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sticky:
this forum can be tough going sometimes---i find it is often really frustrating in that positions never change. there is no real debate. there is no standard of evidence that is agreed upon. there is much talking-past and snarkiness often accompanies the repetitions of this dynamic of talking-past.
personal aside: i find it is difficult to have debates about questions pertaining to israeli actions in the classes i teach--and in doing courses on post 1945 history, it often comes up---i have found that it is imperative to have a substantial shared textual basis for the debates simply in order to give the participants common data to refer to and common reference points for the debates themselves. i generally will outline the topics and sollicit materials from a range of political viewpoints and assign a cross-section of them beforehand. it usually makes for more informed and civil discussion--people get really testy about this and so it is required.
within this there is another problem: which history of israel do you let into the discussion--the one that claims continuity over 2000 years---the one that links it to various strands of zionism (which was multiple and within which debates unfolded concerning coexistance with the palestinian population that foreshadow much of what subsequently has unfolded--the problem being that the wrong type of zionism seems to have won, if peace between groups is the aim here)--or the one that picks up with 1948 and which is fundamentally altered after 1967. the choice of histories entails choices about what constitutes hstory, which debates are going to be framed in and which out, etc.
then there is the problem of racism from all sides in this conflict--racism as a mobilizing tool, racism as a structuring feature of policy, racism that is socially and politically sanctioned and so does not operate as something labelled racism--so you find folk from all sides repeating fundamentally racist understandings of each other without managing to stop and ask themselves how this slid into their views, what work it does, and whether and how this is a problem.
for a variety of personal reasons, i find myself particularly sensitive to and quick to anger about racism that i see as directed against muslims and/or arabs---but i also oppose any anti-semitism--and too often you find that people default into one or the other, as if one implies the other, to counter the one means that you adopt the other--when the problem is both, is racism itself.
these are not easy topics to discuss even in contexts where there are clear rules, a shared textual basis and 3-d people whose responses are as much physical as verbal.
in an abstract space like this, debates have no ground rules, there is no shared textual basis and no agreement about which register of argument is appropriate. there is no brake placed on developing and posting racist arguments (so long as they are not too obvious). and there are no indices at all of how others who post are reacting as human beingzs behind the sentences they write. so folk who would be motivated by concern or kindness for others in 3-d and would modulate what they say and how they say it depending on the types of responses they would see from others as human beings do not have that level of information and so can motor ahead with whatever they want to say without any feedback. all these are problems, and all seem to be part of the nature of the messageboard beast.
it can be really unfortunate, and it is easy to see how folk can be deeply offended by stuff that goes on here.
i assume that the folk who play in this forum are in the main kind generous folk in real life and that all would conduct themselves differently toward each other in 3-d than they would here--even folk who violently disagree about political questions on a routine basis in here. so i try to control from the rhetorical excesses of this forum with that. it is a bit arbitrary, but it's how i manage it.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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