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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 2, 2026

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I don't want to sound like a prosecutor, but do you deny your left-wing, anti-nato, pro-Palestine views, and are you now, or have you ever, been a member...?

I'm establishing a bubble here. If those are your opinions, then you will tend to see them in others with greater frequency than you would in the general population.

I don't think I'm that left-wing by most measures. Anti-NATO, yes. Pro-Palestine, a bit more complex again; if a Palestinian state was founded, I would be against providing it with any sort of aid. I just want any organisation/country that represents me to wash its hands of the whole business, and stop supporting either side, because I think it's a moral quagmire with no winners. Since currently most organisations that represent me are staunchly pro-Israel and anti-Palestine, this directionally winds up being mistaken for a pro-Palestine view.

Either way, as I said, we are talking about a time when I was not even in my teens. I don't think my political views back then were that developed or similar to my current ones. Later, during my teenage edgelord years, I used to tell people that my preferred solution for the Middle East is to offer anyone who is willing to take it a large lump sum of money to move away, and then glass the entire area together with anyone left who refused to take the deal, figuring those people are part of the problem. Does this sound like a "pro-Palestine" view? Whatever I believed during 9/11 is further away from my current beliefs than that.

Either way (2), "left-wing, anti-nato, pro-Palestine" taken together still do not entail belief in an "innocence of the Wretched of the World" or support for the Khmer Rouge.

The thing is, I could also say something like that: being neither a jew nor a muslim, I too wish to wash my hands of the israel-palestine conflict, and not send any money to either. And yet, if a third party talked with each of us at length, I bet he'd characterize me as strongly pro-Israel and you as strongly pro-Palestine. And this is not a mistake. One can't "identify as" neutral, though many try.

Last election you said you were probably voting BSW (far-left splinter party with pro-Russia positions led by a communist). You seem to think Palestinians are and always will be justified to "fight back" in any and every way because of past grievance, hence, total innocence of the wretched.

Last election you said you were probably voting BSW

...for a list of reasons that only include one thing that maybe codes left ("anti-surveillance"), and increasingly only a very oldschool form of it that is now obsolete since the Left has become establishment and therefore favours control.

You seem to think Palestinians are and always will be justified to "fight back" in any and every way because of past grievance

How do you get that out of the post you linked, and how to you get from that to "total innocence of the wretched"? At most, I was arguing about their justifications vis-a-vis Israelis (though I don't see where in that post I implied "any and every way" - indeed, I do think there is a level of retaliation that will fully exhaust any moral license they have to engage in revenge, which is short of "Israel ceases existing and its residents are forced to leave for other countries", and in that case them hunting down the former Israelis in exile would certainly, in my estimation, not be just), which does not imply any sort of general "innocence". As far as I can tell, the Palestinians are a miserable people perpetuating anti-human superstitions and repeatedly making the informed choice to inflict misery upon themselves and others. That still doesn't mean that another people (which anyhow is almost as bad) is free to rob and slaughter them.

Are you just trying to impute these views that I don't hold to me because in your eyes everyone who disagrees with your views ought to fit a particular template? This might be hard to grok if you are one of those people who think that every conflict must have a side that is the "good guys", but I'm quite comfortable saying that in a conflict between A and B A is morally justified but actually A and B are both evil crooks. Like, without any implied sympathy for any of the narcos involved in absolute terms, I think it's probably morally fine (with the caveat that I only just googled up this case, so who knows) for El Mayo's followers to take brutal revenge on El Chapito's.

And maybe some people voted hitler because they were really anti-tobacco. I'm sure you contain multitudes. But you vote BSW, so you get labeled as a leftist, and imo you should accept that. It's fine, you can be a leftist, in fact there aren't enough here. Let's skip the whole israel issue since we both said we'd rather not talk or care about it.