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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   22329 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 23, 2026

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Having been to both (as a rootless piece of Euroslop who spent close to a decade in the US), I would say Turkey felt much less alien than Israel, and the latter's pervasive militarised Manifest Destiny frontier society vibes had everything to do with this.

My experience is exactly the opposite (though I'm an red-blooded American, so "militarized Manifest Destiny frontier society" was the name of my childhood daycare. If anything, this attitude is the thing I find most endearing about Israel--it's very American). Replace the Hebrew with Spanish, and Tel Aviv might as well be Miami. I was shocked at how normal the modern-development areas of Israel were (Jerusalem is a completely different beast, though still not that alien. It's like somebody air-dropped a million Brooklyn hipsters into an ancient middle eastern city).

And while I love Turkey, and think Istanbul is one of the greatest cities in the world, it feels decidedly less familiar to me as a westerner. The ubiquitous street animals, while charming, give a distinctively foreign/third world vibe. The cult of Attaturk is bizarre in an authoritarian way I'm very unused to. And as you get further into the countryside and the culture gets more conservative, fewer and fewer people drink and the women become ever more covered up and socially isolated, increasing the cultural distance. Israel's got its own share of alien ultraconservative religious zealots, but they're less visible/prominent in my memory. To top it all off, there's a certain afterimage of European imperialism to much of the urban environment in Turkey, similar to places like Egypt, Cuba, and much of Africa. Everywhere you look, you see beautiful old buildings constructed by the British or the French or the Germans in richer times, surrounded by cheap, local concrete boxes. That vibe of decay and living off the fumes of past glory and foreign investment is almost entirely absent from Israel.

I should say that in Israel I have only been to Jerusalem and the West Bank, so I can't comment on the reportedly more "normal" state of, say, Tel Aviv. What left impressions were patrols of machine gun toting conscript girls (admittedly good fanservice) on every corner, random coffeeshops with walls dedicated to pictures of patrons who are currently serving in the military (and steep discounts to soldiers), checkpoints, body scanners, locked-down city quarters and the "countryside" being a patchwork of creepy culty settlements and Arab villages enclosed in Berlin wall lookalike concrete slabs, among many others.

On the other hand, in Turkey... yeah, the Atatürk cultism was a bit out there, and I should say I haven't ventured far outside the European part (including however places like Edirne, not just Istanbul), but you can see the same sorts of stray cat populations all over Greece. The fancy buildings are mostly Ottoman, if sometimes imitating European imperial idiom. I don't think not drinking is more alien than Jewish dietary laws, and to my German-influenced eyes most of the US was plenty weird about alcohol (arguably more so than Istanbul, where I had several bottles of Efes with local tweens in a well-trafficked public square without a problem).

You didn't get a 'militarized manifest destiny frontier society' vibe in the US?

Not at all, see my parallel post for the sort of thing I'm talking about. The US just has normal messy imperial metropole vibes, not far from the convex hull of '00s Russia, England and France.

Which parts of the US? Because off the beaten path you can definitely find the hero-cultism of military service, ubiquitous open carry, highly visible cops, Trump cult of personality, American exceptionalism, etc.

Course not. We finished our conquest and settled in behind our comfy double moat so we could switch gears to becoming Leviathan II.

Unless someone finds an uninhabited island with guano deposits.

Would be funny if we started airdropping guano on islands to annex them in order to avoid having to go to Congress for it.

Sounds like a job for... Batman.

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