Shut Up, Dude: This Week’s Best Comments

It's seated! On a downward slope! I wasn't blocking shit!

lol this is a wild takeaway to pick up from what she said.

Perhaps too personal, but I lost a band member to suicide this year and have an eternal soft spot for A Thousand Suns. I hope nothing but the best for them and hope they find peace performing these songs together. At their best, LP was always about catharsis and reaching out to kids who feel lonely and confused.

Waters is an insufferable prick but even a broken clock is right a twice a day.

The continuing concert travelogue of Tom and his daughter is my favorite low-key Stereogum series

good news for people who love old gear

waters sees everything in black and white, which can be a bad thing… but regarding subjects like war and genocide i think it’s admirable how blunt and direct he is. there isn’t any room for equivocation. so i love how smug waters is, ‘cause he’s right and he knows it. cave (as per usual) tries to come across as super intelligent but he’s nuanced to fault here.

Lot of love and respect for Nick but I think he's on the wrong side of history here. While it may not have been the main factor, the academic and cultural boycott of South Africa clearly contributed to the end of apartheid there by refusing to normalize the country's behavior.

For the last couple of years I've been collaborating with Israeli (and international) scholars on an archaeological project in northern Israel, but since Oct. 7 I've been forced to reconsider my participation. It's led to some very heated, very angry discussions with the director of the project - someone I consider a good friend. I love my Israeli colleagues and I know that they despise Netanyahu, Smotrich and Ben-Gvir. They'll feel that I'm abandoning them, being one sided, that I should keep politics out of science. Perhaps they're right.

I don't know if it will accomplish anything, and I don't want to tell anyone else how to conduct themselves in this situation, but I personally don't feel comfortable setting foot in Israel while they commit horrific war crimes on a near-daily basis in Gaza, and fanatical settlers continue to drive Palestinians from their land in the West Bank with the full protection of the IDF. I don't want to normalize that with my presence there. The fact that I, as a foreigner, can just enter and leave the country at will doesn't sit well with me. I hate that when you drive north from Jerusalem to the Sea of Galilee with an Israeli licence plate you just pass right through the West Bank without even realizing it, but if you have a different colored plate, or if you look vaguely Arab, you're very much aware of the borders and checkpoints. I can no longer pretend that it's got nothing to do with me.

I'm tired of the "you can't punish the people for the government's actions" argument against BDS because the government's actions absolutely do match the desires of the people at large in Israel. Support for the apartheid system and genocide of Palestinians is the mainstream stance in Israel, and Israeli Jews who are against that are a politically irrelevant minority. Just like the boycott of South Africa, a campaign like BDS is essentially a statement of no confidence that change will ever occur from within without outside pressure. It's rare, but sometimes the moral decay of a society is so complete that it requires outside intervention, like the Confederacy or Nazi Germany.

The point of BDS is that Israel doesn't get to have it both ways, where they get to be a genocidal apartheid state but still get to have all the creature comforts of a regular Western nation. Israel should feel isolated on the world stage, and the reason why things have gotten this bad in the first place is because for decades, the world told Israelis that it's totally okay for them to live a "normal" Western lifestyle where they get to have their iced coffee at Starbucks in their shitty identikit suburb while refugee camps get bombed 10 miles away.

Nick Cave is in the wrong to oppose BDS. Yah maybe Cave's position is nuanced and Waters is annoying, but Cave is in the wrong.