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PaperclipPerfector  8d ago (text post)   23676 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 24, 2026

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My favourite and least favourite novels I read last year (respectively, Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and Nell Zink's Doxology) featured an eerily similar literary device. Large chunks of Doxology are set in New York City and upstate New York in the 90s and 2000s; unsurprisingly, 9/11 figures heavily in the plot. While the first act of Tomorrow... takes place at Harvard, most of the book takes place in the west coast, and so the 9/11 attacks don't feature as prominently, though they are mentioned.

The literary device to which I refer is that, while the 9/11 attacks are explicitly referred to, they aren't referred to as terrorist attacks. Not only is no attempt made to delve into the perpetrators' motives, there's barely any acknowledgement that the perpetrators had motives, nor even that the attacks were perpetrated by anyone. The attacks are essentially reduced to the status of a horrible tragedy that simply occurred on the volition of no one in particular, like an earthquake, a volcanic eruption or meteoric strike. The election of Donald Trump strikes Zink as a moral outrage, but for her, getting angry at 9/11 would be like getting angry about a heavy downpour. This framing is particularly galling in the case of Tomorrow..., as when one of the main characters is murdered by a crazed homophobic gunman, the novelist wants to make damn sure we understand the political motivations for his crime. Passive voice for me and mine, active voice for thee and thine.

It seems that this framing — 9/11 not as an attack that was committed but as an event that occurred — will soon become policy in at least one North American progressive media outlet:

KINSELLA: 9/11 wasn't a 'terrorist attack,' according to the CBC

The Encyclopedia Britannica people define it this way: “Terrorism is the calculated use of violence, or the threat of violence, to create general fear in a population and coerce a government or society to achieve political, religious, or ideological goals.”

By any reasonable and objective standard, that is what happened nearly 25 years ago, on September 11, 2001: Terrorism.

This week, I received a memo — presumably confidential — addressed to CBC News staff. It is authored by one Basem Boshra, who is the “Senior Director of Journalistic Standards and Public Trust at CBC News.” In Boshra’s memo, reporters are editors are told this:

“Do not refer to the Sept. 11 attacks as terrorist attacks.”

Boshra states that all in bold letters, italicized, as if to emphasize the point. To make clear it is a directive, not a suggestion.

It is not fair and it is in no way accurate. It is rewriting the historical record. It is manipulating facts to fit an ideological perspective. It is cruel and despicable. It is Orwellian.

I contacted a couple of CBC’s designated spokespeople to ask them why CBC has decided that terrorism is no longer terrorism. To ask them why “hijackings [that] led to passenger jet crashes” is not considered terrorism. I thought about asking them, too, if “murder” is considered involuntary cessation of biological functions at CBC. But I didn’t, because that might offend their sensibilities.

Here is what [Kerry Kelly] said: “CBC’s longstanding language guidance regarding the terms ‘terrorist’ and ‘terrorism’ is a preference for the use of these words with attribution, a practice shared by many of the world’s top journalistic organizations. Our general manager and editor in chief has written publicly in the past on the subject.”

I find this kind of evasiveness extremely frustrating. Last year a colleague of mine (who, full disclosure, I consider a manchild, and hardly someone I come to looking for cogent political analysis) was talking about the conflict in Gaza, and scoffed at someone (I think it was Gal Gadot) who'd defended Israel on the grounds that Hamas started the most recent conflict and Israel was defending itself. I immediately shot back "but that's literally what happened", which seemed to stop him dead in his tracks: the relentless focus on Israel's purportedly brutal conduct in Gaza has obliterated from people's minds the simple fact that it wasn't a war Israel started. Likewise, see this article from Spiked: even progressive journalists, with their obsessive fixation on the civilians regrettably caught in the crossfire in Gaza, have essentially forgotten that Hamas and the PIJ are military organisations, with thousands (if not tens of thousands) of soldiers on the ground in Gaza:

‘That was the one image that really knocked me back a bit’, said Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s international editor, on Monday morning’s Today programme. ‘[Hamas fighters] just emerged… in their trucks, which were somehow still intact’, he said. In an attempt to explain the seemingly inexplicable, he added, ‘I presume they must have been parked in some kind of tunnel perhaps’.

Bowen wasn’t the only member of the press corps to have to scoop their jaws off the floor. Others called the ‘remarkable’ scenes a ‘stark reminder’ that Hamas continues to exist.

Since Hamas’s massacre of Israeli civilians on 7 October 2023, too many Western reporters, pundits and politicians have presented the subsequent conflict as if it involved only one combatant: Israel. In fact, watching or reading the media coverage, you could be forgiven for thinking that the Israel Defence Forces were not really fighting Hamas at all, but Palestinian civilians. [emphasis mine]

If you put Hamas apologists on the spot and get them to begrudgingly concede that a) the October 7th attacks happened; b) they were not "false flags"; c) Hamas deliberately targeted civilians, and the overwhelming majority of civilians killed were not killed by the IDF as part of the Hannibal doctrine — having conceded all that, these apologists will defend the attacks on the grounds that they were "inevitable", like an avalanche, or ice melting when it's left out of the freezer. Yahya Sinwar and his legion of followers, you see, simply could not have chosen to behave other than they did.

I'm reminded also of the massive "data desert" in the UK's Ministry of Justice conviction data. It's one thing to collect information about the ethnicity of offenders, but bury it somewhere it's hard to find or insist that it must be considered in light of socioeconomic disparities. But simply not bothering to collect the information in the first place is a whole other ball game. Also consider Coulter's law, or that peculiar journalistic tic in which a vehicle-ramming attack will be described as having been committed by "a car", as if non-self-driving cars possess agency.

I also think this framing is the underlying cause of the discourse around hypoagency, or the "women are wonderful" effect. A lot of people (both men and women) seem to really struggle with the idea that a woman could simply do something heinous without having previously had someone (i.e. a man) do something heinous to her. See the Lindsay Clancy truthers, or the people baselessly claiming that Aileen Wuornos was a rape victim who killed her victims in self-defense — some people even feel more comfortable believing that Elizabeth Holmes was manipulated by her Svengali of a boyfriend into committing wire fraud. The novel I'm currently reading, Penance by Eliza Clark, is illustrative. Her first novel, Boy Parts, was about an abusive woman whose lashing out at men is implied to be the result of her having been molested by her male secondary school teacher. Penance continues the trend: of the three female murderers, one (so far) is definitively stated to have been raped as a child, while another is implied to have been sexually interfered with by a transparent Jimmy Savile stand-in. (We haven't yet done a deep-dive into girl #3's backstory, but I'm not holding my breath for what awaits me there.) For all her talk of delving into the psychology of evil fucked-up women, for Clark, there is always a male first-mover skulking about in the background. Both of her first two novels are ultimately trauma plots: I don't think Clark could even conceive of the idea of a woman doing something awful without having been interfered with in childhood by an adult male.

This is an interesting asymmetry. When conservatives/Red Tribers/Leave voters/gammon/Zionists/whites/cis people/men/heterosexuals etc. do something bad, you will know about it. When a member of group who doesn't meet that description does something bad, you might hear about it, as a page 4 story. But the fact that a member of that group did it won't be mentioned as prominently as in the former case, if at all. It may be framed as something that happened, rather than as something that someone consciously chose to do.

I'm reminded, lastly, of a tweet posted in response to a YouTube video titled "The Internet is Failing the Left":

The fact that this video is titled “The internet is Failing the Left” tells you a lot about the psychological / ideological differences between left and right, much in the mode of Zizek.

If I (or any other right-winger) were to make a video, similar to Burns, criticizing some larger creator like Matt Walsh, we would never title it “The internet is failing the right”.

It’s not even that my arguments against Walsh would necessarily be different than Burn’s arguments against Wynn. It’s that “The internet is failing the right” reads like a GRAMMATICALLY incorrect sentence. The non-volitional object is the active subject. The political agent is the passive object. This is not correct, linguistically. The correct language would read “How the right is failing to use the internet!” or “How our enemies who run the internet are attacking the right!”

All of this goes to show that the modern left sees itself as a passive object that is acted upon. It cannot fail, it can only be failed. Capitalism and Oppression happen to the left, and that’s bad. Maybe, in the future, change and revolution will happen to the left and that will be good. But the left doesn’t DO things. Doing things is not what the left does. It isn’t that kind of thing.

The left is like a tree in the storm that is capitalism / modernity. The rain and the wind are happening to it. Maybe it survives or doesn’t, but the action is that of the storm. The right is like a ship sailing through the storm that is Capitalism / modernity. It cuts through the tempest. Maybe it survives or doesn’t, but the action is on the part of the ship.

Conservatives do things; things are done to progressives. If progressives do things, it's only ever in response to things that were done to them. And if there's no possible way to frame something they did as something that was done in response to something else, then we'll simply say it happened, not that it was done.

Nice slab of paragraphs, but I'm just going to snipe something right in the middle of it

has obliterated from people's minds the simple fact that it wasn't a war Israel started

But it was, it was a war of choice for the allies to plonk Isreal where it currently is. And it was Isreal's choice to behave in the most inhumane way possible all the way back to the Nakba until today. The kind of shit that would get your whole country and people unprsoned in the west, I'm talking wholesale ethnic replacement of vilages with military support, civilians fired at freely by the military with full support of the command chain, and the atrocities have not stoped only brazenly continued.

They shouldn't BE THERE. They don't have a moral inch to stand, on that cliff face of acceptance.

The kind of shit that would get your whole country and people unprsoned in the west

Yes, we're aware the West is doing the "pulling the ladder up behind you" thing.

I'm talking wholesale ethnic replacement of vilages with military support, civilians fired at freely by the military with full support of the command chain

That's a perfect description of Western immigration and law enforcement policy for the last ~15ish years. And sure, let's call those things "crimes"[1]. Sure, the rapists aren't actually killing the women into whom they shoot, but their right to do that is very much backed by the military and command chain of those nations- voice disagreement, and the State's guns show up to suppress you.

Noticing this, somewhat humorously, demonstrates that both the main Western schools of thought about Israel are completely hypocritical:

  • The pro-Israel faction tends to be the most opposed to Western governments committing the [crimes] listed above against them, but also believe that all national governments are fully in the right when they perpetrate those [crimes] against those under that government's monopoly of violence
  • The anti-Israel faction tends to be the most opposed to Israel committing the [crimes] listed above, and claim that all national governments do not have the right to do it, yet they themselves perpetrate those [crimes] against everyone else in the geographic area the instant they gain control of their own government's monopoly of violence

In other words, the people who say the [crimes] should happen seem to dislike it when they're the victims, and the people who say it shouldn't happen anywhere directly perpetrate the [crimes] against their own neighbors.

Neither has a moral inch to stand on; both bear isolated demands for rigor.

Ironically, "forcibly rebuild Gaza into rich Trump resort" was arguably superior simply because the use of force was limited to pushing massive material wealth upon the colonized side- forcing the enemy's material standards of life to improve (and killing everyone who wanted their neighbor's life to remain so economically worthless that throwing it against enemy guns was the only luxury) such that any future chimp-outs would be moderated by the inherent desire not to gamble so forcefully you lose the creature comforts you now take for granted. One notes that this is more or less just how empires are stabilized (well, the successful ones, anyway- the Americans vs. the Germans/Japanese/Soviets, the Han Communists of Beijing vs. the rest of China, etc.).

[1] The framing is smuggling in both the assumption both that these things are "crimes", and that "crimes" are bad. Though, the accusation of rank hypocrisy doesn't change if they are not "crimes", or if these "crimes" are actually good.

I've made it abundantly clear that the "war" to which I referred was the recent escalation of hostilities which began in October 2023, not the broader Israel-Palestine conflict.

a preference for the use of these words with attribution

Pseudo-neutrality like that may not be obvious favoritism, but it only takes one crack before the trick becomes clear. Now that it's been revealed to a broad audience, they had to stop.

A so-called "public broadcaster" that claims to employ "journalists" should know the difference between making plain statements and hiding behind the words of others. Their leadership does know that, and minimizing Islamic terrorism was a deliberate choice by them.

And the classic issue of news headlines when a Republican does something bad are "Republican Does Bad Thing". When a Democrat does it the headlines are "Republicans Outraged at Democrat". As though the emotional state of Republicans is the most relevant fact regarding bad behavior by Democrats.

the simple fact that it wasn't a war Israel started fact.

That depends on whether you consider the taking of your land to constitute an act of war; generally speaking, taking over someone’s legally-recognized territory (see West Bank) constitutes an act of war. So that’s not a simple fact, it’s an opinion.

Who gets to have land as a collective group? Who is taking land from whom exactly? Who does this west bank belong to? The Palestinian people as a national group? Arab people as an ethnic group? The PLO as a political organization? Jordan? Israel? Turkey?

What are the costs and benefits of sovereignty? Is equivocation between exactly who owns what and who is responsible for the armed forces operating there much of the issue?

Who gets to have land as a collective group?

The in-group, of course. As far as I can tell, the rules are this:

(1) If the Palestinian Arabs successfully seize control over and ethnically cleanse an area (for example Hebron or Gaza City), it is forever "Palestinian Land," which means that, as a group, it is their property forever and they have the moral and legal right to exclude Jews and anyone else.

(2) By contrast, if Jews live in an area for generations, their claim is forever tainted by any alleged misconduct of their forefathers. The area will never be "Jewish Land." Even if their forefathers came peaceably and paid for the land fair and square, it's still not Jewish Land. At best, those specific Jews have some right to stay there but the land does not belong to Jews as a group.

Wasn't Gaza Egyptian at one point, though? But I don't recall anyone declaring Egypt controlling it as having been an act of war.

The Wikipedia graph here isn't bad. Looks like Gaza was ruled by Egypt at six points, maybe seven if you count the latter phase of the Fatimid caliphate.

If you look in to the details of the transitions in that graph ... well, it's only a bit of an oversimplification to say that there's acts of war all the way down.

Wasn't Gaza Egyptian at one point, though? But I don't recall anyone declaring Egypt controlling it as having been an act of war.

Actually, if I am not mistaken, at one point before 1967 the PLO formally announced that it was not making any claim as to Egypt-occupied Gaza. The claims that Gaza was part of "Palestine" didn't start until after Egypt left and Israel came in.

This may seem like an obscure fact, but I think it sheds light on the revealed motivations of the Palestinian Arabs as a group. Simply put, they don't actually want to have Gaza; or J+S; etc. Rather, what they want is for there not to be a Jewish state anywhere in the area.

As another example, one can consider their attitudes towards refugees. For example, Palestinian Arabs who live in Lebanon or Jordan. The Palestinian Arabs have announced that if they were to get a state, such refugees would not be absorbed or granted citizenship. Again, this sheds light on their motivations.

Exactly. And the West Bank was Jordanian territory post-'47. The Palestinians are this weird UN-funded permanent hereditary refugee population that has never declared themselves a nation, has no unified government, cannot control the terrorist organizations outside the ones in leadership of territory given them by Israel, yet expects to be given more territory and the benefits of sovereignty while murdering and kidnapping civilians as their primary foreign policy tool.

I was referring to the most recent "hot war" in Gaza, not to the broader Israel-Palestine conflict. I think this was abundantly obvious from context.

Under this logic, would the 1948 Arab-Israeli war be an illegal act of aggression on the part of the Arabs?

You can't have it both ways. You can't be a revanchist jingoist in rhetoric and hide between the liberal international order when you lose. That's chutzpah. You either live in a world of rule of law and norms or you live by the sword. If the Arabs want to rule by right of conquerer, they can't wail and rend their garments when the Israelis pay them in kind.

Under this logic, would the 1948 Arab-Israeli war be an illegal act of aggression on the part of the Arabs?

I'm not an expert, but FWIW I am pretty sure that "aggression" isn't against international law, or it least it wasn't in 1948 or 1967. I believe there was an attempt to make aggression illegal under the Rome Statute, but of course the Rome Statue was not in effect at that time and in any event, Israel was never a signatory to the Rome Statute.

But in any event, I agree with your basic point. In fact, it's pretty normal for arguments against Israel to be based on double standards.

The Kellogg-Briand pact of 1928 outlawed all war.

Article I

The High Contracting Parties solemnly declare in the names of their respective peoples that they condemn recourse to war for the solution of international controversies and renounce it as an instrument of national policy in their relations with one another.

Article II

The High Contracting Parties agree that the settlement or solution of all disputes or conflicts of whatever nature or of whatever origin they may be, which may arise among them, shall never be sought except by pacific means.

Of those involved in the 1948 war, however, only Egypt and Iraq had ratified the treaty. Israel had not (and still has not). The treaty is still technically in effect, but it is clear none of the parties (including the US) take it seriously.

The Kellogg-Briand pact of 1928 outlawed all war.

Article I

The High Contracting Parties solemnly declare in the names of their respective peoples that they condemn recourse to war for the solution of international controversies and renounce it as an instrument of national policy in their relations with one another.

Article II

The High Contracting Parties agree that the settlement or solution of all disputes or conflicts of whatever nature or of whatever origin they may be, which may arise among them, shall never be sought except by pacific means.

Of those involved in the 1948 war, however, only Egypt and Iraq had ratified the treaty. Israel had not (and still has not). The treaty is still technically in effect, but it is clear none of the parties (including the US) take it seriously.

Thanks for posting this.

That’s complicated by the cessation of the British Mandate, the question of who has the right to declare nationhood post-Mandate, and the tactics of newfound Israel. It’s a complicated question with opinions, not a “simple fact”.

The Israelis were willing to accept the UN partition plan. The Arabs weren't. It's ironic that so many maps that are put forth by the Arabs enshrine those borders of which they rejected in the first place.

But that's beside the point. The UN Charter says all ethnic groups have a right to self-determination, and that includes the Jews who lived in the Mandate of Palestine. The Arab invasion rendered the question of legality a moot point. No matter what the Israelis did or didn't do tactically, they were the defenders against a war of aggression at the start of their national existence. Their claim to the land is based on the blood they shed to defend it, not in liberal legality.

Does anyone pretend to even contemplate the hypothetical - if the Israelis lost - that the Arabic nations involved would even consider the Israeli claim? No. No one is foolish enough to believe that.

The West Bank is the legally-recognized territory of nobody, and hasn't been since the dissolution of the British Mandate.

UN member states recognize Palestine and Israel recognizes Gaza and West Bank as comprising one singular territory per Oslo II XXXI

Indeed. You can’t “be fair” to an occupier.

In fact, international law does include rules for acting against an occupier.

And why should Gazan’s be held to observe them anymore than Israel and the US’s casual disregard for international law?

You really want the gloves to be entirely off?

Are we back to pretending like international law is a thing now?

There is such a thing. It is not what the UNILC thinks it is. It is what the relevant nations agreed to and can and will accept and enforce.

… and can and will accept and enforce.

Like the US and Israel I presume?

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Well yes, this is a psychological difference between conservatives and progressives; conservatives tend to have much more agency.

How do you figure Cthulhu always swims left, if conservatives have more agency?

Even before Obergefell, people were getting state level initiatives for gay marriage passed, for example. And progressives have been filming ICE, whistling, and occasionally unarresting people. None of that sounds low agency to me. It actually sounds very, "You can just do things."

@hydroacetylene: conservatives tend to have much more agency (emphasis mine)

you: a couple of examples of progressives actively doing things

This seems very "but I know a woman who's really tall!" or "I know an Asian guy who's bad at maths!"

Credit where credit is due - in a trade war where Trump is all alone, Canada may have given him a way to rally at least some support behind him.

Conservatives do things; things are done to progressives.

But that's a contradiction in terms, because "conservatism" is kind of the definition of not doing things, whereas progressivism is about progress and liberalism is about maintaining the controlled chaos and flexibility out of which progress emerges.

Therefore, we must conclude that:

  • Those who call themselves 'conservatives' are in actual fact liberals/progressives, because they do things, and in the traditional left-right view are left-wing
  • Those who call themselves 'progressives' (or 'liberals') are in actual fact conservatives, because things are done to them, and are right-wing

And if we rephrase it as follows:

  • Men do things
  • Things are done to women

Then we can see that women are by definition the conservative influence they always have been, and men the liberal one. So men now find more common cause with "conservatives" because they are not actually conservative, or rather, what they promise is more liberal than what women want.

Media is generally hostile to left-wing causes when economic conditions reward rent-seeking more than R&D (which is why they were on the left's side back in the '50s-'70s, why they are not now, and to a point why they [falsely] claim to still be left), and the way they prompt that is generally by spamming any plausible invocations of Copenhagen Ethics as possible. So the behavior you see from them tracks.

As for "Republicans Leftists pounce", the reason the left can't benefit from the right violating their own morality is because the right is in control of what that morality is in the first place. Which is not a surprise; they literally exist to be aggrieved as a negotiating strategy. The left fights the right by creating and proving things, memes being the fastest and most well-known example (alternately, consider the phrase 'the left can't meme'; as explained above, this phrase gets who's left and right backwards).

The correct male/liberal behavior is just to ignore them. Once they fight it, they legitimize the framing of women/conservatives that they can't do anything right, and it's over. But, on that note...

And if there's no possible way to frame something they did as something that was done in response to something else, then they'll simply say it happened, not that it was done.

...you sure you aren't Sloot's alt account?

I don't think Clark could even conceive of the idea of a woman doing something awful without having been interfered with in childhood.

Sounds like she's the kind of woman who should try to conceive with an appropriately assertive/attractive $age_of_consent-year-old man.

because "conservatism" is kind of the definition of not doing things

I don't agree. Conservatism doesn't mean "don't do anything" but "don't do anything new".

To speak to this, in the middle of historic flooding, red town Carmel, Indiana "built a makeshift dam out of Sycamore trees and concrete." That's the kind of thing Red places just do, without worry for environmental studies or which contractor will get the kickback. And building levys and dams is something humans have done for millennia. Blue areas in Indiana did not fair as well.

Gary Indiana isn’t controlled by the blue tribe, is it? It’s a majority black city- culturally very different.

Gary is at least a tributary of the blue tribe, and Blacks have allied themselves with the Blue Tribe. The mayor of Gary is a Democrat, his predecessor was a Democrat, his predecessor was a Democrat, her predeccesor was a Democrat, his predecessor was... a Democrat and convicted of fraud. You'd have to go back to 1943 to find a Republican mayor. I know Democrat is not the same thing as Blue Tribe, but I didn't say Blue Tribe, just Blue.

Indianapolis is pretty Blue Tribe and they have all kinds of complaints that their government did not do enough to warn people of the flood dangers. Which itself is kind of amusing, the idea that some more up-to--date facebook posts are the fix to massive flooding.

It does seem under this definition like the parties aren't really as conservative/progressive aligned as the messaging would have you think. Under "don't do anything new", California is arguably a conservative state when it clamps down on building housing, sets strong environmental laws discouraging industry, and blocking data center construction. Alternatively, Texas's libertine rules encouraging solar build out, natural gas, and encouraging industry are progressive. Don't tell Gavin and Greg.

But that seems part of both party's ongoing civil wars: blue team seems to have inherited a lot of conservative (lacking a better term) seniors for whom that means "hands off my Medicare" and a general preference for maintaining late 20th century neoliberalism, which clashes with the DSA types wanting radical changes. Red team has a similar clash between traditionally-labelled conservatives and "you can just build things", although I'm not sure if that fight is still ongoing these days.

The confusing thing about America's constant change and upheaval is that, although dispositional/Burkean/"small-c" conservatism still makes some sense here, and it's still true that traditions which have stood the test of time are less risky than new ideas that haven't, "for many lifetimes this fact of constantly changing traditions has been a longstanding tradition". California didn't get to be California by clamping down that hard on housing and industry; that's a new idea that makes Burkean conservatives shriek, even if the alternative of endless new construction is also worrying. Riding the tiger of modernity is scary, but we're already on it, and jumping right off is scarier.

Yes, I agree that these labels are confusing and outmoded. A long time ago, I pointed out that white nationalists who want to transform the US into a white ethnostate are habitually characterised as "conservative". But to conserve things means to keep things the way they are. The US isn't a white ethnostate, so by definition anyone who wants to turn it into one can't be a conservative. Rather, white nationalists are reactionaries.

Yes. The most sensible definitions are, in my view, that conservatives are the ones keeping the ship running, which includes a lot of doing, just no changing. They are overly pragmatic and have difficulty improving anything substantively. Progressives are the ones who want us to change for the better, which is laudable, but who have a tendency to be impractical and insufficiently concerned with function, often making things outright worse.

This definition also has the advantage of making clear why we need both. The problem is, taking this definition seriously, we'd have conservatives and progressives all over the place along the political landscape. Arguably, the center left is the primary contemporary conservative element.

"Conservatives are ballast, progressives are the sails" is a phrase I've seen a few times, with a number of variations (brakes vs. engine on a car, for instance)

I for my part find it extremely frustrating to deal with the recurrent tendency of Israel apologists, and you in particular in this case, to treat Oct 7th as having happened in a vacuum, as opposed to being another iteration in a long chain of action and reaction.

We can argue about who escalated more and which reaction by what side was uniquely disproportionate to the preceding ones, or who started the chain and whether they were justified in doing that, but having the same old argument where you start out by pretending that Israelis and Palestinians were living in peace and harmony until Oct 7th and then Hamas attacked out of absolutely nowhere, and you even go as far as painting a picture where your opponents agree with this framing and just have some obviously silly weaksauce arguments that try to justify Oct 7th against that putative backdrop of peace and harmony over and over again is not productive. It is particularly frustrating here because I'm sure you have been involved in past discussions where the same topic came up, and it is kind of looking like you just abandoned those discussions, waited for things to cool down and then reposted the same premise under the guise of a long-form "effortpost" hoping to roll the dice again for a pliant choir of allies and newcomers that you can preach to.

Both sides are not particularly nice and a roiling pit of what's a cold war at the best of times.

Nonetheless, if the sides were reversed and Hamas/Palestine were in a similar position of power over Israel now they'd have no qualms of being literally, actually genocidal. If Hamas/Palestine were to win the war, the average QOL in the region would likely drop and peaceful Arabs do perfectly fine (especially if you benchmark neighboring muslim non-petrostates) under the Israeli system. Whataboutisms around 'if Israel weren't there and the CIA weren't mind controlling everybody to force the constant wars and rebellions' are silly as is most flavors of 'refugees are due to the USA bombing the Middle East' as if it were a perfect Tabula Rasa and not inherently a stupid heaving mess.

but having the same old argument where you start out by pretending that Israelis and Palestinians were living in peace and harmony until Oct 7th and then Hamas attacked out of absolutely nowhere

But this isn't the apologetic position.

The Israeli apologetic position is that they should be allowed to wreck Hamas and Gaza now precisely because things have not been harmonious and Palestinians willfully destroyed a dissatisfying but functional equilibrium meant to minimize their suffering (and the hit to Israeli PR) so fuck them.

The line is "they could have made Gaza a paradise but chose rockets" not "Gaza was a paradise and then the Fire Nation attacked".

Neither side actually defends the view that things were fine. The point is they're bad because of the other side and it's time to give up on pretending they'll ever be good with them still in the picture.

Thank you for the reminder and reframing. Gaza before Oct 7 was an attempt to give a safe space to people who identify as Palestinian, where they could be as free and democratic as they wanted. Oct 7 is what they did with it.

If they’d had their own nation-state ala the two-state solution, and if that nation had attacked Israel, the latter would be justified by the long-held rules of war to conquer the territory and rule.

All sufficiently accurately modeled hypotheticals come down to the cliche, “If the Palestinians laid down their arms today, tomorrow there would be peace. If the Israelis laid down their arms today, tomorrow they’d all be dead.”

I for my part find it extremely frustrating to deal with the recurrent tendency of Israel apologists, and you in particular in this case, to treat Oct 7th as having happened in a vacuum, as opposed to being another iteration in a long chain of action and reaction.

I think that even if this is true, it's not a valid excuse to omit the context of the October 7 attacks themselves when discussing (and criticizing) Israel's recent activities in Gaza.

Moreover, the phrase "long chain of action and reaction" suggests that the October 7 attacks were a response to some misbehavior of Israel. It seems pretty clear to me that this is not the case. My main evidence for this is that (1) from the beginning of its existence, the stated goal of Hamas has been the destruction of (Jewish) Israel and the killing of all Jews everywhere; (2) Hamas acted aggressively towards Israel immediately following the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza; and (3) there was never strong objection among Palestinian Arabs to the Egyptian occupation of Gaza before 1967. Probably there is more evidence for this.

To put it another way, if you would like to point to some alleged misconduct on the part of Israel which you believe provoked the October 7 attacks, I am pretty sure I can point to evidence which shows that this is not the actual reason for the attacks but rather a rationalization.

A lot of things happened in 2023 before Oct 7th, too. Look in particular at entries such as June 19th and 21st. Of course no single one of those events will have been "the reason"; and to begin with, mirroring your (1) and (2), from the beginning of its existence, the stated goal of Israel was to create a Jewish state in that territory, which implies expelling the Palestinians or at least codifying their status as second-class citizens in their own home, and Israel acted aggressively towards them immediately following its founding (and, in fact, its predecessor organisations did so before the founding). (3) seems completely irrelevant, since the Egyptians presumably did not do any of those things. I think "Israel's stated purpose entails expelling the Palestinians"+"Israel takes actions that have the shape of expelling the Palestinians" is a pretty compelling and plausible motivation for Oct 7th.

the stated goal of Israel was to create a Jewish state in that territory, which implies expelling the Palestinians or at least codifying their status as second-class citizens in their own home,

I tend to disagree with that given that the original British partition plan (which the Jews accepted and the Arabs rejected) was to create a majority Jewish state and a majority Arab state by drawing lines on the map.

I think "Israel's stated purpose entails expelling the Palestinians"+"Israel takes actions that have the shape of expelling the Palestinians" is a pretty compelling and plausible motivation for Oct 7th.

Would you mind pointing to three of these actions and statements?

Because the thing is, as far as I know (1) Israel has never expelled any Arabs from Gaza but instead expelled all the Jews in the early 2000s; and (2) as mentioned above, the original British partition plan (which the Jews accepted and the Arabs rejected) didn't entail any expulsions as far as I know, but rather was about drawing lines on a map so as to create a majority Jewish state and a majority Arab state; and (3) when Hamas took over Gaza, its leadership refused to allow the descendants of Arabs who fled Gaza in 1967 to move there from refugee camps in Jordan.

All of this seems to contradict your hypothesis, however it would be helpful for me to understand your hypothesis if you could identify 3 actions Israel has taken that "have the shape of expelling the Palestinians" so I can better understand your position. TIA

I don't treat the October 7th attacks as having happened – look at that, you're doing the exact thing I criticised in the OP – having been committed in a vacuum. I'm aware that they were a reopening of hostilities in a conflict which has been ongoing for the guts of a century.

But the fact remains: in the most recent conflict, Hamas struck first. That part is not open for debate. Other things that are not open for debate: Hamas deliberately targeted civilians; most civilians killed were intentionally killed by Hamas and not by the IDF; Hamas intentionally chose to attack Israel. The October 7th attacks were not "inevitable", and to claim that they were is to, ironically, deny the agency of the Palestinian people.

where you start out by pretending that Israelis and Palestinians were living in peace and harmony until Oct 7th

Please show me where I said any such thing.

But the fact remains: in the most recent conflict, Hamas struck first. That part is not open for debate.

Please show me where I said any such thing.

To define the "most recent conflict" as starting on Oct 7th, you either have to assert that there was no conflict before that date, or you can set the beginning of the "most recent conflict" at any point at all for your argumentative convenience. If it's the latter, then, well, I'll say that in the most recent conflict (the one that started on Oct 27th 2023 or so), Israel struck first. That part is not open for debate, etc.

To define the "most recent conflict" as starting on Oct 7th, you either have to assert that there was no conflict before that date

I have to do no such thing. I simply have to stipulate that there was a low-level conflict prior to October 2023, and a sudden and dramatic escalation of hostilities in October 2023. I genuinely don't see how anyone could contradict such a claim in all seriousness.

"Low-level" is relative. Yes, Oct 7th was an escalation. So was the Israeli response! Israel kills n people in 2023, then Hamas kills about 1.2k, then Israel kills 71k. It doesn't look like n is much smaller than 1200/(71/1.2)! Conveniently place your arbitrary cutoff between "high-level" and "low-level" somewhere else, and you can say there was a low-level conflict prior to Oct 27th followed by a sudden and dramatic escalation of hostilities. (Certainly Hamas reduced no Israeli cities to rubble.)

then Hamas kills about 1.2k, then Israel kills 71k. [...] Certainly Hamas reduced no Israeli cities to rubble.

Shockingly, it's far better for the local population to not be on have a war being fought in their territory. It would be insanity to say "Italians killed no American civilians, yet the Americans then went on to kill thousands of Italian civilians and reduced their cities to rubble*!" as a condemnation of America.

*Yes, yes, Monte Cassino. Mistakes are made in warfare, some absolutely awful, and sometimes even deliberately. It does not change the nature of the campaign as a whole.

I feel like I'm losing my mind here. You have Hamas commanders (Yahya Sinwar among them) openly stating that the purpose of the October 7th attacks was to escalate the conflict by provoking Israel into a more aggressive response than they had thitherto been using. You had some of these fine gentlemen explicitly contemplating the possibility that the October 7th attacks might be so gruesome and horrific that Israel would use nuclear weapons in response. And yet you still refuse to assign any moral responsibility for the escalation in hostilities to Hamas. Everything is ultimately Israel's fault, because of something something 1948 right of return.

This seems like a tremendous example of the hypoagentic framing I was complaining about in the OP.

But how about I propose some admittedly arbitrary cutoffs to demonstrate that the October 7th attacks represented a major discontinuity in the conflict up to that point in 2023:

  • It was the first time 1,000+ civilians were killed as part of the conflict in a single day in 2023.
  • It was the first time 500+ civilians were killed as part of the conflict in a single day in 2023.
  • It was the first time 100+ civilians were killed as part of the conflict in a single day in 2023.
  • It was the first time 50+ civilians were killed as part of the conflict in a single day in 2023.

Do you dispute any of these figures?

This also illustrates why your invocation of the 71k figure is a cheat. Israel did not kill 71k Palestinians all at once, but over the course of three years, during which they sustained considerable casualties of their own.

And yet you still refuse to assign any moral responsibility for the escalation in hostilities to Hamas.

Can you show me where you think I said they have no moral responsibility? Of course they do; both parties do in an escalation spiral. I just think the Israelis have more, while it seems to me that you, in your attempts to frame the story as a simple "the Palestinians started it", think they have none.

I do think that, in a very basic sense, the Israelis do have more agency, because to begin with, unlike the Palestinians they have a very plausible option to simply abandon their project of conquest and gtfo. If they used a fraction of the lobbying power that they have accumulated, they could secure citizenship in a rich Western country of their choosing for every one of their people, generous starting package of funds included.

"in a day"

I dispute that how many days the killing was spread out over is particularly relevant.

I thought I replied to this but it seems my internet connection was spotty.

I do think that, in a very basic sense, the Israelis do have more agency, because to begin with, unlike the Palestinians they have a very plausible option to simply abandon their project of conquest and gtfo. If they used a fraction of the lobbying power that they have accumulated, they could secure citizenship in a rich Western country of their choosing for every one of their people, generous starting package of funds included.

You know, even leaving aside the logistics associated with securing foreign citizenship for 7 million people (9 million if you include the Arabs) and uprooting them from their homes – I think it only requires a very cursory understanding of the last nine decades of European history to appreciate why Jews might be reluctant to put themselves at the mercy of one or more Western governments. "Fool me once" etc.

It's this constant two-step with Jew-haters. They order the Jews to leave the Middle East and move to Europe or the US where they belong – then as soon as they do so, they start complaining about how many Jews there are in Europe or the US. Someone on Substack noted that Europeans spent well over a millennium ordering Jews in Europe to go back where they came from (and inciting the occasional pogrom to underline their point) – but as soon as the Jews did so, these same people still weren't happy and immediately began accusing them of founding an illegitimate genocidal settler-colonial state. (Curiously, it's usually the only state they so characterise, and the only state whose name is followed by the slogan "does not have a right to exist". Wow, what a crazy coincidence huh? The only state that doesn't have a right to exist is the one meant to be a safe haven for Jews? Who'da thunk it?) Wherever Jews go, Jew-haters aren't happy and wish they'd go somewhere else. Sometimes I wish Jew-haters would be honest and admit that the place they want Jews to live is not Israel or Madagascar or Europe or the US, but simply "nowhere".

Yes, I'm invoking the memory of the Holocaust to explain why Jews are uncomfortable about the prospect of abandoning their national self-determination project and leaving themselves at the mercy of Western governments who might turn on them and scapegoat them at any time. Maybe you'll say that's tasteless and unfair, that nothing like that Holocaust will ever recur and that Western Gentiles have learned their lesson. But have they, really? In most Western countries, antisemitic hate crimes are one of the most common kind per capita (cue the Joo-posters saying that these hate crimes are an understandable response to Israel's "genocide" in Gaza, a logic they conspicuously do not apply to hate crimes targeting Muslims). A significant proportion of Westerners deny that the Holocaust ever happened, or think it's been greatly exaggerated, and the proportion tends to be higher among young people than old (how can you learn the lessons of something you don't think took place?). There was a mass exodus of Jews from Poland beginning in the sixties in response to persistent ostracisation and scapegoating, with government leaders blaming things that went wrong in Poland on "Zionists" (wink wink nudge nudge). In your honest opinion, has the modal Pole become more or less friendly to Jews in the intervening six decades? And perhaps the most frightening thing is, this phenomenon is not restricted to Westerners of a particular political persuasion. Jew-hatred is a pathology which transcends ideology. Jews are blamed both for rapacious capitalism and surreptitious socialism. There is simply no Western political block that Jews can reasonably trust to be anything more than temporary allies of convenience.

"Abandon the country you spent the better part of a century building and scatter its citizens to the winds, to be left at the mercy of governments who barely even pretend not to despise them" is not a serious proposal. It is either the product of staggering naiveté, or a proposal made in bad faith.

Can you show me where you think I said they have no moral responsibility?

The fact that, in your first reply to me, you described the October 7th attacks as having "happened", the exact kind of evasive euphemistic language I decried in the OP.

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If they used a fraction of the lobbying power that they have accumulated, they could secure citizenship in a rich Western country of their choosing for every one of their people, generous starting package of funds included.

I don't think that's a reasonable alternative in any way.

You're not trotting out the really good October 7th apologia.

Hamas didn't even know about the music festival, which had its hours extended last minute, no raping happened because Palestinian men aren't that sexually confident, all those people at the festival were combatants anyways so it was a valid military target, and the israelis killed more of their own citizens than Hamas did.

Sorry, bad Gaza takes are a guilty pleasure of mine.

I was tempted to mention the people who've claimed in all seriousness that Hamas killed zero civilians on October 7th, and all the footage depicting them doing that is AI-generated. But I decided I've banged that drum plenty of times already.

People on social media who operate in this bizarre lane between 'Palestine/Islam is strong' and 'Any negative headline-causing successful operation by Palestine/general Islamic terrorism is literally Mossad false flagging' are surprisingly common.

But the fact remains: in the most recent conflict, Hamas struck first. That part is not open for debate. Other things that are not open for debate: Hamas deliberately targeted civilians; most civilians killed were intentionally killed by Hamas and not by the IDF; Hamas intentionally chose to attack Israel. The October 7th attacks were not "inevitable", and to claim that they were is to, ironically, deny the agency of the Palestinian people.

Wasn't Gaza under blockade by Israel and Egypt since 2007? Is a blockade not an ongoing military action that kind of complicates the whole idea of Hamas striking first out of nowhere? Like, even if Israel wasn't killing people, they were preventing a lot of imports and exports under the theory that many kinds of goods are dual use, and restricting the free movement of Palestinians.

It can, of course, be noted that had Hamas just stopped ripping apart everything Israël allowed in to build bombs and shoot them at Israël, thé blockade would have gotten a lot lighter very quickly.

Yes - "how dare you restrict metal pipes for water!" becomes a lot less impactful when the terrorists release propaganda videos of themselves turning the water pipes into rockets to be fired indiscriminately at civilians.

Is a blockade not an ongoing military action that kind of complicates the whole idea of Hamas striking first out of nowhere?

I don't recall ever claiming that Hamas struck "out of nowhere". I agree that a blockade constitutes an ongoing military action. Another example of a military action is "firing a missile at another country", something Hamas did somewhere in the region of twelve or thirteen thousand times (source 1, source 2, source 3) between the end of the previous "hot war" and the beginning of the most recent one. No one disputes that Israel and Palestine were engaged in an ongoing conflict prior to October 2023, but it's equally indisputable that there was a sudden and dramatic escalation of hostilities in October 2023. I think the most parsimonious framing of the above is that the immediate catalyst for the escalation in hostilities was Hamas's invasion of Israel on October 7th.

Wasn't Gaza under blockade by Israel and Egypt since 2007?

I'm pretty sure the answer is "yes." And as someone who is on the pro-Israel side of things, I have no objection to including this as context in discussing the October 7 attacks and Israel's response. From my perspective, the main issue here is not that Hamas struck at Israel, but rather that Hamas deliberately engaged in the murder, sexual assault, and hostage-taking of civilians on a large scale.

Yeah, I don't think Hamas attacking civilians was justified in any case, but I think it is more understandable if you don't ignore the constant low level application of military force that had become a part of the status quo in Gaza.

It's similar to how murdering your husband is never right, but it is possible to look back to the days before no fault divorce, and at least understand why some women, who felt trapped in horrible marriages, decided that murder was the best way out. Such a murder didn't come out of nowhere, and it would be silly to say that the wife in such a case "started it" with the murder, even if both participants in the marriage had done their fair share of retaliation and escalation over the years.

I think it is more understandable

I don't think I would use the word "understandable," because it implies something about the mindset of Hamas' leadership which I am pretty sure is inconsistent with reality. I'm pretty confident that even in the absence of a blockade (especially in the absence of a blockade) Hamas would have viciously attacked Israelis given the opportunity.

I think if people genuinely want to understand the situation, they need to take this into account. That Hamas doesn't want to just be left alone to to run Gaza in peace; they want to destroy (Jewish) Israel and kill all Jews everywhere. (Edit: For starters, my evidence for this claim is the Hamas charter.)

Such a murder didn't come out of nowhere, and it would be silly to say that the wife in such a case "started it" with the murder,

Perhaps not, but if the wife's perception of mistreatment was wildly at odds with reality and was mainly a result of her selfishness and narcissism, it might be reasonable to assign full responsibility to her.

in the most recent conflict, Hamas struck first. That part is not open for debate.

But how we define the boundaries of "the most recent conflict" is itself a subjective, political decision. Hamas supporters would argue that there is no such thing as a peaceful state of affairs between Israel and Palestine, and thus no such thing as a "recent" conflict than began on Oct 7th - there were simply the periods when the Israeli boot was grinding them down so overwhelmingly as to make large-scale resistance efforts impossible.

I have little sympathy for Hamas myself, but as a point of principle I do think it's worth debating. If I keep someone as a slave in my basement under constant threat of beating them to a pulp if they escape - and one day, I carelessly leave the door unlocked, and the slave tries to stab me in my sleep - I don't know that you can state for an objective fact that the escaped slave has initiated violence. And I think this holds even if I had some defensible reasons for keeping the guy locked up.

One can characterise the Israel-Palestine conflict as a cold war which periodically gets hot. I don't think anyone is disputing that there was a war in Gaza in 2014, and that the situation in Gaza looked very different before that war began and afterwards. I don't think anyone in Gaza would claim that they didn't notice any difference in their day-to-day experiences before and after that war began. Equally, I don't think anyone would dispute that the 2014 war was just the latest instance of a cold war going hot in a long, long line of them.

By the same logic, I don't think it's controversial to state that the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict went hot in October 2023 and the catalyst for it going hot was the invasion of Israel by Hamas squaddies. Accepting that fact does not require you to sympathise with Israel, believe that Israel aren't committing a genocide, believe that Israel has the right to defend itself, believe that Israel has a right to exist etc. But I don't think it's open to dispute that the most recent instance of this cold conflict going hot was prompted by an action freely undertaken by Hamas.

The characterization I was putting forward is not of a cold war that goes hot, but of a single uninterrupted conflict that moves very slowly because one opponent is much stronger than the other, and keeps the weaker opponent in a headlock for years or decades at a time before said weaker opponent can get their next punch in. I am proposing that at no point in time were a critical mass of Palestinians not trying to destroy Israel, nor Israel not doing things to Palestine that Palestinians perceived as acts of war - Oct 7th was simply the first Palestinian attack in a while that managed to pierce the skin. This is a wholly different question from who's actually morally justified in all of this!

Similar to how Germany and France/England were engaged in "war" for a decent period of time after the fall of Poland (the Phony War, or Sitzkrieg) prior to the successful German invasion of France?

That part is not open for debate.

This is a space centered around debate, and I don't appreciate that attempted consensus-building

Some questions of fact are open for debate. Some are not, and it isn't "consensus-building" to say so. No one would accuse me of "consensus-building" if I said it wasn't open for debate that JFK was assassinated in Dallas in November '63, or that two planes crashed into the Twin Towers in September '01.

JFK faked his own death and changed his name to Tupac, he’s still alive in the Illuminati hotel in Cuba.

No one would accuse me of "consensus-building" if I said it wasn't open for debate that JFK was assassinated in Dallas in November '63, or that two planes crashed into the Twin Towers in September '01.

Ah, never met a JFK conspiracist or a 9/11 Truther, have you?

never met a JFK conspiracist

Well, I certainly haven't met one who seriously claimed that no one assassinated JFK. But I suppose such a person must exist.

In any case, I suppose strictly speaking it would be "consensus-building" to claim that it's not up for debate that two planes crashed into the Twin Towers and that the buildings were not destroyed by explosives. But I view that as "consensus-building" on a par with the claim that "it's not open for debate that heliocentrism is true".

It is not "consensus-building" in the way we apply that rule. Using rhetorical devices like "It's beyond debate" are, perhaps, a little questionable (because literally everything will be debated by someone) but it's not meant to prohibit an assumption of common knowledge. It's meant to prohibit making an argument from the assumption that your opinion is a settled matter.

JFK conspiracy theorists- a group which includes a majority of Americans- pretty much believe that LBJ/Israel/the KGB/ancient Egyptian deities/the mafia/the KKK killed him. The ‘actually still alive’ niche in American conspiracy lore is reserved for rappers.

On the other hand, there’s plenty of 9/11 truthers claiming thé buildings were never hit by a plane, with explanations ranging from ‘magic’ to convoluted ideas about Air Force stunt pilots and nanothermite.

JFK conspiracy theorists- a group which includes a majority of Americans- pretty much believe that LBJ/Israel/the KGB/ancient Egyptian deities/the mafia/the KKK killed him.

Does that group include a majority of Americans?

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The ‘actually still alive’ niche in American conspiracy lore is reserved for rappers.

And Elvis

To me, the reactions against 9/11, 10/7, and school shootings aren't much different. None are inevitable in theory (and certainly all are tragic), but in practice the optimal amount is not zero; there are responses that go too far, which indirectly kill more people while not even helping (especially in the long run), and people with hidden incentives abuse emotion to argue such policies.

But I agree with you that the counter isn't to dismiss 9/11 as not a terrorist attack or Hamas as not evil. We can still try to solve these problems in ways that improve society overall, and maybe reduce them, maybe in the distant future almost entirely; I suspect many people in the 1900s would be shocked at today's murder and starvation rates, falsely believing higher ones would always be inevitable. It's like how when people see stereotype-reinforcing statistics, they should understand that the statistic does not imply they should assume members follow the stereotype (e.g. inverse fallacy), but some dismiss the statistic entirely to reach the same conclusion, they can't believe both for some reason.

Conservatives do things; things are done to progressives.

This immediately makes me think of the "Republicans pounce" meme. Most commonly viewed as a rhetorical device to distract from the negative behavior the right is pouncing on and call to make Dems in good standing refuse to condemn it lest they pattern match to those dastardly Rs, it now occurs to me that this also has the effect of putting the locus of action on the side of the right and framing the left not as the actors in the story but the acted upon. Perhaps it is not JUST a cynical ploy, but actually just that this passive framing for themselves is the most natural framing for lefty reporters.

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