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I live in the UK and I don’t drink beer because I generally, ironically, think beer overall tastes like piss, and yet I still know Tsingtao. It has fairly substantial market recognition in a lot of countries.

I interviewed with them once, and they swore up and down that they were cleaning up and divesting of all the harmful stuff, and wanted me to trust they were all about health and a smoke-free future.

Thankfully they were so staggeringly full of bullshit during the interviews that I quickly realized it’d be an absolutely horrifically toxic (groan, yes, sorry) place to work irrespective of my other doubts, and I ended up telling them I didn’t want to continue the process and that I was so unhappy with the assorted bullshit during the process that I didn’t want to ever be approached by them again.

That’s the very long way of saying I’m not the slightest bit surprised it turns out they are in fact still massive asshats, and I’m very happy I caught on early enough.

And yet my comment did not suggest any views in either direction and only addressed the specific point of selective schools.

Thanks for the interesting overview.

To be honest, I mostly like dragging that quote out because it confounds people’s expectations.

Marx certainly wasn’t arguing against universal provisioning of education - that had been a demand in the Communist Manifesto for example - but against state control of the curriculum, which really must be understood in large part I suspect as a direct outcome of his own personal experience with the Prussian government repression before he left, and fear it’d end up used for government propaganda, rather than any kind of objective assessment of quality.

But that was very much a product of a very specific time, and quite possibly personal resentments mixed in. I suspect had he seen the relative state of the US and German education systems today, he’d certainly have preferred the German model.

I’ve not suggested otherwise, so I don’t know why you felt compelled to point that out.

You’re moving goalposts. You claimed ANCs attacks were inconsequential, and now you’ve changed your tone to focus on civilian attacks.

Sure, they carried out fewer and smaller civilian attacks than Hamas.

There are absolutely arguments over what the most effective use of violent resistance is, and to be clear I have never claimed that Hamas’ method is particularly effective, and it might very well be entirely counter-productive. What I argued was specifically against this:

Although the ANC did declare an armed struggle against the White regime, in fact their attacks were inconsequential and contributed nothing to the struggle. The game-changer was a concerted campaign to mobilise world opinion. It was sanctions and isolation that ended apartheid, not bullets.

But specifically to what you claimed in this latest reply, I do remember the bombing campaign that targeted a range of Wimpy burger joints during lunch hour. I do remember the regular use of limpet mines against sports venues, bus stations, shopping centres and other shops, restaurants. They were regular enough that they are one of the regular features of the 1980’s evening news that was seared into my memory as a child despite growing up half a world away.

The ANC liked to pretend they didn’t target civilians, but in the 90’s applications were made to the Truth and Reconciliation Committee by ANC members who admitted to bombing civilians, and ANC themselves submitted a lengthy list of bombings to the TRC which also included a long list of civilian bombings that they claimed to be “uncertain” who carried out but nevertheless submitted in a longer list of their operations alongside the police and military attacks you mention. These lists are readily available.

Mandela “escaped” being tarnished by this in large part because he was in prison from years before MK escalated from sabotage to bombings, and to this day it’s unclear how much he personally knew, especially about the civilian attacks. It’s clear other members of the ANC leadership, like Oliver Tambo and Joe Slovo, knew, however.

Apartheid started in 1948, but segregation had existed for 40 years by then, and the fight for equal rights preceded the formal start of Apartheid.

What is clear with respect to Mandela is that he doubled down on the necessity of violence to his death and was clear that things got worse during ANCs nonviolent fight and first improved when they started fighting back. He held onto that view to his death.

ANC was founded in 1912 as segregation was just ramping up. 36 years after they were founded, Apartheid was passed.

They didn’t start killing until 1976, after 64 years of the world mostly quietly ignoring them as oppression got worse and worse.

1 year after they started killing, the UN finally made the voluntary and ineffectual arms embargo binding. 8 years after they started killing, the disinvestment campaign started seriously hurting the South African economy. 13 years after they started killing, Thatcher called the ANC a terrorist organisation at the Commonwealth summit, but beside having gone from being seen as a harmless nuisance to being called terrorists by both the UK and US governments, they won the struggle 14 years after they took up arms. But 78 years after they started fighting.

As such, I’ll take Mandelas words on the importance of their armed struggle over yours any day.

Weird fact: In 1875, Karl Marx ripped what became the SDAP (which eventually through mergers and name changes became the SDP) a new one when they argued for state-provided education, and argued that rather than people getting an education from the state, “the state has need, on the contrary, of a very stern education by the people” (Critique of the Gotha Programme)

In the same section he argued that the then-US model of private or locally run education to publicly set standards was far preferable.

Of course, this was at a time when the German/Prussian government was deeply authoritarian, something Marx and his family had experienced first-hand, so I’m sure that coloured his views of state-run education.

There are over 160 selective secondary state/public schools in England. Being state run does not prevent the existence of selective schools.

Your blood and soil arguments are entirely irrelevant to the point that Israel itself does not make the extremist claims you’re making. You keep recycling this despite its total lack of relevance to the argument. And in doing so you’re aligning yourself with a tiny minority of the most far-right extremist fascist-adjacent Israeli parties.

beyond the fact they agreed to a 2 state solution in the 90s then reneged and attacked Israel

Again you’re collectively blaming a population, the majority of which were not born when the Oslo accords were signed (look it up; 65% of the Palestinian population is below 25 years old, and the Oslo accords were signed 30 years ago) for actions a far higher proportion had no influence over.

beyond the fact they elect a genocidal government that will only bring themselves ruin

I’m assuming you don’t get the irony in writing this when it can be equally applied to Israel.

Of the two sides, only one has a government actively engaged in what covers a substantial portion o stage 8 of Stantons ten stages of genocide.

When you cut toddlers throats and rape Innocents who have NO SLIGHTS AGAINST YOU, film it for fun plus have genocide as your prime governmental policy I give 0 shits about your plight regardless of what pushed you there. You deserve to get pushed around by the people you have a desire to wipe off the face of this Earth. To quote the bible, “live by the sword, die by the sword.”

This boils down to “it’s ok to murder innocents and oppress people and want to get rid of people because the other side murdered innocents and wants to get rid of you”. Unless you’re an utter hypocrite, you’d apply that to both sides. Yet this “logic” is meaningless if applied to both sides. By your own logic, Israelis deserve to get pushed around because some of them have murdered innocents and because some of them wants Israel to annex all the land (to be clear, despite your argument in favour of collective punishment: they don’t; just like Palestinians don’t deserve to be collectively punished for the actions of a few either). But if that is the case, you have no moral basis for your uproar over Hamas’ actions - by your own logic you shouldn’t give 0 shits about it.

Yet you clearly do. So clearly you’re not applying that logic to both sides.

You’re conveniently only applying it to the Palestinian population, whom you’ve elsewhere also implied collectively are untrustworthy and likely to try to take over any state who might invite them in.

Again, note how quick you are to be ok with collective suffering for Palestine for the actions of some, while you’re up in arms about the suffering of a portion of Israelis for the actions of some.

Can you see how this deeply hypocritical and one-sided demonisation of Palestinians as a people, whom you have elsewhere implied are collectively untrustworthy and a risk of trying to take over, comes across as racist?

Because I certainly do.

I have no interest in continuing to indulge you in your ongoing demonisation of a population of five million people of whom the vast majority has done no wrong other than been born in what is effectively an open air prison where you, to quote you think they “deserve to get pushed around” despite the majority of them never having voted in any violently oppressive government (and that holds for the majority of Israelis too, though sadly not for the majority of the electorate - but just as I don’t hold all Palestinians responsible for the actions of some, neither to dI hold all Israelis responsible for the actions of some; have a think about that).

And so I’ll shortly be blocking you, so I don’t have to deal with any more attempts at justifying oppression of innocents because of the crimes of some.

What matters is that they must unequivocally reject Hamas, and work with Israel to eradicate these factions as best they can so that Israel can trust their populace to not harbor terrorists. Only then can the Israeli leadership end the restrictions placed upon the Palestine territories that seek to prevent the inflow of arms and rocket artillery to Hamas.

Asking an oppressed population to collaborate with their oppressors like a bunch of quislings in order to appease the oppressor before they can get peace has never worked.

It is not an illogical act that Israel has done to secure the safety and security of their people.

The have not secured the safety and security of their people, though. What their decades of oppression has bought them is continuous warfare.

With the recent artillery attack by Hezbollah, I don’t think there is much question as to where the Palestinian people stand with regards to the Hamas attack on Israel.

So doubling down on the approach of assigning collective blame to a whole population for the actions of some. Who typically assigns collective blame to a whole people for the actions of some? Can you tell me?

Israel does not owe the Palestinians a good outcome. If they keep testing Israel, there is no limit to what Israel can do short of mass-killing genocide. Displacement is the best outcome in an Israeli victory.

So you keep arguing for massive war crimes of a level too extreme even for the far-right Israeli government, in other words.

False. It takes the will and the courage to out the terrorists amongst them to the Israelis so that the terrorists will be hindered and slowly wiped from prominence.

Ah, so you just want them to be quislings and collaborate with their own oppressors. When has that ever worked again, remind me? This is nothing but an excuse to justify your support for continued oppression.

Or perhaps Hamas will benefit from the reprieve in state suppression, and use the opportunity to import more arms, equipment, and training from Arab countries and bide their time.

That is the risk you run when you oppress a population for decades. But if that were to happen, at least they would actually have a moral leg to stand on. Now they do not.

Which is why I said it would be so much easier if it could be done. It regretfully can’t be done which is why there’s so much conflict up till this day. The keyword is “if”.

So to make this clear: You’re regretful Israel is unable to carry out what would be one of the worst crimes against humanity since World War 2? Something which would reach stage 8 of Stantons 10 stages of Genocide?

Yikes.

And besides, the Israeli goodwill is running out.

Well, yes, gross human rights violations for decades do eventually tend to piss people off.

I wonder if they might just throw caution to the wind and just do it, given how right wing their government is getting. It would be just, and there will be popcorn in the aftermath and subsequent war for sure.

Calling crimes against humanity “just”. So much for caring about the millions of innocents you casually are arguing for harming.

Time for a block - debating people who openly not just argue for crimes against humanity, but describe them as “just” is giving extremism unjustified attention.

If all they did was argue for jettisoning stone age thinking, I’d have been all for that. But instead the person I replied to engaged in just another variant of the same stone age thinking.

I’m simply applying the logic the Palestinians apply.

This might be relevant if it was a Palestinian state imposing apartheid on Israel. If so, they would be equally worthy of condemnation irrespective of who had which historical claim to what land.

But they are not, so bringing it up is yet another attempt at victim-blaming.

Had Israel stopped at a point of doing the bare minimum to secure its legally recognized borders, or indeed the borders they themselves recognize, and attempted to avoid oppressing innocent civilians for decades, there’d likely still be conflicts, but then Israel would have something of a moral leg to stand on. They have not. They do not. As it is, they are occupiers, as recognized by their own government and their own courts.

I’d also feel more empathy for the apartheid conditions if Palestinians would stop electing a political group who’s stated goals are the deaths of every Jewish person.

Hamas didn’t even exist until a couple of decades into the oppression. It was formed as a result of the failure of PLO to get Israel to the table, so this is blaming the victims again for responding to decades of Israeli unwillingness to end their oppression.

Also, notice how in contrast to your repeated talk of the Palestinians as a unified group while assigning blame, not once have I tried to blame the Israeli people as a whole for Israel’s actions, despite the fact that a majority of them have elected governments in every single election for the entire existence of their state that have continued a policy of illegal occupations and apartheid?

I stand by that. Just like the Palestinian people as a whole can not be judged for the actions of Hamas, neither can the Israeli people as a whole be judged for the actions of the Israeli state.

Are you going to do the same, or are you going continue to assign collective blame to people including the millions on either side who have no power whatsoever to influence the actions of any of the belligerent parties and/or who oppose them? Including the millions in the West Bank who are largely cut off from even being able to intervene in what goes on in Gaza due to Israeli apartheid policies beyond the control of Palestinians in the West Bank.

And as I said it’s comical you keep saying I support apartheid policies by simply stating killing innocent people is fucking wrong and deplorable no matter what side does it.

When you criticise only specific and limited outcomes of the oppression rather than the oppression itself, then, yes, it’s natural to presume you’re fine with the oppression. Notice how even here you only express opposition to the killing of innocents, and not against the imposition of apartheid or the illegal occupation that created the conditions for it over multiple generations.

If Ukraine starts liquidating Russian cities and raping, torturing, kidnapping, and using innocent’s as human shields I’d say the same fucking thing to them and pull my support. If this is how Palestine wants to do things I shed no tears as they are destroyed.

If your support for opposition to oppression is contingent on the oppressed doing no wrong, then you’re really just looking for any excuse to side with the oppressors.

My support for the Ukranian people, as for the Palestinian people is unconditional. That does not mean I support every action made on their behalf. I do not. That does not mean there aren’t actions I find deplorable. It does not mean I don’t sympathise with innocent victims.

It does mean that in an asymmetric fight the oppressor is the only side that has the choice of ending the oppression, and until they do they have no moral standing to complain when some of their victims lash out in desperation - the oppressor is ultimately always the culpable party for every consequence of their oppression.

Anything else is to create an incentive for oppressors to be extra brutal in order to provoke an extreme response, knowing that if they do, they’ll have people like you ready to dismiss the plight of the entire oppressed population because some of them were pushed into a level of desperation where they’ve gone too far.

If the Palestinians were actually interested in stopping their oppression, they would stop trying to fight an insurgency against the Israelis. As it is, they are a security threat, and for good reason.

Which oppressed peoples have come well out of surrendering to a party that has refused to give concessions?

This is classic victim blaming. It’s also demonstrably false: There have been many lullls in the fighting. And yet the Israeli oppression has never stopped. If anything, Israeli has continued the war crimes of settling occupied territories, and the crimes of Apartheid by tightening the control of the borders of the occupied territories and limiting the movement of the Palestinian position, as well as ramped up racist laws such as the nationality law, and this expansion of oppression has never once stopped when resistance has abated.

This notion that you can end oppression by appeasing your oppressor is not one that has a very successful history in general, and Israel has proven time and time again over a period of decades that it definitely does not work with Israel.

And irrespective of that you fall in the typical trap of thinking you can talk about Palestinians as a unified, single entity, rather than as a mass of people with different views where even if 99.9% were to suddenly decide they trusted Israel would treat them fairly if only they stopped fighting, that would not stop the remaining 0.1%.

Notice how you yourself de facto treats Hamas as a proxy for Palestinians as a whole:

I don’t see why Israel should give quarter to Hamas now, nor should they entertain the idea that Palestinians are being sincere in co-existing with Israelis.

Consider e.g. the IRA, which saw support diminish substantially (while Hamas’ support is still high), and yet still continued an insurgency in a far less oppressive situation until the UK government sat down and actually listened to their concerns and gave concessions.

Israel has created a population where sufficient numbers of people feel they have nothing to live for. There is no realistic scenario here where the insurgency ever stops unless Israel commits total genocide or seeks a negotiated settlement including giving substantial concessions irrespective of whether or not they think they can trust any of the parties.

That is not a question of whether that is fair, or reasonable, or whether it’s the smart think to do for Palestinians to continue.

It is what will happen when you create a situation like this.

So you talk about what Palestinians are “actually interested in”, but the Palestinian people as a whole have zero power to end this because it’d require the total agreement of each and every one of five million individuals. Israel on the other hand has the power to end this, because on their end it only requires the agreement of the state to dial back the oppression enough that support for groups like Hamas loses support, and then negotiate an end to it.

It would be so much easier if Israel just considered them as the enemy, and throw them out of the territory of Israel as they wished. It’s only right for a bunch of sore losers. Let them resist from outside the territory of Israel proper, and seek help and refuge from their Arab “allies”.

Not even Israel considers the occupied territories theirs. They are not the territory of Israel even under Israeli law. As it is what you’re suggesting here would be a severe violation of international law, a crime against humanity, a violation of a number of UN decrees, and would violate Israeli law as well, as Israel’s actions are only accepted by their own Supreme Court on the basis that Israel’s own government have consistently insisted it’s done under a doctrine of belligerent occupation: In other words, they do consider them the enemy and despite their many war crimes, not even Israel is prepared to commit the level of war crimes you suggest.

It is fairly fascinating yet also shocking how many people here argue for a maximalist position so extreme that even the far-right Israeli government rejects it as too extreme, as have every Israeli government since 1967.

Firstly, see “The law of belligerent occupation in the Supreme Court of Israel”, David Kretzmer, Professor Emeritus of International Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, published in the International Review of the Red Cross, 2012:

Not even the Israeli government or the Israeli Supreme Court agree with you that Israel has a legitimate claim to the territories beyond their internationally recognised borders. Maybe somebody here is talking about the entirety of Israel, but I am not, nor have I ever. If Israel were to withdraw to their borders, and Palestinian attacks still continue, then there’d be at least room for discussion of blame.

Until then, as long as Israel itself legally recognizes that it is an occupying power, there is none.

Secondly, people’s experience of being oppressed does not recognize law. Irrespective of who has ownership of what, Israel is engaged in treating Gaza in particular as an Apartheid-style bantustan, and is committing crimes against humanity by doing so.

Whether or not you agree with the legal position on that, when someone places people in those conditions, then it is entirely on them when they hit back.

Blaming people for resisting gross abuse because you don’t like how they do it when you’ve put them in a situation where they have no realistic opportunity to fight clean is victim-blaming.

Are you going to argue that it’s bad for Germans to murder Jews, but it is okay for Muslims?

Nice try. I’ve not argued it is okay for anyone. I’ve argued in some threads that unless you’ve provided a better alternative (and not suggested it; actually tried to make it come to pass), then like the rest of us you’re not in a moral position to judge people for taking desperate steps to try to fight back.

That doesn’t mean not feeling for the victims, because they had no power to end this either. It doesn’t mean not thinking it’s a horrible situation. It doesn’t mean you can’t get angry. It means resisting the urge to assign the blame to a people the vast majority of whom have been born into effective bondage under an apartheid regime for taking desperate and irrational actions to try to end a gross abuse they have no realistic power to change.

“Those other people are also xenophobes” isn’t the great argument you think it is.

The Palestinians are probably not that bad of a people, but it doesn’t help that they keep making armed struggles for a lost cause when they can just make peace on their loss.

Telling people to just lie down and let their oppressor keep oppressing has historically never worked. Israel will never experience peace without coming to terms with that, because every new generation growing up in those conditions will learn from a young age to hate.

Do you have evidence that a huge majority wants to take over states if they are invited in, which was the claim you were making?

To quote you:

The whole reason they don’t take Palestinians in is because Palestinians try to take their country over.

It happened in Jordan, it happened in Lebanon. It will happen anywhere they are allowed to congregate.

This is full on far-right “if you let those immigrants in they’ll take over” rhetoric.

EDIT: I’d also like to point out, that in fact this notion of a people coming in and trying to “take over” ironically given the context here has a long-standing history as an anti-semitic trope when used against Jewish people. It’s no less of a racist trope when employed against other groups, though.

Who? Israel? No, they do not have a legal claim to the occupied areas, or they wouldn’t be occupied. Both irrespective of the occupation, the crime of Apartheid is a crime against humanity under the Rome statute.

The Israeli Supreme Court has ever since 1967 consistently accepted the Israeli government’s own contention that the territories are occupied, and not part of Israel proper, because if they were part of Israel, then Palestinians affected by Israeli oppression would have far stronger legal claims.

So if you want to argue that the occupied territories belong to Israel, you’re arguing against the position of both Israel the state and the Israeli Supreme Court.

See “The law of belligerent occupation in the Supreme Court of Israel”, David Kretzmer, Professor Emeritus of International Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, published in the International Review of the Red Cross, 2012

You realise just how racist it sounds when you’re blaming the Palestinian people as a whole for the actions of a subset?

Only one party is currently illegally occupying land they have legal claim to and engaging in the crime of apartheid. Only one party is engaged in fighting against an illegal occupier. That you choose to argue in favour of the apartheid regime engaged in an illegal occupation says enough.