Of course, Israel already exists, so it's a different situation. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the Zionism/Bundism debates of the early 20th century, Israel has been a nation state for three quarters of a century and I don't think that should change (unless so desired by the people of Israel). It seems likely that Israel will remain a majority Jewish nation for many decades. However, I don't believe that being so is the only way to protect Jews worldwide or that the rights of individual Israelis to be who they want to be should be overridden. My own country has come from being Christian majority to Christian minority in my lifespan. If Israel changes in similar ways, it changes.
You keep repeating the same points, HYUFD. You have not made clear what you want to happen. How would you maintain Israel as evermore a Jewish majority nation? If many Israelis converted to Christianity and threatened that majority, what measures would you want taken? If non-Jewish Israelis have more kids and the population shifts over time, what measures would you want taken?
You seem to be making an unstated assumption that the direction of travel will always be towards greater multiculturalism.
What if the decline of one majority were instead replaced by another that wanted to establish a different kind of state?
The tolerance paradox in action. If you are tolerant, then you end up tolerating intolerance, and eventually the intolerance dominates.
NEW - ARREST MADE: A man has been arrested for the manslaughter of the Nottingham Panthers ice hockey player Adam Johnson, who was killed in collision in a match against the Sheffield Steelers.
An arrest for manslaughter, and even a conviction for manslaughter, doesn't mean it wasn't an accident.
Where someone dies as a result of someone else's gross negligence or recklessness, it can still legitimately be called an "accident". Accidents aren't necessarily blameless.
NEW - ARREST MADE: A man has been arrested for the manslaughter of the Nottingham Panthers ice hockey player Adam Johnson, who was killed in collision in a match against the Sheffield Steelers.
Not knowing ice skating, my assumption was that the victim had fallen and the other skater had skated into him; perhaps an understandable, tragic accident. Then I saw the video, and realised that explanation was wrong. It'll be an interesting (but tragic) one to follow.
It’s a really interesting case. Ice hockey is a sport where a massive amount of incidental violence is treated as perfectly normal, and there’s been plenty of horrific injuries over the years. I don’t think the intention was to put a blade in the neck, but two sets of lawyers are going to argue that point incessantly.
Its a strange game in as you say massive amounts of violence, but undertaken under some common unwritten rules which for the most part are stuck too...e.g. when they go to toe to toe, globes off, no sticks, man goes down you stop...man by the boards, only one goes in to hit him, don't hit them if clearly unsighted and prone position...and actually those overstepping them then see violence turned up to 11.
Excited to share @GoogleDeepMind’s newest AI model GraphCast: the most accurate 10-day global weather forecasting system in the world. GraphCast can also offer earlier warnings of extreme weather events, including the path of hurricanes. In @Science today
When we get easterlies and the forecast goes a bit wrong there's always someone who says 'the models can't get a handle on it because they aren't "used" to this pattern'.
This is of course wrong when it comes to normal weather modelling because the models are essentially just solving Navier-Stokes equations and aren't really biased in that way.
I wonder if this is? Be interesting to see how it copes with low frequency events.
If you can run accurate weather models on relatively normal hardware it is going to put a big dent in several companies...not least purveyors of supercomputers.
Particularly with a changing climate you would wonder how such a statistical model would cope with new conditions. But, arguably the traditional models are tuned too tightly to reproduce the present climate anyway.
The other thing to bear in mind is that, for poorly-observed regions of the world, the ECMWF dataset (I'm assuming they've used the reanalysis) is mostly the output of the computer model, because the observations only provide a weak constraint in some areas.
In that sense the statistical model has been trained on the physics model to a certain extent, and so is perhaps a cheaper way of reproducing it, but you might want to repeat the exercise when the ECMWF model is later improved.
Interesting header - at the turn of the last century Argentina was one of the richest countries on the planet - far richer than Australia, for example. In South America there is no love lost for them - 3 jokes:
Argentines are Italians who speak Spanish and think they're English.
How do you make your fortune in Argentina? Buy an Argentinian for what he's worth, and sell him for what he thinks he's worth.
Contract to build a bridge:
German contractor: $60m: $20m for design, $20m for materials, $20m for construction Japanese contractor: $90m: $30m for design, $30m for materials, $30m for construction Argentine Contractor: $180m: $60m for you, $60m for me and we'll get the Germans to build it.
Has anyone been to Argentina?
Yes, Jeremy Clarkson has, together with Captain Slow and the Hamster. H982 FKL and all that.
With their history, it would frankly be incredible if most Jews DIDN’T care about Israel
Of course, Israel is the only nation in the world with a Jewish majority, therefore the only nation in the world Jews can truly be safe
Is the only place that members of a particular religious, ethnic or ethno-religious group can truly be safe in a nation where they are a majority? That view is both depressingly pessimistic and harks back to a some 19th-century notion of the nation state built around an ethnos that I thought we had long since abandoned.
We should make the world safe for all minorities and majorities.
What does it mean to make the world safe for majorities if you deny their right to remain majorities?
I would want to interrogate what you mean. Individuals have rights. Individuals have the right to safety and to be allowed to express their identities. What does it mean to say a group has the right to remain a majority?
Let's say you follow religion X and you live in a country that has a majority of other people who follow religion X. What happens if a bunch of your countrymen convert to a different religion or abandon any religion (as is happening with Christianity in the UK)? What does a "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean in that situation? Do you get to force your countrymen to not change religion? Do you get to expel them? What happens if your coreligionists just happen to have fewer kids and a minority group are a bit more fecund, until one day you are in the minority? Should your "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean you get to decide how many kids other people have?
It seems to be illiberal and undemocratic to state that a nation state must retain a certain religious or ethnic majority.
I guess you may be alluding to ideas around abolishing the Israeli state, subsuming it into some larger Israel/Palestine single state. That raises different questions. I think the people of Israel should get to decide what happens to them, so I would not want to see any change in the nation that is not supported by democratic majority. So, to take a different example, if Moldovans want to merge with Romania and cease to be the Republic of Moldova (and Romanians agree), then that should happen, and if Moldovans don't want to merge with Romania and they want Moldova to continue as a separate country, then that should happen.
Then there are multiple other Christian majority countries you can still go to if a Christian in the UK, even if the UK is no longer Christian majority.
There is only 1 Jewish majority nation however, Israel and after millions of Jews were murdered in Europe in the Holocaust and anti Semitism present in every other nation of the world it is no surprise the vast majority of Jews wish to keep Israel as the Jewish homeland. A place of safety if needed to move to if things ever get too bad for Jews again in their nation of residence
The desire of many Jews for Israel as a Jewish homeland to exist is understandable. The desire of many Armenians for Armenia as a homeland to exist is understandable. The desire of many Kurds for Kurdistan as a homeland to exist is understandable.
The question is how you balance the rights of different people. Should we carve out a Kurdistan, making a bunch of non-Kurds suddenly minorities in a new nation?
Let's imagine a new religion emerged in Galilee, people believe in a new messiah called Hyufd. Hyufdism spreads and many Israeli Jews convert to Hyufidsm. One day, Judaism is no longer in a majority in Israel. (This has happened before, twice.) What happens? Are the choices of individuals to convert less important than the desire for a Jewish majority nation?
Every citizen of Israel should have equal rights, to worship what religion they want to (or how they want to), to follow what social customs and practices they want to, to speak what language they want to at home, to have the number of children they want to. Those rights, I suggest, trump any collective right of a majority to remain a majority.
I support a Kurdish state and it now effectively exists in Northern Iraq and Northern Syria anyway.
Were Jews a minority in Israel even after Jesus walked the earth? The evidence is not clear. What is clear is it is now the only place they are genuinely safe from anti Semitism and fine kumbaya platitudes about universal human rights ain't much help when things really go bad in your nation of residence. As the Jews discovered the League of Nations was hopeless to protect them in Germany once the Nazis took over and as Ukraine has discovered the UN was also largely ineffective once Putin invaded, they had to fight to preserve their homeland themselves
What, pray, is a ‘fine kumbaya platitude’?
Homo sapiens can be a very nasty, aggressive species when faced with something it doesn’t like. Ask Homo neanderthalis.
TBF, we don't actually know what finished off the Neanderthals.
They weren't entirely finished off - we're in part them.
It's a bit of a stretch, but it has been noted that there is more Neanderthal DNA out there today than at any point in history, simply because of growth in the size of human population, and the fact most of us have a very small percentage of Neanderthal DNA.
I'm certainly no expert, but I thought it had been established that some big chunk of our DNA is probably from the Neanderthals. Some certainly is anyway.
Of course, Israel already exists, so it's a different situation. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the Zionism/Bundism debates of the early 20th century, Israel has been a nation state for three quarters of a century and I don't think that should change (unless so desired by the people of Israel). It seems likely that Israel will remain a majority Jewish nation for many decades. However, I don't believe that being so is the only way to protect Jews worldwide or that the rights of individual Israelis to be who they want to be should be overridden. My own country has come from being Christian majority to Christian minority in my lifespan. If Israel changes in similar ways, it changes.
You keep repeating the same points, HYUFD. You have not made clear what you want to happen. How would you maintain Israel as evermore a Jewish majority nation? If many Israelis converted to Christianity and threatened that majority, what measures would you want taken? If non-Jewish Israelis have more kids and the population shifts over time, what measures would you want taken?
You seem to be making an unstated assumption that the direction of travel will always be towards greater multiculturalism.
What if the decline of one majority were instead replaced by another that wanted to establish a different kind of state?
I'm not assuming the direction of travel will always be towards greater multiculturalism. It might be, it might not be.
I am a democrat. If the population changes and people want a "different kind of state", then they should get a different kind of state. Isn't that how democracy works?
Of course, it's not always quite that simple. If a majority wants to kill everyone called "William", then, no, that should be stopped! There is a (difficult) balance between basic human rights and democracy. A majority in Israel, by some polling, want Jews to have more rights than non-Jews, and I think that would be a mistake. If the situation changed and some future majority wanted to have more rights than Jews, that would also be wrong.
Of course, Israel already exists, so it's a different situation. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the Zionism/Bundism debates of the early 20th century, Israel has been a nation state for three quarters of a century and I don't think that should change (unless so desired by the people of Israel). It seems likely that Israel will remain a majority Jewish nation for many decades. However, I don't believe that being so is the only way to protect Jews worldwide or that the rights of individual Israelis to be who they want to be should be overridden. My own country has come from being Christian majority to Christian minority in my lifespan. If Israel changes in similar ways, it changes.
You keep repeating the same points, HYUFD. You have not made clear what you want to happen. How would you maintain Israel as evermore a Jewish majority nation? If many Israelis converted to Christianity and threatened that majority, what measures would you want taken? If non-Jewish Israelis have more kids and the population shifts over time, what measures would you want taken?
You seem to be making an unstated assumption that the direction of travel will always be towards greater multiculturalism.
What if the decline of one majority were instead replaced by another that wanted to establish a different kind of state?
I'm not assuming the direction of travel will always be towards greater multiculturalism. It might be, it might not be.
I am a democrat. If the population changes and people want a "different kind of state", then they should get a different kind of state. Isn't that how democracy works?
Of course, it's not always quite that simple. If a majority wants to kill everyone called "William", then, no, that should be stopped! There is a (difficult) balance between basic human rights and democracy. A majority in Israel, by some polling, want Jews to have more rights than non-Jews, and I think that would be a mistake. If the situation changed and some future majority wanted to have more rights than Jews, that would also be wrong.
Stopped how and by whom? Does someone in that position just have to hope the USA will invade and overthrow their government?
NEW - ARREST MADE: A man has been arrested for the manslaughter of the Nottingham Panthers ice hockey player Adam Johnson, who was killed in collision in a match against the Sheffield Steelers.
With their history, it would frankly be incredible if most Jews DIDN’T care about Israel
Of course, Israel is the only nation in the world with a Jewish majority, therefore the only nation in the world Jews can truly be safe
Is the only place that members of a particular religious, ethnic or ethno-religious group can truly be safe in a nation where they are a majority? That view is both depressingly pessimistic and harks back to a some 19th-century notion of the nation state built around an ethnos that I thought we had long since abandoned.
We should make the world safe for all minorities and majorities.
What does it mean to make the world safe for majorities if you deny their right to remain majorities?
I would want to interrogate what you mean. Individuals have rights. Individuals have the right to safety and to be allowed to express their identities. What does it mean to say a group has the right to remain a majority?
Let's say you follow religion X and you live in a country that has a majority of other people who follow religion X. What happens if a bunch of your countrymen convert to a different religion or abandon any religion (as is happening with Christianity in the UK)? What does a "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean in that situation? Do you get to force your countrymen to not change religion? Do you get to expel them? What happens if your coreligionists just happen to have fewer kids and a minority group are a bit more fecund, until one day you are in the minority? Should your "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean you get to decide how many kids other people have?
It seems to be illiberal and undemocratic to state that a nation state must retain a certain religious or ethnic majority.
I guess you may be alluding to ideas around abolishing the Israeli state, subsuming it into some larger Israel/Palestine single state. That raises different questions. I think the people of Israel should get to decide what happens to them, so I would not want to see any change in the nation that is not supported by democratic majority. So, to take a different example, if Moldovans want to merge with Romania and cease to be the Republic of Moldova (and Romanians agree), then that should happen, and if Moldovans don't want to merge with Romania and they want Moldova to continue as a separate country, then that should happen.
Then there are multiple other Christian majority countries you can still go to if a Christian in the UK, even if the UK is no longer Christian majority.
There is only 1 Jewish majority nation however, Israel and after millions of Jews were murdered in Europe in the Holocaust and anti Semitism present in every other nation of the world it is no surprise the vast majority of Jews wish to keep Israel as the Jewish homeland. A place of safety if needed to move to if things ever get too bad for Jews again in their nation of residence
The desire of many Jews for Israel as a Jewish homeland to exist is understandable. The desire of many Armenians for Armenia as a homeland to exist is understandable. The desire of many Kurds for Kurdistan as a homeland to exist is understandable.
The question is how you balance the rights of different people. Should we carve out a Kurdistan, making a bunch of non-Kurds suddenly minorities in a new nation?
Let's imagine a new religion emerged in Galilee, people believe in a new messiah called Hyufd. Hyufdism spreads and many Israeli Jews convert to Hyufidsm. One day, Judaism is no longer in a majority in Israel. (This has happened before, twice.) What happens? Are the choices of individuals to convert less important than the desire for a Jewish majority nation?
Every citizen of Israel should have equal rights, to worship what religion they want to (or how they want to), to follow what social customs and practices they want to, to speak what language they want to at home, to have the number of children they want to. Those rights, I suggest, trump any collective right of a majority to remain a majority.
I support a Kurdish state and it now effectively exists in Northern Iraq and Northern Syria anyway.
Were Jews a minority in Israel even after Jesus walked the earth? The evidence is not clear. What is clear is it is now the only place they are genuinely safe from anti Semitism and fine kumbaya platitudes about universal human rights ain't much help when things really go bad in your nation of residence. As the Jews discovered the League of Nations was hopeless to protect them in Germany once the Nazis took over and as Ukraine has discovered the UN was also largely ineffective once Putin invaded, they had to fight to preserve their homeland themselves
What, pray, is a ‘fine kumbaya platitude’?
Homo sapiens can be a very nasty, aggressive species when faced with something it doesn’t like. Ask Homo neanderthalis.
TBF, we don't actually know what finished off the Neanderthals.
They weren't entirely finished off - we're in part them.
It's a bit of a stretch, but it has been noted that there is more Neanderthal DNA out there today than at any point in history, simply because of growth in the size of human population, and the fact most of us have a very small percentage of Neanderthal DNA.
I'm certainly no expert, but I thought it had been established that some big chunk of our DNA is probably from the Neanderthals. Some certainly is anyway.
It's about 1-4% on average in non-African people, so not a big chunk, a small amount (which is still an amazing and interesting discovery).
With their history, it would frankly be incredible if most Jews DIDN’T care about Israel
Of course, Israel is the only nation in the world with a Jewish majority, therefore the only nation in the world Jews can truly be safe
Is the only place that members of a particular religious, ethnic or ethno-religious group can truly be safe in a nation where they are a majority? That view is both depressingly pessimistic and harks back to a some 19th-century notion of the nation state built around an ethnos that I thought we had long since abandoned.
We should make the world safe for all minorities and majorities.
What does it mean to make the world safe for majorities if you deny their right to remain majorities?
I would want to interrogate what you mean. Individuals have rights. Individuals have the right to safety and to be allowed to express their identities. What does it mean to say a group has the right to remain a majority?
Let's say you follow religion X and you live in a country that has a majority of other people who follow religion X. What happens if a bunch of your countrymen convert to a different religion or abandon any religion (as is happening with Christianity in the UK)? What does a "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean in that situation? Do you get to force your countrymen to not change religion? Do you get to expel them? What happens if your coreligionists just happen to have fewer kids and a minority group are a bit more fecund, until one day you are in the minority? Should your "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean you get to decide how many kids other people have?
It seems to be illiberal and undemocratic to state that a nation state must retain a certain religious or ethnic majority.
I guess you may be alluding to ideas around abolishing the Israeli state, subsuming it into some larger Israel/Palestine single state. That raises different questions. I think the people of Israel should get to decide what happens to them, so I would not want to see any change in the nation that is not supported by democratic majority. So, to take a different example, if Moldovans want to merge with Romania and cease to be the Republic of Moldova (and Romanians agree), then that should happen, and if Moldovans don't want to merge with Romania and they want Moldova to continue as a separate country, then that should happen.
Agree with this. I have long held that the Nation State is the best guarantee of democracy and stability for the people living within its boundaries. But that does not mean that any individual Nation State has a right to continue to exist if that is not what the people want. It can either merge into a larger nation state or split into a number of smaller ones that reflect the wishes of its communities.
I do think that a set of very basic international rules - such as those covered by the war crimes and crimes against humanity laws which have been discussing - should also exist and Nation States should be held to account against them. This should, in theory at least, offer the sorts of protection we want to see for minorities, whther they are religious, racial or gender based.
In theory fine, in reality the League of Nations didn't offer a great deal of protection for Jews in Germany once the Nazis too over.
Even Ukraine has been invaded with only some sanctions and weapons supplies to contain Putin, otherwise it is on its own
Neither examples make any difference to my original comments. Yes there will always be countries which wish to act in ways which are harmful to both their own and otherpopulations but that doesn't mean we should just accept it.
With their history, it would frankly be incredible if most Jews DIDN’T care about Israel
Of course, Israel is the only nation in the world with a Jewish majority, therefore the only nation in the world Jews can truly be safe
Is the only place that members of a particular religious, ethnic or ethno-religious group can truly be safe in a nation where they are a majority? That view is both depressingly pessimistic and harks back to a some 19th-century notion of the nation state built around an ethnos that I thought we had long since abandoned.
We should make the world safe for all minorities and majorities.
What does it mean to make the world safe for majorities if you deny their right to remain majorities?
I would want to interrogate what you mean. Individuals have rights. Individuals have the right to safety and to be allowed to express their identities. What does it mean to say a group has the right to remain a majority?
Let's say you follow religion X and you live in a country that has a majority of other people who follow religion X. What happens if a bunch of your countrymen convert to a different religion or abandon any religion (as is happening with Christianity in the UK)? What does a "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean in that situation? Do you get to force your countrymen to not change religion? Do you get to expel them? What happens if your coreligionists just happen to have fewer kids and a minority group are a bit more fecund, until one day you are in the minority? Should your "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean you get to decide how many kids other people have?
It seems to be illiberal and undemocratic to state that a nation state must retain a certain religious or ethnic majority.
I guess you may be alluding to ideas around abolishing the Israeli state, subsuming it into some larger Israel/Palestine single state. That raises different questions. I think the people of Israel should get to decide what happens to them, so I would not want to see any change in the nation that is not supported by democratic majority. So, to take a different example, if Moldovans want to merge with Romania and cease to be the Republic of Moldova (and Romanians agree), then that should happen, and if Moldovans don't want to merge with Romania and they want Moldova to continue as a separate country, then that should happen.
Agree with this. I have long held that the Nation State is the best guarantee of democracy and stability for the people living within its boundaries. But that does not mean that any individual Nation State has a right to continue to exist if that is not what the people want. It can either merge into a larger nation state or split into a number of smaller ones that reflect the wishes of its communities.
I do think that a set of very basic international rules - such as those covered by the war crimes and crimes against humanity laws which have been discussing - should also exist and Nation States should be held to account against them. This should, in theory at least, offer the sorts of protection we want to see for minorities, whther they are religious, racial or gender based.
I also like a bit of Nation State but I feel it's a good thing not a bad thing if certain fundamentals (over and above those you reference regarding war and atrocities) are enshrined somewhere superior to it. An example would be the right of girls to go to school. Or (still on gender equality but more relevant to the western world) female reproductive rights - a minimum threshold there such that (eg) a country cannot outright prohibit abortion.
Of course a supranational body can't 100% enforce such principles on a recalcitrant or dissenting Nation State, nevertheless I think the more we introduce and support such structures, and the more teeth they have, the better. This should be the direction of travel imo rather than leaving them, ignoring them, defanging them, or generally giving them the proverbial finger and saying "nope, what the elected politicians of a country say goes as regards that country, end of".
One would need a world army/gendarmerie to enforce such things, and I see no appetite to create one.
I think us backing such a body would be utterly daft. Western mores are not a majority view in the world. What would be to stop such a supranational organisation imposing the mores of the third world on us?
I wonder if a Labour rebellion and sackings increases the chance of a Corbyn run in London as a way of giving his mob a national platform? He could win if he stood.
He couldn't, but Susan Hall would win. Still that ticks all Corbyn's boxes.
Corbyn should be setting up his own party for the general election. Mandelson is simply running his "they have nowhere else to go" shtick and telling the Left to suck it up.
We want a Corbyn free party of the Left, I think. Socialism for the world of today. Internationalist, contemporary, sophisticated, passionate but pragmatic. No straggly beards. No manhole covers.
And of course youre welcome to it. But it strikes me the most influential politician of the last decade has been Farage who has never won an election. Sometimes the pressure approach is as successful as mainstream. Otherwise Mandy just takes you for granted.
With their history, it would frankly be incredible if most Jews DIDN’T care about Israel
Of course, Israel is the only nation in the world with a Jewish majority, therefore the only nation in the world Jews can truly be safe
Is the only place that members of a particular religious, ethnic or ethno-religious group can truly be safe in a nation where they are a majority? That view is both depressingly pessimistic and harks back to a some 19th-century notion of the nation state built around an ethnos that I thought we had long since abandoned.
We should make the world safe for all minorities and majorities.
What does it mean to make the world safe for majorities if you deny their right to remain majorities?
I would want to interrogate what you mean. Individuals have rights. Individuals have the right to safety and to be allowed to express their identities. What does it mean to say a group has the right to remain a majority?
Let's say you follow religion X and you live in a country that has a majority of other people who follow religion X. What happens if a bunch of your countrymen convert to a different religion or abandon any religion (as is happening with Christianity in the UK)? What does a "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean in that situation? Do you get to force your countrymen to not change religion? Do you get to expel them? What happens if your coreligionists just happen to have fewer kids and a minority group are a bit more fecund, until one day you are in the minority? Should your "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean you get to decide how many kids other people have?
It seems to be illiberal and undemocratic to state that a nation state must retain a certain religious or ethnic majority.
I guess you may be alluding to ideas around abolishing the Israeli state, subsuming it into some larger Israel/Palestine single state. That raises different questions. I think the people of Israel should get to decide what happens to them, so I would not want to see any change in the nation that is not supported by democratic majority. So, to take a different example, if Moldovans want to merge with Romania and cease to be the Republic of Moldova (and Romanians agree), then that should happen, and if Moldovans don't want to merge with Romania and they want Moldova to continue as a separate country, then that should happen.
Then there are multiple other Christian majority countries you can still go to if a Christian in the UK, even if the UK is no longer Christian majority.
There is only 1 Jewish majority nation however, Israel and after millions of Jews were murdered in Europe in the Holocaust and anti Semitism present in every other nation of the world it is no surprise the vast majority of Jews wish to keep Israel as the Jewish homeland. A place of safety if needed to move to if things ever get too bad for Jews again in their nation of residence
The desire of many Jews for Israel as a Jewish homeland to exist is understandable. The desire of many Armenians for Armenia as a homeland to exist is understandable. The desire of many Kurds for Kurdistan as a homeland to exist is understandable.
The question is how you balance the rights of different people. Should we carve out a Kurdistan, making a bunch of non-Kurds suddenly minorities in a new nation?
Let's imagine a new religion emerged in Galilee, people believe in a new messiah called Hyufd. Hyufdism spreads and many Israeli Jews convert to Hyufidsm. One day, Judaism is no longer in a majority in Israel. (This has happened before, twice.) What happens? Are the choices of individuals to convert less important than the desire for a Jewish majority nation?
Every citizen of Israel should have equal rights, to worship what religion they want to (or how they want to), to follow what social customs and practices they want to, to speak what language they want to at home, to have the number of children they want to. Those rights, I suggest, trump any collective right of a majority to remain a majority.
I support a Kurdish state and it now effectively exists in Northern Iraq and Northern Syria anyway.
Were Jews a minority in Israel even after Jesus walked the earth? The evidence is not clear. What is clear is it is now the only place they are genuinely safe from anti Semitism and fine kumbaya platitudes about universal human rights ain't much help when things really go bad in your nation of residence. As the Jews discovered the League of Nations was hopeless to protect them in Germany once the Nazis took over and as Ukraine has discovered the UN was also largely ineffective once Putin invaded, they had to fight to preserve their homeland themselves
What, pray, is a ‘fine kumbaya platitude’?
Homo sapiens can be a very nasty, aggressive species when faced with something it doesn’t like. Ask Homo neanderthalis.
TBF, we don't actually know what finished off the Neanderthals.
They weren't entirely finished off - we're in part them.
It's a bit of a stretch, but it has been noted that there is more Neanderthal DNA out there today than at any point in history, simply because of growth in the size of human population, and the fact most of us have a very small percentage of Neanderthal DNA.
I'm certainly no expert, but I thought it had been established that some big chunk of our DNA is probably from the Neanderthals. Some certainly is anyway.
Of course, Israel already exists, so it's a different situation. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the Zionism/Bundism debates of the early 20th century, Israel has been a nation state for three quarters of a century and I don't think that should change (unless so desired by the people of Israel). It seems likely that Israel will remain a majority Jewish nation for many decades. However, I don't believe that being so is the only way to protect Jews worldwide or that the rights of individual Israelis to be who they want to be should be overridden. My own country has come from being Christian majority to Christian minority in my lifespan. If Israel changes in similar ways, it changes.
You keep repeating the same points, HYUFD. You have not made clear what you want to happen. How would you maintain Israel as evermore a Jewish majority nation? If many Israelis converted to Christianity and threatened that majority, what measures would you want taken? If non-Jewish Israelis have more kids and the population shifts over time, what measures would you want taken?
You seem to be making an unstated assumption that the direction of travel will always be towards greater multiculturalism.
What if the decline of one majority were instead replaced by another that wanted to establish a different kind of state?
I'm not assuming the direction of travel will always be towards greater multiculturalism. It might be, it might not be.
I am a democrat. If the population changes and people want a "different kind of state", then they should get a different kind of state. Isn't that how democracy works?
Of course, it's not always quite that simple. If a majority wants to kill everyone called "William", then, no, that should be stopped! There is a (difficult) balance between basic human rights and democracy. A majority in Israel, by some polling, want Jews to have more rights than non-Jews, and I think that would be a mistake. If the situation changed and some future majority wanted to have more rights than Jews, that would also be wrong.
Stopped how and by whom? Does someone in that position just have to hope the USA will invade and overthrow their government?
Those are good questions. I don't have a good answer. In egregious cases of crimes against humanity, then, yes, there have been international coalitions that went in and took military action, e.g. NATO involvement in Kosovo. In other cases, there have been economic boycotts and international pressure, as happened with apartheid South Africa.
Do you have a different approach you want to suggest?
With their history, it would frankly be incredible if most Jews DIDN’T care about Israel
Of course, Israel is the only nation in the world with a Jewish majority, therefore the only nation in the world Jews can truly be safe
Is the only place that members of a particular religious, ethnic or ethno-religious group can truly be safe in a nation where they are a majority? That view is both depressingly pessimistic and harks back to a some 19th-century notion of the nation state built around an ethnos that I thought we had long since abandoned.
We should make the world safe for all minorities and majorities.
What does it mean to make the world safe for majorities if you deny their right to remain majorities?
I would want to interrogate what you mean. Individuals have rights. Individuals have the right to safety and to be allowed to express their identities. What does it mean to say a group has the right to remain a majority?
Let's say you follow religion X and you live in a country that has a majority of other people who follow religion X. What happens if a bunch of your countrymen convert to a different religion or abandon any religion (as is happening with Christianity in the UK)? What does a "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean in that situation? Do you get to force your countrymen to not change religion? Do you get to expel them? What happens if your coreligionists just happen to have fewer kids and a minority group are a bit more fecund, until one day you are in the minority? Should your "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean you get to decide how many kids other people have?
It seems to be illiberal and undemocratic to state that a nation state must retain a certain religious or ethnic majority.
I guess you may be alluding to ideas around abolishing the Israeli state, subsuming it into some larger Israel/Palestine single state. That raises different questions. I think the people of Israel should get to decide what happens to them, so I would not want to see any change in the nation that is not supported by democratic majority. So, to take a different example, if Moldovans want to merge with Romania and cease to be the Republic of Moldova (and Romanians agree), then that should happen, and if Moldovans don't want to merge with Romania and they want Moldova to continue as a separate country, then that should happen.
Then there are multiple other Christian majority countries you can still go to if a Christian in the UK, even if the UK is no longer Christian majority.
There is only 1 Jewish majority nation however, Israel and after millions of Jews were murdered in Europe in the Holocaust and anti Semitism present in every other nation of the world it is no surprise the vast majority of Jews wish to keep Israel as the Jewish homeland. A place of safety if needed to move to if things ever get too bad for Jews again in their nation of residence
The desire of many Jews for Israel as a Jewish homeland to exist is understandable. The desire of many Armenians for Armenia as a homeland to exist is understandable. The desire of many Kurds for Kurdistan as a homeland to exist is understandable.
The question is how you balance the rights of different people. Should we carve out a Kurdistan, making a bunch of non-Kurds suddenly minorities in a new nation?
Let's imagine a new religion emerged in Galilee, people believe in a new messiah called Hyufd. Hyufdism spreads and many Israeli Jews convert to Hyufidsm. One day, Judaism is no longer in a majority in Israel. (This has happened before, twice.) What happens? Are the choices of individuals to convert less important than the desire for a Jewish majority nation?
Every citizen of Israel should have equal rights, to worship what religion they want to (or how they want to), to follow what social customs and practices they want to, to speak what language they want to at home, to have the number of children they want to. Those rights, I suggest, trump any collective right of a majority to remain a majority.
I support a Kurdish state and it now effectively exists in Northern Iraq and Northern Syria anyway.
Were Jews a minority in Israel even after Jesus walked the earth? The evidence is not clear. What is clear is it is now the only place they are genuinely safe from anti Semitism and fine kumbaya platitudes about universal human rights ain't much help when things really go bad in your nation of residence. As the Jews discovered the League of Nations was hopeless to protect them in Germany once the Nazis took over and as Ukraine has discovered the UN was also largely ineffective once Putin invaded, they had to fight to preserve their homeland themselves
More Kurds live in Turkey than in Iraq and Syria put together. Indeed, the number of Kurds in Iran is greater than or about the same size as the Iraqi and Syrian populations put together, so the autonomous Kurdish areas in Iraq and Syria don't provide the Kurdish people with a solution to their desires for nationhood (and the autonomous Kurdish areas in Iraq and Syria are currently at loggerheads!). While I am sympathetic to Kurdish desire for a nation, I don't think we can rip open the Turkish and Iranian borders without democratic consent.
It's not easy to tell, but I think Christians became the majority in what we call Israel/Palestine today, at least in the Byzantine period. Later, Muslims became a majority. Both of those processes were largely due to conversion. Obviously Jews were very much a minority in recent history until Zionist immigration changed the situation.
I accept that one can and should be sceptical about kumbaya platitudes. Israel is under attack right now: people are dying. Fortunately, Israel isn't under any threat of losing. Ultimately, we want to get to a place where no-one is losing.
And more Jews live outside Israel than in Israel but Israel remains their ultimate homeland of safety as Kurdistan is for Kurds.
The only way Jews can ensure they can never be defeated and eliminated from the planet, as the Nazis wanted and some Jihadi militants now want is to maintain Israel for evermore as a Jewish majority nation and their ultimate place of sanctuary
That is, pretty much definitionally, what Zionism believes, yes. I don't believe that. I think we can strive for a world where minorities can never be eliminated from the planet because of a collective belief in minority rights.
There are many peoples of the world who face oppression and who don't have their own majority nation state. (Some, like the Romany (who the Nazis also wanted to eliminate), have no ambitions for such. Other, like many Kurds or some Sikhs, do.) I don't believe creating majority nation states for the Kurds, Romany, Sikhs, Yazidis, Ossetians, Basques, etc. etc. etc. is necessary or feasible. We have to come up with a better solution to protect people than creating majority nation states.
Of course, Israel already exists, so it's a different situation. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the Zionism/Bundism debates of the early 20th century, Israel has been a nation state for three quarters of a century and I don't think that should change (unless so desired by the people of Israel). It seems likely that Israel will remain a majority Jewish nation for many decades. However, I don't believe that being so is the only way to protect Jews worldwide or that the rights of individual Israelis to be who they want to be should be overridden. My own country has come from being Christian majority to Christian minority in my lifespan. If Israel changes in similar ways, it changes.
You keep repeating the same points, HYUFD. You have not made clear what you want to happen. How would you maintain Israel as evermore a Jewish majority nation? If many Israelis converted to Christianity and threatened that majority, what measures would you want taken? If non-Jewish Israelis have more kids and the population shifts over time, what measures would you want taken?
The Romanies just move from place to place their entire lives, is the main reason they have no settled state. The Kurds as much as the Jews want their own state (as do many Basques etc).
If Israel ceases to be a majority Jewish state that is it for Jews, if another holocaust is pursued against Jews they will again have no safe majority nation of their own to flee to. It is completely different for Christians in the UK as if the now minority Christian population here is persecuted their are multiple other Christain majority nations in the Americas, southern Europe, Ireland, Poland, southern Africa, the Philippines etc they could flee to.
Jews have no such option if persecuted in their nation of residence, their is no other majority Jewish nation on earth but Israel. Hence they will preserve Israel at all costs, including restricting immigration only to ethnic Jews etc (the birthrate of Orthodox Jews in Israel is high enough for that to be unlikely to be an issue though)
With their history, it would frankly be incredible if most Jews DIDN’T care about Israel
Of course, Israel is the only nation in the world with a Jewish majority, therefore the only nation in the world Jews can truly be safe
Is the only place that members of a particular religious, ethnic or ethno-religious group can truly be safe in a nation where they are a majority? That view is both depressingly pessimistic and harks back to a some 19th-century notion of the nation state built around an ethnos that I thought we had long since abandoned.
We should make the world safe for all minorities and majorities.
What does it mean to make the world safe for majorities if you deny their right to remain majorities?
I would want to interrogate what you mean. Individuals have rights. Individuals have the right to safety and to be allowed to express their identities. What does it mean to say a group has the right to remain a majority?
Let's say you follow religion X and you live in a country that has a majority of other people who follow religion X. What happens if a bunch of your countrymen convert to a different religion or abandon any religion (as is happening with Christianity in the UK)? What does a "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean in that situation? Do you get to force your countrymen to not change religion? Do you get to expel them? What happens if your coreligionists just happen to have fewer kids and a minority group are a bit more fecund, until one day you are in the minority? Should your "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean you get to decide how many kids other people have?
It seems to be illiberal and undemocratic to state that a nation state must retain a certain religious or ethnic majority.
I guess you may be alluding to ideas around abolishing the Israeli state, subsuming it into some larger Israel/Palestine single state. That raises different questions. I think the people of Israel should get to decide what happens to them, so I would not want to see any change in the nation that is not supported by democratic majority. So, to take a different example, if Moldovans want to merge with Romania and cease to be the Republic of Moldova (and Romanians agree), then that should happen, and if Moldovans don't want to merge with Romania and they want Moldova to continue as a separate country, then that should happen.
Then there are multiple other Christian majority countries you can still go to if a Christian in the UK, even if the UK is no longer Christian majority.
There is only 1 Jewish majority nation however, Israel and after millions of Jews were murdered in Europe in the Holocaust and anti Semitism present in every other nation of the world it is no surprise the vast majority of Jews wish to keep Israel as the Jewish homeland. A place of safety if needed to move to if things ever get too bad for Jews again in their nation of residence
The desire of many Jews for Israel as a Jewish homeland to exist is understandable. The desire of many Armenians for Armenia as a homeland to exist is understandable. The desire of many Kurds for Kurdistan as a homeland to exist is understandable.
The question is how you balance the rights of different people. Should we carve out a Kurdistan, making a bunch of non-Kurds suddenly minorities in a new nation?
Let's imagine a new religion emerged in Galilee, people believe in a new messiah called Hyufd. Hyufdism spreads and many Israeli Jews convert to Hyufidsm. One day, Judaism is no longer in a majority in Israel. (This has happened before, twice.) What happens? Are the choices of individuals to convert less important than the desire for a Jewish majority nation?
Every citizen of Israel should have equal rights, to worship what religion they want to (or how they want to), to follow what social customs and practices they want to, to speak what language they want to at home, to have the number of children they want to. Those rights, I suggest, trump any collective right of a majority to remain a majority.
I support a Kurdish state and it now effectively exists in Northern Iraq and Northern Syria anyway.
Were Jews a minority in Israel even after Jesus walked the earth? The evidence is not clear. What is clear is it is now the only place they are genuinely safe from anti Semitism and fine kumbaya platitudes about universal human rights ain't much help when things really go bad in your nation of residence. As the Jews discovered the League of Nations was hopeless to protect them in Germany once the Nazis took over and as Ukraine has discovered the UN was also largely ineffective once Putin invaded, they had to fight to preserve their homeland themselves
More Kurds live in Turkey than in Iraq and Syria put together. Indeed, the number of Kurds in Iran is greater than or about the same size as the Iraqi and Syrian populations put together, so the autonomous Kurdish areas in Iraq and Syria don't provide the Kurdish people with a solution to their desires for nationhood (and the autonomous Kurdish areas in Iraq and Syria are currently at loggerheads!). While I am sympathetic to Kurdish desire for a nation, I don't think we can rip open the Turkish and Iranian borders without democratic consent.
It's not easy to tell, but I think Christians became the majority in what we call Israel/Palestine today, at least in the Byzantine period. Later, Muslims became a majority. Both of those processes were largely due to conversion. Obviously Jews were very much a minority in recent history until Zionist immigration changed the situation.
I accept that one can and should be sceptical about kumbaya platitudes. Israel is under attack right now: people are dying. Fortunately, Israel isn't under any threat of losing. Ultimately, we want to get to a place where no-one is losing.
And more Jews live outside Israel than in Israel but Israel remains their ultimate homeland of safety as Kurdistan is for Kurds.
The only way Jews can ensure they can never be defeated and eliminated from the planet, as the Nazis wanted and some Jihadi militants now want is to maintain Israel for evermore as a Jewish majority nation and their ultimate place of sanctuary
That is, pretty much definitionally, what Zionism believes, yes. I don't believe that. I think we can strive for a world where minorities can never be eliminated from the planet because of a collective belief in minority rights.
There are many peoples of the world who face oppression and who don't have their own majority nation state. (Some, like the Romany (who the Nazis also wanted to eliminate), have no ambitions for such. Other, like many Kurds or some Sikhs, do.) I don't believe creating majority nation states for the Kurds, Romany, Sikhs, Yazidis, Ossetians, Basques, etc. etc. etc. is necessary or feasible. We have to come up with a better solution to protect people than creating majority nation states.
Of course, Israel already exists, so it's a different situation. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the Zionism/Bundism debates of the early 20th century, Israel has been a nation state for three quarters of a century and I don't think that should change (unless so desired by the people of Israel). It seems likely that Israel will remain a majority Jewish nation for many decades. However, I don't believe that being so is the only way to protect Jews worldwide or that the rights of individual Israelis to be who they want to be should be overridden. My own country has come from being Christian majority to Christian minority in my lifespan. If Israel changes in similar ways, it changes.
You keep repeating the same points, HYUFD. You have not made clear what you want to happen. How would you maintain Israel as evermore a Jewish majority nation? If many Israelis converted to Christianity and threatened that majority, what measures would you want taken? If non-Jewish Israelis have more kids and the population shifts over time, what measures would you want taken?
On HYUFDian logic, too, we ought at once to abolish the C of E as the state religion of England, as Christians are now a minority group of sects/denominations/religion in the UK. But he won't want that, will he?
With their history, it would frankly be incredible if most Jews DIDN’T care about Israel
Of course, Israel is the only nation in the world with a Jewish majority, therefore the only nation in the world Jews can truly be safe
Is the only place that members of a particular religious, ethnic or ethno-religious group can truly be safe in a nation where they are a majority? That view is both depressingly pessimistic and harks back to a some 19th-century notion of the nation state built around an ethnos that I thought we had long since abandoned.
We should make the world safe for all minorities and majorities.
What does it mean to make the world safe for majorities if you deny their right to remain majorities?
I would want to interrogate what you mean. Individuals have rights. Individuals have the right to safety and to be allowed to express their identities. What does it mean to say a group has the right to remain a majority?
Let's say you follow religion X and you live in a country that has a majority of other people who follow religion X. What happens if a bunch of your countrymen convert to a different religion or abandon any religion (as is happening with Christianity in the UK)? What does a "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean in that situation? Do you get to force your countrymen to not change religion? Do you get to expel them? What happens if your coreligionists just happen to have fewer kids and a minority group are a bit more fecund, until one day you are in the minority? Should your "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean you get to decide how many kids other people have?
It seems to be illiberal and undemocratic to state that a nation state must retain a certain religious or ethnic majority.
I guess you may be alluding to ideas around abolishing the Israeli state, subsuming it into some larger Israel/Palestine single state. That raises different questions. I think the people of Israel should get to decide what happens to them, so I would not want to see any change in the nation that is not supported by democratic majority. So, to take a different example, if Moldovans want to merge with Romania and cease to be the Republic of Moldova (and Romanians agree), then that should happen, and if Moldovans don't want to merge with Romania and they want Moldova to continue as a separate country, then that should happen.
Agree with this. I have long held that the Nation State is the best guarantee of democracy and stability for the people living within its boundaries. But that does not mean that any individual Nation State has a right to continue to exist if that is not what the people want. It can either merge into a larger nation state or split into a number of smaller ones that reflect the wishes of its communities.
I do think that a set of very basic international rules - such as those covered by the war crimes and crimes against humanity laws which have been discussing - should also exist and Nation States should be held to account against them. This should, in theory at least, offer the sorts of protection we want to see for minorities, whther they are religious, racial or gender based.
I also like a bit of Nation State but I feel it's a good thing not a bad thing if certain fundamentals (over and above those you reference regarding war and atrocities) are enshrined somewhere superior to it. An example would be the right of girls to go to school. Or (still on gender equality but more relevant to the western world) female reproductive rights - a minimum threshold there such that (eg) a country cannot outright prohibit abortion.
Of course a supranational body can't 100% enforce such principles on a recalcitrant or dissenting Nation State, nevertheless I think the more we introduce and support such structures, and the more teeth they have, the better. This should be the direction of travel imo rather than leaving them, ignoring them, defanging them, or generally giving them the proverbial finger and saying "nope, what the elected politicians of a country say goes as regards that country, end of".
One would need a world army/gendarmerie to enforce such things, and I see no appetite to create one.
I think us backing such a body would be utterly daft. Western mores are not a majority view in the world. What would be to stop such a supranational organisation imposing the mores of the third world on us?
I think a world army is a fantasy (for now). I think you have to move forward through international consensus building, as has happened since the post-WW2 settlement. Not consistently, not universally, but with some success.
With their history, it would frankly be incredible if most Jews DIDN’T care about Israel
Of course, Israel is the only nation in the world with a Jewish majority, therefore the only nation in the world Jews can truly be safe
Is the only place that members of a particular religious, ethnic or ethno-religious group can truly be safe in a nation where they are a majority? That view is both depressingly pessimistic and harks back to a some 19th-century notion of the nation state built around an ethnos that I thought we had long since abandoned.
We should make the world safe for all minorities and majorities.
What does it mean to make the world safe for majorities if you deny their right to remain majorities?
I would want to interrogate what you mean. Individuals have rights. Individuals have the right to safety and to be allowed to express their identities. What does it mean to say a group has the right to remain a majority?
Let's say you follow religion X and you live in a country that has a majority of other people who follow religion X. What happens if a bunch of your countrymen convert to a different religion or abandon any religion (as is happening with Christianity in the UK)? What does a "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean in that situation? Do you get to force your countrymen to not change religion? Do you get to expel them? What happens if your coreligionists just happen to have fewer kids and a minority group are a bit more fecund, until one day you are in the minority? Should your "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean you get to decide how many kids other people have?
It seems to be illiberal and undemocratic to state that a nation state must retain a certain religious or ethnic majority.
I guess you may be alluding to ideas around abolishing the Israeli state, subsuming it into some larger Israel/Palestine single state. That raises different questions. I think the people of Israel should get to decide what happens to them, so I would not want to see any change in the nation that is not supported by democratic majority. So, to take a different example, if Moldovans want to merge with Romania and cease to be the Republic of Moldova (and Romanians agree), then that should happen, and if Moldovans don't want to merge with Romania and they want Moldova to continue as a separate country, then that should happen.
Then there are multiple other Christian majority countries you can still go to if a Christian in the UK, even if the UK is no longer Christian majority.
There is only 1 Jewish majority nation however, Israel and after millions of Jews were murdered in Europe in the Holocaust and anti Semitism present in every other nation of the world it is no surprise the vast majority of Jews wish to keep Israel as the Jewish homeland. A place of safety if needed to move to if things ever get too bad for Jews again in their nation of residence
The desire of many Jews for Israel as a Jewish homeland to exist is understandable. The desire of many Armenians for Armenia as a homeland to exist is understandable. The desire of many Kurds for Kurdistan as a homeland to exist is understandable.
The question is how you balance the rights of different people. Should we carve out a Kurdistan, making a bunch of non-Kurds suddenly minorities in a new nation?
Let's imagine a new religion emerged in Galilee, people believe in a new messiah called Hyufd. Hyufdism spreads and many Israeli Jews convert to Hyufidsm. One day, Judaism is no longer in a majority in Israel. (This has happened before, twice.) What happens? Are the choices of individuals to convert less important than the desire for a Jewish majority nation?
Every citizen of Israel should have equal rights, to worship what religion they want to (or how they want to), to follow what social customs and practices they want to, to speak what language they want to at home, to have the number of children they want to. Those rights, I suggest, trump any collective right of a majority to remain a majority.
I support a Kurdish state and it now effectively exists in Northern Iraq and Northern Syria anyway.
Were Jews a minority in Israel even after Jesus walked the earth? The evidence is not clear. What is clear is it is now the only place they are genuinely safe from anti Semitism and fine kumbaya platitudes about universal human rights ain't much help when things really go bad in your nation of residence. As the Jews discovered the League of Nations was hopeless to protect them in Germany once the Nazis took over and as Ukraine has discovered the UN was also largely ineffective once Putin invaded, they had to fight to preserve their homeland themselves
What, pray, is a ‘fine kumbaya platitude’?
Homo sapiens can be a very nasty, aggressive species when faced with something it doesn’t like. Ask Homo neanderthalis.
TBF, we don't actually know what finished off the Neanderthals.
They weren't entirely finished off - we're in part them.
It's a bit of a stretch, but it has been noted that there is more Neanderthal DNA out there today than at any point in history, simply because of growth in the size of human population, and the fact most of us have a very small percentage of Neanderthal DNA.
I'm certainly no expert, but I thought it had been established that some big chunk of our DNA is probably from the Neanderthals. Some certainly is anyway.
It's about 1-4% on average in non-African people, so not a big chunk, a small amount (which is still an amazing and interesting discovery).
What is also interesting is that pretty well all humans, other than sub-Saharan Africans, have some genetic material from non-sapiens sources. So far as has been identified to date sub-Saharan Africans are the only ‘pure’ Homo sapiens on the planet.
With their history, it would frankly be incredible if most Jews DIDN’T care about Israel
Of course, Israel is the only nation in the world with a Jewish majority, therefore the only nation in the world Jews can truly be safe
Is the only place that members of a particular religious, ethnic or ethno-religious group can truly be safe in a nation where they are a majority? That view is both depressingly pessimistic and harks back to a some 19th-century notion of the nation state built around an ethnos that I thought we had long since abandoned.
We should make the world safe for all minorities and majorities.
What does it mean to make the world safe for majorities if you deny their right to remain majorities?
I would want to interrogate what you mean. Individuals have rights. Individuals have the right to safety and to be allowed to express their identities. What does it mean to say a group has the right to remain a majority?
Let's say you follow religion X and you live in a country that has a majority of other people who follow religion X. What happens if a bunch of your countrymen convert to a different religion or abandon any religion (as is happening with Christianity in the UK)? What does a "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean in that situation? Do you get to force your countrymen to not change religion? Do you get to expel them? What happens if your coreligionists just happen to have fewer kids and a minority group are a bit more fecund, until one day you are in the minority? Should your "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean you get to decide how many kids other people have?
It seems to be illiberal and undemocratic to state that a nation state must retain a certain religious or ethnic majority.
I guess you may be alluding to ideas around abolishing the Israeli state, subsuming it into some larger Israel/Palestine single state. That raises different questions. I think the people of Israel should get to decide what happens to them, so I would not want to see any change in the nation that is not supported by democratic majority. So, to take a different example, if Moldovans want to merge with Romania and cease to be the Republic of Moldova (and Romanians agree), then that should happen, and if Moldovans don't want to merge with Romania and they want Moldova to continue as a separate country, then that should happen.
Agree with this. I have long held that the Nation State is the best guarantee of democracy and stability for the people living within its boundaries. But that does not mean that any individual Nation State has a right to continue to exist if that is not what the people want. It can either merge into a larger nation state or split into a number of smaller ones that reflect the wishes of its communities.
I do think that a set of very basic international rules - such as those covered by the war crimes and crimes against humanity laws which have been discussing - should also exist and Nation States should be held to account against them. This should, in theory at least, offer the sorts of protection we want to see for minorities, whther they are religious, racial or gender based.
I also like a bit of Nation State but I feel it's a good thing not a bad thing if certain fundamentals (over and above those you reference regarding war and atrocities) are enshrined somewhere superior to it. An example would be the right of girls to go to school. Or (still on gender equality but more relevant to the western world) female reproductive rights - a minimum threshold there such that (eg) a country cannot outright prohibit abortion.
Of course a supranational body can't 100% enforce such principles on a recalcitrant or dissenting Nation State, nevertheless I think the more we introduce and support such structures, and the more teeth they have, the better. This should be the direction of travel imo rather than leaving them, ignoring them, defanging them, or generally giving them the proverbial finger and saying "nope, what the elected politicians of a country say goes as regards that country, end of".
One would need a world army/gendarmerie to enforce such things, and I see no appetite to create one.
Nope. One would simply have to make the cost - in many different ways; trade, financial, movement, perhaps military - greater than the benefits. As I said in answer to HYUFD, no one is claiming you are going to stop these rogue states completely, but having a rules based system that says there are consequences for actions - just as we are supposed to have for individuals under national laws - seems a perfectly valid and acceptable way to run things.
There will always be a disconnect between the ideal and the practical but that doesn't mean you abandon the ideal.
Of course, Israel already exists, so it's a different situation. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the Zionism/Bundism debates of the early 20th century, Israel has been a nation state for three quarters of a century and I don't think that should change (unless so desired by the people of Israel). It seems likely that Israel will remain a majority Jewish nation for many decades. However, I don't believe that being so is the only way to protect Jews worldwide or that the rights of individual Israelis to be who they want to be should be overridden. My own country has come from being Christian majority to Christian minority in my lifespan. If Israel changes in similar ways, it changes.
You keep repeating the same points, HYUFD. You have not made clear what you want to happen. How would you maintain Israel as evermore a Jewish majority nation? If many Israelis converted to Christianity and threatened that majority, what measures would you want taken? If non-Jewish Israelis have more kids and the population shifts over time, what measures would you want taken?
You seem to be making an unstated assumption that the direction of travel will always be towards greater multiculturalism.
What if the decline of one majority were instead replaced by another that wanted to establish a different kind of state?
I'm not assuming the direction of travel will always be towards greater multiculturalism. It might be, it might not be.
I am a democrat. If the population changes and people want a "different kind of state", then they should get a different kind of state. Isn't that how democracy works?
Of course, it's not always quite that simple. If a majority wants to kill everyone called "William", then, no, that should be stopped! There is a (difficult) balance between basic human rights and democracy. A majority in Israel, by some polling, want Jews to have more rights than non-Jews, and I think that would be a mistake. If the situation changed and some future majority wanted to have more rights than Jews, that would also be wrong.
Culture has a tendency to persist despite such efforts, too.
With their history, it would frankly be incredible if most Jews DIDN’T care about Israel
Of course, Israel is the only nation in the world with a Jewish majority, therefore the only nation in the world Jews can truly be safe
Is the only place that members of a particular religious, ethnic or ethno-religious group can truly be safe in a nation where they are a majority? That view is both depressingly pessimistic and harks back to a some 19th-century notion of the nation state built around an ethnos that I thought we had long since abandoned.
We should make the world safe for all minorities and majorities.
What does it mean to make the world safe for majorities if you deny their right to remain majorities?
I would want to interrogate what you mean. Individuals have rights. Individuals have the right to safety and to be allowed to express their identities. What does it mean to say a group has the right to remain a majority?
Let's say you follow religion X and you live in a country that has a majority of other people who follow religion X. What happens if a bunch of your countrymen convert to a different religion or abandon any religion (as is happening with Christianity in the UK)? What does a "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean in that situation? Do you get to force your countrymen to not change religion? Do you get to expel them? What happens if your coreligionists just happen to have fewer kids and a minority group are a bit more fecund, until one day you are in the minority? Should your "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean you get to decide how many kids other people have?
It seems to be illiberal and undemocratic to state that a nation state must retain a certain religious or ethnic majority.
I guess you may be alluding to ideas around abolishing the Israeli state, subsuming it into some larger Israel/Palestine single state. That raises different questions. I think the people of Israel should get to decide what happens to them, so I would not want to see any change in the nation that is not supported by democratic majority. So, to take a different example, if Moldovans want to merge with Romania and cease to be the Republic of Moldova (and Romanians agree), then that should happen, and if Moldovans don't want to merge with Romania and they want Moldova to continue as a separate country, then that should happen.
Then there are multiple other Christian majority countries you can still go to if a Christian in the UK, even if the UK is no longer Christian majority.
There is only 1 Jewish majority nation however, Israel and after millions of Jews were murdered in Europe in the Holocaust and anti Semitism present in every other nation of the world it is no surprise the vast majority of Jews wish to keep Israel as the Jewish homeland. A place of safety if needed to move to if things ever get too bad for Jews again in their nation of residence
The desire of many Jews for Israel as a Jewish homeland to exist is understandable. The desire of many Armenians for Armenia as a homeland to exist is understandable. The desire of many Kurds for Kurdistan as a homeland to exist is understandable.
The question is how you balance the rights of different people. Should we carve out a Kurdistan, making a bunch of non-Kurds suddenly minorities in a new nation?
Let's imagine a new religion emerged in Galilee, people believe in a new messiah called Hyufd. Hyufdism spreads and many Israeli Jews convert to Hyufidsm. One day, Judaism is no longer in a majority in Israel. (This has happened before, twice.) What happens? Are the choices of individuals to convert less important than the desire for a Jewish majority nation?
Every citizen of Israel should have equal rights, to worship what religion they want to (or how they want to), to follow what social customs and practices they want to, to speak what language they want to at home, to have the number of children they want to. Those rights, I suggest, trump any collective right of a majority to remain a majority.
I support a Kurdish state and it now effectively exists in Northern Iraq and Northern Syria anyway.
Were Jews a minority in Israel even after Jesus walked the earth? The evidence is not clear. What is clear is it is now the only place they are genuinely safe from anti Semitism and fine kumbaya platitudes about universal human rights ain't much help when things really go bad in your nation of residence. As the Jews discovered the League of Nations was hopeless to protect them in Germany once the Nazis took over and as Ukraine has discovered the UN was also largely ineffective once Putin invaded, they had to fight to preserve their homeland themselves
More Kurds live in Turkey than in Iraq and Syria put together. Indeed, the number of Kurds in Iran is greater than or about the same size as the Iraqi and Syrian populations put together, so the autonomous Kurdish areas in Iraq and Syria don't provide the Kurdish people with a solution to their desires for nationhood (and the autonomous Kurdish areas in Iraq and Syria are currently at loggerheads!). While I am sympathetic to Kurdish desire for a nation, I don't think we can rip open the Turkish and Iranian borders without democratic consent.
It's not easy to tell, but I think Christians became the majority in what we call Israel/Palestine today, at least in the Byzantine period. Later, Muslims became a majority. Both of those processes were largely due to conversion. Obviously Jews were very much a minority in recent history until Zionist immigration changed the situation.
I accept that one can and should be sceptical about kumbaya platitudes. Israel is under attack right now: people are dying. Fortunately, Israel isn't under any threat of losing. Ultimately, we want to get to a place where no-one is losing.
And more Jews live outside Israel than in Israel but Israel remains their ultimate homeland of safety as Kurdistan is for Kurds.
The only way Jews can ensure they can never be defeated and eliminated from the planet, as the Nazis wanted and some Jihadi militants now want is to maintain Israel for evermore as a Jewish majority nation and their ultimate place of sanctuary
That is, pretty much definitionally, what Zionism believes, yes. I don't believe that. I think we can strive for a world where minorities can never be eliminated from the planet because of a collective belief in minority rights.
There are many peoples of the world who face oppression and who don't have their own majority nation state. (Some, like the Romany (who the Nazis also wanted to eliminate), have no ambitions for such. Other, like many Kurds or some Sikhs, do.) I don't believe creating majority nation states for the Kurds, Romany, Sikhs, Yazidis, Ossetians, Basques, etc. etc. etc. is necessary or feasible. We have to come up with a better solution to protect people than creating majority nation states.
Of course, Israel already exists, so it's a different situation. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the Zionism/Bundism debates of the early 20th century, Israel has been a nation state for three quarters of a century and I don't think that should change (unless so desired by the people of Israel). It seems likely that Israel will remain a majority Jewish nation for many decades. However, I don't believe that being so is the only way to protect Jews worldwide or that the rights of individual Israelis to be who they want to be should be overridden. My own country has come from being Christian majority to Christian minority in my lifespan. If Israel changes in similar ways, it changes.
You keep repeating the same points, HYUFD. You have not made clear what you want to happen. How would you maintain Israel as evermore a Jewish majority nation? If many Israelis converted to Christianity and threatened that majority, what measures would you want taken? If non-Jewish Israelis have more kids and the population shifts over time, what measures would you want taken?
On HYUFDian logic, too, we ought at once to abolish the C of E as the state religion of England, as Christians are now a minority group of sects/denominations/religion in the UK. But he won't want that, will he?
Not at all, even if only 1% of the UK population were Christian the C of E could still be the established Christian church offering weddings and funerals to every resident of their local Parish who wanted one in their Parish church even if they rarely attend church.
Of course some Scottish nationalists were not exactly unsympathetic to the Nazis in WW2, a pity you too have still not found it within yourself to support the Jewish homeland of Israel
Suella Braverman accuses Rishi Sunak of “manifestly and repeatedly” failing to deliver on key policies in scathing letter
I do wonder how close we are to a breakaway party, or defections to Reform?
Might the court case going against migrant deportations prove to the be trigger?
If people believe the Tories are headed for 2 terms in opposition minimum, then it makes sense to break the Conservatives and create a new party from the ground up. Nothing much is lost since opposition is the status quo. Time for a recharge.
With their history, it would frankly be incredible if most Jews DIDN’T care about Israel
Of course, Israel is the only nation in the world with a Jewish majority, therefore the only nation in the world Jews can truly be safe
Is the only place that members of a particular religious, ethnic or ethno-religious group can truly be safe in a nation where they are a majority? That view is both depressingly pessimistic and harks back to a some 19th-century notion of the nation state built around an ethnos that I thought we had long since abandoned.
We should make the world safe for all minorities and majorities.
What does it mean to make the world safe for majorities if you deny their right to remain majorities?
I would want to interrogate what you mean. Individuals have rights. Individuals have the right to safety and to be allowed to express their identities. What does it mean to say a group has the right to remain a majority?
Let's say you follow religion X and you live in a country that has a majority of other people who follow religion X. What happens if a bunch of your countrymen convert to a different religion or abandon any religion (as is happening with Christianity in the UK)? What does a "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean in that situation? Do you get to force your countrymen to not change religion? Do you get to expel them? What happens if your coreligionists just happen to have fewer kids and a minority group are a bit more fecund, until one day you are in the minority? Should your "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean you get to decide how many kids other people have?
It seems to be illiberal and undemocratic to state that a nation state must retain a certain religious or ethnic majority.
I guess you may be alluding to ideas around abolishing the Israeli state, subsuming it into some larger Israel/Palestine single state. That raises different questions. I think the people of Israel should get to decide what happens to them, so I would not want to see any change in the nation that is not supported by democratic majority. So, to take a different example, if Moldovans want to merge with Romania and cease to be the Republic of Moldova (and Romanians agree), then that should happen, and if Moldovans don't want to merge with Romania and they want Moldova to continue as a separate country, then that should happen.
Agree with this. I have long held that the Nation State is the best guarantee of democracy and stability for the people living within its boundaries. But that does not mean that any individual Nation State has a right to continue to exist if that is not what the people want. It can either merge into a larger nation state or split into a number of smaller ones that reflect the wishes of its communities.
I do think that a set of very basic international rules - such as those covered by the war crimes and crimes against humanity laws which have been discussing - should also exist and Nation States should be held to account against them. This should, in theory at least, offer the sorts of protection we want to see for minorities, whther they are religious, racial or gender based.
I also like a bit of Nation State but I feel it's a good thing not a bad thing if certain fundamentals (over and above those you reference regarding war and atrocities) are enshrined somewhere superior to it. An example would be the right of girls to go to school. Or (still on gender equality but more relevant to the western world) female reproductive rights - a minimum threshold there such that (eg) a country cannot outright prohibit abortion.
Of course a supranational body can't 100% enforce such principles on a recalcitrant or dissenting Nation State, nevertheless I think the more we introduce and support such structures, and the more teeth they have, the better. This should be the direction of travel imo rather than leaving them, ignoring them, defanging them, or generally giving them the proverbial finger and saying "nope, what the elected politicians of a country say goes as regards that country, end of".
One would need a world army/gendarmerie to enforce such things, and I see no appetite to create one.
Nope. One would simply have to make the cost - in many different ways; trade, financial, movement, perhaps military - greater than the benefits. As I said in answer to HYUFD, no one is claiming you are going to stop these rogue states completely, but having a rules based system that says there are consequences for actions - just as we are supposed to have for individuals under national laws - seems a perfectly valid and acceptable way to run things.
There will always be a disconnect between the ideal and the practical but that doesn't mean you abandon the ideal.
A few sanctions as the international community has put against Russia has hardly saved much of Ukraine from continued occupation and it wouldn't save Jews from another holocaust if an extremist group took over a nation with a Jewish minority again and pursued such a policy
With their history, it would frankly be incredible if most Jews DIDN’T care about Israel
Of course, Israel is the only nation in the world with a Jewish majority, therefore the only nation in the world Jews can truly be safe
Is the only place that members of a particular religious, ethnic or ethno-religious group can truly be safe in a nation where they are a majority? That view is both depressingly pessimistic and harks back to a some 19th-century notion of the nation state built around an ethnos that I thought we had long since abandoned.
We should make the world safe for all minorities and majorities.
What does it mean to make the world safe for majorities if you deny their right to remain majorities?
I would want to interrogate what you mean. Individuals have rights. Individuals have the right to safety and to be allowed to express their identities. What does it mean to say a group has the right to remain a majority?
Let's say you follow religion X and you live in a country that has a majority of other people who follow religion X. What happens if a bunch of your countrymen convert to a different religion or abandon any religion (as is happening with Christianity in the UK)? What does a "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean in that situation? Do you get to force your countrymen to not change religion? Do you get to expel them? What happens if your coreligionists just happen to have fewer kids and a minority group are a bit more fecund, until one day you are in the minority? Should your "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean you get to decide how many kids other people have?
It seems to be illiberal and undemocratic to state that a nation state must retain a certain religious or ethnic majority.
I guess you may be alluding to ideas around abolishing the Israeli state, subsuming it into some larger Israel/Palestine single state. That raises different questions. I think the people of Israel should get to decide what happens to them, so I would not want to see any change in the nation that is not supported by democratic majority. So, to take a different example, if Moldovans want to merge with Romania and cease to be the Republic of Moldova (and Romanians agree), then that should happen, and if Moldovans don't want to merge with Romania and they want Moldova to continue as a separate country, then that should happen.
Then there are multiple other Christian majority countries you can still go to if a Christian in the UK, even if the UK is no longer Christian majority.
There is only 1 Jewish majority nation however, Israel and after millions of Jews were murdered in Europe in the Holocaust and anti Semitism present in every other nation of the world it is no surprise the vast majority of Jews wish to keep Israel as the Jewish homeland. A place of safety if needed to move to if things ever get too bad for Jews again in their nation of residence
The desire of many Jews for Israel as a Jewish homeland to exist is understandable. The desire of many Armenians for Armenia as a homeland to exist is understandable. The desire of many Kurds for Kurdistan as a homeland to exist is understandable.
The question is how you balance the rights of different people. Should we carve out a Kurdistan, making a bunch of non-Kurds suddenly minorities in a new nation?
Let's imagine a new religion emerged in Galilee, people believe in a new messiah called Hyufd. Hyufdism spreads and many Israeli Jews convert to Hyufidsm. One day, Judaism is no longer in a majority in Israel. (This has happened before, twice.) What happens? Are the choices of individuals to convert less important than the desire for a Jewish majority nation?
Every citizen of Israel should have equal rights, to worship what religion they want to (or how they want to), to follow what social customs and practices they want to, to speak what language they want to at home, to have the number of children they want to. Those rights, I suggest, trump any collective right of a majority to remain a majority.
I support a Kurdish state and it now effectively exists in Northern Iraq and Northern Syria anyway.
Were Jews a minority in Israel even after Jesus walked the earth? The evidence is not clear. What is clear is it is now the only place they are genuinely safe from anti Semitism and fine kumbaya platitudes about universal human rights ain't much help when things really go bad in your nation of residence. As the Jews discovered the League of Nations was hopeless to protect them in Germany once the Nazis took over and as Ukraine has discovered the UN was also largely ineffective once Putin invaded, they had to fight to preserve their homeland themselves
More Kurds live in Turkey than in Iraq and Syria put together. Indeed, the number of Kurds in Iran is greater than or about the same size as the Iraqi and Syrian populations put together, so the autonomous Kurdish areas in Iraq and Syria don't provide the Kurdish people with a solution to their desires for nationhood (and the autonomous Kurdish areas in Iraq and Syria are currently at loggerheads!). While I am sympathetic to Kurdish desire for a nation, I don't think we can rip open the Turkish and Iranian borders without democratic consent.
It's not easy to tell, but I think Christians became the majority in what we call Israel/Palestine today, at least in the Byzantine period. Later, Muslims became a majority. Both of those processes were largely due to conversion. Obviously Jews were very much a minority in recent history until Zionist immigration changed the situation.
I accept that one can and should be sceptical about kumbaya platitudes. Israel is under attack right now: people are dying. Fortunately, Israel isn't under any threat of losing. Ultimately, we want to get to a place where no-one is losing.
And more Jews live outside Israel than in Israel but Israel remains their ultimate homeland of safety as Kurdistan is for Kurds.
The only way Jews can ensure they can never be defeated and eliminated from the planet, as the Nazis wanted and some Jihadi militants now want is to maintain Israel for evermore as a Jewish majority nation and their ultimate place of sanctuary
That is, pretty much definitionally, what Zionism believes, yes. I don't believe that. I think we can strive for a world where minorities can never be eliminated from the planet because of a collective belief in minority rights.
There are many peoples of the world who face oppression and who don't have their own majority nation state. (Some, like the Romany (who the Nazis also wanted to eliminate), have no ambitions for such. Other, like many Kurds or some Sikhs, do.) I don't believe creating majority nation states for the Kurds, Romany, Sikhs, Yazidis, Ossetians, Basques, etc. etc. etc. is necessary or feasible. We have to come up with a better solution to protect people than creating majority nation states.
Of course, Israel already exists, so it's a different situation. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the Zionism/Bundism debates of the early 20th century, Israel has been a nation state for three quarters of a century and I don't think that should change (unless so desired by the people of Israel). It seems likely that Israel will remain a majority Jewish nation for many decades. However, I don't believe that being so is the only way to protect Jews worldwide or that the rights of individual Israelis to be who they want to be should be overridden. My own country has come from being Christian majority to Christian minority in my lifespan. If Israel changes in similar ways, it changes.
You keep repeating the same points, HYUFD. You have not made clear what you want to happen. How would you maintain Israel as evermore a Jewish majority nation? If many Israelis converted to Christianity and threatened that majority, what measures would you want taken? If non-Jewish Israelis have more kids and the population shifts over time, what measures would you want taken?
The Romanies just move from place to place their entire lives, is the main reason they have no settled state. The Kurds as much as the Jews want their own state (as do many Basques etc).
If Israel ceases to be a majority Jewish state that is it for Jews, if another holocaust is pursued against Jews they will again have no safe majority nation of their own to flee to. It is completely different for Christians in the UK as if the now minority Christian population here is persecuted their are multiple other Christain majority nations in the Americas, southern Europe, Ireland, Poland, southern Africa, the Philippines etc they could flee to.
Jews have no such option if persecuted in their nation of residence, their is no other majority Jewish nation on earth but Israel. Hence they will preserve Israel at all costs, including restricting immigration only to ethnic Jews etc (the birthrate of Orthodox Jews in Israel is high enough for that to be unlikely to be an issue though)
I think that's an entirely wrong description of Romany culture or Romany attitudes to nationhood!
Whether Jews worldwide will "preserve Israel at all costs" is debatable. No group is homogeneous and talking about all Jews as if they are of a single mind is ridiculous. The attitudes of orthodox Ashkenazi Jews in Israel versus liberal Jews in Tel Aviv versus liberal Jews in much of the US versus those in New York's orthodox Jewish communities are wildly different. (For example, many orthodox Jews in New York are strongly opposed to Zionism on religious grounds.)
However, I was asking more about what you think is the right approach. You've mentioned ethnicity-based immigration policies (although not whether you think they are right). What do you think is acceptable to keep Israel a majority Jewish nation? Would you ban conversion to Christianity? Would you have different rules for Jewish and non-Jewish Israeli citizens? I don't see how one can have a liberal democracy and a guarantee of Israel as evermore a Jewish majority nation. I don't think any nation should be defined as eternally of one religion.
I wonder if a Labour rebellion and sackings increases the chance of a Corbyn run in London as a way of giving his mob a national platform? He could win if he stood.
He couldn't, but Susan Hall would win. Still that ticks all Corbyn's boxes.
Corbyn should be setting up his own party for the general election. Mandelson is simply running his "they have nowhere else to go" shtick and telling the Left to suck it up.
We want a Corbyn free party of the Left, I think. Socialism for the world of today. Internationalist, contemporary, sophisticated, passionate but pragmatic. No straggly beards. No manhole covers.
And of course youre welcome to it. But it strikes me the most influential politician of the last decade has been Farage who has never won an election. Sometimes the pressure approach is as successful as mainstream. Otherwise Mandy just takes you for granted.
No, I'm agreeing with you. A party of the Left (not centre left) other than mainstream Labour, I meant. But not 'Corbynite'. The British hard left needs a makeover, bring it into 2023. It's like a crumbling period property, good location, lots of potential, crying out for a makeover. Get Phil and Kirstie in.
It reflects well on Rishi, since the sense of her letter is that’s she’s been left in the corner with the safety scissors, glue, and glitter, and kept away from doing any real damage.
She clearly doesn’t have the self awareness to realise how idiotic she has made herself look.
Bravermans tirade is worse than I expected . I think she’s trashed any chance of ever becoming Tory leader .
Doesn't that depend on how Sunak's reputation fares?
The latest ConHome leadership ratings (and pinch of salt required as not necessarily reflective of broader membership) had Sunak on a relatively lowly +7% net, and he's been lower, but Braverman was on +43%.
If the election is a disaster, Tory members aren't going to thank Sunak. He's not got the support Major had - very different party in 1997, and Major had won them an election rather unexpectedly before he lost one (albeit heavily). It won't necessarily pay to go into a leadership election as a loyal lieutenant as opposed to saying "told you so".
Excited to share @GoogleDeepMind’s newest AI model GraphCast: the most accurate 10-day global weather forecasting system in the world. GraphCast can also offer earlier warnings of extreme weather events, including the path of hurricanes. In @Science today
When we get easterlies and the forecast goes a bit wrong there's always someone who says 'the models can't get a handle on it because they aren't "used" to this pattern'.
This is of course wrong when it comes to normal weather modelling because the models are essentially just solving Navier-Stokes equations and aren't really biased in that way.
I wonder if this is? Be interesting to see how it copes with low frequency events.
If you can run accurate weather models on relatively normal hardware it is going to put a big dent in several companies...not least purveyors of supercomputers.
Particularly with a changing climate you would wonder how such a statistical model would cope with new conditions. But, arguably the traditional models are tuned too tightly to reproduce the present climate anyway.
The other thing to bear in mind is that, for poorly-observed regions of the world, the ECMWF dataset (I'm assuming they've used the reanalysis) is mostly the output of the computer model, because the observations only provide a weak constraint in some areas.
In that sense the statistical model has been trained on the physics model to a certain extent, and so is perhaps a cheaper way of reproducing it, but you might want to repeat the exercise when the ECMWF model is later improved.
You know who else promised better weather forecasts?...
With their history, it would frankly be incredible if most Jews DIDN’T care about Israel
Of course, Israel is the only nation in the world with a Jewish majority, therefore the only nation in the world Jews can truly be safe
Is the only place that members of a particular religious, ethnic or ethno-religious group can truly be safe in a nation where they are a majority? That view is both depressingly pessimistic and harks back to a some 19th-century notion of the nation state built around an ethnos that I thought we had long since abandoned.
We should make the world safe for all minorities and majorities.
What does it mean to make the world safe for majorities if you deny their right to remain majorities?
I would want to interrogate what you mean. Individuals have rights. Individuals have the right to safety and to be allowed to express their identities. What does it mean to say a group has the right to remain a majority?
Let's say you follow religion X and you live in a country that has a majority of other people who follow religion X. What happens if a bunch of your countrymen convert to a different religion or abandon any religion (as is happening with Christianity in the UK)? What does a "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean in that situation? Do you get to force your countrymen to not change religion? Do you get to expel them? What happens if your coreligionists just happen to have fewer kids and a minority group are a bit more fecund, until one day you are in the minority? Should your "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean you get to decide how many kids other people have?
It seems to be illiberal and undemocratic to state that a nation state must retain a certain religious or ethnic majority.
I guess you may be alluding to ideas around abolishing the Israeli state, subsuming it into some larger Israel/Palestine single state. That raises different questions. I think the people of Israel should get to decide what happens to them, so I would not want to see any change in the nation that is not supported by democratic majority. So, to take a different example, if Moldovans want to merge with Romania and cease to be the Republic of Moldova (and Romanians agree), then that should happen, and if Moldovans don't want to merge with Romania and they want Moldova to continue as a separate country, then that should happen.
Agree with this. I have long held that the Nation State is the best guarantee of democracy and stability for the people living within its boundaries. But that does not mean that any individual Nation State has a right to continue to exist if that is not what the people want. It can either merge into a larger nation state or split into a number of smaller ones that reflect the wishes of its communities.
I do think that a set of very basic international rules - such as those covered by the war crimes and crimes against humanity laws which have been discussing - should also exist and Nation States should be held to account against them. This should, in theory at least, offer the sorts of protection we want to see for minorities, whther they are religious, racial or gender based.
I also like a bit of Nation State but I feel it's a good thing not a bad thing if certain fundamentals (over and above those you reference regarding war and atrocities) are enshrined somewhere superior to it. An example would be the right of girls to go to school. Or (still on gender equality but more relevant to the western world) female reproductive rights - a minimum threshold there such that (eg) a country cannot outright prohibit abortion.
Of course a supranational body can't 100% enforce such principles on a recalcitrant or dissenting Nation State, nevertheless I think the more we introduce and support such structures, and the more teeth they have, the better. This should be the direction of travel imo rather than leaving them, ignoring them, defanging them, or generally giving them the proverbial finger and saying "nope, what the elected politicians of a country say goes as regards that country, end of".
One would need a world army/gendarmerie to enforce such things, and I see no appetite to create one.
Nope. One would simply have to make the cost - in many different ways; trade, financial, movement, perhaps military - greater than the benefits. As I said in answer to HYUFD, no one is claiming you are going to stop these rogue states completely, but having a rules based system that says there are consequences for actions - just as we are supposed to have for individuals under national laws - seems a perfectly valid and acceptable way to run things.
There will always be a disconnect between the ideal and the practical but that doesn't mean you abandon the ideal.
That would only be achievable, in practice, if such States were weak enough to be susceptible to such pressure.
With their history, it would frankly be incredible if most Jews DIDN’T care about Israel
Of course, Israel is the only nation in the world with a Jewish majority, therefore the only nation in the world Jews can truly be safe
Is the only place that members of a particular religious, ethnic or ethno-religious group can truly be safe in a nation where they are a majority? That view is both depressingly pessimistic and harks back to a some 19th-century notion of the nation state built around an ethnos that I thought we had long since abandoned.
We should make the world safe for all minorities and majorities.
What does it mean to make the world safe for majorities if you deny their right to remain majorities?
I would want to interrogate what you mean. Individuals have rights. Individuals have the right to safety and to be allowed to express their identities. What does it mean to say a group has the right to remain a majority?
Let's say you follow religion X and you live in a country that has a majority of other people who follow religion X. What happens if a bunch of your countrymen convert to a different religion or abandon any religion (as is happening with Christianity in the UK)? What does a "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean in that situation? Do you get to force your countrymen to not change religion? Do you get to expel them? What happens if your coreligionists just happen to have fewer kids and a minority group are a bit more fecund, until one day you are in the minority? Should your "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean you get to decide how many kids other people have?
It seems to be illiberal and undemocratic to state that a nation state must retain a certain religious or ethnic majority.
I guess you may be alluding to ideas around abolishing the Israeli state, subsuming it into some larger Israel/Palestine single state. That raises different questions. I think the people of Israel should get to decide what happens to them, so I would not want to see any change in the nation that is not supported by democratic majority. So, to take a different example, if Moldovans want to merge with Romania and cease to be the Republic of Moldova (and Romanians agree), then that should happen, and if Moldovans don't want to merge with Romania and they want Moldova to continue as a separate country, then that should happen.
Then there are multiple other Christian majority countries you can still go to if a Christian in the UK, even if the UK is no longer Christian majority.
There is only 1 Jewish majority nation however, Israel and after millions of Jews were murdered in Europe in the Holocaust and anti Semitism present in every other nation of the world it is no surprise the vast majority of Jews wish to keep Israel as the Jewish homeland. A place of safety if needed to move to if things ever get too bad for Jews again in their nation of residence
The desire of many Jews for Israel as a Jewish homeland to exist is understandable. The desire of many Armenians for Armenia as a homeland to exist is understandable. The desire of many Kurds for Kurdistan as a homeland to exist is understandable.
The question is how you balance the rights of different people. Should we carve out a Kurdistan, making a bunch of non-Kurds suddenly minorities in a new nation?
Let's imagine a new religion emerged in Galilee, people believe in a new messiah called Hyufd. Hyufdism spreads and many Israeli Jews convert to Hyufidsm. One day, Judaism is no longer in a majority in Israel. (This has happened before, twice.) What happens? Are the choices of individuals to convert less important than the desire for a Jewish majority nation?
Every citizen of Israel should have equal rights, to worship what religion they want to (or how they want to), to follow what social customs and practices they want to, to speak what language they want to at home, to have the number of children they want to. Those rights, I suggest, trump any collective right of a majority to remain a majority.
I support a Kurdish state and it now effectively exists in Northern Iraq and Northern Syria anyway.
Were Jews a minority in Israel even after Jesus walked the earth? The evidence is not clear. What is clear is it is now the only place they are genuinely safe from anti Semitism and fine kumbaya platitudes about universal human rights ain't much help when things really go bad in your nation of residence. As the Jews discovered the League of Nations was hopeless to protect them in Germany once the Nazis took over and as Ukraine has discovered the UN was also largely ineffective once Putin invaded, they had to fight to preserve their homeland themselves
More Kurds live in Turkey than in Iraq and Syria put together. Indeed, the number of Kurds in Iran is greater than or about the same size as the Iraqi and Syrian populations put together, so the autonomous Kurdish areas in Iraq and Syria don't provide the Kurdish people with a solution to their desires for nationhood (and the autonomous Kurdish areas in Iraq and Syria are currently at loggerheads!). While I am sympathetic to Kurdish desire for a nation, I don't think we can rip open the Turkish and Iranian borders without democratic consent.
It's not easy to tell, but I think Christians became the majority in what we call Israel/Palestine today, at least in the Byzantine period. Later, Muslims became a majority. Both of those processes were largely due to conversion. Obviously Jews were very much a minority in recent history until Zionist immigration changed the situation.
I accept that one can and should be sceptical about kumbaya platitudes. Israel is under attack right now: people are dying. Fortunately, Israel isn't under any threat of losing. Ultimately, we want to get to a place where no-one is losing.
And more Jews live outside Israel than in Israel but Israel remains their ultimate homeland of safety as Kurdistan is for Kurds.
The only way Jews can ensure they can never be defeated and eliminated from the planet, as the Nazis wanted and some Jihadi militants now want is to maintain Israel for evermore as a Jewish majority nation and their ultimate place of sanctuary
That is, pretty much definitionally, what Zionism believes, yes. I don't believe that. I think we can strive for a world where minorities can never be eliminated from the planet because of a collective belief in minority rights.
There are many peoples of the world who face oppression and who don't have their own majority nation state. (Some, like the Romany (who the Nazis also wanted to eliminate), have no ambitions for such. Other, like many Kurds or some Sikhs, do.) I don't believe creating majority nation states for the Kurds, Romany, Sikhs, Yazidis, Ossetians, Basques, etc. etc. etc. is necessary or feasible. We have to come up with a better solution to protect people than creating majority nation states.
Of course, Israel already exists, so it's a different situation. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the Zionism/Bundism debates of the early 20th century, Israel has been a nation state for three quarters of a century and I don't think that should change (unless so desired by the people of Israel). It seems likely that Israel will remain a majority Jewish nation for many decades. However, I don't believe that being so is the only way to protect Jews worldwide or that the rights of individual Israelis to be who they want to be should be overridden. My own country has come from being Christian majority to Christian minority in my lifespan. If Israel changes in similar ways, it changes.
You keep repeating the same points, HYUFD. You have not made clear what you want to happen. How would you maintain Israel as evermore a Jewish majority nation? If many Israelis converted to Christianity and threatened that majority, what measures would you want taken? If non-Jewish Israelis have more kids and the population shifts over time, what measures would you want taken?
The Romanies just move from place to place their entire lives, is the main reason they have no settled state. The Kurds as much as the Jews want their own state (as do many Basques etc).
If Israel ceases to be a majority Jewish state that is it for Jews, if another holocaust is pursued against Jews they will again have no safe majority nation of their own to flee to. It is completely different for Christians in the UK as if the now minority Christian population here is persecuted their are multiple other Christain majority nations in the Americas, southern Europe, Ireland, Poland, southern Africa, the Philippines etc they could flee to.
Jews have no such option if persecuted in their nation of residence, their is no other majority Jewish nation on earth but Israel. Hence they will preserve Israel at all costs, including restricting immigration only to ethnic Jews etc (the birthrate of Orthodox Jews in Israel is high enough for that to be unlikely to be an issue though)
I think that's an entirely wrong description of Romany culture or Romany attitudes to nationhood!
Whether Jews worldwide will "preserve Israel at all costs" is debatable. No group is homogeneous and talking about all Jews as if they are of a single mind is ridiculous. The attitudes of orthodox Ashkenazi Jews in Israel versus liberal Jews in Tel Aviv versus liberal Jews in much of the US versus those in New York's orthodox Jewish communities are wildly different. (For example, many orthodox Jews in New York are strongly opposed to Zionism on religious grounds.)
However, I was asking more about what you think is the right approach. You've mentioned ethnicity-based immigration policies (although not whether you think they are right). What do you think is acceptable to keep Israel a majority Jewish nation? Would you ban conversion to Christianity? Would you have different rules for Jewish and non-Jewish Israeli citizens? I don't see how one can have a liberal democracy and a guarantee of Israel as evermore a Jewish majority nation. I don't think any nation should be defined as eternally of one religion.
No it isn't, Romanies live in caravans for a reason, they are a permanently roaming people not a static people.
Of course secular left liberals like aren't that bothered about Israel, you didn't have half your family wiped out in the Holocaust after all. We have learnt our lesson after all, won't happen again will it, why do Jews need a homeland of their own?
Yes there may be differences on social issues between liberal and Orthodox Jews, as there are in the political parties they vote for in Israel but on preservation of Israel they are as one. It must be preserved as the Jewish homeland no matter what the cost.
Hence Israel will eternally be for them a place of majority Jewish ethnicity, including controlling immigration if needed to ensure that
The letter is so deranged I think it's probably neutral at worst for Sunak. The petulant childishness of it does rather justify him sacking her. Hard to imagine Cameron writing a letter like that.
Of course, Israel already exists, so it's a different situation. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the Zionism/Bundism debates of the early 20th century, Israel has been a nation state for three quarters of a century and I don't think that should change (unless so desired by the people of Israel). It seems likely that Israel will remain a majority Jewish nation for many decades. However, I don't believe that being so is the only way to protect Jews worldwide or that the rights of individual Israelis to be who they want to be should be overridden. My own country has come from being Christian majority to Christian minority in my lifespan. If Israel changes in similar ways, it changes.
You keep repeating the same points, HYUFD. You have not made clear what you want to happen. How would you maintain Israel as evermore a Jewish majority nation? If many Israelis converted to Christianity and threatened that majority, what measures would you want taken? If non-Jewish Israelis have more kids and the population shifts over time, what measures would you want taken?
You seem to be making an unstated assumption that the direction of travel will always be towards greater multiculturalism.
What if the decline of one majority were instead replaced by another that wanted to establish a different kind of state?
I'm not assuming the direction of travel will always be towards greater multiculturalism. It might be, it might not be.
I am a democrat. If the population changes and people want a "different kind of state", then they should get a different kind of state. Isn't that how democracy works?
Of course, it's not always quite that simple. If a majority wants to kill everyone called "William", then, no, that should be stopped! There is a (difficult) balance between basic human rights and democracy. A majority in Israel, by some polling, want Jews to have more rights than non-Jews, and I think that would be a mistake. If the situation changed and some future majority wanted to have more rights than Jews, that would also be wrong.
Culture has a tendency to persist despite such efforts, too.
Culture persists, and culture changes. Ethnicities and religions are made-up. They are only whatever we make them. All religions are characterised by diversity in belief and practice.
That's why I don't believe in defining nation states in terms of ethnoses or ethno-religious groups.
I wonder if a Labour rebellion and sackings increases the chance of a Corbyn run in London as a way of giving his mob a national platform? He could win if he stood.
He couldn't, but Susan Hall would win. Still that ticks all Corbyn's boxes.
Corbyn should be setting up his own party for the general election. Mandelson is simply running his "they have nowhere else to go" shtick and telling the Left to suck it up.
We want a Corbyn free party of the Left, I think. Socialism for the world of today. Internationalist, contemporary, sophisticated, passionate but pragmatic. No straggly beards. No manhole covers.
And of course youre welcome to it. But it strikes me the most influential politician of the last decade has been Farage who has never won an election. Sometimes the pressure approach is as successful as mainstream. Otherwise Mandy just takes you for granted.
No, I'm agreeing with you. A party of the Left (not centre left) other than mainstream Labour, I meant. But not 'Corbynite'. The British hard left needs a makeover, bring it into 2023. It's like a crumbling period property, good location, lots of potential, crying out for a makeover. Get Phil and Kirstie in.
Shameful and all the Tories on here doubt we're a racist country!
A much less racist country than previously, when white Europeans were afforded Freedom of Movement, but brown and black immigrants were forced to pay £5k for the dodgy boat?
It reflects well on Rishi, since the sense of her letter is that’s she’s been left in the corner with the safety scissors, glue, and glitter, and kept away from doing any real damage.
She clearly doesn’t have the self awareness to realise how idiotic she has made herself look.
I think we can all agree that he "put uff the tough decisions" for too long. But at least he got around to sacking her in the end.
With their history, it would frankly be incredible if most Jews DIDN’T care about Israel
Of course, Israel is the only nation in the world with a Jewish majority, therefore the only nation in the world Jews can truly be safe
Is the only place that members of a particular religious, ethnic or ethno-religious group can truly be safe in a nation where they are a majority? That view is both depressingly pessimistic and harks back to a some 19th-century notion of the nation state built around an ethnos that I thought we had long since abandoned.
We should make the world safe for all minorities and majorities.
What does it mean to make the world safe for majorities if you deny their right to remain majorities?
I would want to interrogate what you mean. Individuals have rights. Individuals have the right to safety and to be allowed to express their identities. What does it mean to say a group has the right to remain a majority?
Let's say you follow religion X and you live in a country that has a majority of other people who follow religion X. What happens if a bunch of your countrymen convert to a different religion or abandon any religion (as is happening with Christianity in the UK)? What does a "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean in that situation? Do you get to force your countrymen to not change religion? Do you get to expel them? What happens if your coreligionists just happen to have fewer kids and a minority group are a bit more fecund, until one day you are in the minority? Should your "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean you get to decide how many kids other people have?
It seems to be illiberal and undemocratic to state that a nation state must retain a certain religious or ethnic majority.
I guess you may be alluding to ideas around abolishing the Israeli state, subsuming it into some larger Israel/Palestine single state. That raises different questions. I think the people of Israel should get to decide what happens to them, so I would not want to see any change in the nation that is not supported by democratic majority. So, to take a different example, if Moldovans want to merge with Romania and cease to be the Republic of Moldova (and Romanians agree), then that should happen, and if Moldovans don't want to merge with Romania and they want Moldova to continue as a separate country, then that should happen.
Agree with this. I have long held that the Nation State is the best guarantee of democracy and stability for the people living within its boundaries. But that does not mean that any individual Nation State has a right to continue to exist if that is not what the people want. It can either merge into a larger nation state or split into a number of smaller ones that reflect the wishes of its communities.
I do think that a set of very basic international rules - such as those covered by the war crimes and crimes against humanity laws which have been discussing - should also exist and Nation States should be held to account against them. This should, in theory at least, offer the sorts of protection we want to see for minorities, whther they are religious, racial or gender based.
I also like a bit of Nation State but I feel it's a good thing not a bad thing if certain fundamentals (over and above those you reference regarding war and atrocities) are enshrined somewhere superior to it. An example would be the right of girls to go to school. Or (still on gender equality but more relevant to the western world) female reproductive rights - a minimum threshold there such that (eg) a country cannot outright prohibit abortion.
Of course a supranational body can't 100% enforce such principles on a recalcitrant or dissenting Nation State, nevertheless I think the more we introduce and support such structures, and the more teeth they have, the better. This should be the direction of travel imo rather than leaving them, ignoring them, defanging them, or generally giving them the proverbial finger and saying "nope, what the elected politicians of a country say goes as regards that country, end of".
One would need a world army/gendarmerie to enforce such things, and I see no appetite to create one.
Nope. One would simply have to make the cost - in many different ways; trade, financial, movement, perhaps military - greater than the benefits. As I said in answer to HYUFD, no one is claiming you are going to stop these rogue states completely, but having a rules based system that says there are consequences for actions - just as we are supposed to have for individuals under national laws - seems a perfectly valid and acceptable way to run things.
There will always be a disconnect between the ideal and the practical but that doesn't mean you abandon the ideal.
A few sanctions as the international community has put against Russia has hardly saved much of Ukraine from continued occupation and it wouldn't save Jews from another holocaust if an extremist group took over a nation with a Jewish minority again and pursued such a policy
No but for every example where you can say the system might not work hhete are many more where it does work, where people are held to account and where actions have consequences. That is why there is a steadily increasing number of war criminals behind bars.
Persecution of Jews was once the norm in almost all Western countries but is now much reduced. The system of international law is far from perfect but it is a work in progress.
It reflects well on Rishi, since the sense of her letter is that’s she’s been left in the corner with the safety scissors, glue, and glitter, and kept away from doing any real damage.
She clearly doesn’t have the self awareness to realise how idiotic she has made herself look.
The problem is not that Suella Braverman is right wing. It is that she postures, but is useless.
With their history, it would frankly be incredible if most Jews DIDN’T care about Israel
Of course, Israel is the only nation in the world with a Jewish majority, therefore the only nation in the world Jews can truly be safe
Is the only place that members of a particular religious, ethnic or ethno-religious group can truly be safe in a nation where they are a majority? That view is both depressingly pessimistic and harks back to a some 19th-century notion of the nation state built around an ethnos that I thought we had long since abandoned.
We should make the world safe for all minorities and majorities.
What does it mean to make the world safe for majorities if you deny their right to remain majorities?
I would want to interrogate what you mean. Individuals have rights. Individuals have the right to safety and to be allowed to express their identities. What does it mean to say a group has the right to remain a majority?
Let's say you follow religion X and you live in a country that has a majority of other people who follow religion X. What happens if a bunch of your countrymen convert to a different religion or abandon any religion (as is happening with Christianity in the UK)? What does a "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean in that situation? Do you get to force your countrymen to not change religion? Do you get to expel them? What happens if your coreligionists just happen to have fewer kids and a minority group are a bit more fecund, until one day you are in the minority? Should your "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean you get to decide how many kids other people have?
It seems to be illiberal and undemocratic to state that a nation state must retain a certain religious or ethnic majority.
I guess you may be alluding to ideas around abolishing the Israeli state, subsuming it into some larger Israel/Palestine single state. That raises different questions. I think the people of Israel should get to decide what happens to them, so I would not want to see any change in the nation that is not supported by democratic majority. So, to take a different example, if Moldovans want to merge with Romania and cease to be the Republic of Moldova (and Romanians agree), then that should happen, and if Moldovans don't want to merge with Romania and they want Moldova to continue as a separate country, then that should happen.
Agree with this. I have long held that the Nation State is the best guarantee of democracy and stability for the people living within its boundaries. But that does not mean that any individual Nation State has a right to continue to exist if that is not what the people want. It can either merge into a larger nation state or split into a number of smaller ones that reflect the wishes of its communities.
I do think that a set of very basic international rules - such as those covered by the war crimes and crimes against humanity laws which have been discussing - should also exist and Nation States should be held to account against them. This should, in theory at least, offer the sorts of protection we want to see for minorities, whther they are religious, racial or gender based.
I also like a bit of Nation State but I feel it's a good thing not a bad thing if certain fundamentals (over and above those you reference regarding war and atrocities) are enshrined somewhere superior to it. An example would be the right of girls to go to school. Or (still on gender equality but more relevant to the western world) female reproductive rights - a minimum threshold there such that (eg) a country cannot outright prohibit abortion.
Of course a supranational body can't 100% enforce such principles on a recalcitrant or dissenting Nation State, nevertheless I think the more we introduce and support such structures, and the more teeth they have, the better. This should be the direction of travel imo rather than leaving them, ignoring them, defanging them, or generally giving them the proverbial finger and saying "nope, what the elected politicians of a country say goes as regards that country, end of".
One would need a world army/gendarmerie to enforce such things, and I see no appetite to create one.
Nope. One would simply have to make the cost - in many different ways; trade, financial, movement, perhaps military - greater than the benefits. As I said in answer to HYUFD, no one is claiming you are going to stop these rogue states completely, but having a rules based system that says there are consequences for actions - just as we are supposed to have for individuals under national laws - seems a perfectly valid and acceptable way to run things.
There will always be a disconnect between the ideal and the practical but that doesn't mean you abandon the ideal.
A few sanctions as the international community has put against Russia has hardly saved much of Ukraine from continued occupation and it wouldn't save Jews from another holocaust if an extremist group took over a nation with a Jewish minority again and pursued such a policy
No but for every example where you can say the system might not work hhete are many more where it does work, where people are held to account and where actions have consequences. That is why there is a steadily increasing number of war criminals behind bars.
Persecution of Jews was once the norm in almost all Western countries but is now much reduced. The system of international law is far from perfect but it is a work in progress.
No system is perfect but
You only get war criminals behind bars if you invade the countries they rule and remove them from power. Otherwise it is all just theoretical legalese.
By the time the Allies had captured Berlin, millions of Jews had already been murdered
It reflects well on Rishi, since the sense of her letter is that’s she’s been left in the corner with the safety scissors, glue, and glitter, and kept away from doing any real damage.
She clearly doesn’t have the self awareness to realise how idiotic she has made herself look.
The problem is not that Suella Braverman is right wing. It is that she postures, but is useless.
Yes, the Home Secretary whinging that they had no influence over home affairs is…. odd.
With their history, it would frankly be incredible if most Jews DIDN’T care about Israel
Of course, Israel is the only nation in the world with a Jewish majority, therefore the only nation in the world Jews can truly be safe
Is the only place that members of a particular religious, ethnic or ethno-religious group can truly be safe in a nation where they are a majority? That view is both depressingly pessimistic and harks back to a some 19th-century notion of the nation state built around an ethnos that I thought we had long since abandoned.
We should make the world safe for all minorities and majorities.
What does it mean to make the world safe for majorities if you deny their right to remain majorities?
I would want to interrogate what you mean. Individuals have rights. Individuals have the right to safety and to be allowed to express their identities. What does it mean to say a group has the right to remain a majority?
Let's say you follow religion X and you live in a country that has a majority of other people who follow religion X. What happens if a bunch of your countrymen convert to a different religion or abandon any religion (as is happening with Christianity in the UK)? What does a "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean in that situation? Do you get to force your countrymen to not change religion? Do you get to expel them? What happens if your coreligionists just happen to have fewer kids and a minority group are a bit more fecund, until one day you are in the minority? Should your "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean you get to decide how many kids other people have?
It seems to be illiberal and undemocratic to state that a nation state must retain a certain religious or ethnic majority.
I guess you may be alluding to ideas around abolishing the Israeli state, subsuming it into some larger Israel/Palestine single state. That raises different questions. I think the people of Israel should get to decide what happens to them, so I would not want to see any change in the nation that is not supported by democratic majority. So, to take a different example, if Moldovans want to merge with Romania and cease to be the Republic of Moldova (and Romanians agree), then that should happen, and if Moldovans don't want to merge with Romania and they want Moldova to continue as a separate country, then that should happen.
Then there are multiple other Christian majority countries you can still go to if a Christian in the UK, even if the UK is no longer Christian majority.
There is only 1 Jewish majority nation however, Israel and after millions of Jews were murdered in Europe in the Holocaust and anti Semitism present in every other nation of the world it is no surprise the vast majority of Jews wish to keep Israel as the Jewish homeland. A place of safety if needed to move to if things ever get too bad for Jews again in their nation of residence
The desire of many Jews for Israel as a Jewish homeland to exist is understandable. The desire of many Armenians for Armenia as a homeland to exist is understandable. The desire of many Kurds for Kurdistan as a homeland to exist is understandable.
The question is how you balance the rights of different people. Should we carve out a Kurdistan, making a bunch of non-Kurds suddenly minorities in a new nation?
Let's imagine a new religion emerged in Galilee, people believe in a new messiah called Hyufd. Hyufdism spreads and many Israeli Jews convert to Hyufidsm. One day, Judaism is no longer in a majority in Israel. (This has happened before, twice.) What happens? Are the choices of individuals to convert less important than the desire for a Jewish majority nation?
Every citizen of Israel should have equal rights, to worship what religion they want to (or how they want to), to follow what social customs and practices they want to, to speak what language they want to at home, to have the number of children they want to. Those rights, I suggest, trump any collective right of a majority to remain a majority.
I support a Kurdish state and it now effectively exists in Northern Iraq and Northern Syria anyway.
Were Jews a minority in Israel even after Jesus walked the earth? The evidence is not clear. What is clear is it is now the only place they are genuinely safe from anti Semitism and fine kumbaya platitudes about universal human rights ain't much help when things really go bad in your nation of residence. As the Jews discovered the League of Nations was hopeless to protect them in Germany once the Nazis took over and as Ukraine has discovered the UN was also largely ineffective once Putin invaded, they had to fight to preserve their homeland themselves
What, pray, is a ‘fine kumbaya platitude’?
Homo sapiens can be a very nasty, aggressive species when faced with something it doesn’t like. Ask Homo neanderthalis.
TBF, we don't actually know what finished off the Neanderthals.
They weren't entirely finished off - we're in part them.
It's a bit of a stretch, but it has been noted that there is more Neanderthal DNA out there today than at any point in history, simply because of growth in the size of human population, and the fact most of us have a very small percentage of Neanderthal DNA.
I'm certainly no expert, but I thought it had been established that some big chunk of our DNA is probably from the Neanderthals. Some certainly is anyway.
It's about 1-4% on average in non-African people, so not a big chunk, a small amount (which is still an amazing and interesting discovery).
lol
You called me a racist for saying there are discernible and scientifically important genetic differences between Africans and others; you claimed they absolutely do not exist. I gave you this Neanderthal data as an example. Then you went all quiet. Now suddenly it’s an amazing and interesting discovery. Pffff
Shameful and all the Tories on here doubt we're a racist country!
If you have another viable plan to reduce the number of people risking their lives in boats to cross the Channel I'm sure the government would love to hear it.
Shameful and all the Tories on here doubt we're a racist country!
How do you think the French would poll on the issue?
They would NEVER vote Le Pen and even countries who have considered it have never suggested the asylum seeker never having the chance to enter their country.
Of course, Israel already exists, so it's a different situation. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the Zionism/Bundism debates of the early 20th century, Israel has been a nation state for three quarters of a century and I don't think that should change (unless so desired by the people of Israel). It seems likely that Israel will remain a majority Jewish nation for many decades. However, I don't believe that being so is the only way to protect Jews worldwide or that the rights of individual Israelis to be who they want to be should be overridden. My own country has come from being Christian majority to Christian minority in my lifespan. If Israel changes in similar ways, it changes.
You keep repeating the same points, HYUFD. You have not made clear what you want to happen. How would you maintain Israel as evermore a Jewish majority nation? If many Israelis converted to Christianity and threatened that majority, what measures would you want taken? If non-Jewish Israelis have more kids and the population shifts over time, what measures would you want taken?
You seem to be making an unstated assumption that the direction of travel will always be towards greater multiculturalism.
What if the decline of one majority were instead replaced by another that wanted to establish a different kind of state?
I'm not assuming the direction of travel will always be towards greater multiculturalism. It might be, it might not be.
I am a democrat. If the population changes and people want a "different kind of state", then they should get a different kind of state. Isn't that how democracy works?
Of course, it's not always quite that simple. If a majority wants to kill everyone called "William", then, no, that should be stopped! There is a (difficult) balance between basic human rights and democracy. A majority in Israel, by some polling, want Jews to have more rights than non-Jews, and I think that would be a mistake. If the situation changed and some future majority wanted to have more rights than Jews, that would also be wrong.
Democracy is about more than voting, it requires respect for minorities.
The idea that Jews* can only be safe from genocide in their own ethnostate is absurd. Certainly there is anti-semitism in many or even all countries, but that doesn't mean genocide. There is no risk of the Shoah being repeated anywhere in Europe.
*or Sikhs, Kurds, Rohingya, Yazedi, Afrikaaners, etc etc.
I assume that the Braverman letter is the opening of hostilities in the hard right's attempt to oust Sunak?
Yesterday was Sunak's move to the centre and he would have expected this rancid and bitter response from Braverman
As I have commented before, Sunak will not resign from the ECHR which is Braverman’s and the rights demand and he is correct not to do so, not least because of the WF and GFA
This open warfare was inevitable and I do have confidence that Sunak,Cameron, Cleverly and others will win for the soul of the,conservative party while Braverman and her sycophants can join ReformUK with the likes of Farage and Tice
Bravermans tirade is worse than I expected . I think she’s trashed any chance of ever becoming Tory leader .
70% already agree with her sacking
I don't think her letter is that bad (thought tbf the Jenkyns letter shifted the window a bit that) - beyond what I'd expect; self-pitying, deluded, resentful. And while I don't know if she ever had that good a chance of becoming leader, I'm not sure this letter changes the likelihood.
Shameful and all the Tories on here doubt we're a racist country!
How do you think the French would poll on the issue?
They would NEVER vote Le Pen and even countries who have considered it have never suggested the asylum seeker never having the chance to enter their country.
Suella knows her market
Latest 2027 French presidential first round poll from IFOP
I assume that the Braverman letter is the opening of hostilities in the hard right's attempt to oust Sunak?
Yesterday was Sunak's move to the centre and he would have expected this rancid and bitter response from Braverman
As I have commented before, Sunak will not resign from the ECHR which is Braverman’s and the rights demand and he is correct not to do so, not least because of the WF and GFA
This open warfare was inevitable and I do have confidence that Sunak,Cameron, Cleverly and others will win for the soul of the,conservative party while Braverman and her sycophants can join ReformUK with the likes of Farage and Tice
The letter is so deranged I think it's probably neutral at worst for Sunak. The petulant childishness of it does rather justify him sacking her. Hard to imagine Cameron writing a letter like that.
It’s brutal. It’s also much better written than the Jenkyns letter (not hard)
And where is this petulant childishness? Its lucid, firm, bracing - and it drills right into Sunak’s perceived flaws: mainly weakness
Of course, Israel already exists, so it's a different situation. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the Zionism/Bundism debates of the early 20th century, Israel has been a nation state for three quarters of a century and I don't think that should change (unless so desired by the people of Israel). It seems likely that Israel will remain a majority Jewish nation for many decades. However, I don't believe that being so is the only way to protect Jews worldwide or that the rights of individual Israelis to be who they want to be should be overridden. My own country has come from being Christian majority to Christian minority in my lifespan. If Israel changes in similar ways, it changes.
You keep repeating the same points, HYUFD. You have not made clear what you want to happen. How would you maintain Israel as evermore a Jewish majority nation? If many Israelis converted to Christianity and threatened that majority, what measures would you want taken? If non-Jewish Israelis have more kids and the population shifts over time, what measures would you want taken?
You seem to be making an unstated assumption that the direction of travel will always be towards greater multiculturalism.
What if the decline of one majority were instead replaced by another that wanted to establish a different kind of state?
I'm not assuming the direction of travel will always be towards greater multiculturalism. It might be, it might not be.
I am a democrat. If the population changes and people want a "different kind of state", then they should get a different kind of state. Isn't that how democracy works?
Of course, it's not always quite that simple. If a majority wants to kill everyone called "William", then, no, that should be stopped! There is a (difficult) balance between basic human rights and democracy. A majority in Israel, by some polling, want Jews to have more rights than non-Jews, and I think that would be a mistake. If the situation changed and some future majority wanted to have more rights than Jews, that would also be wrong.
Democracy is about more than voting, it requires respect for minorities.
The idea that Jews* can only be safe from genocide in their own ethnostate is absurd. Certainly there is anti-semitism in many or even all countries, but that doesn't mean genocide. There is no risk of the Shoah being repeated anywhere in Europe.
*or Sikhs, Kurds, Rohingya, Yazedi, Afrikaaners, etc etc.
Shameful and all the Tories on here doubt we're a racist country!
How do you think the French would poll on the issue?
They would NEVER vote Le Pen and even countries who have considered it have never suggested the asylum seeker never having the chance to enter their country.
With their history, it would frankly be incredible if most Jews DIDN’T care about Israel
Of course, Israel is the only nation in the world with a Jewish majority, therefore the only nation in the world Jews can truly be safe
Is the only place that members of a particular religious, ethnic or ethno-religious group can truly be safe in a nation where they are a majority? That view is both depressingly pessimistic and harks back to a some 19th-century notion of the nation state built around an ethnos that I thought we had long since abandoned.
We should make the world safe for all minorities and majorities.
What does it mean to make the world safe for majorities if you deny their right to remain majorities?
I would want to interrogate what you mean. Individuals have rights. Individuals have the right to safety and to be allowed to express their identities. What does it mean to say a group has the right to remain a majority?
Let's say you follow religion X and you live in a country that has a majority of other people who follow religion X. What happens if a bunch of your countrymen convert to a different religion or abandon any religion (as is happening with Christianity in the UK)? What does a "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean in that situation? Do you get to force your countrymen to not change religion? Do you get to expel them? What happens if your coreligionists just happen to have fewer kids and a minority group are a bit more fecund, until one day you are in the minority? Should your "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean you get to decide how many kids other people have?
It seems to be illiberal and undemocratic to state that a nation state must retain a certain religious or ethnic majority.
I guess you may be alluding to ideas around abolishing the Israeli state, subsuming it into some larger Israel/Palestine single state. That raises different questions. I think the people of Israel should get to decide what happens to them, so I would not want to see any change in the nation that is not supported by democratic majority. So, to take a different example, if Moldovans want to merge with Romania and cease to be the Republic of Moldova (and Romanians agree), then that should happen, and if Moldovans don't want to merge with Romania and they want Moldova to continue as a separate country, then that should happen.
Then there are multiple other Christian majority countries you can still go to if a Christian in the UK, even if the UK is no longer Christian majority.
There is only 1 Jewish majority nation however, Israel and after millions of Jews were murdered in Europe in the Holocaust and anti Semitism present in every other nation of the world it is no surprise the vast majority of Jews wish to keep Israel as the Jewish homeland. A place of safety if needed to move to if things ever get too bad for Jews again in their nation of residence
The desire of many Jews for Israel as a Jewish homeland to exist is understandable. The desire of many Armenians for Armenia as a homeland to exist is understandable. The desire of many Kurds for Kurdistan as a homeland to exist is understandable.
The question is how you balance the rights of different people. Should we carve out a Kurdistan, making a bunch of non-Kurds suddenly minorities in a new nation?
Let's imagine a new religion emerged in Galilee, people believe in a new messiah called Hyufd. Hyufdism spreads and many Israeli Jews convert to Hyufidsm. One day, Judaism is no longer in a majority in Israel. (This has happened before, twice.) What happens? Are the choices of individuals to convert less important than the desire for a Jewish majority nation?
Every citizen of Israel should have equal rights, to worship what religion they want to (or how they want to), to follow what social customs and practices they want to, to speak what language they want to at home, to have the number of children they want to. Those rights, I suggest, trump any collective right of a majority to remain a majority.
I support a Kurdish state and it now effectively exists in Northern Iraq and Northern Syria anyway.
Were Jews a minority in Israel even after Jesus walked the earth? The evidence is not clear. What is clear is it is now the only place they are genuinely safe from anti Semitism and fine kumbaya platitudes about universal human rights ain't much help when things really go bad in your nation of residence. As the Jews discovered the League of Nations was hopeless to protect them in Germany once the Nazis took over and as Ukraine has discovered the UN was also largely ineffective once Putin invaded, they had to fight to preserve their homeland themselves
More Kurds live in Turkey than in Iraq and Syria put together. Indeed, the number of Kurds in Iran is greater than or about the same size as the Iraqi and Syrian populations put together, so the autonomous Kurdish areas in Iraq and Syria don't provide the Kurdish people with a solution to their desires for nationhood (and the autonomous Kurdish areas in Iraq and Syria are currently at loggerheads!). While I am sympathetic to Kurdish desire for a nation, I don't think we can rip open the Turkish and Iranian borders without democratic consent.
It's not easy to tell, but I think Christians became the majority in what we call Israel/Palestine today, at least in the Byzantine period. Later, Muslims became a majority. Both of those processes were largely due to conversion. Obviously Jews were very much a minority in recent history until Zionist immigration changed the situation.
I accept that one can and should be sceptical about kumbaya platitudes. Israel is under attack right now: people are dying. Fortunately, Israel isn't under any threat of losing. Ultimately, we want to get to a place where no-one is losing.
And more Jews live outside Israel than in Israel but Israel remains their ultimate homeland of safety as Kurdistan is for Kurds.
The only way Jews can ensure they can never be defeated and eliminated from the planet, as the Nazis wanted and some Jihadi militants now want is to maintain Israel for evermore as a Jewish majority nation and their ultimate place of sanctuary
That is, pretty much definitionally, what Zionism believes, yes. I don't believe that. I think we can strive for a world where minorities can never be eliminated from the planet because of a collective belief in minority rights.
There are many peoples of the world who face oppression and who don't have their own majority nation state. (Some, like the Romany (who the Nazis also wanted to eliminate), have no ambitions for such. Other, like many Kurds or some Sikhs, do.) I don't believe creating majority nation states for the Kurds, Romany, Sikhs, Yazidis, Ossetians, Basques, etc. etc. etc. is necessary or feasible. We have to come up with a better solution to protect people than creating majority nation states.
Of course, Israel already exists, so it's a different situation. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the Zionism/Bundism debates of the early 20th century, Israel has been a nation state for three quarters of a century and I don't think that should change (unless so desired by the people of Israel). It seems likely that Israel will remain a majority Jewish nation for many decades. However, I don't believe that being so is the only way to protect Jews worldwide or that the rights of individual Israelis to be who they want to be should be overridden. My own country has come from being Christian majority to Christian minority in my lifespan. If Israel changes in similar ways, it changes.
You keep repeating the same points, HYUFD. You have not made clear what you want to happen. How would you maintain Israel as evermore a Jewish majority nation? If many Israelis converted to Christianity and threatened that majority, what measures would you want taken? If non-Jewish Israelis have more kids and the population shifts over time, what measures would you want taken?
The Romanies just move from place to place their entire lives, is the main reason they have no settled state. The Kurds as much as the Jews want their own state (as do many Basques etc).
If Israel ceases to be a majority Jewish state that is it for Jews, if another holocaust is pursued against Jews they will again have no safe majority nation of their own to flee to. It is completely different for Christians in the UK as if the now minority Christian population here is persecuted their are multiple other Christain majority nations in the Americas, southern Europe, Ireland, Poland, southern Africa, the Philippines etc they could flee to.
Jews have no such option if persecuted in their nation of residence, their is no other majority Jewish nation on earth but Israel. Hence they will preserve Israel at all costs, including restricting immigration only to ethnic Jews etc (the birthrate of Orthodox Jews in Israel is high enough for that to be unlikely to be an issue though)
I think that's an entirely wrong description of Romany culture or Romany attitudes to nationhood!
Whether Jews worldwide will "preserve Israel at all costs" is debatable. No group is homogeneous and talking about all Jews as if they are of a single mind is ridiculous. The attitudes of orthodox Ashkenazi Jews in Israel versus liberal Jews in Tel Aviv versus liberal Jews in much of the US versus those in New York's orthodox Jewish communities are wildly different. (For example, many orthodox Jews in New York are strongly opposed to Zionism on religious grounds.)
However, I was asking more about what you think is the right approach. You've mentioned ethnicity-based immigration policies (although not whether you think they are right). What do you think is acceptable to keep Israel a majority Jewish nation? Would you ban conversion to Christianity? Would you have different rules for Jewish and non-Jewish Israeli citizens? I don't see how one can have a liberal democracy and a guarantee of Israel as evermore a Jewish majority nation. I don't think any nation should be defined as eternally of one religion.
No it isn't, Romanies live in caravans for a reason, they are a permanently roaming people not a static people.
Of course secular left liberals like aren't that bothered about Israel, you didn't have half your family wiped out in the Holocaust after all. We have learnt our lesson after all, won't happen again will it, why do Jews need a homeland of their own?
Yes there may be differences on social issues between liberal and Orthodox Jews, as there are in the political parties they vote for in Israel but on preservation of Israel they are as one. It must be preserved as the Jewish homeland no matter what the cost.
Hence Israel will eternally be for them a place of majority Jewish ethnicity, including controlling immigration if needed to ensure that
Most Romany do not live in caravans. Most live statically. Most Romany are in eastern Europe, of course, so ignore your stereotypes of Romany culture in the UK.
I am concerned about Israel. You don't know my life, my family, my friends. My grandfather was killed by a Nazi bomb, while my grandmother's family were hosting German Jewish refugees. Of course, it was the Conservative government in the 1930s who made it harder for those refugees to come to the UK.
You underestimate the differences in views of Israel among Jewish people. Go read about Neturei Karta in Stamford Hill who are strongly opposed to the existence of the state of Israel.
More generally, you are repeating yourself and not answering my questions. If you don't want to, fine, but it's a bit pointless us just going around in circles. I don't want to stop Israel being a majority, Jewish nation. (I think Bibi should be in jail, but broadly what Israel does should be up to Israelis, not me, or you.) I don't think it is democratic to deny the possibility that such a change might happen in the future. I think we should move away from a 19th-centure view of nation states built on a single ethnos, but I understand and acknowledge the desire of many ethnic groups for a nation state of their own.
With their history, it would frankly be incredible if most Jews DIDN’T care about Israel
Of course, Israel is the only nation in the world with a Jewish majority, therefore the only nation in the world Jews can truly be safe
Is the only place that members of a particular religious, ethnic or ethno-religious group can truly be safe in a nation where they are a majority? That view is both depressingly pessimistic and harks back to a some 19th-century notion of the nation state built around an ethnos that I thought we had long since abandoned.
We should make the world safe for all minorities and majorities.
What does it mean to make the world safe for majorities if you deny their right to remain majorities?
I would want to interrogate what you mean. Individuals have rights. Individuals have the right to safety and to be allowed to express their identities. What does it mean to say a group has the right to remain a majority?
Let's say you follow religion X and you live in a country that has a majority of other people who follow religion X. What happens if a bunch of your countrymen convert to a different religion or abandon any religion (as is happening with Christianity in the UK)? What does a "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean in that situation? Do you get to force your countrymen to not change religion? Do you get to expel them? What happens if your coreligionists just happen to have fewer kids and a minority group are a bit more fecund, until one day you are in the minority? Should your "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean you get to decide how many kids other people have?
It seems to be illiberal and undemocratic to state that a nation state must retain a certain religious or ethnic majority.
I guess you may be alluding to ideas around abolishing the Israeli state, subsuming it into some larger Israel/Palestine single state. That raises different questions. I think the people of Israel should get to decide what happens to them, so I would not want to see any change in the nation that is not supported by democratic majority. So, to take a different example, if Moldovans want to merge with Romania and cease to be the Republic of Moldova (and Romanians agree), then that should happen, and if Moldovans don't want to merge with Romania and they want Moldova to continue as a separate country, then that should happen.
Agree with this. I have long held that the Nation State is the best guarantee of democracy and stability for the people living within its boundaries. But that does not mean that any individual Nation State has a right to continue to exist if that is not what the people want. It can either merge into a larger nation state or split into a number of smaller ones that reflect the wishes of its communities.
I do think that a set of very basic international rules - such as those covered by the war crimes and crimes against humanity laws which have been discussing - should also exist and Nation States should be held to account against them. This should, in theory at least, offer the sorts of protection we want to see for minorities, whther they are religious, racial or gender based.
I also like a bit of Nation State but I feel it's a good thing not a bad thing if certain fundamentals (over and above those you reference regarding war and atrocities) are enshrined somewhere superior to it. An example would be the right of girls to go to school. Or (still on gender equality but more relevant to the western world) female reproductive rights - a minimum threshold there such that (eg) a country cannot outright prohibit abortion.
Of course a supranational body can't 100% enforce such principles on a recalcitrant or dissenting Nation State, nevertheless I think the more we introduce and support such structures, and the more teeth they have, the better. This should be the direction of travel imo rather than leaving them, ignoring them, defanging them, or generally giving them the proverbial finger and saying "nope, what the elected politicians of a country say goes as regards that country, end of".
One would need a world army/gendarmerie to enforce such things, and I see no appetite to create one.
Nope. One would simply have to make the cost - in many different ways; trade, financial, movement, perhaps military - greater than the benefits. As I said in answer to HYUFD, no one is claiming you are going to stop these rogue states completely, but having a rules based system that says there are consequences for actions - just as we are supposed to have for individuals under national laws - seems a perfectly valid and acceptable way to run things.
There will always be a disconnect between the ideal and the practical but that doesn't mean you abandon the ideal.
That would only be achievable, in practice, if such States were weak enough to be susceptible to such pressure.
And there are plenty who are. Hence the reason we have various former leaders in jail right now for crimes against humanity and war crimes.
As an aside, there are plenty of crimes in the UK which go unpanished because we lack the ability and resources to catch the criminals. Your argument would hold that we should no longer have their actions as crimes because we are unable to always enforce the laws.
It reflects well on Rishi, since the sense of her letter is that’s she’s been left in the corner with the safety scissors, glue, and glitter, and kept away from doing any real damage.
She clearly doesn’t have the self awareness to realise how idiotic she has made herself look.
The problem is not that Suella Braverman is right wing. It is that she postures, but is useless.
The letter - which of course is self serving - gives quite a convincing argument she isn’t useless - she has been thwarted
I’ve no idea if this is true. I am fairly sure it is not good news for Sunak
An almighty bust up is brewing in the Tories. Maybe they just need to split
A very interesting country Argentina. Buenos Aires is a terrific city. People dancing the tango on every street corner and in the parks. It reminded me of Madrid on a grander scale. A lot of Germans there. I never thought it appropriate to ask how this German colony had originated! I shot a Repsol commercial there.
With their history, it would frankly be incredible if most Jews DIDN’T care about Israel
Of course, Israel is the only nation in the world with a Jewish majority, therefore the only nation in the world Jews can truly be safe
Is the only place that members of a particular religious, ethnic or ethno-religious group can truly be safe in a nation where they are a majority? That view is both depressingly pessimistic and harks back to a some 19th-century notion of the nation state built around an ethnos that I thought we had long since abandoned.
We should make the world safe for all minorities and majorities.
What does it mean to make the world safe for majorities if you deny their right to remain majorities?
I would want to interrogate what you mean. Individuals have rights. Individuals have the right to safety and to be allowed to express their identities. What does it mean to say a group has the right to remain a majority?
Let's say you follow religion X and you live in a country that has a majority of other people who follow religion X. What happens if a bunch of your countrymen convert to a different religion or abandon any religion (as is happening with Christianity in the UK)? What does a "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean in that situation? Do you get to force your countrymen to not change religion? Do you get to expel them? What happens if your coreligionists just happen to have fewer kids and a minority group are a bit more fecund, until one day you are in the minority? Should your "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean you get to decide how many kids other people have?
It seems to be illiberal and undemocratic to state that a nation state must retain a certain religious or ethnic majority.
I guess you may be alluding to ideas around abolishing the Israeli state, subsuming it into some larger Israel/Palestine single state. That raises different questions. I think the people of Israel should get to decide what happens to them, so I would not want to see any change in the nation that is not supported by democratic majority. So, to take a different example, if Moldovans want to merge with Romania and cease to be the Republic of Moldova (and Romanians agree), then that should happen, and if Moldovans don't want to merge with Romania and they want Moldova to continue as a separate country, then that should happen.
Agree with this. I have long held that the Nation State is the best guarantee of democracy and stability for the people living within its boundaries. But that does not mean that any individual Nation State has a right to continue to exist if that is not what the people want. It can either merge into a larger nation state or split into a number of smaller ones that reflect the wishes of its communities.
I do think that a set of very basic international rules - such as those covered by the war crimes and crimes against humanity laws which have been discussing - should also exist and Nation States should be held to account against them. This should, in theory at least, offer the sorts of protection we want to see for minorities, whther they are religious, racial or gender based.
I also like a bit of Nation State but I feel it's a good thing not a bad thing if certain fundamentals (over and above those you reference regarding war and atrocities) are enshrined somewhere superior to it. An example would be the right of girls to go to school. Or (still on gender equality but more relevant to the western world) female reproductive rights - a minimum threshold there such that (eg) a country cannot outright prohibit abortion.
Of course a supranational body can't 100% enforce such principles on a recalcitrant or dissenting Nation State, nevertheless I think the more we introduce and support such structures, and the more teeth they have, the better. This should be the direction of travel imo rather than leaving them, ignoring them, defanging them, or generally giving them the proverbial finger and saying "nope, what the elected politicians of a country say goes as regards that country, end of".
One would need a world army/gendarmerie to enforce such things, and I see no appetite to create one.
Ok but ideal world direction of travel, I mean. Also even if not enforceable it's good if you can put friction in the way of elected politicians wanting to do grim things that violate fundamental human rights like outright bans on abortion.
Thought experiment: Imagine Leeds City Council wants to ban abortion in Leeds in response to voter demand in Leeds. That's democratic yes? Course it is. The people of Leeds have spoken. But what we say to Leeds City Council is: Sorry, you can't do that. There's a higher body (Westminster) that forbids it.
Now ratchet up a notch. Westminster wants to ban abortion in the UK in response to voter demand in the UK. Democratic? Again yes. Very much so. But what we should imo be saying to Westminster is as before for Leeds: Sorry, you can't do that. There's a higher body that forbids it. Same thing. Same principle.
In this case the 'higher body' could be national (Supreme Court) or (better) international. Course national leaders could still do shit like banning abortion at the end of the day (because like you say they control the police and the army) but we've put some friction in there. We've made it harder for them.
With their history, it would frankly be incredible if most Jews DIDN’T care about Israel
Of course, Israel is the only nation in the world with a Jewish majority, therefore the only nation in the world Jews can truly be safe
Is the only place that members of a particular religious, ethnic or ethno-religious group can truly be safe in a nation where they are a majority? That view is both depressingly pessimistic and harks back to a some 19th-century notion of the nation state built around an ethnos that I thought we had long since abandoned.
We should make the world safe for all minorities and majorities.
What does it mean to make the world safe for majorities if you deny their right to remain majorities?
I would want to interrogate what you mean. Individuals have rights. Individuals have the right to safety and to be allowed to express their identities. What does it mean to say a group has the right to remain a majority?
Let's say you follow religion X and you live in a country that has a majority of other people who follow religion X. What happens if a bunch of your countrymen convert to a different religion or abandon any religion (as is happening with Christianity in the UK)? What does a "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean in that situation? Do you get to force your countrymen to not change religion? Do you get to expel them? What happens if your coreligionists just happen to have fewer kids and a minority group are a bit more fecund, until one day you are in the minority? Should your "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean you get to decide how many kids other people have?
It seems to be illiberal and undemocratic to state that a nation state must retain a certain religious or ethnic majority.
I guess you may be alluding to ideas around abolishing the Israeli state, subsuming it into some larger Israel/Palestine single state. That raises different questions. I think the people of Israel should get to decide what happens to them, so I would not want to see any change in the nation that is not supported by democratic majority. So, to take a different example, if Moldovans want to merge with Romania and cease to be the Republic of Moldova (and Romanians agree), then that should happen, and if Moldovans don't want to merge with Romania and they want Moldova to continue as a separate country, then that should happen.
Then there are multiple other Christian majority countries you can still go to if a Christian in the UK, even if the UK is no longer Christian majority.
There is only 1 Jewish majority nation however, Israel and after millions of Jews were murdered in Europe in the Holocaust and anti Semitism present in every other nation of the world it is no surprise the vast majority of Jews wish to keep Israel as the Jewish homeland. A place of safety if needed to move to if things ever get too bad for Jews again in their nation of residence
The desire of many Jews for Israel as a Jewish homeland to exist is understandable. The desire of many Armenians for Armenia as a homeland to exist is understandable. The desire of many Kurds for Kurdistan as a homeland to exist is understandable.
The question is how you balance the rights of different people. Should we carve out a Kurdistan, making a bunch of non-Kurds suddenly minorities in a new nation?
Let's imagine a new religion emerged in Galilee, people believe in a new messiah called Hyufd. Hyufdism spreads and many Israeli Jews convert to Hyufidsm. One day, Judaism is no longer in a majority in Israel. (This has happened before, twice.) What happens? Are the choices of individuals to convert less important than the desire for a Jewish majority nation?
Every citizen of Israel should have equal rights, to worship what religion they want to (or how they want to), to follow what social customs and practices they want to, to speak what language they want to at home, to have the number of children they want to. Those rights, I suggest, trump any collective right of a majority to remain a majority.
I support a Kurdish state and it now effectively exists in Northern Iraq and Northern Syria anyway.
Were Jews a minority in Israel even after Jesus walked the earth? The evidence is not clear. What is clear is it is now the only place they are genuinely safe from anti Semitism and fine kumbaya platitudes about universal human rights ain't much help when things really go bad in your nation of residence. As the Jews discovered the League of Nations was hopeless to protect them in Germany once the Nazis took over and as Ukraine has discovered the UN was also largely ineffective once Putin invaded, they had to fight to preserve their homeland themselves
What, pray, is a ‘fine kumbaya platitude’?
Homo sapiens can be a very nasty, aggressive species when faced with something it doesn’t like. Ask Homo neanderthalis.
TBF, we don't actually know what finished off the Neanderthals.
I read that as Netherlands !
It was the chocolate sprinkles on toast that did it.
It reflects well on Rishi, since the sense of her letter is that’s she’s been left in the corner with the safety scissors, glue, and glitter, and kept away from doing any real damage.
She clearly doesn’t have the self awareness to realise how idiotic she has made herself look.
The problem is not that Suella Braverman is right wing. It is that she postures, but is useless.
The letter - which of course is self serving - gives quite a convincing argument she isn’t useless - she has been thwarted
I’ve no idea if this is true. I am fairly sure it is not good news for Sunak
An almighty bust up is brewing in the Tories. Maybe they just need to split
Someone that aches for power so obviously? I'd just guess that they'd be entirely crap, and the evidence is that Braverman is a little worse.
Shameful and all the Tories on here doubt we're a racist country!
How do you think the French would poll on the issue?
They would NEVER vote Le Pen and even countries who have considered it have never suggested the asylum seeker never having the chance to enter their country.
A very interesting country Argentina. Buenos Aires is a terrific city. People dancing the tango on every street corner and in the parks. It reminded me of Madrid on a grander scale. A lot of Germans there. I never thought it appropriate to ask how this German colony had originated! I shot a Repsol commercial there.
There’s also a large Welsh contingent in Argentina as well.
With their history, it would frankly be incredible if most Jews DIDN’T care about Israel
Of course, Israel is the only nation in the world with a Jewish majority, therefore the only nation in the world Jews can truly be safe
Is the only place that members of a particular religious, ethnic or ethno-religious group can truly be safe in a nation where they are a majority? That view is both depressingly pessimistic and harks back to a some 19th-century notion of the nation state built around an ethnos that I thought we had long since abandoned.
We should make the world safe for all minorities and majorities.
What does it mean to make the world safe for majorities if you deny their right to remain majorities?
I would want to interrogate what you mean. Individuals have rights. Individuals have the right to safety and to be allowed to express their identities. What does it mean to say a group has the right to remain a majority?
Let's say you follow religion X and you live in a country that has a majority of other people who follow religion X. What happens if a bunch of your countrymen convert to a different religion or abandon any religion (as is happening with Christianity in the UK)? What does a "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean in that situation? Do you get to force your countrymen to not change religion? Do you get to expel them? What happens if your coreligionists just happen to have fewer kids and a minority group are a bit more fecund, until one day you are in the minority? Should your "right to remain [a] majorit[y]" mean you get to decide how many kids other people have?
It seems to be illiberal and undemocratic to state that a nation state must retain a certain religious or ethnic majority.
I guess you may be alluding to ideas around abolishing the Israeli state, subsuming it into some larger Israel/Palestine single state. That raises different questions. I think the people of Israel should get to decide what happens to them, so I would not want to see any change in the nation that is not supported by democratic majority. So, to take a different example, if Moldovans want to merge with Romania and cease to be the Republic of Moldova (and Romanians agree), then that should happen, and if Moldovans don't want to merge with Romania and they want Moldova to continue as a separate country, then that should happen.
Agree with this. I have long held that the Nation State is the best guarantee of democracy and stability for the people living within its boundaries. But that does not mean that any individual Nation State has a right to continue to exist if that is not what the people want. It can either merge into a larger nation state or split into a number of smaller ones that reflect the wishes of its communities.
I do think that a set of very basic international rules - such as those covered by the war crimes and crimes against humanity laws which have been discussing - should also exist and Nation States should be held to account against them. This should, in theory at least, offer the sorts of protection we want to see for minorities, whther they are religious, racial or gender based.
I also like a bit of Nation State but I feel it's a good thing not a bad thing if certain fundamentals (over and above those you reference regarding war and atrocities) are enshrined somewhere superior to it. An example would be the right of girls to go to school. Or (still on gender equality but more relevant to the western world) female reproductive rights - a minimum threshold there such that (eg) a country cannot outright prohibit abortion.
Of course a supranational body can't 100% enforce such principles on a recalcitrant or dissenting Nation State, nevertheless I think the more we introduce and support such structures, and the more teeth they have, the better. This should be the direction of travel imo rather than leaving them, ignoring them, defanging them, or generally giving them the proverbial finger and saying "nope, what the elected politicians of a country say goes as regards that country, end of".
One would need a world army/gendarmerie to enforce such things, and I see no appetite to create one.
Ok but ideal world direction of travel, I mean. Also even if not enforceable it's good if you can put friction in the way of elected politicians wanting to do grim things that violate fundamental human rights like outright bans on abortion.
Thought experiment: Imagine Leeds City Council wants to ban abortion in Leeds in response to voter demand in Leeds. That's democratic yes? Course it is. The people of Leeds have spoken. But what we say to Leeds City Council is: Sorry, you can't do that. There's a higher body (Westminster) that forbids it.
Now ratchet up a notch. Westminster wants to ban abortion in the UK in response to voter demand in the UK. Democratic? Again yes. Very much so. But what we should imo be saying to Westminster is as before for Leeds: Sorry, you can't do that. There's a higher body that forbids it. Same thing. Same principle.
In this case the 'higher body' could be national (Supreme Court) or (better) international. Course national leaders could still do shit like banning abortion at the end of the day (because like you say they control the police and the army) but we've put some friction in there. We've made it harder for them.
Many of us can agree with you almost right to the end there. Something like abortion is not for international courts to decide, but for individual jurisdictions based on their own morality.
The letter is so deranged I think it's probably neutral at worst for Sunak. The petulant childishness of it does rather justify him sacking her. Hard to imagine Cameron writing a letter like that.
It’s brutal. It’s also much better written than the Jenkyns letter (not hard)
And where is this petulant childishness? Its lucid, firm, bracing - and it drills right into Sunak’s perceived flaws: mainly weakness
It will damage him
Lets look at the letter again: 1. Details firm promises made on policy detail, anchored back to their manifesto 2. Notes that Sunak is unelected by anyone and was actively rejected by the party 3. Refers to repeated letters sent to try and drive engagement and action to deliver said policy details - I assume she has copies as she will need to show them 4. Describes how he is either shit at politics or a liar - or both 5. Sets out her preferred nuclear option which he has ignored
Brutal, savage, designed to fire up the right of the party against him. Got to hand it to her, its brilliant. What does he do? The right won't let him brush it aside and move on. And unless he can show she is lying about her specific points he will have to deflect and evade. And that won't work either.
Of course, Israel already exists, so it's a different situation. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the Zionism/Bundism debates of the early 20th century, Israel has been a nation state for three quarters of a century and I don't think that should change (unless so desired by the people of Israel). It seems likely that Israel will remain a majority Jewish nation for many decades. However, I don't believe that being so is the only way to protect Jews worldwide or that the rights of individual Israelis to be who they want to be should be overridden. My own country has come from being Christian majority to Christian minority in my lifespan. If Israel changes in similar ways, it changes.
You keep repeating the same points, HYUFD. You have not made clear what you want to happen. How would you maintain Israel as evermore a Jewish majority nation? If many Israelis converted to Christianity and threatened that majority, what measures would you want taken? If non-Jewish Israelis have more kids and the population shifts over time, what measures would you want taken?
You seem to be making an unstated assumption that the direction of travel will always be towards greater multiculturalism.
What if the decline of one majority were instead replaced by another that wanted to establish a different kind of state?
I'm not assuming the direction of travel will always be towards greater multiculturalism. It might be, it might not be.
I am a democrat. If the population changes and people want a "different kind of state", then they should get a different kind of state. Isn't that how democracy works?
Of course, it's not always quite that simple. If a majority wants to kill everyone called "William", then, no, that should be stopped! There is a (difficult) balance between basic human rights and democracy. A majority in Israel, by some polling, want Jews to have more rights than non-Jews, and I think that would be a mistake. If the situation changed and some future majority wanted to have more rights than Jews, that would also be wrong.
Democracy is about more than voting, it requires respect for minorities.
The idea that Jews* can only be safe from genocide in their own ethnostate is absurd. Certainly there is anti-semitism in many or even all countries, but that doesn't mean genocide. There is no risk of the Shoah being repeated anywhere in Europe.
*or Sikhs, Kurds, Rohingya, Yazedi, Afrikaaners, etc etc.
Lots of confidence on this point from people with little to no stake in the outcome.
Always worth remembering that it was viewed as unthinkable that a civilized country like Germany would do anything like that in the 1930s. Also that it doesn't need to happen in exactly the same way as last time (or the time before that, or the time before that...) in order to justify a mass flight of Jews towards Israel.
A very interesting country Argentina. Buenos Aires is a terrific city. People dancing the tango on every street corner and in the parks. It reminded me of Madrid on a grander scale. A lot of Germans there. I never thought it appropriate to ask how this German colony had originated! I shot a Repsol commercial there.
When were you there? I traveled widely in Argentina in 2019. Buenos Aires is a faded dump - you can still see the glimpses of its once-gilded architecture - the Barcelona of South America etc - but now it is overwhelmed by poverty and new migrants, outside some rare lush suburbs
In places it is seriously dangerous
Paradoxically, everywhere else I went in Argentina seemed pleasant to properly pleasant. In much of the country the climate is kind. Malbec wine flows like water. There are spectacular landscapes. Yes they are quite poor but not obviously poorer than their neighbours - and not obviously poorer than, say, Sicilians - where I have just been
It has such great potential, too. Don’t write it off
Senior Stephen Lawrence officer Ray Adams was corrupt, says secret Met report
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-67372493 A senior officer involved in the Stephen Lawrence murder case was corrupt, according to a secret Met Police report uncovered by the BBC. It said Ray Adams was cleared by a corruption probe which relied on false testimony from a man linked to the family of one of Stephen's killers. The revelation contradicts years of police denial about the role of corrupt officers in the case. Mr Adams says he has asked the Met to investigate the allegations. The Metropolitan Police did not answer the BBC's questions about the report's conclusions regarding Mr Adams. The force said it will review material before deciding whether any further action is required. Imran Khan, solicitor for Stephen's mother Baroness Lawrence, said the report about Mr Adams - a former commander, who was once head of criminal intelligence for the entire Met - was "dramatic, disturbing and shocking". Sir William Macpherson's landmark 1998 public inquiry into the murder did not hear about this link between Mr Adams and the informant. Fourteen years later, the Met said there was no suggestion of any relationship between the two...
Line of Duty was a documentary...
It's quite a long read, but the details are remarkable, and disgraceful.
It reflects well on Rishi, since the sense of her letter is that’s she’s been left in the corner with the safety scissors, glue, and glitter, and kept away from doing any real damage.
She clearly doesn’t have the self awareness to realise how idiotic she has made herself look.
The problem is not that Suella Braverman is right wing. It is that she postures, but is useless.
The letter - which of course is self serving - gives quite a convincing argument she isn’t useless - she has been thwarted
I’ve no idea if this is true. I am fairly sure it is not good news for Sunak
An almighty bust up is brewing in the Tories. Maybe they just need to split
A very interesting country Argentina. Buenos Aires is a terrific city. People dancing the tango on every street corner and in the parks. It reminded me of Madrid on a grander scale. A lot of Germans there. I never thought it appropriate to ask how this German colony had originated! I shot a Repsol commercial there.
There’s also a large Welsh contingent in Argentina as well.
In Patagonia which is a region shared between Argentina and Chile
It reflects well on Rishi, since the sense of her letter is that’s she’s been left in the corner with the safety scissors, glue, and glitter, and kept away from doing any real damage.
She clearly doesn’t have the self awareness to realise how idiotic she has made herself look.
The problem is not that Suella Braverman is right wing. It is that she postures, but is useless.
The letter - which of course is self serving - gives quite a convincing argument she isn’t useless - she has been thwarted
I’ve no idea if this is true. I am fairly sure it is not good news for Sunak
An almighty bust up is brewing in the Tories. Maybe they just need to split
Nah. I think the new top team- Sunak, Dowden, Cameron, Cleverley - will be pretty united and will happily face down the mutineers. There will be a battle after the election and I rather suspect Cleverley is being lined up by the party establishment with Badenoch as as the approved alternative. Braverman, or whoever the rightwing factionalists line up, will likely get squeezed out.
Braverman has rotten ratings with the public - she's no Boris - a paper tiger.
Comments
Where someone dies as a result of someone else's gross negligence or recklessness, it can still legitimately be called an "accident". Accidents aren't necessarily blameless.
The other thing to bear in mind is that, for poorly-observed regions of the world, the ECMWF dataset (I'm assuming they've used the reanalysis) is mostly the output of the computer model, because the observations only provide a weak constraint in some areas.
In that sense the statistical model has been trained on the physics model to a certain extent, and so is perhaps a cheaper way of reproducing it, but you might want to repeat the exercise when the ECMWF model is later improved.
I am a democrat. If the population changes and people want a "different kind of state", then they should get a different kind of state. Isn't that how democracy works?
Of course, it's not always quite that simple. If a majority wants to kill everyone called "William", then, no, that should be stopped! There is a (difficult) balance between basic human rights and democracy. A majority in Israel, by some polling, want Jews to have more rights than non-Jews, and I think that would be a mistake. If the situation changed and some future majority wanted to have more rights than Jews, that would also be wrong.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/14/opinion/trump-stephen-miller-immigration.html
Do you have a different approach you want to suggest?
If Israel ceases to be a majority Jewish state that is it for Jews, if another holocaust is pursued against Jews they will again have no safe majority nation of their own to flee to. It is completely different for Christians in the UK as if the now minority Christian population here is persecuted their are multiple other Christain majority nations in the Americas, southern Europe, Ireland, Poland, southern Africa, the Philippines etc they could flee to.
Jews have no such option if persecuted in their nation of residence, their is no other majority Jewish nation on earth but Israel. Hence they will preserve Israel at all costs, including restricting immigration only to ethnic Jews etc (the birthrate of Orthodox Jews in Israel is high enough for that to be unlikely to be an issue though)
So far as has been identified to date sub-Saharan Africans are the only ‘pure’ Homo sapiens on the planet.
Generally agreed by whom?
https://order-order.com/2023/11/14/suella-this-is-for-the-best/
Might the court case going against migrant deportations prove to the be trigger?
There will always be a disconnect between the ideal and the practical but that doesn't mean you abandon the ideal.
·
Nov 14
Britons support the government's Rwanda plan by 48% to 35%
Strong support: 28%
Tend to support: 20%
Tend to oppose: 11%
Strong oppose: 24%
Don't know: 18%
https://x.com/YouGov/status/1724463836202254476?s=20
Of course some Scottish nationalists were not exactly unsympathetic to the Nazis in WW2, a pity you too have still not found it within yourself to support the Jewish homeland of Israel
"As on so many other issues, you sought to put off tough decisions in order to minimise political risk to yourself."
If you want to read it without giving pageviews to Guido (not that Musk is a whole lot better):
https://twitter.com/SuellaBraverman/status/1724465401982070914
The replies to her Tweet are quite amusing.
https://twitter.com/SuellaBraverman/status/1724465401982070914
Whether Jews worldwide will "preserve Israel at all costs" is debatable. No group is homogeneous and talking about all Jews as if they are of a single mind is ridiculous. The attitudes of orthodox Ashkenazi Jews in Israel versus liberal Jews in Tel Aviv versus liberal Jews in much of the US versus those in New York's orthodox Jewish communities are wildly different. (For example, many orthodox Jews in New York are strongly opposed to Zionism on religious grounds.)
However, I was asking more about what you think is the right approach. You've mentioned ethnicity-based immigration policies (although not whether you think they are right). What do you think is acceptable to keep Israel a majority Jewish nation? Would you ban conversion to Christianity? Would you have different rules for Jewish and non-Jewish Israeli citizens? I don't see how one can have a liberal democracy and a guarantee of Israel as evermore a Jewish majority nation. I don't think any nation should be defined as eternally of one religion.
She clearly doesn’t have the self awareness to realise how idiotic she has made herself look.
Coming on now 5pm news....
The latest ConHome leadership ratings (and pinch of salt required as not necessarily reflective of broader membership) had Sunak on a relatively lowly +7% net, and he's been lower, but Braverman was on +43%.
If the election is a disaster, Tory members aren't going to thank Sunak. He's not got the support Major had - very different party in 1997, and Major had won them an election rather unexpectedly before he lost one (albeit heavily). It won't necessarily pay to go into a leadership election as a loyal lieutenant as opposed to saying "told you so".
Anyway, the linked Deepmind paper says "ECMWF is already experimenting with GraphCast’s 10-day forecasts" and links to
https://charts.ecmwf.int/products/graphcast_medium-mslp-wind850
Of course secular left liberals like aren't that bothered about Israel, you didn't have half your family wiped out in the Holocaust after all. We have learnt our lesson after all, won't happen again will it, why do Jews need a homeland of their own?
Yes there may be differences on social issues between liberal and Orthodox Jews, as there are in the political parties they vote for in Israel but on preservation of Israel they are as one. It must be preserved as the Jewish homeland no matter what the cost.
Hence Israel will eternally be for them a place of majority Jewish ethnicity, including controlling immigration if needed to ensure that
The letter is so deranged I think it's probably neutral at worst for Sunak. The petulant childishness of it does rather justify him sacking her. Hard to imagine Cameron writing a letter like that.
That's why I don't believe in defining nation states in terms of ethnoses or ethno-religious groups.
But at least he got around to sacking her in the end.
from
Sue Ellen Braverman
Aged 5 and three Quarters
Persecution of Jews was once the norm in almost all Western countries but is now much reduced. The system of international law is far from perfect but it is a work in progress.
No system is perfect but
By the time the Allies had captured Berlin, millions of Jews had already been murdered
You called me a racist for saying there are discernible and scientifically important genetic differences between Africans and others; you claimed they absolutely do not exist. I gave you this Neanderthal data as an example. Then you went all quiet. Now suddenly it’s an amazing and interesting discovery. Pffff
(And a fully open door isn't viable.)
Suella knows her market
The idea that Jews* can only be safe from genocide in their own ethnostate is absurd. Certainly there is anti-semitism in many or even all countries, but that doesn't mean genocide. There is no risk of the Shoah being repeated anywhere in Europe.
*or Sikhs, Kurds, Rohingya, Yazedi, Afrikaaners, etc etc.
As I have commented before, Sunak will not resign from the ECHR which is Braverman’s and the rights demand and he is correct not to do so, not least because of the WF and GFA
This open warfare was inevitable and I do have confidence that Sunak,Cameron, Cleverly and others will win for the soul of the,conservative party while Braverman and her sycophants can join ReformUK with the likes of Farage and Tice
Le Pen 31%, Phillippe 25%, Melenchon 14%, Zemmour 6.5%, Wauquiez 5%
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2027_French_presidential_election#First_round
And where is this petulant childishness? Its lucid, firm, bracing - and it drills right into Sunak’s perceived flaws: mainly weakness
It will damage him
I am concerned about Israel. You don't know my life, my family, my friends. My grandfather was killed by a Nazi bomb, while my grandmother's family were hosting German Jewish refugees. Of course, it was the Conservative government in the 1930s who made it harder for those refugees to come to the UK.
You underestimate the differences in views of Israel among Jewish people. Go read about Neturei Karta in Stamford Hill who are strongly opposed to the existence of the state of Israel.
More generally, you are repeating yourself and not answering my questions. If you don't want to, fine, but it's a bit pointless us just going around in circles. I don't want to stop Israel being a majority, Jewish nation. (I think Bibi should be in jail, but broadly what Israel does should be up to Israelis, not me, or you.) I don't think it is democratic to deny the possibility that such a change might happen in the future. I think we should move away from a 19th-centure view of nation states built on a single ethnos, but I understand and acknowledge the desire of many ethnic groups for a nation state of their own.
As an aside, there are plenty of crimes in the UK which go unpanished because we lack the ability and resources to catch the criminals. Your argument would hold that we should no longer have their actions as crimes because we are unable to always enforce the laws.
I’ve no idea if this is true. I am fairly sure it is not good news for Sunak
An almighty bust up is brewing in the Tories. Maybe they just need to split
Thought experiment: Imagine Leeds City Council wants to ban abortion in Leeds in response to voter demand in Leeds. That's democratic yes? Course it is. The people of Leeds have spoken. But what we say to Leeds City Council is: Sorry, you can't do that. There's a higher body (Westminster) that forbids it.
Now ratchet up a notch. Westminster wants to ban abortion in the UK in response to voter demand in the UK. Democratic? Again yes. Very much so. But what we should imo be saying to Westminster is as before for Leeds: Sorry, you can't do that. There's a higher body that forbids it. Same thing. Same principle.
In this case the 'higher body' could be national (Supreme Court) or (better) international. Course national leaders could still do shit like banning abortion at the end of the day (because like you say they control the police and the army) but we've put some friction in there. We've made it harder for them.
It was the chocolate sprinkles on toast that did it.
1. Details firm promises made on policy detail, anchored back to their manifesto
2. Notes that Sunak is unelected by anyone and was actively rejected by the party
3. Refers to repeated letters sent to try and drive engagement and action to deliver said policy details - I assume she has copies as she will need to show them
4. Describes how he is either shit at politics or a liar - or both
5. Sets out her preferred nuclear option which he has ignored
Brutal, savage, designed to fire up the right of the party against him. Got to hand it to her, its brilliant. What does he do? The right won't let him brush it aside and move on. And unless he can show she is lying about her specific points he will have to deflect and evade. And that won't work either.
Always worth remembering that it was viewed as unthinkable that a civilized country like Germany would do anything like that in the 1930s. Also that it doesn't need to happen in exactly the same way as last time (or the time before that, or the time before that...) in order to justify a mass flight of Jews towards Israel.
In places it is seriously dangerous
Paradoxically, everywhere else I went in Argentina seemed pleasant to properly pleasant. In much of the country the climate is kind. Malbec wine flows like water. There are spectacular landscapes. Yes they are quite poor but not obviously poorer than their neighbours - and not obviously poorer than, say, Sicilians - where I have just been
It has such great potential, too. Don’t write it off
Will it be a split or a mirror image of "Change"?
https://www.wales.com/about/language/history-welsh-people-patagonia
Braverman has rotten ratings with the public - she's no Boris - a paper tiger.