This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Trump's Mideast Envoy Forced Netanyahu to Accept a Gaza Plan He Repeatedly Rejected
Trump declared repeatedly that if the remaining Israeli hostages weren't out by his inauguration there would be 'hell to pay'. Most people assumed this meant that MIGA Don would fully back more aggressive Israeli military action, but instead he's willing to pressure Israel into a deal they don't want. Israeli finance minister Smotrich called it a 'catastrophe' and if he quits the government it would collapse Netanyahu's coalition.
Details of the proposed plan can be found here:
The agreement includes provisions for Israeli forces to remain in the Philadelphi corridor and maintain an 800-meter buffer zone along the eastern and northern borders during the first phase, which will last 42 days. Israel has also agreed to release 1,000 Palestinian prisoners, including approximately 190 who have been serving sentences of 15 years or more. In exchange, Hamas will release 34 hostages. Negotiations for the second and third phases of the agreement would begin on the 16th day of the ceasefire.
Presumably, the Palestinian prisoners were not getting 15 years for nonviolent protests.
Take Sinwar:
The correct utilitarian response would have been not to exchange 1026 prisoners for an Israeli soldier, and it would certainly not be to exchange 34 hostages for 1000 prisoners now.
How is this anything but an almost total Hamas victory?
To me it reads like a very dehumanizing admission from Hamas, and a natural corrolary from the idea that Israel will retaliate more than ten-fold against attacks on its population. It enshrines the idea that Israel has such a social, technological, military, political advantage on Palestine that its people's lives, even just civilians and common soldiers, are worth orders of magnitude more than Palestinian lives. And Hamas agrees with that.
If it was plausible for Hamas to claim it was because they are kicking Israeli ass so much on the battlefield they forced them into negociating an unfavorable exchange, then maybe it would be a Hamas victory. But the only way Hamas is winning is that they getting killed so hard that Israel has to pull its punches for it not to look like they're outright massacring the helpless.
I feel like pointing out that Israel is very much not pulling their punches, to the point that "Israel is outright massacring the helpless" is the default position among the youth, and among most people outside the US' sphere of influence. This is a gigantic contributor to the massive rise in antisemitism (well, in combination with the conflating of anti-Israeli sentiment with antisemitism). IDF soldiers and members of the Israeli government are currently unable to travel to huge portions of the world without being arrested due to the belief(and evidence) that they are outright massacring the helpless.
It seems like that's largely owed to the fact that any amount of striking buildings that house Hamas and also (by Hamas' design) house the helpless is going to look like massacring the helpless. The only way to not massacre any helpless in this case is to stop doing anything, or invent magical weapons like that one scene from Iron Man where he takes out terrorists with micromissiles while sparing every hostage they had.
Granted, but at some point if you have any humanity you have to say, 'the number of helpless people we're massacring is not worth the number of terrorists we're killing".
And what is the equivalent point for non-helpless people, and non-terrorist combatants?
Even people under terrible regimes have agency, which is why 'just following orders' or 'just running train schedules' were dismissed as defenses in notable past examples. Helplessness in turn also implies an inability to defend one's self- but this cannot co-exist with the ability to attack, since the means are the same, and which has certainly been displayed.
Similarly, terrorists are- by almost universal international definitions- actors who conduct unlawful violence. This is not only categorical, but generally morally, distinct from the systemic use of lawful force by a governing entity- particularly when the stated and demonstrated intent is to continue violence as a matter of policy. The categorization is certainly complicated by legalistic disputes, but as far as the moral premise goes the acts which started the war were conducted by the same entity that would be responsible for punishing said acts if they were unlawful.
The Palestinians have many issues, not all of which are their own fault, but treating them as helpless and without agency is neither accurate or humanizing them. There certainly isn't a lack of willingness and ability to fight and die against a hated administrating entity- only a dispute as to who it is. A consequence of that, however, is that arguments of helplessness against the other don't carry the same weight.
I'm not defending the terrorists, as in the people actually firing rockets, I'm defending everyone else. Including, yes, people who hate the Israelis and hope that Hamas wins, which I imagine is just about everybody at this point, as well as the people who pack their lunch boxes.
Incidentally I disagree with this, and discussed it further here. Until WW2, it was almost always understood that those giving orders would be held responsible for the results of those orders being carried out, providing that the actions taken corresponded roughly to the orders given. Like so many load-bearing aspects of our society, we jettisoned this so that we could jump up and down on the Nazis a bit more.
I would dispute that you are actually defending the non-terrorists. (Which- if it seemed otherwise- you weren't being accused of. Apologies if that seemed so.) Rather, I would present that your attempted framing is a form of moral malpractice- not because it defends terrorists, but precisely because it does not defend non-terrorists, and instead leads to greater risk to them.
The question was posed to you with the expectation you'd avoid it, but also to demonstrate its limits: the humanity argument's tolerance for casualties goes up significantly when the populace has agency that they use to support actors, and even higher when the actor in question is the government. Simple humanity is willing to both kill and watch a lot more people get killed when it's a result of an inept aggressor than a helpless bystander. You can see demonstrations of this in everything from fiction, to group social dynamics, to- of course- security politics both domestic and inter-state.
As such, appeals to humanity that imply the former (humanity has a low tolerance limit for violence) is in play rather than the later (humanity has a high tolerance limit for violence against aggressors), appeals which are used by bystanders in rationalizing acceptance of the 'actual terrorists' who use such appeals as the basis of their strategy, are placing more people at risk, rather than a less.
This would be a great deal of wishful projection.
Sadly, most people in the world don't particularly care about the Israeli-Hamas conflict, any more than they could be forced to care about the Russia-Ukraine conflict. It wasn't a dominant factor in recent Western democratic elections. It has notably not set the Arabic street ablaze as middle eastern states have not merely maintained neutrality, but even increased cooperation with Israel. It certainly hasn't been a particularly captivating issue in Asia or sub-saharan Africa, where sympathy for far away non-co-religionists is in short supply and where you can often find non-trivial examples of even sympathy for Israel on anti-islamic grounds.
The dominant trend of anti-Israeli international politics over this war is how few of them outside of the normal muslim world religious sympathies are about Israel, and how many of them have American or domestic political motives. Whether it's a low-cost/high-visibility way to raise a middle flick off the US (always popular in Latin America), a way to counter-balance/win some favor with American strategic rivals by signaling partial alignment with them / against the US (often overlapping), a way to discredit international law advocates/bodies that might challenge them (Nicaragua), or a way for electorally unstable ruling parties to try and rally support by appealing to narrative origins (South Africa, Ireland), it quite often has little to do with Israel or Hamas themselves.
People who believe the world is on their side on any issue, let alone this one, are going to be disappointed, much as the Europeans were disappointed when 'the world' and 'the international community' were not particularly on their side in the Ukraine War.
And WW2 was also where the pre-WW2 era of geopolitical dominance by European monarchies and empires was broken, and with it the artificial imposition of European monarchist political norms which tied sovereign immunity to the legal identity of the Sovereign and their enabling actors which helped lead to said world wars.
Whether your post-WW2 political tradition holds more in the individualist western political traditions (in which the individual agency permits guilt, even as it can protect from collective judgements), a familial/clan-centric model (in which membership of the oppressive ethnic-clan group allows guilt), religious-identitarian models (in which case participation in the religious-administrative group permits disposition), class-ideological models (in which case membership to the relevant oppressor classes enables class-based action), or other more collective-responsibility models in general, the pre-WW2 models of European monarchial-sovereign supremacy of responsibility have globally been replaced by traditions that- for various reasons- recognize the agency and culpability of various non-central actors.
Given that one of the enabling factors of WW2 (and even WW1) was precisely how load-bearing 'it's not my responsibility' was on enablers to the wars that (repeatedly) self-destructed the European political system, there was a fair deal more reason to jettisoning that presumption than just Nazi-jumping.
More options
Context Copy link
Perhaps if every country or faction that wanted to defend Palestinian citizens sent troops so that there would be enough manpower to force the end of hostilities without bombing the places where the rockets are being fired from, we wouldn't be having that talk. And yes, it is my understanding that Israel can't afford to have that many boots on Palestinian ground, certainly not when they're bound by the need to wear uniforms and Hamas isn't.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link