site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

4
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

the just punishment for Israel's actions is that they must annex all of Gaza and the West Bank, make everyone living there full citizens of Israel and provide them with the same access to resources as they do to any other Israeli citizen right now.

Are you not aware that this has been the leftist demand the whole time? The problem is obvious. If Israel annexes the whole of mandate Palestine then the Jews will be a minority and swiftly have the mechanism of state turned on them. At best they would be Dhimmi in a shariah state subject to the abuses that have led to there being basically no jews anywhere else in the islamic world and with a reasonably high chance of being subject to massive pogroms that would make the holocaust seem loving by comparison.

subject to the abuses that have led to there being basically no jews anywhere else in the islamic world

I feel like pointing out that the major historical abuse that lead to the jews leaving the arab world was actually the creation of Israel. Even wikipedia makes it clear that there were plenty of jews living in the Arab world up until the creation of Israel, and the descendants of those populations are largely referred to as Mizrahim today. Some of the other "abuses", like the 1950s Baghdad bombings, were almost certainly committed by Israelis in order to encourage Iraqi jews to emigrate to Israel to boot.

They lived in those areas as a persecuted minorities under, ironically given the current accusations, appartide conditions. Subjected to additional taxes, exclusion from official positions, lesser status under the law and the occasional pogrom. There are some few contested incidents like the 1950s Baghdad bombings but many many more straightforward incidents like the Egyptian denationalization and mass asset seizures of jews across the region. The idea that the push factors compelling jews to move to Israel from the middle east were largely fabricated is ahistorical. Certainly Israel wanted to entice jews to move there and sure up their numbers but the woes of the jews across the region were very real.

I in no way meant to imply that life as a minority was a land of milk and honey for the jews in the arab world - but when they have spent over a thousand years suffering those abuses and managed to maintain their own cultural and ethnic identity during that time, you're being a bit misleading when you say that those abuses are why there aren't any jews left in the rest of the region.

It was those abuses plus finally having a place to go that emptied out the rest of the middle east. My point was to explain why Israelis would be unwilling to make themselves a minority in a single Palestinian state.

If a domestic abuse victim moves out because they finally found a safe place to stay instead, it feels weird to say "well, they didn't leave because of the abuse".

I don't think that metaphor really applies. The last time I read about Jewish life in Islam-controlled nations it was about the Golden Age of the Jews, which took place in Islamic Spain (the abuse actually happened afterwards when the Catholics came and massacred them). I'm sure it wasn't all peachy all the time, but it can't have been that bad when they consider a portion of the time spent under Islamic rule a golden age.

Right. So, rather the Americans should be telling Israelis to move to some corner of Montana and have at it. Because what's happening is not tenable by modern ethical standards, either lording it over a population in that way or having a state charter built on the lord.

Freddie de Boer has this as his preferred solution, but the 'well the Israelis should all become Americans' is a nice logical solution that's completely useless. It's just as unlikely as the right wing version of this ('give all the Palestinians Jordanian/Egyptian citizenship') - a solution you come up with when you realize that neither the Israelis nor Palestinians are going to give up anytime soon, but that you're ethically sensitive enough to still want a solution. But even if President Woke threatened Israel at gunpoint to concede to a maximalist version of the 2SS, we're just going to end up where we are now after the next attack from State-Palestine, whether or not the recognized government attacks, allows an attack, or is too weak to stop one. There's no point in any of this so long as a significant proportion of Palestinian society is willing to beat their own brains out on the border wall.

second best option: extract America from this eternal nonsense as much as possible.

Actually that's the first best option

Well that's fine, but I don't see how you end up anywhere but the exact situation as today, less some Israeli military hardware. Fine, so our hands are clean. If Israel can't fight without our support, they end up in 2rafa's 3rd resolution, which will collapse immediately on the next attack; if they can, maybe they just accept being a pariah and just go to war as they need to for their security, cut a deal with China or what have you. Doesn't seem likely to produce an ethical improvement outside of American feelings.

"outside American feelings."

As an American, that matters most. As much as extracting yourself from a brawl that will go on brawling with or without you. At least your hands are clean.

If the Palestinians can give up on the pipe dream of driving the jews into the sea then a two or three state solution where both peoples prosper is totally possible. It's essentially the direction Trump's plan pushes things. What you're asking for is a near equivalent to demands all non-native americans leave turtle island and go back to the countries of their ethnic origin, justice by some tortured ethic but simply not going to happen and the sooner the fantasy is dispensed with the sooner real solutions can be tried.

I'm sorry, the Israelis are not going to lay down and let themselves all be killed or expelled from what they believe to be their homeland. If your plan is for them to do that then you need to come up with another plan.

There is no realistic two state solution that does not involve ethnic cleansing of Arabs and Jews both. The remaining areas allotted and allowed to Palestinians are so marginal and split up by settlers that there is no contiguous state possible without expelling large numbers of Jews. Otherwise a Palestinian state is unworkable and unviable, certainly not prosperous.

A one state solution is the only non-genocidal solution on offer. Recognize Palestine all they want, the West will lack the stomach to murder the Jewish settlers who drive wedges through any possible Palestine.

A one state solution is plainly genocidal, once you count up numbers and birthrates.

My impression was that the pure Jewish birth rate was actually stronger than the Israeli Arab birthrate these days, though then you zoom in closer and it gets into different categories of Jew, though then there's an intra Jewish genocide question, idk it all gets pretty complicated and I'm not sure what we're talking about at a certain point.

But there's no viable contiguous Palestinian state that can be drawn without evicting large numbers of Jews, who show no evidence of wanting to go peacefully. The resources and transit aren't there. You can make a retarded botched abortion of a statelet, but I'm not sure that will really solve the problem anymore.

So you're left with somebody getting kicked out of the place they live.

My impression was that the pure Jewish birth rate was actually stronger than the Israeli Arab birthrate these days, though then you zoom in closer and it gets into different categories of Jew, though then there's an intra Jewish genocide question, idk it all gets pretty complicated and I'm not sure what we're talking about at a certain point.

Doesn't matter, though, incorporate the Gazans and West Bank Palestinians and the equation shifts to their side completely.

But there's no viable contiguous Palestinian state that can be drawn without evicting large numbers of Jews, who show no evidence of wanting to go peacefully. The resources and transit aren't there. You can make a retarded botched abortion of a statelet, but I'm not sure that will really solve the problem anymore.

I'm fairly sure the intended solution rhymes with "ass raves".

There is no realistic two state solution that does not involve ethnic cleansing of Arabs and Jews both. The remaining areas allotted and allowed to Palestinians are so marginal and split up by settlers that there is no contiguous state possible without expelling large numbers of Jews. Otherwise a Palestinian state is unworkable and unviable, certainly not prosperous.

The term for this when it's done as a deal and mutually agreed upon is population transfers and has been done successfully in the past in other contexts. Realistically there would be a Gaza and separate west bank state. The west bank would ideally just have jewish citizens if they don't want to transfer back to Israel although in practice I expect most of them to.

Where has it been done successfully and without significant atrocities performed?

People mostly point to Europe, while ignoring the significant violent ethnic cleansing operations against Germans et al post WWII, and the whole context of WWII preceding it, and the EU framework that followed. India-Pakistan certainly wasn't peacefully, and still not entirely successfully. So, where?

Where has it been done successfully and without significant atrocities performed?

The partition of Czechoslovakia?

Notably, Czechs and Slovaks retain the right of return, or just free travel, through each other's countries.

For about as central an example as there could be Israel already executed a population transfer of their settlements in gaza, in your formulation would you refer to that as an ethnic cleansing? Perhaps but it does seem like this is a weaponization of the term to slime non-central examples with greater atrocities. Other exchanges include the Greco-Bulgarian, Greco-Turkish and Cyprus exchanges.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_genocide?wprov=sfti1

I'll confess to knowing nothing about the Bulgarian case, and I'm not going to insult you by immediately researching it as pretending to. But the Turkish-Greek split was not without atrocities on either side.

Those are the events that preceded the transfer. The transfer itself was relatively peaceful and successfully ended these hostilities. If there are population transfers in the west bank in 2030 then it would be dishonest to cite the deaths in the Gaza war as being caused by the population transfer.

Sure and that's reasonable. But the situation in the West Bank is also completely unique and completely untenable long term. If Israel could agree on some sort of border it would work better. But they want the land and not the people and most of the West Bank is essentially fully integrated into Israel ignoring the blobs of Palestinian towns throughout. If Israel drew a line and declared one part Palestine and one part Israel I think they'd get reasonable far many countries have disputed borders. But the West Bank is a millstone around their neck because they want the land but not the people and the occupation prevents them from being a normal country.

I agree that an enduring peace would require abandoning the settlements outside of the ones on the current 67 borders. But I will also point out that what you demand was on offer in 47 and rather than accept them the surrounding Arabs went to war with Israel and lost. It's kind of rich to attempt decades of war to deny an offered border, lose repeatedly, and then demand the original offer anyways. The Palestinians themselves have made no such offer and give every indication of denying one if it was offered without an "unlimited right of return" or a "just settlement of the right of return" which has never been defined and acts as a poison pill that sounds OK to the west but could easily expand to mean enough refugees are shipped into Israel proper to effectively make Israel a Muslim majority.

But I will also point out that what you demand was on offer in 47 and rather than accept them the surrounding Arabs went to war with Israel and lost.

Setting aside the question of whether it was a smart decision to reject the partition plan, it's easy to see why they didn't view it as legitimate. Imagine if Mexican immigrants petitioned the UN to split the American Southwest into a new Hispanic state because they (illegally) immigrated there in sufficient numbers.

This is more similar to the hazy borders of Texas before it was inducted as a state in the US than Mexico trying to pull this on already established US territory. In fact the parallels are myriad and early mexico really did get screwed out of their territory after losing a war, remember the Alamo, to the American settlers. Imagine if now centuries later Mexico continued to dispute the territory and launched regular unguided rocket attacks at San Antonio. The mandate Palestine area was not a state before the fall of the Ottoman empire and had no real borders. After the fall the territory was rightfully British clay and the mandate policy gave the immigrant Jews a right to attempt to establish a state there. Was there lots of shenanigans coming from both of the budding nations? Absolutely, there were among the early Texans as well. Really the more I think of it Texas really is a pretty good analogy for Israeli history before around like 1960.

That's why the West Bank is such a millstone though. They won it in war but now they need to either integrate it or give it up. Keeping it in limbo is the source of all their problems. If Israel could actually enunciate their borders they wouldn't need to negotiate or accept anything from the Palestinians at all. The haven't needed Syria to agree to them having the Golan Heights for example. Maintaining this quasi sovereignty indefinitely is the source of essentially all their problems both internal and external.

And now yes because of Hamas handing over anything is tricky. But they had decades where they could have handed whatever rump state they wanted to the PLO. And they wouldn't have needed their agreement anymore than they need Syria's for the Golan。

I agree it's a millstone but it's far from the source of all their problems which seem more centrally to be located in the surrounding population which has a persistent belief that if they just keep fighting eventually they will drive the Jews to the sea and have the whole of the region as a Palestinian state and is thus unwilling to continence any kind of long term peace that forecloses on that possibility.

The haven't needed Syria to agree to them having the Golan Heights for example. Maintaining this quasi sovereignty indefinitely is the source of essentially all their problems both internal and external.

If they enunciated some border, say a modest expansion over the green line to encompass the majority of the settlements clustered along that line then what are their policing positions in the west bank? The fear is that pulling out without a Palestinian partner would lead to a repeat of their pull out form gaza and that the west bank would immediately become a staging ground for attacks on Israel which would eventually trigger an invasion and we'd be back to square one.

Handing over the territory without a deal might have ended up like Gaza (which is criticized even by pro-Pals as a way to freeze the peace process*). Worse maybe.

So we have to go back to why a deal didn't happen.

* Pretty damning when you think about it tbh.