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philosopherking1887 · 8 hours ago

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I agree with pretty much everything OP says here, but as an academic philosopher (though not an ethicist), I need to complicate the points about moral philosophy at the end. There are Leftists, often inspired by Marx and/or anti-colonial theorists, who claim that applying the same formally impartial legal and moral principles to the stronger and the weaker is effectively rigging the game in favor of the strong. (Discussion under the cut because the post is already really long.)

Consider the capitalist notion of "freedom of contract" used to defend the fairness of employment conditions that the employee (supposedly) agreed to just as freely as the employer -- ignoring the fact that employees must work to live, and are faced with the threat of poverty and starvation if they refuse to agree to even the most degrading conditions, while the employers have plenty of resources and no shortage of potential workers who will agree to the contract even if one refuses. Antitrust laws established to prevent businesses from banding together to fix prices and cheat consumers were also used to bust unions -- which are also, in a sense, vendors of labor colluding to fix the price of their labor higher than it would be if they were in proper market competition. But we all think there's a big moral difference between labor unions and industrial cartels, precisely because of the relative power of the participants.

Anti-colonial theorists have applied similar principles in cases of conquered populations trying to throw off their conquerors. The idea is that if they were expected to follow the same rules, they would have no chance of winning; it would be like saying a boxing match between a giant and a five-year-old child is "fair" because neither of them have any weapons beyond their hands. Proponents of the Israel-as-colonial-oppressor/ Hamas-as-noble-resistance narrative will say this when you bring up Hamas's violations of the laws of war:

"Well, of course they wear civilian clothes instead of uniforms and hide themselves and their weapons among civilians -- they're a scrappy band of guerrilla fighters, using standard guerrilla tactics! American Revolutionaries did the same thing!"

"Of course they have to take hostages; that's the only way they can gain leverage over a much more powerful opponent, and prevent them from destroying the whole territory!"

"Of course they have to deliberately kill some civilians; that's the only way to make such a powerful enemy bleed, and make it seem like it's not worth the cost of maintaining the colonial occupation. Look at the Algerian resistance, look at the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya -- yes, they brutally slaughtered some civilians, settlers as well as local collaborators, but that was a necessary condition for getting the occupiers to leave!"

The problem with these arguments, however, is that they tacitly presume a prior judgment of the moral justification of the two sides' positions. Imagine, for example, Leftists saying the same things about a neo-Nazi uprising in the US, about the Proud Boys and the Oathkeepers, or about the right-wing Contra militias fighting against the communist government in Nicaragua in the 1980s. If it were purely about comparative military capability and their chance of winning without resorting to such tactics, the very same principles would apply. But it's only desirable for the less powerful to have a chance of winning if we already assume they're in the right -- either because they're less powerful (which is the bad assumption the post was addressing) or on independent ethical grounds (because the underdog is regarded as the champion of freedom, human rights, Leftist principles, etc.). So it turns out that they're still appealing to an ultimately impartial conception of morality, but it's just a different one than the form of deontology that says all combatants are equally required to obey the laws of war: either different rules apply based on the moral righteousness of the cause (maybe there are exemptions in exceptional circumstances, or people considered guilty as oppressors are liable to righteous punishment); or they're relying on a form of consequentialism rather than deontology, where the well-being of a few must be sacrificed for the well-being of a greater number (this seems less plausible because of the emphasis that Leftists seem to place on guilt and deserved retribution, which suggests that if they have a consistent morality at all, it's deontological).

The specific defenses of Hamas's war crimes listed above also rely on some factual assumptions that would need to be true for the justifications to work, but are in fact false:

A fighting force can only be justified in hiding among civilians to confound their opponent if there is broad civilian support for them and their cause. As I understand it, popular opinion in Gaza is much more divided: some civilians will happily hide Hamas militants, weapons, and hostages in their homes; but many are furious that Hamas puts a target on all of them by firing rockets from residential neighborhoods and putting their tunnel networks under hospitals and schools. Popular protest movements in Gaza, like the 2019 "We want to live" protests, have been violently suppressed, so opponents of Hamas are often too afraid to protest, but the population has been emboldened recently as Hamas has been weakened by the Israeli offensive. (Leftists try to have it both ways on this: if they regard Hamas as virtuous heroes, they'll say that all Gazans support everything they do, and accuse you of either tokenizing or spreading Israeli propaganda if you try to point out the anti-Hamas protests; if they acknowledge that Hamas has done horrible things, they'll claim that all Gazan civilians have nothing to do with them and so are completely innocent. Either way, it's more complicated than that, because Gazans are people and people are complicated. Who'da thunk?)

Taking hostages to give the enemy a reason not to lay waste to your territory presupposes that the enemy would do that if not for the need to avoid killing the hostages. Leftists like to paint Israel as evil enough to do that -- hence the "genocide" charge -- but there's no good reason to think they are, considering the precautions they have taken in every conflict with Hamas to try to minimize civilian casualties -- including when there weren't any hostages. Hamas's strategy of operating out of, or under, protected sites like hospitals and schools relies on the assumption that Israel will have compunctions about hitting such sites -- Hamas themselves are relying on Israel having more ethical scruples than they do! And it doesn't go without saying that a state combatant will consider itself bound by the laws of war: contrast Russia, which strikes hospitals and other civilian infrastructure in Ukraine without any pretext of aiming for a military target nearby.

Brutally slaughtering civilians to convince a colonial power that it's not worth the cost of staying only makes any sense if you're actually dealing with a foreign colonial power that has the option of leaving. Hamas and other Palestinian extremists, and the useful idiots on the Western Left who have swallowed their propaganda whole, seem to have the fantasy that they can drive out all of the 7 million Jews who live in Israel. The jihadists might prefer to kill them, but the deluded Leftists who believe that Hamas is a righteous liberation force rather than a genocidal death cult imagine that all Israeli Jews could just go back to where they came from, which they assume is either the US ("Don't they all have apartments in Brooklyn?" -- something I have genuinely seen people on this hellsite say) or Europe ("Go back to Poland" -- i.e., the place where most of your family was murdered, often with the gleeful assistance of their neighbors). This ignores, obviously, that more than half of Israeli Jews are descendants of those expelled from Arab/Muslim countries in the Middle East and North Africa, and they decidedly do not have the option of going back. The slaughter of Israeli civilians will not convince them all to leave; it will only provoke efforts to eliminate the threat, as would be the case with any nation facing a persistent external threat to its safety.

Y'know all the Gen Z folks online who oversimplify the entire world and all morality into a binary oppressor and victim dynamic which...just doesn't reflect reality?

Which routinely regards murdering, raping, suicide bombing, gay-hating, misogynist terrorists...as the good guys?

Want to know how they developed this particular set of cognative distortions?

This worldview, often seen among Millennials and very common among Gen Z leftists, was produced by the corruption of a good and useful bit of critical theory meant to address nuance, complexity, and compassion: intersectionality.

Coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, intersectionality began as a way to explain how different forms of discrimination overlap and interact, especially for Black women who face both racism and sexism in ways that neither anti-racist nor feminist frameworks alone fully addressed.

So, for example:

A white woman might face sexism but not racism.

A Black man might face racism but not sexism.

A Black woman faces both, and often in compounded ways.

This seems like a helpful way to understand complexity in lived experiences, right?

Because it is! It's fantastic and appropriate and necessary! Sojourner Truth brought it up in 1851.

So late Millennials and Gen Z college students were exposed to sloppy versions of Crenshaw's thesis and, like a lab leak, the idea spread beyond academic critical theory into activist and online spaces...where it began to mutate into something else entirely.

Instead of just understanding overlapping disadvantages, intersectionality became a kind of oppression calculator.

People began to stack their marginalized identities in a way that assigned moral authority. The more marginalized identities you hold, the more your voice is prioritized.

If you have "privileged" identities (white, male, cisgender, etc.), you may be expected in leftist spaces to sit down, shut up, and only listen.

The problem: it is awfully illiberal to grant agency to (or take agency from) an individual based on their group association.

(Liberals recognize that as old fashioned bigotry masquerading as justice.)

Oppressor/Oppressed

So this framing helped flatten the complexity of individuals into a binary of oppressor or oppressed, based solely on which and how many marginalized identities one can claim.

This inevitably led to hierarchies of victimhood in which competing identities are ranked to determine whose suffering is more valid.

Leftists seemingly trade memes like the one below without irony:

That's the origin of Oppression Olympics.

This is where it went completely off the rails, with some movements and organizations deciding that only those with certain identities or performed political perspectives should be permitted to speak.

But...what if you're not a holder of one of these victim identities? Well, if you belong to a privileged group, you're now the proud owner of collective guilt and are held responsible for the system of oppression...even if you've personally done nothing wrong.

This made it easy to turn entire groups, millions of complex people in varying and nuanced circumstances...into simplified moral symbols.

If a group is judged powerful or privileged, it (and anyone associated with it) is an oppressor.

If a group is judged marginalized, it becomes the victim.

Wait, though - it gets worse.

Once this kind of "intersectionality" (which no longer resembled Crenshaw's) became part of the social media discourse, algorithms boosted simple, emotional content that aligned with the victim/oppressor binary. In social media, engagement is everything, and it distorts everything.

Gen Z folks are particularly susceptible to these distortions because they have spent most of their lives soaking in performative social media activism which offers a (wrong but) clear, simple, binary moral compass in a world which otherwise feels messy, confusing, and overwhelming. This gives them the opportunity to express solidarity with those who suffer injustice, which makes them feel like they're good people for siding with the good people against the bad people.

So intersectionality went from "people are complex" to "if you check [X] boxes, you are righteous, and if not...you're complicit."

Intersectionality started as a tool for empathy and nuance, helping us see how systems of oppression intersect and interact. This, I want to repeat, is great.

In social media activism, though, it got flattened into a worldview where people and nations are judged morally and collectively based on their group identities and perceived power.

You know how you can tell that this isn't really justice? Justice is rarely so simple, binary, and completely devoid of nuance.

Okay, so there's the mindset of the Gen Z leftist. Let's look at how they apply it to Israel.

The many and complex facts and long history of the Arab/Israeli conflict don't fit neatly into this framing, so the narratives must be re-written to cram them into the shape such leftists demand:

Palestinians = oppressed

Framed as an indigenous, stateless people living under military occupation and suffering from systemic discrimination, they are exclusively innocent victims without agency who need the good people of the West to save them from...

Israel/Jews = oppressors

Cast as a colonial, European, settler colonialist, imperialist, racist power, seen as inflicting structural violence on a vulnerable population.

And because these leftists don't read history (just memes and TikTok), they believe this oppression has been going on from time immemorial.

(That's perhaps part of where they get the idea that "Palestine" is an ancient civilization.)

This framework, this need to be on the right side of a false binary requires them to aggressively ignore, bury, appropriate, downplay, or invert all Jewish historical trauma, indigeneity, and security concerns...all to make a complex set of circumstances fit into the box of their simple moral binary.

Think about it. Isn't that the content of most of the ugly comments you get from them? Simple, moral binaries which aren't supported by facts, evidence, or reason?

(Yes, the far right Gen Z folks do the same thing for different reasons and in a mirror...where victim and Oppressor switch places. That's how we get cishet white Christian males who are certain they're being oppressed, but that's a topic for another time, maybe.)

Israel as White Colonial Power

Israel is increasingly racialized as "white" or "European," despite its multi-ethnic population (including ~50% Mizrahi/ Sephardi Jews and ~20% Arab citizens).

Zionism, instead of being recognized as a liberation movement for Jews after ~2000 years of genocides and ethnic cleansings, is recast as an extension of European settler colonialism...despite Jews being undeniably indigenous to the region and never meeting the definition of 'settler colonialism.'

The term's definition, the leftists realize, must be changed so they can cram Israel into the oppressor box! It's become a common tactic.

Remember when Amnesty International could only try to make "genocide" stick to Israel by changing the definition of genicide?

Remember when Ireland demanded that the ICJ change the definition of genocide for the exclusive purpose of slapping that label on Israel?

Its still effin' ridiculous, but at least this finally explains their cognative distortion of reality: They must distort reality in order to feel okay about themselves.

Palestinians as Eternal Victims

Palestinians, to be crammed into this framing, are depicted as having no agency, portrayed solely as victims of Israeli evil.

Violence by Palestinian actors (terrorism, 138 suicide bombings, incitement...October 7th...) is justified, excused, or omitted as a "reaction" to occupation. They're oppressed, say the leftists, so they bear no responsibility for their choices.

Like children. Infantilizing, isn't it?

Power is Oppression

Israel's military, economy, and alliance with the US make it the powerful party and therefore the oppressor. Why?

Because the framing requires the more powerful side to be morally wrong...even if it is acting in self-defense.

Not satisfied with ordinary Jewish Erasure, this victim/oppressor framing erases:

Jewish indigeneity to the land.

The Holocaust's role in accelerating global Zionist momentum after WWII

The ethnic cleansing of 850,000 Jews from Arab lands, most of whom went to Israel.

~2,000 years of Jewish ethnic cleansings and genocides.

This false binary requires that Jews be racialized as white and labeled privileged.

De-legitimizing the oppression of Jews usefully de-legitimizes their right to self-determination.

So history, facts and reason are set aside, any attempt to bring nuance to the conversation is shut down, any fact or point of view shared by an Israeli or a Jew is obviously a lie because Jews, remember, are oppressors. As a result, any defense of Israel is framed as siding with oppression. (As has been the case so many times before, Jews are just wrong and evil and will therefore be condemned regardless of what they do.)

Again, think about it. How many times on Tumblr have you seen a reasoned defense of Israel and the response from the tankies is something along the lines of 'you're lying and defending genocide?'

The victim-oppressor lens simplifies the complex, long-term Israel-Arab conflict into a grotesquely, dishonestly simplified morality play with a powerful villain and a powerless victim.

That's why kids who claim to care about justice do shit like this:

Understanding how they got like this is just the first step.

The next question is:

Can they be de-programmed?

Thoughts?

#moral philosophy #israel/palestine #israel/hamas war #oppression olympics #intersectionality #long post #very long post #all queued up with nowhere to go

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philosopherking1887 · 16 hours ago

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It’s summer and that means the kids are going to camp! Last week the kids were at gymnastics camp at the place they take lessons. This week they’re at kosher culinary camp at the local Chabad.

The difference could not be more stark.

Last week, I drove up outside the front doors for pick up and drop off, shouted their first names through the window of my car, and either received a thumbs up at drop off, or had the kids walk out unaccompanied at pick up.

This week, I had to walk them inside (adults have to present ID to be allowed in the building) and check them in with two separate sets of adults. I had to present ID again (separately from getting into the building) to be allowed to pick them up. If someone who is not their legal guardian is going to pick them up, paperwork needs to be filled out in advance.

Last week, the only people outside the building were a couple of teenagers in orange vests to make sure the littlest of kids got inside the building ok.

This week, the only people outside the building were security guards with walkie talkies on one hip and very obvious pistols on the other.

My kids are signed up for three different Jewish camps this summer. All three of them have sent emails outlining the security measures in place to protect the children. No details, because the more people that know the details, the easier it is for someone with ill intent to discover and subvert them, but I know that there will be armed security personnel at all three camps and they will be coming with on field trips. I know that staff at all three camps have been conducting safety drills in the weeks leading up to camp, and I know that all three camps are partnered with local and federal law enforcement to stay up to date on any threats or recommended security changes.

I have never received information like this from any non-Jewish camp. I have received information like this from every Jewish camp.

This is what Jews are talking about when we say that antisemitism impacts the way we live our lives even when we are not being directly targeted by antisemitism. Summer camps shouldn’t have to hire armed guards to keep kids safe. Going to camp at the JCC should not put you at greater risk for violence than going to camp at the YMCA. Requesting that non-Jews help us live in a world where that’s true is not a ridiculous thing to ask.

And before anyone tries to say “Oh just because you feel like you’re not safe that doesn’t mean you’re actually not safe,” I’d like to point out two things. The first is that the Chabad my kids were at today has received multiple bomb threats in the last couple of years. We feel like we’re not safe because people have made it clear that they would like to attack us. We are, in fact, actually not safe.

And the second is that even if we were actually safe, and all the people out there who were saying that (((Zionist))) institutions should be attacked were just running their mouths and were not going to act on it (disproven by recent (and not recent) violent attacks, but we’ll accept the premise for the sake of argument), isn’t it pretty messed up that antisemitic actions have made Jews feel like this is necessary? Like, if one person in a couple was constantly so verbally threatening to their partner that the partner was 1) fearful for their safety and 2) felt it necessary to reach out to law enforcement, we would rightfully call that abuse. Why can we easily recognize that behavior as being immoral in that scenario, but find it acceptable in the local/national/fucking global treatment of Jews?

#antisemitism #judaism

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