The far right pitch

I just succumbed to subscribing to John Ganz’ Unpopular Front, and was rewarded with a post offering a sharp critique of left anti-antifascism which named some things which have been bothering me. (In short, a certain school of left antifascism which sees sees “liberalism” as nothing other than a defense of capitalism, sees fascism as the instrument which capitalism creates to suppress the left, and therefore regards liberals as at least as great a threat as actual fascists, if not an even greater threat. Someday I need to write about this perverse misunderstanding of fascism at length.)

The post contains long quotes from Prophets of Deceit: A Study of the Techniques of the American Agitator, a 1949 book by “two nearly forgotten Frankfurt School sociologists, Leo Löwenthal and Norbert Guterman” which already have me glad I subscribed. It would be dishonorable to share the subscriber-only post, but I think it is fair to share a key bit of his quotation from the book which summarizes of the far right appeal:

My friends, we live in a world of inequality and injustice. But whoever believes that this state of affairs will ever be or can ever be changed is a fool or a liar.

[⋯]

Not utopia but a realistic struggle to grab the bone from the other dog — that is our program. Not peace but incessant struggle for survival; not abundance but the lion’s share of scarcity. Can you realistically expect more? To win this much you will have to follow me. We will form an iron-bound movement of terror. We will ally ourselves with the powerful in order to gain part of their privilege. We will be the policemen rather than the prisoners. And I will be the leader. I will think for you, I will tell you what to do and when to do it. I will act out your lives for you in my public role as leader. But I will also protect you. In the shadow of my venom you will find a home.

Universal services are both stronger and more just

Hamiltion Nolan says Everyone Into The Grinder:

One of the most direct ways to improve a flawed system is simply to end the ability of rich and powerful people to exclude themselves from it. If, for example, you outlawed private schools, the public schools would get better. They would get better not because every child deserves to have a quality education, but rather because it would be the only way for rich and powerful people to ensure that their children were going to good schools. The theory of “a rising tide lifts all boats” does not work when you allow the people with the most influence to buy their way out of the water. It would be nice if we fixed broken systems simply because they are broken. In practice, governments are generally happy to ignore broken things if they do not affect people with enough power to make the government listen. So the more people that we push into public systems, the better.

Rich kids should go to public schools. The mayor should ride the subway to work. When wealthy people get sick, they should be sent to public hospitals. Business executives should have to stand in the same airport security lines as everyone else. The very fact that people want to buy their way out of all of these experiences points to the reason why they shouldn’t be able to. Private schools and private limos and private doctors and private security are all pressure release valves that eliminate the friction that would cause powerful people to call for all of these bad things to get better. The degree to which we allow the rich to insulate themselves from the unpleasant reality that others are forced to experience is directly related to how long that reality is allowed to stay unpleasant. When they are left with no other option, rich people will force improvement in public systems. Their public spirit will be infinitely less urgent when they are contemplating these things from afar than when they are sitting in a hot ER waiting room for six hours themselves.

Conservatives tend to misrepresent this sort of thing as “totalitarian” because they believe that it exceeds the rightful domain of government. I submit that this reflects that conservatives are opposed to equality. Ian Welsh has their number in Making the Rich and Powerful Work for Everyone:

The philosopher John Rawls suggested that the only ethical society is one which we design before we know what position we will hold in it. If you don’t know whether you’ll be born the child of janitor or a billionaire, black or white, you may view social justice differently than when you know that your parents both went to Harvard or Oxford.

Rawls’s point is just in the sense that though none of us choose our parents, very few of us are able to see the world except through our own eyes. What I am going to suggest is something different: A society works best if it treats people the same, no matter what position they hold. This is hardly a new position. The idea that everyone should be treated equally is ancient and many a war has been fought over it. But despite a fair bit of progress, we don’t really understand what equality means, how it works, and why it works.

In a much earlier post I pointed to Tom Junod’s Are We a Nation of Line-Cutters, or Are We the Line? talking about the breakdown of egalitarianism at a water park.

I’ve been taking my daughter to Whitewater for the last five years, and over the last two the place has changed. It has changed because someone saw the experience of waiting in line as a problem to be solved rather than as an opportunity to be endured, and applied a “market-based” solution — that is, a combination of money and technology. Apparently, an Englishman named Leonard Sim took his family to Disneyland a few years ago, and his vacation was ruined by waiting in line. He invented something called the Flash Pass, and then sold it to an English company called Lo-Q — as in “Low Queue” — which contracted it to Whitewater. So now, when you go to Whitewater and many other American amusement parks, you pay for parking (^$15, at Whitewater), and then for admission (^$37.⁵⁰, for any human being over 48 inches tall), and finally for a locker (^$16), and then, once you’re inside, you can pay an extra $30 for a “standard” Flash Pass or ^$40 for the “gold.” And then you can cut the lines.

It sounds like an innovative answer to the problem that everybody faces at an amusement park, and one perfectly in keeping with the approaches currently in place at airports and even on some crowded American highways — perfectly in keeping with the two-tiering of America. You can pay for one level of access, or you can pay for another. If you have the means, you can even pay for freedom. There’s only one problem: Cutting the line is cheating, and everyone knows it. Children know it most acutely, know it in their bones, and so when they’ve been waiting on a line for a half-hour and a family sporting yellow plastic Flash Passes on their wrists walks up and steps in front of them, they can’t help asking why that family has been permitted the privilege of perpetrating what looks like an obvious injustice. And then you have to explain not just that they paid for it but that you haven’t paid enough — that the ^$100 or so that you’ve ponied up was just enough to teach your children that they are second- or third-class citizens.

It wouldn’t be so bad, if the line still moved. But it doesn’t. It stops, every time a group of people with Flash Passes cut to the front. You used to be able to go on, say, three or four rides an hour, even on the most crowded days. Now you go on one or two. After four hours at Whitewater the other day, my daughter and I had gone on five. And so it’s not just that some people can afford to pay for an enhanced experience. It’s that your experience — what you’ve paid full price for — has been devalued. The experience of the line becomes an infernal humiliation; and the experience of avoiding the line becomes the only way to enjoy the water park. You used to pay for equal access; now you have to pay for access that’s more equal than the access afforded others. The commonality of experience is lost, and the lines are striated not simply by who can pay for a Flash Pass and who can’t; they’re also striated by race and class.

See also my enthusiasm for more public utilities and cheaply democratized computers ….

YIMBY index

Getting a start on capturing some YIMBY-ish resources:

The San Francisco tech boom crisis

Another index of mine, collecting articles specifically about the collision between the “tech” industry and San Francisco bay area housing & transit policy.

Authors Pull Back Study That Found LA Has More Vacant Homes Than Homeless People

There is a NIMBY canard that there is an abundance of housing, but it is kept vacant by landlords for poorly-specified Reasons. This is of course just not true.

The Lego Movie is cosmic horror

Copied from Tumblr:

was explaining to my mom on the phone the concept of a cosmic horror and she hit me with the one hit k.o. ⋯

me: yeah so basically a cosmic horror is the fear of a godlike being or entity so much bigger than yourself and your perception of the universe that your brain cant possibly comprehend it, often leading to some sort of madness in the stories because of this “break” in your perception of reality because this entity is so incomprehensible to your limited worldview. the concept is credited to h.p. lovecraft because of stuff like cthulu but the guy was also a massive —

my mom, interjecting: ah, so like horton hears a who. i get it.

---

# wait so like # does the LEGO movie count # they manage to escape into the human world and it’s all hazy because they don’t understand # and the people were controlling them the whole time

SURE
SURE THE LEGO MOVIE IS A COSMIC HORROR
WHY NOT

---

The LEGO Movie absolutely counts, and it’s treated that way from the characters’ points of view. Emmett describes The Man Upstairs as having “hands like giant pink sausages, like eagle talons mixed with squid” which sounds like a human trying to describe an eldritch horror.

Just think, everyone and everything in his world is made of Lego pieces. They are as fundamental as the subatomic particles that make up our world.

From the characters’ perspective, the humans are gods that created these fundamental elements as drastically simplified playthings imitating their own world. Imagine finding out that the periodic table of elements was constructed by gods in order to build a simulation of something thousands of times more complex, and we are just simulations being puppeted by these gods for their amusement.

This also explains why objects like the Kragle and the Scepter of Q-Tip are considered “relics” with unnatural powers — they are discarded items from the higher, far more complex reality that follow the rules of THAT reality, not the characters’ reality. That is why they can influence the characters’ world in ways not normally permitted by that reality.

This puts a whole new perspective on the scene where Lord Business uses the nail polish remover on Good Cop / Bad Cop to ERASE HIS FACE.

Premature antifascists

I respect premature antifascists, but not premature anticommunists. A long excerpt:

“Premature Anti-Fascist”

by Bernard Knox

I first heard the remarkable phrase that serves as my title in 1946 when, fresh out of the US Army, I went up to New Haven, Connecticut for an interview with the chairman of the Yale Classics Department, to which, taking advantage of the generous provisions of what was popularly known as the GI Bill, I had applied for admission to the graduate program for the Ph.D. in Classics. I had submitted a copy of my certificate of the BA I had received from St. Johns College, Cambridge in 1936. I did not make any mention of the fact that I had made rather a mediocre showing in the final part of the Tripos, ending up with a second class (at least, I comforted myself, I did better than Auden, who got a third, and Housman, who failed completely). To jazz my application up a bit, I had included my record in the US Army, private to captain 1942-45. The Professor, who had himself served in the US Army in 1917-18, was very interested, and remarked on the fact that, in addition to the usual battle-stars for service in the European Theatre, I had been awarded a Croix de Guerre a l’Ordre de l’Armée, the highest category for that decoration. Asked how I got it, I explained that, in July 1944, I had parachuted, in uniform, behind the Allied lines in Brittany to arm and organize French Resistance forces and hold them ready for action at the moment most useful for the Allied advance. “Why were you selected for that operation?” he asked, and I told him that I was one of the few people in the US Army who could speak fluent, idiomatic, and (if necessary) pungently coarse French. When he asked me where I had learned it, I told him that I had fought in 1936 on the northwest sector of the Madrid front in the French Battalion of the XI^th International Brigade. “Oh,” he said, “You were a premature anti-Fascist.”

I was taken aback by the expression. How, I wondered, could anyone be a premature anti-Fascist? Could there be anything such as a premature antidote to a poison? A premature antiseptic? A premature antitoxin? A premature anti-racist? If you were not premature, what sort of anti-Fascist were you supposed to be? A punctual anti-Fascist? A timely one? In fact, in the ’30s, as the European situation moved inexorably toward war, the British and French governments (the French often under pressure from the British) passed up one timely opportunity after another to become anti-Fascist. They did nothing when Adolf Hitler took Germany out of the League of Nations and began a massive rearmament program (except that the British government negotiated an Anglo-German Naval Treaty that gave Hitler the right to build the U- boats that, in the early ’40s, came close to starving Britain into surrender). No action was taken when Hitler reoccupied the Rhineland, demolishing the buffer against an invasion of France created by the Versailles Treaty. They allowed Hitler and Mussolini to supply Franco with planes, tanks, guns and troops, while enforcing a so-called Non-Intervention Agreement that cut off supplies to the Government. They remained silent while Mussolini conquered Abyssinia and Hitler annexed Austria. And in 1938, they sold down the river for a ludicrous illusion of Peace in Our Time the only strong, democratic state in Eastern Europe that might have been a deterrent to Hitler’s plans for expansion, the Czechoslovak Republic. You couldn’t call Chamberlain, Daladier and Laval ‘timely anti-Fascists’. They declared war on Hitler in 1939 as he invaded Poland, a declaration that gave no help to the Poles, who were crushed between the armies of Hitler from one side and Stalin from the other. So what kind of anti-Fascists were they? My French maquisards had a phrase for the Frenchmen who, in 1944, as the Allied armies broke out of the Normandy pocket and raced across France in pursuit of the retreating Wehrmacht, finally tried to join the Resistance. Resistants de la dernière heure was their contemptuous name for them — ‘last-minute anti-Fascists’. It is a perfect description of Neville Chamberlain and Lord Halifax.

But in 1939, last-minute was too late. Too late to save the millions who died in the death camps; too late to save the soldiers and sailors who died in the campaigns in Russia, the Middle East, North Africa, Italy, France and Germany, at Pearl Harbor, Midway, Guadalcanal, Peleliu, Okinawa and many other places Americans had never heard of; too late to save the civilians who, like the inhabitants of Guernica, died under the bombs in Rotterdam, London, Hamburg, Berlin, Dresden and Hiroshima. It would have been better to be premature.

I did not, of course, say any of this to the professor. I kept quiet and was admitted, and resumed the study of those ancient authors whom I had left untouched for ten years, ever since, a few months after graduating from Cambridge in 1936, I left for Spain. What I did not realize (something the professor knew perfectly well) was that ‘Premature Anti-Fascist’ was an FBI code-word for ‘Communist’. It was the label affixed to the dossiers of those Americans who had fought in the Brigades when, after Pearl Harbor (and some of them before) they enlisted in the US Army. It was the signal to assign them to non-combat units or inactive fronts and to deny them the promotion they deserved. Not only did they deserve it; the Army needed them in responsible positions, for they were the only soldiers in it who had any experience of modern war, who had been bombed and strafed by modern German and Italian aircraft, who had faced German and Italian tanks, who had come under the fire of modern artillery, especially the Luftwaffe’s 88mm antiaircraft gun, which the German crews had found murderously effective against ground troops because of its high muzzle velocity. It was later the nightmare of the GIs in North Africa, Italy, and France.

What made me, and many others like me in England, France, Belgium, Holland, Canada and the United States, into premature anti-Fascists? I can speak only of my own case but it is, I think, typical of that of many of my contemporaries. I grew up, like most of my generation, haunted by the specter of what was known in England as the Great War, the war of 1914-18. My two earliest memories, in fact, are vivid pictures from that time. Some time in 1917, when I was barely three years old, I was carried, in the arms of a Canadian nurse who was boarding at our house in South London, across a street illuminated only by moonlight and the moving beams of the searchlights looking for German zeppelins overhead. Behind me came my mother, carrying my brother and sister, newly-born twins. We were hurrying to the bomb shelter, an underground taxi garage just across the street. My father was in the Army; he was engaged in the nightmare battle of Passchendaele in Flanders, a winter offensive in appalling weather conditions that won a few useless miles of muddy terrain at the cost of 300,000 casualties. The second picture is that of a Lee-Enfield rifle leaning against the wall of the sitting room of our house, and beside it a khaki kitbag with a helmet on top of it. It was my father’s equipment; he was home on 24-hour leave before sailing for Italy, where his regiment was sent to stiffen the Italian army after its disastrous defeat at Caporetto.

My father, like many veterans of that war, would never talk about it. But like most of my generation, I read all the books about it I could get my hands on Robert Graves’ classic Goodbye to All That, Henri Barbusse’s unforgettable Le Feu, the unacknowledged model for Remarque’s later All Quiet on the Western Front — and the poets Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg. All that we read induced in us a horror at what seemed a senseless waste of human lives and a fear that, in spite of the League of Nations, war might recur. The secondary school I went to in 1926, the year my father died, confirmed my fears. Like most such schools it had a Cadet Corps, a military training program designed to produce potential junior officers for the next war. Every Friday I went to school in uniform khaki puttees, breeches, a tunic with highly polished buttons, and a peaked cap; after morning lessons we went out onto the school playground and were put through the rigors of close-order drill, carrying rifles that dated back to the Boer War at the beginning of the century. But Friday afternoon was only the beginning. We also had firing practice at the HQ of the local Territorial Regiment with rifles and also the Lewis gun, the light machine gun of the British Army in the Great War, and every summer we went off to a camp on the Isle of Wight, where we lived through two weeks of military training under canvas, our lives regulated by bugle-calls and enlivened by simulated combat maneuvers against the cadet corps of other schools located in the vicinity.

When in the autumn of 1933 I went up to St. John’s college in Cambridge, Hitler was already dictator of Germany and had begun his program of militarization of the country; the prospect of a renewed European war was now a grim reality. I soon joined something called the Anti-War Movement, which on November 11 organized a march to lay a wreath on the War Memorial. The inscription on the wreath read: ‘To the victims of imperialist war from those who are determined to prevent another.’ Naturally, we ran into opposition. November 11 in those days was not only a day of remembrance, it was also a sort of patriotic ceremony at which artificial poppies, reminiscent of those of Flanders, were sold by volunteers to raise money for wounded and hospitalized veterans. Our march through the central college area to the memorial was bitterly contested; not only were we pelted with fruit and eggs bought from nearby stores, we were also repeatedly charged by rugger toughs trying to break up our column. Though battered, we reached the memorial and deposited our wreath.

This demonstration, however, was only a symptom of a deeper malaise which affected us; we were worried not only about the possibility of war but also about the economic and political situation that produced it. And even if war was averted, we faced a bleak future. What would happen to us after three years of study and security at the university? England, like the rest of the world, was in the depths of the Great Depression, which seemed to have become a permanent condition. Even the professional optimists among the economic pundits could offer little hope of recovery. The Depression was a more dispiriting phenomenon in England than in the United States; the Roosevelt New Deal was no panacea but it was at least evidence of official concern, whereas the so-called National Government’s policy of retrenchment was a defiant manifesto of indifference to widespread distress. In 1933 unemployment figures in the British Isles reached a record high of three million (23 percent of all insured workers); the unemployment benefits on which their families had to live were just enough to keep them from starvation on a diet of bread and margarine, potatoes and tea. Looking back at it in 1966, Harold Macmillan, who had been Prime Minister but was a junior conservative MP in the 1930s, remembered his conviction that “the structure of capitalist society in its old form had broken down … Perhaps it could not survive at all without radical change … Something like a revolutionary situation had developed.”

⋯

The communist dream would turn to ashes when the truth of Stalin’s totalitarianism became clear. But as the saying goes, the problem with communism was how it failed in its dream, while the problem with fascism was how it succeeded.

Against the Big Bad Boycott

Big Bad Con is a tabletop roleplaying convention founded with a deep commitment to social justice and a healthy community space. This year, people have organized a Big Bad Boycott demanding a strong “anti-Zionist” statement from the Con organization.

I have been itching to clean up my long Twitter thread about it into a crisp post, but have not been able to carve out the time. Because the issue is pressing, I am settling for this somewhat clumsy capture of the thread (with just a few tweaks for clarity and legibility) for sharing elsewhere.

Initial thread

I oppose Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza, and Israel’s longstanding apartheid military policing of Gaza & the West Bank. I am not a Zionist.

So I oppose the ill-informed, irresponsible Big Bad Boycott with sadness in my heart. I feel sadness because the Boycott organizers obviously speak from a sincere commitment to justice. All people of conscience must stand in opposition to Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza in this moment. But the terms of the boycott are irresponsible.

(I offer this commentary having never having attended BigBadCon, though I have given the Con modest financial support from the beginning, and I count many Con organizers & participants as part of my personal gamenerd community.)

Had the organizers of the Boycott called for the Con to make a public statement in opposition to Israel’s ongoing genocidal attack on Gaza, I would have considered it outside the scope of the Con’s responsibility, but noble.

This is not that.

The Boycott’s core statement has a host of problems. They summarize their position as a “stand against the normalization of genocidal views within our spaces”, but that summary is misleading.

The Big Bad Boycott demands

a public values statement indicating that Big Bad Con is an anti-Zionist space

That is a far stronger demand than expressing opposition to genocide, in ways which I assume that the boycott organizers do not understand.

“Zionism” does not mean support for the current genocide, or for the Nakba, or for the disenfranchisement of Palestinians. Zionism means neither more nor less than support for the continued existence of the state of Israel in some form.

Again, I am not a Zionist. I respect, even agree with, many anti-Zionist arguments. But given what “Zionism” actually means, even if one faults it as wrong one must respect it as a legitimate position. Many Jewish Israelis who have worked hard for justice for Palestinians understand themselves as Zionists, by which they mean that they love the only home they have ever known. Demanding an anti-Zionist BigBadCon demands their exclusion.

The Boycott summary faults BigBadCon for having “censored anti-Zionist language from event programming”. This is a misleading description of the events documented in the Boycott’s own letter, in which the Con organizers asked for the omission of an event plan in which ‘all panelists were asked to sign onto a statement [which] included the phrases “anti-Zionist” and “from the river to the sea”’. That is much more than Language In Event Programming.

Many say “anti-Zionism” as a noble call for justice across Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel. But Jews have good reasons to also hear “anti-Zionism” as a call for the expulsion of Jewish Israelis from the only home they have ever known.

Many say “from the river to the sea” as a noble call for justice across Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel. But Jews have good reasons to also hear that as a call for the expulsion of Jewish Israelis from the only home they have ever known.

The Big Bad Boycott summary calls on BigBadCon to “commit to consulting with Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims, and anti-Zionist Jews”. Thinking about Zionism is hard. Excluding non-Zionist and liberal Zionist Jews from discussion is irresponsible. Placing conditions on Jewish participants but not Palestinians is irresponsible; Palestinian anti-Zionists who advocate genocide exist. And one should reflect on how, and why, the Big Bad Boycott assumes that non-Palestinian Arabs & Muslims have a stake in this conversation.

I have yet to read the Big Bad Boycott letter as closely as I would like. For now, I want to examine just one segment which worries me, an early email from one of the Big Bad Boycott organizers to the Con, saying that Big Bad Con …

… asked to remove anti-zionist language from its event description due to the presence of zionist staff and/or donors at Big Bad. I find this news troubling, given that zionists are currently participating in and supporting a genocide in Palestine.

This passage is true in a trivial sense. Yes, there are Zionists participating in & supporting the genocide in Gaza. Just as there are vegetarians with the same culpability. The passage obviously means something else; it clearly implies that Zionists all participate in, or at least support, the genocide in Gaza. That is simply not what “Zionist” means.

That passage, and the whole tenor of the Big Bad Boycott, says that Zionists should be excluded from the Con community. Much stronger than Anti-Zionist Language In Event Programming.

I recognize that the Big Bad Boycott sponsors believe that they are calling for nothing other than the exclusion of advocates for genocide. If they were, I they would have my support. But they are not. In their ignorance, the leaders of the Big Bad Boycott have actually called for the exclusion of Israeli Jews who oppose the horrors committed under the flag of the home they love.

It should be evident why Jews would be touchy about this.

Again, I respect what the leaders of the Big Bad Boycott sincerely believe that they are doing. But they are responsible for what they are actually doing. Their demands are irresponsibly sloppy & ill-informed; they are harmful to the community.

Because I respect the noble motives behind the Big Bad Boycott, I urge BigBadCon to engage in good faith dialogue with its leaders, and to publicly address their demands. But I also urge BigBadCon to firmly refuse the current demands.

Little follow-ups

The Boycott organizers say:

Any claims to being both pro-Palestine / anti-genocide and a Zionist are inherent contradictions.

That is offensively false.

It occurs to me that it would be better to instead demand that BigBadCon commit to confronting the legacy of colonialist ideologies in TTRPGs more generally.

Seeing BigBadCon talking about doing “staff education about Zionism and Palestine”. I offer some resources I keep handy:

• Settler colonialism & history
• What “Zionism” means
• What “anti-Zionism” implies

It really itches me that the Big Bad Boycott faults the BigBadCon organization for “censoring” an event description. A con organization does not just have a right to edit the con program, they have a responsibility to.

A decade back, I played a part in protest against a different con because they allowed an event description which insulted trans people. Con organizers have an obligation to ensure that the program welcomes & supports all members of the community.

Reasonable people may differ about whether BigBadCon made the right editorial decision in response to the event description submitted to them. But the Boycott is wrong to suggest that it was wrong for them to exercise editorial control at all.

I saw that a Quillette pseudo-journalist is criticizing the Big Bad Boycott, and I vigorously reject any support from them. I keep an index of resources about how Quillette respectability-wash the far right.

I have not seen anyone calling the Big Bad Boycott “financial violence”, but for what it’s worth, I concur with critiques of that position. I think the Boycott is wrong. But it is a legitimate instrument for pursuing a legitimate aim.

A long exchange with a Boycott supporter

This exchange starts with me saying how I want to speak to a couple of things about this post in support of the Big Bad Boycott which represents things which I find frustrating about the Boycott in general:

After the most recent update from BigBadCon, I and [others] will be joining #bigbadboycott. I love Big Bad Con, and believe that while likely most of the staff have their hearts in the right place, their failure to roll back their censorship is unacceptable —

This was the most simple and central demand of the boycott. I was so certain it would be addressed I hadn’t even considered it a possibility that they wouldn’t, so I didn’t originally sign on. I was clearly wrong.

Additionally, their insistence that “from the river to the sea” has multiple meanings is, whether intentional or not, a dangerous concession to genocidal propaganda.

I sincerely hope they will change their course in the next seven days before the boycott becomes official.

From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free 🇵🇸

I respect the Boycott pushing back against the Con’s editorial choices about event descriptions. A con program is an instrument by which the con defines its community; the community absolutely has a stake in it.

I am frustrated by the Boycott characterizing the Con’s editorial control of the program as “censorship”. Con organizers do not just have a right to exercise editorial control over event descriptions, they have a responsibility to, as custodians of the con community. I take the point about con organizers’ editorial control over the program very seriously because I am a veteran of a different con suffering a crisis over the org’s failure to protect vulnerable members of its community in its program.

Second, I am mortified to see the con saying “‘from the river to the sea’ has multiple meanings” characterized as “a dangerous concession to genocidal propaganda”. The multiple implications of the phrase is a fact.

I am confident that this individual and all organizers & participants in the Boycott mean nothing other than liberation & justice for all people in the Levant when they say “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”. But no, that is not the only implication. The phrase “from the river to the sea” has long been used by people advocating the expulsion of Jewish Israelis. It has long been used by Israel hardliners who advocate the expulsion of all Arab Palestinians. It. Has. Multiple. Meanings.

The phrase “from the river to the sea” evokes “push them into the sea”, which has been used to advocate the expulsion both of Jewish Israelis and of Arab Palestinians. Anyone well-informed about the history of Israel-Palestine recognizes this. It is simply a fact that the phrase “from the river to the sea” comes burdened with multiple meanings. It is, frankly, chilling to see people call recognition of this bare fact “a dangerous concession to genocidal propaganda”.

Boycott organizers have echoed that refusal to accept facts:

claiming that “anti-Zionist” and “from the river to the sea” have a “plurality of meanings” is a Zionist capitulation, whether it is intended as such or not

Fergawdsake, actual f•cking Nazis commonly call themselves “anti-Zionist” as a coy way of claiming not to offer antisemitism. Damm straight it has a plurality of meanings. Claiming otherwise is unsafe for Jews.

Understand, I would vigorously support a boycott of a con which forbade the use of the expressions “anti-Zionist” or “from the river to the sea” in con events. The Big Bad Boycott is doing something very different.

I admire the organizers & supporters of the Big Bad Boycott working to have the Con community clearly stand against the ongoing genocide in Gaza, as it should. I urge them to reconsider the terms on which they do this.

The author of the thread I was criticizing showed up in my mentions with a very generous-spirited reply:

Hey, first of all I appreciate the fact that you censored my name and pfp [blurring out those identifying details from a screenshot of the thread, to deter harassment] and it seems you are interested in good faith discussion. I can’t fit everything I want to say in one tweet so bare with me for a few minutes—

First of all, my position on the boycott will not be changing. It is tragic, especially when it seems to me that many of the Big Bad staff are in agreement with Palestinian liberation. It sucks that a battle is happening here rather than against worse organizations like the DNC. But I also think it is perfectly reasonable that a group is threatening to boycott an event after the language they want to use in their event has been restricted. Whether or not “Censorship” is the correct term seems immaterial here.

Secondly and more importantly, as far as I am aware, every “official” use of the river-sea slogan is explicitly NOT anti-Jewish / a call for removal. The 1968 PLO charter and its later revisions explicitly say that Jews will not be evicted, only people who oppose liberation. The 2017 Hamas charter also explicitly states that it “rejects the persecution of any human being or the undermining of his or her rights on nationalist, religious or sectarian grounds”. If there are more similar official uses of the phrase, please let me know about them.

Of course there will be racists and antisemites who try to co-opt the movement and its terminology. In my expirience both in my local community and online, the liberation movement has been very proactive about calling them out and ousting them from pro-Palestine spaces. But I think giving their interpretations of the phrase credence is akin to saying that because equal rights for lgbtq people has been used to justify imperialist projects (including in Palestine), we shouldn’t use pro-lgbtq language.

I’ve spent a lot of time studying this but I am not an expert so please do let me know if there are things I am missing here. I do believe we are ideologically aligned for the most part and do want to hear what you have to say. I can promise to at least look into it

I replied:

Delighted to have you come to me this way, I really appreciate it. Let me reïterate: I respect you and the Boycott movement on two fundamentals. Doing the Boycott is legitimate, and all people of conscience must stand against the genocidal attack on Gaza and for Palestinian liberation. I say that partly because I have been trying to think of a way to respond which does not land at sounding pretty harsh, and feel that I have failed. So I want to be very clear where I am coming from.

I share your sense of tragedy over this conflict. There is stuff to say about [that], but I don’t want to start [there].

Editorial decisions about the Con program affect the Con community, so the community has a stake in those decisions. I both think the Boycott is a bad idea and consider it wholly legitimate. This distinction between “good” and “legitimate” is important in addressing the way the Boycott talks about the Con org “censoring” the event description.

The semantic weight of “censoring” is far from the most important thing, but it is substantive. It is fair for the Boycott to fault the editorial choices the Con org made over the event description in the program. It is very bad for the Boycott to imply that the Con org is wrong to make any editorial choices about event descriptions.

It is very easy to imagine event descriptions which you and I would vigorously agree that the Con org should forbid. The term “censorship” is pejorative and suggests that doing so would be illegitimate.

Further — and again, this is not of central importance, but it is worth naming — faulting the Con for “censoring anti-Zionist language” is weirdly incomplete. The issue is not that the language was anti-Zionist, it was the particular form it took. We can imagine a proposed event description including “kill all Zios” which we would all agree the Con would be right to forbid. So the question is whether the Con was right to forbid this particular anti-Zionist language.

It is reasonable to fault the Con org for having made the wrong decision about that event description. I’m going to mount a defense of their decision, but honestly I don’t feel all that strongly about it. I do feel strongly about the Boycott demands extending far beyond calling for a reversal of that decision about that event description.

So let’s talk about “from the river to the sea”.

Your invocation of “official” use of the slogan is strange. Why should that matter?

In objecting to the use of “from the river to the sea” (FTRTTS) and “anti-Zionist”, the Con org were addressing how those would be read, not what the event organizers meant. [The BigBadCon organization’s] evaluation may not be right, but [the Con organizers grounding their decision in] this standard is correct. I am confident that you are sophisticated enough in social justice advocacy principles to recognize that the Con should be considering impact, not intent.

As I said upthread, I both read most use of FTRTTS (including this one) as a call for liberation which I support and still feel dread when I hear it. I grit my teeth through that because supporting Palestinian liberation is more important than my feelings. But no, it is not unreasonable for Jews — especially Israeli Jews — to feel more threatened by [FTRTTS] than I do. (In a bit, I’ll address some of the historical particulars that you bring up.)

And “anti-Zionism” is even more charged than FTRTTS. I know that you and most “anti-Zionists” mean that you oppose disenfranchisement and worse of Palestinians. But that arrogates the meaning of “Zionism” away from actual Zionists [who] understand Zionism to mean nothing more or less than supporting the continued existence of Israel in some form. Zionism includes opposition to the oppression of Arab Palestinians, from its beginnings through the present. Israeli Jews who have actively worked against the oppression of Palestinians understand themselves as “Zionists” simply because they love the only home they have ever known. The event description excluded them.

Saying, “golly, the ‘anti-Zionist space’ the event description named and the Boycott now demands across the Con is not an attack on Israeli Jews who oppose the genocide in Gaza” is disingenuous. Why should they read it that way?

I have had exchanges with left “anti-Zionists” who say that celebrating Israel’s independence day is cause enough to drive someone out of their community. Why would someone reading the Con program assume that an “anti-Zionist space” means otherwise?

Understand, I am not necessarily defending celebrating Israel’s independence day. Heck, I am critical of celebrating the US’s Independence Day! But I think it is obvious why it would be unreasonable to demand that — since US history is riddled with slavery, genocide, and other brutality — the Con should exclude anyone who celebrates the US Independence Day.

Again, I don’t take you or the Boycott or most advocates for Palestinian liberation as meaning that Israeli Jews who love their home should be excluded from the community. But all y’all are responsible to know that you are saying something which will be heard that way.

OK, so finally I can come to your historical observations arguing that no one should read FTRTTS or “anti-Zionist space” these ways. Frankly, I find this naïve in accepting disingenuous arguments from the Palestinian liberation movement. There is a whole body of rhetoric by the movement for Palestinian liberation which says that Arab Palestinians have only ever wanted to live together in the Levant in peace and harmony, while “Zionists” all sought a violent purge of Arab Palestinians.

Horseshit.

Again, I know that you and the Boycott organizers & supporters and most people standing up for Palestinian liberation in the face of genocide in Gaza want a just, inclusive Palestine in which no one is disenfranchised. But you raised the history.

I know the PLO Charter quite well. It states clearly that they seek an Arab state in the whole of Palestine. It only counts “Jews who had normally resided in Palestine until the beginning of the Zionist invasion” as Palestinians.

The PLO Charter says “Jews [⋯] are citizens of the states to which they belong”, not of their imagined Palestine. Most Israeli Jews are not just the descendants of refugees from genocide, they are descended from refugees from Arab states. It must be said that I am not offering Because The Shoah as justifying every wrong committed by pre-Israel Zionists or Israel. My point here is about the PLO’s vision, obviously significant in understanding Palestinian liberation movements.

In the vision of the PLO Charter, only a handful of Israeli Jews could be citizens of Palestine. Article 16 welcomes Israeli Jews as guests in Palestine, not citizens. So sure, the PLO Charter does not call for the murder or expulsion of Israeli Jews, it just announces plans to make them into stateless people, disenfranchised in the only home many of them had ever known.

And human rights language in the Hamas Charter is simply risible. Hamas are authoritarian theocrats. They don’t even respect the human rights of Arab Palestinians.

If you are pointing to the PLO & Hamas charters as reasons why Jews should not find FTRTTS and “anti-Zionist space” threatening, you are just not equipped to understand why the Con org responded as it did or why I am skeptical of the Boycott … you are just not equipped to gauge how diligent the movement for Palestinian liberation has been in avoiding bad allies … and you are just not equipped to understand how American Jews who support Palestinian liberation are touchy about antisemitism in this moment.

In demanding that BigBadCon declare the entire Con an “anti-Zionist space”, the Big Bad Boycott requires Jews to read that phrase more generously than [BigBadCon] can reasonably expect, and is calling for a lot more than [BigBadCon declaring] opposition to the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

That brings me back, finally, to the tragedy of the conflict over the Big Bad Boycott. Advocates for the Boycott are willing to crash an institution deeply dedicated to social justice over a stronger demand than y’all understand.

It is right and necessary that the Con community hold the Con org accountable for a truly inclusive space which supports marginalized people. It is unmistakable that the org are responding to the Boycott with the care & seriousness it merits.

I respect Boycott supporters like you who want to stand against the oppression of Arab Palestinians as we all should. I do not respect the Boycott organizers, who are responsible for escalating to bad demands.

This is doubly maddening because I think the Boycott is missing an opportunity to call for a broader reckoning with colonialism which would be relevant to both the TTRPG community and the horrors in Gaza.

I have gotten way too long-winded for Twitter here! And I have said things more harshly than I would like. This thread is clumsy in the name of not leaving you hanging too long. Please understand that I respect you acting out of good conscience, toward a good cause.

Threads from Thirsty Sword Dreadlord Latinx

On antisemitism

Big Bad Con Boycott has an issue with semantics, in that they hide behind it and then accuse their critics of doing the same. Of course, this is about Anti-Zionism. They want this term to be as broadly applied as possible without having to take responsibility.

Currently, Anti-Zionism has two definitions being used in discourse and that is:

1. opposition to colonial violence of a Jewish religious enthnocracy.
2. opposition to the existence of Israel and refusal to acknowledge imperial antisemitism and Jewish diaspora

The boycott’s Anti-Zionism is vehemently hostile and extends to demanding the names and ostracization of volunteers and donors who they accuse of harboring these sentiments, however they also get defensive and hostile when asked to explain what exactly they mean.

The most obvious reason BBC boycott doesn’t want to engage in defining Anti-Zionism is that leaves them open to accusations and straw-man fallacies and that definitely is a huge risk. I can’t play that down enough: there are people against the boycott are doing this.

However, bad faith accusations are never an excuse to engage in bad faith accusations which is what the boycott has done since mid August, almost a month before they threatened the convention to go public with accusations of being Zionist sympathizers. August 13^th, was the first time the boycott called Big Bad Con “Zionist sympathizers” here on twitter, less than one week after they declared their Anti-Zionism boycott of Gencon a failure.

I can’t remark on the Gencon boycott beyond that some of the same people who participated are now involved with the most recent Big Bad Con boycott, however, they have been has escalating the use of Anti-Zionism rhetoric from this point. Big Bad Boycott has so far accused volunteers and attendees of Zionism for the following:

• Censorship of the panel description
• Expressed concerns for the security risk the uncensored panel descriptions would bring to the con by Zionist supporters
• Expressed concerns about the convention’s charity status being jeopardized by making a public statement of being Anti-Zionist
• Expressed concerns that the boycott broad application of Anti-Zionism would be received by the Bay Area’s Jewish community.
• Expressed concerns about the boycott’s accusation that volunteers are protecting Zionist sympathizers who are a danger to people of color.
• And [expressed concerns] that the boycott is specifically targeting critics of the boycott as Zionist sympathizers.

Yet no clear definition of Anti-zionism

That is until last week when a member of the boycott stated on Discord …

• Israel itself is a colony on stolen indigenous land and Jews, as colonizers, have no right to that land.

and more importantly

• Palestinian pain takes precedence over antisemitism.

Malignant ignorance of this stance gives me chills especially when applied to Anti-Zionism. It has no regards to the marginalization of Jews, historical or in the present day.

The Big Bad Boycott’s definition of Anti-Zionism is to exclude and marginalize any Jew or gentile who has a connection to the people and the land of Israel regardless how we use that connection to oppose the crimes against humanity Israel commits. For advocating for that connection, and the refusal to set it aside, Jews and gentiles like me are accused of playing “semantics and tone-policing”, when, in actuality, we demand a free Palestine and condemnation of the state of Israel without denying Jewish pain.

I have seen screenshots of a key bit of this discussion on Discord. Thirsty Sword Dreadlord Latinx is distilling the sense of the exchange rather than simply quoting it. But I can attest that his summary is an astringent but fair representation.

On a troublingly naïve aspect of the Boycott

On the boycott’s and my views on censorship of the panel at Big Bad Con. Censorship is a loaded word and it is abused heavily in right-wing circles. It’s why I get really angry when I see it used, but in this case the term does fit the definition of what has happened, but censorship happens for multiple reasons, and in this case the staff stated it was for security purposes, which the boycott refuses to acknowledge beyond a heavy dose of skepticism. The relationship continues to break down because the boycott doesn’t recognize the threat.

As stated by the staff, through leaked communications between Big Bad Con and the boycott, the con was concerned about vulnerabilities to website and to convention itself. Despite the boycott’s incredulity and ignorance, this threat is real and is growing day by day. A journalist of a right-wing online magazine has already taken notice of the boycott as well has written about two of those involved in a prior incident [I won’t state who nor which magazine]. The boycott is joking about this, but this is exactly the concern the staff have.

My particular concern is about the website and its security. Those who are familiar with our community for the past few years know how much the volunteers struggle to keep the site functioning especially when it comes to assigning spots for attendee at events … least to say, the website is very important to the convention and there are groups hostile to social justice and marginalized people and there are those who can could take advantage of that fact from anywhere in the world.

Those familiar with alt-right online threats know what can happen, but examples are doxxing of volunteers, swatting and harassment of attendees and volunteers, especially if they have highly visible social media presence, and DNS attacks. This is what the staff were referring to.

Hence, this is why the staff of Big Bad Con thought the removal of those key terms from the panel was necessary and I agree with them, and why the boycott's ideological opposition and condemnation is so frustrating. This boycott is righteous, but they are often wrong.

Note that the change in language of the panel ALSO included requiring the panelist to give signed commitment to Anti-Zionism which has complicated relationship with Jewish identity and antisemitism, which I have little understanding of and so I shouldn’t comment beyond this note.

Apropos of which, in the email exchange shared in the long Boycott letter, they asked BigBadCon to name any Zionists in the org. It should be obvious why that is a scary request, as discussed here:

A thread from (Mike) Draco on the Boycott’s theory of change

I told boycotters that painting BigBadCon and staff as being pro-genocide is fucked up and really not “reaching out out of love” and got hit with “so your issue is with the tone of our language”.

No, I think suggesting “YOU ARE EVIL GENOCIDE APOLOGISTS UNLESS YOU DO WHAT WE WANT” is a thing you say to someone you love is deeply, horrifically warped.

I tried to be clear that no, I’m not against boycotts. If this was GenCon (which y’all mysteriously did not boycott despite their lack of masking and SJ [social justice] oriented statements), a huge convention that has actively chosen to, for example, not enforce masking and doesn’t have a history of going above and beyond for folks then fine. Or if you're boycotting a business that is explicitly making anti-LGBTQ or pro-Trump statements or whatever have at it!

I’m asking for people to consider that they are throwing rocks AT THEIR FRIENDS, INSIDE THE GLASS HOUSE YOU SHARE WITH THEM.

But I got “so boycotts are fine when you agree with them” in response.

And I sighed so damn hard.

To not be a hypocrite because I often criticize people who have complaints but no solutions:

I’m very curious why — when deciding to go more public with this issue — your group decided to immediately jump to a boycott instead of trying to first rally more public support. The boycott was the first I’d heard of the issue and hearing that y’all tried to go McCarthyist on con staff didn’t strike a good first impression. Did you ever apologize for that ridiculous demand or even admit it was wrong to make?

I know many people are likely not reading your whole (40 page long now) letter, including the 6 pages of e-mails. I’ve read most of it. I didn’t see any admissions of error, only continued brow-beating of staff, which matches my discord experience, and staff was much more polite. This is what I am referring to:

I’m emailing as a TTRPG professional who intends to attend Big Bad Con this year and a Scholarship Recipient. I have received troubling news from Esther, another Scholarship Recipient (CCed here), that one of the panels they are on was asked to remove anti-zionist language from its event description due to the presence of zionist staff and/or donors at Big Bad. I find this news troubling, given that zionists are currently participating in and supporting a genocide in Palestine. It would be beyond disappointing to learn that Big Bad is refusing to stand against genocide and is, in fact, supporting this genocide by siding with zionists. I hope that Big Bad does not make the same mistake that Gen Con made.

Can you please confirm the following?

• Who amongst Big Bad Con’s staff and/or donors identifies as a zionist?
• Does Big Bad Con openly and publicly hold anti-zionist values and support a free Palestine?

Please feel free to include in our email chain whomever among Bid Bad staff is relevant to address this concern. I hope to hear from you soon.

I really, truly, struggle to see how you leap from this response from BigBadCon staff …

Hello Hamnah and Esther,

We appreciate your concerns about Big Bad Con’s stance concerning the phrasing around [the panel organizer]’s panel. We want to make it clear that we do not track the political affiliations of any of our attendees, donors or staff and there have not been any demands made on us by any outside groups, individuals, donors, staff or otherwise. As an institution, no matter what our personal beliefs are, we do not want to draw Zionist attention to our public site, and Big Bad Con in general, through easily searchable phrases. We will not risk the safety of our marginalized attendees, staff, or volunteers.

As you know from attending Big Bad Con in years past, we go to great lengths to protect all of our attendees. Through our scholarship program we help women and people from marginalized genders, people of color, disabled, and lgbtqia+ individuals attend the con. Through Big Bad World we encourage and incentivize our attendees to live our community standards of respect, support, and kindness. Our anti-harassment, public health safety, and accessibility policies are all designed to ensure the wellbeing, safety, and inclusion of everyone who attends.

We are committed to taking action in lieu of statements when we can, in allyship with marginalized people. Every year, we have a fundraising run called the Wolf Run, which raises money for a charitable cause of our choosing. This year, we are donating the proceeds of the Wolf Run to Doctors Without Borders, a non-partisan group providing medical aid in Gaza.

To summarize: In the interests of protecting our staff and attendees, we asked that the more inflammatory language in the panel description be removed while keeping the majority of the values statement intact. We have made no other requests to [the panel organizer] or the other panelists, and have published the panel listing on our website with the amended values statement provided to us by [the panel organizer] in preparation to host the panel at our event this year.

Sincerely,
Nathan Black and the Big Bad Con Community Coordinators

… to accusing [the BigBadCon staff] of being pro-Zionism and complicit in genocide.

Endgame

BigBadCon: Our Stance in Support of Palestinians

Posted to the BigBadCon blog on 27 September:

Big Bad Con denounces genocide, apartheid, and human rights violations. We believe in every person's right to self-determination, autonomy, and liberty.

We believe in the decolonization of Palestine, which we define as full equal rights for all people who dwell on the land. We do not condone calls for violence or expulsion of anyone in the region.

We call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and an embargo on US military support for Israel. We call for an end of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and the invasion of Lebanon.

What does this mean for Big Bad Con?

Big Bad Con is a gaming convention dedicated to our community standards of Respect, Support, and Kindness. While we cannot significantly affect the events on the world stage, we can however ensure that our own community is a safer and welcoming space.

When we use the terms “Zionism” and “anti-Zionism”, we base them on the definition provided by the Jewish Voice for Peace: “While it had many strains historically, the Zionism that took hold and stands today is a settler-colonial movement, establishing an apartheid state [in Israel] where Jews have more rights than others.” Using this definition, we align ourselves in opposition to the oppressive actions of this form of Zionism, and stand in allyship with those oppressed by it. This is what we mean when we say that we are an anti-Zionist space.

The claim that anti-Zionism is antisemitism is a means to deflect criticism of Israel’s governmental actions. We reject the claim that anti-Zionism is antisemitic, and reject the use of this claim as a silencing tactic against Palestinians and those who stand in solidarity with them.

We cherish the Jewish members of our community. We will not tolerate anti-Zionism being used as an excuse for harassment.

Our anti-harassment policy forbids hate speech and we expect everyone, especially when discussing difficult topics, to embody our community standards and treat each other with Respect, Support, and Kindness. Inclusion in our spaces is based on behavior, not by beliefs or identities.

The use of phrases and slogans to stand for complex sets of values is an important part of establishing a welcoming and supportive environment for those working to liberate themselves and others from oppression.

We acknowledge that phrases and slogans are used to stand for complex sets of values. Phrases such as “Black Lives Matter”, “never again”, “anti-racist”, “anti-Zionist”, and “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” are calls for the end of oppression and the liberation of oppressed peoples.

Context matters, and we presume the good faith of activists using these phrases. However, the use of these or any other phrase as a call for violence will not be tolerated in the Convention space.

We recognize that Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims are often subject to Islamophobic discrimination, dehumanization, and violence. We recognize that Jews are often subject to antisemitic discrimination, dehumanization, and violence. We abhor Islamophobia and antisemitism, and will not tolerate them in our spaces.

Big Bad Con was called on by our community to demonstrate our position as a convention dedicated to supporting marginalized communities. We know that our allyship on these issues has been insufficient and we acknowledge the impact this has had on our community as we worked on this document.

What are we doing to help?

In addition to our above public statement, we are also responding with direct action. We call on our community in turn to join us in providing immediate support to the following relief efforts.

We have donated a total of ^$5,000 to the following relief funds. From now until October 27, 2024, we will match donations (up to another $5,000 total) to these causes:

• Crips for eSims for Gaza, a digital lifeline for people in Gaza cut off from the internet.
• Palestine Children’s Relief Fund, addressing urgent humanitarian needs and supporting long-term recovery efforts in Gaza.

To have your funds matched use this fundraiser link to donate to PCRF or email donate@bigbadcon.com with a receipt for your donation to Crips for eSims.

Big Bad Boycott response

The summary:

We have accepted Big Bad Con’s response to our demands. They have put out a pro-Palestine values statement, retracted anti-Zionist and pro-Palestine censorship, and committed to consulting with relevant groups in the TTRPG space over the next year. Though the statement is not as strong as we would have liked, we accept it in good faith as a demonstration of effort on the part of Big Bad's staff. We have given Big Bad our feedback on the statement and hope they will amend it to be more firmly anti-Zionist and pro-Palestine.

Since the boycott demands have been met, the #BigBadBoycott will not move forward on Oct. 1^st. As per the terms of the boycott, we will not be hosting an alternative convention.

At the same time, we understand that Big Bad's leadership has acted and failed to act in ways that have been harmful to the community, especially to people of colour (PoC). Many have expressed a loss of trust in Big Bad Con as a space as it currently stands. We have expressed as much to the staff and have suggested courses of action they can take to do the long, hard work of appropriately stewarding a space for PoC. It is our hope that, over the next year, we will see Big Bad’s leadership do that work.

Their long demand letter which has a lot of detail about their communications with Con organizers has more, including this comment on the Con’s response:

We have a few thoughts on ways in which the statement could be further strengthened:

“We believe in every person’s right to self-determination, autonomy, and liberty.”

While we agree with the sentiment behind this sentence, “self-determination” is a term that Zionists often use to justify and excuse the colonization of Palestine. In this instance, we would suggest revising the sentence to “We believe in every person’s right to dignity, autonomy, and liberty.”

“We believe in the decolonization of Palestine, which we define as full equal rights for all people who dwell on the land.”

This sentence could call for decolonization in stronger terms – as it is, it reads like a two-state solution redefinition of decolonization. Decolonization means land back. Hamnah and I advise at minimum removing the second clause, and ideally, changing the clause to “which we define as sovereignty over the lands returned to Palestinians.”

“We do not condone calls for violence or expulsion of anyone in the region.”

This sentence comes across as condemning resistance to oppression that must sometimes necessarily manifest in violence. There are a plurality of approaches to liberation among Palestinian communities, and it’s not for us as non-Palestinians to define the terms and methods of their liberation for them. In other words, it’s not our place to tell Palestinians what steps to take to decolonize their lands. Historically, across the world, social progress has been made in part due to violent arms of various resistance movements. We would, at the very least, remove this sentence. Ideally, we would change the sentence to “We believe all resistance to oppression is valid and justified.”

“We call for an end of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza”

This sentence invalidates Israel’s occupation of Palestine as a whole. The lands we now call “Israel” are part of occupied Palestine. Thus, when we call for the decolonization of Palestine, we mean all of those lands. Hamnah and I would change this sentence to “We call for an end of Israel’s occupation of Palestine”. This is especially pertinent because the statement cites Jewish Voice for Peace in its opposition to Zionism. It is important to note that JVP actively does not support a two-state solution and does not support Israel as a state. It is inconsistent to cite JVP while using language that suggests anything less than full Palestinian sovereignty over their own lands.

“Context matters, and we presume the good faith of activists using these phrases. However, the use of these or any other phrase as a call for violence will not be tolerated in the convention space.”

We urge the con to continue to develop more precise understandings of how you will determine when these phrases are deployed as “calls for violence.” At the very least, there should be some assurance for folks who do choose to use these and other liberation-minded phrases that, for instance, they will not be expelled from the con due to another attendee taking offense to the phrases and reporting them as a “call for violence.”

Commentary

The BigBadCon response to the #BigBadBoycott declares the con an “anti-Zionist space”, taking care to explicitly define what that does and does not mean, so that antisemitic dogwhisles don’t sneak through that rhetorical door. Using the Jewish Voice For Peace description of Zionism not only rules out ‘zionism’ which exists only in the antisemitic imagination … it also explicitly sets aside numerous real forms of Zionism, including Israelis who oppose their government’s wrongs while still loving their home.

I have serious hesitations about JVP. For example, And their 21 Grief Technologies document says:

Hearing Hebrew language can be deeply traumatizing for Palestinians. Therefore, prayers are best said in English or Arabic, rather than Hebrew. It is not our place to redeem our tradition on the backs of Palestinians. Enough has been taken.

And one of their local chapters said:

“death to israel” is not just a threat. it is a moral imperative and the only acceptable solution. may the entire colony burn to the ground for good.

But drawing on JVP to specify clearly what “Zionism” BigBadCon opposes in making a statement against Zionism has advantages. It benefits from the credibility to strong opponents of Israel of being such strong opponents of Israel. And that description avoids the unwholesome implications of “anti-Zionism” I warned against above, so I support that usage by the Con.

I have a hard time not seeing a bad faith motte-and-bailey move in the Boycot organizers grumbling about an expectation of a more expansive conception of “anti-Zionism” et cetera after their loosely-framed demands were met.

Never compare Jews to Nazis

This should require no explanation. I offer one anyway.

One can call Israel’s current ongoing attack on Gaza genocidal; it is. One can call Kahanists and Likudniks fascists; they are. One should not call Zionism fascist because that is offensively false, but that is not wrong in the same weight class as comparing Jews specifically to Nazis.

Consider the example of The N Word. We all understand that white people must never speak it, not even in an edge case where there is obviously no malice to it — to sing along to a hip hop song, or even to say “the word ‘n███r’ is offensive”. Avoiding even unmistakably anti-racist statements using The Word is oddly arbitrary, but justified by the importance of admitting no exceptions. There are very good reasons why a white person saying The N Word reaches right into Black people and hits a deep wound, context be dammed. Using The N Word is a racist choice to say something which one knows will offend. It is an attack.

It would be irresponsible to claim that comparing Jews to Nazis simply parallels white people using The N Word; the two cases are incomparable in countless ways. But The N Word exemplifies language which is so inherently charged that using it is a problem whatever the context.

The Nazis built murder factories out of pure hatred for us, killing off half of us, and the only thing that stopped them from killing even more of us was reducing their entire society to rubble. Comparing us to them cuts deep. Making the comparison is doing antisemitism even in a context innocent of any antisemitic intent or sentiments. Any point worth making with the comparison is better made another way.

Some may defend comparing Israelis or ‘zionists’ or particular Jewish groups or individuals to Nazis, claiming they are not saying “Jews are like Nazis”. Nope. That is the same bullshit as saying, “Golly, I was not calling all Black people n███rs”. We know better than to fall for that.

Some may defend comparing the Nakba or the ongoing genocide in Gaza to the Shoah. Nope. That is just a roundabout way of comparing Jews to the Nazis.

Some may defend comparing Israel to Nazi Germany as a relevant historical irony. Nope. Still out of bounds.

Some may defend comparisons by saying that right now opposing an ongoing genocide trumps every other concern. Nope. Not this concern.

I have real sympathy for people who are not raging bigots making these mistakes. It is unfair that the righteous and currently urgent cause of Palestinian liberation must walk through a minefield where it is genuinely difficult to make sense of what constitutes antisemitism which one must avoid.

Israel hardliners disingenuously reject any criticism of Israel as “antisemitism”.

Cunning antisemitic bigots coyly make their case without explicitly referencing Jews.

People who really are not talking about Jews still stumble into antisemitic narratives.

Weird Jewish cults accuse other Jews of antisemitism while doing it themselves.

Even sophisticated social justice advocates get tripped up by the particularity of antisemitism.

Et cetera. It is weird out there. So take comfort in this one rule being simple.

Never. Compare. Jews. To. Nazis.

My protocol for dealing with sealions

“Sealion” is the term of art for a stranger who comes into your mentions on social media to grind an axe, named after this pointed, funny Wondermark comic about the pattern.

I have a personal protocol I try to follow when encountering sealions, which I will try to articulate here. This may be a living document, as I spot more principles behind how I do the dance.

Principles

DO IT FOR PEOPLE WATCHING

One cannot “win” a debate with a sealion, much less persuade them; trying is a pointless waste of time. The only reason to engage with sealions is for the benefit of people watching the exchange, either in a public forum or in a shared private forum for a community I care about.

I am vulnerable to temptation, but I keep an eye on the ball. Every move in every sealion encounter is an opportunity to inform someone who is new to the topic, or to show support for allies whom the sealion is attacking. Keeping in mind the object — revealing to observers what the sealion really is and really stands for, communicating to observers what your position really entails — improves everything about how the exchange with a sealion goes.

One can live a better life forgetting all the other lore in this post and just remembering this key point.

Defend good faith discussion

The sea lion in the Wondermark cartoon, with its talk about wanting a “civil discussion” et cetera, exemplifies how sealioning weaponizes a fake version of discussing disagreements in good faith. Sealioning is actually even worse than that; sealioning attacks our shared ability to have good faith discussion at all. Sealions teach people to distrust when someone exercises the norms of good faith discussion of hard topics, because people have mostly encountered those norms applied deceitfully by sealions and other wreckers. Sartre rightly recognized this bad faith in the guise of good faith as chipping away at the foundations of society.

One can fight this degradation of The Discourse by responding skillfully to sealions. I have cultivated the skill out of deep commitment to the norms of Karl Popper / Isaiah Berlin Liberalism, which you can find summarized at the bottom of this post. Exercising those norms in a sealion encounter demonstrates to observers both how these norms work and why these norms are good.

Since sealions only understand the norms of good faith as a trick they can use, exercising those norms properly paradoxically accelerates them revealing that they are actually speaking in bad faith, and when that reveal comes the contrast is stronger for observers.

Plus once in a blue moon, it turns out I misread someone as a sealion, and they actually were coming to me in good faith. This protocol has made me some good friends. Some of those friends hold positions I deeply oppose, but we both benefit from better understanding how the other side thinks, and from helping each other sharpen our understandings of what we ourselves think. And sometimes I even persuade them, at least a little, that my position has merit.

Be a good forum citizen

I try to not just rigourously obey the norms of the forum on which these encounters take place but also to always employ certain good forum behaviors which are often unarticulated as rules:

Contain the discussion

I try to keep the exchange with the sealion from annoying everyone in the forum.

If the sealion shows up to a discussion with multiple people involved, I leave them tagged into the first few rounds of my exchange with the sealion, but once it becomes a dialogue between me and the sealion, I un-tag others so it does not keep showing up for them.

I resist the temptation to to expand the exchange by replying to the sealion’s parallel replies to other people; if appropriate, I will reply with a link saying “we are already talking about this over here, if [third person] does want to join in.” It is good for people to see that they do not need to act to ensure that the sealion does not go un-challenged.

I will respond to a sealion subtweeting / vaguebooking elsewhere about their exchange with me, saying, “I presume that [sealion] is talking about this discussion [link], if folks are interested in what was actually said.” Again, this keeps the sealion from bullshitting unchallenged, while minimizing the spread.

This connects to specific move …

Resist forked threads

On any platform with threading, discussions with sealions can get bushy. Out of either incompetence or malice, sealions tend to create a lot of forks. This makes it hard for observers to see the whole discussion, and creates openings for sealions to grumble that you “ignored” a point they made.

I try hard to keep my comments on one main thread as much as I can. When something comes up on a fork, I respond to it on that main thread, then on the fork I link to where I replied to tie it off.

If the discussion escalates into a true social media shitstorm, this practice supports the most important anti-shitstorm principle: pursue clarity.

Respond in kind

Introduce as few things as possible

Sometimes one must introduce something important to the topic the sealion raised, but as much as possible I try to speak only to the points which the sealion introduces. Observers will eventually register that the sealion is trying to blitz the discussion with a flurry of points, moving the goalposts, and jerking the discussion around while I am responsing to them thoughtfully.

Among other advantages, this prepares for the common sealion tactic of asking, “Why are you so fixated on [point X]?” I can reply, “I did not introduce [point X], you did, then you refused to accept my response [argument Y] and move on. I keep responding to your counter-arguments against [argument Y] because [reason why Y is important].”

Stay at (or better, under) the sealion’s insult level

I try never to escalate an exchange of insults; if possible I try to keep my voice friendly even in the face of abusive language. I am not above calling a claim “stupid” or a position “cruel” if it is, but I try to reserve even these astringent descriptions for after the sealion has deployed them. Even when my feelings get the better of me a bit, or when I bare my teeth so I am not enabling bullying with my passive acceptance, I make a point of keeping my voice gentler than the sealion’s.

Most sealions start with the feigned polite reasonableness exemplified in the Wondermark cartoon, but few stick with it. As their insults grow increasingly mean-spirited, the disparity between their voice and mine shows observers what is really going on.

Seek the core disagreement

Digging out the fundamental question and seeking a shared understanding of it is Popper / Berlin Liberalism in action. Usually this boils down to a single important moral value plus a few points of fact. “You think evolutionary theory is morally degrading and grounded in a conspiracy of scientists; I don’t”. Moves like the Ideological Turing Test in pursuit of that ideal deliver a range of good results:

• If the sealion pushes back against moving toward more fundamental questions, it reveals the sealion’s disingenuousness to observers.
• Observers often get a clearer picture of why the sealion’s position is bad when I articulate its core.
• If the sealion embraces this move — which does sometimes happen — it produces a more substantive argument for observers to learn from.
• If reading the person as a sealion was a misdiagnosis of someone thoughtful, they will register what I am doing, embrace it, and we can get to a discussion I might actually learn from.

Moves

Ask crisp questions as much as possible

Sealions expect their targets to speak to them dismissively, and they have a pattern of using leading questions to shape the discussion. Asking them questions — and making them good, clarifying questions — disorients the sealion, helps make their question-asking pattern evident to observers, and accelerates the reveal of what their real agenda is. I like to use these patterns:

• When you say [thing they said], that seems to imply [ugly consequence] because [reason]. I assume that you do not mean that. Can you clarify?
• You seem to [always / never] [accept / reject] [thing]. Is that right? Or can you name an exception?

Grant points

I look for opportunities to show that I am not a stonewalling ideologue. So I look for opportunities to say stuff like:

• I agree with you about [Point X].
• I half agree with you about [Point X]: it is [right in Y way in Z situation], just [wrong about A in B way].
• Yeah [Case X] does exist. I am just focused on [Case Y] because [reasons].
• Thank you for catching the clumsiness of the way I put that. Allow me to clarify.
• FWIW, I am sure that [their Point X] is wrong but I respect it as a legitimate position that a reasonable person could hold.

This creates a useful contrast when I firmly hold the line. Observers notice that if I am willing to concede [Points X & Y] but not [Point Z], it means that [Point Z] is important … and that the sealion conceding nothing demonstrates that they are the stubborn blockhead.

Preëmpt sand traps

Most sealions are crackpots. They want to feel smart by making the people they harass respond by saying dumb things, (or things they think are dumb). They often try to produce that by offering familiar weak versions of their arguments, or teasing out motte-and-bailey bait.

When I see where the sealion is going, I jump directly to a crisp version of where they are going with patterns like:

• Am I right to think that you setting up a case for [where they are going]?
• I am familiar with [where they are going] and reject it for reasons I am sure you have heard before. If that is where you are going, what do we actually need to discuss?

Often observers find it clarifying to see a sealion’s frustration that they will not get the dance they wanted. I have a meme image I built to underline what is happening in those cases:

Apologize readily and well

I like to actively look for an opportunity to render an apology to a sealion. It demonstrates the difference between what a sealion does and genuinely speaking in good faith and extending charity. As I am human, I need not manufacture these opportunities; I will make a mistake.

We have a general No Apology Is Adequate problem. I try to stay ahead of that by explicitly apologizing and erring toward over-generously resting responsibility on my side. For example:

• I’m sorry I took you as saying [bad thing]. I saw it as implied in [thing they said] and obviously got it wrong. I want to avoid misrepresenting you. Would you correct my misreading by expanding on what you did mean there?
• I apologize. I see how you read [thing I said] as implying [bad thing X]. I was not clear. I should have been more careful to say explicitly how I [oppose / do not think] [bad thing X]. I should have said [refined version of thing I said] in the first place.
• I’m sorry I said something hurtful. I did not mean it to be, but it was my responsibility to be more careful.
• I’m sorry I did not respond on that particular point. I should have registered its importance. [Reply to the point.]

I enthusiastically refine these apologies in a second round if the sealion demands one on remotely reasonable terms.

This tends to soften sealions’ escalation to uglier rhetoric early in the exchange, but it does not stop it, because they want to get me to escalate to prove that they are right & reasonable; my willingness to apologize denies that to them.

It also draws a contrast between the times when I have an error to admit, or to offer as a generous interpretation of a bad turn, in comparison to points where I have nothing to apologize for and can point to how their accusation of my failing is disingenuous. That I will apologize and clarify underlines how I did nothing wrong when I do not.

Of course sealions tend to neither apologize nor accept apologies. Observers will register the difference.

Name when the sealion acts as predicted

Sealions often respond to any analysis of the implications of what they say as “unfair”, but when I give them enough rope they almost always say — or refuse to say — something which proves my point. When it happens, I point back to where I called it.

Announce when the sealion Blocks you

A Twitter post by the astringent Josh Ellis got me started on this post:

Lemme explain something that should be obvious: if you go after a stranger on social media and they block you, that’s not cowardice. They just don’t wanna talk to you.

When you go after someone, and they absolutely body you for it, and then you block them?

That’s cowardice.

It’s the equivalent of swinging on a total stranger at a bar and then running away crying when they tag you back. It’s a bitch move.

If you can’t leave people alone, don’t complain when they paddle your soft little ass for it. Cowboy up and take your whipping like an adult.

Sealions have a strong tendency to respond to the protocol I describe here by engaging for quite a while … and then they suddenly Block me. Observers need to know what happened, so I do a wrap-up saying:

I see that [sealion] Blocked me. They came into my mentions, I tried to address as many of their points as they could, and they ran off when it did not go their way.

I confess that this also feels good. It is as close to winning as these maddening exchanges can get ya.

Related

You can see examples of how I respond to sealions transcribed on my posts about crafting good policy for handling antisemitism and how the political right does not see people as equal.

I have posts about how I handle discussions in my space and social media shitstorms relevant in my space and elsewhere. That last includes a summary of principles relevant here:

I believe in the liberal-as-in-liberal-democracy approach to the Paradox Of Tolerance, which says that we need all six of these principles working together.

1. Honesty — always speak in good faith, telling the truth as well as one knows it, especially about oneʼs own ideas and intentions
2. Generosity — start from a presumption that everyone speaks & acts in good faith
3. Vigilance — always watch carefully for bad actors
4. Skepticism — demand strong evidence before accepting that someone is a bad actor
5. Transparency — publicly document evidence of bad actors
6. Safety — ruthlessly exclude demonstrated bad actors