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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 20, 2025

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Reuters Poll: Republicans and Democrats reversed on recognition for Palestine State and crediting Trump for hypothetical peace.

The statehood recognition phrasing annoyingly does not define a hypothetical Palestinian state. "If peace efforts are successful, Trump deserves significant credit" surprised me, a little, since Democrats didn't shy away from giving Trump credit for Operation Warp Speed, so you have to wonder whether this is signalling or policy disagreement with current peace proposals. On the one hand, there's no shortage of anti-Trump signalling. On the other, even more Democrats agreed with the statement "The United States should recognize Palestine as a country," so it's very possible the sample had a lot of Democrats who think hypothetical near-term peace would be in spite of US foreign policy, not because of it. I don't think this is logical, given the prior state of the conflict, but it doesn't need to be logical for people to think it. The non-partisan takeaway from the poll, so far as I can tell, is that "The United States should recognize Palestine as a country" is close to non-partisan, with only 53% of Republicans opposed and 58% and 59% agreement from "Other" and "All adults," respectively.

"The United States should recognize Palestine as a country" is close to non-partisan, with only 53% of Republicans opposed and 58% and 59% agreement from "Other" and "All adults," respectively.

That is not remotely what non-partisan means. Non-partisan statements are stuff like "the US should have a military", "the US should have a market-based economy", "raping kids should be illegal". Close-to-non-partisan statements would be "minorities and women should have the franchise". Basically, stuff with which perhaps twice the Lizardmen constant would disagree. 59% is not closely that. You might as well call stricter gun laws a non-partisan issue as 56% support them.

Also, it is not clear to me what the purpose of recognizing a state is. First and foremost, states exist through the ability to use coercion, force. This is completely orthogonal to any concept of legitimacy. Even if I believe that the Matriarchal Commune of Afghanistan is the legitimate, that does not matter one bit if the Taliban hold Afghanistan and nobody contests them for it.

At the end of the day, in international politics, you have to deal with the facts on the ground, even if you do not like them. The test if a subgroup in a state is a state or not is actually very simple: Can they, through persuasion or force of arms defend their claims to territory? Of course, not every entity which meets this threshold will be internationally recognized, sometimes they will just be seen as a rebel group.

Israel will not suffer any Palestinian entity to have weapons which could effectively oppose them, which is quite reasonable given the history of the conflict. No other country which could oppose Israel is willing to have their soldiers die trying to defend the West Bank from the IDF.

The more appropriate way to react to Nethanyahu's aggression is to stop giving him military aid and sanction him.

Also, all of that is moot because the US will be the last country to recognize Palestine except for Israel. For most of your 59% who want recognition, that is not their most important issue. By contrast, there is a lobby group for which support for Israel is the main reason for existence. A candidate might gain a bit of approval by being anti-Bibi, but once the attack ads come in, that will flip around completely.

That is not remotely what non-partisan means.

Echoing @ArjinFerman, I take "non-partisan" to mean "not driven by partisan affiliation"; in other words, the fact that someone believes in X doesn't tell you much about their political affiliation. This includes beliefs which are so popular that practically everyone believes them (like "murder should be illegal"), but also includes unpopular beliefs which are equally likely to be endorsed by a conservative or a progressive:

Based on 20 surveys conducted in the US between 2012 and 2021, the authors found that around a third of the conspiracy theories they reviewed were more attractive to Republicans than to Democrats, a third were more attractive to Democrats than to Republicans, and the rest were non-partisan... Some of the best-known conspiracy theories, including the JFK assassination, Holocaust denial, and 9/11 being an “inside job,” were not associated with political views, although they may have been in the past.

If four per cent of conservatives believe a conspiracy theory and zero per cent of progressives do (e.g. "the 2020 election was stolen by the Democrats"), that's a partisan belief: the fact that someone endorses it sends a strong signal as to their political affiliation. If four per cent of conservatives and four percent of progressives believe a conspiracy theory (say, the Warren commission lied about the assassination of JFK), it's a non-partisan belief (even though it's unpopular in absolute terms), as the fact that someone believes doesn't in and of itself tell you anything about their political affiliation, unless further disambiguated by "Oswald was in the pocket of the Soviets"/"Oswald was a CIA stooge set up to kill Kennedy so they could escalate the Vietnam war". If conservatives are just as likely as progressives to want to "recognise" (whatever that means) a Palestinian state, then it falls into this category.

That is not remotely what non-partisan means.

I... thought "non-partisan" just means "not divided by party lines", so something equally supported, equally opposed, or roughly equally controversial, would indeed be "non-partisan"

I think it loosely has an assumed connotation of "generally agreed upon", even if the word doesn't directly imply that.

"Bi-partisan" has those positive generally-agreed-on connotations

Non-partisan doesn't really imo

I was a bit confused too, but they’re pointing out that 59% is more partisan than gun control.

59% to 56% doesn't measure partisanship, though. The significance of the 59% in

The non-partisan takeaway from the poll, so far as I can tell, is that "The United States should recognize Palestine as a country" is close to non-partisan, with only 53% of Republicans opposed and 58% and 59% agreement from "Other" and "All adults," respectively.

isn't that 59% of "all adults" agree with that statement, it's that the difference between the % of "all adults" and the % of Republicans is small (not trivially so, but in this context, I think 53% to 59% would generally be considered significant but small). So, to say that gun control is "less partisan" than this because it only has 56% support would require also providing information that shows that Republicans and Democrats both cluster pretty closely around 56% support (though what counts as "small" becomes even more arguable when crossing the 50% threshold), more closely than the 53% to 59% difference in the Palestine example.

quiet_NaN seems to be making the same point that VoxelVexillologist does above, that "non-partisan" doesn't just mean "not partisan" but has an additional, extended meaning that has little to do with partisanship, meaning "generally agreed upon."

Democrats didn't shy away from giving Trump credit for Operation Warp Speed

Kamala Harris explicitly stated that she wouldn't take the vaccine if Trump recommended her to do so.

Trump deserves significant credit" surprised me, a little, since Democrats didn't shy away from giving Trump credit for Operation Warp Speed,

Wait what?

Who is the most mainstream Dem you can cite who acknowledges Trump saved millions of lives and got a vaccine out at a speed they previously categorized as "misinformation"?

Biden?

“Let me be clear. Thanks to the prior administration and our scientific community, America was one of the first countries to get the vaccine,” Biden said.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/21/politics/biden-trump-covid-vaccine-booster

I am going to write the first part of my response before clicking, and the second after.

  1. Notably posted without a timestamp indicating Biden was giving Trump credit prior to the election.

AND

  1. Yup, safely in the rear view mirror. Biden already thought he probably was going to have Trump on Treason charges at this point. And all he really gave Trump credit for at all was taking the vaccine, not making it happen.

Irrelevant to the question being asked. And no he credited him for the speed of getting the vaccine out as shown in the part quoted.

After previously hemming and hawing about the efficacy of the vaccine six months into Covid, when encouraging more people to get vaccinated ought to have been the top priority. By December 2021, probably just about everyone in the US had already developed Covid antibodies, natural or otherwise.

No, he didn't say anything about the efficacy of the vaccine in that article. He critiques whether people will believe Trump. He does not hem and haw about the efficacy of the vaccine itself at all.

"One of the problems with the way he's playing with politics is he's said so many things that aren't true," Biden said last week. "I'm worried if we do have a really good vaccine, people are going to be reluctant to take it. ... If I could get a vaccine tomorrow, I'd do it. If it cost me the election, I'd do it. We need a vaccine and we need it now."

And from December 2021 itself.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/biden-receive-covid-19-vaccine-harris-campaigning-georgia-n1251890

But regardless it satisfies the original request a mainstream Democrat who praised Trump for the vaccine.

The statehood recognition phrasing annoyingly does not define a hypothetical Palestinian state.

Which is not surprising, since even something like "West Bank minus East Jerusalem plus Gaza" is not acceptable for Israel.

To be fair, it was, until it wasn’t. If they’d accepted 1948 and stationed a Jordanian-Egyptian army garrison just outside East Jerusalem (which I guess would have been a Danzig-style international city) there would be no settlers on the West Bank.

The same could have been said for the Algerians who then took their land back.

Being given a deal where you are evicted from your ancestral homeland and forced out into the desert with no right to even return to the place you where born because some Eastern Europeans claim it is theirs is absurd.

The end of French Algeria is one of the greatest tragedies of the 20th century. It happened under American pressure but it really happened, ultimately, because the settlers did not fight to the death to save it. They had France to return to. The Israelis (most of them, anyway) lack the same luxury, even if they have dual citizenship it is to a land of which they know nothing and to whom they will never belong. Their only identity is Israeli, or Jewish.

Countless native civilizations have been destroyed before. As Churchill said, nobody now mourns the native Americans beyond the vapid and entirely European absurdity of “land acknowledgements”. The only time settler regimes ended despite real and proper resistance (see Rhodesia) had a 20:1 native to settler population ratio. Israel will soon be at 1:1 with the total Palestinian diaspora still in Arab lands.

There is a good chance that Israel is still destroyed in the lifetimes of most of the people reading this. But even in that scenario I anticipate it will still be a fight to the death for millions.

As Churchill said, nobody now mourns the native Americans beyond the vapid and entirely European absurdity of “land acknowledgements”.

What did he say?

Apartheid ended with a native/settler ratio of like 8:1.

Yeah, but the South Africans were not interested in putting up a fight to the level that the Rhodesians had.

I doubt that, if the safety of Israel's population were seriously threatened, some countries in Europe would not open their gates to them no questions asked. (Not without irony, the main way I'd expect this to fail is that in some countries the Muslim population that washed up in no small part thanks to Israel's misadventures, and other things (such as, uh, Algeria) that rhyme with them, has become a significant enough voting block to provide a contrary incentive to politicians!)

If there were enough places for Jews to go to following an ethnic cleansing of Israel, they wouldn't lose basically every UN vote ever without American Security Council intervention.

That doesn't seem to follow. Just because you lose a vote doesn't mean you have no support. Presumably there were more than two votes in your favor, but if it's you and your bully friend against literally the entire world it might be time to start asking "are we the baddies?"

Also, to the extent Europe is unsafe for Jewish people, it's approximately 100% due to mass migration from Muslim countries.

Also, to the extent Europe is unsafe for Jewish people, it's approximately 100% due to mass migration from Muslim countries.

The people of Israel dont seem to share this confidence.

That doesn't seem to follow. Just because you lose a vote doesn't mean you have no support. Presumably there were more than two votes in your favor, but if it's you and your bully friend against literally the entire world it might be time to start asking "are we the baddies?"

I have considered this and have found the hypothesis lacking. Islam appears to be the cause of most of the baddieness in the region, and when it comes to my country in large numbers causes more bad stuff here.

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Also, to the extent Europe is unsafe for Jewish people, it's approximately 100% due to mass migration from Muslim countries.

Sure, but if there were to be mass migration from Israel, there would be conflict between the groups and the two-tier policing would favor the Muslims. That is, Jews defending themselves would be prosecuted, Jews organizing to defend themselves would be declared terrorists and imprisoned, and Muslim violence against Jews would be ignored.

And no, most of that Muslim migration was not caused by Israel.

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The pied-noir are anti-Israel?

The same could have been said for the Algerians who then took their land back.

The Pieds-Noirs had a country to go back to. Israelis don't. Maybe some would flee to the US, but I don't think the Algerian strategy is going to work; it certainly hasn't worked yet. If anything, the Palestinians are losing ground.

On the other hand what would be done with the Jewish Orthodox population. Other countries probably don't want to take on that particular burden without the religious motivations underpinning Israeli supporting them

And it is important to say that even 1 million to-the-death committed settlers in Algeria in 1960 could likely still have fully pacified the native population given both HBD and other factors.

Israel has accepted a lot more land settlement deals over the years than the Palestinians have. Further complicating things, Israel has one government, and the Palestinians have somewhere between two and six, depending on which terrorist organizations you count. There is no body of Palestinians that can approve a deal that can command the obedience of all the disparate armed groups. Hamas does not command the PLO, the PLO does not command Hezbollah, Hezbollah does not command IJ.

Plus even if you aligned all current major Palestinian paramilitary forces you'd likely get a splitter-off within a week who'd enthusiastically get back to it.