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AufheBonus Bonus - Nov 2023 (Patreon)

Published:
2023-11-20 07:00:04
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

Videos

  • 247963325.mp4

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Content

On 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.

Files

Comments

Sara Sg

It looks like the logical endpoint of your argument is that Palestine is a lost cause and the left should stop giving this conflict so much airtime. In the most generous scenario such a position is rooted in deep ignorance about the conflict you speak so confidently about, about Israel's role in the middle east and warmongering around the world, its relationship with the Palestinian population in wb and Gaza and also about the campaigning that has been done in the past decades by Palestinians and allies in the west. Especially where you talked about class relations that define Israel's relations to Palestinians, or lack thereof it was painfully clear how little research you have done. Maybe another case of writing what you think is true first then looking for sources to back it up? Anyway at this point your take is just irrelevant to the global developments and what seems to be escalating into a regional war, which for those of us who actually live in the middle east, it's not just an abstract question of oh hmm I wonder what the western left should do, through the prism of the kind of abstract impotent theory you enjoy engaging with. The western left is non-existent and irrelevant at this point and so are unfortunately you guys.

Eli A

I've never seen your faces before and I don't know how I feel about it.

Davka Smolah Collective

Phil, when did you become an Israel expert? I'm surprised how much you're able to rattle off the top of your head that you've never let leak into your image as a thoroughly British and foreign podcaster. Did you study the region at some point or is there some link to your mysterious Balkan origins?

Joan Guenther

Only 5 minutes in but I’m a really intellectually shallow person so I’ve had to pause the video long enough to comment that you guys look just like you sound … a couple of you do look a very few years older than I might have assumed and the other younger … looking good tho all around …

Carson H

Phil says that "The condition of Palestinian liberation is getting rid of Hamas, and anyone who doesn’t see that or accept it doesn’t have any kind of meaningful hope for Palestinian emancipation.” I think this captures what's wrong with your approach to this conflict. No doubt the political marginalization of Hamas would be ONE condition of Palestinian liberation, whatever exactly that entails in the long-run. But if it's THE (primary, essential) condition, then you are once again taking the exact same position as Biden, Starmer, Sanders et al. Namely, that the Palestinians can only win their dignity and freedom by abasing and submitting themselves to the will of their colonial oppressors. This despite the fact that Israel is unequivocally demonstrating before the eyes of the world that they are willing to slaughter the people of Gaza en masse if it will lead to their eventual expulsion from the land of "Greater Israel." This despite the fact that we (and more importantly, the Palestinians themselves) have already witnessed the murderous Israeli response to attempts at non-violent resistance (e.g., the Great March of Return). The most obvious problem with this line of thinking is that it's simply counterfactual: whether or not you believe that Palestinians must abandon their resistance to Israeli occupation in order to be free, evidently, they themselves do not. And while it's true that it is currently more or less impossible to discern a path forward that would lead to the liberation of Palestine from both Islamist and colonial domination, it is also impossible to imagine Israel successfully stuffing this back in the bottle, no matter the outcome of the current round of "war." The popular passions aroused in the region and all around the world by the jaw-dropping spectacle of Israeli depravity will have real geopolitical impacts (for better or for worse) in those places where legitimacy crises are already acute. I don't have a clue what will happen, but I think that your sense of resignation when it comes to this "issue" is rooted in an overly narrow approach to the broader social and political context. By going along with the idea that Hamas is (in the first instance) an obstacle to Palestinian liberation rather than a symptom of the Western-backed Zionist colonial project, you are naturalizing the very "post-historical" conditions that you otherwise aim to critique. Yet it's hard to think of a moment in our era when "the triumph of the Western Idea" has appeared more in question than it has this past month.

Blake

I get how you guys want to be theoretically rigorous but declaring that "no side deserves support" as social media is being flooded with images of dead kids, 90% of which were killed by one side, just comes off as incredibly callous to people.

Jeffrey Martin

With all due respect to the argument that, because the state is already involved in censorship, we should abandon efforts to get the state out of that business, but instead work to 'democratize' decisions over what content on social media is to be permitted, I submit that that view is far more naive than my contention that the state, whether on its own, or in combination with the NGO industrial complex, should simply not be in the business of, say, censoring people who discuss covid statistics, vaccine efficacy or lack thereof, or anything, really. First, this quango-type network is immensely corrosive of anything resembling democracy, in America perhaps more than other countries because we have the First Amendment, the jurisprudence of which has not traditionally allowed censorship or prior restraint absent an imminent threat of violence, which virtually nothing the Regime censors actually contains. The defenders of this squalid arrangement try to defend this by equating mis/dis/malinformation with violence, but anyone with an IQ over room temperature should be able to see this bit of linguistic sorcery for immoral swindle it is. Second, there is no realistic prospect of subjecting this sort of arrangement to democratic oversight, let alone democratic determination, a) because the different organizations involved are subject to different types of law, b) the private corporations are subject to no democratic oversight whatsoever in re: their ToS and "trust and safety" protocols, c) the state involvement comes not from elected officials but from bureaucrats buried deep in the vast cloaca of the state, such that trying to change what they do by voting for someone is like pushing on a string to move a lever to pull a switch to.... you get it, and d) the very idea of an election platform including a list of things the candidate would permit and forbid on social media is too absurd to contemplate, let alone to exist in reality. Third, and therefore, it would be much simpler to have a hard, simple, crude rule that on social media, you cannot threaten imminent violence, SWAT people, or do other things that are already illegal, like promote or disseminate child exploitation material, and that everything else goes, than to have shifting, indeterminate standards of micromanagement. The best answer to those complaining about dis/mis/malinformation (political and ideological terms, not scientific ones) is, "If you don't like it, stop fucking reading it." There exists no entitlement, nor any imperative, to live in, or create, a progressive integralist state.

Magnus

Just wanted to say I enjoy this podcast and will pay for it when I can

C

This is simpler then it appears - their argument stands or falls on showing anti Semitism on the left to be structurally significant even if the empirical evidence can only deliver anecdotal incidence of oddballs (as James f comments). They obviously fail to do this which is why people find the argument so intellectually weak. It’s also why, sadly, the ideas on offer here - for the moment at least - aren’t worth five dollars a month. Bummer cuz I do otherwise like the show …

Steve Bowbrick

No 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.

Bartleby

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.