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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   26998 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

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The Venn diagram between “thinks SJ is existentially dangerous” and “has given up on liberalism” is damn close to a circle. Killing some percentage of the population is not in the liberal Overton window. You can thank the Nazis and the Soviets and maybe the television for that cultural antibody.

No, game-theoretic excuses for genocide are limited to a really tiny subset of the conversation. The kind of subset that hangs around on Internet forums. I’d go as far as to suggest it’s mostly branding, signaling, a Molochian race to the bottom for viewers and clout. The Venn diagram between these people and actual capacity for violence is, thankfully, even smaller. Incentives work, and the liberal social order makes random violence deeply unappealing.

There is a much larger constituency which wouldn’t piss on their enemies if they were on fire. That’s not a response suited to an existential threat. It’s bog-standard tribalism, the sort that liberalism kind of sort of suborned.

Killing some percentage of the population is not in the liberal Overton window.

Actually, yes it is. Kamala Harris was fully on board with ethnic cleansing of brown people, and so committed to it that she preferred supporting wiping out the Palestinians to actually winning the election. Hell, even AOC voted for more weapons and bombs! Extermination of unwelcome minorities is very squarely and firmly in the overton window right now thanks to what's happening in Gaza.

How many of them would describe it in those terms? I guarantee you, Harris never framed it as ethnic cleansing. As far as I can tell, the closest she got to mentioning the death toll was acknowledging the “suffering in Gaza.”

How many of them would describe it in those terms?

Depends on the context, but this objection is utterly meaningless. If I was selling influence to political donors and lobby groups, I would not describe what I was doing in those terms. If someone eats a pure carnivore diet but describes their diet as vegetarian you're just being stupid if you invite them to your roast vegetable appreciation society meeting.

As far as I can tell, the closest she got to mentioning the death toll

What she actually said was that she wasn't going to distance herself from Biden's policy and that she wouldn't change anything about it - and the Biden policy was that Israel can do whatever they want and the US will support them no matter what. Trump, when he said that what was happening in Gaza had to stop, was actually further to the left than Kamala Harris.

It’s not meaningless when you’re trying to trace the Overton window.

I’ll assume for the sake of argument that Israel is trying to ethnically cleanse Palestine, that Harris recognized it, and that she also knew supporting them would lose her the election. Why, then, wouldn’t she say it out loud?

Whatever you think Kamala lost by supporting Israel, it would have been much worse if she’d said “yeah, kill all those brown people.” The costs massively outweigh any benefits. That’s what it means for something to be outside the window. Even if one believes it, one can’t say it out loud.

I’ll assume for the sake of argument that Israel is trying to ethnically cleanse Palestine, that Harris recognized it, and that she also knew supporting them would lose her the election. Why, then, wouldn’t she say it out loud?

She actually did say out loud that she wouldn't do anything to stop them, and high ranking members of Netnyahu's government (Smotrich etc) were open about their plans for ethnic cleansing. If one person says "I think all the jews should be exterminated" there's not really much of a distinction between that and someone else saying "That person talking about exterminating the jews has an opinion that I respect and won't deviate from" - both of them are advocating for a holocaust, there's just a layer of obfuscation to gull credulous and stupid people in front of one of them. She didn't go out of her way to advertise her position on this topic because she knew it was politically toxic with her base, but you'll be hard pressed to find politicians who voluntarily run attack ads against themselves because they want to be honest with the people. I don't think the overton window really matters here because "just exterminate all the Palestinians so we can build luxury hotels" and "Starving those children to death is perfectly fine because they had pre-existing medical conditions" is still inside that window.

It's not clear that Harris would have done better had she taken a more pro-Palestinian line. Certainly, a lot of Muslims stayed home (which is still only half as bad from the Dem perspective as actually flipping), but AIUI this wasn't true of non-Muslim SJers, and had she taken such a line she'd have been up against AIPAC and gotten called a baby-beheader.

Laziest, sloppiest, slowest and least thorough genocide ever. I suspect the Gazans breed faster than the Israelis manage to kill them.

I think it's fair to say that @netstack was referring to "killing some percentage of the population that resides within one's own country". Even if one accepts your claim that the Palestinians in Palestine are being "genocided", they are neither American citizens nor resident within the US.

Even if one accepts your claim that the Palestinians in Palestine are being "genocided", they are neither American citizens nor resident within the US.

The genocide (thank you for accepting the claim) is taking place with US support and using US manufactured weapons. The genocide in Gaza would be impossible for the Israelis to carry out without extensive western support and American taxpayer dollars. I do not think that you have a very good picture of the average left-winger's thought process if you believe "Oh the brown people we're exterminating for more Lebensraum for white settlers aren't American citizens so you can just ignore all those hospitals we're blowing up" would be compelling to many of them.

thank you for accepting the claim

I don't accept the claim.

The genocide in Gaza would be impossible for the Israelis to carry out without extensive western support and American taxpayer dollars.

I don't believe so. Per @ymeskhout, formerly of these parts:

Yes, the $3.8 billion sent to Israel every year is a lot of money, but it’s nothing compared America’s $850 billion military budget. And Israel on its own remains an extremely wealthy country that enthusiastically prioritizes its military capabilities, with a $24 billion budget and an advanced domestic industry that is a major weapons exporter. If you really believe Israel is committing a genocide, vanishing all American financial assistance would barely leave dent in their efforts.

From another article:

Israel has been receiving around $3.8 billion per year in military aid from the US since the 2000s, constituting roughly 15% of Israeli military funding.

US military aid has since increased to $17.9 billion total in emergency military aid since Hamas initiated the current war. Israel’s military budget on its own has surged 65% to $46.5 billion in 2024. This now constitutes 8.8% of Israel’s GDP, the second highest in the world, right after Ukraine’s current 34.5% (for context the US spends 3.4%). This remains a significant decline from 1975, when Israel was willing to allocate a record 30% of its GDP towards its military.

Obviously, America’s military aid to Israel is significant. But let’s say Uncommitted got what they wanted and the US stopped all aid and imposed a total arms embargo on Israel. Given the significant chunk involved, we should reasonably expect Israel’s military capabilities to be hobbled. At least, temporarily.

The problem that few protesters seem to consider is that while Israel started out scrimping and scrounging for whatever military equipment they could get their hands on (including Soviet hand-me-downs via Czechoslovakia in their 1948 independence war), it now has a robust and healthy military industry that is both iconic and prolific. Israel designs and manufactures a wide range of its own advanced military equipment, including the Uzi submachine gun, the IMI Galil rifle, the Merkava main battle tank, and precision-guided munitions like the Iron Sting 120mm mortar and the SPICE family of guided bombs.

Major manufacturing sites include Israel Military Industries (IMI) for small arms and ammunition, Rafael Advanced Defense Systems for precision-guided bombs and missiles, and Elbit Systems in Haifa. Elbit recently secured contracts to supply thousands of heavy air munitions and establish new raw materials plants, with the explicit aim of reaching “full independence” in bomb and munitions manufacturing.

It is particularly relevant to note that Israel has already been subjected to arms embargoes several times before: France in 1967, the US in 1971, and the UK in 1973. Israel’s world-class military industry was developed in response, and it would not have reached its level of sophistication were it not for the embargoes. Now, this tiny country barely the size of New Jersey, is the 8th largest weapons exporter in the world, comprising 3.1% of global arms exports.

What the US gives that Israel cannot readily make itself are advanced fighter jets (F-15, F-35), and certain precision ordinance (JDAM kits, GBU-39 Small Diameter Bombs). Were that supply source suddenly vanish, there is no universe where the IDF just shrugs and says “ah we don’t have GBUs, let’s pack it up and go home guys.”

Making things go boom is very easy. It takes little technical sophistication to drop an unguided bomb from a plane when gravity does all the work. The eye-watering invoices of modern munitions come from the integration of guidance systems, sensors, and networked targeting computers — features that reduce collateral damage but are harder to replace quickly if US supplies are cut off.

If you’re genuinely and earnestly concerned about the civilian death toll in Gaza, there is a serious risk that an arms embargo would make that worse! Both by further entrenching Israel’s domestic military industry, or by encouraging a reduced reliance on precision munitions.

There's also the fact that, as noted by many commentators, Israel has nukes. If they wanted to exterminate the entire population of Gaza, they could have just dropped a nuke on it in October 2023 and called it a day, no US military aid required.

Moving on:

I do not think that you have a very good picture of the average left-winger's thought process

We were talking about the liberal Overton window, not the left-wing one. Some people use the two terms interchangeably, but I am not one of them. I will reiterate that "blowing up brown people in the Middle East" is a policy proposal that does very much reside within the liberal Overton window in a way that "wiping out large chunks of American citizenry, or people residing within the US" does not.

for white settlers

45% of Israeli citizens are Mizrahi Jews, while 20% are Arabs. Even if your use of the scary term "white settlers" was meant to gussy up your accusation, it's just false on its face. The majority of Israelis are not "white" by any conventional definition of the term.

The Venn diagram between “thinks SJ is existentially dangerous” and “has given up on liberalism” is damn close to a circle.

I'm rather bemused at all the people here who bemoan the lack of charity for left, casually just making shit up about their outgroup, but I suppose such is life. Anyway, sadly, you are mistaken. Liberalism skeptics managed to appeal to some of the elites, but we're yet to win mass appeal, even among anti-SJ people.

Aww, heck. I didn’t even realize the ambiguity.

I was trying to say that it’s a very small circle. Almost no one treats SJ as an existential threat. Out of the handful that do, most of them are otherwise disillusioned with liberalism. Plans to quarantine/exile/execute SJWs are firmly in the lunatic fringe. They barely even make it into the alt-discourse.

Now, I was also thinking that there were almost no liberalism skeptics who got there without developing a distaste for SJ. @magic9mushroom pointed out the obvious counterexample. So I suppose the illiberalism circle should fully contain the existential-SJ circle, rather than perfectly overlap it.

The Venn diagram between “thinks SJ is existentially dangerous” and “has given up on liberalism” is damn close to a circle.

Much of SJ is in the latter but not the former.

Killing some percentage of the population is not in the liberal Overton window.

I will cop to being a serial breaker of Overton windows. It's really quite hilarious the things people say when one does so; "are you Darkseid" and "what's next, revealing your family's secret rape dungeon" are some of the more memorable (though I've gotten really, really sick of "you're a child molestor").

Much of SJ is in the latter but not the former.

While SJP certainly has an illiberal strain, I do not think they have the stomach to do what is required to stamp out competing memes. This is a good thing, because unlike your edgelord position, they are numerous.

Their world is a world where people get cancelled if they do a racism on social media, with the definition of racism steadily expanding. However, they do not have a ideological underpinning of violent totalitarianism. I do not see them actually running gulags.

A Nazi would have been willing to murder an "Aryan" German if he was a communist. Cutting out the ideological rot from the people's body and all that bullshit. A SJW will not murder a black lesbian, because his ideology teaches that black lesbians are sacrosanct. This makes it a bad ideology to enforce its own purity, which is a good thing for fans of liberalism.

your edgelord position

Okay, yeah, I'll cop to "wait for my domestic opponents to literally die in a fire" being edge-flavoured. It's not like I'm the one causing the fire, though, and I have tried my best to pull some of them out of the fire with my advocacy for civil defence, so I don't think there's a less edgy position for someone who predicts a high chance of WWIII and has Noticed that SJ is very urban.

I am sorry, I was referring to your analogy between SJ and super-rabies with the outright statement that for the latter murdering the infected would be acceptable.

Of course, I did not pay close enough attention to your disclaimer:

(None of these are exactly my own views. This is an ironman post.)

So feel free to reapply my label to the fictitious person who would make that kind of overton-breaking argument in earnest instead.

If SJWs were into murdering people, which as of 2025 they mostly are not, I think they would cheerfully murder Clarence Thomas, or even Candace Owens.

The Zizians didn't bother with these two particular people. Neither did the group that opened fire on ICE. Nor the bloke that tried shooting Republican congressmen playing baseball.

I know the Zizians killed their landlord and some of their parents, and I think maybe even one of their own, plus I think they tried to kill some cops who were about to arrest them, but did they ever actually pull an outright ideology-only assassination where they didn't have a personal beef with the target? Because that's the reference class I'd think proper.

(To be clear, I'm not for a second claiming they didn't intend on doing this eventually - I've read enough of Sinceriously not to say that in a million years. I'm just asking if they ever got around to actually doing it before they got arrested.)

I will cop to being a serial breaker of Overton windows. It's really quite hilarious the things people say when one does so

Fellow serial breaker of Overton windows here, and can confirm; I’ve gotten a slew of these insults myself. Most of them I’ve forgotten by now, but one that really sticks in my mind is the time I was called an “incest porn aficionado who roofies women”. I mean fucking Christ lol.

Hell it’s quite noticeable how much even the more charitable descriptions of me conflict with how I actually act. I imagine most of these people would likely find me to be rather good-natured in real life.

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