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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   35359 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 15, 2025

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Welp, back from the penalty box/fishing trip and I've missed the whole shitshow last week.

So let's start there: How about that preference cascade?

We all had our whacks at guessing which point was peak woke. I feel uncontroversial in saying the past month has been the drop. A couple trans school shooter, the Charlotte train snuff film and the assassination of Kirk, all in a few weeks. A real perfect storm of narrative-puncturing events. Coupled with Trump in office, the economy not being too terrible (yet?), and the completion of the right-wing media sphere, I believe this is the the political realignment so long and so far incorrectly predicted.

First off, on the nature of the conflict: We are not at war, but the list of stages between now and then is getting very short indeed. Peaceful societies have to work up to civil wars. A generation of kids have to grow up with regular violence radicalizing them and turning into a reciprocal cycle. It must grow in scale, and eventually involve the tacit support of legitimate governments at the state and local level. And both sides have to build social, legal and financial structures to support their violent wings, even if they "disavow" some of the specific actions.

But these violent exchanges happen regularly and are regularly defused. The Days of Rage lead to Reagan, and we enter a new cycle. Reagan leads to the fall of the USSR, which leads to Clinton, which leads to Waco and Ruby Ridge which leads to Oklahoma City, and it was tamped down. 9/11 redirected the narrative and the direction.

If you want my "Schelling point" for when we are actually staring down the barrel of civil war, it's that you will be able to make six figures enlisting to fight for one side or the other. The reader can judge whether that's fair and exactly where our politics are in relation, but that's how I see it.

So we're not there yet, let's talk about the filthy politics of it all!

I lived through one of these preference cascades before, on 9/11. I didn't have the context for it at the time, but I do have some perspective now. The pendulum will not be kind to either side here. The Right spent the moral capital they gained by the destruction of the twin towers on two wildly expensive wars that destabilized large parts of the Middle East and fucked up our foreign policy for two decades.....so far.

The left spent the moral capital they gained from the right doing all that plus the religious ecstasy of the First Black President on ...well, you know.

I have no faith the Right will be any "better" this time around, because politics is people and people are assholes. Especially in large groups, especially when ingroup/outgroup dynamics are making them crazy. Moral certainty is a hell of a drug. A lot of social and legal norms have been thrown into the bonfire of Donnie Jay. The tech boom has entered the Monopoly phase, and neither our politics nor our society seems to be responding well to the adjustments needed.

Both sides of any conflict will have their aggressive, radical wings. To the degree each side keeps their radicals in check, violence can be avoided. But each time a real or perceived violent attack happens, it bolsters the radicals and weakens the moderates. There is no point running around looking for intellectual consistency, because groups are not homogenous and most people are hypocrites. To the degree the center-left allowed their radical wing to run wild, or fed their violent fantasies, the center right will have that much harder a time restraining theirs.

My takeaway from this whole process, spanning the thirty years of my political consciousness, is that no ideology can resist reality forever, and being in power, in control of the narrative, drives people to resist reality. Whether that's the "democratic aspirations" of third world, seventh century revanchists or the definition of "woman".

The pendulum swings, and the only time you can slow it down is when it is on your side. If you're on the right, look at the people on the left who have spoken out at various stages of these past two decades. Remember those names. They tried, too little and too late for sure, but even so and generally at some cost.

For those on the left, look at those on the right who are holding their convictions, who are calling for peaceful (even if hypocritical/oppressive) responses, rather than in kind, with blood, this week.

If you all can't feel closer to them than you do to your own violent wing, give the radicals a call. It'll cost you six figures per man, and a lot more than that before it's over.

A couple trans school shooters

More than one?

One was FTM.

EDIT: Missed the context; no, that one wasn't from the last month.

Fixed

I've seen the people on Discord.

The pendulum has maybe slowed a bit. It certainly hasn't reversed direction.

Also, it may look like the pendulum has reversed because people are being publically called out for supporting assassination, but that isn't the pendulum reversing. It never was acceptable to support assassination, it's just that supporting assassination was about the only case left where the right kept enough influence to object.

Both sides of any conflict will have their aggressive, radical wings. To the degree each side keeps their radicals in check, violence can be avoided. But each time a real or perceived violent attack happens, it bolsters the radicals and weakens the moderates. There is no point running around looking for intellectual consistency, because groups are not homogenous and most people are hypocrites. To the degree the center-left allowed their radical wing to run wild, or fed their violent fantasies, the center right will have that much harder a time restraining theirs.

I'm constantly struggling over this both sides fig leaf people keep throwing out there for the sake of unity. This is only accomplished because they weigh January 6th against all the Floyd riots and all the Ferguson Riots, CHAZ/CHOP, the siege of the federal courthouse, attacks on the White House so bad they had to evacuate Trump during his first term, etc. It's a farcical comparison, but they keep making it. Even assuming Jan 6th was every bit as bad as they claim, they honestly believe it makes us equal? A single day of terrifying violence for legislators versus months and months of wondering if your town would burn down, or a mob would form outside your home, for years and years?

There is no unity, and there is no both sides. Nobody is afraid of the sorts of violence that erupts simultaneously in every city as when Democrats get restive. At most they are afraid someone might get it in their head to try to take a scalp of their own. But I'd be shocked if it succeeded. Remember it took the Left 2 attempts on Trump, a home invasion on Tucker Carlson's family, sending violent mobs after Supreme Court Justices, endless credible threats against Tim Pool and Nick Fuentes, before they finally got a kill. Charlie Kirk is just the 9/11 to the 1993 WTC bombing. They've been trying this whole time in a way the right hasn't.

They aren't even bombing transition clinics! Think about that. They consider violent extremism just saying "I don't think we should transition children". People used to blow shit up they didn't agree with. Thats how thoroughly they've framed the conversation, that your speech is considered violence on par with their actual violence. The only way the left could possibly get more violent is if their paramilitary troops (Antifa, BLM, etc) had actual military hardware instead of black masks and molotovs. Think about how much room the right has to get more violent before you start pulling "both sides" on me.

Antifa has the capability to rack up a much higher body count than they currently do without improving their weapons.

They're very strategic in their use of violence for PR reasons. They're very aware of how much cover the media will run for them and trying not to step outside of that while still scaring and provoking their enemies. They know full well that their violence will be minimized while the violence of those they provoke will be exaggerated, and they use that asymmetry to control the narrative.

The riot on Jan 6 was a distraction, a representation of the real danger, which was the Eastman plan to attempt to present an alternate slate of electors and undo the results of the election.

This was way more dangerous than you’re letting on. If it had succeeded, then essentially any amount of violence from the left would have been justified, because the formal process of the election was undermined.

The rioters, sure, they were not as damaging. But seriously wargame the next moves in America if that plan worked. It’s not pretty.

this always present a funny dichotomy to me, where the left focuses on Jan 6 when certifying an alternate slate of electors was much more concerning

And the right focused on weird conspiracies around voting machines instead of the actual confessed conspiracy to delay vaccine trial results to prevent Trump from winning, at the cost of a 9/11 or 3 of elderly Americans come the next COVID wave.

Yeah, I think it’s mostly about what makes for better TV. A riot from people who you can allege are trying to hang the Speaker is immediate, visceral, you don’t need to know much to enjoy it. A plan to file paperwork wrong, deliberately, is comparatively lame. Could paperwork be that important?

It reminds me of that scene from the old Star Wars movie where everyone is voting away their rights in favor of an emperor. Or, if you prefer, the actual event I think it was based on, which was really two events: the selection of Marshal Petain as the head of an interim French government to negotiate capitulation with Hitler, and the subsequent vote to give him unlimited constitutional powers. The first was rather popular, as everyone thought well of Petain, and the second was forced through with the assistance of ruffians shouting down from the galleries and thuggish ministers physically blocking a floor debate. George Lucas preferred the first scene over the second, for some reason. Really makes you think, huh.

Or, if you prefer, the actual event I think it was based on, which was really two events: the selection of Marshal Petain as the head of an interim French government to negotiate capitulation with Hitler, and the subsequent vote to give him unlimited constitutional powers.

That particular parallel seems week given that the defining feature of the selection of Petain was that it happened to a country that had just lost a war and everyone knew that the new government was being chosen to capitulate to Hitler.

The more obvious parallel is the fall of the Roman Republic (the terminology of Republic/Empire/Senate is obviously taken from Rome). The obvious parallel to the specific scene where liberty dies to thunderous applause is Julius Caesar being declared dictator for life by the Senate. The consensus among blogging classicists seems to be that Palpatine's rise to power looks more like Augustus than Caesar, but Augustus didn't start taking on Imperial airs and graces until he had already held absolute power for several years, so there was no grand scene in the Senate marking the formal transition from Republic to Empire. There are also the inevitable parallels to the Reichstag passing the Enabling Law in 1933 - in particular the idea that the Empire is an assumption of emergency power to deal with an ongoing emergency (rather than a post-civil was assumption of absolute authority to restore peace, order and good government as was the case for both Romans).

Wikipedia's article on Palpatine gives a long list of historical dictators he might be modelled on, but clicking the links to sources shows that George Lucas was probably thinking of a combination of Caesar, Napoleon, and Hitler.

a country that had just lost a war

This is the excuse that the defeatists gave in the moment, but in fact they had not lost the war, and de Gaulle went on to win it. Had he the advantage of the French fleet and a loyal army evacuated to North Africa (which the Germans could not touch, in accordance with what their generals were writing at the time and in retrospect), one can only imagine the process being smoother. The armistice question was also up in the air for longer than you suggest.

George Lucas was probably thinking of a combination of Caesar, Napoleon, and Hitler.

None of these were known as kindly old men in whom the country could trust in trying times and who was willing and eagerly voted excessive powers by a legislative body feeling lost and ineffective, which is Lucas’ text here. The first (whichever you choose) won a civil war and set terms. The second leveraged a generalcy into a coup. The third used a popular movement of angry young men to quell opposition and gain legitimacy. None were voted in by a deceived parliament thinking it was a jolly good thing too. On the other hand, Petain is actually a good parallel to the literal text. I suggest the Wikipedia analysis, insofar as it ignores the words, is misguided.

de Gaulle went on to win it

Lol Gaullist propaganda. The British, Americans and Soviets won it and the British and Americans graciously allowed de Gaulle to take some of the credit in order to ensure an anti-communist government in post-war France.

I wasn't relying on the wiki article for analysis - I was using it for links to interviews with George Lucas. The claim that Lucas was inspired by those three comes from his own words. My personal view is that the dominant historical inspiration for the Galactic Republic and early Empire is Rome, including via Isaac Asimov (Coruscant is obviously Trantor, and Asimov was always explicit that his Galactic Empire was inspired by Rome).

eagerly voted excessive powers by a legislative body feeling lost and ineffective

A fairly accurate description of how Augustus and Napoleon spun the grants of extreme power post-coup, even if it isn't what actually happened. As with Augustus, Caesar and Napoleon (Hitler is a grey area) the Senate meeting we see on screen was a stage-managed ratification of a coup that had already happened. And there is no vote on-screen, and canon material consistently describes the declaration of the Empire as a proclamation, not the result of a vote.

I suggest the Wikipedia analysis, insofar as it ignores the words, is misguided.

I wasn't there, but I don't think Petain was installed "to thunderous applause" given the miserable circumstances.

Lol Gaullist propaganda. The British, Americans and Soviets won it and the British and Americans graciously allowed de Gaulle to take some of the credit in order to ensure an anti-communist government in post-war France.

What do you mean? He organized military and paramilitary resistance to German forces and successfully negotiated with key allies to achieve his main war goals. What you’re expressing here is an astonishingly naive view on war: that it only “counts” if it’s all on the backs of your own troops. The reality of war is that the winner wins. Nothing else matters, although losers love to find excuses. Napoleon is a great example of a loser here - spent a lot of time making excuses in his last exile. Weygand too, from the safety of a country that other men liberated. I recommend against taking the perspective of losers.

And there is no vote on-screen, and canon material consistently describes the declaration of the Empire as a proclamation, not the result of a vote.

I don’t remember that detail from the film, but it has been many years. If that’s so, it’s so, and the comparison to Caesar would be more appropriate. (I’d hold that Napoleon in particular is a bad comparison. The representatives were deliberating over whether to declare him an outlaw when he came back with men with guns and dispersed them permanently.)

"The left successfully manipulated the information environment such that Americans voted the wrong way" is not grounds for overturning an election. As a matter of law and public opinion, the appropriate response would be "Sucks to suck. Git gud."

The weird decision was going after the voting machines first rather than running with the plausible lies about mass postal vote fraud from day one. In general, until Eastman takes over from Giuliani and Sidney Powell in early December, Trump's effort to overturn the election was pretty shambolic - particularly given that it had clearly been pre-planned.

"The left successfully manipulated the information environment such that Americans voted the wrong way" is not grounds for overturning an election.

Even if they used government force to do so?

Legally, definitely not. Politically, I don't think that type of attack has ever worked to undermine the legitimacy of an election anywhere, and it has been tried a lot.

The US is one of the few countries where there is no legal process to overturn an election on grounds other than the casting and counting of the votes. But in countries where there are other grounds to overturn an election, they look like "The candidate or his designated campaign team committed one of a short list of specified offences" - most commonly exceeding spending limits or knowingly accepting illegal foreign assistance. The idea of overturning an election based on some third party being biased in a way which it is not itself illegal is batshit - particularly if it is the incumbent claiming his own government was biased against him. But in any case using a legal technicality to overturn an election makes you look like a sore loser and typically causes you to lose the rerun election in a landslide.

Legally, definitely not. Politically, I don't think that type of attack has ever worked to undermine the legitimacy of an election anywhere, and it has been tried a lot.

In Romania, it was enough that a non-incumbent had a TikTok account. But it should be no surprise that the same government that "manipulated the information environment" would not accept that this invalidated an election.

As I said, legal processes to invalidate elections involve specific election offences committed by the candidate or campaign. In the case of Georgescu, it was (assuming that the documents released by the government were genuine) an absolutely blatant campaign finance violation - a million euros was spent on paid promotion of the TikTok account while Georgescu was claiming to have received zero campaign donations.

In normal times or if law remotely mattered, Giuliani's election contests would have stopped the counting and mixing of ballots and would have been successful in multiple states, definitely in Georgia. Giuliani wasn't the one pushing voting machines and was actually one of the people telling Trump to ghost Sideny Powell pretty early on.

No decision was made to focus on machines and machines weren't the focus of the campaign. Even a slight glance at any of the filed election contests should cure you of that claim, especially attempting to claim it was "clearly pre-planned."

The machine claims focus was something which developed post-hoc for a variety of reasons, but mainly because it was the one the media could pick up because its proponents, e.g., Sidney Powell, were increasingly deranged and their at least some of their claims were terrible and it could easily be made into a nonsense caricature. The areas which would have borne more fruit, e.g., signature checks and voter mail fraud, were meeting significant resistance in what was ostensibly Trump's own side.

The entirety of the GOP election game was unserious and clownish for various reasons, but that's hardly new. Any lawyer even remotely connected to GOP politics were getting many phone calls trying to scramble people into areas which should have already had pre-planned contests ready to go. Even among GOP "lawyers," few were willing to work for the Trump campaign in 2020 for a variety of reasons.

Although Giuliani was responsible for Four Seasons Total Landscaping, which was the most visibly shambolic moment of the whole affair.

okay, so then what?

nothing little in your post is remotely accurate with respect to the 2020 post-election campaign; it's just post-hoc narrative formation cherry picking anecdotes you read in friendly media

claiming the machines fraud narrative was "pre-planned" or "the weird decision was going after voting machines first" is just entirely detached from reality

because the formal process of the election was undermined.

the process outlined in the US Constitution is the formal process of how the winner is determined

the formal process of the election was undermined when laws were ignored, processes were illegally changed, legal requirements like signature checks were undermined or simply ignored, mass ballots were sent out, observers were removed, counting was done in secret, ballots were created, records were purposefully destroyed, even the lamest "time-out guys" court orders were ignored, etc., etc.

But seriously wargame the next moves in America if that plan worked. It’s not pretty.

could you describe it to us?

Sure.

Jan 6, a group of protesters gathers around the Capitol, some breaking in. They are under the impression they are demanding a recount and an investigation into fraud. Inside, a group of Trump loyalists inform the frightened Congressmen that they are demanding a corrected record, and there is no telling what they might do. A set of unfamiliar people, claiming to be electors, arrive and announce an alternative slate for Trump. Dissent is quashed by law enforcement, which says the situation is “dangerous” and that loud debate may draw attention. Pence walks in, and announces that in accordance with the text of the Constitution, he can verify electors. He verifies the new one. The people present do not know what to do, and do not oppose this move. Pence declares Trump as the continuing President.

Jan 7. News of this event comes out. America is immediately divided. Trump claims that he is President. Biden claims he won the election, and is now the president. Congressional Democrats move to invalidate the Jan 6 decision. Trump loyalists in Congress oppose the move strongly. Most Republicans aren’t sure what to do, and try to delay. A few days later, the first protests are organized and start. After nightfall they quickly descend into riots. MAGA counterprotests immediately follow. Mayors attempt to control the worst of it with riot police, but they increasingly struggle to control the crowds and opt to let the two sides have it out. News channels blast opposing viewpoints, and one-up each other in extreme language. Despite all this, things are eerily silent, and nothing really changes leading up to inauguration.

Jan 20. Trump arranges an inauguration in Washington DC. He deploys the National Guard around it. Biden, citing concerns for safety, withdraws to NYC and holds his inauguration there. Congressional Democrats go with him.

Jan 21. Biden, as President, orders the National Guard to defend him as he moves into the White House and displaces the pretender. Trump countermands that order. Both demand that the other be arrested. Some Guardsmen agree to support each side, and the civil war begins. What happens next depends on chance and individual conscience and is beyond predicting.

I hope I’ve made my point. The natural result of the plot was two people declaring their formal status as President at the same time. The moment one of them tries to exercise his executive authority you have a civil war. This is not particularly imaginative; this is what happens in history, over and over again, whenever you have a succession crisis that isn’t nipped in the bud. In reality, Trump backed down and the crisis ended. That was lucky. We were not guaranteed luck.

Thank you for typing that out.

I could have written the same thing about "wargaming" a stolen election from the opposition's perspective. Except we know that didn't happen, and I highly doubt it would have been any different had Pence refused to accept the electors from the states which cannot verify the results of their elections. The alternative slate of electors are not "unfamiliar people" anymore than the state-certified slate of electors are "unfamiliar people." The alternative slate were chosen due to how the process must play out given the outlined Constitutional process and deadlines. This has been done many times throughout US history. Trump's plan wasn't to simply accept the alternative slate of electors, it was to refuse to count the electors from some states and demand a debate and/or inquiry and if this failed to produce the required number of electoral college electors then the election would be thrown to the House, something which as been done multiple times in US history.

Why do you think the same comment would be wrong to have been written from the other perspective here? Eastman's plan wasn't to "undo the results of the election," it was contesting the results of the election.

The moment one of them tries to exercise his executive authority you have a civil war.

Not really. Much like each string of events you wargamed, one doesn't necessarily lead to the other. At each of these stages, the escalation can fail for a variety of reasons, much like Trump simply stopping and going home to Florida.

Whether this was more dangerous than pushing the COVID hysteria, more dangerous than race riots and burning parts of cities down, more dangerous than state executives unilaterally and illegally changing election rules, so that it culminated in stealing an election isn't obvious to me. Much like you believe Democrats are justified in using whatever violence to stop it, the same could be said at the time for those who watched as an election was stolen from them. Otherwise, the narrative means one side always loses which is eventually untenable and we're seeing some of that now.

The alternative slate of electors are not "unfamiliar people" anymore than the state-certified slate of electors are "unfamiliar people."

The description here is meant to evoke a plausible description of how the coup would be executed without being disrupted in the moment. In reality, it was disrupted in the moment, so explaining experientially what it would be like for the Congressmen on the ground matters. It’s not a contrast between this elector and that fake elector.

This has been done many times throughout US history. Trump's plan wasn't to simply accept the alternative slate of electors, it was to refuse to count the electors from some states and demand a debate and/or inquiry and if this failed to produce the required number of electoral college electors then the election would be thrown to the House, something which as been done multiple times in US history.

I think, in order for this statement to be supportable, you need two detailed examples. Then we can argue whether this was or was not comparable. But as it stands this is a bare assertion.

Why do you think the same comment would be wrong to have been written from the other perspective here? Eastman's plan wasn't to "undo the results of the election," it was contesting the results of the election.

Contrast the Bush-Gore kerfuffle. Immediately after the election, Florida law and Gore demanded a recount, which was immediately performed. Gore contested that result to the Supreme Court, which was decided in December. By the time that electoral certification rolled around the affair had been decided. Trump also submitted lawsuits, but these were rejected quite early. The Supreme Court was not willing to listen to him. So, by the time Jan 6 came about, the affair had been decided.

What Eastman proposed to do was not a method of contesting results. The results were already contested, and contesting them had failed. He was proposing to replace the results.

The analogy here would be if Gore had tried to declare that he was actually President and that the Supreme Court case was decided unjustly. Could you explain, without reference to facts of the election (because facts are the subject being contested in court here, and Gore and Trump lost in court), on a procedural basis, why Gore’s hypothetical rejection here would be invalid while Trump’s would be valid? Or if both are valid, what are the necessary and just steps that would then be taken to fix things and get a President in the two weeks leading up to the inauguration? Or do we not get a new President at all?

Not really. Much like each string of events you wargamed, one doesn't necessarily lead to the other. At each of these stages, the escalation can fail for a variety of reasons, much like Trump simply stopping and going home to Florida.

Absolutely true. I’m assuming that a successful coup on Jan 6 emboldens Trump and makes him fear for his safety if he tries getting off the metaphorical tiger. If he seriously attempts to hold onto power, however, it’s extremely doubtful to me that Biden just accepts it (because this legitimizes every future attempt in the same vein) and then you wind up with men with guns trying to decide which authority to listen to. The nice version of this is that they all pick one side or the other, and the nasty version is that they split roughly down the middle.

Notably, Harris did not even attempt to contest the 2024 election, and most of the same “election stealing” was in place from the last time. With all due respect, I don’t have much patience for the claim that the election was stolen. It is extraordinarily shady and motivated reasoning. I understand that the event must have been very upsetting, but the truth has higher standards. So forgive me for not really engaging with that half of your post. I just don’t see anything there to talk about.

The elections in 1800 and 1826 were decided by the House. For discussion about alternative electors, you can look at the 1960 Hawaii slate of alternative electors which were accepted by VP Nixon over the certified electors. In so far as a VP decided whether to count votes, Thomas Jefferson decided to open and count the electoral votes from Georgia despite them being obviously fraudulent thus awarding himself the presidency (well, after the House determined Jefferson should be President after Aaron Burr attempted to take it for himself given both received the same number of votes).

For a detailed discussion of the VP exercising the power to reject or pick elector slates, here is a response to a criticism by John Eastman which lists historical examples as well as many law review articles which discuss the topic and also clarifies exactly what Eastman's plan and advice was about what was to happen in Jan 6. Calling this plan "a coup," to be frank, is ridiculous.

Contrast the Bush-Gore kerfuffle.

Trump filed election contests well within the legal deadlines. These election contests were not "rejected quite early," with 6 of 7 contests still pending by the date of the safe-harbor elector slate certification in December. In Georgia, the court flatly refused to put the state required hearing and processes onto the court docket which resulted in an appeal, an order to do force them to do that, and then the trial court simply refusing to do it and then declaring the contest moot after Jan. 6.

Gores theory was much more limited than Trumps. Gore requested hand-recounts in only 6 or so counties and he hoped those election offices would find the ballots he needed. And thus those counties were indeed finding those ballots until GOP protesters/lawyers/rioters broke into their Broward County office and stopped them from making up ballots. It was this "recount" effort which was stopped.

What Eastman proposed to do was not a method of contesting results. The results were already contested, and contesting them had failed. He was proposing to replace the results.

No, there are multiple levels to contesting election results at the state and federal level. The winner of an the presidential election is determined by the process outlined in the US Constitution. By the date which electors were required to be certified, 6 or 7 election contests were still pending. Holding otherwise would mean states are required to abide by the illegal or unconstitutional election results of other states and have no way of contesting this, especially post-Texas v Pennsylvania where the SCOTUS laughably claimed a state doesn't have a judiciable interest in the outcome of an election.

Which was foreseen and why there is specific language in the US Constitution, a short document, outlining a process in the case of contest election.

Could you explain, without reference to facts of the election (because facts are the subject being contested in court here, and Gore and Trump lost in court), on a procedural basis, why Gore’s hypothetical rejection here would be invalid while Trump’s would be valid? Or if both are valid, what are the necessary and just steps that would then be taken to fix things and get a President in the two weeks leading up to the inauguration? Or do we not get a new President at all?

Gore didn't contest the electoral college vote. He could have. If he had and refused to count votes from Florida which would have resulted in neither candidate having the required majority electoral college votes, the election would be decided by state delegation from the House, as outlined in the US Constitution specifically to be a back-stop and ensure a winner would be determined during a contested election situation. Alternatively, the Congress could have set-up a commission to determine which votes they would count and for whom like they did in 1876. Alternatively, he could have counted an alternative elector slate and attempted to declare himself winner and then the joint-session would have decided what to do.

Harris did not even attempt to contest the 2024 election, and most of the same “election stealing” was in place from the last time. With all due respect, I don’t have much patience for the claim that the election was stolen. It is extraordinarily shady and motivated reasoning.

No. Most (I think all) states which were in dispute in 2020 either lost court battles over their illegal election process or made substantive changes to their laws which made the 2024 election better than the 2020 one. Also, there is a difference in kind between an election decided by 40,000 ballots in 3 states and millions of ballots across 8 or 9 states including the popular vote by approximately 2.5m ballots.

I've found people defending the 2020 election to be engaged in shady and motivated reasoning which essentially assumes the outcome, much like you do here and demanding a standard they know full well is impossible to meet even under the assumption substantial fraud took place. Additionally, they don't particularly care nor do they particularly have the knowledge about it anyway which makes dialogue about it mostly unproductive.

Under a defensible standard for election contests, i.e., making a showing that there are likely enough ballots in dispute which is higher than the difference in a race - interestingly enough the standard used by American courts everywhere except in 2020 where the standard was ignored or avoided, the 2020 election was stolen in the sense that it is impossible to truly determine the winner of the election. If you have interest, here is a relatively short article about the issue.

I'm constantly struggling over this both sides fig leaf people keep throwing out there for the sake of unity... It's a farcical comparison, but they keep making it.

Always has been. The Che posters and shirts, the hammer and sickle posters and shirts, well that's "just a phase." Approximately nobody makes swastika posters or Goering shirts (if he weren't, ya know, a Nazi, the Nuremburg picture would make a fine meme), they're definitely not sold at university-sanctioned and hosted poster sales, and if they did exist they certainly wouldn't be treated like it's "just a phase." Anti-black racism, unforgiveable; anti-white racism, doesn't even exist, definitionally impossible. No right-wing terrorist has ever become a university professor or gotten an honorary degree from Cambridge. Et cetera and so forth.

The thing has, somebody has to be the better person if they want to keep a country. That sucks, it's difficult, it's no fun, it's unfair, illiberal, quite often you'll feel like a chump. If you want there to be any chance of somebody on the other side listening, you have to carefully couch your point, hem and haw both-sides, avoid any invisible fence collars (inverse dogwhistles, if you prefer to skip the article; only the metaphor is relevant to my point). Otherwise you trip their trigger and they shut down.

It sucks and I'm bad at it. Absolutely terrible at avoiding inverse dogwhistles. But I still believe trying is better than the alternative.

The thing has, somebody has to be the better person if they want to keep a country.

Who's "being the better person" and who's "keeping a country?" I don't think they are the same group.

I've seen a different type of inverse dog whistle proposed before, one with some distinct similarities to this but also distinct differences. It was a "duck call", a meme intended to seem innocuous to your in-group but to provoke your out-group to reveal and beclown themselves. A rather pernicious type of duck call is a knowingly false argument that your in-group is much less likely to know or care is false; this type of duck call is also a loyalty test, in that it dares people who are otherwise on your side but are aware of your "mistake" to defy you.

A whole world of social strategies waiting to be named! Thank you, this is also an interesting one.

Would you care to provide some current examples? I don't quite understand how these are supposed to be different from scissor statements.

  • gender pay gap means society discriminates against women
  • trans women feeling happier after taking estrogen means they really were trans
  • higher gun violence rate in america is due to america’s high per-capita gun ownership

The premise of scissor statements assumes, usually incorrectly, that the battle lines weren't already drawn before the scissor statement revealed them. Duck calls are more shibboleths deployed in an ongoing conflict, taunts that only the enemy can hear, taunts that will tempt them to cross the battle lines and say "alright, listen here, mister". Most supposed dogwhistles are at best duck calls, as they're supposedly hidden right-wing messages that mostly left-wingers care about. "It’s okay to be white" is a classic duck call of a more honorable type, as is the okay sign, or going back further, something like Black Lives Matter.

Here's a recent example of the dishonest kind of duck call. A lot of the "evidence" getting passed around that Kirk's assassin was a Groyper is very silly if you're familiar with anything being discussed. To properly refute it, though, you need to demonstrate some familarity with Groypers, and this won't make you more persuasive to people who want to believe it; it'll simply give them occasion to sneer at you for being familiar with the topic of discussion. The original example I saw referred to as a duck call was actually directly parallel to this but with the opposite political valence.

The Jan 6 vs. BLM riots or whathaveyou is not an apples to apples comparison.

I had a BLM march a block from my house and damage done within a mile.

But BLM did not attempt to thwart the constitutional process of a presidential election.

Just focusing on "how much violence was there" or "what was the material impact" doesn't capture the badness of Jan 6 relative to more routine bouts of violence.

I agree that in general leftwing violence gets downplayed and rightwing violence is overhyped in polite society, but Jan 6 was quite bad as a political issue and could have been a lot worse if things had gone slightly differently.

Imagine if CHAZ/CHOP and Jan 6 switched political polarities and what would be said about them by the relevant sides. Obviously the Left would demonize CHAZ/CHOP and at least make excuses for Jan 6 being an attempt to oppose a very bad president. What would the Right do?

I didn't say anything about the relative grievances, that quote is merely descriptive of the structure.

If you want my position on Jan 6, it was barely a riot, certainly not an "insurrection". My father and brother were there, just not on the side where people went into the buildings. The only person to be killed was an unarmed middle-aged woman shot by security, the rest of the violence was very minor for a riot. Everyone involved even tangentially was punished all out of proportion to the offense. There's no equivalence to my mind between that and the regular drumbeat of destructive and violent riots the Left puts on, defends and refuses to punish.

You're illustrating my point, which is that it's hard for anyone who wants to argue the Right should not engage in mass political violence to make their case without running into the past fifty years of lefty activism, terrorism and assassination.

the rest of the violence was very minor for a riot.

Tell that to the 140+ cops who got injured https://www.policemag.com/patrol/news/15310988/140-officers-were-injured-in-capitol-riot-officials-say

Including

One officer has two cracked ribs and two smashed spinal discs and another was stabbed with a metal fence stake

One was beaten and tased until he passed out and another was attacking cops with a metal whip

After being pulled from the line of officers, Fanone was then beaten by rioters during one of the most brutal assaults on police protecting the Capitol that day. He was tased in the neck and eventually lost consciousness during the attack, where he had begged rioters for his life and told them he had children.

...

Andrew Taake of Texas pleaded guilty to assaulting police officers with bear spray and a "metal whip" on Jan. 6 and was sentenced to six years in prison.

Another threw a bomb at a group of cops.

There was also multiple pipe bombs planted by an unfound individual yet

One grabbed an officer by the back of their vest, pulled them down stairs and then beat them with a metal pole

Another hit cops with a baton he brought, and threw a speaker box at them

These are just a portion of the violence by Jan 6th protestors. And the property damage too, windows were smashed, offices were trashed and damaged and things were stolen off desks.

Total cost estimated around 2.7 billion dollars

Now of course, these criminals are just a small portion of the Jan 6th protest. There were tens of thousands of people there, many of whom were completely peaceful and not engaged in destructive behavior. Those people do not deserve blame for the actions of criminals just for existing in the same place together. Like members of any loosely formed group, people should be held individually responsible.

But that doesn't mean the criminals don't exist either. They do, and they were very violent and destructive. Both can be true, criminals exist and other protestors who didn't do crime aren't responsible for it.

That would make it what, 147th on the list of most violent/destructive protests in the past twenty years? Like I said, very minor.

That would make it what, 147th on the list of most violent/destructive protests in the past twenty years? Like I said, very minor.

If has about a 1 in 400 cop injury ratio seems pretty high, especially when it's significantly higher than even BLM (something else often called violent) and their cop injury ratio.

I agree with you, most participants are still peaceful. Most of any group are peaceful. And all those peaceful individuals deserve to be judged for their peace, not the behavior of criminal scum.

But relatively, yeah it was pretty high in the rate of criminal scum.

Great, make your worst-case scenario, let's take it all as gospel FTSOA.

The right has several thousand more fatalities and several trillion more dollars in damage to do before the ledger of riots is balanced in just my lifetime.

J6 was a minor riot that killed no one, and during which police shot and killed an unarmed middle-aged woman. There's no math that makes this the equivalent of even one weekend of BLM, much less the entirety.

J6 was a minor riot that killed no one, and during which police shot and killed an unarmed middle-aged woman. There's no math that makes this the equivalent of even one weekend of BLM, much less the entirety.

Is the only violence that matters to you death? Beating up a cop is still wrong, even if you don't kill them.

You're being obtuse. Nonfatal violence is less serious than fatal violence. It wasn't nonviolent, there were felonies committed, and plenty of people should have gone to jail over it. None of that makes it as bad as six months of terror, murder, secession, looting and arson.

More comments

I watched all of the live streams as this unfolded.

I’m so confused because none of the violence referenced in your links was at all observable on any of the livestreams.

The only actual violence, that increased past the point of pushing and shoving - fisty cuffs, if you will - was that of Ashleigh Babbit who was shot as she tried to climb through a barricaded door.

It almost seems to have appeared post-hoc. Do you have any video evidence of any of this? It seems near certain that there would have been given how much was filmed.

Total estimated cost at 2.7billion… god someone did well out of this. From what I saw, I would have guessed several hundred thousand - a few million at most.

That $2.7billion includes a lot of things like costs spent increasing new security.

This amount reflects, among other things, damage to the Capitol building and grounds, estimated costs borne by the Capitol Police, the District of Columbia, and federal agencies, and estimated costs to address security needs and investigations as described in budget and funding requests, appropriations, agency estimates, and other publicly available information.

I remember seeing photo albums of the damage in the aftermath and it totaled up to like, 4 maybe 5 broken windows. Shared by a leftwinger, FWIW, though I suppose it could have just been laziness or incompetence.

I’m so confused because none of the violence referenced in your links was at all observable on any of the livestreams.

A lot of it is done in the messier busier crowds where seeing what's going on is difficult. But yes we have videos like this and this.

Interesting, we also have video of a current DOJ official yelling to kill the cops

It almost seems to have appeared post-hoc. Do you have any video evidence of any of this? It seems near certain that there would have been given how much was filmed.

So yes we do, and if you want more you can just Google for the rest. Videos + police testimony makes for a strong case, cops don't generally lie about being attacked.

Thanks for sending - I hadn’t seen the second video, although I had seen the first - which is what I initially described as fisty cuffs - people fighting to get through the barricades but then the violence disappearing once through.

It’s definitely a dishonest comparison from you to compare the left’s rioting with the right’s, but fair to suggest that it should still nonetheless be disavowed as it definitely crossed a serious line.

It’s definitely a dishonest comparison from you to compare the left’s rioting with the right’s, but fair to suggest that it should still nonetheless be disavowed as it definitely crossed a serious line.

How exactly is it dishonest? Assaulting police is a crime, whether you're right or left wing.

Yeah I always look through these links for videos, but it seems to be entirely relayed stories or things that people eventually had to plead guilty to in order to get lighter sentences in the zealous over-prosecutions.

And then you get a game of telephone, where NBC news writes "an explosive device" that made a loud noise and apparently caused psychological trauma because some officers anticipated it might have otherwise been a dangerous grenade, in an article where they also mention (at the bottom of the article) the second worst explosive as "lit what appeared to be a firecracker, but it did not explode". And then here it's upgraded to simply "a bomb".

In addition to Jan 6, there was also the Tiki Torch thing way back when, which spooked people because it was white-identitarian but otherwise resembled a leftist protest.

I still maintain that a lot of this started when protesting became a social scene, a thing to do like going to concerts and shows, but with an incentive to one-up each other performatively and let mob mentality take over.

A single day of terrifying violence for legislators versus months and months of wondering if your town would burn down, or a mob would form outside your home, for years and years?

I live in a purple city directly bordering Portland, with its 100+ days of riots. There was even a Proud Boys vs Antifa fracas in a park 5 minutes from my house that made the national news. Yet, I never for one second worried about my town burning down or a mob forming outside my house. These "mostly peaceful protests" were still fairly isolated to very specific small urban areas. I guess if you were unlucky enough to live next door to a police precinct, you'd have reason to fear those things, but there has not been cause, IMO, for any general panic over these things, even near the heart of the problems.

I didn’t worry about a mob getting my house, quiet. But I (quite irritatingly for tax reasons) live at the far edge of sprawling city limits, and I hated getting texts from the mayor’s emergency alert regarding ‘citywide’ curfews (aimed at the greater downtown) that the threats were real and while not that close, closer than I’ve ever experienced. Watching enjoyable shops and restaurants be wrecked, likewise. Watching the ones that posted “minority-owned” signs in their windows and on Instagram being laughed at for thinking it made a difference (the mockers were right; it made no difference), likewise.

Minneapolis is 4 or 5 times further away than Washington but had far more direct impact on my life.

I was living in a ground-floor apartment in a nice/revitalized downtown area during 2020, and it was scary enough for a couple of days that I left town and stayed with a friend out in the suburbs. Windows were boarded up with desperate "black lives matter" messages scrawled on them to dissuade looters. Masked men dressed in black and carrying weapons were running around causing mayhem. It legit felt like law and order had simply collapsed around me. I can't even imagine how terrifying it must have been for my neighbors with young children.

There is no unity, and there is no both sides.

Well, the idea that there are just two "sides" is also foolish. The conflict and lack of unity is real, and for that reason suggests a multiplicity of sides. You expect fractious human beings to just line up within one of these sides, out of just two sides? What are you assuming here, kumbaya unity?

From Different Worlds

I’ve written before about how 46% of Americans are young-earth creationists, and how strongly that fails to square with my personal experience. I’ve met young-earth creationists once or twice. But of my hundred closest friends/co-workers/acquaintances, I think zero percent of them fall in that category. I’m not intentionally selecting friends on the basis of politics, religion, or anything else. It just seems to have happened. Something about my personality, location, social class, et cetera has completely isolated me from one particular half of the US population; I’m living in a non-creationist bubble in the midst of a half-creationist country.

As has been remarked on several times in the last culture war thread [1] [2], it appears Charlie Kirk was outside of most Motteizen's bubble. I was more aware of Fuentes and Groypers, which is ironic in light of all the people who heard of them 30 seconds ago and are now talking like experts.

From friends and family (And now Not the Bee), some prone to exaggerations, some not, I've heard multiple reports of churches having attendance exceeding Easter/Christmas levels. A friend of a friend claimed 1,300 attendees over normal, though this seems rather implausible, but several anecdotes mention standing-room-only situations and cars parked down the street from churches as people drove to their own. I was not able to go to church this Sunday, but I'd be curious if others have personal anecdotes. I'm guessing attendance at the Seven Sisters was normal.

Another anecdote that I want to share would be better if I doxxed myself. In the past, I have commented about my experiance with the Professional Managerial Class believing the Motte of wokism. I wasn't in the meeting, but I am told that the owners of said company were quite shaken upon hearing about the murder of Charlie Kirk.

I'm still getting the vibe that those on the left aren't groking why this is a big deal.

Aside: As someone who has made this mistake before, Ruby Ridge was under Bush Sr.; the Attorney General was William Barr.

P.S. Last thread appears to be the most comments in site history:

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 8, 2025: 3,000

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022: 2,781

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022: 2,775

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022 2,708

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023: 2,601

Charlie Kirk was thé normie con par excellence. He was incredibly popular among normie cons. Fuentes is not.

But also this was a successful assassination of a leading conservative figure. Of course conservatives are going to come out of the woodwork about how much they like him- he was one of ours and he was killed by one of theirs, simple as.

Kirk was unique in that he was the gateway between the normiecon boomer politics world and the underworld of bizarre lolcows. So he was very popular with normies, but there are also a ton of terminally online right-wing zoomers that liked him. One mistake everyone that is covering this is making is that young people don’t just follow a single political commentator. There are a good chunk of people that like both Fuentes and Kirk.

Interestingly, the left's attempt to paint the assassin as a Fuentes fan has really raised his profile. A real "choose your destructor" moment, and not one I think is likely to go well.

Depressing individual anecdote: I did not see even one new visitor at my church. We definitely need to figure out how to get our name out there more.

What type of church is it?

Lutheran (LCMS) out in the suburbs of a large Midwestern city. We have a large and lovely church building next to one of the area's most popular parks. However, the historical path of our congregation is that it boomed as the suburbs around it sprung up in the 1960s, and was very full for decades; but as that generation died off, the Gen X and Millennials that replaced them did not then start attending in their place.

It is a struggle to be in an area, as we are, with stable, not growing, population. And we're not near a big shopping center, apartment block or anything. I think all the time about how we could do more effective outreach. But our pastor is about to retire, and - as many on X have complained about in their own churches - didn't give a sermon on Sunday that would fire anyone up. Didn't mention Charlie at all. So I wonder if visitors will just turn around and think, "Nothing special here."

(I love Pastor, he's just winding down. He is very effective in many areas of his work. I just wish he would take on what's going in the world more often.)

Our church is growing.

I don't know that firing up is the best path for growth.

How's your community outreach, how are the small groups? People need a reason to participate in the life of the church.

I'm still getting the vibe that those on the left aren't groking why this is a big deal.

Anyone care to expound on that? Seems to pivot away from PMC company-owners being shaken.

I live in a deep blue enclave inside a blood red part of the country. Around here, people are still saying truly fucked up shit, but they're saying it in person when nobody has their phones out.

They're aware of the reputational risk, but they don't seem to be aware of the genuine anger from the right that seems to be driving it.

These Romney conservatives were willing to buy into the Motte of DEI and Woke - especially in finding Trump crass and distastefully - but in the face of the worst 2 weeks for the left I've ever seen large portions of the left decided to throw a party in the Bailey.

P.S. Last thread appears to be the most comments in site history

We've had people dooming and glooming over our decline, and while there were bigger thrads back on reddit, the primary reaaon for reduced activity is that nothing was happening. But when things happen, they happen here as well.

If you want my "Schelling point" for when we are actually staring down the barrel of civil war, it's that you will be able to make six figures enlisting to fight for one side or the other. The reader can judge whether that's fair and exactly where our politics are in relation, but that's how I see it.

Interesting. Can you say more about this?

You'll know there's enough coordination that you don't need to worry about getting vanguarded into some quixotic coup attempt. If there ain't enough people behind it to fund an army, your side isn't ready for war, and should not try to fight one. Be nice until there's enough coordinated meanness that you can make a good living at it.

I have to admit that's a pretty solid indicator.

Do you mean official armed combatant employment? I just have a hard time imagining the ad on Indeed, apart from it promising you'll be On The Right Side Of History, or right-wing-equivalent-thereof.

People already make 6+ figures being demented culture warriors on Twitch, Youtube, and T-T.

or right-wing-equivalent-thereof

He evidently thinks you'll be able to make 6 figures working for either side.

People already make 6+ figures being demented culture warriors on Twitch, Youtube, and T-T.

$100K is not as much as it used to be. There are plenty of military members in the US that make that, not to mention civil servants working with the military.

There exist people who make that much, but it doesn't scale: a random person can't suddenly decide "I'm going to be a culture warrior" and reliably earn a six-figure salary from that career decision. For every person that does, there will be dozens who languish in obscurity and make no money.

No, actually enlist to fight, whether as mercenaries, militia, regular military, paramilitary etc.

Do you mean official armed combatant employment?

Official as in companies or parties openly funding paramilitary groups like militias, PMCs, beefing up their own security departments.

Think oil pipeline security facing off with NGO-funded armed protesters, or CIA-funded terror cells sniping at the FBI-funded terror cells.

Presented without comment from the opening of Antony Beevor's "The Battle for Spain, 1936-1939":

'A civil war is not a war but a sickness,' wrote Antoine de Saint-Exupery. 'The enemy is within. One fights almost against oneself.' Yet Spain's tragedy in 1936 was even greater. It had become enmeshed in the international civil war, which started in earnest with the Bolshevik Revolution.

The horrors in Russia had undermined the democratic centre throughout continental Europe. This was because the process of polarization between 'reds' and 'whites' allowed both political extremes to increase their own power by manipulating fearful, if not apocalyptic, images of their enemies. Their Manichean propaganda fed off each other. Both Stalin and Goebbels later exploited, with diabolical ingenuity, that potent combination of fear and hatred. The process stripped their 'traitor' opponents of their humanity as well as their citizenship. This is why it is wrong to describe the Spanish Civil War as 'fratricidal.' The divisiveness of the new ideologies could turn brothers into faceless strangers and trade unionists or shopowners into class enemies. Normal human instincts were overridden. In the tense spring of 1936, on his way to Madrid University, Juian Marias, a disciple of the philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset, never forgot the hatred in the expression of a tram-driver at a stop as he watched a beautiful and well-dressed young woman step down onto the pavement. 'We've really had it,' Marias said to himself. 'When Marx has more effect than hormones, there is nothing to be done.'

In the tense spring of 1936, on his way to Madrid University, Juian Marias, a disciple of the philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset, never forgot the hatred in the expression of a tram-driver at a stop as he watched a beautiful and well-dressed young woman step down onto the pavement. 'We've really had it,' Marias said to himself. 'When Marx has more effect than hormones, there is nothing to be done.'

Very interesting. I look at frustrated Gen Z men and their disdain for licentious hot women and the men who get laid with them and feel something similar. They've overcome the stigma of being what my generation called "a hater" (and the attendant possession of a PhD, or Player Hatin' Degree).

Like I said, we're not there yet. AOC is still pretty milfy for a politician.

I think all this civil war talk is massively overblown.

Let's consider Russia for a moment, in the 1990s. The economy shrank 40%, looters stole much of what remained. Millions of people are unemployed in a country that has no experience with unemployment, or their wages just aren't paid. If they are paid, often they can't buy anything. There are no working social services. Life expectancy dropped 8 years. It's really, really bad.

There are some extremely dubious elections, in a country which has barely even had a chance to get used to elections. The communists (numerous and well-organized) had many very good reasons to dispute them, given that capitalism had proven to be a massive disaster thus far.

The President (a retarded drunk) had the army shell the White House with tanks. Hundreds of government representatives and officials died. There was a disastrous war in Chechnya. It was the nightmare-fantasy version of what Trump will do to America but real.

Still no civil war! Rich countries with strong bureaucracies do not have civil wars unless there are extreme circumstances. I count Russia in the 1990s as a rich country - the US is extremely rich. US security forces have many things that the Russians didn't, drones and internet surveillance. And then there are the American nuclear forces, who have many good reasons to want to stick together and resolve things peacefully.

For a civil war to happen in America, the power of the government has to be broken. At minimum, there'd need to be a decisive military defeat by China prompting an economic depression and delegitimation of traditional authorities. But even then you might just get a socialist/fascist takeover or a breakup rather than a civil war. One dead guy does not cut it.

For a civil war to happen in America, the power of the government has to be broken.

It seems to me implicit in this is defining a (future) civil war in America to be between two armies, like the blues vs. the greys, or a large insurgency like the Tamil Tigers. I agree that neither of those will come to pass while there's still a strong central government. But a state of affairs similar to the troubles in Ireland (similar in methodology, i.e. bombings, assassinations, etc.) is within the realm of possibility if something doesn't change, though there's something inside me that insists we'll all come to our senses before that happens.

Ronde van Spanje: Tumult, Unrest, and Vingegaard Wins

There is one road cycling event which exceeds all others in general notability, Tour de France. This post is not about it, but about its Spanish counterpart, alike in the rules, mechanics, participants.

The 2025 edition of the Tour of Spain has just ended on Sunday, and boy was it memorable. Not for the cycling, but for what spilled over the side of the road, onto the course. Namely: Pro-Palestine protests. The stated cause of these protestors was the participation of the team "Israel - Premier Tech" (IPT), which despite its name, is not owned by Israel, but by a Jewish Canadian. (Israel has not exactly disassociated itself from the team, its PM expressing support to the team for not buckling).

Stage 5 was a Team Time Trial, where instead of all cyclists starting together, each team starts separately at regular intervals. Perfect situation for those targeting some team. Protestors were aware of this, and attacked IPT, whose finishing time would later be reduced by 15 seconds.

In Stage 11, when cyclists were about half an hour from the finish, shortened by 3km, it also was declared it would have no winner.

IPT would change jerseys, replacing "Israel" on them with the Star of David.

Stage 16 was altered, when the race was already on, by reducing its length by 8km.

Stage 18 was an Individual Time Trial, where each cyclist starts separately at set intervals, again perfect if one targets a particular cyclist. Race organizers sensed the danger, and shortened the course from 27.2 km to 12.2 km, the day before the stage.

Stage 21, the final one, was set to end in several circuits around Madrid, but that part was cancelled. The stage would have no winner, nor would it count for the Spanish Yellow aka Red Jersey.

Safety concerns also prevented podium ceremony from taking place. An IPT rider, American Matthew Riccitello becoming the leader in the Youth (or White Jersey) classification in stage 20, thus entitled to participate in the ceremony, probably exacerbated the perceived security situation. (The teams would go on to conduct their own ceremony in some parking lot, with the production value of an amateur race.)

Currently the position of PM of Spain belongs to the Socialist Party, and in the conflict between making his country look competent and his support for Palestine, chose the latter. Explicitly supporting the disruptors, (following the Spanish FM's calls for IPT to abandon the race a bit over a week earlier). The opposition opposed, as did Israel's FM and PM of Denmark.

Incidentally, the team at the center of this controversy on Sunday participated in a Canadian one-day-race, "Grand Prix Cycliste de Montréal" under "IPT", instead of the full name. The race went smoothly, and was won by an American Brandon McNulty riding for the state-owned team "UAE Team Emirates - XRG".

Protestors having veto rights over sports participants, is something I oppose. It would be anti-pluralist. It would be like some manifestations cancel culture in being a variant of tortious interference. The audience wants to see the best riders, the best riders want to participate, but a politicized minority wants to come between them.

It reminds of some democrat-tinged critiques of the US political system, in that it has too many veto points, thus changes are hard to enact. It is, however, out of of all institutions the government, for which it makes the most moral sense to be veto-full as it is unique in wielding force against everyone. But such a veto-full system applied to all of society would be undesirable, as another person watching a cyclist riding for a team you do not like, does not make one coerced. This is why one should have less say in it.

EDIT: Cycling's governing body, UCI, has issued a statement. Most damning for Spain is the following paragraph:

We also regret the fact that the Spanish Prime Minister and his government have supported actions that could hinder the smooth running of a sporting competition and, in some cases, expressed their admiration for the demonstrators. This position is contradictory to the Olympic values of unity, mutual respect, and peace. It also calls into question Spain's ability to host major international sporting events, ensuring that they take place in safe conditions and in accordance with the principles of the Olympic Charter.

If you look at the wars that became horrendous PR failures such as Vietnam, the French in Algeria, South Africa etc they have all been wars against a population that fundamentally has no reason to accept that order. The South Vietnamese government had no real claim of authority or legitimacy. The palestinian population has no reason to accept large number Eastern Europeans who moved there in the 90s having more rights than they do. They have no reason to accept having a country that is chopped in two parts of which the largest part isn't connected to the sea.

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

and in the conflict between making his country look competent and his support for Palestine,

The completely incompetent looking one was the one who dragged Spain into the Iraq war. Competency is ensuring we don't have a Mediterranean state that creates a massive refugee crisis near Europe. A country that bombs six MENA countries in a week is an enemy of Europe.

Israel destroyed Gaza's catholic church and expects to be treated like a normal country. Does Israel treat countries that destroy synagogues the same way?

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.

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?

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.

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 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.

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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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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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.

The palestinian population has no reason to accept large number Eastern Europeans who moved there in the 90s having more rights than they do. They have no reason to accept having a country that is chopped in two parts of which the largest part isn't connected to the sea.

Not dying is one reason. Not being permanently impoverished and second class citizens is another. At some point, those negative things become certainty and they are negotiating something else. A short guy has no reason to accept that he can't play in the NBA, but not accepting it doesn't get him onto the team. The Israeli line goes peace will come when the Arabs love their children more than they hate the Jews. That seems clever, but the problem becomes explaining to the Arabs what loving their children means.

If the Palestinians had simply given up they would have been genocided by Israel. They have fought back and kept a decent size of land because of it. If they love their children they should do what the Irish did and get their country back.

No, they would have been ordinary arab citizens of Jordan, Egypt, Syria, and/or Lebanon.

Again zionists end up advocating for mass immigration. We do not want a massive wave of refugees to any country.

Who's advocating for anything? I responded to your historical counterfactual with my belief that events would not have been nearly as bloody as you described them.

Your comment is not in good faith, and unworthy of the legacy of this place.

I admire the gumption of reversing the usual argument against the one state solution, but I must again remind you that Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza and only levied the blockade when the Gazans continued to fire rockets at Israel.

It would have been very weird for Israel to withdraw unilaterally if the only thing that was keeping them from genociding the Palestinians was Palestinian resistance.

Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza because armed resistance made the cost of maintaining settlements too high, same with Lebanon. If the Gazans were entirely pacifistic they would have had no reason to leave in the first place.

Si vis pacem, para bellum.

There is no inherent moral right to sovereignty. I'm sorry, you were lied to: the liberal international order is a spook. The breadth of your dominion is limited to the force of your arms - no matter how righteous or unrighteous you may be.

Did the last prophet, PBUH, not conquer peoples who had fundamentally no reasons to accept his order? Was not God on his side?

Similarly, the Israelites have made a conquest of Israel and Judea. Is God not on their side, now?

Possession is nine-tenths of the law. If the Palestinians want a change to the status quo, they should have cultivated an army to beat the IDF. Now they're beggars in the land of their forefathers with no hope of recovery. No, you're not getting your land back: the people with guns who took it aren't in any mood to just hand it over. It is for them to accept the reality of impotence and exile, as every people who lost wars before them have.

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

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.

(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.

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?)

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.. . ”

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.

Possession is nine-tenths of the law. If the Palestinians want a change to the status quo, they should have cultivated an army to beat the IDF. Now they're beggars in the land of their forefathers with no hope of recovery. No, you're not getting your land back: the people with guns who took it aren't in any mood to just hand it over. It is for them to accept the reality of impotence and exile, as every people who lost wars before them have.

Actually the funny part about this is Israel may not even be around in its current form in a couple generations and it won’t be due to military conflict. The Satmar Jewish sect is the largest congregation of Jews in the world and they are fervently anti-Zionist as well as many (though not all) Orthodox. Guess who fertility rates are favoring over the long run? And it’s not even close.

All Palestinians may have to do is continue to hold out. Jews are on their side in the long run.

Most Satmars don't live in Israel (as you'd expect) and those that do don't participate in elections. I wasn't able to find any figures online but ChatGPT estimates that the Satmar only make up about 2% of Haredi Jews in Israel, and so an even smaller percentage of the total population.

Haredi non-Zionism is mainly focused on the fact that the Israeli state is too secular, they're not wishing to dismantle the state and let the Arabs take back the land.

My expectation is that as the Haredi welfare teat gets closed off and they are forced to serve in the military, a significant chunk of them will end up joining the religious zionists.

The Satmars don’t live in Israel because they’re opposed to its existence and it’s sacrilegious for them to do so. And they put in work to support groups who desire to see Israel dismantled.

Among those that are religious who support Israel, most of that comes ordinarily as you’d expect from the Orthodox, but even then there’s no overriding consensus on the matter. Israel is extremely worried when it comes to mobilizing the very religious sectors of their society because they haven’t been able to move the needle in any substantial way without risking a huge rift in fabric of Israeli society. I think if worst comes to worst things will run the other direction. I don’t share your prediction on this.

Edit: Phone keeps autocorrecting/making typos.

I assume you are jewish.

If you missed it there are strict rules of warfare that have been a part of western civilization for a long time. Catholicism has a view of war that is completely incompatible with the jewish view of war. Might is right with ethnic cleansing has not been applied in Europe.

The French on Haiti didn't want their land back. The Boer didn't want to live in a Bantu state. The occupation isn't long term sustainable and will fall apart. Palestinians have effectively ensured Israel is in a permanent state of crisis with an unsolvable public relations crisis.

I am not Jewish, and my argument would remain the same whether or not I was or wasn't.

I am Chinese.

The Chinese pushed out the Westerners and the Japanese not through impassioned appeals to international law or anti-colonial agitation, but through the barrel of a gun.

Similarly, the Chinese have taken the territories of Tibet and Turkestan for her own against the wishes of the people who live there, with the barrels of guns. If you have enough of them, any occupation is tenable.

I see no reason why the Israelis can't do the same.

There are 250 Chinese for each Tibetan, there are more Palestinians than jews. Also there aren't large Tibetan nations surrounding China.

China didn't defeat its occupants in a big battle, they made occupying China unfeasible in the long run. That is what the Palestinians are doing.

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?

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.

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?

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Just chiming in to say that I have a very similar opinion as you and it disturbs me a little how similar our opinions are.

Israel is always contentious topic, but repeatedly whenever antisemitism-du-jour or unpopularity of how Israel-US relations are among the western world is brought up my reaction is always "obviously?"

What Israel is, is an ethnostate with religious and political mandate to entrench itself in a land surrounded by their religious enemies, full of people that have been historically persecuted on an industrial scale (the exact scale is apparently a hot topic of debate in some circles), and have managed to secure themselves power, a modern military, and alliance with a hyperpower.

What did people think was going to happen if their civilians got shot up and kidnapped?

You look at the countries surrounding Israel and they're generally not very well run. How much of this is down to Mossad/US efforts is up for debate, also, but Arab governance today just generally isn't great. The Chinese attitude is pragmatic; it comes into the mind of the Chinese that if they were in a modal Arab nation that wanted to wipe out Israel for realsies, they would conduct themselves in a very different way after one or two costly failures.

What Israel has done is demonstrate power and capability and networks. They've burned a lot of political credibility to do it, and I'm not sure how popular Bibi is within Israel these days.

The greater problem with the conflict is that everyone looks bad; Arab leaders are caught in a weird catch-22 as always where they need to placate the more card-carrying Muslim extremists within their tribes to maintain political power but are also aware that the further down that path they tread the less likelihood of them being able to function as a country. I believe American hate for Israel is just an ingrained pathology of supporting the underdog, and anger at the use of American resources to support a country they don't really care that much about and personally see no benefit from supporting. The American argument for strong allies in the ME has deteriorated with the tidal wave of oil fracking, and even enforcement of the petrodollar has imploded with oil being now traded in other currencies.

And there's also no way of extricating Israel from this conflict or de-escalating relatively peacefully in a way that either side can accept. Maybe Bibi is aware that America's sufferance for Israeli dalliances will end; America will be happy to keep selling them weapons and infosharing with Mossad, but politically the younger generation getting into politics and the increased irrelevance of traditional American media structures may spell a lapse in Jewish influence on American populism. They'll be fighting over the ME forever, even if America ends up having nothing to do with it.

Hollywood was one of the key structures of Jewish soft power and one of America's most widely exported methods of cultural agitprop; I don't know if anyone's noticed but they're not doing too hot recently. Silicon Valley is American, yes, but a larger and larger share of corporate tech CEOs are looking quite non-Jewish recently.

If the Chinese were in the position of the Arabs they'd form an Arab United Front in 1948 (which, to the credit, the Arabs did try, but the coalition was nowhere near as large as it could have been) and prevented the creation of an Israeli state from the outset. When presented with the horrible atrocities and butcher's bill, they'd say 'send in the next wave'. They wouldn't stop until the Americans and Soviets threatened to intervene and they'd draw up on the armistice lines and actually make peace.

The Japanese did way, way, way worse to the Chinese than the Arabs did to the Israelis, and yet in the modern day they do business with them.

Catholicism has a view of war that is completely incompatible with the jewish view of war. Might is right with ethnic cleansing has not been applied in Europe.

Citation very much needed.

I assume you are jewish.

This is the definition of an ad hominem. Even if he were Jewish, "Your opinion is invalid because Jew" isn't acceptable.

You've been warned and banned repeatedly because of your antagonistic obsession with Jews. As we are obligated to repeat over and over, you can hate whomever you want, but your posting needs to follow the rules.

Banned for two days, but next time you are looking at a longer term ban.

The average Gazan's life would improve immensely if they just complied and stopped fucking with Israel. The main thing motivating them is pure zealotry for a system of belief and governance that only somewhat succeeds if coupled with a gigantic Oil windfall.

The best case scenario for independent Palestine is likely Libya or Lebanon. The main humanist crisis here is not achieving the standards of living currently available to peaceful Israeli Arabs

I watched an interesting interview on Tucker Carlson’s podcast not too long ago that offered an alternative perspective of what it’s like for an ordinary person to live under Israeli occupation and also has to live with Palestinians and Hamas.

Israel isn’t helping itself using this conflict to support its ulterior designs for expansion to create a Greater Israel in the region. You can argue who started the fire and draw your lines in the sand wherever you want but to me there’s no doubt Israel is pouring more gasoline on it at the moment than Palestinians are.

to me there’s no doubt Israel is pouring more gasoline on it at the moment than Palestinians are.

What are you basing that opinion on?

Its reaction to October 7th?

Right, so Hamas fires literally thousands of rockets at Israel for no discernible end for decades, stages October 7th as a last-ditch effort to get the world to pay attention to them (fully cognizant of the fact that the Arab world is growing increasingly tired of the Palestinian cause), Israel responds by waging war on Hamas to reclaim the Israeli hostages, Hamas fights back, using various repugnant strategies designed to maximise Palestinian civilian casualties, and persists in firing rockets at Israel throughout (along with the occasional indiscriminate terror attack inside Israel's borders while they're at it)-

And your gloss of this is that Israel bears more responsibility for escalation of hostilities than Hamas?

The obvious next question is - if the fashion Israel responded to October 7th was excessive or inappropriate or whatever, what, in your estimation, ought they to have done instead?

Hamas didn’t fire off thousands of rockets against their peaceful neighbors. They fired off thousands of rockets at people they’re being occupied by.

The entire debate being had is the one Israel gets to play by imposing the framework of discussion to make Hamas take blame for things they aren’t primarily at fault for.

And your gloss of this is that Israel bears more responsibility for escalation of hostilities than Hamas?

Yes because Israel is the military occupier. You can’t be fair to an occupier. How can you?

The obvious next question is - if the fashion Israel responded to October 7th was excessive or inappropriate or whatever, what, in your estimation, ought they to have done instead?

As far as a comprehensive program at this point, I really don’t know. But I can tell you where Israel should start. Halt any further military incursion tomorrow and rethink its plans for the region. There would be a good place to start. Hamas should end its violent campaign as well and the easiest way for both sides to do that is to stop participating in it.

They fired off thousands of rockets at people they’re being occupied by.

Israel pulled out of Gaza in 2005. Hamas persisted in firing rockets at them for the next two decades. And far from these rockets being aimed at military targets, there's no real guidance system to speak of, and the goal is solely to sow terror among Israeli civilians who themselves bear no more responsibility for this state of affairs than the civilians in Gaza do.

Israel gets to play by imposing the framework of discussion to make Hamas take blame for things they aren’t primarily at fault for.

Hamas isn't to blame for the thousands of rockets they fired at Israel over the last few decades? Hamas isn't to blame for the suicide bombers they sent into Israel, or the water pipes they dug out of the ground in Gaza to use to manufacture rockets?

Yes because Israel is the military occupier. You can’t be fair to an occupier. How can you?

To reiterate: Israel pulled out of Gaza in 2005.

Halt any further military incursion tomorrow and rethink its plans for the region. There would be a good place to start.

How many military incursions did Israel make into Gaza between 2014 and October 7th, 2023? Your brilliant suggestion was Israeli policy for the better part of a decade. Hamas responded to this cessation of hostilities by committing the worst pogrom since the Holocaust. At this point "complete and total destruction of Hamas, root and branch" strikes me as an entirely reasonable goal for Israel to pursue.

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After the tidal wave of gasoline that was Oct 7th, I'm not ready to point fingers at Israel for not deescalating.

If you think that qualifies as a tidal wave of gasoline what do you think about the vast numbers of Palestinian hostages? Sure, some of the small children they arrest get charged with crimes, but some of the Oct 7 hostages were "kidnapped from their tank" etc - actively serving in the military. October 7th is a rounding error when compared to what the Israelis were doing to the Palestinians beforehand, and if you want to claim that it justifies what happened next then you unfortunately also have to justify everything the Palestinians have done in revenge.

some of the Oct 7 hostages were "kidnapped from their tank etc - actively serving in the military.

Which is why they're being treated as POWs, with all the rights involved, right? As opposed to being treated as... well, hostages?

The International Convention against the Taking of Hostages defines the offence as the seizure or detention of a person (the hostage), combined with threatening to kill, to injure or to continue to detain the hostage, in order to compel a third party to do or to abstain from doing any act as an explicit or implicit condition for the release of the hostage.[17] The Elements of Crimes for the International Criminal Court uses the same definition but adds that the required behaviour of the third party could be a condition not only for the release of the hostage but also for the safety of the hostage.[18] It is the specific intent that characterizes hostage-taking and distinguishes it from the deprivation of someone’s liberty as an administrative or judicial measure.

Although the prohibition of hostage-taking is specified in the Fourth Geneva Convention and is typically associated with the holding of civilians as hostages, there is no indication that the offence is limited to taking civilians hostage. Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, the Statute of the International Criminal Court and the International Convention against the Taking of Hostages do not limit the offence to the taking of civilians, but apply it to the taking of any person. Indeed, in the Elements of Crimes for the International Criminal Court, the definition applies to the taking of any person protected by the Geneva Conventions

Which is why they're being treated as POWs, with all the rights involved, right? As opposed to being treated as... well, hostages?

If you feel so strongly about people being taken as hostages, I assume you're aware of the vast numbers of Palestinians that have been kept hostage by Israel as prisoners? If that's your actual objection and you're concerned about violations of international law there's actually a lot of ground to go over with regards to Israeli violations of it. If that's your actual point, I'm more than happy to go over it with you.

But if your point is just who/whom (taking hostages is fine and legal when the Israelis do it but a warcrime when the Palestinians take a tenth of that number) then I'm not really interested in a discussion, or what passes for one when your criteria is just "if it is my side it is good, if it is the other side it is bad".

This is a misuse of the word "they". The average Gazan's life would improve immensely if Hamas and their non-Gazan enablers stopped using Gaza to fuck with Israel.

The Palestinian tragedy is that the Palestinian population of the West Bank and Gaza are interested in improving their own lives in ways which Palestinian emigrés who are allowed to speak for "the Palestinian cause" (aka the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state) by the non-Palestinian Muslims and Leftists who fund it and support it internationally are not. When the First Intifada produced Palestinian leadership which was indigenous to the West Bank and Gaza, we got Oslo. When the Palestinian leadership is emigrés funded by foreigners, we get insane unwinnable wars.

If Israel got poofed out of existence tomorrow the Palestinian state that emerges is most likely another Syria or Libya wracked by internal schisms and poverty.

If Palestinians didn't defend themselves they would have been ethnically cleansed. Not being genocided by being forced to leave is a main Palestinian goal. Why would they want to be sent to live in Libya? Why would Libya accept ethnic cleansing of millions of people so that millions of refugees end up in their country? Why would Spain which this thread is about want millions of refugees dumped in Libya where they easily can get to Europe.

Had the Irish all thought the same way there would be no Irish left.

Had the Irish all thought the same way there would be no Irish left.

What do you mean? The mass Emigration seems to have worked out very well for them in the long run.

Funny how zionists always end up advocating for mass immigration.

Ireland is today a successful nation. Palestine could very well be as well. The British military wasn't defeated in a major battle against the irish. All the Irish had to do was make it infeasible to continue occupying Ireland.

All the Irish had to do was make it infeasible to continue occupying Ireland.

What exactly do you think the stable equilibrium in Palestine that is analogous to this looks like? Please make sure it's one the Palestinian people themselves would accept.

I'm not sure where they're getting the petrochemicals to be a functional nation from. The best case scenario for independent Palestine is joining the other non-functional local states in the choir

All the Irish had to do was make it infeasible to continue occupying Ireland.

It looks pretty feasible as far as I can tell.

Palestine gets 17 out of 23 counties and Palestinians get full citizenship in the remaining six would be a substantial win for Palestinians.

The Irish are capable of administering a competent first world state. The current status quo is since on the 10000th chance the scorpion wouldn't stop stinging the frog.

They have higher IQ than the gulf states which do fine.

Also if they are inherently civilizationally incompetent it is important that they stay in Palestine so that we don't end up with Palestinian refugees.

The gulf states do okay since they are literally lottery winners. Islam is not a productive way of running a modern society in the absence of massive material wealth

30% of Palestine was Christian before Israel started to destroy the Christian population of Palestine. Non of the war mongering has helped the countries in the middle east.

Also if they are so civilizationally incompetent, the last thing we would want would be a Palestinian refugee crisis. Therefore they need to stay put.

The Christians saw a quarter of opportunity to advance themselves via either joining Israel or heading overseas and took it for the most part on account of not being insanely irrational.

Palestinian refugee crisis would come even if they were totally peaceful under their own administration right now. Glancing at the plethora of other nearby states shedding large refugee numbers to the West despite nothing to actually take refuge from apart from their own lack of welfare

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The average Gazan's life would improve immensely if they just complied and stopped fucking with Israel.

Too late for this. Israel moved on and lost any interest in improving Palestinian quality of life. The plan for Gazans is to leave or die. And since Gazans have nowhere to go...

Decades of wild child-like lashing sponsored by the greater Islamosphere and the global culture no longer having any real answer to 'what if a guerilla warfare participant simply doesn't care about their own population'

To be fair, I don’t think there’s a single army in history who’s reputation would be improved by the soldiers having the ability to broadcast all their activities on tiktok.

ISIS? Depends on the target audience of course.

I mean reputation for humanity and morals, not of fearsomeness. What I mean is that if you gave mass communication to soldiers in any war you would see some pretty ugly behavior and pretty ugly attitudes.

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

On one side, young people with cute frog hats are not fond of Israel. How sad.

On other side, Israel just demolished city of two million, reduced neighboring countries to wrecks, terminates anyone it wants , whether by bombing or targeted killings, and no one in the region can do anything about it. You do not have to love Israel to admit that it is on the roll and it is not going to stop.

Things could change when American boomers raised on Hollywood biblical epics and Scofield bible start dying off in earnest, but this is at least decade away.

Is support for Israel actually reliant on dispensationalists? Hell, is it even tied to Boomers?

  • Knee-jerk reaction to Oct 7
  • Knee-jerk reaction to one’s domestic opponents expressing a position
  • General distaste for Islam
  • Vague sense that Israel is more aligned with western interests

On the rare occasion that I encounter such a discussion at work, it’s more likely to be the last one. It’s not like there’s any shortage of Christians here in Texas. But we also fought enough wars in the Middle East to give a ton of non-Boomers an excuse to support Israel. Pro-Palestine protests only confirm that bias.

Israel is dropping in popularity among young people left and right.

Israel is deeply unpopular in much of the world and increasingly becoming less popular.

If winning a war was measured in dropped bombs, Vietnam would be American and Northern Ireland would be Irish.

and no one in the region can do anything about it

When Iran fires missiles at Israel, there's a frantic military effort by the US and UK to defend Israel. US warships in the Persian Gulf and Med firing interceptors, US aircraft providing air defence, US bombers targeting Iran, US satellites and enablers helping Israel.

Israel is not fighting and could not fight this war alone. They've been heavily dependent on US munitions the whole time even for their 'blowing up Gaza' operation, let alone more advanced missile defence. Where are the 2000 pound bombs coming from? American arsenals. They got $20 billion in military aid/assistance in just the first year after October 7th.

Israel is not going to be viable as a state when the state is deeply unpopular in the rest of the world.

It actually only matters in America. Lots of countries are deeply unpopular and yet somehow manage.

I suspect even without America they could scrape by. Their neighbours are pretty pathetic and weak by comparison

Interesting how your comment is about a cycling team with no actual ties to Israel and the inability/unwillingness of the Spanish gov’t to protect and sanctify the Olympic spirit, in the face of dissent. yet the cavalcade below doesn’t seem to be related to the Vuelta at all.

I am glad you mentioned this. I watched he entire race live, and it was surreal to just watch this fall apart.

I was actually a bit surprised at the lack of disruption during the TdF - there were Palestine flags here and there but nothing like what we saw in Spain.

I was actually a bit surprised at the lack of disruption during the TdF - there were Palestine flags here and there but nothing like what we saw in Spain.

Perhaps too many gendarmes willing to engage in a little rompa cabezas.. err, casse las têtes

Gotta love Gallic bloody mindedness

Aren’t Spanish cops known for being more skull cracking and thuggish, not less?

In general I thought so, but I think the French are really serious about the TdF, in a way the Spanish aren't about the Vuelta.

That’s possible. Also possible- policia armada is being handicapped for Spanish political reasons(AIUI it’s actually a thorny political issue in Spain and their government is propped up by a coalition that includes some of their equivalent of far left wackadoodles) or Spain just wants to give Palestinians a platform in a way France doesn’t.


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