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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   30006 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 17, 2025

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Perhaps no one has noticed given Trump, Ukraine, Yemen, Trump, and eggs: war in the Middle East is back! Very strong words from America in support of Israel:

All hell will break loose, and all of the terrorists in the Middle East – again, the Houthis, Hezbollah, Hamas, Iranian-backed terror proxies and Iran themselves – should take President Trump very seriously when he says he is not afraid to stand for law-abiding people. He is not afraid to stand up for the United States of America and our friend and our ally Israel.

as compared to “Canada only works as a state”. Israel’s reasoning is as follows:

Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said in a statement cited by Israeli media that the attacks had “the goal of achieving the war objectives as determined by the political leadership, including the release of all our hostages – both the living and the fallen”.

Prompt: what is it that makes Israel worthy of the friendship of the US whereas NATO is worthy of relegation given both would pull it into wars of choice half way around the world of no strategic importance? Follow-up: should Israel be the 51st state?

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2025/03/17/middleeast/israel-strikes-gaza-hamas-ceasefire-intl-hnk

what is it that makes Israel worthy of the friendship of the US whereas NATO is worthy of relegation

I understand that users here tend to be particularly stupid when it comes to anything involving jews, but the simple answer is that unlike the Germans, the Isrealis pay thier bills and have actually managed to win a war in the last century.

Also Ukraine just costs a lot more. America has sent more aid to Ukraine in 2 years than it has sent to Israel in the last 30. Ukraine has gotten as much aid in 2 years as Afghanistan got in two decades. And that’s just from the United States, not counting what Ukraine is getting from Europe.

The numbers are actually pretty close. US aid to Israel is about 4 billion USD per year, so "in the last 30 years" is c. 120 billion (on an inflation-adjusted basis - the headline figure is lower). The total amount appropriated by Congress in Ukraine aid bills is 180-190 billion, but that includes the cost of new-for-old replacement of old weapons delivered to Ukraine - the highest estimate of the actualSo value of the aid (counting the weapons actually delivered, not the newer weapons the US is replacing them with) is 128 billion (not all of which has been spent) according to this CFR report

So given the difficulty of getting a straight answer to either question by googling, "about the same amount" seems accurate.

Just wanted to say that I appreciate the offering of actual data on a question of fact.

You're not wrong about Germany being a military underperformer, but FWIW NATO is also orders of magnitude bigger than Israel.

This is a strange statement. German armies of 1914-45 were massive military overperformers who fought much better than almost all their enemies. The problem was that they kept taking on very powerful enemies and failed to sustain the military industrial base.

This feels so obvious to point out that I suspect I'm missing your point, but here goes: The Germany of a hundred years ago is not the same as Germany today.

I understand that users here tend to be particularly stupid

I assume there is no need for me to explain why you are banned for a week.

I'm not second-guessing, just curious: Did TequilaMockingbird have a history of name-calling-type behavior? Politely claiming that discussions of Israel/Jews on The Motte are low-quality wouldn't have been against the rules, and a one-week ban for a first ban would be abnormal, so far as I know.

Isn't he obviously Hlynka? My instincts could be misleading me here, but if that's the case there's a long history of exactly this behavior way beyond the lifetime of this particular account.

I would be very surprised if this were true.

Really? How many right wingers are there on here that thoroughly dislike race & AI discourse, argue for DR3, think that online nu-rightists and leftists are the same at their core, frequently use invective against sissy intellectual elites, tend to write think pieces as top posts, and like snappy one liners as responses, especially those with certain trademark expressions like "what's the old saw"? Not to mention that the account was created in June 2024, i.e. a short time after Hlynka's ban, but frequently talks like it's been part of the wider SSC-sphere for more than a decade.

Politely claiming that discussions of Israel/Jews on The Motte are low-quality wouldn't have been against the rules,

And if that's what he did I'm sure that he wouldn't have been banned. I've made plenty of posts that would get me banned if I decided to be maximally offensive too.

Three prior warnings for antagonism, with explicitly attacking the community as an aggravating factor.

I appreciate the transparency!

Let's consider the hundreds of billions of direct US aid to Israel since 1948. Estimates of the cost for sanctioning and isolating Iran are unknown but Grok estimates the figure to be in the range of $300–$600 billion. Joseph Stiglitz estimated the cost of the Iraq war to be $3 trillion, and more conservative estimates put it around $2 trillion.

The cost of Zionism to the United States and Europe is in the many trillions of dollars, and much more than that. NATO, Ukraine, and Europe are infinitely more worthy of the loyalty of the American people than Zionism and the state of Israel, which it looks like may after all drag the United States into war with Iran.

Iran is not sanctioned entirely due to Israel- Iran and America are just enemies due to events in the Islamic revolution.

You mean '61 don't you?

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