Kriss gave a disappointing response to my critique where he repeats much of the same behavior I criticized him over. There’s more going on here and it’s probably most efficient to respond with a color-coded map.

Overall this is a tedious dispute to have. I don’t understand why Kriss bothers commenting and responding if he isn’t going to engage with the positions I actually hold. I’m very eager to be critiqued and challenged on things I’ve said but Kriss is blindly firing volleys where I’m not standing and me having to respond is a waste of both of our time.

🟨 Kriss makes a few assertions that are either flat-out untrue, or simply too ambiguous to evaluate. It’s not accurate to say I used to be “neutral” on Israel/Palestine before Oct7th because that implies knowledgeability which I did not have. Rather, I was ignorant/agnostic on the subject, and it wasn’t Oct7th that changed my mind but rather it was seeing the jubilant reaction to the massacres from some of my leftist friends that prompted curiosity to learn more about the issue.

It’s only accurate to say I’m a “liberal” in the classical sense (I’m a basic bitch libertarian), and I have no idea how exactly I’m aligning myself with fringe Israeli right-wing because he does not specify. He flatly asserts that I’m aligning myself with people murdering dozens of people seeking food, which is news to me! So is the part about me having an “attachment to the wrong side in a genocidal war”. Buh? Zuh? What sides are we talking about here? How am I attached to genociders? A modicum of specificity instead of obfuscation would’ve been useful here!

I’m not enough of a notable figure to expect everyone to memorize all my granular positions, but it seems a reasonable expectation if anyone is going to critique me! It’s not like I’ve been opaque in any way about my beliefs on this issue (see ymeskhout.com/p/sorta-c…).

🟥 Kriss & I are circling the drain on antisemitism vs antizionism, as he continues recycling “refutations” to points I either never made, that I’ve already conceded, or that I’ve already addressed (ymeskhout.com/p/slicing…). I’ve explicitly said in my Kosher Salami essay that it was a mistake for me to label any action as clearly motivated by antisemitism, and I wrote thousands of words outlining why dissecting motive is an incoherent and fraught exercise. Kriss’s repeated insistence of “but they are different” is the definition of missing the point.

🟦 What I critiqued Kriss over was both his “argument by assertion” and his obfuscating language, and these are more examples. I did indeed explain what was cloudy about his language, and I did so by showcasing the lack of meaning in his verbose-but-cloudy prose and contrasting it to a condensed-but-empty version (“RfP is bad because it’s vaguely connected to this other thing that is bad”).

I never said it’s illegitimate to question RfP’s institutional affiliation, it’s perfectly legitimate! What I did say is that it’s an insufficient basis for condemnation. Kriss introduces a new argument by claiming that RfP already represents the current “Palestinian government” but this is bafflingly non-responsive. RfP’s target audience is the mass of supposedly pro-Palestine activists around the world, not the PA!

🟩 Kriss has a disappointing insecurity tic of shoring up his responses with gratuitous insults and condescension. This can be funny sometimes, if adroitly deployed, but here it just comes off as attempts to mask for deficient logic.