You're Not A Very Good Person, In My Opinion

On July 21st, 2024, the day President Biden announced he wouldn't seek reelection, a political commentator named Owen Jones delivered an unconventional eulogy to his career:

Joe Biden has the blood of tens of thousands of Palestinians on his [hands]. Israel would never have been able to raze Gaza to the ground without him.

I'm a non-believer, but if Hell exists, that man would have a first-class ticket there. A monster who belongs in jail.

Don't worry, I'm not going to debate Joe Biden's eternal resting place or even the morality of helping to raze Gaza to the ground. The reason I bring this up is Jones’ response when a commenter described his tweet as “truly deranged.”

Anyone who responds like this does not, in my view, regard Palestinian life as having any real or meaningful value.

Jones was one of the first people to criticise the severity of Israel's response in Gaza. He covered it extensively in articles and on his YouTube channel. He doubtless spent hours every day looking at footage of dismembered children and grieving mothers, interviewing traumatised healthcare and humanitarian workers.

And because the algorithm was showing him these horrific images, because Biden was in meaningful part responsible for them, he couldn’t understand how anybody could think of Biden differently.

If you didn't wish Biden eternal damnation, it couldn’t be because you weren’t paying particularly close attention to this conflict, it couldn’t be because you hadn’t seen the same images he had, it couldn’t even be because you occupied a corner of the algorithm that shielded you from the details of Israel’s actions, the only possible explanation was that you didn’t regard Palestinian life as having "real or meaningful value."

In my article, “Why You Must Never, Under Any Circumstances, Compare Israel to Nazi Germany,” I argued that the increasingly common comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany would only alienate people who occupied this corner of the algorithm.

James had a similar reaction to Owen Jones.

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James:

I compare the leaders of the State of Israel to Nazis all the time, and I will continue to do that as loudly and forcibly as I can.

Intentionally killing non-combatants, including children, not limited to intentionally starving them to death, as is happening right now in Gaza — That's heinous evil.

It's absolutely shocking that people who were treated that way are behaving now in the same evil, demented, cruel way.

People who support the state of Israel's genocide in Gaza are exactly like Nazis. They are vicious, evil, and demented.

We must never lose sight of that.

We must call out this tremendous evil with all the force we have.

I for one will do that as much as I can.

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Steve QJ:

People who support the state of Israel's genocide in Gaza are exactly like Nazis. They are vicious, evil, and demented.

This actually isn't true. I’ve spoken to hundreds of people who are simply ignorant of the facts or propagandised or have been manipulated into believing that anything less than blind support for Israel is antisemitic.

I understand your core point, of course, but “force” is not the only (and often not the best) way to resolve problems. Especially in rhetorical terms.

So if your goal is simply to vent and chastise, then be as blunt and forceful as you like. Just know that this plays perfectly into the hands of people who want to paint you as a Jew-hating extremist, and will send many people who are persuadable, but haven't been paying close attention, running for the hills.

But if you're hoping to persuade people, if you want to change minds rather than just yelling at the evil people, I suggest you try a different approach.

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James:

I think you must be wrong. Footage of the carnage plays across my screens constantly. Nobody could be ignorant of that. I don't know where you get that idea.

I think you're not a very moral person. You appear to be trying to justify genocide, or at least turn it into something that we do not forcibly condemn.

You're not a very good person, in my opinion.

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Believe it or not, James blocked me here, but while that’s the end of the conversation, I can think of no more perfect example of why we’re finding it so hard to talk to each other on so many issues.

LGBT/race issues, immigration, geopolitics, you name it, millions of people are forming their worldview based entirely on what their algorithms feed them. Algorithms that even tech CEOs admit are “confirmation bias machines.”

But it gets worse, because these millions of people are also judging other people on the assumption that algorithms are all showing us the same things. So people can no longer just be uninformed or perhaps better informed than we are, if they disagree, even slightly, they must be evil.

And I pray that one day soon we’ll see that this is unsustainable.

We cannot improve society if we abandon the concept of persuasion, we cannot maintain a society if we brand everyone who disagrees with us a monster, and we cannot learn or grow or figure out when we’re wrong if we rely on algorithms to show us the full picture.

Conversation is valuable, despite the disheartening number of trolls and bad-faith actors, because it gives us a window into different perspectives, free of algorithmic interference. It’s not perfect, it’s not easy, it’s certainly not always fun, but the alternative is a word that is truly deranged.