The thing about debate is that it’s supposed to be a fair and reasoned and good-faith discussion about The Thing. It’s supposed to be two people of differing opinions attempting, through discussion, to find the truth.
But debating with cult members and trolls only mimics this. It’s a nice shiny flower that also happens to be a praying mantis with bodyparts that look like petals.
You’re not arguing with them about The Thing. You’re arguing with them about their opinion of The Thing. Which is 1) entirely in their control, and 2) really isn’t particularly important to you.
Unless you make it important to you.
Like, by conflating it with the thing it purports to be.
The instant you get invested, the instant you feel the need to convince THEM, the instant convincing them becomes synonymous with successfully defending your own beliefs, they have a hold on you.
And they will use that hold to do what predators do.
They’re not interested in being convinced. They’re not interested in finding the truth. They’re interested in arguing you out of everything you believe using the debate process you’ve foolishly placed your faith in and staked your positions on, and using your own convictions that being right makes you a superior debater and/or that being a superior debater makes you right, to convince you that you owe it to them to change YOUR mind, because you chose to avail yourself of their supposed willingness to change THEIRS.
You can, actually, lose a debate while still being right. Debate is a skill contest, not a magical truth-detector. You don’t owe anyone to change your beliefs to their tune just because they’re more skilled at debating, more sophisticated at finding arguments, or just more unwilling to concede points.
But they’ll try to convince you otherwise. In fact, they run on your entrenched beliefs otherwise.
To say “I still don’t accept this” and walk away, to keep your own autonomy at the cost of mockery on a level you probably believe, takes strength and savviness few people possess, and they absolutely prey on that too.
It’s very helpful to be able to be honest with yourself about whether you’re actually willing to believe/accept their position, and fair to your prospective opponent to avoid debates (or at least avoid calling it a debate) over something when you absolutely are not willing to accept the opposing position. Because being fair in a real debate means you risk accepting the opposing position.
And if you’re the only one being fair in a debate only you believe is real, you’re taking a huge-ass risk with only purely illusory payoff.
The trap is that they’re offering you the illusion of an opportunity to defend your beliefs by convincing them, at the cost of you risking your beliefs on the strength of your ability to convince them. And then they use their refusal to be convinced as the “impartial” judge of victory.
The fight is not what you think the fight is, and it’s time to walk away.
“We have many times more empty houses and apartments than we do homeless people, but America can’t have laws limiting investments in single-family residences (which are being snapped up as passive investments by foreigners and Wall Street) because the industry owns so many politicians. Investment companies own about a quarter of all American single-family homes: last year, investors bought 22% of all American homes sold and “donated” millions to politicians. Many were purchased specifically to leave them sitting empty, because real estate goes up in value faster than even the stock market. By pulling all these houses out of the housing market, these investors and speculators are driving up — intentionally — the price of housing. And as the price of housing goes up, so does homelessness: there’s a linear relationship between the two when the price of housing in a community exceeds one-third of the community’s median income. So why can’t we regulate that? Why can’t there be at least some disincentive, some penalty, for this destructive form of investing? Citizens United.”
idk. yesterday was a slow day and at the end of it, I still stared into a cash drawer, one of three, that had more than my rent in it, even if you only count the 20s. I spent a lot of that day trying to calculate in my head how many hours of work equal one pair of pants, let alone how many hours of work equals the fun thing I want to do next month.
I feel a cough coming on, because I work in a drug store, and all of my customers are sick. I always feel a little bit sick, now. I can’t afford to eat well enough to keep my body healthy. Cough medicine is worth two hours and 20 minutes of work. Our store probably bought a case of cough medicine for they price we’re selling one box. If this cough gets worse, I might have to call out, which will cost me more than the medicine in the long run- but that doesn’t give me the money to buy the medicine right now. I stock a case onto the shelf. I don’t buy any.
A mom wrangling three crying, sick kids enters my line and sets two types of children’s medicine down, says they’re both on sale and thank god for that. I ring her up, and she gets very quiet, because she misread the sign, and her total is twice as high as she was expecting. Her youngest screams in the cart, because she’s burning up with fever. Her mother very quietly asks, please, she’s so sorry, if I could please take the more expensive one off her total.
I agree, I move the box below the counter, and when she’s not looking, I slip it into her bag. I pray as hard as I can that if she notices the “mistake” she says nothing, because I so desperately want her to have that medicine. The store has lost profit at the cost of a child’s health. I don’t bat an eye. This is a terminable offense. If I’m presented with the same situation tonight, I’ll do it in a heartbeat.
The myth of evil employees stealing from the company falls apart the second you realize the company would shoot you dead to make a profit. This isn’t two equal players, one of whom is stealing from the other. This is someone fighting for survival versus someone fighting to make an extra million. It’s not equal.
Employees should be able to steal, actually.
Bro I teared up oh my god bro
When I worked at Walmart as a cashier almost 20yrs ago. A guy came in with his obviously sick 5yr old son. & all he was buying was a bottle of medicine for his kid. He was short a dime. A fucking dime. 10 cents. I had a dime & pulled it out of my pocket & helped pay for the medicine.
My manager comes over in a huff & angrily says, “What were you thinking?! How could you do that?! What if he expects you to cover him every single time he’s short on money??? He could be a meth addict or something.”
Me, “I’m not going to lose any sleep over helping & being out a dime. I would do it again.”
This guy comes in a day or two later, holding a dollar in the air & running towards me. He gives me the dollar & says for me to keep it. He wasn’t there for anything else, just came in to give the dollar.
When it came time for me to quit. It was still during the time a cashier didn’t need an override to discount items. I had HAAAADDD it with Walmart’s bullshit. & so EVVVVERYYYYONE got discounts over the course of a week.
A woman comes in with a couple thousands dollars worth of stuff to redecorate her house. She probably paid $300.
Moms with a basketful of groceries. 75% off.
I even told my husband (they didn’t know he was my husband) to come in when he got paid & to get as many groceries & hygiene & cleaning products as he could fit in a basket. & whatever else he wanted. & I discounted TF out of it.
I didn’t care anymore & I wanted to save everybody in my checkout money.
& to this day, working the odd jobs in retail - I internally snicker at loss prevention. Fuck that. You want to steal something? Babes, I didn’t see shit.
okay, bear with me: so as you may know, harry houdini and arthur conan doyle were friends, at least for a while.
by the early 1920s, both arthur conan doyle and acd’s wife jean, aka lady doyle, believed whole-heartedly in spiritualism, talking to ghosts and all of that. (sidenote: this was of course right on the heels of a devastating world war and a devastating pandemic, both of which had created a huge population of grieving people, so spiritualism was having a moment.)
lady doyle sincerely thought she had the ability to go into a trance state and pass along messages in writing from the dead. she offered to do this for houdini. houdini agreed.
lady doyle attempted to channel houdini’s late mother. she basically drew a cross at the top of the paper and filled it with generic platitudes addressed to “harry.” houdini’s mom was jewish and didn’t talk like that, so houdini knew the jig was up, even if lady doyle didn’t. but not wanting to make the situation awkward, he kind of went along with it to their faces.
then acd decided to publish a glowing account of the seance, and since both he and houdini were super famous, it got a lot of attention, and letters started pouring in for houdini, asking if this was true. ultimately, houdini couldn’t life about it. so he essentially said, like, “yeah, i think lady doyle THINKS she can talk to ghosts but she absolutely can’t.” and it ruined his friendship with acd forever.
and then of course a lot of the people running seances weren’t even well-intentioned like lady doyle, they were just simple charlatans taking advantage of traumatized people mourning loved ones. in houdini’s youth, he and his wife had traveled the carnival circuit where he did an act pretending to commune with spirits, so he knew all the tricks of the trade AND he had lingering guilt over having done this, AND he was infuriated by this increasingly popular wave of con artists so he decided to assemble a team of anti-grifting grifters and together they went on the road exposing whichever spiritualists were preying on the locals.
houdini’s best agent was a young woman named rose mackenberg, who donned disguises to visit the fraud de jour and then importantly sussed out what non-supernatural thing was actually happening, and then houdini would demonstrate the techniques onstage to packed audiences.
(if you want to know more, check out episode 175, “ghost racket crusade” of the podcast Criminal or read Tony Wolf’s book The Real-Life Ghostbusting Adventures of Rose Mackenberg.)
but yeah, what really gets my goat is that all this happened and as far as i know, we still don’t have like four seasons of a Leverage-style historical procedural about rose mackenberg and the rest of the crew having adventures in the 1920s as they unmask craven hucksters all over the united states. (what we do have, apparently, is one season of a show called “houdini and doyle” which is about the oddball friendship of two contrasting men solving sometimes-actually-supernatural mysteries, and whose premise does i think at the very least a real disservice to houdini’s whole quest and also totally erases rose, who is arguably the most interesting part of this story to me.)
This post is by no means comprehensive, but bear in mind rule one of the Internet: You CANNOT tell the difference between a well-meaning yet uninformed leftist, and a neo-Nazi sockpuppet pretending to be a leftist to spread antisemitic rhetoric. Reading and absorbing the information in this post will help you avoid dipping into antisemitic modes of thinking.
Don’t deny Jewish history in Palestine. There’s been a continuous Jewish presence in Palestine ever since the Romans destroyed Judea - and not just the descendants of Jews who stuck around after that; Jews have been making aliyah to Palestine, and specifically the four holy cities (Hebron, Safed, Tiberias, and Jerusalem), for pretty much the entire history of the Jewish Diaspora. Every time Jews got expelled from somewhere, some Jews migrated to Palestine. There was even an attempt, in the middle of the war between the Byzantines and Sasanians in the 7th century, to regain political autonomy in Palestine and reconstitute Judea under the Sasanids (it, uh, obviously didn’t succeed.) This is all historical fact, but that doesn’t mean any of it justifies apartheid in the modern day. Denying the history doesn’t help anyone, it just makes you antisemitic.
Don’t whitewash the Jewish population in Israel. Ashkenazim only make up about 31% of Israel’s Jewish population, less if you consider that the 2019 study would have counted Bulgarian and Greek Jews as Ashkenazim, when they’re in fact Sephardic. The majority of Israeli Jews are Mizrahim who were expelled from other countries in the SWANA region who wrongly blamed their local Jewish populations for the Nakba. There is an internal racial dynamic within Israel where Ashkenazim hold hegemony, and that is worth critiquing in concert with Israeli oppression of Palestinians, but just saying “Jews are white Europeans” is antisemitic and flatly wrongheaded. Jews are an ethnoreligious group whose members come from all racial backgrounds.
Don’t invoke classic antisemitic tropes like dual loyalty, or tell Jewish Israelis to “go back where they came from”. Most Israelis do not have a second passport, are not eligible for a second passport, and cannot return to wherever they or their grandparents came to Palestine from. Litvak Israelis can’t return to Lithuania, their communities were destroyed by the Nazis and then paved over and replaced by the Soviets. Moroccan Israelis can’t return to Morocco, they were expelled. American Israelis only make up about 5% of the Israeli population. Jews have always lived on “other people’s land”, the difference in Palestine is that we’re the oppressor, rather than the oppressed.
Understand why Israelis fear the Palestinian Right to Return, even if that fear is something you (rightly) oppose. It’s true that settlers always become anxious about the people whose land they stole fighting back, but with Israelis this is even more potent due to two thousand years of antisemitism, and in particular, an event in living memory. In 1932, German and Austrian Jews were stripped of their citizenship, becoming stateless, and when the Evian Conference was held in 1938 to address what to do with the Jewish refugees, all 32 countries in attendance refused to take in more than at most 30,000 Jewish refugees, and that “most” was from the USA and the UK. (Except the Dominican Republic, but that was because Trujillo wanted to bring in a surge of Europeans to overwhelm the country’s Black population, so…) When my country, Canada, itself a settler colony, was asked how many Jewish refugees would be allowed into Canada after the war, the infamous response was “None is too many.” Golda Meir, then representing the British Mandate in Palestine, and later a Prime Minister of Israel who said and did some awful shit to Palestinians, was not permitted to speak or participate in the conference, she was only allowed to observe as country after country refused to accept Jewish refugees in any large number. (Though it should be noted that Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion, later the first President and Prime Minister of Israel respectively, actually supported this bullshit, because they thought having nowhere else to go would drive Jewish refugees to Palestine. They were right.) Israeli settlers are terrified of becoming a minority, because they do not trust the Palestinians to be any different from the rest of the world. And again, none of this justifies Israeli apartheid, but it elucidates where the Israelis are coming from, and should inform your anti-Zionist work.
Be specific and precise in where your principled anti-Zionism is coming from. To say that “the State of Israel is an openly settler-colonialist venture that has displaced millions of Palestinians and continues to engage in daily human rights abuses and ethnic cleansing” is specific and precise. To say that “Zionists use the Holocaust to play victim and get whatever they want”… do you understand the difference between those two statements? And why the second one might sound like when you say “Zionists”, what you really mean is “Jews”?
Avoid double standards. Unless you genuinely believe that all white people should be kicked out of the Americas and return to Europe, don’t apply that same belief to Israeli Jews. There is no post-Israeli future in Palestine that doesn’t involve Jews living there. See points 1 and 4. And just to be clear, avoiding double standards cuts both ways. There is also no just future that involves the continued apartheid and ethnic cleansing of Palestine. It’s evil, fascist, and genocidal for Israeli military officials to say that for all they care Gazans can go jump into the sea.
For fuck’s sake stop putting the Neturei Karta on my dash. The Neturei Karta are a fringe group of Litvish Haredim who split off from other Haredim in Jerusalem. They’re very publicly anti-Zionist while also being visibly ultra-Orthodox, so they get a lot of attention, but they’re also Holocaust revisionists who attended and spoke at a 2006 Holocaust denial conference whose other speakers included David Duke of the KKK and several outright Holocaust deniers, and their leader defended Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a president of Iran who claimed Jews made up the Holocaust. If you want anti-Zionist Jews, there are plenty of us. Check out Jewish Voice for Peace, Independent Jewish Voices, or even the Satmar if you really want Haredim. Don’t give the fucking Neturei Karta any oxygen.
Finally: Zionism is not a euphemism. Zionism is not “when Jews do a thing I don’t like,” and a Zionist is not “a Jew I disagree with/don’t like”. Zionism is a nationalism, and like all nationalisms, it hasn’t fully delivered on the liberation it was created to provide, and it’s oppressed others in the process. Zionism will never go away until the material conditions that drive Jewish nationalism - that is, global antisemitism - are addressed, and yet the Palestinian right to liberation is not and must not be contingent on the end of antisemitism. This is the fundamental problem at the core of the issue: Zionists believe Jewish safety will only come from a Jewish ethnostate with a Jewish majority, and since everywhere on Earth is populated by someone, it may as well be in Palestine, given the Jewish historical roots there. And they’re wrong. They’re doing horrific, evil, genocidal things in the name of Jewish safety, and they’re wrong to do so. But we can condemn Zionism from an informed perspective, rather than from an ignorant one, and in doing so avoid antisemitism and strengthen our anti-Zionist work. The last thing we want to do is spread Nazi rhetoric in the name of Palestinian liberation.
