Maybe, just maybe, your deep concern for the The safety of the Jewish community would be abated by becoming leaders in stopping Israel from wiping out the Palestinians. Advocate for your community you care so deeply for, and insist Israel stop targeting children, women, hospitals and all innocents in their maniacal zeal to occupy the territory of Palestine. Or express some concept of acceptance that the Palestinians deserve to live in peace without the fear of being bombed, starved or have access to clean water. They cannot because they are effectively trapped by Israel in an Israeli outdoor prison. They have no freedom of movement because the world's 7th largest military crushes them under their weight, like an elephant on an egg.
How about you stop the anemic whining about the conditions of your freedom at least and until, you speak up about the brutality the state of Israel employs against a population, who can only dream of the freedom your complaining about?
Being Jewish isn't special. Jewish folk are no more God's chosen than any Palestinian, or anyone else for that matter, on this planet. But Jewish folk, sure have a lot of advantages, they bend a lot of ears with the whining and victimization of their beliefs. Israel sure has enough money and guns and are masters at weaving the narrative to their advantage with this exact kind of talking points about antisemitic treatment. Absent in the narrative ate the talking points of why the global view of your plight might not be met with sympathy or exist in such a simplistic terms you have laid out.
Until Palestinians have the same level of safety, security and right of determination as the Israelis have, your identity whining and "me, me, me, complaints are hollow, and mock the suffering and the pain of the Palestinian people.
If the mistreatment of Jews is to be expected because of the actions of Israel, then it is very easy to argue that the mistreatment of Palestinians is to be expected because of the actions of Hamas. I suspect many far-right Israelis would agree with your argument once we swap out Jewish for Palestinian and occupation with terrorism.
It's a 'spectrum' is it not? I'd even go so far as saying that what Bibi did in Gaza was ... 'understandable' which is at least cozying up to 'justified' but not quite there. It seems to me that the whole project of all sides trying to 'justify' themselves on the basis of the previous atrocity by some other side, has to be abandoned because *that* atrocity, too, is justified by some atrocity previous to it. It's atrocities all the way down to Joshua and even before that. IOW the 'justification layer-cake' is rather thick.
Absolutely, justifying atrocities with references to past atrocities results in an endless cycle. That being said, I was referring to the committing of crimes against random Jews and Jewish institutions/random Palestinians and Palestinian institutions, not the underlying conflict motivating the crimes. My point was that I can see no bright-line rule that distinguishes a guy assaulting a random Palestinian over Palestinian terrorism from a guy assaulting a random Jew over Israeli occupation.
Exactly. Murder is just murder. Yet, all this is to be 'expected' -- it is going to happen. Bibi's crimes in Gaza have opened the floodgates of random jihadi attacks against any Jew anywhere in the world. Even pro-Palestinian Jews like my Dad. I'd like it to stop.
The two opposing arguments are not equitable. Hamas is not equitable to the state of Israel. They are absolutely the under of the underdog. They are dismissed immediately by the international community as terrorists. It used to be the PLO, and to no avail, to be considered a seat at the table, they too struggled to be seen as advocates for justice as they were also labeled as "terrorists. " where are they now exactly?
In a liberal democrascy, the individual is the unit of "self-determinatiion."
This won't end until we stop talking about "The" Jewish People and "The" Palestinian People, and focus on Jewish people and Palestinian people (as persons).
Yabut the Palestinians as individuals still require a Palestinian state in which they can have self determination, so the there's no escaping the collective reference.
What state do you live in? Do you lack "self-determination"?
REPEAT: In a liberal democracy, the INDIVIDUAL is the unit of self-determination. The State exists to guarantee equal protection to all individuals, regardless of ethnicity.
Jews shouldn't "require" a Jewish State, and Palestinians shouldn't "require" a Palestinian state.
Jews should be free to return in peace from 2,000 years of Exile -- but that doesn't automatically call for a Jewish State. (FWIW, Judah Magnes had the right idea -- despite the antagonism of both ethninationaist Zionists and anti-Israel Palestinians.)
At this point, that might not be what many of the inhabitants want -- but considering the results thus far, they've obviously got it wrong!
> Jews shouldn't "require" a Jewish State, and Palestinians shouldn't "require" a Palestinian state.
I take your point, alas, in the real world the Jews *do* require a Jewish state and ditto the Palestinians. There's always a tension between idealism and ugly reality, no? I'm a bit of a political orphan on this file because I support both Israel's 'right to exist' *and* the Palestinians right to a state of their own -- while being an 'islamophobe' and half Jewish but raised Christian.
"Coercive" great word, coercive. Does that coercion extend to AIPAC? The influence peddling and huge sums of cash with an rotating door to our elected officials qualify as "coercion?" How about legacy media's constant obsequious endorsement of Israeli policy and narratives? Does that qualify as "coercive?"
You tell me, because I think American public opinions reflect a "knee jerk" support for the Israeli point of view and it didn't get that way organically.
I'd put it like this: The Jews should wake up to the current reality. Until the Palestinians get some sort of just settlement, antisemitism WILL keep increasing. I know this is difficult but try to understand the difference between what SHOULD happen and what WILL happen.
> they bend a lot of ears with the whining and victimization of their beliefs. Israel sure has enough money and guns and are masters at weaving the narrative to their advantage with this exact kind of talking points about antisemitic treatment
The Jews have been very slow to wake up to the observed fact that they can no longer invoke their Victimhood. They are now white Oppressors (congratulations??) That's the fact of the matter irrespective of what anyone thinks 'should' be the case. In decades past, even threatening to call someone an antisemite was as sure to shut them up as calling them a racist or a bigot. Doesn't work anymore. Opposing Israel -- and by association hating Jews -- is now almost de rigueur on the Left. Zionists desperately try to claim that anyone opposing Israel is automatically an antisemite -- but again, it just isn't working.
This is the critical argument for why the 1st Amendment is essential to protect minorities, including Jews. But I think what’s often missing from the “free speech” conversation is that civil society must play a role in preventing our universal moral TABOOS against overt hateful bigotry and the endorsement of violence from getting expressed and normalized. And the only way we can do that is with social consequences, which may look like “cancel culture” but must be distinguished as a legitimate and necessary form of social ostracism. This was a crucial lever to marginalize the KKK out of polite society, i.e. we didn’t let unmasked KKK members live normal lives.
Like you and many others, I detest “cancel culture”. What I’m proposing is a principled, non-partisan approach to ostracize those who explicitly and egregiously and unapologetically advocate for violence and discrimination, which doesn’t just assess single actions and allows for forgiveness and redemption for those that choose to moderate themselves and attempt repair for any harm they caused.
I spend all of my time arguing for the restoration of these essential TABOOS, and recently wrote about the nuance missing from the discussion on “stochastic terrorism” - an abused term but a concept we must take very seriously. I would love to hear your thoughts on this topic. On whether this most extreme hateful bigotry is nearly universally seen as socially unacceptable, whether we can apply a principled approach to ostracize it out of polite society (as we had done up until October 8th), this time without succumbing to the excesses of cancel culture, and what happens if we don’t?
“Polite society”? That’s an awfully quaint concept, and possibly irrelevant in a populist age where distrust of institutions (and therefore the people who uphold them) is frighteningly low. The greatest harm social media has inflicted on us is not so much “misinformation” as mistrust, the assumption that mainstream media and “polite society” are in some ways “enemies of the people.” As long as people outsource their minds to an internet-connected device, “polite society” is going to be circling the drain. The most promising solutions are content-neutral, such as banning smartphones in schools. Perhaps we can create more phone-free spaces, find more ways for people to actually spend time being present with other people. It would be great if we could find a way to ban the algorithms designed to hold people’s attention and keep them on their devices, which are responsible for a lot of the radicalization we’ve seen—instead of trying to regulate content, regulate usage, like we do with cigarettes.
I can certainly empathize with the cynicism, and there's a lot of truth there.
While we certainly can't get "polite society" to agree on much, I do think that the vast majority (>95%) of Americans agree on our core values of liberty and equality, and thus, more specifically, believe that overt, hateful bigotry and the endorsement of political violence are socially unacceptable. There's no shortage of evidence to the contrary, but I don't think our failure to consistently enforce these taboos proves that people are opposed to them, and if pressured to confront that sort of hate, would explicitly reject it and those who espouse and sanitize it.
I am not a cynic, though I know “being realistic” is what cynics claim to be. Nonetheless, reading a variety of sources including some various Reddit forums and polling analysis (I’m thinking in particular of a. Bulwark post from JVL a few weeks ago) reveals that our easy assumption that most Americans basically share liberal values is probably misguided. Certainly a majority does, but how big that majority is and how much they agree on the meaning of “liberty” or “equality” is not simple. Many Americans live in an alternate cultural/information environment where what we see as liberty is perceived as threatening their way of life (faith and family).
I think the "Perception Gap" study from a few years ago, along with polling like this https://americaspoliticalpulse.com/citizens#section=violence&crime=violence3 indicates that there is very broad agreement across society that the most extreme hatred and intolerance is socially unacceptable, but also a misperception that more Americans tolerate this hatred than truly do.
That's not to say there isn't a tremendous risk of the distortion field, or even this tiny subset of radicalized extremists, but I do think the majority is still on the side of core liberal democratic values of general tolerance, even if they can't always articulate it or sometimes excuse violations of these values due to partisanship/tribalism. I just believe that we, the vast majority of society, can and must hold people accountable when they egregiously violate those core values, and if we draw and hold that moral line, we'll be ok. So I will continue advocating for precisely that, to make this hateful bigotry TABOO again.
I think that mainly shows that there is broad agreement that actual violence is bad, and people understand that getting hit by a thrown rock is serious. And it is good to know that for all the talk about immanent civil war, almost no one is really up for violent conflict. The real threat is bad actors taking advantage of polarization to consolidate power and chip away at/smash structures that maintain social welfare and peace among nations.
I'm 100% with you on that threat. I'm hoping we can activate enough of a sliver of the vast majority of moderate, normal, non-hateful Americans to draw a line and ostracize the Illiberal, hateful bigots out of polite society before they burn it all down.
Yeah I do agree with this. I think there is a lack of consequence in society. It used to be that you would be ostracised, but for really horrible things you would lose your job.
I think some of the problem now is people can hide who they are on social media, and if they aren’t anonymous they will always fall back to a group/echo chamber that will have them.
Indeed, and that's why I'm encouraging a universal, principled, non-partisan approach so that everybody is expected to police/ostracize their own tribes as well, or face their own social consequences as a sort of "moral accountability by association". If people stayed uncritically associated with David Duke or other hateful bigots, they'd have been ostracized out of polite society as well.
We can and must re-impose these types of social consequences for people that explicitly and egregiously cross the line and violate our universal moral TABOOS, or those taboos will fully erode and destroy all Western liberal democracies.
The important principle announced in this article applies with equal force to Muslims. They, too, must advocate for free speech as the best defense against islamophobia.
There's another dynamic contributing to this problem -- one that Yascha surely understands:
One couldn't really expect Barack Obama to declare, "There are no Black Lives, no White Lives -- All Lives Matter" -- but to a lot of people, that very transition (to BLM) started to look like a bait-and-switch.
And as a gay male (age 76) who's fought all my life to advance a recognition that there's nothing "queer" about same-sex attraction?... Don't even get me started.
As we've picked each other to pieces over "pronouns" and "privilege," the oligarchs have been laughing all the way to the bank.
And that's the real root of the problem -- at which point the danger is that they'll all just end up blaming the Jews.
Truer words have never been written. Censorship is a slippery slope which only picks up speed with time. Thank you for the common sense words of wisdom.
This is true. The current prevailing theory is that the Israelites arose naturally within Canaan as their culture developed and they split from the greater Canaanite population. The enslavement narrative likely arose as a combination of a century of Canaanite rule of Egypt followed by four centuries of Egyptian rule of Canaan. That's my understanding of it anyhow.
"Instead, Hyksos rule might have been preceded by groups of Canaanite peoples who gradually settled in the Nile Delta from the end of the Twelfth Dynasty onwards and who may have seceded from the crumbling and unstable Egyptian control at some point during the Thirteenth Dynasty.[12]"
Now that isn't too hard to mesh with the story of the Hebrews migrating to Goshen is it? Joseph referring to an alternate rulership there, and then the Egyptians reasserting control leading to the Exodus? So perhaps the Hyksos and the Hebrew children under Joshua are essentially the same? It sorta works.
It's also my understanding that it became canon at a time when the Israelites were allied with Persia against Egypt. So they just took standard political propaganda and sacralized it.
If truth matters, people shouldn't repeat it as if it was true.
1) Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two is four, whether or not it's Good For The Jews.
2) The crucifixion narrative is at the heart of Christian identity, yet plenty of Christians have had the honesty and the decency to admit that it falsely accuses the Jews.
3) If you claim a right to lie and falsely accuse and never be called on it, that doesn't seem like a good way to get less hatred.
> yet plenty of Christians have had the honesty and the decency to admit that it falsely accuses the Jews
I should know this, but I've heard that there are ancient Jewish writings that take full credit for the execution of Jesus -- the Romans are viewed as mere instruments.
If there are such "ancient Jewish writings," that's indicative of strife AMONG the Jews. This sort of thing has been going on since the days of the Maccabees and the Hellenists. It's embedded in our heritage from the prophets.
FWIW, as a Jew, I regard Jesus as a great Jewish lawgiver (beyond the prophets), on the same level as Abraham and Moses. Ditto for Spinoza.
Other Jews' mileage may vary. But don't blame "the Jews."
So they say. But the Jews are so very, very different from the Canaanites in so many ways. One might discount the Exodus story, but what about the genocide following? Is that made up entirely?
Whether or not it actually happened, isn't it ironic, don't you think: the first people in recorded history to say "This entire people is so evil that it's our moral duty to wipe them off the face of the Earth to the last man, woman, and child" were the Jews.
Arguably the first in recorded history were the Moabites when they took the Israelite town of Nebo and killed all of its inhabitants in the name of their god, but I suppose that depends on whether the inhabitants of a town count as a people. Either way, the Bible would still be the second.
Ironic indeed. That's why I've always said that of all the peoples on the planet, the Jews should be the very last to invade another people's homeland and expel or murder or enslave or brutalize them. But, irony within irony, the ultras feel that Joshua's example is the one they should follow to this day. Thus BenGvir and the other ultras openly say that the Palestinians should be either exterminated or driven into the desert. AND ... the Islamists respond by taking up Joshua's example ... but rather to exterminate the Jews themselves. The devil himself couldn't make this up. With all sides imagining themselves to be Righteous.
And yet they have the chutzpah to insist that nothing must ever be compared to THE Holocaust, the one, the only. (Except of course if it involves Jews, in which case everything can be compared.) Nobody's entitled to be snobs about their suffering.
Yup. The Jews have always liked to put their suffering on a special pedestal. I'd demote it to 'just another' horror show. And yet the Holocaust does stand out from the crowd. IIRC you have to go back to Timur to find its equal. But I reject that entire mentality.
They say that Attila was an honest thief, he didn't pretend that he was anything other than a brigand. In the whole Israel/Palestine shit show my favorite politician is BenGurion who was matter of fact about the need to expel the Palestinians so as to steal their land, which, as he explained, the Jews needed more than the Palestinians did. As I always say, the truth is more satisfactory than the lie.
I recently read Thomas Healy’s very good The Great Dissent which tells the story of how Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr came to his mature view of the first amendment, which ultimately became the law of the land. Much of the book is about Holmes’s intimate friendships with Jews, especially Harold Laski, Felix Frankfurter, and Louis Brandeis. It is striking how these men influenced Holmes’s thinking on the importance of free speech. Without their genius and their efforts, our first amendment rights might not have become what we have today. (Bless them.)
Holmes realized and mused about the fact that he seemed to be drawn to Jews (“the better class of Jews,” if I remember correctly. I guess the Great Dissenter was still a man of his time and place).
Perhaps the issue is not about limiting free speech but encouraging civil speech. It is absolutely fine for people to hold strong views that may not accord with mine. Expressing those views in a way that leads to healthy discourse is the element in social media that seems to be missing.
The real change must come through changing the attitudes of the haters rather than through regulation. This may sound realistic, but we have to keep banging on about the destructive nature of hate on the fabric of society and indeed the haters themselves.
I think that's bullshit. Whitewash it all you want to. Israel is actively wiping our an entire population of people and your telling everyone to not focus on that. Let's all focus on whether or not we're being antisemitic instead.
Such a well-read defense of the genocide. To still insist gentiles remember that not all Jewish folk are responsible for killing of innocents! When does the defense of it stop and when does the responsibility for the reality of it begin?
I strongly agree with Mounk's position when it comes to government regulation. I'm far less sure, however, of the wide-open stance when it comes to the voluntary policies of social media companies. People often confuse the two, treating platform "censorship" as akin to a First Amendment violation. But platforms can pretty much publish and disseminate whatever they like, and decline to publish and disseminate whatever they don't. Forbidding *their* censorship would itself violate the First Amendment, straightforwardly so. Social media platforms are not in fact the "public square," which is public. They are owned and regulated by private parties.
If a private party -- say, Random House or The New York Times -- published a clearly antisemitic screed (which, let's stipulate, would be, like user-generated content, not the direct speech of either publisher or an employee of that publisher but of a guest author) -- we would rightly condemn such publication. We wouldn't want to outlaw it, but we'd see it as horrible -- lawful but awful as they say.
We don't treat social media platforms in the same way, largely because of the impossible size of their output and because they don't make individualized determinations about what gets posted. At the same time, they are hardly passive bulletin boards. Their software amplifies content based on a mix of user preferences and a broader calculation about what will sustain prolonged "engagement." Just because they do this automatically does not, I believe, relieve them of all responsibility.
Many platforms do indeed regulate already. With the notable exception of X, all the major ones already ban sexually explicit content, for example, even though it is protected by the First Amendment. Many also have some sort of hate speech rules as well, but I gather that policies are fuzzy and enforcement is lax.
I would like to see something like a voluntary constitution agreed to by major social media platforms, one that provides for the consistent and transparent enforcement of decency norms. Such norms would be narrowly defined for adults and more broadly defined for kids (which probably is an area where government could regulate to an extent). Such a constitution would permit the vast majority of content, including edgy, politically incorrect content, but it would draw some reasonable and reasonably clear lines that would render them far less of a socially and psychologically pernicious cesspool the likes of which we have never seen before.
What's in it for them? one might wonder. Fair point. I could imagine a pressure campaign -- directed against them specifically and also advertisers -- to adopt such a constitution. I don't think it would be so very difficult to collect compelling exhibits, tell true stories, and draw up reasonable rules that would support such a campaign.
These conversations are 80 years old, things have only gotten worse in that time. I will end my participation by saying having the right to exist is dependent on your ability to defend that right. In the most natural sense of having the "right, " you are also burdened by the act(s) to defend them. Many groups could attest to that; those who have been and are, under served by the ideals of "equality."
> And while extremists still remain in the opposition in most countries in Western Europe, polls suggest that they may be only one election away from storming the gates of power.
Who are these Extremists? Seems to me that the Extremists mostly just want to stop the invasion of their own countries.
Maybe, just maybe, your deep concern for the The safety of the Jewish community would be abated by becoming leaders in stopping Israel from wiping out the Palestinians. Advocate for your community you care so deeply for, and insist Israel stop targeting children, women, hospitals and all innocents in their maniacal zeal to occupy the territory of Palestine. Or express some concept of acceptance that the Palestinians deserve to live in peace without the fear of being bombed, starved or have access to clean water. They cannot because they are effectively trapped by Israel in an Israeli outdoor prison. They have no freedom of movement because the world's 7th largest military crushes them under their weight, like an elephant on an egg.
How about you stop the anemic whining about the conditions of your freedom at least and until, you speak up about the brutality the state of Israel employs against a population, who can only dream of the freedom your complaining about?
Being Jewish isn't special. Jewish folk are no more God's chosen than any Palestinian, or anyone else for that matter, on this planet. But Jewish folk, sure have a lot of advantages, they bend a lot of ears with the whining and victimization of their beliefs. Israel sure has enough money and guns and are masters at weaving the narrative to their advantage with this exact kind of talking points about antisemitic treatment. Absent in the narrative ate the talking points of why the global view of your plight might not be met with sympathy or exist in such a simplistic terms you have laid out.
Until Palestinians have the same level of safety, security and right of determination as the Israelis have, your identity whining and "me, me, me, complaints are hollow, and mock the suffering and the pain of the Palestinian people.
If the mistreatment of Jews is to be expected because of the actions of Israel, then it is very easy to argue that the mistreatment of Palestinians is to be expected because of the actions of Hamas. I suspect many far-right Israelis would agree with your argument once we swap out Jewish for Palestinian and occupation with terrorism.
But let's not say 'expected' when we mean 'justified'. Yes, both of the above are to be expected, but neither is justified.
I agree with that. There exists no bright-line rule that I can see that would distinguish the two, justifying one and not the other.
It's a 'spectrum' is it not? I'd even go so far as saying that what Bibi did in Gaza was ... 'understandable' which is at least cozying up to 'justified' but not quite there. It seems to me that the whole project of all sides trying to 'justify' themselves on the basis of the previous atrocity by some other side, has to be abandoned because *that* atrocity, too, is justified by some atrocity previous to it. It's atrocities all the way down to Joshua and even before that. IOW the 'justification layer-cake' is rather thick.
Absolutely, justifying atrocities with references to past atrocities results in an endless cycle. That being said, I was referring to the committing of crimes against random Jews and Jewish institutions/random Palestinians and Palestinian institutions, not the underlying conflict motivating the crimes. My point was that I can see no bright-line rule that distinguishes a guy assaulting a random Palestinian over Palestinian terrorism from a guy assaulting a random Jew over Israeli occupation.
Exactly. Murder is just murder. Yet, all this is to be 'expected' -- it is going to happen. Bibi's crimes in Gaza have opened the floodgates of random jihadi attacks against any Jew anywhere in the world. Even pro-Palestinian Jews like my Dad. I'd like it to stop.
The two opposing arguments are not equitable. Hamas is not equitable to the state of Israel. They are absolutely the under of the underdog. They are dismissed immediately by the international community as terrorists. It used to be the PLO, and to no avail, to be considered a seat at the table, they too struggled to be seen as advocates for justice as they were also labeled as "terrorists. " where are they now exactly?
It's only gotten worse.
In a liberal democrascy, the individual is the unit of "self-determinatiion."
This won't end until we stop talking about "The" Jewish People and "The" Palestinian People, and focus on Jewish people and Palestinian people (as persons).
Yabut the Palestinians as individuals still require a Palestinian state in which they can have self determination, so the there's no escaping the collective reference.
What state do you live in? Do you lack "self-determination"?
REPEAT: In a liberal democracy, the INDIVIDUAL is the unit of self-determination. The State exists to guarantee equal protection to all individuals, regardless of ethnicity.
Jews shouldn't "require" a Jewish State, and Palestinians shouldn't "require" a Palestinian state.
Jews should be free to return in peace from 2,000 years of Exile -- but that doesn't automatically call for a Jewish State. (FWIW, Judah Magnes had the right idea -- despite the antagonism of both ethninationaist Zionists and anti-Israel Palestinians.)
At this point, that might not be what many of the inhabitants want -- but considering the results thus far, they've obviously got it wrong!
> Jews shouldn't "require" a Jewish State, and Palestinians shouldn't "require" a Palestinian state.
I take your point, alas, in the real world the Jews *do* require a Jewish state and ditto the Palestinians. There's always a tension between idealism and ugly reality, no? I'm a bit of a political orphan on this file because I support both Israel's 'right to exist' *and* the Palestinians right to a state of their own -- while being an 'islamophobe' and half Jewish but raised Christian.
Or in other words all Jews should advocate your narrative or expect persecution. What a chillingly coercive worldview
"Coercive" great word, coercive. Does that coercion extend to AIPAC? The influence peddling and huge sums of cash with an rotating door to our elected officials qualify as "coercion?" How about legacy media's constant obsequious endorsement of Israeli policy and narratives? Does that qualify as "coercive?"
You tell me, because I think American public opinions reflect a "knee jerk" support for the Israeli point of view and it didn't get that way organically.
I'd put it like this: The Jews should wake up to the current reality. Until the Palestinians get some sort of just settlement, antisemitism WILL keep increasing. I know this is difficult but try to understand the difference between what SHOULD happen and what WILL happen.
> they bend a lot of ears with the whining and victimization of their beliefs. Israel sure has enough money and guns and are masters at weaving the narrative to their advantage with this exact kind of talking points about antisemitic treatment
The Jews have been very slow to wake up to the observed fact that they can no longer invoke their Victimhood. They are now white Oppressors (congratulations??) That's the fact of the matter irrespective of what anyone thinks 'should' be the case. In decades past, even threatening to call someone an antisemite was as sure to shut them up as calling them a racist or a bigot. Doesn't work anymore. Opposing Israel -- and by association hating Jews -- is now almost de rigueur on the Left. Zionists desperately try to claim that anyone opposing Israel is automatically an antisemite -- but again, it just isn't working.
This is the critical argument for why the 1st Amendment is essential to protect minorities, including Jews. But I think what’s often missing from the “free speech” conversation is that civil society must play a role in preventing our universal moral TABOOS against overt hateful bigotry and the endorsement of violence from getting expressed and normalized. And the only way we can do that is with social consequences, which may look like “cancel culture” but must be distinguished as a legitimate and necessary form of social ostracism. This was a crucial lever to marginalize the KKK out of polite society, i.e. we didn’t let unmasked KKK members live normal lives.
Like you and many others, I detest “cancel culture”. What I’m proposing is a principled, non-partisan approach to ostracize those who explicitly and egregiously and unapologetically advocate for violence and discrimination, which doesn’t just assess single actions and allows for forgiveness and redemption for those that choose to moderate themselves and attempt repair for any harm they caused.
I spend all of my time arguing for the restoration of these essential TABOOS, and recently wrote about the nuance missing from the discussion on “stochastic terrorism” - an abused term but a concept we must take very seriously. I would love to hear your thoughts on this topic. On whether this most extreme hateful bigotry is nearly universally seen as socially unacceptable, whether we can apply a principled approach to ostracize it out of polite society (as we had done up until October 8th), this time without succumbing to the excesses of cancel culture, and what happens if we don’t?
https://elevin11.substack.com/p/dismantling-stochastic-terrorism
“Polite society”? That’s an awfully quaint concept, and possibly irrelevant in a populist age where distrust of institutions (and therefore the people who uphold them) is frighteningly low. The greatest harm social media has inflicted on us is not so much “misinformation” as mistrust, the assumption that mainstream media and “polite society” are in some ways “enemies of the people.” As long as people outsource their minds to an internet-connected device, “polite society” is going to be circling the drain. The most promising solutions are content-neutral, such as banning smartphones in schools. Perhaps we can create more phone-free spaces, find more ways for people to actually spend time being present with other people. It would be great if we could find a way to ban the algorithms designed to hold people’s attention and keep them on their devices, which are responsible for a lot of the radicalization we’ve seen—instead of trying to regulate content, regulate usage, like we do with cigarettes.
I can certainly empathize with the cynicism, and there's a lot of truth there.
While we certainly can't get "polite society" to agree on much, I do think that the vast majority (>95%) of Americans agree on our core values of liberty and equality, and thus, more specifically, believe that overt, hateful bigotry and the endorsement of political violence are socially unacceptable. There's no shortage of evidence to the contrary, but I don't think our failure to consistently enforce these taboos proves that people are opposed to them, and if pressured to confront that sort of hate, would explicitly reject it and those who espouse and sanitize it.
If you're curious, what inspired me to pursue this project was what I saw happen when Charlie Kirk was killed, which I wrote about here: https://elevin11.substack.com/p/the-kirk-test-how-a-political-assassination Feedback and pushback is welcome!
I am not a cynic, though I know “being realistic” is what cynics claim to be. Nonetheless, reading a variety of sources including some various Reddit forums and polling analysis (I’m thinking in particular of a. Bulwark post from JVL a few weeks ago) reveals that our easy assumption that most Americans basically share liberal values is probably misguided. Certainly a majority does, but how big that majority is and how much they agree on the meaning of “liberty” or “equality” is not simple. Many Americans live in an alternate cultural/information environment where what we see as liberty is perceived as threatening their way of life (faith and family).
I think the "Perception Gap" study from a few years ago, along with polling like this https://americaspoliticalpulse.com/citizens#section=violence&crime=violence3 indicates that there is very broad agreement across society that the most extreme hatred and intolerance is socially unacceptable, but also a misperception that more Americans tolerate this hatred than truly do.
That's not to say there isn't a tremendous risk of the distortion field, or even this tiny subset of radicalized extremists, but I do think the majority is still on the side of core liberal democratic values of general tolerance, even if they can't always articulate it or sometimes excuse violations of these values due to partisanship/tribalism. I just believe that we, the vast majority of society, can and must hold people accountable when they egregiously violate those core values, and if we draw and hold that moral line, we'll be ok. So I will continue advocating for precisely that, to make this hateful bigotry TABOO again.
I think that mainly shows that there is broad agreement that actual violence is bad, and people understand that getting hit by a thrown rock is serious. And it is good to know that for all the talk about immanent civil war, almost no one is really up for violent conflict. The real threat is bad actors taking advantage of polarization to consolidate power and chip away at/smash structures that maintain social welfare and peace among nations.
I'm 100% with you on that threat. I'm hoping we can activate enough of a sliver of the vast majority of moderate, normal, non-hateful Americans to draw a line and ostracize the Illiberal, hateful bigots out of polite society before they burn it all down.
Yeah I do agree with this. I think there is a lack of consequence in society. It used to be that you would be ostracised, but for really horrible things you would lose your job.
I think some of the problem now is people can hide who they are on social media, and if they aren’t anonymous they will always fall back to a group/echo chamber that will have them.
Indeed, and that's why I'm encouraging a universal, principled, non-partisan approach so that everybody is expected to police/ostracize their own tribes as well, or face their own social consequences as a sort of "moral accountability by association". If people stayed uncritically associated with David Duke or other hateful bigots, they'd have been ostracized out of polite society as well.
We can and must re-impose these types of social consequences for people that explicitly and egregiously cross the line and violate our universal moral TABOOS, or those taboos will fully erode and destroy all Western liberal democracies.
The important principle announced in this article applies with equal force to Muslims. They, too, must advocate for free speech as the best defense against islamophobia.
There's another dynamic contributing to this problem -- one that Yascha surely understands:
One couldn't really expect Barack Obama to declare, "There are no Black Lives, no White Lives -- All Lives Matter" -- but to a lot of people, that very transition (to BLM) started to look like a bait-and-switch.
And as a gay male (age 76) who's fought all my life to advance a recognition that there's nothing "queer" about same-sex attraction?... Don't even get me started.
As we've picked each other to pieces over "pronouns" and "privilege," the oligarchs have been laughing all the way to the bank.
And that's the real root of the problem -- at which point the danger is that they'll all just end up blaming the Jews.
Truer words have never been written. Censorship is a slippery slope which only picks up speed with time. Thank you for the common sense words of wisdom.
Beautifully argued! Thank you.
The problem is that now free speech has become free harassement.
It always has been. FOS has always been a very messy thing.
I suppose this is a side point, but most historians these days believe that the story about the Jews being slaves in Egypt never happened.
This is true. The current prevailing theory is that the Israelites arose naturally within Canaan as their culture developed and they split from the greater Canaanite population. The enslavement narrative likely arose as a combination of a century of Canaanite rule of Egypt followed by four centuries of Egyptian rule of Canaan. That's my understanding of it anyhow.
> a combination of a century of Canaanite rule of Egypt
Really? When was that? I could be wrong but I recall nothing like that in my study of history.
1650 - 1550 BCE by the Hyskos as the 15th Dynasty. Admittedly, they didn't control all of Egypt and their origins are disputed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyksos
Thanks:
"Instead, Hyksos rule might have been preceded by groups of Canaanite peoples who gradually settled in the Nile Delta from the end of the Twelfth Dynasty onwards and who may have seceded from the crumbling and unstable Egyptian control at some point during the Thirteenth Dynasty.[12]"
Now that isn't too hard to mesh with the story of the Hebrews migrating to Goshen is it? Joseph referring to an alternate rulership there, and then the Egyptians reasserting control leading to the Exodus? So perhaps the Hyksos and the Hebrew children under Joshua are essentially the same? It sorta works.
It's also my understanding that it became canon at a time when the Israelites were allied with Persia against Egypt. So they just took standard political propaganda and sacralized it.
If truth matters, people shouldn't repeat it as if it was true.
So instead, ;people should start repeating, "Judaism -- and the entire narrative at the heart of Jewish identity -- is based on a lie"?
That's how we solve antisemitism?
Gimme a break!
1) Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two is four, whether or not it's Good For The Jews.
2) The crucifixion narrative is at the heart of Christian identity, yet plenty of Christians have had the honesty and the decency to admit that it falsely accuses the Jews.
3) If you claim a right to lie and falsely accuse and never be called on it, that doesn't seem like a good way to get less hatred.
> yet plenty of Christians have had the honesty and the decency to admit that it falsely accuses the Jews
I should know this, but I've heard that there are ancient Jewish writings that take full credit for the execution of Jesus -- the Romans are viewed as mere instruments.
If there are such "ancient Jewish writings," that's indicative of strife AMONG the Jews. This sort of thing has been going on since the days of the Maccabees and the Hellenists. It's embedded in our heritage from the prophets.
FWIW, as a Jew, I regard Jesus as a great Jewish lawgiver (beyond the prophets), on the same level as Abraham and Moses. Ditto for Spinoza.
Other Jews' mileage may vary. But don't blame "the Jews."
Jews didn't use crucifixion. If they killed Jesus, they would have stoned him to death.
So the key to ending antisemitism is for Jews to "admit" that Judaism is based on a fraud (as opposed to "settled science").
Gee, thanks!...
You're welcome.
And since at this point you're just repeating yourself, let me close with:
THERE! ARE! FOUR! LIGHTS!
So they say. But the Jews are so very, very different from the Canaanites in so many ways. One might discount the Exodus story, but what about the genocide following? Is that made up entirely?
Whether or not it actually happened, isn't it ironic, don't you think: the first people in recorded history to say "This entire people is so evil that it's our moral duty to wipe them off the face of the Earth to the last man, woman, and child" were the Jews.
Arguably the first in recorded history were the Moabites when they took the Israelite town of Nebo and killed all of its inhabitants in the name of their god, but I suppose that depends on whether the inhabitants of a town count as a people. Either way, the Bible would still be the second.
Ironic indeed. That's why I've always said that of all the peoples on the planet, the Jews should be the very last to invade another people's homeland and expel or murder or enslave or brutalize them. But, irony within irony, the ultras feel that Joshua's example is the one they should follow to this day. Thus BenGvir and the other ultras openly say that the Palestinians should be either exterminated or driven into the desert. AND ... the Islamists respond by taking up Joshua's example ... but rather to exterminate the Jews themselves. The devil himself couldn't make this up. With all sides imagining themselves to be Righteous.
And yet they have the chutzpah to insist that nothing must ever be compared to THE Holocaust, the one, the only. (Except of course if it involves Jews, in which case everything can be compared.) Nobody's entitled to be snobs about their suffering.
Yup. The Jews have always liked to put their suffering on a special pedestal. I'd demote it to 'just another' horror show. And yet the Holocaust does stand out from the crowd. IIRC you have to go back to Timur to find its equal. But I reject that entire mentality.
They say that Attila was an honest thief, he didn't pretend that he was anything other than a brigand. In the whole Israel/Palestine shit show my favorite politician is BenGurion who was matter of fact about the need to expel the Palestinians so as to steal their land, which, as he explained, the Jews needed more than the Palestinians did. As I always say, the truth is more satisfactory than the lie.
Hasbara? AIPAC propaganda?
Another great post.
I recently read Thomas Healy’s very good The Great Dissent which tells the story of how Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr came to his mature view of the first amendment, which ultimately became the law of the land. Much of the book is about Holmes’s intimate friendships with Jews, especially Harold Laski, Felix Frankfurter, and Louis Brandeis. It is striking how these men influenced Holmes’s thinking on the importance of free speech. Without their genius and their efforts, our first amendment rights might not have become what we have today. (Bless them.)
Holmes realized and mused about the fact that he seemed to be drawn to Jews (“the better class of Jews,” if I remember correctly. I guess the Great Dissenter was still a man of his time and place).
Perhaps the issue is not about limiting free speech but encouraging civil speech. It is absolutely fine for people to hold strong views that may not accord with mine. Expressing those views in a way that leads to healthy discourse is the element in social media that seems to be missing.
The real change must come through changing the attitudes of the haters rather than through regulation. This may sound realistic, but we have to keep banging on about the destructive nature of hate on the fabric of society and indeed the haters themselves.
I think that's bullshit. Whitewash it all you want to. Israel is actively wiping our an entire population of people and your telling everyone to not focus on that. Let's all focus on whether or not we're being antisemitic instead.
Such a well-read defense of the genocide. To still insist gentiles remember that not all Jewish folk are responsible for killing of innocents! When does the defense of it stop and when does the responsibility for the reality of it begin?
I strongly agree with Mounk's position when it comes to government regulation. I'm far less sure, however, of the wide-open stance when it comes to the voluntary policies of social media companies. People often confuse the two, treating platform "censorship" as akin to a First Amendment violation. But platforms can pretty much publish and disseminate whatever they like, and decline to publish and disseminate whatever they don't. Forbidding *their* censorship would itself violate the First Amendment, straightforwardly so. Social media platforms are not in fact the "public square," which is public. They are owned and regulated by private parties.
If a private party -- say, Random House or The New York Times -- published a clearly antisemitic screed (which, let's stipulate, would be, like user-generated content, not the direct speech of either publisher or an employee of that publisher but of a guest author) -- we would rightly condemn such publication. We wouldn't want to outlaw it, but we'd see it as horrible -- lawful but awful as they say.
We don't treat social media platforms in the same way, largely because of the impossible size of their output and because they don't make individualized determinations about what gets posted. At the same time, they are hardly passive bulletin boards. Their software amplifies content based on a mix of user preferences and a broader calculation about what will sustain prolonged "engagement." Just because they do this automatically does not, I believe, relieve them of all responsibility.
Many platforms do indeed regulate already. With the notable exception of X, all the major ones already ban sexually explicit content, for example, even though it is protected by the First Amendment. Many also have some sort of hate speech rules as well, but I gather that policies are fuzzy and enforcement is lax.
I would like to see something like a voluntary constitution agreed to by major social media platforms, one that provides for the consistent and transparent enforcement of decency norms. Such norms would be narrowly defined for adults and more broadly defined for kids (which probably is an area where government could regulate to an extent). Such a constitution would permit the vast majority of content, including edgy, politically incorrect content, but it would draw some reasonable and reasonably clear lines that would render them far less of a socially and psychologically pernicious cesspool the likes of which we have never seen before.
What's in it for them? one might wonder. Fair point. I could imagine a pressure campaign -- directed against them specifically and also advertisers -- to adopt such a constitution. I don't think it would be so very difficult to collect compelling exhibits, tell true stories, and draw up reasonable rules that would support such a campaign.
These conversations are 80 years old, things have only gotten worse in that time. I will end my participation by saying having the right to exist is dependent on your ability to defend that right. In the most natural sense of having the "right, " you are also burdened by the act(s) to defend them. Many groups could attest to that; those who have been and are, under served by the ideals of "equality."
> And while extremists still remain in the opposition in most countries in Western Europe, polls suggest that they may be only one election away from storming the gates of power.
Who are these Extremists? Seems to me that the Extremists mostly just want to stop the invasion of their own countries.
Thankyou Mitchell for your comment and translation