AufheBonus Bonus - Nov 2023
Added 2023-11-20 07:00:04 +0000 UTCOn your criticisms.
[Patreon Exclusive]
We respond to your points made in the comments on Patreon over the past few months. The first section is of course dedicated to the Gaza war, followed by discussion on hyperliberalism, neutrality, big tech, outsourcing, and drugs.
Comments
Decent responses that I don’t necessarily agree with, but it’s clearer where you guys stand which seems like the point. (More video please. It makes you guys harder to hate for some reason.) I think Phil has a politician’s habit of answering a question he’d like to answer rather than addressing the actual premise of the question. I think the point the listener made about the way the US and British economies are intertwined with Israel’s was not that we judge the importance of each alliance by its economic impact. More that the specific way it works in this case implies some measure of moral responsibility for the actions of the Israeli state in these western nations. You guys deftly avoid that by saying this is entirely a political question and the rest is just irrational and therefore irrelevant. I’d say that’s rarely the case, especially in the Middle East. You can’t ignore the horrific substance of the actions here, they directly impact and affect the nature of the political question. If the realities, as Alex says, make a neat political answer from either side an impossibility (Israel as a non ethno state, Palestinians rejecting hamas) should we just throw our hands up and walk away? Or look even deeper and see which levers we can push to alter the character of the situation so a politic solution can reveal itself? The latter seems to me to be what the protest movements of the left are currently trying to do, and not as Phil says, just lamenting the plight of the powerless. Take note of how strongly the American labor movement has taken action on this politically-that seems significant.
Bartleby
2023-12-07 16:29:31 +0000 UTCNo one noted that the impetus for the use of 'genocide' and 'apartheid' is essentially legal. If the occupation and the war can be defined in ways that are fully contained within these terms then legal avenues open up for the human rights approach. This is a legal game - lawyers do their legal thing, looking for definitional correspondences, for matches with precedent. Likewise, Israel's energetic resistance to the use of this language - to the point where they seem happy to accept almost any other description of their conduct, so long as no one says 'apartheid' - must be read in these terms. Israel's fear is that its conduct will be neatly absorbed by these terms, that international bodies will codify them and that this will be damaging to its international position. Israel must be allowed to continue to float above legal determination and not be pulled down into it which would limit its room for manoeuvre. This also explains the liberal obsession with pinning these terms on the conflict. So much of contemporary liberal discourse has its origin in human rights case law, liberals take their lead from legally-ordered institutions.
Steve Bowbrick
2023-11-27 11:58:12 +0000 UTC
