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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 28, 2025

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Trump, breaking with Netanyahu, acknowledges ‘real starvation’ in Gaza. Reddit discussion.

This makes him the first right winger I've seen say anything about starvation after something happened recently that made lots of places start talking about it, maybe the move to GHF food distribution? I can't really trust the UN when they talk about it, since they may have been still pissed that Israel cut UNRWA out, plus I heard it was only two dedicated Gaza writers putting out statements of that kind. I can't really trust leftists when they post about it, because they fail to show me their homework and seem to argue a very motivated stance. But Trump talking about it... I don't know about that either. He has spoken off the cuff before. But it brings me to ask: how bad is it? What footage did he see and is it reflected in the data?

Supposing that there is starvation: is that Israel's intention? What is Israel's strategy going forward? I thought that making camps to move civilians into was a good idea, and then once everyone's out, painstakingly clear the whole place, but I think that the international community wouldn't accept that because it's technically ethnic cleansing. There isn't actually anything the international community would be satisfied by except for total ceasefire and return to October 6th. But I don't actually know what the intention is, is the intention to draw Hamas out of hiding to get to the food somehow? I have a hard time discerning what is true about the war and what isn't.

In a coincidence of timing, I've spent much of the day going through the telegram channel "Palestine English News Updates" (gazaenglishupdates) in another round of my continuing effort to locate video of the alleged mass murder of civilians. Content in the channel is only very rarely blurred, so if any of you plan on opening it, be warned: it contains extremely graphic images and video. I found a single video of the moment an individual was shot, and none depicting the moment where a group was shot at or attacked with explosives, but I relied entirely on search terms, and in a channel going back to Oct 23 that has 10K images and 20K videos, that's plenty of chances for me to miss one or several hundred.

What I didn't miss is the plentiful video and images of starving children. While the cause might be up for debate, that children are starving isn't. It's intuitive anyway: not easy to feed people in a warzone, the only food is coming in from the outside, people and especially children are going to die from malnutrition and starvation.

Israel might not "intend" (apply as heavy caveat to that as you wish) for civilians to starve, but starvation walks hand in hand with war and death. They knew it would result from the start, and it is strictly true that if the IDF stood down and withdrew, fewer people would starve. Should they? Good luck finding an impartial answer to that.

You do realize you're watching curated propaganda designed to outrage and pull heartstrings, right?

How are images of the facts on the ground curated propaganda? Is reality propaganda at this point?