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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   31371 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

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By now, most everyone has forgotten about the war.

I read this sentence, and my first thought was: which war? Israel-Gaza? Israel-Iran? Syrian civil war? Or (as it turned out) Russia-Ukraine?

You might have wanted to be more specific — or at least give an explanation why, out of all those ongoing conflicts, Russia-Ukraine is the war.

...

Israel-Gaza aren't waging war

Is this you saying that Hamas doesn't represent Gaza, that without statehood Gaza can't be considered a political entity capable of international relationships such as existing in a state of war, that it's only a wider aspect of Israel's war against Iran due to Hamas being a proxy (unlikely, given that you state Israel-Iran is not a war), or that the war is so one-sided that it hardly counts despite Hamas's best efforts to put up a fight?

...

doesn't involve continuous high-intensity ground combat between armies.

Did our war in Afghanistan involve "continuous high-intensity ground combat between armies"? For that matter, how about the Yugoslav wars?

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Yugoslavia.. there was a fair bit of pitched combat there, no?

Pitched, yes, but would you consider those fighting "armies" — particularly if you contrast "insurgencies" as something distinct, as your comment applies.

In any event, you seem to have a pretty narrow and idiosyncratic definition of what constitutes "a real war"; one which, it seems to me, most people do not share.

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