but the point of all this is that "moderating" your demands and your critiques does nothing for you. it soils the moral argument you're making, and it doesn't satisfy the people who support the violent institution. you get the worst of both worlds, politically.

i think this is why scott weiner's video is not going over well (that, and the fact that in the video he can't help but center his own feelings about the word "genocide" rather than the fact that hundreds of thousands of palestinians have been murdered for an ethnostate in the name of his faith)

should we celebrate someone pushing a "moderate" critique of zionism? of course not. accommodating this narrative that only the upper echelon of israeli gov is the problem here begs us to draw painful comparisons to nazism and its pervasive hold on german society.

but this is the attempt to moderate the left's position and mollify a movement that has seen how zionists up and down, left and right, in israel and around the world, have internalized anti-arab views, and have deeply internalized the vision of an ethnostate made via forced relocation and genocide.

one salient characteristic of zionist media that we've seen over the past few years is that genocidal statements are absolutely not exclusive to senior members of the israeli government. when you focus on that detail, it's really a rather ridiculous thing to say.

i'll just briefly add as an example

after weiner failed to answer the question "is israel committing genocide" in a primary debate last week, he made a video where he said "we hear the genocidal statements by certain senior members of the israeli government"

let's unpack this...

this one?

ahh this is a good point. monopoly on language and "messaging discipline" is really... conspicuous and hard to justify under direct scrutiny

scott weiner's been going around trying to do damage control after he refused to answer whether israel is committing genocide during a debate (his opponents answered "yes"), and even his damage control is proving insufficient. i think we continue to see evidence that earnest, ambitious demands work

i absolutely am not standing by the position that no such path exists. i'm earnestly asking if someone can lay out evidence supporting the case that there's a natural path (which i'll try to take at face value if i can). it's just that i've only ever heard this kind of path *assumed* to exist

it's fun when it's a couple of years but when it crosses the 10 year mark it begins to horrify me. or maybe the passage of time just scares me.

i have linguistics+ youtube channel recommendations if you're interested in recommendations; i was looking last night on my phone but scrolling a million subscriptions on there is awful

this has surely been a roller coaster ride of emotions.

xander. ugh.