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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   35295 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 15, 2025

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Israel is dropping like a rock in the polls and especially among young people.

Israel is not going to hold a world democratic referendum on its own existence.

Palestine's best weapon is IDF soldiers with tiktok showing the world their true nature. Israel is not going to be viable as a state when the state is deeply unpopular in the rest of the world.

Israel's best weapon is IDF soldiers, full stop. And if North Korea can be viable as a state, so can Israel.

if North Korea can be viable as a state, so can Israel

North Korea is a fully centralized totalitarian party-state, heir to centuries of cultural isolationism. Israel is incredibly unstable politically, there are routinely massive protests and huge factional divides. You could not have picked two countries any more different.

And if North Korea can be viable as a state, so can Israel.

I'd imagine even most Israelis who don't give a damn about Palestinians would start having second thoughts if they were promised North Korean living standards. Is Israel going to force Jews to stay in the country at the threat of torturing their families to death?

Is Israel going to force Jews to stay in the country at the threat of torturing their families to death?

If it gets to the point where the United States is willing to make Israel a pariah state, the Israeli Jews won't have any place to go.

Of course, none of this is going to happen. All of this fantasizing about how the entire international community (including the US) is going to look at Israeli atrocities and the angelic behavior of Hamas and cut Israel off once and for all is just mental masturbation.

If it gets to the point where the United States is willing to make Israel a pariah state, the Israeli Jews won't have any place to go.

The Boers didn't have any place to go either but they gave up instead of choosing to become North Korea despite facing infinitely worse demographic prospects.

Of course, none of this is going to happen. All of this fantasizing about how the entire international community (including the US) is going to look at Israeli atrocities and the angelic behavior of Hamas and cut Israel off once and for all is just mental masturbation.

Thinking it's going to happen because the "international community" miraculously decides to start caring about morality would be mental masturbation, but it's actually going to happen because Israel is a gigantic liability whose subsidy is indefensible from an America First realpolitik perspective.

The total American expenditure on behalf of Israel over the past two years is measured somewhere between tens and hundreds of billions of dollars, including nearly a quarter of the THAAD interceptor supply in just under two weeks. This enormous investment towards a country that appears to operate parasitically vis-a-vis the US and which has no issue taking actions that directly harm American interests seems unlikely to survive the next election cycle.

The Boers didn't have any place to go either but they gave up instead of choosing to become North Korea despite facing infinitely worse demographic prospects.

Even the black South Africans aren't, as a whole, as genocidal as Palestinian Arabs. And the whites may yet find they made a mistake.

Even the black South Africans aren't, as a whole, as genocidal as Palestinian Arabs.

Based on what, exactly? Jews lived alongside Palestinian Arabs for the past thousand years and the number of major anti-semitic incidents prior to the arrival of the Zionists can be measured on one hand. It's only after people arrived who hid explosives inside Synagogues and engaged in "assassination, terror attacks and even castration that the Palestinians became bloodthirsty.

Anyone forced to live under the domination of such people would eventually become pretty genocidal. Would they maintain this attitude in the event said domination ceased, forever? I've yet to see any evidence that they'd be any worse than Zulus or Xhosas.

You're not arguing that the Palestinians aren't genocidal, you're arguing that it's justified that they are. That's an entirely different argument.

Well no, the first paragraph is providing essential context, namely that by your own standard the Jewish terrorists prior to 1947 demonstrated the exact same genocidal tendencies while the Palestinians only exhibited such tendencies reactively after a millennia of Palestinians living in peace with their Jewish neighbors.

The second asks a rhetorical question: would the Palestinians be genocidal if they weren't being dominated? So far you've yet to provide any such evidence, just bald faced assertions that an SS Sturmbannführer could as easily make about how genocidal Jews would be if the tables turned and they were allowed to dominate Germany.

Israel is not going to hold a world democratic referendum on its own existence

Taken to the extreme, at some point Israel gets so unpopular that Western countries start arming the Arab states specifically to wage war against Israel.

Shortage of weapons, was, to put it mildly, never a problem for the Arab countries. Israel faced this situation before.

Israel is not going to hold a world democratic referendum on its own existence.

Zionists aren’t. The Ultra Orthodox Jews are as anti-Israel as Hamas is.

They are not. They are critical of the state of Israël’s policies. There is a difference.

Have you actually read their statements at all? They are entirely opposed to establishing a State in Israel because they believe their Exile by God is still in effect.

Most ultra-orthodox Jews, especially in Israel, are not satmar.

And most of them don’t support the State of Israel either.

Which is an important factor that no-one really takes into account when doing the demographic projections.

Israel is a welfare queen that wouldn't last many days if it got the south Africa during the 80s or current Russia sanctions.

If Israel's military is so great why have they failed to take an area the size of a suburb in almost two years despite massive brutality and having to beg for boundless supplies of weapons? Israel's main military asset is propaganda and giving low IQ west bank settlers the capacity to do things that are seen and heard globally effectively turned that on its head.

If Israel's military is so great why have they failed to take an area the size of a suburb in almost two years despite massive brutality and having to beg for boundless supplies of weapons?

Because they aren't actually being all that brutal. Depopulating and securing an area is quick and easy if you're willing to adopt the ROE of Ghengis Khan or the Greco/Turkish war.

Israel's main military asset is propaganda

This seems wildly inaccurate.

giving low IQ west bank settlers the capacity to do things that are seen and heard globally effectively turned that on its head.

I think you've got that backwards.

Because they aren't actually being all that brutal. Depopulating and securing an area is quick and easy if you're willing to adopt the ROE of Ghengis Khan or the Greco/Turkish war.

The Israelis shot their own hostages while they were shouting in Hebrew and waving white flags, they aren't operating according to strict ROE. Just being brutal doesn't always translate to being more militarily effective: the perpetrators of the Rwandan Genocide were so focused on the genocide that they actually wound up losing to the much smaller Tutsi militias that prioritized actual military objectives over pointless slaughter.

The Israelis shot their own hostages while they were shouting in Hebrew and waving white flags, they aren't operating according to strict ROE.

It's almost like war is confusing, and friendly fire is, has been, and always will be.

the perpetrators of the Rwandan Genocide...

...Were largely civilians, waving machetes and operating under no military discipline whatsoever. Those Tutsi militias were veterans of several other brush wars in Tanzania and Uganda, and were led by a quite effective and battle-hardened leader (Kagame)

Just being brutal doesn't always translate to being more militarily effective...

It does if your objective is, as many allege, to simply depopulate an area through violence. The Rwandan genocide took a little over 3 months, during which mobs of civilians armed with blades and a few small arms killed a million people. It defies credulity that the IDF, armed with modern weapons, somehow is so incompetent at genocide as to only kill less than 10% as many over a period of time six times longer, especially when all the would-be victims are penned up in a tiny area like Gaza.

No, if the Israelis were actually the Nazis that so many here portray them as being, they could have just treated Gaza like the Warsaw ghetto and it would have been over inside a month.

It does if your objective is, as many allege, to simply depopulate an area through violence. The Rwandan genocide took a little over 3 months, during which mobs of civilians armed with blades and a few small arms killed a million people. It defies credulity that the IDF, armed with modern weapons, somehow is so incompetent at genocide as to only kill less than 10% as many over a period of time six times longer, especially when all the would-be victims are penned up in a tiny area like Gaza.

  1. Israel's modern weaponry is dependent on a complex international supply chain that could be interrupted at any moment by patrons dropping their support whereas Germany was, by design, autarchic and self sufficient.

  2. The IDF has nearly no tolerance for casualties, unlike the Hutus or Waffen SS. You can drop bombs or snipe people from a distance but to commit Rwanda-tier genocide you have to close in and closing in would expose Israeli fighters to a level of risk they aren't willing to take.

No, if the Israelis were actually the Nazis that so many here portray them as being, they could have just treated Gaza like the Warsaw ghetto and it would have been over inside a month.

Ironically, Nazis used this exact argument:

We executed orders very well, so I assure you if there had been an order to kill all Jews, there would be none left in Europe. Instead, there are millions of survivors. We would not have used an insecticide to do it either; Zyklon B was a fumigant that all nations used to kill lice, which cause typhus, which killed millions after the first war. The Americans called it DDT, so the Jews expect us to believe DDT was used to gas them. The Allies destroyed rail lines, bridges, roads, and airports so that no supplies could get to German cities or the camps. The prisoners got sick, withered away, and died, many times right when the Allies entered the camps. Many died even while under allied care, it took weeks to stop the outbreaks, and thousands of prisoners died. The Allies caused these deaths, although not intentionally. It was just easy to blame a policy of extermination instead of telling the truth.

General Ernst Remer 1987.

EDIT: Also they didn't "deal with the Warsaw Ghetto" by bombing it to rubble and then shooting everyone (except at the very end when people starting fighting back, and ironically those people had the best odds of survival) they transported people to concentration camps. If killing millions of people is as simple as you think then why did Hitler bother with the logistical hassle instead of just killing them on the spot like Genghis Khan?

Israel's modern weaponry is dependent on a complex international supply chain that could be interrupted at any moment by patrons dropping their support whereas Germany was, by design, autarchic and self sufficient.

Germany literally ran out of fuel, as well as several major metals necessary to build tanks, airplanes, and shells. And as for Israel, they produce quite a lot of their own gear; the Merkava tank, their own small arms, quite a lot of their drones, etc.

The IDF has nearly no tolerance for casualties, unlike the Hutus or Waffen SS. You can drop bombs or snipe people from a distance but to commit Rwanda-tier genocide you have to close in and closing in would expose Israeli fighters to a level of risk they aren't willing to take.

Neither the hutu militias nor the einsatzgruppen (of whom there were only a few thousand at any given time) were zerglings or mindless hordes; this is not a serious analysis.

We executed orders very well, so I assure you if there had been an order to kill all Jews, there would be none left in Europe. Instead, there are millions of survivors.

Extreme apples and oranges. Attempting to exterminate an ethno-religious group across an entire continent is a much different thing than attempting to destroy a single large city and kill the inhabitants - something the Nazis did do several times during WWII, most notably in Warsaw which went from a city of over a million to having only a couple thousand people left when the Soviets entered. Here, actually, the Japanese were significantly worse - they simply demolished dozens - potentially hundreds - of towns and villages, and killed all the inhabitants.

If killing millions of people is as simple as you think then why did Hitler bother with the logistical hassle instead of just killing them on the spot like Genghis Khan?

They did quite a lot of killing-on-the-spot - far more than the Israelis have done, with far fewer soldiers involved. Also, the Nazis extensively used prisoners - including jews in concentration camps - as slave labor in service of that autarkic fantasy you mentioned above.

Germany literally ran out of fuel, as well as several major metals necessary to build tanks, airplanes, and shells. And as for Israel, they produce quite a lot of their own gear; the Merkava tank, their own small arms, quite a lot of their drones, etc.

Most of Israeli military production concerns the top of the production chain, operating under the assumption that they can import the vast majority of their other needs; Israel doesn't even produce their own bombs. Trying to compare Israeli self sufficiency with that of Nazi Germany is a good joke, though; one Israeli general estimated that they would be entirely out of supplies in under a month if they stopped getting foreign support.

Neither the hutu militias nor the einsatzgruppen (of whom there were only a few thousand at any given time) were zerglings or mindless hordes; this is not a serious analysis.

You say, after claiming all Israel needs to do to win in Gaza is to "go full Genghis Khan".

Yes, they aren't "zerglings" but they were willing to take serious casualties to achieve their goals, something the IDF clearly isn't willing to do. What's actually "not serious analysis" is pretending that Israeli morality is a greater factor in their way of warfare than Israeli cowardice and Israeli incompetence on the ground.

Extreme apples and oranges. Attempting to exterminate an ethno-religious group across an entire continent is a much different thing than attempting to destroy a single large city and kill the inhabitants - something the Nazis did do several times during WWII, most notably in Warsaw which went from a city of over a million to having only a couple thousand people left when the Soviets entered. Here, actually, the Japanese were significantly worse - they simply demolished dozens - potentially hundreds - of towns and villages, and killed all the inhabitants.

They did quite a lot of killing-on-the-spot - far more than the Israelis have done, with far fewer soldiers involved. Also, the Nazis extensively used prisoners - including jews in concentration camps - as slave labor in service of that autarkic fantasy you mentioned above.

Yes, the Nazis used Einsatzgruppen, but the Nazis discovered pretty quickly that death squads don't kill people fast enough and also leave soldiers as psychological wrecks. Hence the invention of death camps and the Final Solution. They wouldn't impose the enormous logistical strain of the camp system on themselves if the job could be done just as easily by regular soldiers shooting people on the spot.

As to how much "killing-on-the-spot" has been committed by the IDF, I have no idea how you've made an estimate because the IDF has demonstrated they're perfectly happy to storm a house and kill unarmed elderly people for sport, to triple tap a WCK convoy, to slaughter rescue workers and then bury the evidence with bulldozers. These crimes are only ever acknowledged when they're caught on camera by bystanders/victims and even those incidents have yet to see a single perpetrator sentenced to prison time. We'll only know the true extent of the crimes years after the fighting stops, just like how the death toll of the Holocaust only became apparent years later: estimates in the immediate aftermath of the war actually put the Jewish population higher in 1948 than 1938.

Also, of course the Japanese probably killed more people that way but the Japanese were courageous to a nearly suicidal degree. You'll never in a million years see Israeli soldiers charging tanks with bombs on sticks. Not a great comparison.

You say, after claiming all Israel needs to do to win in Gaza is to "go full Genghis Khan".

I did not say that. What I actually said was that "Depopulating and securing an area is quick and easy if you're willing to adopt the ROE of Ghengis Khan," and thus the fact that Israel has not depopulated Gaza during two years of war isn't evidence of their incompetence, as suggested by @functor.

More comments

If Israel's military is so great why have they failed to take an area the size of a suburb in almost two years despite massive brutality and having to beg for boundless supplies of weapons?

Your premises are incorrect.

Israel's main military asset is propaganda and giving low IQ west bank settlers the capacity to do things that are seen and heard globally effectively turned that on its head.

The West Bank is over ----> thataway. West Bank settlers aren't doing anything in Gaza.

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