Zompist Bboard Again

One thing that people forget is that many Israeli Jews aren't White Europeans but rather are Mizrahi, originally Arabic-speaking Jews who had been living amongst Muslim Arabs and Christian Arabs for centuries before they were for all practical intents and purposes expelled after 1948, and had nowhe...

As for 'selling out the lives of palestinians', I really don't see what it's about. I'm pretty sure I read the list twice, but maybe somehow I missed the part where he calls for killing all Palestinians? Now I've read this several times and I can't quite tell if you're being disingenuous or not. Ab...

feels like this guy is selling out the lives of palestinians for civility tbh. Same. And the whole "we're all really from Africa" is the "All Lives Matter" defence of settler colonialism. I also don't know that I buy his arguments about geopolitics. It's not inevitable that a Pa...

Torco wrote: ↑Fri Apr 26, 2024 3:32 pmI don't know that PRC wanting to conquer Taiwan is a good example of settler colonialism

I think he's actually talking about the KMT conquest of Taiwan (and the wave of Han settlement which preceded it). There was no significant Han presence on the island prior to the 16th century.

To be fair, thats not an exact quote I was using; he was - in his book - rebutting against the suggestion that, despite the periphrasic(sp) "do" appearing in various Celtic languages, there were those who suggested that the "do" arose independently in English or was from another...

MacAnDàil wrote: ↑Thu May 09, 2024 9:37 amI think Travis's point, which I agree with, is about which way to vote, not about discrediting protests.

Please show me where in my OP I said a damn word about voting or not voting. He simply ignored the content of my post to ride his old hobby horse about voting.

When did do support first appear in English? according to Dr McWhorter, back in the days of Welsh, Cornish, and other Celtic languages. (it was brought into English from there, so its been here the whole time) McWhorter is, IMNSFHO, full of shit here. This construction appears to arise in the 13th ...

I get why a spontaneous student movement is as threatening to establishment Democrats as it is to Republicans, but I really wish people would apply a modicum of common sense and a healthy dose of scepticism when evaluating the charges of those trying to discredit the movement. It's the same canards...

But I’ll point out that ‘calling for violence’ is itself bad enough. Humans being what they are, it often becomes a prelude to violence itself. And I don’t want to see that happen. But the violence is already here . This ship has sailed, sunk, been salvaged, and sunk again. One fact that I will poi...

oh, incidentally... i hear they're going to be legally making it a hate crime to criticize israel in the states? I don't know if this is deliberate hyperbole or what. The bill passed by the House does explicitly define anti-Zionism as antisemitism, but it doesn't lay out any penalties. I suppose it...

On this point, it’s worth highlighting the Australian student protests, which — at least so far — have been substantially less violent than the American ones. (There was the whole ‘kids calling for intifada’ thing, but that seems to have been an isolated incident.) I know the conversation has long ...

These conspiracy theories about the student encampments are really getting bonkers. First, a relatively sane friend shared a headline about how 80% of the protesters arrested at ASU you were not university affiliates with the question "Wondering what percentage of the participants of these prot...

Yeah, Linguoboy, I get it, I'm a bad person because I'm not interested in supporting the cause of a movement that is calling for my murder. I would certainly be a much better person if I would look at a movement that wants to murder me, and also a lot of other people, and tell them that I'm fully o...

On the other hand , you get students chanting ‘burn Tel Aviv to the ground’, or the protest organiser who said ‘Zionists don’t deserve to live’. (And we all know who they mean by ‘Zionists’: the linked article makes it quite clear that they mean ‘anyone who is identifiably Jewish’.) Even in my own ...

All there really is is an obligation to pay that's funded out of current revenues. The thing with the proposed alternatives is that they mainly just go to greater lengths to hide the same kind of thing. In the US or more generally? Here pensions and our equivalent of Social Security have dedicated ...

Yes, exactly! If there is a problem with demographics, no matter how the pensions work, we're still going to run into the same kind of problems. There is a potential shortage of labour. That's only equivalent to a "problem with demographics" if we don't continue to improve productivity th...

On the other hand , you get students chanting ‘burn Tel Aviv to the ground’, or the protest organiser who said ‘Zionists don’t deserve to live’. (And we all know who they mean by ‘Zionists’: the linked article makes it quite clear that they mean ‘anyone who is identifiably Jewish’.) Even in my own ...

I just toured the perimeter of the encampment. There's an iron fence on the west side of it which is covered with signage. There are tables with craft materials and folks are being invited to make their own signs. A lot are just generic messages of solidarity (e.g. "Jewish Alumni for Palestine&...

I think we should be quite clear that this isn’t whataboutism. I fully respect people’s right to criticise Israel, as long as they in turn respect my right to argue back. But I could take protesters a lot more seriously, if they showed any sign of being as upset about the other problems in the worl...

I think you don't get it because Zionism does not mean what you think it means. Zionism is the belief that there should be a Jewish homeland at about the current location of Israel, nothing more, nothing less. C'mon, we'r all linguists here, we all know it's never this simple. This is like saying &...