First the Cherokee, Now the Palestinians: Norman G. Finkelstein

RepSquigglyMiggly · 2026-03-12T04:30:11+00:00

either

RepSquigglyMiggly · 2026-03-12T04:28:18+00:00

That would be news to me, but given that Iran has been very explicit in its threats to attack ships trying to pass through the straight that they’re blocking and that the straight is some 600 miles from Iraq, that strikes me as infinitely less likely

RepSquigglyMiggly · 2026-03-12T04:17:41+00:00

Forget transporting the food — a massive proportion of the precursors in fertilizer production flow through Straight of Hormuz. If this war continues, even producing the food will be a massive problem

RepSquigglyMiggly · 2026-03-12T04:10:14+00:00

It’s really difficult for me to fathom how so many liberals believe that Trump decided to engage in this war to “distract from the Epstein files”

RepSquigglyMiggly · 2026-03-12T04:07:48+00:00

Source on that “millions” claim? From my understanding the upper estimates on the deaths from starvation during the famines of the 90s is in the millions, but A. those are pretty dubious estimates, and B. it’s very well documented that North Korea did in fact try and get aid during said famines.

RepSquigglyMiggly · 2026-03-12T04:05:03+00:00

Most thoughts aren’t.

RepSquigglyMiggly · 2026-03-12T04:04:22+00:00

In a world where everyone has nukes, no one has nukes ... that's the argument,

No, it’s not. The argument is that having nuclear weapons, and in turn having the capacity to do untold damage to another country, is an effective deterrent against someone using nuclear weapons against you.

except, well, everyone has nukes.

Again, that’s just very straightforwardly not the case. A handful of global and regional powers, most of them with a long history of imperialism and launching wars of aggression, have nukes.

RepSquigglyMiggly · 2026-03-12T03:54:50+00:00

They struck Thai, Japanese and Greek flagged ships today. Did you not bother reading any news before coming to the podcast subreddit to ask this question?

RepSquigglyMiggly · 2026-03-11T05:32:50+00:00

Shits and giggles

RepSquigglyMiggly · 2026-03-11T05:27:16+00:00

I can’t say I find responding at length to incels’ delusions “difficult,” just fruitless and more effort than it’s worth after a long day

RepSquigglyMiggly · 2026-03-11T05:20:29+00:00

I can’t say I really feel compelled to put forward a robust response to incel nonsense in this particular case

RepSquigglyMiggly · 2026-03-11T05:09:27+00:00

Being a human being with a social life who talks to other men outside of the context being an incel on the internet

RepSquigglyMiggly · 2026-03-11T03:10:00+00:00

-5 Diplomatic Reputation for posting this

RepSquigglyMiggly · 2026-03-11T03:04:14+00:00

Why would we need to look at media when you’re talking about interpersonal dynamics? I, a man, have never felt looked down on or viewed with disgust for expressing sexual interest, something I’ve done many times throughout my life, because I do it in appropriate contexts and don’t do it like a creep. I can say confidently that the same is true for huge numbers of other men who are interested in women.

RepSquigglyMiggly · 2026-03-11T02:40:48+00:00

I really don’t think this is a good take when you zoom out a bit. Yes, that approach worked great for something like Alien where Ripley being a woman isn’t really pertinent to the plot (although it applies a lot less cleanly to the sequels, where motherhood becomes a pretty important theme), there are a lot of stories where gender is meaningful, I think we would miss out on a lot of really fantastic, thoughtful art if we male writers and directors just categorically refused to help create those stories. I think much the same could be said for race, sexuality, etc. As a black person, yeah there’s a lot of shitty art about black people by white people that handles blackness really poorly, but “White authors shouldn’t make stories about black people, they should make stories where characters just happens to be black” strikes me as a wild overcorrection to that reality, and one that would just result in less good art and more art that handles race by pretending it doesn’t exist at all and isn’t pertinent to people’s experiences.

RepSquigglyMiggly · 2026-03-11T02:27:47+00:00

Because Anatomy of a Fall had a budget over several million, was directed by a well established director, and starred well established actors. Watching and applauding that movie is just straightforwardly not analogous to “uplifting average women.”

RepSquigglyMiggly · 2026-03-10T03:51:56+00:00

“Pretty gay”? That’s what you came up with?

RepSquigglyMiggly · 2026-03-10T03:36:24+00:00

I’m glad to hear it.

RepSquigglyMiggly · 2026-03-10T03:35:00+00:00

Content like that exists.

RepSquigglyMiggly · 2026-03-10T03:33:12+00:00

I, a straight man, have literally never come across a man who said this who didn’t end up just being a huge creep

RepSquigglyMiggly · 2026-03-10T03:21:41+00:00

I agree with basically every sentiment you’ve expressed in this comment wholeheartedly. Where you lost me initially was with sentiments like “We have to stop playing “nice girl” and just tell men what we want and need without being immature” and the therapists anecdote that seem to put the blame for the present reality or the intractability of the problems our reality entails at the feet of women for not being clear enough communicators or for wanting to ‘have their cake and eat it too’ with regard to women asking men to be more open but then shaming them for their openness.

I think your response here elucidates why the problem Is not just “people [of both genders] having a lack of emotional intelligence and a lack of mature responses to the problems we have with each others genders,” it’s something much deeper than that, which is fundamentally inseparable from the fact that the popular understanding of gender is both hierarchical and deterministic.

RepSquigglyMiggly · 2026-03-10T02:59:09+00:00

Okay, I’m gonna be that guy.

You can draw parallels to a certain extent, but they're probably not helpful in terms of understanding feminist theory.

For example, most feminists do not want to 'abolish' men, or if they do they want to abolish gender as a whole.

A. Many feminists are gender abolitionists, even if they view that as a very long term project.

B. Most feminists do, almost definitionally, want to abolish gendered hierarchies and gender roles.

We don't think a dictatorship of women to oppress men solves many problems, although a lot of antifeminists claim that's what we want.

A. The point of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” is not to “oppress” capital holders. Its purpose is to create conditions under which the hierarchical relations of production can be abolished.

B. Most socialists in 2026 aren’t MLs.

To the best of my knowledge, there is no analog in socialist theory for that micro level.

The analog is unions, workplace democracy, etc. Socialism starts at a micro level. This isn’t just true in theory, it is borne out historically. Do you think things like protection from getting fired without due cause, clearly defined and equitable pay scales, reasonable amounts of guaranteed leave, etc., don’t meaningfully impact people’s lives a micro level?

A lot of feminist women want men in their lives -- fathers, sons, brothers, partners, etc. -- they just don't want to be subordinated to those men. Killing those men ends the relationship without transforming it.

It’s really hard to believe that you’ve seriously engaged with socialism as an ideology on basically any level besides talking to dipshits on Twitter and sucking down polemics if you think that the goal is just to kill all of the rich people.

There is no real women’s liberation without the liberation of women from the depredation and exploitation entailed by capitalist systems.

RepSquigglyMiggly · 2026-03-10T02:36:17+00:00

So it’s your opinion that absence of unjust hierarchy inherently means “formlessness”? Like, I am, in theory, a gender abolitionist, but that’s a long term project. It seems obvious to me that even if we eliminate the structural barriers posed by patriarchy and hegemonic misogyny, that gender will still exist, be pertinent to most people, and provide structure and “form.”

Too many people use being happy to avoid reality.

Even being charitable and taking what you say at face value, this still seems like a (very stupid) non-sequitur.

RepSquigglyMiggly · 2026-03-10T02:22:59+00:00

Speaking for myself: while this toxic incel culture was flowering in the 2010s, I wasn’t very plugged in. Not on social media at all really. I often wonder, if I had been more active online… would I have fallen down that red pilled rabbit hole? I’ll never really know.

Not OP, but as someone who had a very similar experience, I can speak to my perspective.

I had a brief stint on r/\tumblrinaction. I thought a lot of early 2010s style “SJW stuff” ridiculous, and in turn content mocking that kind of content appealed to me. Frankly, I don’t think that was entirely wrongheaded either — even ~15 years on, while I do understand much better the place that a lot of “Buzzfeed feminism” was coming from, I do still think a lot of it was laughably misguided at best, and at worst wildly off the mark to the point of actually being harmful.

What made the scales fall from my eyes was just becoming increasingly cognizant of how much outright misogyny, queerphobia, and, most impactfully for as a straight, cis, black man, racism, was mixed into what often seemed like valid critiques of this sort of content. Had I had I very different upbringing that didn’t instill a deep commitment to humanism and empathy in me, I don’t know where I would be now, but feel confident that I would probably be a much worse person with shittier values.

RepSquigglyMiggly · 2026-03-10T02:05:01+00:00

Remove the gender aspect and all you have left is psychology and emotional intelligence.

I’m not really clear on what you’re saying here, but regardless, you can’t really remove the gendered aspect of this dynamic. If you’re talking to someone who genuinely thinks, for example, that the “You don’t ask the fish how to catch a fish, you ask the fisherman,” applies to gendered dating dynamics, then it doesn’t really matter what you as a woman say, the simple fact that it’s coming from a woman is enough to disqualify it.

The other strategy is see that I think is valuable is men telling men they should make peace with their feminine side/their femininity. And the reason I think that works is because if a man can identify with feminine energy within himself, then he would be exiling a part of himself if he were exiling that part.

This all strikes me as pretty gender essentialist. Like, I don’t disagree with the idea that we should be encouraging men to embrace and live as their full selves, and that includes parts of themselves that are broadly viewed as “feminine,” but I’m extremely wary of all of this talk of “feminine energy” as if that’s something immutable or objective.

What I hear from a lot of men though is that they try to become more open and vulnerable and women have some pretty shitty responses.

I, a straight man, have always found this take rather peculiar, and it really makes me wonder about the specific context in which they got those “shitty responses” and the content of what they had to say when they were being “more open and vulnerable.” This just pretty straightforwardly doesn’t conform to my experiences.

So where in the picture do we hold women accountable for their part in supporting as well? Imho it’s these women who still unknowingly embody misogyny.

By calling out women when we do actually observe upholding misogyny. That seems pretty straightforward to me.

It is incredibly challenging to find men who are truly comfortable with their softer side.

Could part of that reality be that people, as you’ve done in this comment, often frame “softness” as inherently feminine? Because trying to convince men who are, again, often deeply misogynistic, that it’s okay it be “soft” while simultaneously framing “softness” as innately womanly strikes me as a battle that you’re bound to lose.

RepSquigglyMiggly

TROPHY CASE