> The piece isn’t claiming that AI tools are useless or that they don’t materially improve day-to-day work
Would you call something that could replace your labor "spicy auto complete"? He also evokes nfts and blockchain, for some reason. To me this phrasing makes it sound like he thinks they are damn near useless.
What cory thinks now doesn't affect the piece that focuses on the future and how humanity shapes around it. It feels like missing the forest for the trees to focus on what he feels about AI in c.2025 when the piece is talking about ramifications.
It's really not and I don't think it's worth arguing with you but.. Zionism is the establishment of a Jewish majority state.. which requires the expulsion of much of the existing non-Jewish population. That not the same as other countries acknowledging the borders of Palestine.
Palestinians are the indigenous people to the land who were ethnically cleansed via Nakba. It's not "nationalism" to allow people to return to the land that was stolen from them.
Maybe because most of them were born there and also their parents and grandparents?
That is called birthright and the way I see it, it applies to both groups. And the conflict will never be solved (without large scale genocide), if both groups largely negate the other groups rights.
You're right, expelling Israelis from Palestine would be a crime exactly as it's been a crime expelling Palestinians. While I believe that Jews had no right in the first place to immigrate there, this doesn't change the status of their descendants who are born there and whose families are born there.
But let's be clear on this: Jews that are not currently in Israel have no right to immigrate there. Jews that are in Israel have no right on any part of the land that isn't already part of Israel proper; and finally, Jews (exactly as much as Palestinians do) have a right to life, property and safety but not necessarily to their own political entity.
But what about Palestinians who were born elsewhere? Do they have a right to go back to their ancestors land?
To me it seems close to the arguments of the jewish who see themself as native, "just" on a larger timescale. There is no easy solution that I can see. (except letting go of fanatism)
In the case of Palestinians, "their ancestors" means their fathers or grandfathers. They still have the keys of their homes. In the case of Jews, it means some mythical ancestor of 2 thousand years ago or more.
But yes, the question of the "right of return" of Palestinian refugees is a tough one; but I think it's a distraction. The very minimum the international community should force Israel to, is to withdraw within the 1967 border and cease any interference with the territory and sovereignty of Palestinians. It won't happen because the goal of Israelis and Zionists everywhere is to conquer as much land as they can, and a constant state of attrition is the excuse they need to keep settling more ethnically-cleansed land.
Connecting these two concepts like Netanyahu et. al. are constantly (insincerely) doing, is actually breeding real antisemitism. I wish more people realized this.
Someone with a tendency towards racist generalisations might start disliking a particular group due to the zeitgeist identifying "disliking the behaviour of a political entity" with "disliking all members of an ethnic group", though. If they previously didn't hold any such views, then they would go from "not racist" to "racist". (If you disagree with my category boundaries, you can construct your own similar example for your preferred category boundaries.)
Just because something's wrong, that doesn't mean it's illogical. A logical conclusion from flawed premises is still logical.
The difference being that racists who do so are factually incorrect, when they blame the victims. You've just pointed to the actions of individuals (those who trained the racist in the racist culture) as a potential cause, and I'm inclined to agree with you: does that make us racists? I think not.
I don't think we should treat extremely powerful men as powerless victims of antisemitism who've done nothing to stoke the flames, a priori. Maybe they haven't: I certainly don't blame George Soros for the George Soros conspiracy theories (even though he partly does: I think he's wrong to blame himself any amount, since a non-Jew doing Black Wednesday or philanthropy wouldn't have emboldened the antisemites). But people in charge of states and militaries, who've been accused of war crimes by rather a lot of international justice bodies, who rarely let a chance to say "if you hate our decisions, you hate all members of this group" pass them by? They might be contributing to the bigotry. If a racist said something like that, we'd rightly condemn it as stoking the flames of hatred: why should it be any different, if someone else says it?
There's nothing supremacist about Zionism, it's just the support of Jewish self-determination. Efforts to twist it into something nefarious are just propaganda with no etymological basis.
Think about what you're saying. Zionism the idea that a particular ethnic group (the Jews) will have the authority to determine what happens in their country (Israel). That is a textbook case of ethnic supremacism. And that's not even mentioning the violent expulsion of the Arabs that this de facto entailed.
Most Zionists have a goal of preserving a Jewish majority for pragmatic reasons - history has shown that it's the only way to ensure the safety of Jews. That's not a supremacist ideology at all.
Moreover, no country is perfect, and we shouldn't have double standards just for Israel. Can you identify any other Middle Eastern country that compares favorably, in terms of diversity and tolerance of all religions and ethnicities?
"Judaism" sometimes refers to the religion, but many Jews are not religious. Jews are a group of people from Judea, hence its historical name. Some dispersion to other regions doesn't change where a group of people is from.
And think about how absurd it would be for anyone on the planet to go murder Africans and steal their land under the guise of it being our “homeland”. Sadly that has happened, but they didn’t bother to use that excuse.
- You could say that antisemites are a cause of Zionism, but that doesn't mean they intentionally support it. Not all antisemites are of the "go back to Palestine" type.
- Just as "antisemitism" doesn't actually mean hate of Semetic people, "antizionism" doesn't actually mean opposition to Zionism. Instead it developed into a rather separate hate movement. Many antizionism ostensibly support a 2SS, which would mean they actually support rather than oppose Zionism, but are nonetheless part of the antizionism movement.
Trying to frame the violent expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland as just "Jews trying to live in their own homeland".. isn't working in 2026 and nobody needs to read the thoughts of a man who saw Cecil Rhodes as a kindred spirit.
You mean the well-documented terrorist operations by Israel against Jews in the Arab disaspora? The terrorist state started with terrorism and sustained through it.
Remember when Germany lost the second world war, lost a third of its territory, had millions ethnically cleansed from said territory and then proceeded to not maintain a goal to wipe Poland off the map (again)?
Would you please stop posting flamebait and perpetuating flamewars? You've been doing this a ton lately and your account is crossing over the line (https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...). We've repeatedly asked you to fix this and your latest run has been one of the worst. That's not good.
One can similarly become Palestinian by immigrating to Palestine (and "fitting in", which involves speaking Arabic etc). Arafat was born in Egypt, for example.
Does this refute the notion that Palestinians are from Palestine? I would say no. Similarly Jews are from Judea, despite the existence of a small number of converts with "impure" lineage.
The focus on a particular location is a religious one (in the scriptures there was a Jewish homeland before Israel or Egypt, and Israel is singled out because God told them to go), but it's also a selective one that ignores all the times God arranged for Israel not to be there; and crucially does not stop and wait for His opinion about the present. It is the most dangerous kind of religious opinion: one invented by us.
Herzl makes no religious argument, he is fairly close to an atheist. That’s why I mentioned people should read the book or a summary before commenting on the matter.
Of course there could be, and Hertzel writes about it explicitly - the idea that Jews need a homeland because antisemitism makes it impossible for them to live within another people.
In regard to religion itself, like the other post said, he couldn't really care less and even advocated for Jews to convert to Christianity at a time, seeing it as another solution to the discrimination they're facing: "I see myself as an average modern Jew and I'm not afraid from the idea of a formal conversion to Christianity. I have a son, and I'd prefer converting today and not tomorrow so that his membership will start earlier and I can save him from the troubles and discrimination he'll face as a Jew".
Look, there's no way the coordinates this guy triangulated lined up with the religious site by chance. That would be similar to the odds that a flawed calculation of the age of the earth would turn out to be 6,000 years. If he had said anywhere else that argument might be right, but not of all places the temple mount, the one place in the world nobody would need any explanation for. If you're saying he was writing from a pragmatic standpoint, perhaps he argued that it would be convenient and more conducive to organizing power to follow along with what others believed: but that's still based on the religious thought.
Of course it did not happen by coincidence, but Hertzel himself was considering other places too. There were real discussions around the best location, and finally it was agreed that Mandatory Palestine is the place most Jews would unite around - due to history, religion, culture, existing population etc.
My point is that the idea that Jews need a homeland was prior to the idea of the exact location it should take place in. If you bundle history, culture, belief and a like into the word "religion", then sure, we can say that the later decision of the exact location was based on religion. For us non-religious Jews that sounds awkward: we feel connected to the place because of our culture, not because of our non-existing religious feelings - but that's just semantics.
I guess we have just been talking semantics. I am only saying that the cultural view came from the religious view originally. I don't think that is something many people would disagree about.
There are other groups that could claim the same: Romany/Gypsies would be a big one but no one seems to want to claim a North Indian homeland for them; Sikhs might be another.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say, but if there are other groups who are being discriminated against, and have a strong connection to a specific place on earth - be it Romany, Palestinians or whoever - I definitely wouldn't be the one objecting their right for self-determination. The way I studied Zionism as a child was clear: through our (Jews') right to a land we can understand the right to land of others.
Roma do have a supposed homeland in India and have been badly persecuted. There is an exceptionalism about Zionism. Many features can be found elsewhere. When I've seen Haredi in Israel, they look like Eastern Europeans to me in their mannerisms, dress (inappropriate for the heat) and even language. I personally think European Jews succeed better in the USA than Israel. Israel is under siege all the time. I have spent a few months in Israel. I left with a very different opinion.
"I don't believe in god but he promised me this land 3000 years ago" sums up Zionism pretty well, or "Jews aren't safe anywhere so let's create a state by wiping out and expelling the native population and make enemies of all our neighbors". It's such a laughably self-contradicting ideology
Except none of these statements are part of the Zionist agenda. You putting them in quotes does not make them a quote.
I already explained why your first "quote" is false: Hertzel didn't think Jews should move to Israel because it was promised to them.
The second one is also completely wrong: He never called for expelling the native population, and he actually advocated for close and good contacts with them and the surrounding countries.
The effect you're describing is often created when people with very distinct views agree on one thing and argue in favor of it along conflicting axiomatic lines.
Don't get too excited about their views - they very much believe that the land belongs to Jews, they just think they should wait for the Messiah to give us the signal before going there.
It's funny how people associate their views with humanism: they are simply extremely religious and on this specific question, the current result of their extreme beliefs happen to align with yours.
Oh, I am under no impression that they are less than batshit religious. But they are a very clear counterexample to the bullshit claim that I was responding to.
I recommend _Culture in Nazi Germany_ by Michael K Kater. [0]
The push for a Zionist state started and accelerated in the 1920s to the end of the 1930s. Most of the Jews that moved from Europe to Palestine, which was part of modern day Israel, were by the Zionists. Reason is because the only jobs at the time were farming so people would have to give up their current triad.
Number of these individuals actually supported fascism. Even after WWII the mind set was not that fascism was bad but poorly implemented. That mind set was shared by a number of Germans and Jews that moved to Palestine before Israel became a state.
It was not until the late 1960s that younger culture started to shift that mind set to fascism is bad.
If you think I am wrong about the summation of the book ... read it.
It's a hundred pages. If someone hasn't read it, or even a summary, they have little knowledge of Zionism. WW2 was far after the modern return of Jews to Israel.
I grew up in a very left leaning, pro terrorism household. I was absolutely wrong about what Zionism was - not a 'God promised me this because I'm special" as I was told but rather "racism means we need a homeland let's all go back to Israel".
You sound like you’re trying to collapse the term into a single definition based on one guy, which just doesn’t match the variety of people and motivations using it today. Christian white nationalists in the US are not calling themselves Zionist because “we need a homeland, let’s all go back to Israel”.
You might as well say that Republicans are the party that fought the Confederates and freed the slaves. It is not true today.
How does having a religious base state prevent bigotry and discrimination? Both are mutually exclusive.
In the world, Jews discriminate against Jews, Christians discriminate against Christians, Muslims discriminate Muslims, ... A religious state can only have one variant of religion that is deemed the right variation even though multiple variations exist.
The closest thing to a non bigot and discriminating state is one that is not built on religion but accepts other people and allows them to exercise their variation of religion.
Earth is the home land of humans not a politically divided territory.
"More rights than most Arab countries" lmao sure, just cause you keep repeating a slogan doesn't make it true, that's called propaganda, there's very systematic and well-documented racism towards anyone who's not a Jew
When it comes to their most basic democratic rights - the right to vote and the right to be elected - they're also better than most Arabs in Arab countries.
Less than half of Israelis are Askenazi, and unless your solution is to "ethnically cleanse" by sending people back to the countries their grandparents fled, it hardly matters.
Americans and Europeans have the false notion that Israeli Jews are predominantly European. They are not.
While I agree that the land has been taken by force, unfortunately returning the land is no longer an acceptable option.
The land of Israel has been developed in such a way that it has become completely different from what it was one century ago, and there is no doubt that its previous owners could have never succeeded to do a similar development, due to a combination of lacking both the financial means and the skilled labor capabilities.
While I believe that returning the land would be unjust at this time, I also believe that the never-ending war between Israelis and their neighbors can be stopped in only 2 ways, one of which is not acceptable in the modern world and which would bring eternal shame on Israel if they would ever succeed to realize it.
The second option is for Israel to do the same that Israel has demanded and has obtained from states like Germany. This means that Israel should admit that they have occupied the land by force and they should repair this by paying a just compensation to the remaining descendants of the former inhabitants, exactly like Israel has received from countries responsible for the oppression against Jews during WWII.
You need to take into account that Zionists are aging out of the population. The younger generations in the West absolutely support military action against Israel. If it was taken by force, it can be returned by force. I would definitely support US military action against Israel to defeat Zionism.
> younger generations in the West absolutely support military action against Israel
The West–and America in particular–has always had a contingent that believes in drawing foreign borders through force. Particularly in the Middle East. It goes back to Sykes and Picot.
I wouldn't put a war with Israel out of the cards in my lifetime. But it’s not happening in the next two decades—our neo-imperial ambitions have found purchase closer to home.
No land was stolen. All land was purchased before the war. All land taken after wars was taken after wars started by the Arabs.
That's always been the case with nations who lost wars. Germany lost the war and lost land because of it. Should Germany take back land that was "brutally taken from them"?
Or should they maybe just accept that they shouldn't have started the war? The Germans certainly have accepted that.
> If a war has finished, should the victor still be able to keep taking land off the loser? What’s the duration of that right?
Practically? In 2026? As long as you can keep it. We're back to deciding borders through force versus treaty. Which, based on the rhetoric around Gaza, is ambiguously worse.
At some point, all land has been taken either by direct force, or by the threat of force.
All land, everywhere. It is NOT a natural right that anyone owns any land, nor that any countries exist. That is something everyone's ancestors fought each other for and created as a system of human society.
Of course that's written in the past tense. Facing reality rather than the fantasy presented in history books and documentaries; not only did our ancestors do that, it hasn't stopped. The bloodshed still happens today in so many places. Those we might hear about in the news, and others forgotten even in the news because it is considered normal and thus ignored.
We are not yet a species of plenty. Scarcity still exists, at the very least in the real form of land where people want to be.
Antarctica is Earth's southernmost and least-populated continent.
Situated almost entirely south of the Antarctic Circle and surrounded by the Southern Ocean [ and ] is the fifth-largest continent, being about 40% larger than Europe, and has an area of 14,200,000 km2 (5,500,000 sq mi).
There was no one to "take it from" and when it was divided up by "Great powers" that was more by competition (race to open routes) and some notion of good sport:
Antarctica was claimed by several states since the 16th century, culminating in a territorial competition in the first half of the 20th century when its interior was explored and the first Antarctic camps and bases were set up.
Then there are the more remote parts of Australia, nominally "taken" by the English (despite not being reached for some time) and later returned (post Mabo) to the descendants of what seems likely to be first settlers some tens of thousands of years past (the multiple waves of settlement arguments and other aspects of the History Wars in the Black Armband / Quadrant circles are looking thin in these days of genetic markers).
But that one's a complex can of worms that takes some time to unpack.
> At some point, all land has been taken either by direct force, or by the threat of force
You're broadly correct. But there is land that was settled within the historical record.
The Levant, obviously, is not that. It was settled prior to the historical record. It is the coast closest to our cradle of civilisation. Every human with ancestry outside Africa has some sort of claim to lineage to that land.
'within the historical record' -- No one still makes a big deal about it because it happened long enough ago.
There are places that are not widely contested today, generally most of their present borders are assumed to be generally stable. Or places with obvious natural geographic bounds and mostly internal conflict through history.
Yet at some point were those places not battled over? Even the internal conflicts count, even if as a whole the majority of a country's population of today considers themselves of one people.
The regions that remain in conflict are considered such largely because of the people who have, at some point, lived in an area long enough for it to become a notable part of their history, they have not unified as a people OF a place, but as a distinct ethnic group (be that religious or otherwise) who happened to have at some time lived in some area.
They have all been 'wronged', and all* (generally an assumption but likely to be true) have 'wronged' others (at least in 'aggressive self defense' if not in some other way) at some point.
-- put into a metaphor --
There's a public park owned by the people (earth) which has a single tree that many children have made memories with. However two or more groups of childhood friends want to continue making memories with that tree and disagree with each other and how each other interact with the tree.
What is the solution?
The evil answer from a fiction writer is to destroy the tree to remove the problem. However that does not make a right.
Using any method to give the tree to one group would be a wrong to the other groups.
The groups cannot agree on how to share, nor how to all be full adults and make memories with the tree in peaceful coexistence.
Thus, lacking an accepted answer, the problem remains unresolved.
Most humans can legitimately claim ancestry to the Levant. It's the coast closest to the cradle of civilization.
There is absolutely evil happening in Gaza. But pretending this is black-and-white, from an ocean away, is just alienating. It turns what should be a broad political discussion into a niche issue.
> Most people on the planet view this as a black and white issue. Zionists are the modern day Nazis and I don't see a lot of sympathy for them.
No. Most people see the nuance. There are a small number of extremists (on both sides, granted) who see this as a black-and-white issue requiring extermination.
Do most people see nuance with the Nazis? I suggest you talk to some Gen Z people as they most definitely view Zionists as Nazi equivalent. A view I think most of the non-Western world also holds.
> they most definitely view Zionists as Nazi equivalent
Some of them do. They’re concentrated in a few cities. (Principally New York.)
Most of them see the back and forth and minority of extremists in each camp not representing the others. (There are more than two factions at play before we even figure on the international elements.)
> most of the non-Western world also holds
Most of the non-Western world doesn’t know what Zionism is because it’s irrelevant to them.
Ukraine was my pet war. I had to fight the tendency to reduce every geopolitical and domestic political issue through it. Because it’s not true. We aren’t abandoning Ukraine because of some Russia conspiracy, we’re abandoning it because most voters care much more about pocketbook issues.
Do you have an example? I've studied quite a bit of Hertzel and what I mainly remember repeated to us is "We shall never discriminate between one man and another; We shall never ask 'what is your religion?' nor 'what is your race?'. For us it is enough that he is a human being." and "My will to the People of Israel: create your country in such a way, that the non-Jew will feel good to be your neighbour".
In a diary entry from June 12, 1895, Herzl detailed his plan: "We shall try to spirit the penniless [Palestinian] population across the border by denying it any employment in our own country... Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly".
We've banned this account for using HN primarily for political/ideological/nationalist/religious battle. You can't do that here, regardless of which side you're on.
We've banned this account for using HN primarily for political/ideological/nationalist/religious battle. You can't do that here, regardless of which side you're on.
The Arab homeland is in Arabia, not Palestine. Palestine is a Roman creation after the destruction of Judea. It was named after a group of European invaders who conquered a small part of Israel 3000+ years ago.
Arabs aren't native to Palestine. Jews are. They were present in Palestine before the name Palestine was ever used.
Exactly. It's usually the Zionist sources themselves that are unabashedly genocidal and supportive of ethnic cleansing.
More recent example is Bari Weiss, who wrote in 2021:
"The results of this mess, as always, are especially bad for the Palestinians who live under Hamas rule. Casualty reports are hard to verify because Hamas controls the media (even the international press) inside the Gaza Strip, but it appears that more than 50 Palestinians have been killed. Some of these people are entirely innocent non-combatants, including children. This is an unspeakable tragedy. It is also one of the unavoidable burdens of political power, of Zionism's dream turned into the reality of self-determination."
So according to Bari Weiss, the mass slaughter of children is one of Zionism's political responsibilities of power.
there are many people who believe that punishment creates fear and fear creates compliance and compliance solves problems. So if someone in America believes this, then they probably think this will punish people for trafficking drugs (or disobeying US demands) and instill fear in them with regards to trafficking and will get them to stop trafficking drugs and therefore Americans will no longer be addicted to drugs.
The problem is that fear-based problem solving often just becomes problem avoidance. People become afraid to say there's a problem so it _looks_ as if the problem is solved, but the problem just becomes more buried and actually gets worse.
So, it might help Americans _think_ that the drug problem is solved, but not actually help us solve the drug problem. And I suppose when we push punishment, we're mostly pushing problem avoidance, and so it helps people Americans avoid problems more, so I guess it'd be successful in that.
That is an out of date question unfortunately. Now you just have to ask how it benefits the criminal oligarchy currently in charge of our country. Short term it gives them bread and circuses for their base. Longer term, oil wealth.
That’s a way of viewing it, but of course it assumes logical planning by reasonably bright individuals. So it’s begging the question somewhat.
Same as with Iraq. A more friendly regime that would be willing to let American companies extract its natural resources, and a proxy state used to coerce neighbors on behalf of the US.
I think even Bush would recognise it didn't really work out that way with Iraq, but hey, maybe this administration has unlocked the secret.
Would you call something that could replace your labor "spicy auto complete"? He also evokes nfts and blockchain, for some reason. To me this phrasing makes it sound like he thinks they are damn near useless.