Anonymous asked: Do you support Israel?
That question could be interpreted in a lot of different ways, anon. I assume this means something like “do you identify with Team Isreal in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?” Last time I looked into the issue with any degree of effort I can to the conclusion that both sides had fucked up a lot, and that determining who has the more legitimate claim to a piece of land is often a hopeless quagmire.
If it’s something like “do you support the continued existence of Israel,” then yeah, I’d rather not force people to live through a change in regime.
If you mean “should the Jewish population get to have its own ethnic state,” I lean toward yes. “But then shouldn’t Europeans and Christians get that too?” I don’t think so.
I’ve been thinking recently about how atomic communitarianism works for majority and minority populations. Consider gay bars. Nearly everyone who doesn’t just oppose homosexual behavior outright seems to think they have at least some useful function. Whether or not they should get to exclude cishets is more controversial, but most progressives lean toward yes. Opponents will obviously point out that allowing this but not allowing cishet-only bars seems unfair. Supporters reply that “the whole world is a safe space for cishets!” This last reply is true for two reasons that I think we don’t distinguish between often enough.
Firstly, our society is still rather homophobic, even if this varies in degree, so gay and trans people have an interest in being protected from that sort of thing that cishets don’t. Secondly, unless there’s some very surprising and scientifically interesting demographic shift, gay and trans people will always be in a minority, and will never make the whole world a queer-only space in the way that cishets often can even without trying. This also happens to be true of Jews, since Judaism is by and large a non-evangelistic religion.
Thinking about this some more, I think I’d be okay with letting majority groups have their own dedicated spaces as long as there a limit to how much total space they take up. I am, for example, perfectly okay with the existence of Vatican City, and I wouldn’t have a problem with them declaring themselves to be a Catholics only zone. The problem is when exclusive spaces get big enough that you can’t avoid them or they take up all of a given category. So straights-only bars would be okay with me as long as they only made up a small minority of the bars that were out there, and as long as they didn’t end up being used for business meetings to keep out gay people or whatever. This is obviously a much harder standard to reach in a small town than in a big city. I’d be much more comfortable having bakery #3757 in New York City refusing to cater for gay weddings than Joe’s Baked Goods which serves the entirety of Podunk.
I think this works as a meta-level rule, but I’m not sure how confident I can be endorsing it yet. I’d love to hear critique on it.
An interpretation of that rule could be, “you’re only allowed to defend yourself after you’re already losing.”
“New defensive measures with costs are only justified if existing ones don’t seem to work, and current ones with costs may be unjustified if they’re redundant” seems reasonable?
Like, right now there is a problem with anti-Semitism in some regions of Europe. Historically, there have been other problems with anti-Semitism in some regions of Europe. I would suggest that there are some responses that would be justified in the late 1930s that are not justified today.
Also, if Denmark wants to let in everyone who formally converts to Evangelical Lutheranism (specifically, whichever kind Den Danske Folkekirke practices) and signs some agreement to pay the church tax [1] and maybe even show up a certain amount, that would probably not be that bad? (It, uh, also wouldn’t be very good for nationalism whatnot, though, because I’m pretty sure lots of existing Christians in countries that are worse than Denmark would be happy to convert to a slightly different sect if that meant they could live in Denmark. This is the natural consequence of having Christianity be the majority religion.)
And I’d be essentially fine with being banned from entering Vatican City, but I doubt sedevacantist groups would be.
Also, if you want to defend cisgender heterosexuality, isn’t there kind of an issue with plastics going on? IDK, it’s not my priority, but I thought there was. And if you’re looking to defend the institution of marriage, again, I doubt straight-only bars will help as much as other measures. You might want to do a comparison study on the effects of legalizing covenant marriage, although there’s an obvious confounder in that states with the sort of people who want to legalize covenant marriage are the ones in which it is legal.
[1] What do Denmark and the historic Ottoman Empire have in common? Christians have to pay a special tax in both regions, although I’m sure Denmark would say this isn’t about pressuring people to deconvert.
First rule of the plastics thing club is you don’t speak of the plastics thing to people who might be interested in stopping it. Dumping finasteride into the water supply is only suitable as a backup plan.
Also, Finland also has a special tax for christians. Not supposed to make them deconvert, but revealed preferences and all (but we could use a lot of deconversion because the state still gives a shit about what the church says and that’s not okay). Another thing it has in common with the Ottoman Empire is that one can construct an argument for either them being the legal heir of the Roman Empire (along with at least Russia and possibly kind of Austria as well but that one is stretching it).
3 months ago · tagged #support your local supervillain #nordic country hatedom ingroup #finland is swastika country · 43 notes · source: wirehead-wannabe · .permalink