Yeah I was thinking steins;gate too. But it hits way different to SEL. Same for GitS and GitS:SAC, they tickle overlapping parts of my brain in that exploration of identity and the digital world overlaying the material world.
I tend to say and write "Jewish people" in place of "Jews" because otherwise it feels like I sound like a Nazi. I suppose I do this with most ethnic groups though, on reflection. Eg referring to black people as "blacks" parses as racist and reminds me of how white south Africans spoke about their indigenous populations.
Reminds me of "transwomen" vs "trans women" discourse in a lot of ways vis-à-vis othering or in the case of ethnicity, dehumanization.
Thank you for posting the Baldwin excerpt. I should have read the comments before posting, it really helped crytalise the core issue explained in the essay for me.
I realise that I've focused in on this without also acknowledging/exploring the complicity of the rest of the world in requiring Palestinian messaging to be so precise and stripped back in order for us to digest it without disregarding it off-hand or interpreting it in bad faith.
I'm not sure what to say further on that specifically, except that the scale of opposition Palestinians face even in telling their stories is so massive. We have an important duty to push back had against lazy or willful misinterpretation of Palestinian voices whenever and wherever we encounter it. To help people properly contextualise these voices and their messages.
Even though it makes sense now that I know, I had no idea there was such a focus on teaching Holocaust and antisemitism history and theory to the Palestinian people.
I've been aware of Palestinian academic contribution to that area of study, which I have found to be an interesting phenomenon but I suppose I assumed was a product of organic curiosity/interest (or, frankly pragmatic "tactical" motivation in a diplomatic sense) in understanding the psychology and mythos of Israelis and of Zionism.
How the author describes the complex and distracting (political) necessity of communicating the atrocities and indignities committed against the Palestinian people in politically correct and precise language is something I think we can all relate to.
It has always felt like "first world problems" to be frustrated by this, which it generally is for me, I live in such comparative luxury that the burden of precise speech isn't much of a burden at all in practice. But often we do have to blunten a lot of emotion and passionate rhetoric in order to communicate around social justice and human rights issues in a way that preemptively heads off bad faith misinterpretation and derailment of our messaging.
That regular Palestinians have to jump through the same hoops and police their own speech while talking about (and actively, continually, experiencing) such brutal mistreatment and exploitation is just.. Words fail me, tbh. I can't imagine how frustrating and disempowering it must be.
What a cruel mindfuck.
I have more sympathy than ever for the people who decide to pick up a gun instead.
As an aside, I think it speaks to the Israeli delusion that their "enemies" are entirely motivated by ignorant and religiously motivated hatred, that they expend such effort on this avenue of propaganda in the Palestinian regions / populations.
I thought it was humorous. I think he's likely disgusted by how much money he makes for doing so little work, was invited to write about "what is this 'pod casting' thing?" for some site and decided write a critical piece about the medium in a self deprecating way.
It's not like he's never worked in his life. He helped unionise a brewery.
If you're super offended just switch to pirating the thing.
Something something state monopoly on violins