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Notes -
A short prompt of good news for starting the week- the likelihood of the current Gaza conflict ending just got significantly higher today, as Hamas has released at least the first 7 of 20 surviving hostages to Israel, with more expected later today (or maybe already completed), as part of a Trump-mediated peace deal that is excepted to culminate in a regional summit this week.
Big if carried through, and while there was leadup to it last week, there was a fair bit of (and fair grounds for) skepticism on if the deal would actually be followed through. There were questions on if Hamas even could deliver all the living hostages given how the hostages were often not under Hamas's direct organizational control (but sometimes under other groups), and this deal does not address the bodies of the dead hostages, among other things.
There is also some irony, or possibly some future culture war conspiracy theories, about how this will not get Trump a noble peace prize, since they announced that late last week.
That said- and I think this is good news in general- it's also worth noting this doesn't mean stability or even a lasting peace. While the Yemen-based Houthis have indicated they will stop their Red Sea attacks so long as Israel upholds the ceasefire, this runs into complications like how Hamas has already engaged in gun battles with gazan clans as it tries to re-assert control, which goes significant premise of Hamas being removed as the military and civil authority of Gaza. Which remains a huge, unanswered question which could restart this problem all over again, if Hamas remains in power for lack of anyone actively displacing. The NYT is running a piece on how mediators are already signaling this isn't a comprehensive deal for either side.
One thing that isn't in question, however, is that the return of the still-living hostages is going to reshape the underpinnings of Israeli politics, as the post-October 7 war cabinet coalition that kept Netanyahu in power will lose much of the reason for being. This means political instability, for worse or for better, as Israel rebalances. The next election would be no later than late next year regardless, and could come earlier.
Absent some new (and detrimental to all) nonsense, this means that a lot of the people who only supported Nnetanyahu because of the war will likely be more willing to withdraw their support and trigger early elections, which would be no later than about a year from now anyways. This does not, however, mean a general discrediting of the Israeli right, and a decades-belated return of the Israeli left (whose original decline was after the failure of the gaza withdrawal almost two decades ago). The war was a significant polarizing effect on Israeli politics and society, and while I'd not bet on Netanyahu I'd also not bet on any part of the political left seen as opposing the war for pro-Palestinian reasonings.
I'll end it there. While there is plenty of reasons things could yet again get worse, and while I am sure eventually they will, for the moment I'll encourage people to view this new news as good news, which can well make many people's lives better.
Thank you for the detailed, succinct write-up. I intended to make a top-level post using the presumptive end of the current Gaza conflict as a jumping-off point to ask a much broader question, namely:
What will the next Current Thing™ be?
In May of last year, I argued that media minutes, column inches and the forefronts of public consciousness follow a Pareto distribution, in which one issue clearly dominates at the expense of all others. In Ireland (and presumably a significant chunk of the Anglosphere and also the entire world), a list of these "primary" issues over the past decade or so looked as follows:
I'm not saying the Israel-Palestine conflict is permanently over: as a cold conflict which periodically goes hot for 77 consecutive years, it would be very impressive indeed if the imminent cessation of hostilities represented a decisive end to the conflict. But I do think there's a very good chance that it stops being the "primary" issue that dominates the discourse, and retreats to the status it occupied prior to October 7th, 2023. Diehards will still emblazon their balconies with Palestine flags, you have not heard "from the river to the sea" for the last time, there will be periodic calls to boycott and divest — but it will go back to being a page 4 story. I strongly suspect that the era of copycat attacks on random Jewish civilians in First World nations has come to an end.
Which invites the obvious question: what will the next Current Thing™ be?
Playing the game on Easy Mode, and the answer might be that something which was a secondary issue for the last two years now jumps forward to become the pack leader in the Pareto distribution. Sometimes the easy, obvious answer is the correct one: activists had been complaining about police mistreatment of black Americans for years prior to the murder of George Floyd, and Putin's invasion of Ukraine could not have come as a complete surprise to anyone with even the most passing familiarity with the geopolitics of the region. In this framing, obvious candidates for the next Current Thing™ include AI, the ongoing debate about immigration from the global south, and Orange Man Bad. In the latter case, it's entirely possible that all of the "ceasefire now" people will quickly realise that their moment in the limelight has passed, exchange their keffiyehs for black bloc and get back to partying like it's 2017.
Playing the game on Hard Mode, the answer might be something completely unexpected. In January 2020, who among us could have foreseen that a virus in Wuhan (whether from a lab or a wet market) would determine the course of our lives for pretty much the duration of March 2020-December 2021? In this light, do any of you have candidates in mind for dark horse black swan events which could dominate the discourse for the next two years or so?
I don't think that the Israel issue is over - even though the focus might change away from Palestine, my money on the next major issue in US politics is the US-Israel relationship. The current arrangement isn't sustainable, and the polling I've seen suggests that a majority of Americans want AIPAC and Israel brought to heel. There's no way this particular milk gets unspilled, and none of the normies who supported Palestine because it was the Current Thing are going to forget what they saw Zionists and those funded by them do. The activists are already hard at work on projects like the Hind Rajab foundation and other efforts to make sure the world does not forget what Israel did. The outsize influence of Israel over western governments is being pulled into the spotlight all over the world, and the consequences of that conflict have in no way finished playing themselves out. Given that Israel is potentially going to be restarting the conflict with Iran and drawing the US in to that fight as well, I don't think this particular issue is going to leave "current thing" status barring some other major event (AGI getting achieved, climate disaster, another pandemic, another war, etc).
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Don't forget "#MeToo" (October 2017 - ~January 2018)
True.
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It would be nice if it was the social media digital id thing all the five eyes countries are currently doing to try to ensnare the US and enforce their social media policies.
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Immigration is the duh example, and I'd expect that we'll continue to see a parade of real and imagined oversteps by the Trump admin, along with real and imagined bad behaviors by protestors or state governments in response.
On this side, I think you're going to see trans stuff become much more prominent, quickly. Republicans see a lot of options as 80-20 issues, and a large part of the Dem activist branch isn't willing to Sister Souljah even the clearest nutjobs. But a lot of the political activists have very strong opinions and/or investments in this matter, they've got a massive amount of logistical and big corp support, and there's a lot of things that look like low-hanging fruit to social conservatives that are either hard problems or unacceptable compromises to even moderate Dems.
From the other direction, I expect that we'll have a Mass Casuality Gun Incident (a la Los Vegas) or targeted assassination (... that Dems care about, a la Giffords), and gun control will show up as a major political discussion again. There's a lot of Dems and self-described moderates that are absolutely sure they've got a vast majority of the population on their side, here, and they just need the right salience/terms, and while some of that reflects badly-run poll manipulation and huffing their own farts, it genuinely is a space that a lot of Republicans shoot their own feet.
Serious domestic infrastructure attacks by a coordinated and uncaught adversary. We've seen them in warfront environments, a few nutjobs using them for publicity, and a few dry runs (aka Metcalf) by uncaught (and thus presumably serious) actors, and maybe some arguable cases (aka Florida Oranges), but there's Moore's Law of Mad Science reasons to suspect it to hit in the next ten years. It's bad when 'someone kills dozens at multiple subway stations and gets away with it' is the optimistic version of the problem, but the pessimistic one is much worse, and either version will have obvious direct culture war ramifications as increasingly broad conspiracy theories drop. More critically, it will also have a ton of 'obvious' and wildly contradictory solutions with large-scale impact on the innocent.
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Immigration enforcement/concern about trump authoritarianism(real or not, people are worried about it).
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Does the Charlie Kirk thing have legs? It's been the Current Thing in our newspapers since before the body was cold.
It might be a local Current Thing in the US for some time to come, but it didn't seem to get much traction in the wider Anglosphere. In Ireland, people had already stopped talking about it by the following week.
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I think most the responses here are taking “Current Thing” to mean something like “biggest issue”, but I disagree. To me the Current Thing is what normie women put in their instagram bio. Palestine, Ukraine, BLM, those were current things. The AI bubble deflating will simply never be the current thing no matter how earthshattering it is
You're absolutely right, I didn't mean "the most important issue facing the world right now". I simply meant "the issue that everyone is talking about", regardless of its importance.
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A secondary issue that's been smoldering in the background for sure, my guesses from most to least likely:
The economy and the job market, even the out of touch boomers are starting to notice prices just keep going up and their grandkids with a fresh college degree can't get a job no matter how many times they tell them to walk in with a firm handshake and a can-do attitude.
The AI bubble deflating, even if the bet pays off in the end the rate of cash burn is insane at current revenues. I expect it to at least take a major haircut possibly causing a cascading panic pullback when investments slow down and timelines extend.
Trump rapidly and obviously declines physically/mentally like Biden.
Republicans do something truly insane like massive election interference or rejecting midterm results if Democrats are making big gains.
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Mass riots over some ICE injustice. In the leadup to George Floyd you could tell the media was agitating for it with Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery, it took them about six months of sustained efforts to get the temperature high enough. The media has certainly been trying with ICE, but until somebody gets shot on camera I don’t think they’ll get much traction. They may pivot back to blacks if ICE isn’t working though
I have a hard time imagining the whole Black Bodies, People of Color, Black-owned Businesses, Defund the Police thing coming back in full force; we're supposed to be over peak woke. I'd like to believe normies got a little sick of it.
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I don't think this is likely. There's definitely agitating for it, but having those sorts of riots depends on the authorities tolerating them, and if it happens Trump is going to invoke the Insurrection Act and send in the National Guard before the relevant Federal judge even wakes up.
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I can definitely envision nationwide anti-ICE protests in the same ballpark as 2020 BLM next year.
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Are you serious that there have been no domestic Irish issues that were the Current Thing in Ireland at any point in the last decade? (I agree Brexit and COVID had pretty large domestic impacts, such that being the Current Thing in Ireland is reasonable).
Domestic issues that have been the Current Thing in the UK over that time period include Brexit (obviously), COVID (obviously), ongoing uncovering of cold case paedo scandals, Partygate, Trussonomics, and small boat immigration.
I may have exaggerated slightly. Prior to Covid, the gay marriage referendum was the thing everyone in Ireland was talking about for the first half of 2015 and several months prior. The campaign to legalise abortion via constitutional amendment was likewise a really big deal for several years prior to its successful legalisation in 2018, occupying discussions almost as much as Brexit and Orange Man Bad (Irish people would put "Repeal the 8th" in their Instagram or Tinder bios, and plain black sweaters with the word "REPEAL" emblazoned on them in all caps sold in their tens of thousands). One sometimes gets the impression that progressive politicians and activists in Ireland were victims of their own success: after both gay marriage and abortion were legalised with massive public mandates, they found themselves at a bit of a loss for what to do next, hence their eagerness to lend their support for foreign causes like Ukraine and Gaza. Nebulously-defined "trans rights", nor farcical efforts to portray Black Lives Matter as a movement which has the slightest relevance to Irish politics, don't scratch quite the same itch. The campaign to amend the Irish constitution to remove any reference to "marriage" or "mothers" was a resounding failure, being rejected even by many who consider themselves progressive. Likewise the so-called "hate speech bill", which was never put to a public vote but which was so controversial that it was shelved.
Other than those two, in the linked post, I listed some domestic Irish issues which were the Current Thing in Ireland — but, as a rule, only for the duration of a single news cycle. For a few weeks in January 2022, everyone was talking about the murder of Ashling Murphy, then promptly forgot about it as soon as her killer was arrested, and immediately started talking obsessively about Ukraine for the next twenty months.
Looking back over the past two years, I sincerely cannot think of any domestic Irish event or issue which captured the public's imagination (or had nearly as much staying power) as much as the conflict in Gaza has. There have been literally hundreds of protests against Israel across the country; both our prime minister and President have weighed in on the conflict several times, as has virtually every recently-minted Irish celebrity (and some less recently minted); our government are considering passing a bill which would make it a criminal offense to do business with certain Israeli firms and so on and so forth. The only domestic issues which even came close to this level of omnipresence were a) the ongoing debate about immigration, and by extension the anti-immigration riots in Dublin in November 2023; and b) the civil rape trial against Conor McGregor, which everyone was talking about from the tail end of last year and early this year.
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I do note that the main article currently on the English language section of Yomiuri, a Japanese paper, is about Gaza.
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The Palestine situation is not over. Israel is continuing to oppress Christians, is continuing to occupy parts of the west bank, is continuing its war in Syria and is continuing its meddling in other country's policies. AIPAC's absurd meddling hasn't gone away. The US is still wasting billions and billions on Israeli interests in the middle east and Israel is still making it hard for refugees to return from Europe.
Can we please proactively provide evidence for inflammatory claims? Or at least a clear explanation of what manner of oppression is occurring?
I know public proselytizing is illegal in Israel. I suppose the claimed oppression is something far harsher than that.
Firing tank shells into Churches, backing jihadists in Syria and occupying Christian territory.
This interview with Tucker is a good intro
From what I can gather it was a fragment of a single tank shell which struck a single church by mistake. Your hyperbolic condemnation of every single thing Israel does is counterproductive.
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I explicitly stated that I don't think the Israel-Palestine conflict will come to a complete end any time soon, so I don't know why you're pointing that out. It doesn't seem like a productive contribution to the discussion.
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Environmentalism vs Reindustrialzation in the US. For Military purposes we need to reshore rare earth refinement. This will undoubtedly lead to some desert in Nevada getting radiated and risk the extinction of some heretofore undiscovered species of jackalope.
Alternatively, bringing freedom and democracy to Venezuela. The latest Nobel Peace Prize winner was practically begging Trump for it.
Reindustrialization would inevitably entail giving well-paying jobs to universally reviled toxic smelly dudebros. We need to keep that in mind.
You mean the guys who drive pick up trucks and already destroy the environment with their capitalist spending habits? Guys like those will turn Nevada into even more of a wasteland? Anger! Let the culture war commence!
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