transcript:

Murderous solipsism. Israeli football fans go on a rampage im Amsterdam, tearing down Palestinian flags and shouting racist slogans. Why? Because the very presence of anything Palestinian is a threat to the integrity of the solipsistic bubble we inhabit even when abroad.

Then, of course, we are surprised. How is it that when we do such things we suffer the consequences? How is it that we are attacked? How is it that the Dutch police doesn't recognize that we are on a mission for peace, that we are good while they must be bad?

Events last night in Amsterdam are presented as a "pogrom" here in Israel. We do not occupy the same plane of existence as the rest of you. Our actions have no implications. We can never be the cause of anything. Everything happens to us. Only we are real. Murderous solipsism.

Every article I've found has presented the Israel fans as innocent victims here, but then I read this paragraph in the middle of A CBS Report

So, as Mr. Goldberg says above, before the game Maccabi fans marched through Amsterdam attacking anything Palestinian and chanting "Death to Arabs", and then later after the game these same fans were attacked throughout the city, and yet the whole incident is being portrayed in the press as a spontaneous antisemitic convulsion.

Obvsl this situation is fairly confused right now. On Bluesky, I'm seeing some commentators I trust talk about the attacks being wider than just Maccabi fans, so it's possible there WAS a larger antisemitic element to this but, as of 9:22 CST, This Article from the Associated Press on the issue said there wasn't yet evidence of that

HOWEVER, there's also talk about discussions on Telegram(widely used by fascist and hate groups) of "Jew Hunting" coming out of the Mayor's office. Now, I'm not acquainted with Dutch politics, but after some prelim reading I feel like the Mayor, Famke Halsema, is a dedicated lefist with a strong sense of personal integrity, so I feel like she wouldn't make that up. So the rhetoric was there, even if we don't yet know if it turned into action.

This Article in The Forward(an independent leftist Jewish newwspaper) is, so far, the clearest and most sensible to me. I won't quote much of it, I'd rec reading it it isn't long, but I want to highlight two parts, this quote from a local community organizer:

And this 2nd quote from him ending the article:

My take, at this time, is that this seems to be a case of two groups of hooligans hooliganing at each other, which was intensified by current political events(including the disparity in how anti-genocide activism is violently suppressed by the very local cops escorting Maccabi fans around, protecting them as they cheer genocide and insult the local population).

transcript:

Murderous solipsism. Israeli football fans go on a rampage im Amsterdam, tearing down Palestinian flags and shouting racist slogans. Why? Because the very presence of anything Palestinian is a threat to the integrity of the solipsistic bubble we inhabit even when abroad.

Then, of course, we are surprised. How is it that when we do such things we suffer the consequences? How is it that we are attacked? How is it that the Dutch police doesn't recognize that we are on a mission for peace, that we are good while they must be bad?

Events last night in Amsterdam are presented as a "pogrom" here in Israel. We do not occupy the same plane of existence as the rest of you. Our actions have no implications. We can never be the cause of anything. Everything happens to us. Only we are real. Murderous solipsism.

Every article I've found has presented the Israel fans as innocent victims here, but then I read this paragraph in the middle of A CBS Report

So, as Mr. Goldberg says above, before the game Maccabi fans marched through Amsterdam attacking anything Palestinian and chanting "Death to Arabs", and then later after the game these same fans were attacked throughout the city, and yet the whole incident is being portrayed in the press as a spontaneous antisemitic convulsion.

I must admit it gives me sick joy to see this guy constantly getting himself into new disasters, like knocking over multiple can pyramids at the supermarket

>Converts to Catholicism

>Alienates the Irish block

Jesus fucking christ please fucking vote please vote against these nazis PLEASE

I understand not wanting to vote for genocide in Palestine. Unfortunately you don't have a vote that will do that. No US government can change the Israeli government's policies or kick out Netanyahu and his ilk. That is not within their power.

There is no candidate you can choose who will change the situation in Gaza. You can only vote against a genocide in your own country, and I urge you to do that while you can.

I looked into this to see what was happening, and. It's worse than just a sentiment.

Copied from the Washington Times, which appeared fully in support of this.

here's an argument that actually works with your MAGA coworker in favor of mass deportation: plane tickets cost money and your tax dollars are gonna be seized for it. this kind of talk is ALWAYS a scam.

detention facilities cost billions to build and run and guys thrown in there could be there for years filing legal defenses and who's gonna pay for it? trump? some random millionaire senator from georgia?? the politicians who make bank talking tough about deportation are NOT the working joes who get taxed to pay for the trucks, the prisons, the guards, the paperwork, the plane tickets. even when the projects actually go through and no one up top grabs all the money and runs, these camps divert military resources and bankrupt local communities and wreck property values! so sure, fuck illegals and all, fair enough to be concerned about crime.... but you're letting some slimeball who only cares about getting your vote sell you on the bullshit solution of A WHOLE NEW BRANCH OF GOVERNMENT.

meanwhile like the places immigrants are even a "problem" are like inner cities and they already got a budget for that. when's the last time an illegal around here did anything worse than some rednecks with a meth trailer? shouldn't we keep our defense budget focused on THAT? let Los Angeles manage itself. let New York City buy its own boats! mass deportation is a total scam. let trump fly them out on his own private jet if he cares so much!! c'mon.

see, your maga coworker doesn't care about the dignity of all men and you can't make him... but he absolutely understands the concept that slimeball politicians talk fast and leave their constituents to pay their bills. reach out and let your neighbors know when a campaign pitch is just one more bullshit grift.

Yeah!

Obvsl there are other ways to come to understand this, but I think if ppl understood more about "The History of Ideas" or Philosophical History, this might be a little bit more obvs than it seems.

Like: as @cryptotheism says here, most folks think of fascism as just, like, "Cruelty: the Philosophy", but its philosophical underpinnings lie in Romanticism(Yes: it was ALSO a political philosophy, or more accurately a FAMILY of political philosophies), and in particular the intersection of Romanticism and Nationalism(which overlap so heavily in 1800s Europe that they're practically a single line). There's also inherently a "magical" or "occult" element to this in how fascism conceives of the Body-Politic, in that it abstracts it through the singular person of The Leader as his magical ability to understand and speak for "The People". Like that's not a metaphor that's just literally what fascists think that "The Leader" had a supernatural connection to "The People" which makes democratic forms like "talking to each other" and "compromise" unnecessary.

Sorry for the tangent there. But, yeah, there's a strain in romanticism which is all about valuing emotion and emotional experience for its immediacy and power over the "cold" accuracy of empirical argument, and in fascism you see conservatives taking THIS, mixing it with the older "ultramontane" wholesale rejection of empiricism as an valid approach to knowledge and social organization in favor of Divine Hierarchy(the idea that authorities are Divinely Inspired), and taking the result of that to an absolutely vile extreme. Core to fascism is the idea that even TRYING to know things in an objective sense is a morally disgusting and "weak" act and that True Knowledge is a combination of Will and a very thinly secularized version of Divine Revelation, i.e., "I FEEL that this is True, and I WANT it to be True, and if I just insist it is hard enough it WILL be True."

Borders doesn’t real I have more in common with the Chinese man seeding the torrent I download than my congressman

i feel like there's a tendency to describe things that are liberal as fascist in a way that lets liberalism off the hook- as if genocide and segregation are exclusive to fascism, and as if liberal nations haven't engaged in genocide and segregation as well for as long as they've existed. if we posit that countries like the united states of america, israel, australia, etc are fascist and not liberal then the term liberal just doesn't mean anything. this also gives fascism too much credit-no nation built on fascist principles could last as long as any of the previously listed genocidal liberal nations. similarly, an individual can be bigoted, even genocidal, and still be a liberal.

'but whyyy would tolkien shoehorn sam into a romantic relationship with rosie when it's so obvious that frodo's the most important person in his life?'

hear me out, what if...and this is a long shot...tolkien had lived through some deeply harrowing experiences that emphasised that people can love each other in different ways and they're all equally important? and that the strongest bonds you form aren't always explicitly romantic? what if everything in tolkien's work (eowyn's different loves for faramir and aragorn, boromir having no interest in romantic relationships and putting everything into his love for his city) fairly dripped with the idea that romance isn't the only important sort of love? what then?

Like, I *get* where people are coming from with this, I remember thinking that Sam and Frodo were not-very secretly in love when I was a teenager. Sam is even literally described as being driven by his love for Frodo in the books, and I, a dumbass, thought that had to be romantic love. But that was from my point of view as a teenage boy, back when I still thought that telling anyone other than your significant other that you loved them was somehow emasculating yourself. I am telling you now, as a guy in my mid-thirties, that I have very few friends, but those I have I would absolutely march into the den of a fuck-off huge spider to protect them, and I unashamedly love them, but, and this is important, I would never want to date or fuck them in a million years. 

The English language has saddled us with a very limited range of words for the vast array of meanings that we collectively call “love”, and our culture has become very narrowly focused on romantic love as being the only “true” love. 

Further, Tolkien lived through the first world war, but two of his oldest friends (part of their own private club of only four as school boys) didn’t. The Fellowship mirrors these experiences in many respects: they set out on a deeply perilous journey, they get separated, Gandalf and Boromir die (although Gandalf doesn’t stay dead), and while the remaining members return home more or less intact, none of them are really the same people they were when they left. Frodo eventually goes sailing west with the elves because his experiences had damaged him so much spiritually that he couldn’t live in Middle Earth any longer. Sam, for his part, manages to come back intact, gets married, and stays to raise a happy family despite the harrowing experiences he had and watching what those experiences and the ring did to his best friend. Although Tolkien got married shortly before going to war, and certainly didn’t come back “intact” (he caught trench fever and had the dubious fortune of being medically evacuated back to England shortly before most of his battalion got wiped out in the battle of the Somme), his journey and Sam’s mirror each other. 

Tolkien dearly loved his wife, and he also loved his friends that he lost to the war. Neither of those loves diminished the other, they existed as separate and more-or-less equally important aspects of his life. Sam escorts Frodo on his journey to the sea, but doesn’t sail west with Frodo for the same reason. There’s no doubt that Frodo is incredibly dear to Sam, but that doesn’t make his wife and family suddenly mean nothing. Emotions are fucking complicated, and if you try to boil down the characterization to something as simple as “Sam was in love with Frodo, so obviously he shouldn’t have been shoehorned into a straight relationship”, you’re doing both yourself and the story a major disservice.

It can be deeply meaningful to do a romantic reading of Sam and Frodo. But, since Tolkien’s time, the boundaries of emotional expression in male friendships have constricted so much that some people’s first impression is that the relationship must be romantic. The greater limits on expressions of male friendship are in part reactionary homophobia as gay people gained more visibility: men could still be friends while blowing things up, but where was the basic human tenderness? So even celebrating the standard, by-the-book platonic reading is a challenge to our modern norms at this point.

I think it's also important to recognize love is not exclusionary.

Like: our society teaches us that jealous is a necessary, natural, and good part of love but it isn't any of those things; It's Bad, Actually; Love is NOT some Finite Resource you can run out of; it's NOT Selfish; and it's entirely possible, for instance, for Sam to love Frodo physically and romantically to -as he repeatedly does in the book- romanticize and eroticize Frodo's body and find him beautiful, and for him to ALSO have the ability to fully love, desire, eroticize, and romanticize another person.

Like: the above are all important points(though the cultural approbation of masculine affection over the 2nd half of the 20th century was NOT due to the growing visibility of gay ppl -gay ppl in the 50s and 60s were actl LESS visible than they had been for decades[maybe even a century] before then due to the VICIOUS culmination, in the period of the World Wars and early Cold War, of a long campaign of State-Driven political-homophobia wrapped up with, in my opinion, Nationalism, Political Christianity, and the ~Elite~-driven project to create and promote Nation-State Identities, which was as much about EXCLUDING particular demographics as it was about Defining the traits of each particular ~Nationality~. The ever-shrinking USian masculine emotional universe is a continuation and intensification of this campaign), but it's equally important to recognize that Sam's love for Frodo(which, imo, it is perfectly acceptable to read as romantic and sexual, and perfectly acceptable to read as not) does not negate his love for Rose. There is no competition, there is no restriction, there is no betrayal. It is entirely possible to love more than one person in a romantic and sexual way, and indeed I would argue that is the natural, healthy, and historically more common human emotional state. Jealousy is Poison, not Love, and Love is not a property-relation.

there is nothing essential about russian culture that puts the country on a warpath against its neighbors, there is nothing inherently cruel, violent, or sadistic to be found in it. there is likewise nothing about azerbaijanis or turks that makes them predisposed to barbarity against armenians, kurds, greeks. we are going to see all this happen again and again and again if we buy into this superficial, reactionary argument

"The knife is a weapon of the Other"

"The emerging martial art of Bartitsu, appearing in middle-class magazines during the Boer War, was the encapsulation of British civilian gallantry. Yet Bartitsu would have slid into obscurity had it not been for its curious appearance in the Sherlock Holmes canon. The final showdown of the ‘duel’ between Holmes and Moriarty is a wrestling match between two Victorian masterminds. When Holmes returns to London he tells Watson that he and Moriarty went to battle at the Reichenbach Falls unarmed. Holmes managed to ‘slip through’ Moriarty’s grip as he possessed ‘some knowledge’ of ‘baritsu, or the Japanese system of wrestling’, adding that the art had on occasion been useful to him.

Founded in the 1890s by an Anglo-Scottish engineer, Edward William Barton-Wright (1860–1951), Bartitsu was a synthesis of British boxing, French la savate (kickboxing) and Japanese jujitsu. Barton-Wright tapped into the need for a bourgeois form of self-defence, something which he could promote as being British and yet was also exotic and refined.

The principal aim of Bartitsu’s promoters was ‘to provide a means whereby the higher classes of society may protect themselves from the attacks of hooligans and their like all over the world’. These urban gangs were a new form of folk devil, descendants of the mid-Victorian-era garotter. While they were armed with clubs, knuckles, iron bars and leather belts, it is doubtful that they carried firearms. Nevertheless, the press did represent the hooligan as a threatening presence.

Perhaps the scares promoted the growth of a burgeoning culture of ‘British’ self-defence which avoided the aggressive and increasingly unmanly action of using a firearm against a ruffianly lower-class opponent equipped only with basic weapons.

Barton-Wright follows a literary tradition when he presents his martial art as a British form of self-defence. Pierce Egan’s well-known self-defence manual was supplemented with a word on the ‘Englishness’ of physical heroism, arguing that ‘Englishmen need no other weapons in personal contests than those which nature has so amply supplied them with’. In 1910 the former lightweight boxing champion Andrew J. Newton said in his manual Boxing that ‘the native of Southern Europe flies to his knife’, whereas the ‘Britisher […] is handy with his fists in an emergency’. Elsewhere it was maintained that the ‘Italian, Greek, Portuguese, or South American’ ‘give preference to the knife’ while the Englishman extols boxing. For Barton-Wright, British boxers ‘scorn taking advantages of another man when he is down’, while a foreigner might ‘use a chair, or a beer bottle, or a knife’ or, ‘when a weapon is available’, he might employ ‘underhanded means’. The views of these articles reappear in a later self-defence manual of 1914, where it is argued that Britons ‘live in a country where knife and revolver are not much in evidence’. This statement about the low number of firearms and edged weapons can be read as an attempt to extol British virtues and is not necessarily representative of reality. The knife is a weapon of the Other. Barton-Wright’s view that English practitioners of Bartitsu are principled men is reflected in the Sherlock Holmes canon, where Holmes never uses a knife, although his enemies, whether foreign or British, do so at times."

— Emelyne Godfrey, Masculinity, Crime and Self-Defence in Victorian Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) (very abridged)

I feel like there is a very interesting discussion to have here about nationalism and isolationism. In this dark days, people that should be on the same side of a conflict turn against each other; shut each other out. Lórien rejects dwarves on sight. Rohan speaks a language that foreigners don’t even understand. The Ents aren’t on anyone’s side because noone cares about trees. 

The Enemy is already winning.

@sindar-princeling’s tag: #AND THE WAY LOTR IS ABOUT SLOWLY UNDOING ALL OF THESE BARRIERS

you misunderstand. blorbo from your shows is flat and cringe. blorbo from my shows is full of fascinating depth, perfect writing and infinitely nuanced acting, and deserves, no, needs to be talked about ad nauseum for months on end. 

indeed! our blorbos are only of the best stock

It’s always fun to be reminded how recent European national identities are. Peasants in 1860’s Sicily had never heard the term “Italy” before, the majority of people in France didn’t speak French at the time of the French Revolution, etc.

So “queer” isn’t just an identity that’s broadly inclusive because, I don’t know, we like big parties. There’s actually an underlying ethic, a queer theory, that has political implications.

Its name reclaims a slur because the point is to say, “I am different, but that’s not a bad thing.” The queer movement is about upholding the right of all people to deviate from an oppressive cisgender, heterosexual, patriarchal norm. Broadening the spectrum of acceptable diversity; questioning and dismantling the social pressures that police and punish deviance. Changing not just our own lives, but how our entire society thinks about sex and gender.

That’s why “queer” embraces so many different groups. It’s not trying to erase their differences, but to try to coherently understand the complex overlapping pressures that affect each of them, and to extend our reach beyond the LGBT+ community. It’s about the right of lesbians to live without men and the right of trans and nonbinary people to be who they are, the right of asexuals to define for themselves what’s significant in their lives, the right of straight men to be vulnerable and emotional and nonviolent. When the great queering project is done, you will see the changes everywhere, not just in small LGBT+ enclaves.

It’s recognizing that something that harms or oppresses one of us is pretty likely to harm all of us, so we all benefit from taking it down together.

Did you just say emotional straight men are qu*er? Did you deadass just say that cishet men are part of the lgbt community? And y’all wonder why so many people hate it?

(sigh) I’ll repeat myself:

For everyone who’s like “Whoa, I was with you until you threw straight men in there”:

Homophobia is a huge part of how all men are policed. If a man isn’t strong, tough, aggressive, and dominant? He gets called gay. So this isn’t “Soft straight men are totally LGBT+ and belong in your gay support group!” but it is “Part of the work of disassembling homophobia is changing how it affects straight men.”

It’s the same way that men aren’t the primary intended beneficiaries of feminism, but part of the work of feminism is addressing and changing toxic masculinity. If you’re effective enough at changing the system, you change it for everyone.

(more discussion here)

To reiterate: One way that toxic masculinity is kept as the default pattern of behavior for straight men is that they are punished, quickly and efficiently, for any show of vulnerability. Dismantling the structures that enforce traditional gender roles is one way to ensure that LGBT people are welcomed in society. 

The world would be much more accepting if Joe Cishet didn’t feel the need to correct every single deviation from the toxic behaviors he believes are required.

The curb cut effect is good y’all. Not bad.

I’m stuck on “the great queering project”

Queer theory uses “to queer” to mean “to interpret in a way that causes something to depart from cisheteronormative societal standards” or “to interpret as queer”. It originated in literary and cultural criticism, but it can be used to describe the tangible social inroads LGBTQ+ people have made in dismantling cisheteronormativity itself.

the people that insist on seeing queers as wrong have fallen into the trap of respectability politics: that there is an inherent virtue in being normal, and thus that being different is bad. they might say they believe in diversity, but it comes with caveats: this much is okay, but not that much. there’s a right way to be gay, there’s a right way to be lesbian, there’s a right way to be trans– oh and of course it’s transgender and not transsexual, don’t you know–and anyway there is an order to all of this. there are forms and functions and boxes and definitions and it’s so important to make sure no one legitimizes the real freaks out there!

the thing is that when you don’t need to measure and quantify someone’s distance from the norm in order to figure out if it’s okay for them to be like that, everyone gets to live much better lives. even you. you get to chill the fuck out. you get to mind your damn business. 

you literally get to live and let live. 

thus: we’re here. we’re queer. get used to it. 

^^^All of this^^^

Also: important to remember that we only remember toxic masculinity as “traditional” because we’ve been propagandized to think it’s centuries old when it isn’t. Most of this stuff is a product of the post WWII era. The fact is that the cult of ~Hardness~ -the idea that men should be emotionless and unaffectionate; uninvolved, disinterested Dads and abusive husbands- is relatively new even in Euro cultures, and has a lot more to do with the preferences of industrial capitalism, Imperialism, and Nationalism[Hierarchical and Us vs Them politics work best if you cultivate emotional alienation, as this facilitates the dehumanization and violence both require to maintain&spread themselves] than  with history or “tradition”. This isn’t to say that none of these elements can be found in male socialization before the 20th century or the 16th, but it IS to say that the whole of them, brought together as a coherent ideology and propagated by Imperial Nation-States and Libertarian-Capitalists both, is a very new development.

And, obvsl, propagating this went hand-in-hand with criminalizing and persecuting Queerness. As the modern National-Capitalist State spread its influence deeper into society -promoting the concepts of masculinity, femininity, family and Humanity it found most convenient for its ambitions- that necessarily meant defining them AGAINST someone; defining a THEM the US could enforce itself by persecuting. And so modes of life that had been tolerated and accepted as normal for centuries became, more and more, objects of OFFICIAL revulsion requiring OFFICIAL and LEGAL harassment and punishment.

tl;dr: There’s nothing “Natural” or “Standard” about the persecution of queer folks, let along “Right”. People don’t do it instinctively; they do it because they’ve been taught to do it, and new people can be taught different by future societies.

gettin real fuckin tired of how many proudly leftist / liberal blogs uncritically denigrate israel without any acknowledgement whatsoever that outside of israle, jews in the middle east are comprehensively screwed. please look at this chart from wikipedia of what the 20th century did to us. 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_exodus_from_Arab_and_Muslim_countries

quick math on those numbers: there are a hundred times less jews now in the middle east than there were a hundred years ago, and the numbers are continuing to go down because jews continue to face discrimination and violence. alongside the european holocaust, jewish communities in the middle east were destroyed down to a hundredth of their populations. please let that sink in. ninety ninety nine out of a hundred people, gone, and that very last one in serious danger. 

the plight of palestinians is not justified by this; it’s complicated and tragic and important. however, jewish populations in every single muslim-majority state are under ongoing threat as well, and i have never, ever, not once, seen acknowledgement of this by the same people who denigrate the israeli state.

to criticize jewish extirpation of non-jews, to focus on the one example of it that is happening anywhere, but to be complacently silent and ignorant of all the pogroms against jews that are ongoing basically everywhere else, is to send a very clear message to everyone listening to you: you don’t think jews have a right to exist, and you will sit back while they continue to be destroyed. 

if this isn’t the message you want to be sending, rethink what you’re saying and why you’re saying it. if it’s a message you’re comfortable with, then go fuck yourself.