Settler colonialism, Israel, and history

Posts on this subject are obviously fraught, so first:

• I keep an index of resources
• the moral question is simple:
  Palestinian liberation is right & necessary
• the history is complicated:
  hence this post attempting to dispell many common misunderstandings
• the praxis is complicated:
  antisemitic entryism into the movement for liberation is subtle, pervasive, and unacceptable

This post was originally written in 2021, though I have made an ongoing series of refinements and additions since then

Because of the [2021] horrors undertaken by the state of Israel, a friend said something characteristic of a lot of American lefties who have had to un-learn both pro-Israel propaganda and US propaganda about our own history:

Israel is exactly a parallel of the US. It’s a settler-colonial state that displaces and claims the territory of the people who were there before [⋯] That’s also why the US supports Israeli actions so much.

I got long-winded in my frustrated reply, and that led to this short history of the Israel-Palestine conflict, in which I try to iron out some common misunderstandings.

• US support for Israel
• The USA is different
• Zionism before Israel
• Palestine before Israel
• Founding Israel
• Early Israel
• The Six Day War, and occupation
• Oslo and afterward
• Genocide in Gaza
• The bottom line
• More commentary on settler colonialism

US support for Israel

First I must dispense with an obvious canard. No, the US does not support Israel out of some weird settler colonialist solidarity. There are a few big factors behind strong US support for Israel:

• The US military is very interested in being able to intervene in a lot of places in Israel’s neighborhood and it helps to have an ally who will let US planes land and refuel on their airbases.
• Republicans support Israel’s policies because they are in the grip of Evangelicals who believe that Israel is an integral part of realizing Biblical prophecy. (I would think that one would want to devote our foreign policy to preventing Armageddon, but what do I know?)
• Democrats support Israel’s policies because they are in the grip of the hardline Israel lobby whom liberal Jews have been too feckless to purge from the coalition.
• Americans on both sides of the aisle are prone to anti-Muslim bigotry which sharpened in the wake of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attack, leading to a reading of Israel as a natural ally against the villainous Arab world, and a reading of Arab Palestinian resistence to oppression by Israel as nothing other than villainous Muslim terrorism.

The USA is different

The other part of my friend’s comment — the question of Israel’s settler colonialism — requires unfolding a lot of history. At the bottom line, Israel is the result of a settler colonial project and that project is ongoing in the present crisis, but analogizing it to the history of the US is irresponsibly misleading.

Prior to the founding of the USA in the Revolutionary War and its aftermath, the British colonies in North America starting even at Plymouth Rock were engaged in settler colonialism: seizing land with the intention to make it their own for every following generation, with total disregard for the indigenous people of the continent. By the time of the Revolution what would become the US had more than a century of expansionist settler colonialism with an overt program of total genocide to establish British sovereignty over territory; the program of genocide continued through the closing of the frontier, a legacy which is alive in the present day.

Israel’s history is bloody and ugly but it is very different.

Zionism before Israel

The Zionist project can be seen as beginning with the First Zionist Conference in 1897, when what is now Israel was still part of the vast, weak Ottoman Empire. It is important to understand that the Zionism conceived then did not seek to establish the state of Israel as we now have it. The Conference in 1897 defined their project thus:

Zionism aims at establishing for the Jewish people a publicly and legally assured home in Palestine.

In this we can see how Zionism is indeed an ethnic nationalism but not quite what one might naïvely imagine from the succinct description “Jewish nationalism”.

First, the 1897 statement shows Zionism explicitly rejecting a religious project; “the Jewish people” are framed in secular terms, as an ethnic people. The Magen-David ✡︎ emerged as a symbol of ethnic Jewish identity at this same time, distinct from the seven-branch menorah which was the predominant symbol of Judaism as a religion in Europe. The use of this symbol on the flag of Israel underlines that Israel is a secular state, not a theocracy.

Second, the pointed use of the word “home” deliberately avoids identifying a sovereign Westphalian nation-state like Israel as it exists today as the defining goal of Zionism. Yes, that was the dream of many Zionists, but not all, and it was not the plan. Partly that reflects how at that time there was no imaginable path toward carving a new sovereign nation out of the vast Ottoman Empire which included Palestine. Partly that reflected how many leaders in the Zionist coalition actively rejected founding a nation-state as desirable at all. It is neither accidental nor incidental that this original definition of Zionism is at least compatible with a pluralistic society; many from both camps in the Zionist coalition rejected a vision of an exclusively Jewish society. (More on that in an earlier post on the origins and consequent meaning of “Zionism”.)

The Basel Program adopted by the 1897 Conference called for Zionist “settlements” in Palestine, and many key Zionist leaders did explicitly describe that project in terms modeled on the settler colonialism undertaken by the European colonial powers. But one should not misread this as plans for settlement simply paralleling European colonization of the Americas. Zionism could not conceive itself as an extension of the European colonial project since it was a response to oppression by those powers and had nothing like their capacities.

Instead, “settlment” took a form more comparable to the Pennsylvania Dutch, buying and homesteading land to create ethnic enclaves in territory under Ottoman governance. That is not to say that one should picture early Zionists as just like the pacifist Amish! Zionists created many enclaves on land purchased fair and square. And those enclaves were protected from hostile neighbors by Jewish militias which were hard to distinguish from other settlement militias which seized territory by force of arms, even terrorism. We must recognize both that brutality has been an integral part of the Zionist movement from the beginning and also that alternatives & opposition to brutality have equally deep roots in the movement.

Palestine before Israel

Again, in 1897 Palestine was the European name for a region within the much larger Ottoman Empire rather than a country with its own identity. Indeed, the first time someone called themself a “Palestinian” was the year after the First Zionist Conference. A map of “Palestine” would often include not just what is now Israel but also most of what is now Jordan; you can see an example at the top of this post.

The poetic resonance of Jews’ ancient roots in both history and myth was not the only reason Zionists chose Palestine as their site. There was a significant population of Jews already living among the Arab majority. And the weakness of the Ottoman Empire enabled local communities subject to relatively little government interference.

Indeed, the Ottoman Empire was so weak that it collapsed with WWI. Palestine became a colonial holding of the British Empire for the three decades which followed; they divided the region into the Emirate of Transjordan in the east (nominally independent but a “British protectorate”) and Mandatory Palestine (subject to direct British rule, which included a bit more than what is now Israel and its occupied territories) in the west.

Zionism was tolerated by both the Ottomans and British rather than sponsored by either of them, as reflected in the British government’s Balfour Declaration of 1917, which neither implied plans for a sovereign Jewish state nor subjected the British Empire to any binding commitments to the Zionist project:

His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.

Meanwhile, the British did not even tolerate the growing Arab Palestinian nationalist movements of the era which were animated by frustration with British rule and by European Jewish immigration. Some of those movements sought independence for British Mandate Palestine as a new independent Arab state; others understood themselves as part of a broader pan-Arab nationalism which rejected dividing the Arab world into multiple states. In the late ’30s Palestinian nationalists’ armed revolt suffered British suppression with their characteristic brutality: colonialism, but neither settler colonialism nor Zionism.

Founding Israel

That in the wake of WWII the US & Europeans re-drew borders all over the world — that it would primarily be Britian who would adjudicate the competing claims of Jews and Arabs in Palestine — was not Zionist settler colonialism, but rather the legacy of European exploitative colonialism evolving into post-colonial imperialism.

By the late 1940s, there were an array of different Jewish populations in Palestine. There were non-Zionist Ashkenazi & Sephardic Jews whose ancestors had migrated there from Europe centuries before Zionism. There were Mizrahi Jews who looked just like their Arab neighbors, living in the same houses their great-great-grandparents had been born in under the reign of Sultan Abdul Hamid II in the 19^th century. There were Jews born in houses their Zionist grandparents purchased at a fair price at the dawn of the 20^th century. There were Jews born in houses stolen by Zionist militias in the 1920s. There were Jewish refugees who fled the Nazis in the 1930s. And there were growing numbers of Ashkenazi refugees, Shoah survivors who found that the Eastern Europeans who helped Nazis ship Jews to concentration camps were equally dangerous as administrators of Soviet domination, who had been turned away by the governments of the US and every nation in Europe, whose only hope for survival was the Zionists who brought them to Palestine to join their cause.

In 1947 & 1948, there were a series of partition proposals for Palestine sponsored by the then-new United Nations and others which framed a nation-state of Israel with boundaries very similar to what Israel would come to actually hold over the decades to come, plus Arab sovereignty over something close to what we now call the West Bank of the Jordan river, the Golan Heights, the Gaza Strip, and the state of Jordan.

From the British perspective, elevating the Emerite Of Transjordan into a truly independent state while converting most of British Mandate Palestine into the state of Israel was apportioning to the Arab majority most of the Palestinian territory the British Empire had controlled, with a smaller territory for Jews where they were already most numerous. The oddness of the Green Line map of Israel in these proposals partly emerges from the British Empire’s long habit of preserving their power by setting administrative borders which produced local conflicts.

These proposals were rejected by most Jews and practically all Arabs. The architects of what would become Israel wanted more land, while Arabs refused to accept Israel at all.

States in the region took shape not through negotiation but through bloodshed, in a tumultuous process between 1947-9. Israel emerged as a nation-state with borders very similar to the Green Line plan. Jordan eventually differed more from Transjordan under British rule, but not dramatically. The West Bank, the Golan Heights, and Gaza were never part of an independent state on the territory of British Mandate Palestine; Jordan, Syria, and Egypt absorbed them. I don’t have the expertise to untangle (much less summarize) this process well, not least because much of the history remains vigorously disputed by good faith scholars.

One can see why salty Israel apologists say that we already have a two-state solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict: Jordan & Israel. One can see why salty advocates for Palestinian liberation call Israel an illegitimate product of European colonialism. One can see why salty critics of pro-Palestinian movements ask why we hear so much about the oppression of Palestinian Arabs by Israel but never by Jordan, Egypt, and Syria (and more on that in a moment). All of these arguments are whataboutism but none of them are entirely bullshit.

Early Israel

One might very roughly parallel the founding of Israel with the partition of South Asia into India & Pakistan: border disputes, population transfers, local atrocities on all sides, and lasting instability.

Mizrahi Jews migrated to Israel from all over the Middle East, often (though not always) escaping severe oppression and deliberate efforts to displace them. In 1948 Holocaust refugees made Ashkenazim from Europe the majority of Jews in Israel; though Sephardic & Ashkenazi Jews continued to move to Israel from Europe and the US after ’48, there was so much migration by Mizrahim that they would become the majority of Jews in Israel … while they practically disappeared from the rest of the Middle East.

Israel apologists often sincerely believe that the 700,000+ Arab Palestinians who fled the newly-formed Israel departed “voluntarily” because the new Arab nations’ leaders directed Palestinians to clear a path for their armies’ attempts to destroy Israel. For a long time, the best available scholarship made that telling of history plausible, but in the last few decades it has become clear that this account was almost entirely a fabrication of Israeli propaganda. Zionist militias which evolved into Israel’s army murdered thousands to drive Arab Palestinians out; advocates for Palestinian liberation call this genocidal nightmare the Nakba, meaning “the catastrophe”. Arab states almost entirely refused to accept immigration by displaced Arab Palestinians because they believed doing so would legitimize Israel. Most refugees in the West Bank eventually became citizens of Jordan (as Jordan held the West Bank from 1950-1967) but many Palestinians displaced by Israel remained in legal limbo, stateless people living out the rest of their lives in refugee camps.

About 150,000 Arab Palestinians remained in Israel and became citizens … but second-class citizens subject to brutal military rule.

During this early era, Arab nations continued to refuse to recognize Israel’s legitimacy at all, declaring their plans to literally wipe the country from the map, as did the nationalist terrorists of the Palestine Liberation Organization founded in 1964.

During its first two decades, Israel fought a series of wars and border skirmishes with all of its neighbors. Israel hardliners describe these as unprovoked attacks by conquerer neighbors; historians find that Israel sometimes faced existential threats, while other times they were spoiling for a fight in hopes that they could seize more territory.

Echoes of this early era persist in the attitudes of all of the players in the region to this day. Many Israelis see themselves as still facing a constant threat of national destruction by an implacably hostile Arab world, with Arab Palestinians nothing other than the most intimate manifestation of that threat, despite Israel being far stronger than it was in its early era. Many Arabs still see Israel as nothing other than a final imposition of overt European imperialism and colonialism, despite the Mizrahi majority among Israeli Jews and decades of European animosity toward Israel.

The Six Day War, and occupation

In 1967, Israel fought the Six Day War with Jordan, Syria, and Egypt. At this point in this telling of the history, it should be evident why it is hard to say simply Who Started It.

Remember the West Bank of the Jordan River, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights from British Mandate Palestine, which Jordan, Syria, and Egypt seized? Israel suffered ongoing rocket attacks and shelling from them, with the narrow segment between the Mediterranean Sea and the West Bank especially vulnerable, just a bit over nine miles wide at its tightest point. Israeli planners yearned to annex territory both for these strategic military reasons and as places for Israelis to live.

At the end of the 1967 war, these were now all in Israel’s hands … along with the Sinai Peninsula to the south, which had more than twice the area of all of pre-1967 Israel. In violation of international law and UN resolutions, Israel then subjected all of these territories to military occupation and built settlements for Jewish Israelis.

Israel would fight one last major war with its neighbors in 1973, retaining all of that land. After that Israel started emphatically denying that they had nuclear weapons … in a way that meant that they wanted everyone to know that they really had them. Border conflict never really stopped, but the full-scale wars ended.

Israel’s occupation of the Sinai did not last; under the Camp David Accords signed in 1979, Israel returned the Sinai to Egypt. (I confess to frustration that Israel’s critics somehow forget this when they insist that Israelis refuse to even consider any real sacrifices in pursuit of peace.)

Israel continued to lay claim to the Golan Heights to the north; the construction of settlements never stopped. Ongoing fighting over this territory — which has included Israel making military incursions into Syria & Lebanon beyond even the Golan — has a very complicated history, defined at least as much by internal strife in Syria & Lebanon as it is by fighting between those countries and Israel. That history may qualify as even more complicated than the history of Israel, and I confess that I do not understand it well enough to even attempt to summarize.

Within Israel’s pre-1967 borders, Israel lifted military rule over their Arab Palestinian citizens in 1966 so that theoretically they shared Jews’ rights protections under the law, democratic representation in government, et cetera. In practice Arab Palestinian citizens of Israel continued to suffer severe oppression. Today they account for about 2 million of Israel’s 9½ million citizens.

Oslo and afterward

(updated and expanded in late 2023 and after, to help contextualize the Hamas attack and Israel’s bloody response)

Gaza and the West Bank remained under Israeli military occupation; Israel continued to build settlements for a growing population of Jewish Israelis. In the late 1980s, vigorous nonviolent Palestinian protest & resistance known as the First Intifada made it clear that this was not sustainable.

In the early 1990s, “peace process” negotiations between Israeli and Palestinian leaders resulted in the Oslo Accords, an agreement which created the Palestinian Authority to govern both Gaza the West Bank. The PA is elected by Palestinian citizens of those territories, but the PA’s sovereignty is limited, with countless intrusions large and small by Israel. In the West Bank, the terms of Oslo allow for Israeli settlements under Israel’s control which break Palestinian territory into cantonized fragments; Israel populates those settlements with rightwing hardliner assholes prone to confronting their Palestinian neighbors with harassment and worse. Optimists hoped that Oslo would create an opening to further negotiation toward a more just resolution, but efforts which followed like Bill Clinton’s doomed 2000 attempt at Camp David foundered on distrust and hardliner intransigence on all sides.

Israel also had soldiers & settlers in Gaza after Oslo, but when the hard right Likud coalition won control of Israel’s government in 2005, they withdrew that presence. But conditions for Arab Palestinians in Gaza have actually been worse than in the West Bank. Israel’s military policing of Gaza from the outside is brutal, including a blockade of goods entering or leaving, a “buffer zone” which prevents cultivating much of the arable land, and hugely disproportionate reprisals by Israel’s military whenever radicals fire a rocket into Israel from Gaza, or even when Israel attributes a terrorist attack to Gazans. The common refrain that Gaza constitutes “an open-air prision” because of crowding and the brutality of these conditions is an exaggeration, but not much of one.

In a 2006 election, governance of the Palestinian Authority split between Gaza versus the West Bank. The corrupt, kleptocratic, secular Fatah party which sprung from the PLO retains power in the West Bank. The theocratic, authoritarian Hamas party overturned Fatah in Gaza; they have not permitted an election since.

During the post-Oslo era, radicals on all sides have violently sabotaged any movement toward reconciliation, peace, and justice. Optimism that relations might improve after Oslo was dashed by an Israeli hardliner assassinating prime minister Yitzhak Rabin for signing the Oslo Accords, followed by Palestinian terrorist attacks killing hundreds of Israeli civilians during the Second Intifada in the early 2000s. To advocates for Palestinian liberation, the Second Intifada was the inevitable, even justified, escalation of resistance to ongoing oppression. Many Jewish Israelis read the Second Intifada not as a demonstration that the post-Oslo order was unjust, but rather as a demonstration that concessions to Arab Palestinians only compromise Jews’ safety … which led to their support for the Likud political coalition which has tried to repress Arab Palestinians through more brutal military policing … which feeds Arab Palestinian support for violent resistance. Every softening of the conflict during this era has been cut short by provocations by one side or the other. The Likud coalition grew increasingly fascist, adding new incursions in the West Bank shrinking the archipeligo of territory in the West Bank under Palestinian control further and further.

A story in The New Yorker underlines the dynamics of this slow turn of the screw in the West Bank.

Kerry met regularly with Obama in the Oval Office. During one of those meetings, Kerry placed the maps on a large coffee table, one after another, so Obama and his advisers could study them. Ben Rhodes, one of Obama’s longest-serving advisers, said the President was shocked to see how “systematic” the Israelis had been at cutting off Palestinian population centers from one another. Lowenstein didn’t show the maps to the Israelis, but he did walk them through the key findings, which were incorporated into Kerry speeches and other documents. Lowenstein said the Israelis never challenged those findings.

Later, Kerry presented some of the maps to Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian President. Kerry’s goal was to show Abbas that the Obama Administration understood the extent to which the two-state solution was threatened. Abbas was taken aback. Instead of feeling reassured, he told a confidant that the maps convinced him that the Americans believed “the chances of a viable Palestinian state is next to nil.” Alarmed by Israeli actions depicted in the maps, Obama decided to abstain on a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning the settlements, clearing the way for its passage. It would be Obama’s final act of defiance against Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, before Donald Trump took office and put in place policies that were far more accepting of the settlers.

Genocide in Gaza

That cycle continued until (and after) the horrifying Hamas attack on 7 October 2023 and Israel’s even more horrifying response.

It is absurd to accept Israel apologists’ claim that Israel’s Likud leadership seek only the release of Israeli hostages taken on 10/7. (We must also recognize how the return of hostages is an entirely reasonable demand; Hamas’ refusal demonstrates a callous disregard for Palestinian lives.) I also think that it is dangerously foolish to read Israel’s attack on Gaza as the realization of their dreams of eliminating Gaza’s Arab Palestinian population and annexing Gaza. I think the attack on Gaza is best understood as beginning as a panic response to distract Israelis from the Likud policy of endless military policing of Gaza & the West Bank failing to keep Israeli Jews safe, then quickly becoming an attempt to destroy Hamas and reconstruct Gaza into a form similar to the West Bank which would enable even more brutal military policing, using overwhelming military force which callously creates immense civilian casualties. For more detail about the dynamics of the 2023-4 crisis, I like this explainer.

We still must register that as genocidal: though not an attempt to eliminate Palestinians in Gaza, from the beginning it was an attack on the people of Gaza as a people, which has escalated as such efforts do.

And now we do have Trump & Netanyahu fantasizing about annexation.

The bottom line

Roughly a couple of million Arab Palestinians are oppressed by Israel in Gaza & the West Bank: increasingly brutal genocide in Gaza and ongoing displacement of Palestinians in the West Bank to build new settlements. Another couple of million Arab Palestinian citizens of Israel suffer significant oppression as well. Israel holds the unmistakable upper hand in an endless cycle of violence.

This emerges from — and continues to reflect — settler colonialism. This is unjust military occupation & policing and an unjust apartheid state. But students of American history should recognize from the particulars I have presented here how different they are from our horrors, so we should resist projecting our own patterns onto a very different situation.

If you have read this far, and come to wonder what “Zionism” means in a post-1948 and post-1967 world, I have an open letter to an anti-Zionist which may interest you. In short, “Zionism” means not support for Israel’s current border, political order, and policies; rather it means neither more nor less than support for the continued existence of the state of Israel — the only home which millions of people have ever known — in some form. It is important that we do not misrepresent what “Zionism” means.

More commentaries on settler colonialism

Tzvi Bisk’s liberal Zionist novel The Suicide of the Jews offers a tidy summation of how Zionists tend to rationalize their project as distinct from the history of colonialism. Each of these points offers apologetics neither simply true nor simply false. Criticisms of Israel & Zionism should grapple with these peculiarities.

1. Every colonial enterprise represented or derived from an existing mother country or group of countries — Zionism did not.
2. No other colonial enterprise viewed itself as returning to its homeland — Zionism did.
3. No other modern colonial enterprise was driven by the desire of the colonizers to escape persecution and discrimination — Zionism was.
4. No other colonial enterprise viewed its colonial ambition as being part and parcel of their national cultural, psychological and moral renewal — Zionism did.
5. No other colonial enterprise satisfied itself with only one colony — Zionism did.
6. No other colonial enterprise desired so passionately to settle a land devoid of natural resources — Zionism did.
7. No other colonial enterprise desired to create an independent state (all the others saw themselves as dependent colonies of the mother country) — Zionism did.
8. No other colonial enterprise desired to create an entirely new society — Zionism did.

But Ha’Aretz offers the article Israel Is a Settler Colonial State — and That’s OK addressing some of the deceits of Bisk’s list and defending the framework of “settler colonialism” as a necessary goad to a more just future for Israel.

In fact, rigorous scholars who study the applicability of the settler colonial framework for the history of Israel / Palestine need not subscribe to a political agenda committed to the end of the State of Israel. Moreover, claiming that structurally, Zionist settlers are comparable to American pioneers or South African Voortrekkers, does not necessitate the denial of a historical connection between Jews and the Holy Land, the unique nature of European anti-Semitism, or even requires having sympathy for the Palestinian armed struggle against Zionism. As a matter of fact, even prominent Zionists made explicit comparisons between their own political movement and those of settlers around the world.

The indispensible Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg has a long, instructive post about double-edged particulars which make Israel unique among colonial projects:

Jews have not been part of colonial projects in the same way that colonizing nations have.

But we have been, often, part of them. It’s all both / and.

Often, Jews have been simultaneously settlers and refugees.

[⋯]

Jews generally did not leave the places we were living in order to steal, but rather: we were seeking safety.

And yet: Jews benefitted mightily from that exploitation, extraction, destruction and land theft.

There’s a difference between a major European power’s relationship to colonialism and Jewish refugee’s.

But the Jewish refugee is nonetheless participating in colonialism.

I highly recommend clicking through to read the whole thing.

And if you want even more, I have a later post with a grab bag of links & quotes further expanding on many of the particulars.

Return

I have long felt that Palestinians’ call for Right Of Return for all refugees was among the political claims which present a frustrating paradox: the fundamental moral claim that every loss should be made whole is indisputable, but actually persuing it was so hopelessly intractable that keeping it on the table only stood in the way of either justice or peace. But Peter Beinart’s essay Teshuvah: A Jewish Case for Palestinian Refugee Return has turned me around. The moral case is even stronger than I registered. The pragmatics are hard, but not as impossible as I feared.

In 1977, Palestinian American graduate student George Bisharat traveled to the West Jerusalem neighborhood of Talbiyeh and knocked on the door of the house his grandfather had built and been robbed of. The elderly woman who answered the door told him his family had never lived there. “The humiliation of having to plead to enter my family’s home ... burned inside me,” Bisharat later wrote. In 2000, by then a law professor, he returned with his family. As his wife and children looked on, a man originally from New York answered the door and told him the same thing: It was not his family’s home.

But after Bisharat chronicled his experiences, he received an invitation from a former soldier who had briefly lived in the house after the Haganah seized it in 1948. When they met, the man said, “I am sorry, I was blind. What we did was wrong,” and then added, “I owe your family three month’s rent.” In that moment, Bisharat wrote, he experienced “an untapped reservoir of Palestinian magnanimity and good will that could transform the relations between the two peoples, and make things possible that are not possible today.”

There is a Hebrew word for the behavior of that former Haganah soldier: Teshuvah, which is generally translated as “repentance.” Ironically enough, however, its literal definition is “return.” In Jewish tradition, return need not be physical; it can also be ethical and spiritual. Which means that the return of Palestinian refugees—far from necessitating Jewish exile—could be a kind of return for us as well, a return to traditions of memory and justice that the Nakba has evicted from organized Jewish life. “The occupier and myself—both of us suffer from exile,” Mahmoud Darwish once declared. “He is an exile in me and I am the victim of his exile.” The longer the Nakba continues, the deeper this Jewish moral exile becomes. By facing it squarely and beginning a process of repair, both Jews and Palestinians, in different ways, can start to come home.

Transphobia, antisemitism, and the far right

I believe that in the 2020s, transphobia has come to serve the function that antisemitism did in far right conspiracy theories of the early 20^th century. Against the possibility of Twitterpocalypse, I have captured some threads about it from there:

Blyth Crawford — May 2021

Something that basically everyone who’s spent any time on far-right social media is aware of is that transphobia is one of the biggest narratives pushed by the far right. But so often this goes unexamined, so here's a quick thread on far-right transphobia.

The far right often adheres to really stringent gender roles i.e. men = warriors & wage earners and women = the domestic realm. Often this is based in “traditionalism” and a desire to return to an idealised “simpler age” where men and women had strictly defined roles.

To extremists, trans people are seen to violate their ideal of strict roles, and the concept of gender fluidity is seen to threaten their stereotypical world view of what men and women “should” be like. Often the “concept” of transness is seen by the far right as a by-product of modernity and of the corrupt modern age which deliberately seeks to undermine the traditional familial structure, and threaten (white) Western culture. Often transness is referred to as an “ideology”, framing trans people as part of a political agenda, and falsely suggesting that being trans is a choice. This alleged “agenda” is seen to wish to stop men from being "masculine" and women from being traditionally "feminine".

In more extreme far-right circles this "transgender ideology" is seen to be controlled by Jewish people, fusing far-right transphobia with traditional far-right antisemitism.

Commonly, the far right also frames children – the paradigm of innocence – as the most “at risk” from this so-called transgender ideology. They suggest children are preyed upon by “trans-advocates” who push them to surgically transition at a young age against their will.

This is really clearly exemplified by the legal battle between Anne Georgulas and Jeffrey Younger over custody of their transgender daughter, which in 2019 became a huge flash point for the far right. Younger (the girl’s father) denied his daughter was trans, claiming her mother was forcing her and wanted to immediately “chemically castrate” her. His custody campaign spread wildly throughout far-right social media where fundraising campaigns for Younger were promoted.

The idea that children are targeted by “transgender ideology” is partially based in a fundamental misunderstanding of how gender reassignment surgery works. Transphobes claim that children are at risk of being “mutilated” or forced into “irreversible” hormone therapy.

However, this is far from the case. Gender reassignment journeys begin with many consultations with medical professionals and the process of beginning hormone therapy or getting access to surgical options (if they are wanted) can take years. Hormone therapy also simply delays puberty to give a young person time to make the choice that is right for them. It is reversible.

Also, not all trans people will choose to surgically or medically transition.

The idea that children are forced to surgically transition at a young age is therefore a myth perpetuated by the far right to frame transgender people as evil and preying on children, and a tool to help extremists recruit more followers to their cause.

Transphobia is such a powerful tool for the far right because unfortunately it has been part of mainstream political discourse for some time. It is a major conservative talking point, and is also a cause taken up by some on the left. In the same way that, for some, misogyny is what initially sucks them into the far-right, extremists seek to harness the popularity of transphobic narratives to recruit “normies” into their movements and into escalating extremism. Therefore far-right transphobic narratives are often a more extreme reflection of the discourse that already exists at a more mainstream level, and allows them to attempt to attempt to gain more followers.

In our recent report, we highlight that extremists have attempted to capitalise on the appointment of Dr Rachel Levine by the Biden administration, as an excuse to ramp up their transphobic propaganda and recruit newcomers. Groups like the Proud Boys have used Levine as a symbol for their transphobic hatred, and have deadnamed her repeatedly, refusing to recognise her gender identity, and sharing photos of her prior to her transition.

This shows that groups like the Proud Boys, which claim to be accepting of homosexuality (although this claim is super dubious), still have particularly acute anxieties about transgender people, and view transgender people with a particularly intense hatred.

Why is this important? Not only is it necessary to understand far-right transphobia because it’s one of the biggest ways the far-right recruits newcomers, and we cannot counter this without first understanding it.

But also, trans people are at a disproportionate risk of violence, and of suicidal ideation. In 2015 98% of trans people who had experienced 4+ instances of discrimination and violence in the past year had thought about suicide. 51% attempted it. Trans people are also being targeted by anti-trans bills in multiple US states, and in the UK where plans to enable trans people to legally assert their identities were scrapped in 2020 after pressure by transphobic groups.

Transphobia should be given far greater academic attention and should be recognised as a key part of security discourse as it is such a major tool used for recruitment by the far right, yet on the whole, it often goes undiscussed. Of course, I’m not claiming our recent report is the only one to ever highlight this issue! In 2019 SPLC observed that transphobic threats from white nationalists were escalation, and I would recommend this as essential reading on the topic. However, in general far-right transphobia is deserving of far greater attention. This thread only covers (some of) the basics of extremist transphobia, but I really hope this is something that will be given more recognition in the future in the field of security studies.

weary mourner — Oct 2021

sigh

deep breath

rubs at the bridge of his nose

Maybe you should research trans communities in Berlin during the 30s. Not a picnic but for the time trans people had a measure of freedom back then. It was certainly better in Germany in the 30s for trans people than it was for trans people in the US during the 30s.

1. No.
2. The Nazis saw queer existence as a manifestation of Jewish “corruption” & a Jewish “weapon” against the German people. This is inseparable. You cannot isolate their transphobia from their foundational antisemitism.

As a Jew I am extremely irritated by every aspect of this Discourse, because I can already feel the claim coming - indeed saw it claimed in this thread — that we’ve somehow paid too much attention to Jewish victims or that the Nazis did not have a special bias against Jews.

Which is, of course, The Point of the whole rhetorical tool — it’s designed to exploit bad-faith rhetorical tendencies on here where “Bad person says X, not Y” & then the foes of Bad Person immediately radicalize themselves into “actually Y is far more important than X & fuck X”.

Which, when you've wielding the Holocaust as a tool — and exploiting the seething left-wing resentment about coverage of the Shoah — is designed to goad people into Shoah erasure & antisemitism to isolate them from “normies.”

Remember, and I will say this for the N^th time:

NAZISM IS NOT INTERSECTIONAL, IT IS CONSPIRATORIAL.

Nazism sees all the “corruption” of the world as the product of a few demographics viewed as masterminds.

that makes the hirschfeld book burnings make even more sense. target a wedge group, that they viewed as “proof of a spreading corruption” or some other horrible justification for their crimes.

That’s the thing, friend: you’d assume that, because you’re a reasonable person whose approach to this is “pragmatic” and utilitarian, & wants to acknowledge intersectionality. You have it backwards. To Nazis, queer people are a symptom of Jewish action.

Now — and this is an uncomfortable topic — Nazism generally imprisoned non-cishet men and trans women on a systemic scale. They were sent to the concentration camps, but not necessarily (to my knowledge) the death camps. But that’s hardly “Nazis were OK with queer folks!”

(Apparently he Nazis didn’t target queer cis women or trans men under Paragraph 175 for at least a significant period, but they were still totally socially ostracized and faced persecution at home. And those who were sent to the camps suffered horribly.)

It is never a pleasant topic to debate “who had it worst under the Nazis” because honestly you’re going to piss somebody off. I’ve obviously got some biases here, because in my opinion it’s a bad idea to apply notions of “fairness” here. But being goaded into that minefield is a blunder. And it’s a pretty blatant ploy to try to push somebody who means well into that territory.

I dunno one day when I feel real self-destructive I’ll tweet more about this, but for now: look, just don’t, OK? Don’t even get into the terrain of “well the Nazis targeted (x) first / more / etc.” Just don’t. It is ground with no victory, and you’re really just gonna piss Jews off.

I’m hardly endorsing their monstrous pseudoscience. I’m not trying to deny antisemitism is the original bigotry or that the Jewish people the worst consequences of Nazi hatred. A roughly equal number of other people died in the Holocaust too, they had hatred to spare.

Please don’t do this. I know you mean well, mate, I really do. I know you’re trying to ensure Everyone Has Their Day of Grief. But when it comes to Nazis, their atrocities toward some demographics — Roma, Sinti, Jews — were above and beyond the already-horrific cruelties they doled out to others.

That’s part of the unique horror of Nazism — you have “ordinary” levels of already-damning evil towards marginalized and occupied victims, and then you have the places where they went into the realm of the borderline demonic, where the impact of their crimes still echoes today. How’s somebody to possibly give everyone their fair moment and spotlight of grief when faced with that?

sigh

And there it fucking is. There’s the inevitable person minimizing the primacy of Nazi antisemitism.

Motherfucking A-! Excuse me I’m just gonna primal scream here a bit. Please can we retire the “everyone thinks the Nazis hated Jews but ((they)) don’t want you to know that akshually they targeted (insert demographic here) first / as many victims / etc”? Please?

Are Americans free?

This quote from David Bentley Hart, from the article Three Cheers For Socialism: Christian Love & Political Practice has been making the rounds lately.

Americans are, of course, the most thoroughly and passively indoctrinated people on earth. They know next to nothing as a rule about their own history, or the histories of other nations, or the histories of the various social movements that have risen and fallen in the past, and they certainly know little or nothing of the complexities and contradictions comprised within words like “socialism” and “capitalism.”

Chiefly, what they have been trained not to know or even suspect is that, in many ways, they enjoy far fewer freedoms, and suffer under a more intrusive centralized state, than do the citizens of countries with more vigorous social-democratic institutions.

This is at once the most comic and most tragic aspect of the excitable alarm that talk of social democracy or democratic socialism can elicit on these shores. An enormous number of Americans have been persuaded to believe that they are freer in the abstract than, say, Germans or Danes precisely because they possess far fewer freedoms in the concrete.

They are far more vulnerable to medical and financial crisis, far more likely to receive inadequate health coverage, far more prone to irreparable insolvency, far more unprotected against predatory creditors, far more subject to income inequality, and so forth, while effectively paying more in tax (when one figures in federal, state, local, and sales taxes, and then compounds those by all the expenditures that in this country, as almost nowhere else, their taxes do not cover).

One might think that a people who once rebelled against the mightiest empire on earth on the principle of no taxation without representation would not meekly accept taxation without adequate government services. But we accept what we have become used to, I suppose.

Even so, one has to ask, what state apparatus in the “free” world could be more powerful and tyrannical than the one that taxes its citizens while providing no substantial civic benefits in return, solely in order to enrich a piratically overinflated military-industrial complex and to ease the tax burdens of the immensely wealthy?

The Crocodile Epiphany and the case for socialism

A plush toy I saw in a shop window back in the 20^th century made me so angry that I became fully devoted to socialism.

The shop was a “gift shop”, and there in the window was an little plush crocodile, a few inches high, wearing a T-shirt with a pun on it. It was ugly, and the joke was bad.

Croc ’N’ Roll

Someone was going to buy this “toy”, and give it to someone as a gift. They would chuckle for a moment over the bad pun. It would sit on their desk for a week or a month or a year before getting tossed into a landfill. This was its purpose. That was the plan for it.

Croc ’N’ Roll

In a sudden epiphany, I pictured the meeting in which it was decided that things would be set in motion so that I would see this crocodile.

A designer, with a drawing or a prototype. Some manufacturing expert, ready to consider the logistics. A manager with priorities to weigh. Sober discussion. What shall we do? What shall we make?

Yes. Yes, let us make this.

Croc ’N’ Roll

In my epiphany, I thought of all the people and machines which had done the work to put this crocodile before me. A factory with people making crocodiles all day. Crates full of cheap joke gifts loaded onto container ships. Big trucks driven through the night. Distribution centers bustling with forklifts and people with clipboards. Purchasing agents, making choices. Big boxes of crocodiles getting opened with boxcutters so that the crocodiles could be put into smaller boxes. Small trucks. All along the way, barcodes going bip bip bip. Shopkeepers setting crocodiles onto shelves and into shop windows.

Croc ’N’ Roll

In my epiphany, I thought of all the work which made all of that work possible. Miners digging through rock and great furnaces and crucibles to make the steel which went to factory to be sharpened into the needles which sewed that crocodile. I thought of the people who had built the sewing machine. The human ingenuity which had invented the sewing machine. And so too for the container ships and the containers on them, the forklifts, the clipboards, the barcode scanners, the trucks, the shops with the windows. Plus the petroleum wrung from the Earth which powered all this.

Croc ’N’ Roll

Telling this now, I think of Ouspensky, who doubted Gurdjieff’s theory of the human mind … until he saw a truck full of prosthetic legs.

Gurdjieff had said that we are machines, slaves to certain natural laws and processes that are as mechanical as a motor car. If people were remotely awake they would never submit to going off to war and likely death. The leaders of great nations are likewise sleepwalkers through the strange workings of unknown dynamics.

Ouspensky had difficulties with these ideas until an event he witnessed brought them to life. He saw a truck loaded with artificial limbs on its way to the front. They were for legs that had not yet been blown off but it could be calculated that they would be. There was something so mechanical about this process, something so lacking in conscious awareness, that the insanity of the situation was revealed in all its ludicrous horror. If those legs hadn’t been blown off yet then why on earth did they have to be? The process was surely stoppable.

Croc ’N’ Roll

Telling this now, I think of an untrustworthy commentator’s keen observation about the god Moloch.

Like all good mystical experiences, it happened in Vegas. I was standing on top of one of their many tall buildings, looking down at the city below, all lit up in the dark. If you’ve never been to Vegas, it is really impressive. Skyscrapers and lights in every variety strange and beautiful all clustered together. And I had two thoughts, crystal clear:

It is glorious that we can create something like this.

It is shameful that we did.

Like, by what standard is building gigantic forty-story-high indoor replicas of Venice, Paris, Rome, Egypt, and Camelot side-by-side, filled with albino tigers, in the middle of the most inhospitable desert in North America, a remotely sane use of our civilization’s limited resources?

Croc ’N’ Roll

Telling this now, I think of Gil Scott-Heron’s brilliant, funny lament in the face of one of the greatest achievements of human history.

Was all that money I made last year
For whitey on the moon?
How come I ain’t got no money here?
Hmm! Whitey’s on the moon
Y’know I just ’bout had my fill
Of whitey on the moon
I think I’ll send these doctor bills
Airmail special
To whitey on the moon

Croc ’N’ Roll

I was awed by all the human capacity and effort which went into that trivial little toy, a bit of waste made to deliver a tepid joke, a trivial byproduct of the power we hold over the material world.

I gazed into the crocodile’s plastic eyes and remembered every time someone said to me, “No, you naïve bleeding heart, we cannot provide for all! Some must live shoeless, hungry, and deprived because there is just not enough Stuff for everyone.” They were wrong. They are still wrong. Not just mistaken, but profoundly wrong, spake the crocodile.

Croc ’N’ Roll

I would have vowed never to forget, but having had the Crocodile Epiphany I need no vow. I know it deep. There is enough. There is so much that even our crumbs of crap are mighty.

We can provide for everyone. Their needs. Their dignity. And since we can, we must.

Croc ’N’ Roll.

Systems thinking

I am reminded that it would be convenient to keep an index of some of my favorite resources about systems thinking.

• Systems Thinking For Designers is a much more thorough resource than this one
• How Complex Systems Fail is a succinct discussion of what it says on the tin
• 20 Things I’ve Learned As A Systems (Over) Thinker describes the personal challenges of this kind of work
• The Goat Rodeo Index is a discussion of the “hard-to-define quality of utter fuckedness” of badly broken complex systems
• How to organize a children’s party is a very charming introduction to the Cynefin framework for thinking about systems
• The Iron Law Of Institutions is

  the people who control institutions care first and foremost about their power within the institution rather than the power of the institution itself; thus, they would rather the institution “fail” while they remain in power within the institution than for the institution to “succeeds” if that requires them to lose power within the institution

  (see also Archibald Putt’s Law Of Failure “innovative organizations abhor little failures but reward big ones”, which produces the evil career advice to avoid easy things)

The livelihoods of far right cranks

TLDR

Gods help us all, I have almost 8000 words here. After saying something dumb and irresponsible, I had an obligation to write it.

The only people I would tell to read it are folks who want to take the step of sharing or acting on the preposterous claim that I am a “fascism apologist”. I am not. Here is the proof. Every word I say here is consistent with the mess of my comments on Twitter.

For everyone else, here is the gist:

• I said something on Twitter which it was irresponsible to try to say in 280 characters.
• The implied defense of Curtis Yarvin as a person or a commentator was a clumsy, irresponsible misstatement on my part. I have thought from the jump that he is despicable and dangerous and merits no defense.
• Fascism and the far right are poisonous and dangerous, and we must make a range of vigorous efforts to counter them …
• … and bigotry in the workplace is poisonous and harmful, and we must make a range of vigorous efforts to counter that …
• … but recruiting conference organizers and corporate HR in that project by having them judge people’s public political writings, then attack the livelihood of those who expressed far right ideas, should not be in the toolkit …
• … if only because free speech principles make us hesitate to have democratically-accountable governments inspecting people’s public writings and delivering consequences for them, so we should hesitate even more over less-accountable agents doing so.
• There are a lot of reasons to think I am wrong on this point, and while I respectfully disagree, I emphasize “respectfully”, as I grant a lot of merit to those disagreements.

And.

After thinking this hard, and talking to a range of people about this subject, I have an ethical vertigo that leaves me stumped. Considering both the magnitude of the threat of the far right and the magnitude of the effort which that calls for, plus the magnitude of the damage bigotry at the workplace does, deciding whether far right propagandists do or do not give technical talks at conferences shrivels into an absurdly trivial question. In the course of laying out my opinion on the question, I became giddy with confusion about whether it mattered.

Consider this a capture of what I believed and advocated for, in the moment I made the original comment and engaged in the conversations which followed, rather than a picture of where I stand at the time of this posting.

I don’t know where I stand now.

And with that, the long version:

What I said, and meant

The other day, in the course of succumbing to getting into a long, messy argument on Twitter, I foolishly made a comment trying to make a point about a very particular antifascist tactic, a point just too subtle to try to get at in snippets of 280 characters, and I screwed it up.

I was prepared to hold my nose and defend Yarvin on the basis that he was not appearing at λ as Moldbug so his repugnant politics were irrelevant — and then he kindly nullified my hesitancy by defending UR in his public comment on λ

If you cringe reading that, I respect it. “Foolish” is, in fact, too kind a word for what I did there. Though I stand by the principle behind it — this essay is about what that principle is, and why I consider it important — first I have to register that the tweet was irresponsible.

It also got more attention than I had reason to expect, and soon I was facing a wall of smart criticisms of what I said, dumb criticisms of things I did not say and do not think, and a lot of stuff in a space in between. The resulting discussion sadly went as these things do. I bear significant responsibility for that. As I say, the original tweet was clumsy and wrong in a vital way. I said graceless things to some people. That internet shitstorm dynamics got the better of me explains but does not excuse my sharper and clumsier comments; I should have done better. Some folks in that conversation say I owe them an apology. Well, I was careless, and I am sorry.

In service of doing better, I hope that this is a more appropriate medium in which to say properly what I had to say. I’m afraid that I see no way to do this right without getting long-winded. I want to be held responsible for what I actually think, rather than for what one may glean from messy conversations held 280 characters at a time.

Reasonable people may think I am wrong. I want people holding me responsible for being wrong about what I actually think.

Also in service of doing better, this essay ends with a catalogue of several key counters to my stance which I have heard or considered. I include this both to lay out why I am not convinced and because many of these points haunt me with the possibility that they are right. If you read that far, you deserve to chew on those objections, because I still do.

So, with apologies for using so many words ….

Yarvin? λ? Moldbug? UR? WTF?

If one is unfamiliar with the story I alluded to in that tweet, I offer this thumbnail sketch from memory. I properly should check all the particulars and provide links — and I might try later — but as I write this I am snowed in with limited internet access.

Several years back, a guy named Curtis Yarvin was scheduled to do a talk at a technical conference called LambdaConf.

On one level, this was perfectly natural. I gather that Yarvin was and is an undisputedly significant figure in the technical domain of the conference, with relevant knowledge to share.

On the other hand, Yarvin is an extraordinarily terrible person. Not just extraordinary in the degree of his terribleness, but in the kind of his terribleness.

Under the name “Mencius Moldbug” he wrote the blog Unqualified Reservations, in which he made very very long and complicated arguments about culture & politics which made him one of the leading figures in a small, energetic, strange, nerdy, evil movement of political ideas known as the “Dark Enlightenment” or “Neo-Reaction” or “NRx”.

Moldbug said that if one reads enough dead white reactionaries, one realizes that democracy stinks and liberalism is at war with human nature, so we would be better off if we appointed someone smart like Steve Jobs to be dictator of America. Or maybe we should clone Charles II and crown the clone king. After all, Singapore is authoritarian but a nice place to live and very economically productive. This long, tortured argument was full of repulsive asides like, “Golly, reviving slavery is probably not the best move, but while it is not a big deal to me, I have to admit that dead white reactionaries made a lot of persuasive arguments that slavery is actually a good idea, and if you think about it, Black people really are best suited to slavery, aren’t they? Not that I’m a white nationalist, though. Those guys are not as smart as I am.”

If you don’t know Moldbug, I know that sounds like a parody. It is not. That is a succinct taste of stuff the blog really said. I read a fair bit of it years ago, fascinated by its bizarre style and repulsive ideas.

Moldbug is not exactly a Nazi or a fascist; he reflects an idiosyncratic far right sensibility significantly different but equally horrible. Yarvin was not attached to a political movement which did anything real, they just said a bunch of crazy, evil stuff on the internet, but that is still quite bad enough. And though really just a blowhard, he is a dangerous, damaging blowhard. He has radicalized a bunch of nerds. Yarvin evidently had some kind of contact with the Trump campaign though the racist, fascist advisor Steve Bannon. Fascist or not, I cannot overstate how evil his ideas and influence are.

Rather than get fussy about which evil far-right nuts are According To Hoyle “fascists”, antifascists use the word “fash” as a term of art for the whole range of evil far right nuts. Moldbug is definitely fash, and I will refer to him as such here.

(If you are cursed with a desire to know more about Moldbug and this bananas movement, I recommend Elizabeth Sandifer’s witty and suitably vicious book Neoreaction: A Basilisk; I am proud to have backed the Kickstarter which funded its publication.)

Yarvin maintained a soft split between his professional work as Yarvin and his political writing as Moldbug. One could easily look up Yarvin and not discover Moldbug, but he made no secret of being the person behind both names. It was easy to find out who “Moldbug” really was, and to discover Moldbug while looking in to Yarvin.

So when people saw Yarvin on the conference schedule, many of them offered the conference their Strongly Worded Concerns about a fash presenter.

Then Yarvin published an essay on the internet — under his name, not as Moldbug, not on the Unqualified Reservations blog — saying, “Hey there, LambdaConf community! My politics are not as bad as you’ve heard! Sure I think Black people make good slaves, but that is really no big deal if you think about it!”

Really. I am deliberately not linking any of his stuff, but you can look it up for yourself if you have the stomach. That is what he said. [Update: since originally publishing this post, I have added a few links in the name of helping newcomers make sense of the particulars.]

All this left me with an itch, which led me to talk about it now, years later.

Am I some kind of fascism apologist?

So what the heck? Why would I hold my nose to be in any alliance with this asshole?

It is because of a serious, principled objection to a very particular political tactic. I mention Yarvin at all because he presents an acid test of my dedication to the principle. The main purpose of this essay is to describe the line I draw, as clearly as I can. But I need to lay a little track about where I am coming from.

First, I have to confess that an important part of what I screwed up is that I was foolish — no, worse, irresponsible — to frame my position as though it were a defense of Yarvin. I retract the heck out of that. I don’t have a defense of Yarvin, I have a specific principle which makes me reject a particular attack on him.

My phrasing was dumbass and wrong, so people reading me wrong has been in significant part my own fault.

Thus I have a big correction to that tweet. I offer no defense of Yarvin. No defense of his evil, racist, reactionary, anti-democratic philosophy. No defense of the far right in general or of fascism in particular. I want to attack him however will work best. Everything I say here is motivated by me thinking about how best to combat the Yarvins of the world.

Indeed, I have been excitable about my opposition to fascism and the far right for a good long time. I first threw a little money at David Neiwert, my favorite journalist covering the far right beat, over a decade ago. This is part of why I had already taken a hard look at Unqualified Reservations when all this LambdaConf stuff happened.

With the turn American society has taken in the last few years, my opposition to fascism has grown more pointed.

I support militant antifascist work, both in principle and (very modestly) materially. Go git ’em. I have some tactical quibbles with the people who do that stuff (and this essay is about a big one) but they are doing the work in a way that I am not, so I misgive my own misgivings. Doxx the fash to their friends and family. Disrupt their organizing. Step up against them when they show up in the streets; don’t start a fight, but be ready to face one down. Shame and embarrass and belittle fash at every turn; videos of them getting punched in the face are known to work. Et cetera.

Ideally I want well-resourced, serious law enforcement efforts to disrupt fash organizing and crimes ... but this is a fantasy, requiring law enforcement institutions which are not structurally kinda fash as they are now, and a law enforcement corps which is not riddled with officers who are super duper fash, as they are now. So after we abolish the police — which we ought to do, in large part because they are so fashy — let us replace them with institutions which combat the far right rather than support it.

Fash are always grave threats, and especially so now. We must smash the hell out of them. I have sworn an oath to a terrifying elder god to fight fascism in my nation. Over on the same Twitter where I put my foot in my mouth, I also do exactly that, as I do on this blog, and in other places. I am not a militant antifascist, but I support those who are, and I do my small part.

So, again: what would make someone like me potentially supportive of a monster like Yarvin in any way, under any circumstance?

The answer lies in a principle which I hold dear because it lies at the intersection of what action against fash is effective, what action is wise, and the principle of free speech.

Free speech

When I summon the question of free speech, one has good reason to expect that I am about to offer the arguments of “free speech absolutists” who reliably get suckered by fash. There are free speech boneheads naïve about the Paradox Of Tolerance who fall for bad faith actors like fascists claiming that they deserve to lie, plot, and threaten people without consequence. And fash are among the free speech charlatans feigning a commitment to free speech in bad faith to their own advantage.

I am neither.

Limits to free speech

A few years back, I blogged a short essay about what the principle of free speech means, in part because I had been through the conversation many times and figured I needed to just set out my thinking and have it handy. I also wanted to have it as a companion to another essay about how it was right for protestors to No Platform Milo Yiannopoulos.

I will recapitulate the important arguments from both.

Both bonehead and charlatan free speech absolutists would say Yiannopoulos had a right to be heard. But he did not, on two counts. First, while he has a right to say what he will on platforms willing to have him, that does not give him a right to speak in every forum, on every platform, or even on any platform. The people who own the microphones, and the communities around those microphones, have not just a right but a duty to examine whether his voice should be heard in the space that microphone reaches. Second, it would be enough that the community rejected his message for any reason, but they had especially good reasons with Yiannopoulos. He was not just offering odious ideas, though his ideas are odious. Worse, he had demonstrated that he would use the microphone to harass members of the community and thereby target them for further harassment. That is not just unworthy of protection and support, it is criminal.

Yiannopoulos is a free speech charlatan, abusing the principle of free speech in defense of harassment, deliberately doing this, as fash do, in order to discredit the principle of free speech itself. We must actively work to deprive such people of platforms.

No Platform’ing such figures is a defense of free speech principle, not some exception to them. We have no conflict with the First Amendment. It does not protect harassment, lies, threats, criminal conspiracies, and the like. The principle of free speech protects people who offer ideas — even bad ones — but not threats and other crimes.

Since my response to Yarvin hinges on the need to defend free speech principles, even when it puts us momentarily on the side of bad people, this also makes a good moment for me to talk about a mistaken moment when principle put another free speech defender momentarily on the side of some fash: the ACLU’s support for Nazis’ Skokie march.

I love the ACLU, their rigor, and their commitment to taking difficult and unpopular stands, and forgive them this error, but they got this one wrong. The march was not an offering of ideas to the American public. A swastika is a way of saying, “I am advocating for killing people. I am planning on killing people.” There is no swastika which does not say that. It is a threat. Carrying a swastika or its equivalents, marching for Naziism, and such are crimes.

But though I believe in a lot more limitations on free speech than “absolutists” do, in an important way I have a commitment to a more muscular version of free speech than many of them do.

Beyond the First Amendment

I hold that the principle of free speech extends well beyond First Amendment protections against government censorship.

The state is not the only force of coercion. If one cannot express ideas without facing violence from private citizens, one does not have free speech. If one cannot express ideas without risk of losing one’s housing, one does not have free speech. If one cannot express ideas without risk of losing one’s livelihood, one does not have free speech.

So I oppose — or at least withhold my support for — a lot of Get ’Em Fired pressure campaigns when the reason for the campaign is that the person they want to see fired said something very bad, even when I share the desire to see that person face consequences. My reasoning is both principled and practical.

On principle, as a civil libertarian, I do not think any of us have the wisdom to choose unerringly which ideas should be punished. I would not punish people for expressing ideas at all ... and I surely do not want that power in the hands of corporate HR, bosses, and social media mobs.

On principle, as a leftist, I do not think anyone should be driven from being allowed to work so long as we live in a society in which dignity and survival depend on working for a wage. If we embrace a tactic whose logical endgame is to leave people who say sufficiently bad things houseless beggars, how is that meaningfully different from just saying we should round up people who express sufficiently bad ideas and throw them in prison?

I am vexed that so many leftists have this libertarian-ish blindspot which only fears government power over speech. One of the injustices of the world we have is how landlords and corporations and bosses are permitted to exercise this power without even the inadequate democratic accountability of our government. They are not censors we should court, they are censors we must oppose even more than the government.

In practice, I also think that such campaigns make a grave strategic error.

I am vexed that so many social justice advocates do not just legitimize but actively court the exercise of this unaccountable power over people, shaming employers of bigots and other villains. I respect their frustration at having so few means to deter antagonists against social justice, but history teaches us who suffers most when employers fire employees because of their political views ... or other things they have said ... or fear public pressures over their employees. This knife cuts reactionary white male professionals the least.

Advocates for these campaigns say that it will teach employers not to hire fash, but I do not imagine that the bosses will learn that lesson. They will learn “don’t hire people with controversial political opinions”. They will inspect workers’ social media. They will ask “do you have any political opinions we should know about?” in job interviews. That is bad on the merits and will most hurt the most vulnerable.

In practice, if we support Get ’Em Fired campaigns, then we legitimize those campaigns as tools for anyone to use, and we encourage employers to make their own guesses about how to preëmpt them. Yes, it will hurt the fash, but I expect that it will most hurt the most vulnerable.

With all that, I do not want depriving fash of their livelihoods in our Fash Smashing toolbox. There are plenty of other ways to respond to them.

Principles for the workplace

Having said that we should reject moves to fire people for their politics, even if they are fash, it would be nice if it were simple. But there are complexities.

My rule is more specifically don’t fire people for ideas they share outside the workplace, if the ideas are irrelevant to their job.

In this I do not want to legitimize the most visible critics of “Cancel Culture”, who are profoundly wrong. I am pushing back against a part of what we talk about when we talk about Cancel Culture, but not their part.

I call shenanigans on culture industry professionals decrying other culture industry people losing jobs — or most often, just having to change jobs and move to another platform — for the ideas they publish. If one’s day job is offering ideas, then of course one may lose their job over the ideas they share to the world.

More generally, one’s employer has a legitimate interest in what one says outside the job about the kind of stuff one does on the job. On Twitter I talk about design, because I work as a designer; if I say something stupid or smart about design on Twitter, then of course it will affect my livelihood.

Similarly, for a manager or executive with significant power and authority, especially over other people, a wide range of ideas that person expresses reflect on the fitness of the leadership judgment which they exercise. If an airline executive advocates for the Flat Earth theory, then that suggests they might not be right for, ah, global responsibility. If a manager expresses racist bigotry, then that indicates that they are unfit to manage people, who may be people of color ... or who may not be, because the bigoted manager drove them away.

And of course an employer has an unmistakable interest in the ideas which a worker voices at the workplace. A bigoted machinist working a lathe alone who keeps their mouth shut about their bigotry well enough that their colleagues do not know what they think is one thing; if that bigoted machinist wears a swastika T-shirt and spews offensive epithets in the lunchroom, their colleagues are harmed and the employer has not just a right to kick them out, but a responsibility.

That does not draw a perfectly bright line but it gives some principles, which underlie my teeth-gritting defense of LambdaConf offering a speaking platform to a fascist. Yarvin is the opposite of the reason for the principle I describe here; he is the hard counter example which tests how deeply I believe in it.

The case of LambdaConf

All this undergirds why I might have defended Yarvin being allowed to present at LamdaConf ... and why I felt perverse relief when he ran his mouth.

As I understand it, there was no reason to imagine that he would bring his politics into the forum. Since his politics is published under another name, legitimizing Yarvin as a technical expert did no legitimizing of Moldbug as an expert in culture & politics.

When confronted by the community with the link between Yarvin The Expert and Moldbug The Fash, I imagine a possible response in terms of the principles I have committed to here.

LambdaConf could have said something like:

We are hosting a technical conference, and have invited Mr Yarvin to speak on the subjects of his technical expertise. We are aware that he comments on culture & politics under another name, and we do not condone or support any of what he says on those topics. We have told him that his professional obligations as a conference presenter forbid him speaking to topics outside the technical subjects we invited him to discuss. We ask that conference participants not prompt him on other subjects, as we want him not to have any occasion to air his opinions on them.

Yarvin could have said something like:

While I do write on other topics under another name, it would be irresponsible of me to use the platform I have for talking about technology in this forum to promote that other work. I discourage anyone intrigued by my presentation about the Urbit technology from taking that as a reason to seek out my commentaries on culture & politics; the one does not inform the other in any way.

Had they done that, much as I would want to see Yarvin suffer embarrassment, dishonor, and loss for being fash, I would have gritted my teeth and stood by LambdaConf, because they had excluded his political ideas from the professional space.

This would have been desirable as a bulwark against placing both impossible duty and unmerited power in conference organizers’ hands. We should not want conferences vetting everything a presenter has ever said in public.

But Yarvin, instead, responded to his critics by publishing to the conference community some of his very worst political / cultural opinions, to offer his justification of why people should not find them troubling. He brought his politics into the forum. Once introduced into the space of the conference, the organizers had responsibility for it, and this made it right and necessary to exclude him. Alas, they did not.

Years ago, when I learned of this, I breathed an unwholesome sigh of relief. I did not have to occupy the position of conflicting principles leaving me supporting the platforming of fash, even in the privacy of my own heart. I could cheer Yarvin’s exclusion with a clear conscience. Yet I must also register the cost which makes my own response unwholesome; it meant people throughout the community had been exposed to his evil justifications of slavery and racism.

In sum

I oppose the far right and support a range of vigorous tactics in combatting them. I oppose bigotry in the workplace and support a range of vigorous tactics in combatting that. But I reject the specific tactic of attacking their livelihoods of people who express far right ideas in public, both on principle and because I believe that it in the long run it does more harm than good, including that it puts vulnerable people at risk.

I read Yarvin as having been subject to one such attack, so while I favor a number of measures to disrupt the spread of his fashy ideas, those principles took precedence. Potentially standing with him on this particular point is a high price for what I take to be a necessary, very particular, virtue.

It was foolish and irresponsible of me to open this subtle question on Twitter. This longer treatment was necessary.

Criticisms

Thanks to the magic of Twitter, I have faced a number of criticisms of this stance over the past few days. I am frankly frustrated by how many criticisms I received took me as advocating things different from — sometimes even diametrically opposed to — the things I said both there and here.

But there are many legitimate criticisms of what I advocate here. I disagree, but respect many of those deeply. And some of them give me strong enough doubts that I will sit with them and revisit my thoughts over time.

Harms from fash

In one sense, Yarvin’s mere presence at the conference is as unthreatening as a person could be, just another nerd talking about software. But it is obviously painful for someone who knows what his views are to see him at the front of the room in a position of honor. I am too white to understand what it is for someone Black to know that Yarvin looks at them as a potential slave, but what I can imagine is nauseating and enraging enough. Perhaps some might find a bit of comfort in the thought of Yarvin chafing at having to hold his poisonous tongue in front of people alert to find any hint of his politics, but that is not enough. Again, as a white guy I know better than to try to gauge how deep that cuts.

Indeed, one of my Twitter challengers told me that it is simply not my place to evaluate harms, period, I should simply accept when people assert that a person’s presence is harmful to them. It should be obvious why I deeply respect the impulse which gives rise to that sentiment. But that proposed principle chills me. Almost everything I say here comes of trying to out-think bad actors who might twist the principles we apply. Radical credulity about harms practically invites abuse.

The principle I am calling for does have a deep cost for the people who already suffer the most. I would not do so if I did not think the alternatives are worse, for the reasons I describe.

If we do count being in the presence of a quiet bigot intolerable, I am at a loss for a proper remedy. I wish Yarvin’s measure of bigotry were so very exceptional that we could find the entire poisoned handful and tell them that the only work available to them is done in solitude. But they are numerous. Shall we find and fire them all? How will that work out?

Is the presence of my hypothetical tight-lipped machinist in the workplace intolerable? If we left them alone but were as quick to punish visible bigotry in the workplace as I hold we should, I count that as coming out well ahead of the status quo. And this does not grant a pass to the Klansman who has the good sense to leave his robes at home; I simply hold that we should deter, catch, and correct that Klansman outside the workplace rather than within it. I see plenty of headroom to do better at that without resorting to coming at their livelihood.

And all of this underlines that my principle — that we should refuse to make workplaces better by responding to the bigotry we find in things workers expressing outside of work — only has moral credibility paired with an assertion that we must do a lot more to make workplaces more just, safe, and supportive for people who face bigotry. In one sense, my stance is prioritization of where we put our energies: not in ferreting out secret bigotry but addressing the unjust circumstances we know we have inside organizations. There is so much to do. That it is so common for people to suffer harms large and small from bigotry at the workplace that we should have the impulse to catch bigots there by looking at what they do outside only underlines the urgency of doing all of the other things we need to do to improve those spaces.

Free speech

There are a few arguments against the fundamental importance of free speech.

The most fundamental says that free speech is integral to a Western liberal democratic tradition which gave us colonialism, slavery, genocide, exploitation, environmental crisis, racism, war, and other evils. I am deeply committed to free speech liberal democracy. But, uh, yeah, this critique is undeniably right on an important level and keeps me up at night. Free speech comes to us from guys like John “Slavery” Locke and Thomas “Slave Rapist” Jefferson. I believe in the potential for a deeper, more profound liberal democracy — societies which are categorically more dedicated to equality, equity, rights, democratic accountability, and all the promised fruits of the libdem tradition through new institutions with better formulations of rule of law and public engagement and rights protections. But my hope may well be wrong. It is all too possible that the worm lives in the seed of the apple, and any radically new liberal democracy would only reproduce the failings of the old. Thus free speech would simply not merit valuing. Again, I disagree, but respect the heck out of the position, and would love for someone to offer me a better alternative to liberal democracy.

There is also the horror and bafflient with which people like the Germans look at the way we conceive free speech in the US. They know firsthand its vulnerabilities to movements like fascism. We are certainly in a moment in which the threat of toxic bullshittification of our entire public discourse already has a genocidal body count and is only getting started. Maybe free speech is itself specifically poisonous. Again, I don’t think so, but the people who do have very good reasons.

And there are the people who say free speech is good, sure, but just not as important as I take it to be. Other things are just more important. Some of these folks frankly make me uneasy; I suspect that they do not value free speech at all, and I wonder what their social and political philosophy really is. But many of them are weighing values against each other, as we must. As I say above about harms from fash, there is every reason to respect weighting them above free speech.

The vulnerable lack this protection

I hold that we need to protect fash from attacks on their livelihoods for things they say outside the workplace because, in part, we need a hardline principle to protect more vulnerable people who already face injustices from suffering similar attacks.

One may object that I am being naïve in thinking that I am protecting those folks. We can point to examples of how they already suffer loss of livelihood for things they say and do outside of work. Am I not, in practice, proposing a protection which only the privileged fash will actually enjoy?

My calculation is different. I believe that existing injustices show where the energy will go if we step up attacks on the livelihoods of people who express disagreeable ideas in public. Yes, the vulnerable suffer now. If we make this move, I submit that this will not simply stay the same, it will get worse. We would win victories against the Yarvins of the world at a price of even greater pressures on the folks we were trying to protect.

Are corporations and conference organizers wise, ready to learn to ferret out the fash in their organizations? Or are they stupid, likely to learn from attacks on the livelihoods of fash that one must guard against employing people with “controversial political opinions”? Will employers learn to lock out bad actors, or become overreactive in ways which bad actors will learn to exploit? History teaches me to bet on stupidity.

But this is also a place where I am least confident of my prediction. My own privileges make me less qualified to judge than those who experience the risk. If those folks have a strong consensus that they are prepared to roll the dice, that matters more than what I think.

Political expression is not a protected class

One may say that we have already litigated who we protect from the caprices of employers. We protect immutable characteristics like race and sexual orientation and gender (increasingly, but not yet universally, including protections for transgender people). Chosen characteristics like political beliefs and public expression, we do not protect.

But in many cases we also protect religion, as we should. Religion is “chosen” but deeply held. We protect it because we recognize the dangers of discrimination. And even where we do not legally protect it, we have norms which understand that firing someone for being Muslim or Jewish or Catholic or Atheist or Buddhist or whatever is wrong.

I am arguing for a norm even though we do not have the law. And yes, I very much advocate legislation. Workers’ political creeds and expressions outside of work absolutely should be protected by labor law. If they were, that would, again, most help the most vulnerable.

(I should add that one Twitter critic of mine said that what I really should favor is universal basic income: if one’s livelihood is just not dependent on employers, then employers lose the coercive power which make them a threat to free speech. This is, indeed, one of the countless reasons why I am a UBI crank, who holds that we should implient a generous UBI and other policies sufficient for a dignified life without work.)

Fash require ruthlessness

I know from militant antifascists that doxxing fash to their employers and getting them fired works. It often breaks those individuals away from their politics, and often does the same for the other fash they know; imagining that one is persecuted is fun but being persecuted turns out to suck. Even if they stay with it, the disruption makes them less effective.

As I say, there are plenty of other tools for fighting fash, but I want to recognize that I am advocating that we discard one of the best.

This is partly because I believe that how we win matters as much as that we win. But it does matter that we win. And we have a fash problem right now. There is a school of thought which says that vigorous militant antifascism is a bit like running a fever: it’s bad for the host, but worse for the disease. So I respect folks who think that this particular move I resist is necessary for the duration of the crisis. But I also worry about how temporary crisis measures have a tendency to stick around.

The fascism gets in everything

One can make a case that Yarvin’s technological projects are themselves inherently fashy, with reactionary politics baked into the structure. That may sound silly, but to me it does ring true; I know that Bitcoin has libertarian goldbug ideas implicit in its structure.

Further, there is a good case to be made that this is not specific to Yarvin but characteristic of all fash: their worldview is so consuming that it gets into everything they do. My imagined tight-lipped fash machinist may not find a way to make a fash cog, but they still will do some harmful fash stuff all the time.

If you don’t know much about the far right, or fascism in particular, this sounds paranoid. I have read enough studies of fascism, authoritarianism, and related political and cultural tendencies to be a little paranoid.

Not quite an attack on livelihood

One could say that I am right to want to avoid attacking fash for the ideas they expressed in their day job, but that preventing Yarvin’s presentation at a conference does not quite meet the threshold of qualifying as a sufficiently coercive attack on his livelihood. Missing a speaking opportunity is a different order of thing than outright unemployment.

This is another fair point. The point of the hard principle is to be strict, but I have already talked about many fuzzy edges. One could draw a bright line which says one’s actual day job merits protection but more para-professional stuff like conferences does not.

(Note that this is in friction with a parallel criticism one may offer of my position, that Yarvin’s presence at the conference damages the livelihoods of diverse people who are deterred from participating in career-advancing conferences by the presence of him and other monsters. Surely if his attendance impacts their livelihoods, barring him impacts his. And again, if I thought this were the entire choice, it would be easy for me to decide against Yarvin and figures like him.)

In this I fall to the principle of erring on the side of caution and expansive rights protections in general. I know very well how professional opportunities include much beyond the workplace itself.

Presenting is power

Per my point about managers and executives facing a more stringent standard, admitting more of their outside-of-work behavior as relevant to their jobs, one might argue that presenting at a conference likewise calls in more of a presenter’s whole self than merely attending.

But I find this criticism much less impressive than many of the others. Yes, presenting is power, but far less pervasive power than a manager or executive’s. What misbehavior a bad actor can do as a presenter is in plain view, literally presented to the community, such that what matters can be judged without needing reference to outside the professional domain.

We will only use this power for Good

One may argue that one is not advocating for allowing attacks against the livelihoods of everyone for the things they say outside of work, only people who say really bad things. That’s not to be flippant about Yarvin. His politics are, again, evil, a word I generally hesitate to use.

This is in important ways both the best and the worst argument against my point.

I am sure that a lot of people read me as just doing some stubborn white guy nose-pinching here, letting abstract principle get in the way of just doing the obvious right thing. Fergawdsake, just let other questions be other questions and answer this question. Fergawdsake, we know who it hurts and who it helps to have him present versus to kick him out, so just be on the right side of that.

I certainly respect people who see me as overthinking things, getting in my own way, prioritizing distant theoretical worries over a very present very real very serious threat to real people.

And also, this is “the ends justifies the means” territory, setting aside principle or thinking ahead to unintended consequences or possible error is in judgment. History teaches what happens when people convinced of their goodness and rightness decide that they don’t need rules or systems of oversight. Yes, we can agree that Yarvin is really bad, but what will we do when we disagree?

I think we need to care about principles, which is why I have written so very many words about mine, to clarify for you and for me what mine are, and hopefully to help clarify for you what yours are.

In sum: respect

It should be apparent that I take the disagreements many have with my stance seriously. There are good reasons to reject my position that the principle of free speech must protect even a figure like Yarvin from attacks on their livelihoods for ideas they express outside work.

Indeed, I assume that most people do not share my worry about this particular move, and are unworried to see someone like him take a blow this way.

I hope it is clear that I recognize that I could be plain wrong on this. I hope that people will register that I am not merely dismissing their concerns. I invite people who disagree to continue to try to convince me. And I pray that if they are indeed right, that they will convince me.

Ethical vertigo

After sweating out this long essay, and engaging in both friendly and hostile discussions about these questions on Twitter, I have spent enough time steeped in the fundamentals of these questions that I have become unmoored.

We face far right ideas and movements which are a cancer on democracy and a deadly threat to countless people now, and are on the march to do the worst things imaginable. We face injustices and cruelties in the workplace which reinforce grinding, horrible, pervasive social inequities … and even make those workplaces less effective along the way.

There is so much we must do. The addition or subtraction of a few tech conference speakers does not rate. I feel dirty having written the necessary words above.

In the face of such things, my hesitation to back an ouster of Yarvin before he brought his politics into the forum is, in one sense, a check on my own impulse to ruthlessness. Because whatever misfortunes he suffers for being fash, when I hear of it I will start by carving myself a thick, guilty, delicious slice of schadenfreude pie. Costing him a speaking gig is not even a tiny pebble at the foot of the mountain of things I am prepared to do to keep his ideas from taking hold, which is good because I remember the time it took lakes of blood to stop the Nazis from filling the oceans of blood they wanted.

I asked people about their endgame for stopping the far right at the workplace, and some reassured me that there was no way we would have a world where everyone who expresses far right ideas is so universally reviled that they end up homeless and destitute out of inability to find work, which I suppose means that the hope is to have a world which screws up the livelihoods of fash just enough that it deters them just enough, which … does not sound right.

If spending an hour listening to Yarvin talk about data structures is intolerable harm to people who know themselves to be threatened, physically threatened, by his ideas then should a guy like that have any job, any place? If we were prepared to send GIs across Europe with tanks to blow fascists to bits, which was both justified and necessary, then keeping far right advocates out of the workplace is small potatoes, right?

Are unaccountable conference organizers a better instrument for this than the government because they can do so much less? That too is several kinds of wrong. If, as I argued at grinding length in this essay, it is worrisome to have conference organizers and corporate HR and advocacy campaigns to pressure such organizations acting as censors, then does that principle create an obligation for me to attend a tech talk by a Yarvin, lest I pressure the conference? That too is thoroughly perverse.

So the disrupting the livelihoods of far right cranks is justified, which makes depending on a constellation of jumpy corporate authorities too chaotic and unaccountable. But that implies doing something systematically, exercising authority, with, uh, due process of law? If we are prepared to impoverish these folks because they are dangerous, should we not put them somewhere where they cannot hurt anyone? Uh, did I just now propose that we scour the websites for folks like Yarvin, put them on trial, and put them into prison? Camps for political prisoners? But not, y’know, too much of that? Is that what I am saying?

Seriously, what do we do with these folks? We have many thousands of outright fascists. We have millions of QAnon cranks in the US who seriously want to murder most journalists and Democratic Party leaders.

Keeping their visible proponents from speaking at tech conferences? I cannot care any more about that. What will we actually do?

I am giddy with horror. I have stalemated myself. I cannot think about this any more, right now.

Desk stuff

At the time I write this, I keep a nice home office which I currently cannot use because I am camping out away from home as part of my bubble's pandemic protocol. I just finished setting up a smaller but still fairly elaborate desk at the place where I will be for the next month or two (or, heaven forbid, longer) and snapped a picture of it to share with Facebook friends. Folks were so interested that I have been writing up what all my Desk Stuff is, so I thought it would be fun to transcribe that here. At the time I post this it is still a work in progress.

1

I suffer the constant temptation to clutter already-cluttered desk with items which are strictly decorative. In this reduced arragnement, I have sweated it down to two items.

I have never met a Hindu programmer who did not keep a representation of Ganesh at their desk. I am not qualified to give puja, but I find that he is patient with western pagans with modest offerings, so I give him a little “jai Ganesh!” or a bit of candy from time to time, and credit him with the smooth running of my computer. If things get really dire fixing something, I light the candle.

The Dymaxion icosahedron globe is a relatively new acquisition. I am a bit of a Buckminster Fuller enthusiast and the map is my favorite of his designs. I’m starting to think I should have gone for the blue/orange version, thoough, because when unfolded the dark blue oceans of the satellite image version I have are hard to distinguish from the magnets which hold the globe together.

2

The important thing at the end of the desk is an old iPhone, now repurposed just to run the BeFocused app, which is a smart pomodoro timer. I do not really practice the Pomodoro Technique rigorously — though I am working on it — but it does help keep me self-aware about my time and working rhythms. Keeping that in reach and visible and able to make its own independent sounds really helps.

A little organizer holds my favorite fancy bullet journal marking supplies: colored washi tape, sticky tabs, color coding dots, a correction ribbon, and a Postit glue stick. I have been stepping up my BuJo game this year. I do not keep an elaborate journal as many folks do — the simplicity is part of what makes it work for me — part of what makes the BuJo work for me is how it engages my attention through getting to fuss with paper products.

Then I have a little wooden playing card holder. My stationary obsessions extend to a love for index cards, so it is nice to be able to set up a tiny kanban board with them at my desk.

3

On the left side of the desk, I have my iPad on a stand, a little storage box with some alternate cables and other supplies, and a new acquisition: the big Contour ShuttlePro.

The Shuttle is programmable keypad with a jogwheel, primarily designed for audio and video editing. The driver software is smart enough to recognize which application is selected and to deliver shortcuts appropriate to it to the device, so I can work with one hand on the trackpad and one on the Shuttle. I'm just getting set up with it because for many years I relied on a different (and better) solution the Razer Nostromo, a gamers' programmable left-hand keypad with the same application awareness. Alas, they ended Mac support for the Nostromo and its successors a while back, and the new Mac OS Big Sur killed the controller software, so I had to change platforms.

4

The inexpensive flat-pack desk I got has open side shelves, so I have a few desktop organizers tucked onto the shelves on the left. I have spare notebooks, extra pens, index cards, sticky notes, a pair of scissors, index cards, stamps, and the like here.

5

My MacBook Pro recently bricked itself and my decade-old iMac was wheezy, so when Apple announced the new Apple silicon Mac Mini, I upgraded to it ... and thus needed to get a new monitor. Dell has a retina-resolution monitor which is Good Enough and a big step up from the monitor I used to have, and it has one of those Dell stands which makes it easy to switch to portrait format. If I am flush later this year, as I hope, I will spring for an awesome main display and rotate this one to use as a tall adjunct display dedicated to reading, writing, and note-taking. It also acts as a USB hub, which helps with the Mini's port limitations.

This also meant I needed to get a USB webcam, especially in this work-from-home quarantine year, and to my pleasant surprise I could find a camera better than what I can reliably transmit over the internet was inexpensive.

6

Together with the webcam, upgrading my machine and doing more remote meetings, I also recently needed to break down and get a proper USB mic rather than rely on my headphone mic, so I got a mic that was not too expensive, well-reviewed ... and old-timey-looking. Interlocutors tell me that I do not quite sound Broadcast Awesome, but much better than before.

On the monitor stand I also keep my (now collectors' item) Silicon Valley Tarot deck (which is witty and surprisingly useful for work), eyeglasses, and a fidget cube.

8

That wacky Keyboardio keyboard arouses the most curiousity, so I have a whole separate post about it.

10

So the big thing here is a vertical file organizer with a mini-whiteboard which I got dirt cheap from of of my favorite catalogues, American Science & Surplus. It is a glamourless plastic thing, unlike the beautiful glass desk WB from Quartet which I lust after but do not really have a proper use for. The organizer has a slightly depressed tray on top for a couple of WB markers, which is a nice touch, keeping those big WB markers away from my other pens. But the cool part — the thing which makes it an essential part of my arsenal — is how in back there are four thick slots for folders, ascending a bit in back stadium-style. These are my Hot Files for stuff I am working on.

I use a set of durable plastic folders with translucent bodies so I can tell what is inside. I have marked each folder with a letter for indexing elsewhere if I need it, though I am not getting so much mileage out of that as I expected. But it is really useful to me that the tabs of the folders are colored, so I color code yellow/orange/red for ascending urgency of things I need to do, plus green for On My Desk But Currently Cool, and blue for Pending Action From Elsewhere. I keep the folder supply upside-down in the back slot, with matching colored sticky dots on each one so it is easy to pull a new folder of the appropriate color for a new project. The limited space in the slots keeps me from holding too much stuff on my desk.

To the left of the organizer thing I have chargers for my watch and phone, wired phone headphones for when I need them, a book of videoconference signs which I made, and three key desk tools: a good retractable pen, a good eraser, and a cheap little desk knife which comes in very handy.