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Their official stated policy goal is to leave the fate of Israel up to a democratic referendum which includes displaced Palestinians. Oh the horrors of justice and the rule of law! Is our heart so small and our palate so delicate that we should ignore three million Palestinians in the West Bank living in a dehumanizing and disenfranchised state as Israel’s state-sponsored proxy settlers (some labeled terrorist groups in the US) torture and torment Palestinian women and children nearly every month? I hope not. America should be unironic social justice warriors (not the gay kind).
Israel has been waging a proxy war upon much of the Middle East through her greatest proxy America. I hope I don’t need to list all of the atrocities and damage caused by this proxy in the region. We are literally their proxy. We do their bidding because their supporters pay us to. You can pick up a copy of the Israel Lobby and read about it. If it weren’t for Israeli lobbyists it is unlikely that Iraq and Afghanistan would happen, and we likely would not have taken out Assad (half a million dead), and so on.
Other proxies include the South Lebanon Army which caused the Sabra and Shatila massacre. You can read how “prior to the massacre, the IDF took [their proxies] to training camps in Israel and showed them documentaries about the Holocaust. The Israelis told the Lebanese fighters that the same would happen to them too, as a minority in Lebanon, if the fighters did not take action against the Palestinians”. And “as the massacre unfolded, the IDF received reports of atrocities being committed, but did not take any action to stop it. Instead, Israeli troops were stationed at the exits of the area to prevent the camp's residents from leaving and, at the request of the Lebanese Forces, shot flares to illuminate Sabra and Shatila through the night during the massacre.” Another group that Israel has funded is MEK which carried out assassinations in Iran.
It is completely reasonable for Iran to fund proxy forces against an expansionist power which has a history of oppressing their neighbors. You may have noticed that America has been doing the same thing, as we fund Ukraine because of the territorial ambitions of Russia. The difference is that any Ukrainian left in Russian territory will eventually be given full rights; the Israelis cleanse the land of every Muslim and Christian they can before acquiring it, and any remaining non-Jew is oppressed and cannot participate in Israeli democracy. Horrifying. Do you think Russia has the right to target American scientists sleeping in their homes with their children via ballistic missiles, because we funded a proxy group to defend against their expansionist ambitions?
Did you just...add a word to my quote? I don't know if that's against the rules or not, but it's definitely poor form.
I genuinely don't know what this is based on. I've Googled around and all I can find are articles about Iranian proxy war strategy. That is, a war with guns and bombs and rockets. Nothing about referendums. Indeed, I'm curious how exactly invading Israel and destroying its military could lead to a peaceful referendum?
Iran is not the Middle East, Iran is Iran. And the Iranian regime has been dedicated to the destruction of Israel since it took power in 1979. The idea that Iran is standing up on behalf of the greater Middle East seems like a stretch, given that Iran is currently bombing every Middle Eastern country it can reach, and has spent years funding paramilitaries in them.
https://www.newsweek.com/iran-plan-israeli-palestinian-conflict-vote-1887056
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Poland is Poland, not Europe or Ukraine, and America is America, not Europe or Ukraine, but they’re both funding Ukraine to defend against Russian aggression in Europe. Surely if Iran lacks the right to fund defensive groups against Israeli encroachment, then Israel lacks the right to encroach on land for around 80 years. The majority of UN member states consider the Golan to be Syrian and demand it to be returned, but Israel occupies it with American approval. Isn’t it strange that Iran, the supposed “international pariah”, is not encroaching on any new land, not once in the past fifty years?
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This sounds very nice when put in such anodyne, bureaucratic terms. A rhetorical tactic you are very practiced at, phrasing horrendous or risible propositions in superficially reasonable ways.
"Iran just wants democracy and for the Palestinians to be granted suffrage! Who could be against that?"
Gosh, indeed, who could be... if one ignores the undeniable and immediate consequences of letting Palestinians vote on a "democratic referendum on the fate of Israel."
This is just how people who think Israel shouldn't exist say Israel shouldn't exist without saying "Israel shouldn't exist."
It's always amusing watching the Jew-haters suddenly become bleeding hearts over Palestinians. You don't care about Palestinians. You wouldn't want them in your country. You don't care about their enfranchisement or dehumanization. You are well aware of the lengthy history of Arabic atrocities carried out against each other, against Iranians, and against Africans. No one has treated the Palestinians worse than other Arabs. In fairness, that's because the Palestinians have had an unfortunate tendency to destabilize every country in which they are admitted. This sucks for the vast majority of Palestinian civilians, who as several people have already pointed out at length, are the unfortunate victims caught up in every war in which a nation undertakes aggression that the women and children and old men never signed up for. But the Israelis aren't refusing a farcical Palestine/Israel one state purely out of ethnic/religious exclusion (though that is certainly part of it). They reject your proposal (again, hilarious to see you pushing a proposal only advocated by the most deluded leftists in the West, only because it's something that would stick in a knife in Jews) because they can see what has happened in every country in which Palestinians become a political force, and because the Palestinians make no secret of what they want to do to Israelis. The idea that admitted as full citizens of Israel, Palestinians would proceed to coexist peacefully with the Jews as fellow citizens is not something anyone actually believes. I don't think even those deluded leftists really believe it, they just won't say out loud that what would result is something they think the Jews have coming.
No one is forcing Israel to occupy and encroach on land in the West Bank. If they don’t want to add the residents to their nation, then they can just stop occupying and dispossessing them.
I believe in the past you have claimed to be Irish. I might be misremembering. One way to gauge your moral intuition on this conflict is to imagine a scenario where the British decided to occupy Ireland tomorrow, dispossess them, ban them from traveling throughout the UK, steal their homes, and then fund chavs to settle in Irish towns, chavs who routinely harass them. Occasionally chavs will burn down an Irish home or kill random Irish civilians. The British in the UK press call anyone who opposes this a Anglophobic Brit-hater.
Or another scenario to imagine: “what if Iran took control of Israel?” You can imagine Persians confining 3 million Israelis to an occupied zone where they are periodically brutalized and dehumanized. How would you reply to this? Do you think the international Jewish community would accept this as “just part and parcel of living in a civilized world” or something?
It’s very easy to call things that challenge us “hatred”. It’s harder to put ourselves in the
shoessouls of the oppressed. If it were so easy to practice compassion for our enemies then we wouldn’t need a whole religion to compel humans to do it. As an Irishman I’m sure you know what I’m talking about.So, first of all, I am not Irish. I have some Irish ancestry. I also have English, Scandinavian, German, Jewish, and (according to a DNA test) North African ancestry. As I've said before, I am Jewish enough for the Nazis to have classified me as such in that thing that you say totally didn't happen but was good, but I am not Jewish enough to actually care about Jewish religion or culture or Israel per se. Sorry if that makes it harder to pin me down on my ethnic biases.
Now, the rest of your argument was entirely beside the point because you don't care about the West Bank any more than you care about Gaza. You care about Jews. That is the beginning and the end of it, that is your entire logos on the matter. Your sympathy for Palestinians is an affectation. If a portal to hell opened up and demons invaded Israel, you'd write verbose apologetics for the infernal cause. Absent Jews, obviously you'd be as anti-demon as you are anti-Muslim, but Jews therefore...
I do not believe Iranians or Palestinians are demons, of course. I actually have sympathy for Palestinians and the impossible position they are in, largely because of their leadership (but, it must be pointed out, because of what most of the Palestinian population believes). But to take your straws in order:
The West Bank settlers are awful, I think Israel should put an end to their activities, and other countries should rightfully pressure Israel to do this. That said, even under what passes for "international law," that land basically belongs to whoever can hold it, and "neighboring country encroaches on unincorporated territory and boots out the locals" is a tale as old as time. It's always miserable and tragic, but again, you don't care about the whom, only the who. If Israel did completely pull out of the West Bank and leave the Palestinians there alone, you'd still want Israel to get pushed into the sea by the rest of the Arabs and you'd argue about Gaza and Jordan and Egypt's grievances instead.
The history of Palestine is long and tragic, but it's not directly analogous to England and Ireland, except in the sense that they are inextricably mixed. Israel and Palestine have been mixed since ancient times, and I am no more impressed by Jews' Biblical claims to the land (I don't give a fuck if your holy book says you're rightfully entitled to this land because your ancestors lived here 2000 years ago) than I am by revisionist Palestinian claims that historical Israel never existed and that Palestinians have always had a national identity (they have not) or that Jews haven't been there for centuries.
But again, the historical comparisons are beside the point because I don't believe your "moral intuition" is based on sympathy for Palestinians. it is based on hatred of Jews. Not because this "challenges" us or because you are deeply concerned about the oppressed (in every other context you display nothing but disdain for oppression and social justice narratives). Yes, it's entirely proper to identify your argument as Jew-hatred. If it was anyone but Jews curb-stomping the Palestinians (like, say, the rest of the Arab world, as they have done repeatedly), yes, you'd shrug and say that's what that part of the world is like.
I must have confused the details of a conversation re: Ireland.
This is an ad hominem attack, and a confused one. It’s not clear what you intend by Jewish. Are you counting Neturei Karta? The Samaritans and Karaites? Ezra Koenig? Glenn Greenwald and Max Blumenthal? If you mean “a system of beliefs and behavioral demands”, then there is nothing wrong with liking or disliking it based on its merits. I imagine you strongly dislike Salafism and Khameneism, or there is some ideology which you hate out of an impartial consideration. Do you mean the system of codified rulings considered normative among Rabbinical Judaism as practiced today? I think you got upset when I made a post a while back which specifically analyzed the moral code as taught among Orthodox Judaism.
This is not how the international community has ruled when they have come together at the UN. It seems you’re suggesting that international law is illegitimate. That’s unfortunate. Do you believe moral law is illegitimate? Why shouldn’t the international community come together to enjoin a minimum of rights and obligations?
How so?
When you’re living around everyone with a similar identity, there is no reason to distinguish (say) “Palestinian” from those living in the border regions of Lebanon. The Irish did not have a national identity until the 1800s.
Yes, the Sephardic Jews lived peacefully in Palestine for a long time. They were 2.5% of Palestine in 1800! Surely this doesn’t mean they deserve to inherit the whole thing though, right?
There's nothing confusing about it. Unlike you, I am not confused about your past statements. You attack Jews regularly. You have made it very clear that you do not like Jews. You do not like the Jewish religion and you do not like the Jewish people. You criticize Israel in an unprincipled manner, by which I mean you criticize Israel in a way that only applies to Israel (unlike leftist critics who criticize Israel because they have a general oppressed/oppressor model, or sometimes a general antipathy for all things Western, with which they associate Israel), because it is by proxy attacking Jews. I'm not going to pretend we're talking about the finer points of rabbinical Judaism or Samaritans or Karaites. Nor am I "upset" about this, any more than I was "upset" about your specious analysis of Orthodox Judaism.
I am calling it out, however, because it's annoying. (I suppose in that sense, "annoyed" is kind of like being "upset"). I am not going to argue about the history because as much as I find the history of the region quite interesting and endlessly convoluted (having read a number of books by Israeli histories, of both the Zionist and New Historian school, by Palestinian historians, largely of the Edward Said school, and by Western historians both from a pro- and anti-Israel perspective), I know when I engage with you, I am not engaging with someone interested in history, in justice, or in discerning truth and nuance, I'm engaging with someone whose core motivation is animus towards Jews, and thus everything you write on the subject is an argument-as-soldier. I can't change your mind, and you're allowed to hate Jews. But I'm not indulging the pretense that this is a discussion about international law or concern for Palestinians.
“You are hateful and motivated by hate” is the same old anti-Western argument that has been weaponized against Americans for 60 years now. It’s a stale, tired, and debunked anti-Christian canard. It’s been used by Marxists, Soviets, the racially-aggrieved, you name it. In recent years it has been rehashed by the pro-Israel mouthpieces who whisper in Trump’s ear. It is a laser-guided munition aimed directly at the Western Christian soul and its beautiful guilt-prone culture. And we are over it. No one buys it anymore. The guilt-tripwire has been illuminated and darkness will not overpower the Light.
As there is evidently nothing useful I can say to someone insistent on reading everything through the lens of pure hatred, I will only point you to the words of someone more Jewish than you, who has more experience in Israel. Feel free to call him an antisemite. This is from Moshe Ya'alon, the Minister of Defense in the 33rd and 34th Governments of Israel, the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Strategic Affairs in the 32nd Government, and the 17th Chief of the General Staff of the IDF:
There is no correlation between what I said and what you said. Nothing I said has anything to do with hatred of America, hatred of the West, or hatred of Christians.
Jewish supremacists exist and there is plenty to criticize Israel about.
Nonetheless, I repeat and assert my point: you do not care about Palestinians. You are not motivated by humanitarian concerns for Palestinians. You are not motivated by concerns that Israel's government is not as moral and democratic as it should be. You are motivated by hatred of Jews, which you express in many threads, even threads having nothing to do with Israel or Palestinians. This you have not and will not deny, you will only keep attempting to divert the issue with counter-accusations, such as trying to find some identity politic label to affix onto me that you think will be rhetorically effective. But prove me wrong and state unambiguously that you are not an anti-Semite and you do not hate Jews. I will state unambiguously that you are wrong and I do not hate America, the West, or Christians.
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