This is a pretty solid update in his favor to me, a bit of unjustified antipathy to Yeglesias doesn't completely swamp the case that he is a more or less reasonable person.
He's good about that to the extent that I largely agree with his position on the issue, but the problem with Robinson (to my mind) is not about his positions on the issues. If animal rights were not already coded left-wing, I don't believe he'd be an advocate, at least not publicly. That's the problem.
Robinson, and I've been reading his stuff for what feels like decades now, is very smart and is 100% correct. The problem is, he's 100% correct if the goal of all this is "waving the flag for what is self-evidently the morally superior team, regardless of the real world impacts, costs or feasibility." He's never tried to persuade anyone with a sober, objective cost-benefit analysis of all the facts or data, he wants to display that his view is morally superior. That other stuff that Yglesias cares about? Even caring about it is wrong. Of course it's wrong to care about things that don't matter! They don't matter, right?
Yglesias is also very smart, and of course has a different goal under which Robinson is obviously 100% wrong. But ironically, most of the times that Y is wrong is when he is operating in the same mode as R: that of valuing symbolic partisan moral superiority over reality.
I'm obviously not trying to defend R, (far from it) but I might humbly suggest that you are missing his point. He's not trying to prove that Y is wrong with Logic, he's trying to simply say that the Things Y Wants are bad because he knows that doing those things would necessarily involve not doing the Things R Wants, and they're competing for the same demographic, so they need to be told that the Bad Things are bad. I think we should instead write articles about doing Good Things, and I think that you probably agree. But he's working in a totally different field, with completely different goals. If you want to get to the heart of it, I (again, humbly) feel that you have to highlight (more, perhaps?) that specific difference in core, base values, rather than just simply disproving his claims, which he likely doesn't really care about.
Robinson scored a touchdown in moral-high-ground-football. Yglesias has made some impressive three point shots in logic-and-data-ball. The question of "so who's winning?" seems less relevant than "we should probably talk about how they're not playing the same game."
I don’t think this makes Robinson look any better, because even by his own goals the piece is a failure. How many “Yglesias is bad” articles has he written? Who does he think is currently giving Yglesias credit who will stop now that Robinson has written the Nth takedown? The problem isn’t that Robinson isn’t trying to persuade people with facts and logic; it’s that he isn’t trying to persuade people at all, or rally them to a cause, or anything else worthwhile. It’s just a “this bad person still bad” piece that’s a total waste of his time and everyone else’s.
You nailed it. A person can disagree with Yglesias, but he’s at least trying to convince them. Robinson isn’t writing for anyone that doesn’t already agree with him. The proper sports analogy here is that Matt is playing basketball and Nathan is trying to be the Harlem Globetrotters. It’s fine as entertainment if that’s what you’re into but you’re making a serious category error if you think you’re learning anything about the world.
no, he's a propagandist because he thinks "means well" is all that matters, and that people who bring up pesky facts and logic about consequences and unintended bad outcomes are just secretly opposed to "meaning well."
And my point is that you have to see that is his goal in order to (justifiably) criticize him. If you just say "but look at all this data and logic that says you're wrong!" that's not going to persuade him (or people who think like him) because you're missing their (admittedly wrong) point. He already has a big chunk of his brain labeled "how to recognize evil capitalist pig dogs who are trying to justify their brutal exploitation of everyone good with their evil, manipulated data and logic."
Got it, that makes sense. this analysis still feels unsatisfying, i think bc he markets himself as a serious pundit, a left-wing version of Yglesias, and there’s another layer of dishonesty in that pretend act.
Right but Yglesias is already the left-wing version of Yglesias. The differentiation between "serious" and "unserious" is how much you let reality/data/facts guide you. Y doesn't always meet that standard - who does? not me - but he is capable of admitting when reality contradicts his beliefs or policy recommendations. R (like many other propagandists) never does.
When you read R's attack on Y the actual words/ideas vividly express to me the critical differences he perceives between himself and Y, and that difference (to me) is that R does not think there could be any actual data/logic/info that might make his idea of leftish-socialisty-stuff a bad idea, and therefore anyone who even reluctantly admits that must actually just be in the service of his reactionary enemies, or at least brainwashed by them.
IIRC he was essentially the biggest Tara Reade advocate and worked tirelessly to promote her story for months during the 2020 primary while constantly trying to accuse Democrats of trying to sabotage Bernie, then just silently dropped the story and never mentioned her again after it emerged she had a history of confabulation. I really don't think he'd ever let it go if a centrist like Yglesias ever dared engage in that kind of actual sabotage against Bernie, and the language he'd use to describe such saboteurs would involve lots of rats and snakes.
One of the big issues with leftoids is their unwillingness to accept the fact that markets are extremely efficient. That doesn't mean you can't have redistribution; if we cut half of our social programs and just shoved the money into expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit, we would probably wipe out most poverty in the country in a year or two, especially if it was paired with removing regulations that heavily constrict the supply of high-priced goods and services such as housing.
But the EITC and deregulation are market based solutions, and people like Robinson think that's evil and bad. Their activism is genuinely worthless due to this type of stupidity.
I would need to be convinced that markets are extremely efficient, because I can think of several obvious examples of market inefficiencies just off the top of my head. GameStop shares are selling for $28. Tether, somehow, is still a thing and people are buying it.
Doge is worth more now than ever, despite it existing solely on the greater fool theory of value!
“Markets are extremely efficient” isn’t disproved by you thinking up a few examples of a markets distortions. Wrt your examples, you can think of them more as gambling/investing on sentiment anyway.
Gambling and investing on sentiment seem like disproofs that markets are extremely efficient to me. When one says that markets are extremely efficient, then, the question is, extremely efficient at doing what?
Gambling and investing on sentiment are proof that individuals don’t act perfectly rationally. Markets are efficient because firms that act rationally stick around. They are efficient at getting people the goods they want. Some people want to gamble and invest on sentiment, the production of these goods is perfectly rational, especially since a firm can make a killing being on the right end of that transaction. It’s a form of entertainment essentially.
Honestly that was the only piece of his that ever resonated with me. I went to an elite college, had a year long stint in the Obama admin with all of the self-satisfied ex-TFA Obama cultists and careerists line buttigieg; they are awful and must be stopped. They represent the worst tendency of neoliberals to hollow out our working class so white collar PMC types can sell services abroad.
Generally cannot stand NJR. He very confidently wrote one of the most ill informed articles of all time about something I know a lot about which permanently put the stink on him for me.
It's rather amusing to read a leftist skewer Fatty for not being leftist enough, while myself believing much the same thing in the opposite direction ("If this guy is really so smart, how the hell is he still a Democrat?"). Anyways--far-left socialist writes something retarded, also the sky is blue, more news at ten.
I think that the safe version of the argument is: whether or not you like Chomsky, he holds himself to higher intellectual standards than Robinson does.
I’m sorry to sound snippy, it’s hard to avoid in these forums, but I’m human.
Chomsky is the Judith Butler of Linguistics - he has generated a phenomenal body of work of pure jibberjabber on the subject, with the endless reiteration of mysterious organs which acquire language and thought - conventionally called the brain by biologists.
When I write jibberjabber, I speak of reading his papers off and on for at least four decades, and having been trained in science at Caltech, and having read in neurobiology with Roger Sperry among others. It’s like nobody sat back with a clear mind and said “this is all nonsense”.
The lack of any empirical evidence at all for any of his conjectures (theory seems quite bold for his views on linguistics) - the rare ones which are falsifiable - would seem be a mere detail. Not a shred of evidence over decades, and in the end an entire field and careers wasted on his nonsense. You wouldn’t know it from his Wikipedia page because he seems to have invented the field of cognitive science, which is ironic since its existence is a refutation of his career in whole and in all the details.
The death knell for his pseudo-scientific work in linguistics of course are LLM’s (like chatGPT) which manage to “learn” language by merely finding arithmetic correlations among words. Surprisingly they have better grammar in all trained languages (though interesting syntax at times in other languages I know). The word he struggled for his entire career was probably “auto-regressive”, not “transformational grammar”. I read frequently he was a bully and prevaricator professionally. I suspect that’s true. His career seems to be an endless series of evasions, equivocations, bullying and abuse for those who find his work, well, questionable.
On the other hand - outside the linguistics failure - we have a pathological fan of genocidal regimes, presenting as a liberal. Chomsky is a noted Pol Pot fan, an apologist of the famous Khmer Rouge genocide, as well as an apologist for genocidal crimes in the Balkans, an apologist for Putin in Ukraine (“Russia is acting with restraint and moderation in Ukraine”). To top it all off, he believes Hamas is more peaceful than Israel. Where does it stop? He even presents as a Nazi apologist for a professor who was censured in France for claiming the holocaust didn’t occur. France is touchy about such things.
Frankly he doesn’t seem to have met a genocidal regime he can’t apologize for somehow.
This is your hero.
That’s why I wrote “really?” - the rest of the article was well-done until the wrench jumped into the cogs.
Do read critical writing on Chomsky. It’s quite illuminating
You don't sound snippy. And I too find some of Chomsky's foreign-policy stands abhorrent. I'm not competent to judge his linguistics work, and for the sake of argument, I am happy to grant every claim that you make about it.
My point isn't that Chomsky is good. It's that, even if his intellectual standards are extremely low, Robinson's are lower. I could be wrong about this. But note that your own argument about Chomsky seems consistent with this view.
Given all that you write about Chomsky, it may seem doubtful that anyone could have lower intellectual standards. But Robinson is special. His misrepresentation of arguments and refusal to consider context is so great that it doesn't just verge on deceit—it topples headlong into deceit. His willingness to deceive is so great that we might as well think of him as a Trumpian figure on the left.
Of course, Robinson's idiom is very different from Trump's. It's highbrow. And Robinson does write well at the level of the sentence. But that is part of the problem: he does the authoritative tone well enough to sucker a lot of people who should know better. Like Trump, he is a skilled and deceitful demagogue. He's just speaking in a different register and from a different part of the political spectrum.
You specifically ignored his point that the casualties from the Israel-Gaza war have been higher than any other in the past three years. The Saudi war in Yemen has decreased in intensity a lot since 2021, and that does matter if we're talking about what people care about.
Anyway, I would certainly like reading 5,000 words of disagreeing with Robinson. What I would like even more is a published email exchange with him. The Chomaky-Harris emails are among the greatest intellectual debates I have ever seen, and I often just go back and reread them for fun, and imagine a world where such exchanges replace all opinion columnists.
It's true, but even despite this, the Saudi war was much worse. Now, I was not claiming that someone should regard the current Saudi war as more significant--it's mostly ended. Rather, my claim was that there's at least something puzzling about people being single-issue Israel voters, when no one is a single-issue Saudi voter.
Well, I'm sure there's someone, but to be honest, it's pretty hard to get Americans concerned about the welfare of a new Islamist rebel movement when their slogan includes "Death to America, Death to Israel, A curse upon the Jews".
I mean, even Hamas rewrote its charter to try and remove the really obvious anti-Semitism.
Yes. But apparently, it worked on some of them. There's a story from a woman living in one of the raided towns that two Hamas fighters broke into her house and reassured her that "It's okay, we're Muslims, we won't hurt you." She said they further stuck around for two hours before leaving, at one point asking her for permission to eat one of her bananas.
I only get misty eyed about those two guys, who apparently were completely convinced that what we consider a cynical PR move was totally authentic.
Almost childishly naïve.
So I don't know if those two guys believed the hype, or maybe they were just unusually devoted to the nonviolent tenets presented in the Qu'ran.
But it's made me a little less cynical, about the cynical. If it were any of those other fighters in that house, they would have killed that women and her children, or worse. So there's a chance that that purely cynical PR change in the Hamas charter saved three lives.
Criticism of Israel is salient because non-critics, or fans, of Israel are too. Meaning, the country has been roped into our own value system, pop culture and domestic politics in a way Saudi Arabia hasn't been then. So of course, people pay more attention to that conflict.
>Nathan writes that “shockingly, the people who most loudly call for empathy and dialogue are the least willing to engage in genuine empathetic dialogue…”, and uses me as an example. I can only say in my defense that last month, I sent Nathan an email saying that I thought it would be productive to engage in dialogue with each other in a way “where instead of trying to disagree publicly, we’re trying to come to agreement privately, then present the results of that agreement”. I offered to do this with him on a topic of his choice. He wrote back saying he didn’t have enough time, which is fine. But when he then publishes an article in a national magazine announcing that I am a hypocrite because I refuse to dialogue with my political opponents, I feel pretty betrayed.
I bet this is a very smart well written article that takes down Robinson, but I'm not going to read it, because Robinson is a pretend socialist who fires his staffers for unionizing, all while dressing like a member of a ska band.
I'm just going to take your word for it because the guy is a clown person.
Nathan Robinson is neither serious enough nor taken seriously enough by anyone of import to deserve this much effort.
Honestly, a simple pic of his face is enough to disqualify any of his insipid little hit pieces, you can see what kind of person he is just by looking at him.
Robinson is a classic example of someone who is way too much of a midwit to deserve his level of snark.
Yours is the most rDrama-coded username I've ever seen.
WWG1WGA
Are they still Tayposting on the new site?
I'm not super sure, I'm not there much anymore. I'm mostly on one of the splinter communities now.
Trappysaruh came back though 😍
He’s right about the most important thing though: https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2018/01/meat-and-the-h-word
Yeah, he's good on that.
This is a pretty solid update in his favor to me, a bit of unjustified antipathy to Yeglesias doesn't completely swamp the case that he is a more or less reasonable person.
He's good about that to the extent that I largely agree with his position on the issue, but the problem with Robinson (to my mind) is not about his positions on the issues. If animal rights were not already coded left-wing, I don't believe he'd be an advocate, at least not publicly. That's the problem.
Robinson, and I've been reading his stuff for what feels like decades now, is very smart and is 100% correct. The problem is, he's 100% correct if the goal of all this is "waving the flag for what is self-evidently the morally superior team, regardless of the real world impacts, costs or feasibility." He's never tried to persuade anyone with a sober, objective cost-benefit analysis of all the facts or data, he wants to display that his view is morally superior. That other stuff that Yglesias cares about? Even caring about it is wrong. Of course it's wrong to care about things that don't matter! They don't matter, right?
Yglesias is also very smart, and of course has a different goal under which Robinson is obviously 100% wrong. But ironically, most of the times that Y is wrong is when he is operating in the same mode as R: that of valuing symbolic partisan moral superiority over reality.
I'm obviously not trying to defend R, (far from it) but I might humbly suggest that you are missing his point. He's not trying to prove that Y is wrong with Logic, he's trying to simply say that the Things Y Wants are bad because he knows that doing those things would necessarily involve not doing the Things R Wants, and they're competing for the same demographic, so they need to be told that the Bad Things are bad. I think we should instead write articles about doing Good Things, and I think that you probably agree. But he's working in a totally different field, with completely different goals. If you want to get to the heart of it, I (again, humbly) feel that you have to highlight (more, perhaps?) that specific difference in core, base values, rather than just simply disproving his claims, which he likely doesn't really care about.
Robinson scored a touchdown in moral-high-ground-football. Yglesias has made some impressive three point shots in logic-and-data-ball. The question of "so who's winning?" seems less relevant than "we should probably talk about how they're not playing the same game."
I don’t think this makes Robinson look any better, because even by his own goals the piece is a failure. How many “Yglesias is bad” articles has he written? Who does he think is currently giving Yglesias credit who will stop now that Robinson has written the Nth takedown? The problem isn’t that Robinson isn’t trying to persuade people with facts and logic; it’s that he isn’t trying to persuade people at all, or rally them to a cause, or anything else worthwhile. It’s just a “this bad person still bad” piece that’s a total waste of his time and everyone else’s.
You nailed it. A person can disagree with Yglesias, but he’s at least trying to convince them. Robinson isn’t writing for anyone that doesn’t already agree with him. The proper sports analogy here is that Matt is playing basketball and Nathan is trying to be the Harlem Globetrotters. It’s fine as entertainment if that’s what you’re into but you’re making a serious category error if you think you’re learning anything about the world.
It’s ok NJR is a hack bc he means well?
no, he's a propagandist because he thinks "means well" is all that matters, and that people who bring up pesky facts and logic about consequences and unintended bad outcomes are just secretly opposed to "meaning well."
And my point is that you have to see that is his goal in order to (justifiably) criticize him. If you just say "but look at all this data and logic that says you're wrong!" that's not going to persuade him (or people who think like him) because you're missing their (admittedly wrong) point. He already has a big chunk of his brain labeled "how to recognize evil capitalist pig dogs who are trying to justify their brutal exploitation of everyone good with their evil, manipulated data and logic."
Got it, that makes sense. this analysis still feels unsatisfying, i think bc he markets himself as a serious pundit, a left-wing version of Yglesias, and there’s another layer of dishonesty in that pretend act.
Right but Yglesias is already the left-wing version of Yglesias. The differentiation between "serious" and "unserious" is how much you let reality/data/facts guide you. Y doesn't always meet that standard - who does? not me - but he is capable of admitting when reality contradicts his beliefs or policy recommendations. R (like many other propagandists) never does.
When you read R's attack on Y the actual words/ideas vividly express to me the critical differences he perceives between himself and Y, and that difference (to me) is that R does not think there could be any actual data/logic/info that might make his idea of leftish-socialisty-stuff a bad idea, and therefore anyone who even reluctantly admits that must actually just be in the service of his reactionary enemies, or at least brainwashed by them.
I used to try to read Robinson to broaden my think piece diet, but after his sickening Buttigieg hit piece I quit.
IIRC he was essentially the biggest Tara Reade advocate and worked tirelessly to promote her story for months during the 2020 primary while constantly trying to accuse Democrats of trying to sabotage Bernie, then just silently dropped the story and never mentioned her again after it emerged she had a history of confabulation. I really don't think he'd ever let it go if a centrist like Yglesias ever dared engage in that kind of actual sabotage against Bernie, and the language he'd use to describe such saboteurs would involve lots of rats and snakes.
Nah, dubious honors for that have to go to Ryan Grim. He was still at it in 2021.
One of the big issues with leftoids is their unwillingness to accept the fact that markets are extremely efficient. That doesn't mean you can't have redistribution; if we cut half of our social programs and just shoved the money into expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit, we would probably wipe out most poverty in the country in a year or two, especially if it was paired with removing regulations that heavily constrict the supply of high-priced goods and services such as housing.
But the EITC and deregulation are market based solutions, and people like Robinson think that's evil and bad. Their activism is genuinely worthless due to this type of stupidity.
I would need to be convinced that markets are extremely efficient, because I can think of several obvious examples of market inefficiencies just off the top of my head. GameStop shares are selling for $28. Tether, somehow, is still a thing and people are buying it.
Doge is worth more now than ever, despite it existing solely on the greater fool theory of value!
“Markets are extremely efficient” isn’t disproved by you thinking up a few examples of a markets distortions. Wrt your examples, you can think of them more as gambling/investing on sentiment anyway.
Gambling and investing on sentiment seem like disproofs that markets are extremely efficient to me. When one says that markets are extremely efficient, then, the question is, extremely efficient at doing what?
Gambling and investing on sentiment are proof that individuals don’t act perfectly rationally. Markets are efficient because firms that act rationally stick around. They are efficient at getting people the goods they want. Some people want to gamble and invest on sentiment, the production of these goods is perfectly rational, especially since a firm can make a killing being on the right end of that transaction. It’s a form of entertainment essentially.
The more obvious truth would be "markets are far more efficient than any known alternatives."
Honestly that was the only piece of his that ever resonated with me. I went to an elite college, had a year long stint in the Obama admin with all of the self-satisfied ex-TFA Obama cultists and careerists line buttigieg; they are awful and must be stopped. They represent the worst tendency of neoliberals to hollow out our working class so white collar PMC types can sell services abroad.
Fantastic
Generally cannot stand NJR. He very confidently wrote one of the most ill informed articles of all time about something I know a lot about which permanently put the stink on him for me.
https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2021/01/the-only-thing-worse-than-a-nimby-is-a-yimby
It's rather amusing to read a leftist skewer Fatty for not being leftist enough, while myself believing much the same thing in the opposite direction ("If this guy is really so smart, how the hell is he still a Democrat?"). Anyways--far-left socialist writes something retarded, also the sky is blue, more news at ten.
Regarding Chomsky not writing anymore, Chomsky and Robinson just released a new book. I know nothing about it, so maybe Chomsky sort of co-signed?
I don’t think NJR weekend-at-berniesing a desiccated Chomsky counts
Yea that last paragraph in this post is a little ironic in light of this. I saw NR discuss the book on GG's show.
Chomsky? Seriously?
I think that the safe version of the argument is: whether or not you like Chomsky, he holds himself to higher intellectual standards than Robinson does.
Granted, Robinson sets the bar extremely low.
I’m sorry to sound snippy, it’s hard to avoid in these forums, but I’m human.
Chomsky is the Judith Butler of Linguistics - he has generated a phenomenal body of work of pure jibberjabber on the subject, with the endless reiteration of mysterious organs which acquire language and thought - conventionally called the brain by biologists.
When I write jibberjabber, I speak of reading his papers off and on for at least four decades, and having been trained in science at Caltech, and having read in neurobiology with Roger Sperry among others. It’s like nobody sat back with a clear mind and said “this is all nonsense”.
The lack of any empirical evidence at all for any of his conjectures (theory seems quite bold for his views on linguistics) - the rare ones which are falsifiable - would seem be a mere detail. Not a shred of evidence over decades, and in the end an entire field and careers wasted on his nonsense. You wouldn’t know it from his Wikipedia page because he seems to have invented the field of cognitive science, which is ironic since its existence is a refutation of his career in whole and in all the details.
The death knell for his pseudo-scientific work in linguistics of course are LLM’s (like chatGPT) which manage to “learn” language by merely finding arithmetic correlations among words. Surprisingly they have better grammar in all trained languages (though interesting syntax at times in other languages I know). The word he struggled for his entire career was probably “auto-regressive”, not “transformational grammar”. I read frequently he was a bully and prevaricator professionally. I suspect that’s true. His career seems to be an endless series of evasions, equivocations, bullying and abuse for those who find his work, well, questionable.
On the other hand - outside the linguistics failure - we have a pathological fan of genocidal regimes, presenting as a liberal. Chomsky is a noted Pol Pot fan, an apologist of the famous Khmer Rouge genocide, as well as an apologist for genocidal crimes in the Balkans, an apologist for Putin in Ukraine (“Russia is acting with restraint and moderation in Ukraine”). To top it all off, he believes Hamas is more peaceful than Israel. Where does it stop? He even presents as a Nazi apologist for a professor who was censured in France for claiming the holocaust didn’t occur. France is touchy about such things.
Frankly he doesn’t seem to have met a genocidal regime he can’t apologize for somehow.
This is your hero.
That’s why I wrote “really?” - the rest of the article was well-done until the wrench jumped into the cogs.
Do read critical writing on Chomsky. It’s quite illuminating
You don't sound snippy. And I too find some of Chomsky's foreign-policy stands abhorrent. I'm not competent to judge his linguistics work, and for the sake of argument, I am happy to grant every claim that you make about it.
My point isn't that Chomsky is good. It's that, even if his intellectual standards are extremely low, Robinson's are lower. I could be wrong about this. But note that your own argument about Chomsky seems consistent with this view.
Given all that you write about Chomsky, it may seem doubtful that anyone could have lower intellectual standards. But Robinson is special. His misrepresentation of arguments and refusal to consider context is so great that it doesn't just verge on deceit—it topples headlong into deceit. His willingness to deceive is so great that we might as well think of him as a Trumpian figure on the left.
Of course, Robinson's idiom is very different from Trump's. It's highbrow. And Robinson does write well at the level of the sentence. But that is part of the problem: he does the authoritative tone well enough to sucker a lot of people who should know better. Like Trump, he is a skilled and deceitful demagogue. He's just speaking in a different register and from a different part of the political spectrum.
Ty for pointing this out
Everytime I've seen him write about a person it's been a roughshod, unsubtle hit job. Horrible behavior.
You specifically ignored his point that the casualties from the Israel-Gaza war have been higher than any other in the past three years. The Saudi war in Yemen has decreased in intensity a lot since 2021, and that does matter if we're talking about what people care about.
Anyway, I would certainly like reading 5,000 words of disagreeing with Robinson. What I would like even more is a published email exchange with him. The Chomaky-Harris emails are among the greatest intellectual debates I have ever seen, and I often just go back and reread them for fun, and imagine a world where such exchanges replace all opinion columnists.
It's true, but even despite this, the Saudi war was much worse. Now, I was not claiming that someone should regard the current Saudi war as more significant--it's mostly ended. Rather, my claim was that there's at least something puzzling about people being single-issue Israel voters, when no one is a single-issue Saudi voter.
Well, I'm sure there's someone, but to be honest, it's pretty hard to get Americans concerned about the welfare of a new Islamist rebel movement when their slogan includes "Death to America, Death to Israel, A curse upon the Jews".
I mean, even Hamas rewrote its charter to try and remove the really obvious anti-Semitism.
Yes. But apparently, it worked on some of them. There's a story from a woman living in one of the raided towns that two Hamas fighters broke into her house and reassured her that "It's okay, we're Muslims, we won't hurt you." She said they further stuck around for two hours before leaving, at one point asking her for permission to eat one of her bananas.
It was mainly a PR move — they’re clearly very good at that. Their overall mission statement is still liberate the region by killing the Jews.
I mean, in case you’re tempted to get all misty eyed about them.
I only get misty eyed about those two guys, who apparently were completely convinced that what we consider a cynical PR move was totally authentic.
Almost childishly naïve.
So I don't know if those two guys believed the hype, or maybe they were just unusually devoted to the nonviolent tenets presented in the Qu'ran.
But it's made me a little less cynical, about the cynical. If it were any of those other fighters in that house, they would have killed that women and her children, or worse. So there's a chance that that purely cynical PR change in the Hamas charter saved three lives.
Criticism of Israel is salient because non-critics, or fans, of Israel are too. Meaning, the country has been roped into our own value system, pop culture and domestic politics in a way Saudi Arabia hasn't been then. So of course, people pay more attention to that conflict.
He sounds like kind of a shitty guy in general: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/03/10/response-to-current-affairs-on-against-murderism/:
>Nathan writes that “shockingly, the people who most loudly call for empathy and dialogue are the least willing to engage in genuine empathetic dialogue…”, and uses me as an example. I can only say in my defense that last month, I sent Nathan an email saying that I thought it would be productive to engage in dialogue with each other in a way “where instead of trying to disagree publicly, we’re trying to come to agreement privately, then present the results of that agreement”. I offered to do this with him on a topic of his choice. He wrote back saying he didn’t have enough time, which is fine. But when he then publishes an article in a national magazine announcing that I am a hypocrite because I refuse to dialogue with my political opponents, I feel pretty betrayed.
Fatthew Piglesias
I bet this is a very smart well written article that takes down Robinson, but I'm not going to read it, because Robinson is a pretend socialist who fires his staffers for unionizing, all while dressing like a member of a ska band.
I'm just going to take your word for it because the guy is a clown person.
Nathan Robinson is neither serious enough nor taken seriously enough by anyone of import to deserve this much effort.
Honestly, a simple pic of his face is enough to disqualify any of his insipid little hit pieces, you can see what kind of person he is just by looking at him.