we also accept a lot of other things. I wrote a whole thing on why there's about as strong a case for the bombing of Dresden being a genocide, and went through the criteria one by one here. For more, see John Spencer, an urban warfare expert, discussing why Gaza is not a genocide.
There is also far from a universal consensus. Noted scholars such as Menachem Rosensaft, Israel Charny, republished by the nonprofit Genocide Watch, Benny Morris (not a genocide scholar, but a New Historian, an Israeli historian skeptical of the traditional pro-Israeli narratives). Indeed, the ICC's decision was simply saying that it is possible to commit genocide against Palestinians and South Africa's claim was not ipso facto spurious (as, e.g., a claim that Israel was committing genocide against redheads would be), many military experts, over 500 scholars, et cetera et cetera.
Anyway, on the IAGS: I looked at their members after the membership purge and found at least two dogs.
Yeah, but all of these details and nuance don't give dazeddwarf the same moral outrage high as getting to tell Jews that they're the evil ones, not the Nazis, even as they're also saying that we're the new Nazis.
i think hamas and hezbollah and the irgc and basically every terrorist organization hellbent on killing the jews makes a little more sense or is at least more morbidly interesting to look at when you view it under the lens of them being people who just don't know how much power they've lost. because the arab conquests happened so long ago that landback people refuse to acknowledge that colonization happened in the first place, and in that time across the entire world really there were basically no consequences for oppressing jews. nul. efes. because sure there was that occasional pesky uprising but anyone but jews caring about antisemitism is a very very recent historical development. and at the end of the day these groups are religious extremists, and religious extremists more often than not are people so conservative they're basically stuck in the middle ages. so like yeah they're aware that the jews have a state and an army now and all that but just by the osmosis of the kind of culture they live in and absorb jews are still viewed as something very destructible. a century or two ago you could commit a massacre, you could commit many massacres against jews and walk away relatively unscathed. but now jews have actual agency in the world and they have the power to retaliate, retaliate hard even, and that simply doesn't register to the islamist mind. it doesn't compute.
“Where are the trans men in history?” See. When you're born a gender that was forcefully married off, who had to live most of their life indoors, when you had to raise children, and had a lobotomy if your family thought you were a tad too odd, it's kinda hard to come out as a trans man now ain't it.
Every time I see someone say something like “this person wants Palestinians dead” anymore, they’re talking about A) someone who expressed support for Jewish people and/or spoke out against blatant anti-semitism amongst pro-Palestine groups, or B) a Jewish person.
A rule change pushed by White House officials would slash benefits or end support for as many as 400,000 Supplemental Security Income recipi
The Trump administration wants to make a rule change that would decrease or end benefits for SSI recipients who live with their family. As many as 400,000 disabled people may have their benefits cut if this rule change occurs.
It's worth noting as always that as things currently stand, the MAXIMUM benefit a person can receive from SSI is $994 a month.
If two people on SSI are married, the MAXIMUM they can receive is $1,491 a month, total, for both of them. (Meaning marriage to another SSI recipient reduces your maximum income possible to $745 a person each month.)
Could you live on that?
Could you live on that without living with family?
If you tell a yankee "its never okay to kill people for the US no matter how poor you are" you can trigger secret dialogue that makes you understand why Malcolm X hated liberals the way he did
Real talk, though. I am mystified by this whole argument. Are they demanding that the US just not have a military? In this current era of human history? With Russia trying to revive its empire through conquest and China itching to ravage Taiwan?
I get they're saying militaries are evil, but they're still necessary to have. Are they gonna demand everyone else demilitarize too?
Okay so maybe I’m the confused one but where did Malcolm X call for radical demilitarization? Didn’t he lead a militia-adjacent group at one point?
I’m pretty sure he didn’t hate liberals because of the US military existed, he hated people for not standing up for civil rights at home and doing it poorly abroad.
Realistically this is propping up dead Civil Rights leaders like puppets which is part of the racist cycle of history Malcolm X was calling out (I googled it and no, he didn’t. This is a mischaracterization of his views that is so bad I’d classify it as lying.)
i literally know other people have said it before and no honestly i don't know what to do about it but holy shit every morning i wake up and there's some other incredibly-obvious violation of the law. what do you mean only three people voted to put that data center into utah. what do you mean that a data center in michigan was voted down; but they sued the town, won, and is now getting put in anyway. what do you mean that the projected environmental costs of these surveillance-state bunkers is akin to a nuclear bomb.
what do you mean that the president privately settled his own frivolous lawsuit, meaning that he is redistributing tax dollars to the proud boys for emotional damages. what do you mean that he offered a no-bid deal to his friends to seal the reflecting pool. what do you mean his cronies have learned to just dodge questions and lie on the stand. what do you mean about fucking anything he does.
and of course yes the pointless, inhumane war is distracting from the files. of course the gas prices are distracting from the endless push of capitalism's last breath. it's hard to revolt when you have no energy or time left.
and god forbid you try to actually do anything about it, holy shit. i've done the protesting and the volunteering and yes, we are all incredibly burnt out. we've been running on fumes forever, but these days everything feels incredibly pointless. we don't have the money for schools, but we will have the money for more weapons delivered to the police station.
and i don't fucking know the answer! i don't know. everyone says just get out there and vote and like, obviously yes, duh. i'm so well-past voting as an answer, though; because my trust in democracy is essentially zero. no matter how much we beg fucking do something, they just wring their hands and say: well, we need to meet them in the middle. no health care. no social security. no environmental protections. over and over we're told the money doesn't exist; and over and over we reply: it does if you just tax the rich. but don't worry! we can fund ICE with half the fucking treasury! because if he wants it, it gets done.
it is the country's 250th birthday in a month. and look how far we've come.
found in the notes via @oddisht that made me feel better:
some of trump's losses this past week:
- massive inflation has lowered his approval rating to 34%. this is among the lowest ratings recorded for any president in us history, behind the bushes, carter, nixon, and truman
- the senate parliamentarian blocked the $1b funding bill for trump's dumbass gilded ballroom; this also serves as a setback in republican plans to fund ICE
- a judicial seat in baton rouge got flipped blue after protests againsts republican amendments in louisiana
- elon musk lost his $150b ai lawsuit. idc about sam altman but we love seeing elon musk lose
- colorado supreme court ordered its hospitals to ignore trump about trans youth healthcare, by law
- a judge in new york ruled it illegal for ICE agents to arrest immigrants actively in court for their hearings
- a republican in texas backed a democratic state senator based on opposition to data centers
- democrats are projected d+11 in a generic congressional ballot; we only need d+4 to win the house
- he's losing massive amounts of support from his white and male voters
all reported in the past week, but what we see is what is sensationalized. the things we are doing are meaningful! they work!
turnnoffyourmind
dailybridgerton
gummygunk
romaincrisis
