Oliver February

[Oliver February @oliverfebruary]

@History__Speaks @hasanthehun @History_Speaks, what would you recommend reading regarding Mizrahi Jewish migration/ethnic cleansing? Are any of Avi Shlaim's books particularly good on this issue?

[Oliver February @oliverfebruary]

@sapinker does this mean you think its creation was good or bad?

[Steven Pinker @sapinker]

Israel’s Creation: The Ultimate ‘Decolonisation’ Project https://t.co/ifeYQNMrHk

[the song cave @thesongcave]

"I think that fiction is one of the places where we go for silence, a worded silence, words that amount to or return to silence. And the best fiction maybe even aspires to a kind of muteness."

-our tender bookworm, Michael Silverblatt, rest in peace ❤️

[Oliver February @oliverfebruary]

@sapinker are you ok with the documents in question being about 9 or 10 anonymous x messages and even fewer anecdotes? How do you reconcile that with an insistence on the importance of statistics and overall trends? Do you care about academic Israel critics who've suffered worse?

[Steven Pinker @sapinker]

A Spiral of Silence: Maarten Boudry @mboudry documents how disagreement with the reckless accusation of "genocide" in Gaza is enforced in academia (particularly in Europe) by outright intimidation, leading to dissenters being silenced, reinforcing the illusion of consensus (a common dynamic in intellectual repression). https://t.co/aYBT1og57f

[Nelee Mazibuko @NeleeOzone]

Happy new month ✨

[Oliver February @oliverfebruary]

@sapinker Zionism has been tried and the outcomes are oppression, poverty, stupid 'wars', and also ethnic cleansing, collective punishment, and mass murder. Will you acknowldege that, by your own standards, it has been a disaster?

[Steven Pinker @sapinker]

I spoke with @LaulPatricia about Marxism:

One is: What’s remarkable is that Marxism has been tried. Now, of course, defenders of Marxism say it hasn’t really been tried anywhere, but certainly the people who implemented it claimed they were implementing Marxism.

And this is a massive experiment—a global experiment—with a very clear outcome. Namely, the Soviet Union was a disaster. The imposition of communism on Eastern Europe was a disaster. The imposition of communism in Venezuela was a disaster. The imposition of communism in Maoist China was a disaster. Disaster in terms of both poverty and oppression and genocide and stupid wars. So the world has told us what happens under communism, and it’s a sign of how out of touch intellectuals can be that there are still people who defend it despite the entire world giving a very clear-cut answer.

One more is: would you rather live in North Korea or South Korea? Would you rather live in the old East Germany or West Germany? We have an experimental group and a matched control group in terms of culture, language, and geography, and the answer is crystal clear. So this is a sign of, I think, the pathology of intellectual life—that Marxism can persist.

The other is, you did call attention to one of the appeals of Marxism, though, and more generally of heavy, strong influence of government guided by intellectuals, which is that there are certain kinds of reforms that you can state as principles. You can articulate them verbally as propositions—like equality, human rights, democracy—but there’s other kinds of progress that take place in massive distributed networks of millions of people, none of whom implements some policy. But collectively, there is an order, an organization that’s beneficial.

So that can happen organically through, for example, the development of a language. No one designed the English language. It’s just hundreds of millions of English speakers. They coin new words. They forget old words. They try to make themselves clear. And we get the English language and the other 5,000 languages spoken on earth.

Likewise, a market economy is something where knowledge is distributed. You don’t have a central planner deciding how many shoes of size 8 will be needed in a particular city, but rather information is conveyed by prices, which are adjusted according to supply and demand. And you’ve got a distributed network of exchange of information that can result in an emergent benefit.

Now, intellectuals tend to hate that. They like rules of language—of correct grammar. They like top-down economic planning. They like cultural change that satisfies particular ideals described by intellectuals. And so rival sources of organization, like commerce, like culture—traditional culture—tend to be downplayed by intellectuals.

And this can be magnified by the fact that many dictatorships give a privileged role to intellectuals, which may be why, over the course of the 20th century, and probably continuing to the present, there has not been a dictator that has not had fans among intellectuals—including the mullahs and ayatollahs of Iran, but also the communist dictators: Mao and Castro, even Stalin in his day. And every other dictator has had, actually, often fawning praise from Western intellectuals.

[Oliver February @oliverfebruary]

@sapinker how comforting for you, that protests against your government's participation in the destruction of civilian life in Gaza are counterproductive!

[Steven Pinker @sapinker]

An MIT student, Sidhu Pachipala, notes that protests, a favorite pastime of students, are often ineffective or counterproductive. (He could have added that they are not necessarily on the right side of history: Students protested for Hitler & book-burnings in the 30s, for segregation in the 50s, and for Khomeini in 1979. The 60s protests against Vietnam were mixed with support for communism, Maoism, anarchism, and Ho Chi Minh. Even their role in ending the Vietnam war is questionable – the backlash elected Nixon in 1968 and 1972). https://t.co/s6UURr0N0u via @BostonGlobe

[Oliver February @oliverfebruary]

@MeToobirdy @jk_rowling Maybe you could ask a woman to advise you on how free speech works.

[Oliver February @oliverfebruary]

@MeToobirdy @jk_rowling I support anyone posting whatever they want, including men posting questions.

[Oliver February @oliverfebruary]

@jk_rowling @jk_rowling will you respond directly to anyone disagreeing with you on these issues or just continue to post AI-generated images that don’t fit your claims, or to pretend that Jewish supremacy is synonymous with the Jews (to borrow your phrasing).

[Oliver February @oliverfebruary]

@jk_rowling @jk_rowling supporters of US and Israeli hegemony don’t care when their cause conflicts with Iranian rights. Will you criticise them or acknowledge that doing so doesn’t preclude care for Iranian civilians?

[Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald]

This photo that Western regime-change enthusiasts are trying to turn into an iconic image is a woman in Canada, not Iran.

But who cares if war propaganda is accurate?

Why are Saudi, Egyptian and Emirati women never shown facing the brutal repression from US/UK-funded regimes?

[Oliver February @oliverfebruary]

@jk_rowling @IanMalcolm84 To anyone observing that he wrote the words Jewish supremacy: are you saying that all Jews are Jewish supremacists or that criticising Jewish supremacy is antisemitic?

[Oliver February @oliverfebruary]

@jk_rowling @IanMalcolm84 @jk_rowling, where in this post does he say it's the Jews fault? I thought conflating Israel with all jews is antisemitism.

[Oliver February @oliverfebruary]

@jk_rowling @jk_rowling, do you think supporters of human rights should express an opinion on every protest in the world? Do you support human rights? If so, why did you promote police threats to deny people's speech rights and stop them from showing solidarity with Palestinians?

[Oliver February @oliverfebruary]

@VFPlus Which other countries fit this description?

[Nathan J Robinson @NathanJRobinson]

attacking doctors without borders for being willing to call a genocide a genocide is heinous

[Oliver February @oliverfebruary]

@NathanJRobinson If @sapinker cares about free speech, incl accusations of genocide, he'll address the many ways Israel has killed, arrested, banned, or otherwise censored its critics. Perhaps he'll even respond to these questions. https://t.co/F8YU9oBiKz

[Oliver February @oliverfebruary]

@sapinker do you think Israel’s ban on aid groups, incl. MSF, entering Gaza has nothing to do with the original article or with Quillette publishing this video summary in the same week? Do you support the ban or think it’s important to mention when discussing Israel and MSF?