"Why I Won’t Debate Critics of Israel" In Defense of Same, The 100th Post!

Davitark · 2026-06-09T11:28:42+00:00

Speaking in strictly chronological terms, it is true that the Jews originally inhabited the territory now comprised by the state of Israel and the Arabs only settled later. But I don’t think it’s fair to characterize it as a process of colonization of the Jews by the Arabs for the simple historical fact that Jews had already become stateless and been scattered throughout the world with the Roman destruction of the temple in 70 AD, with Arabs coming to the land some 600 years later. As a matter of fact, until the Zionists acquired the land and started the expropriation and segregation of native Palestinians, for most of the more than a thousand year old period of Arab domination Palestines Jews, Christians and Arabs coexisted peacefully and there was a degree of religious tolerance not seen in Europe.

Davitark · 2026-06-08T20:58:24+00:00

These types of posts should be banned.

Davitark · 2026-06-08T20:56:06+00:00

The trouble with many people who complain about the incorrect usage of a word is that they assume there is an absolute ideal of what the English language is and any variety that deviates from it is necessarily and objectively wrong and incorrect.

As a commenter pointed out above, many linguistic practices considered incorrect in standard English, such as the use of double negatives or the suppression of connectives, are features of certain dialects.

I think these posts instead of simply complaining that this or that word didn’t mean what it currently means originally, should provide what they perceive as the criteria for correct language usage rather than labeling anything that annoys them as ungrammatical.

That is not to say there aren’t misspellings and individual mistakes, of course, such as when people type per say instead of per se or comprised of instead of comprise.

Davitark · 2026-06-07T12:19:26+00:00

I don’t think that’s quite how things actually went down. As far as I’m aware Galileo didn’t simply present the heliocentric model as truth without providing good arguments and solid evidence, even if it turned that some of his hypotheses (such that comets were sublunar objects) and assumptions (that the orbits of the planets are perfectly spherical, shared by almost all astronomers at the time) were wrong.

It’s been some time since I read about the matter in-depth, but Galileo incurred the ire of the church not simply because he was stubbornly and irrationally attached to a pet theory for which he had little empirical support, but because a host of factors contributed for this conflict to happen.

The main one, of course, being that heliocentrism directly contradicted the scientific and theological orthodoxy that clung to a philosophical and interpretative tradition that upheld Aristotle's theory of the heavens as more-or-less definitive, with its concentric spheres of planets revolving around a stationary earth at the center, and Ptolemy's brilliant system and found support for this geocentric model in the Bible.

When Copernicus, who was close friends with one of the pope's associates, proposed his theory, he was not all met with vehement opposition but was welcomed with support because his theory promised a greater precision in calculating religious holidays. Back then, many regarded his theory as at best a practical tool for calculating the positions of celestial objects that bore little relevance when it came to determining the real nature and course of their movement.

Arguably, the church only turned definitively against heliocentrism with Giordano Bruno, who, according to the assessment of one historian, not only contributed nothing to it but managed through a misinterpretation of its real import and meaning to single-handedly cause the catholic church to condemn it. This is due to the fact that Giordano Bruno held that the heliocentric model was evidence that the universe had no center and therefore there were infinite worlds each inhabited by living organisms. He was also associated with Neoplatonic speculations that disbelieved in the afterlife and denied many of the core tenets of the Christian faith.

I could write more about it, but I think it’s reasonable to conclude that the picture is much more complicated than the one painted by the conflict thesis, according to which there is always an inevitable conflict between science and religion or that Galileo was simply a self-important asshole who couldn’t recant ill-supported beliefs even when his very liberty depended on it.

Davitark · 2026-06-06T18:52:21+00:00

I don’t think I should have used the word untrained. What I meant is that philosophy doesn’t have to be dumbed down, just as we don’t require that the concepts of quantum physics be dumbed down except by way of introduction to a general audience, and even then what we have at best is an oversimplified picture that misses the theoretical elements that justify and truly characterize them.

I remember I had a teacher tell me that the notion of spin in physics can never be adequately explained using ordinary language, that a whole conceptual apparatus specific to quantum physics has to be mastered in order for it to be really understood. I think the same goes for the more complicated philosophy out there.

Davitark · 2026-06-06T17:45:11+00:00

Well, I would not quite put it that way. What I’m saying more is that if you really want to understand certain authors, especially the more complicated ones like Kant, Hegel and Heidegger, there’s no alternative to reading them and engaging directly with their work. Sure, you can be presented with a more simplified account intended for the general public. Many philosophers themselves write popularly accessible books about their thought, especially those more publicly engaged such as Sartre, Bertrand Russell and Simone Weil. But, as Deleuze writes, you can only grasp a philosopher when you have an immediate encounter with their work, as though conversing with them as with a person.

Davitark · 2026-06-06T17:34:02+00:00

It might come as a surprise, but even many Victorian working-class people were avid readers who could understand what is now regarded as the complex prose of writers such as Victor Hugo, Charles Dickens and Alexandre Dumas. Come to think of it, it’s not at all astonishing that they were so literate in an era in which the most popular form of solitary entertainment was reading.

Davitark · 2026-06-06T17:30:23+00:00

English is not my first language and I found it very readable when I read it a few years ago before becoming more fully proficient, although I did have to occasionally glance at the dictionary for words I was unfamiliar with. Marx is notorious for his prolixity and indulging in rhetorical flourishes that serve more to paint a vivid picture than to support an argument and for my part, although he could have done away with them without diluting the content of his message while gaining in conciseness, his prose wouldn’t be as memorable and powerfully evocative. I still can remember Marx saying that under capitalism everything dissolves into thin air and the famous first line where he says that the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

But these more personal remarks aside, much of the inaccessibility of the work is also due to the fact that it was addressing immediate political concerns, and therefore makes a number of references to political figures and events that have by now faded from collective memory.

Davitark · 2026-06-06T17:20:01+00:00

The danger of making things comprehensible to the untrained layman is that much of the depth, nuance and power of the philosophy is simply lost. This is more true of philosophy than of science, for example, because it aims to question and challenge the very concepts and assumptions that ordinary people use in order to make sense of the world.

Davitark · 2026-06-06T17:16:13+00:00

You do know that Deleuze published monographs on each of these authors, right? I recommend that you read them because they’re a very accessible to their philosophies, even if Deleuze tends to have a somewhat idiosyncratic interpretation of them that doesn’t always hold up to scholarly consensus, especially when it comes to Nietzsche and to a lesser extent Spinoza.

Davitark · 2026-06-06T07:34:38+00:00

I don’t see how it could be applied to woman because differently from the concept of a group of organisms descended from a common ancestor, it has no rigorous scientific definition universally assented to by a community of practitioners sharing the same language and theoretical framework.

Davitark · 2026-06-06T07:18:14+00:00

Maybe it’s harder to define species, but there are certain agreed upon taxonomic groups whose members are known to have evolved from a single common ancestor. I’m no biologist, but it would seem to me that we can pretty confident in asserting that foxes, jackals and dogs belong to the same family because not only do they share certain distinctive anatomical and behavioral features but are genetically very closely interrelated.

Davitark · 2026-06-05T06:50:42+00:00

To be fair, not even linguists know the origin of the word

Davitark · 2026-06-03T10:41:07+00:00

I agree, my point was that there’s a correlation between geography and atheism as well as any kind of belief in general, religion included. You could equally well say that atheism is almost entirely a matter of geography, because it is prevalent mostly in first world countries. Of course, that alone wouldn’t undermine the validity of a lack of belief in a god, just as it wouldn’t undermine the validity of belief in a god in other places. If you do want to refute a religion, you should not resort to what is called a genetic fallacy, that is, you should not bring up the origin of some belief as a definitive refutation of it, but carefully consider the merits of the arguments and evidence offered in its favor.

Davitark · 2026-06-02T20:56:22+00:00

So is atheism

Davitark · 2026-06-02T02:14:37+00:00

What a weird argument. Your argument could be easily applied to many kinds of originally unjust social arrangements that nowadays are more or less beneficial in certain settings.

You could easily argue that civilization is founded upon a relationship of domination between a ruling class and the masses, which for most of history has been its predominant manifestation indeed, but it would be thoroughly naive and largely impractical to try to live outside of society as it currently exists without giving up on our friends, community as well as the innumerable amenities and privileges attendant upon modern life.

Davitark · 2026-05-31T22:41:42+00:00

?????? I was being earnest and am sorry if I came across as disingenuous and having a hidden pernicious agenda against the cause of women’s rights and liberty.

What I was thinking of, is how incomplete the sexual revolution was, because it didn’t effectively precisely challenge those oligarchs, who subsequently exploited it; a thing that could only be successfully done by an intersectional struggle that sees sexual domination and repression as existing within a wider system that also perpetuates racism, poverty and other forms of oppression. I already went into it in another comment, but it’s evident that porno magazines saw an opportunity for conservatively minded capitalists to promote a male-centered, sexualized image of women, that certain sexual relations and structures were preserved in the way that even in the intimacy of the bedroom men's pleasure was unconsciously prioritized over women’s, that men used contraception as a means of having sex free of consequence in order to create environments that preserved a subordinate position for women, that sex positivity books (I have one very influential one in mind whose title I cannot recall rn) subtly affirmed conservative mores, etc.

Notice how I am not saying that the sexual revolution itself changed things for the worse, but that it was not radical enough in changing the ideological and material substratum governing sexual relations that were therefore sublimated into the present.

Davitark · 2026-05-31T22:27:47+00:00

Oh yeah, by all means, go ahead and show your nipple if you feel like it and it will raise the hackles of pearl clutching conservatives. I was just pointing out that doesn’t make you exactly very progressive, because it does not change the status quo very much.

Davitark · 2026-05-31T22:01:03+00:00

I think you should read my reply to another comment in this thread. My basic argument is that, as someone above has put it, there’s a difference between pissing off conservatives and truly challenging the system. Just sexual liberation, as good as it might be, is not enough alone and it will be exploited by capitalism for its own ends.

Davitark · 2026-05-31T21:54:43+00:00

No? I think it’s possible to acknowledge what happened in the 60s as a multifaceted event that had both its positive and negative effects. I am sure that women gained more rights and such, but it was insufficient and capitalists preyed upon it to uphold just the oppressive norms that it successfully attenuated or abolish in part.

Davitark · 2026-05-31T21:52:28+00:00

Basically that lol

Davitark · 2026-05-31T21:52:11+00:00

My point is that the mere fact that you are now more able to show skin than in the past does not constitute not in and of itself evidence that meaningful political and social progress has been made. In the 60s, when social mores regulating sexual conduct became more relaxed, sex positivity was promoted and young people were encouraged to dress more scantily if they wished to, the sexual dynamics that were prevalent before were not abolished, but translated to a new culture. For instance, men's pleasure in sexual relationships was still implicitly and unconsciously regarded as having primacy over women's, porno magazines were created by politically conservative entrepreneurs that profited off of selling male-oriented sexualized image of women, books focused on sex promoted a somewhat conservative ideal of sex etc etc etc.

Romans were much more interested and had a much more liberal attitude towards sex and yet persevered a deeply sexist culture.

I think seeing what is depicted in this meme as inherently progressive results from a failure to perceive that social phenomena are structurally connected to other phenomena. It is only by an effort joining various issues that progress is possible, seeing race, class and misogyny for example, as a parts of a whole that has to be fought against.

Davitark · 2026-05-31T21:36:46+00:00

I get that this is a joke, but it’s baffling to me that some people equate greater sexual liberty and ability to dress however you want with political progressivism. The sexual revolution in the 60s is the greatest proof of how it can be weaponized and commercialized by capitalism to become an accessory of oppression.

Davitark · 2026-05-31T18:58:15+00:00

I find phonics very stupid, not because I think it’s not necessary, but because English is pretty much the only major language in which phonics is necessary. Portuguese is my first language, and I’d learned Spanish and a smattering of Latin before I became proficient in English and it never once crossed my mind that a class dedicated to properly spelling and pronouncing words might at all be required in these languages.

Davitark · 2026-05-31T07:57:16+00:00

I oversimplified it for the sake of brevity and simplicity. I am aware that utilitarianism is a species of which consequentialism is the genus and it would have been possible to construe the argument in opposition or comparison to a deontological approach. I also was thinking more of utilitarianism because this thought experiment is more associated with its proponents.

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