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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   34305 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 15, 2025

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There is Motte-and-Baileying going on here. Motte: Palestinians screwed up, vae victis; Bailey: we owe Israel continued support, gifts and hospitality.

Why do we have to identify one side as The Good Guys in any conflict and throw everything behind them? Why can't we dismiss this as two groups of barbarians butchering each other and just uninvite them both from our society until they show signs of improvement?

(Also: would you have accepted the same argument regarding the Nazis and their victims?)

Because America loves Star Wars.

They want a clear bad guy and a clear good guy and it'd be best if the bad guy's sword was red so they could tell he was bad.

Most of the disastrous ME foreign policy of the US has boiled down to a popular misunderstanding of trying to map the Evil Autocrat vs the Oppressed Rebels that unfortunately tracks all the way to the very top. Realpolitik has its own weaknesses and failings, but Americans have the political memories of goldfish and the nostalgic memories of geriatrics.

Because America loves Star Wars.

They want a clear bad guy and a clear good guy and it'd be best if the bad guy's sword was red so they could tell he was bad.

You might like this Substack piece by Librarian of Celaeno (assuming you haven't read it already): "Jedi Brain":

Jedi Brain is a term (I’ve also heard Disney Brain, Marvel Brain, and the like) for a mental state wherein people’s main frame of reference for understanding politics, war, and the interrelationship between them is mass media entertainment products. There are good guys and bad guys, each occupying a respective political identity, and it is the job of the former to seek a more just order by destroying the latter. Narrative coherence tends toward the personification of each side in small groups of heroes on the one hand and one big villain on the other. This latter figure is the wellspring of Team Evil’s grand scheme; if he is destroyed, so goes with him all the bad stuff he represents.

…

This final point is key; Jedi Brain is a form of groupthink that flourishes largely (but not exclusively) among people who expect neither to suffer nor inflict violence themselves. They are secure from it. For them, killing people is an abstract question decided on the basis on whether the good guys will be helped by it, which will in any case occur far away. Negative forces in the world are under the direction of supervillains, who must be destroyed for good to flourish, and upon their destruction peace, harmony, and the sort of personal safety and well-being the Jedi-Brained individual has will simply arise as a kind of emergent property of his noble efforts, or rather the noble efforts of the heroes who will engage in the actual violence, far from the clatter of keyboards. It’s not only neocons who think that every third-world dictator is Adolf Hitler; it’s arguably the default way most of the population now imagines the world, even if only implicitly.

…

Politics- sublimated violence- follows the same trajectory. One can see Jedi Brain on full display deployed against Donald Trump and his MAGA storm troopers, right down to the “Resistance” imagery from the terrible new Disney trilogy being circulated among those terrified at his election in 2016. In addition to being Darth Vader, he’s also Hitler, and also Voldemort, because to the people who deploy those allusions, they’re all the same thing. The boundaries between fiction and reality collapse into a media machine that undifferentiates them, blending them into a narrative where the evil on a page or a screen is the same whether it’s a dark wizard, a wrestling heel, a murderous dictator, or a random internet istophobe. The proper response to any evil, which is all evil, is to demonstrate emotion comprehensible and acceptable to others with whom you wish to identify, in much the same way the public expression of consumer choices validates one as a member of a fandom. Zelensky and the latest Dr. Who trailer- liked and reposted, of course- it’s just the right thing to do.

I think the final point is what gets me, the one about the rebuilding after Shock and Awe receiving no more thought as if Good People naturally get Good Outcomes, medals and a parade. The idea that good is an emergent property of killing all the bad people is something I don't understand except as a seductive lizard-brain problem of having some people to blame. Solzhenitsyn's line about good and evil has stuck with me all my life.

(Also: would you have accepted the same argument regarding the Nazis and their victims?)

President Truman did...

"If we see that Germany is winning the war, we ought to help Russia; and if that Russia is winning, we ought to help Germany, and in that way let them kill as many as possible.. . ”

I'm not a fan of Western support for Israel, but the Arabs have done very little in recent times but the occasional pointless terrorism and whining in every international venue that they can. If they want to reclaim the lands of their forefathers, they should strengthen their countries.

And no. Nazism is not the same. Back when countries actually could wage war, people put their chocks down and stopped them. The status quo is the equilibrium of the violence states are willing to achieve their political ends. If the Arabs can't summon the collective will to forge a state to defeat Israel on the battlefield, bluntly, they don't deserve the lands they claim.

The question I meant to ask is whether, before Israel happened, an argument like "if the Jews can't summon the collective will (...) to defeat Germany on the battlefield" would have been acceptable by the same principle.

And either way, Israel gets a lot of support - Arab states trying to defeat Israel alone on the battlefield hasn't really been tried, and if the argument is that the US should help Israel against the Arabs because the Arabs can't defeat the Israel-US coalition, then as long as the US remains militarily dominant this argument is basically circular. If the US decided to back José Santos Almeida of Rua Cleide, 123 in São Paulo with the determination that it displays in supporting Israel, all of South America probably couldn't summon the "collective will" to forge a state to defeat him on the battlefield either; but this doesn't lead us to conclude that the US ought to help this fictional person I placed on a random street from Google Maps become the overlord of his continent.

I can tell you never have ever read any sort of far-right or Neo-nazi argumentation because that is absolutely what they say about America, Great Britain and the Soviet Union - that it was flush through with Jews. (Heck, WW2 being a Jewish victory over Nazism is probably a position you could argue in good faith, with the proper caveats).

Arabs couldn't beat Israel alone, even as a coalition, even before Western support and indigenous nuclear weapons. It is arguable that they have lost military capacity since 1948 with the complete failure of Arab socialism. The Jews are perfectly capable of defending themselves: American diplomatic and military aid is backstopping security, not sovereignty. Israel would not hesitate to expel the rest of the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza if Americans withdrew their support: in fact, they would do it immediately.

Realpolitk has nothing to do with morals. There is no 'oughts' or 'shoulds'. Azerbaijan just did it. Who's sanctioning them?

(Also: would you have accepted the same argument regarding the Nazis and their victims?)

Poland was legitimately way too uppity, as per usual. They can never be opposed to both Germany and Russia. It just doesn’t work geopolitically.

The vibe I get is that people here seem to mistakenly think that “Israel” is this one big, indivisible thing. They’re supporting the Zionist regime under the mistaken premise of thinking it’s in support of Jews. Most religious Jews hate the State of Israel because its secular and want to see it dismantled just like Hamas does, and they work to protest and support groups directed at that end of things.

Because we are conjoined at the Geopolitical hip with Israel. I'm with you on everything else though.

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