NN: Tom Is Wrong

I'm slow to say it simply and strongly but by now we know

This is part of the sprawling No Nichols complex of posts analyzing the rhetoric and reasoning behind certain sorts of support for Israel.

It takes some real work to say seriously and credibly that you are right and some smart successful thoughtful person is wrong. I’ve now done that work. So I now say, with respect but also with firmness, to the accomplished Dr. Tom Nichols, and to those taking the side he takes in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for roughly the reasons he has recently expressed: you are wrong.

Here’s five minutes on preparing, persuading, clapping back, and blocking exits, followed by a rough transcript:

(from this starting point)

Thank you for your interest friends and enemies and internet strangers.

Rough Transcript:

Greetings from Buenos Aires, 6 p.m. December 3rd, walking home with a chicken milanesa sandwich. And thinking I'm probably finally truly going to finish and post the last of my materials on Tom Nichols and on his Atlantic article about the juvenile viciousness of campus antisemitism. Now, I've been falsely asserting that for more than two weeks now.

00:28

I've made and broken many promises and vows to y'all and to myself. But it's got to end somewhere. It's got to end some time. What better place than here? What better time than now? And so the sort of main piece of it will be a post titled No Nichols:

00:46

Free Tom and Free Palestine. And maybe I will make this another sort of final bottom line saying Tom is wrong. As I say in my video that I posted yesterday, or in the wee hours of this morning, as particular protests, wider world, and whole history.

01:07

This is a video I made as I was sort of starting this. And first promising it probably that day. Now that's more than two weeks past, but I laid out how, something that I have written about,

01:20

something that will be sort of central to that essay that I'm finishing No Nichols is there's this strange structure that we often have, often use, and that Tom often uses in that Atlantic article and many of his tweets and skeets that like the takeaway, the bottom line, is hey support Israel.

01:45

The Palestinians are in the wrong. But the actual exact content and topic is not about Israel or the Palestinians, and it is instead about, for example, supporters of the Palestinians. It is, they are using this word genocide wrong.

02:01

They are chanting something that is genocidal. They are jerks. They are bad. And therefore support Israel. It feels like it fits, but logically it doesn't. You cannot get there from here. Flaws in protesters tell you nothing about their cause logically speaking. They make us feel it because of how goddamn tribalistic we are.

02:29

If they're wrong we must be right. You can both be wrong! So to actually in a respectable and defensible and credible way reach a conclusion about the Palestinians you're going to have to talk about the Palestinians. And so that's one part of what's going on. And another important part is the way we just endlessly argue back and forth, that there's always a clap back available, right?

02:57

I mean no one ever is forced to stop and admit that a point is correct or that a conclusion is true. There's always a comeback available just because of the infinite variety and flexibility and reach of our abstractions and of the world, you can always swerve off in a million different directions.

03:17

Somebody can give an absolutely watertight takedown of your point. And you can respond with well you're just saying that because of such and such motive. You can always start a new discourse there. This is something that I wrote and almost posted, maybe ought to post.

03:34

Yeah we can mute any message by just starting a new message, starting a new discourse, changing the subject. So something I do in a lot of my thinking and writing is try to close off all those exits. First address all those clap backs before I clap. And it's only once I have made all of the right concessions and clarifications and preemptions that then I can get to the firm punch line of you are wrong.

04:07

But that is what I have now done with Tom Nichols. Okay. As far as our sniping you can always answer back to each other, and as far as what I lay out in that video about particular protests and the whole world, that we can just go in circles, versus taking some systematic stock of the whole damn thing.

04:29

So yeah because of everything I have addressed in all of these No Nickels posts about Tom and about our discourse and his discourse and about the topics, about the Palestinians and the Israelis and the protests and everything else. Granted all of that we can now say, Tom, you are wrong about Israel and Palestine.

04:52

Israel is in the wrong here. And Palestine should be free, from the river to the sea. Now a chicken sandwich for me.