Specifically note the bit “I just have a mother whose mother was [culturally Jewish]”.

Please read my comment again.

Genetics is not just “the content of your genome”. The term genome comes from genetics, not the other way around.

Many commiserations!

It is not a choice.
I’ve never been religiously or culturally ‘active’. I just have a mother whose mother was, and the “Jewish nose”.

Just having the nose has been enough for me to be physically attacked by neoNazis, and you can be sure my genetics would have got me killed by the original ones.

Why they are who they are: they never had the success they felt *entitled* to.

Mediocre swimmers. Middling alcoholic soldiers. Failed screenwriters.

The reason they aren’t winners couldn’t be *their* failings. It must be all the trans/brown/female/queer DEI that kept them from being winners.

Plus it starts the ball rolling on the acceptability of un-personing anyone they don’t like: the easiest precedent to establish it before spreading it to others.

70% of the people I had sex with while at university I met through the tabletop RPG club, and 70% through the leftist political groups.

It actually works out: 40% were in both.

...Violence that is used to "justify" Israel's claims that a Palestinian state is impossible due to some supposed flaw in the Palestinian character, rather than every attempt to achieve it being undermined and attacked by Israel.

Israel is absolutely dead set against there *ever* being a Palestinian state.

It's why Israel funded Hamas when it was a tiny fringe Islamist org - to create a counter-faction to secular PLO, and both split Palestinians politically and produce a new source of violence as the PLO moderated.

And European imperialism before that, too.

There are twice as many Zionists as there are Jews, so it is not just possible but logically necessary.

Christian Zionism is a very big thing in evangelical circles.

It just makes no sense to me that I - as an Australian Jew - can go to Israel and automatically have citizenship available to me, but people whose parents were displaced in 1948 and still have the key to their house have no such right and their house is occupied by Israelis without recompense.

Most of the Zionists in the world aren’t Jews, and many Jews are not Zionists.

Zionism is a supremacist political movement, like various forms of Islamism or fundamentalist evangelical Christianity. Just as many/most Christians and Muslims are not supremacists, neither are most Jews.

It’s pretty hard to argue it is just a homecoming and national renewal when Jewish *converts* get automatic “right to return” but the families who were kicked out in 1946 don’t.

If I and several million of my fellow Australians decided to create a nation by displacing the residents from a section of Great Britain, it wouldn’t be seen as just return to our “historic homeland”.

The migration of Jews to Palestine could be seen as such, but not Israel and the Nakba.

When you have Theodore Herzl and Cecil Rhodes patting each other on the back about their colonial plans, you can be pretty sure those plans are colonial by both modern *and* 19th century standards.

Theodore Herzl, founder of Zionism, described Zionism as a colonial project right from the start, and said the project would Europeanise the region.

Not going to argue on the local wars, but most conflict in the region is a product of past colonial conditions.
On “racist terrorism”: international law says that an occupied population has a right to fight back against their occupier. Israel has been a colonial project since the late 19th century.

I simply do not understand this seeming attitude that anything less than immediately launching The People’s Revolution is to be spurned as unacceptable equivocation.

Progress is progress, and every step that reduces harm or improves people’s lives is worthwhile on the path to liberation.

You do know what “in the mean time” meant?

I didn’t mean “electing the left(ish) candidate is as good as it gets, we’re done”. It is a tiny step towards better times that still have to be worked for.

Really? What happened in the 70-odd years before October 7th?

The thing is, Wikipedia is actually accurate in its summaries of many things, including the two political philosophies under discussion.

And while I’d prefer a mass movement towards a genuinely worker owned economy, I’ll accept some better than average electoral candidates in the mean time.

We’re discovered!

I guess I misremembered your CRT collection details.

I didn’t say Mamdani is a saviour, I just clarified the distinction between social democracy and democratic socialism.
I’m well left of both of those, though I now lean more to anarchism than any of the major Marxist strands of communism.

And truly neither of the presidential options were good.

1. Wikipedia isn’t a bad source, just a very basic one. Perfect for folks who don’t understand SD != DS

2. The democratic socialist candidate isn’t campaigning on immediately expropriating landlords and turning over industry to workers councils, so they aren’t really socialist?

Social democracy:
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_...

Democratic socialism:
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democra...

The former aims for equality and social safety nets within a capitalist system, the latter seeks to establish a socialist economy and society.

I don’t doubt that Mandan is less extremely left than I would like, but he is distinctly left of any of the other likely candidates for the election.

Plus, he isn’t a social democrat, he is a democratic socialist, the latter being further left than the former.

Not in general, just with a certain flavour of neurodivergent enthusiast.

And we’d better hope my son doesn’t see this exchange or he’ll be pestering you for your parents’ contact details.

Nice article!l. I like the way you linked the themes.

One of my kids is into retro gaming and TV from the time of *my* childhood - Famicom and NES, and CRTs to run them through.

When he watches a movie in his room it’s from streaming, but with the output going to a big old Trinitron CRT TV.

“There are reasons people have no empathy for Texans.”

I don’t see any “apart from children and progressives” or “MAGA Texans” distinction in there.

You basically said “I don’t care if any and all Texans die” just in different words