This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
And the Palestinians are, for the most part, impoverished uneducated lumpenproles who live off foreign aid and jihadist payments. Arab armies are jokes and failures. Hamas, Hezbollah, even Iran have been bombed to oblivion. Who is going to come to the Palestinian's aid now? Turkey?
The Israelis don't want to leave Israel. They don't want to leave it so much that they basically stole themselves nukes so that they'd never be coerced to do so. If the Palestinians are competing on who can make the other's situation shittier faster, then they'll lose that competition. If Israel has to choose between becoming an illiberal pariah state like North Korea or its nonexistence it will go for the former every time.
If it gets so desperate as to reach that point, why wouldn't they just murder every Palestinian and dare the international community to do anything about it?
Why are you so certain that their willpower to remain will give up before the Palestinians will?
This isn't actually a choice. Becoming an "illiberal pariah state" is not a long-term stable situation - you can't run a first world economy with Israel's geography while completely cut off from all international trade and support. Take away all the direct and indirect support provided by America, as well as the support provided by diaspora jews (part of becoming a pariah state means that remittances and other sources of funding/support will go away too), and you're looking at a country with a very limited lifespan.
One of the targets of Iran's strikes against Israel was the diamond exchange - the diamond exchange is one of Israel's most profitable trades, despite the fact that they don't actually have any diamond mines in the country. How long is that going to last when Israel is cut off from international trade flows? How long is their tech sector going to last when all foreign investment is pulled? Israel does not have the population demographics or material resources required to sustain themselves when completely cut off from the rest of the world (to say nothing of what their internal politics will look like when the orthodox are forced to work and join the army). Don't forget that the majority of Israelis have the ability to simply fuck off back to their actual home country - and when faced with a choice between grinding poverty in a pariah state and living a first world lifestyle back in the west I think a portion of them will simply leave.
Pariah Israel would simply be a last, desperate grasp before the entire project is swept away into the dustbin of history, and if there's any hope for survival for Israel it means not ending up as a universally despised and hated ethnostate.
Your assumptions are simply incorrect.
Sure, many would leave. But there is a sincere core of Zionists who believe that Israel was promised to them by their God and they will stay there to the bitter end. They will eat rocks and dust and do what they must before they let the Palestinians win. A impoverished state with nuclear weapons and arms - not that it would ever get that desperate - will never fall. The Arab leadership very well know where those warheads are aimed at.
The fantasy of the Israeli state dissolving itself after sufficient isolation is simply that. The onus is on YOU to convince me that it is the case. Just stating it as a matter of fact does not make it so. It is the Palestinian project that looks like it is on the verge of collapse, at this very moment. With no geopolitical sponsor, how could it hope to continue on in any relevant form?
And is that enough to maintain Israel as it is currently constituted? Does it include the Orthodox population of useless eaters/religious scholars? Being willing to fight on to the bitter end just means that the end will be bitter, not that it never comes.
Did South Africa have nuclear weapons? I'm sure the leadership of all the black nations around them knew where those warheads were aimed at. How effectively did they prevent the fall of South Africa's apartheid regime? I'm confident they'll be just as effective at protecting the Israeli apartheid regime as they were in the past.
Fantasy? No, it is simply the most likely course of action based on historical trends. Pariah ethnostates that become liabilities for their imperial sponsors tend not to have particularly long lifespans, historically. Modern states with modern militaries are dependent upon a vast web of interconnected supply chains that simply cannot be replaced with domestic production. Where will Pariah Israel acquire the petroleum that their military needs to run? Where will Pariah Israel get the advanced electronics and armaments required to maintain their qualitative edge? Where will Pariah Israel get the vast amounts of funding that they use to support and maintain their society (someone has to pay for all those orthodox scholars)?
The reason I believe Israel would fall after becoming a pariah state is that there are several huge inflows of capital and materiel from abroad that are currently required to maintain the country in the face of tremendous opposition, and there's no viable domestic replacement for them in the hypothetical future of a Pariah Israel.
I think I can roughly guess your political leanings and positions on this matter: and rather than go into detail into hypotheticals that I don't care to argue, I'd just say that eighty years of failure and defeat, with Israel consistently prevailing over great numbers and further entrenching itself does not make me believe it will inevitably fall. In fact, it is the opposite.
You want to wishcast the fate of European African regimes onto Israel. Understandable. But you do not admit the possibility that the natives are simply destroyed. That they are exiled forever from their homelands with no recourse or restitution. That the arc of history does not turn towards justice, but in fact, the opposite. What makes you believe that the Palestinians will remain relevant in a decade, much less a century, for these historical trends to play out? For that is the null hypothesis, for so many destroyed peoples denied homeland and evicted by the militarily superior.
If the Jews lose Israel and Jerusalem, who is to say that the Palestinians will have it? They, who have proven to have no talent for military or diplomacy or government?
I reject your narrative of history. I predict that the Palestinian people will come to the same end as the Rohingya and the Uyghers, the Kurds and literally every Amerindian - nations without states. Crushed. Obliterated. And only university students will care. And I assert this with the same confidence and lack of evidence as you give me.
I've openly stated my political leanings on the motte in several places - but if you can guess, please do so because I've been called both left and right depending on the day and it'd be nice for someone to be able to correctly identify where I sit on the spectrum.
So if you saw an elite athlete who had been performing excellently for several decades start to falter, would you claim that his fourty years of active athleticism is a compelling argument against the idea that he would grow old and frail? After all, he had 40 years of strength and prevailing over great opposition - why would a few gray hairs and injuries be a sign that he was failing?
Wishcast? I'm not sure what you mean by that. What I'm actually doing is comparing the trajectory of nations in similar situations throughout history - and there's actually quite a lot of examples. The Crusader Kingdom of Outremer is an even more apt comparison, complete with the useless scholars that require a lot of material support.
No? My actual assumption was that the wiping out of the Palestinians would be what was responsible for Israel becoming a pariah state. Committing genocide (and there's no way you can spin 'the natives are simply destroyed' as non-genocidal) would absolutely be enough to mark Israel as a pariah state and get them cut off from the rest of the world.
But more fundamentally to my point... it doesn't matter if the Palestinians are there or not - Israel is unable to support itself over the long term without extensive inflows of capital and materiel from the external world, and when those flows are shut off the resource limits available to them will exacerbate internal stresses and conflicts.
You're not alone - the first lesson of history, after all, is that nobody learns anything from history. But more importantly, what you're tossing out and ignoring from my post are the hard resource limits that international ostracization would place upon Israel. There are serious material concerns which would place hard limits on the ability of Israel to maintain their military effectiveness in the face of a global boycott and abandonment.
Do you know how much food Israel imports? Do you know what kind of other agricultural-based technology they import in order to farm their particular environment? Do you know how much energy they import, or how much of their tech sector is dependent upon foreign investment? How does Israel maintain their military edge when completely cut off from the supply chains required to make their technology work? These are all incredibly serious questions relating to the future of Israel which you have just completely ignored, seemingly because you do not think that there are any lessons to be learned from history.
It is admittedly very hard to provide evidence for exactly how a society breaks down in a hypothetical future world - but honestly, I think you actually have a bit more confidence than me. I'm calling back to history and comparable events in order to buttress my arguments, while you're simply asserting that history has nothing to teach because the Israelis would be much better at genocide than other people, which involves flying much further out from any available evidence than I would on here.
I don't care to debate hypotheticals, as it has no end and no productive purpose, but an Israeli I know gained ten kilos since October 7th and he wants a Popeyes in his country. I think they're good.
And after I went to all the trouble of finding non hypothetical points for discussion like food security and energy. Oh well, c'est la vie.
Sigh.
Okay. Look.
If you take a look at the economic sanctions on North Korea as a cursory glance at Wikipedia, you see that they are not embargoed in terms of food, only its export. They can import as much food as they like from people willing to sell to them. Cuba is the same. Starvation happens in those countries not because of a lack of sellers, but a lack of hard currency to make imports with.
No one has ever accused of Jews of not having money.
As we've seen with Russia, both food and energy exports are not constrained. The technology necessary to maintain a modern economy is imported from a variety of sources, but even that can be overcome. The Mossad isn't experienced in playing shell games with corporations in Lebanon and Turkey. It is trivially easy for them to do so - that's how they got the pager bombs to begin with.
Sanctions and boycotts have not stopped these countries. Inconvenienced? Yes. But no sanctions regime is airtight.
I don't know why you insist on this being the silver bullet that fells the Zionists, but it's clear you in some form or another believe in the priors of BDS. All of these points are irrelevant, and as I said - fantasy. Eighty years of Arabs not trading with them have not caused them to collapse. BDS has gone on for twenty years and achieved nothing. Israel will always have American sponsorship, if only because it is where most of the world's Jews live, so it is a hypothetical of hypotheticals.
I don't know what to say but your beliefs in this regard are pure idealistic fantasy, and even if such events come to pass it would not result in the historical arc that you envision. My evidence, to counter your 'history', is all of the real-life regimes right now who ignore sanctions and embargos without great difficulty. Effort, perhaps. But existential they are not.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link