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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   10303 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 2026

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The point of being vocal is to change something that you can affect in the world. Americans can’t affect humans rights abuses in Iran, Belarus, or Sudan. But we could have influenced the food embargo in Gaza and stopped a few hundreds of thousands of children from starving. That would have been cool.

But we could have influenced the food embargo in Gaza and stopped a few hundreds of thousands of children from starving.

I would still love to see evidence for these hundreds of thousands of Gazan children who starved. Most pro-Palestine people seemed to quietly drop that specific claim after the UN were forced to walk back the most explosive framing of it.

https://www.rescue.org/press-release/children-gaza-need-protection-hunger-and-injuries-surge-irc-data-shows

Polling indicated that 1 in 3 children in Gaza during the height of the blockade went full days without eating. There are 600,000 Gazans under 10 years old, meaning that 200,000 children were consciously starved by the Jewish State during the food blockaid.

No, it says that one in three children under 3 went a full day without eating in the past 24 hours (kind of an oddly phrased question, but whatever).

We can make reasonable extrapolations from this poll:

  • A family with limited food is not going to single out their youngest child to go without eating; the human instinct is to feed the youngest and most vulnerable. If children under 3 are going a full day without eating, then this is at minimum how long every child is going without eating. The youngest is who needs to eat the most frequently.

  • This poll wasn’t conducted on a day with a particularly limited amount of food, but sampled on a random day. This means they are continually going full days without eating.

  • Doctors who worked in Gaza have confirmed this: Mark Brauner, Tom Adamkiewicz, Nick Maynard, Joanne Perry. (These are the non-Muslim names).

Do you deny that this is starvation?

I don't deny that it's starvation, but I'm unconvinced that Israel is solely to blame for this state of affairs. I read several articles independently claiming that Hamas were seen stealing aid packages and selling them to fund their war effort.

USAID found no evidence of that. AFAIK no evidence was ever presented to journalists or the public. No international organization has supported Israel’s claims. And note the infeasibility of Hamas members (20,000) stealing ~1 million unique aid packages daily or weekly in refugee camps monitored by drones with facial recognition software. Any widespread theft and redistribution would be trivially easy to record. And if this were happening, Israel would have gladly allowed aid simply to be able to target and track Hamas militants. The whole area is under constant surveillance by the most advanced aerial surveillance system in the world. Meanwhile you have prominent Israelis in Netanyau’s cabinet who have promoted the idea of starving them: Gallant, Smotrich, Ben-Gvir, Eliyahu, Katz.

This event is significant to the overarching question of whether the whole world holds a bias against the Jews or whether the Jews hold a bias against the whole world. Their most consistent historical stereotype is that they lack compassion for outside groups. You find this in Tacitus, in early Christians, in medieval writers, in Shakespeare. The basis of Western religion is the the split between the mercy-laden story of Christ bringing in outsiders and the hardness of heart of the Pharisees, the forebears of modern Rabbinical Judaism. The occupation of note in Jewish history is moneylending, something the Jews made impermissible to do to another Jew because “one should not swallow up the wealth of his friend without his [even] feeling it, until he finds his house empty of all good, as this is the way of interest, and the matter is well-known”. The most beautiful passage about mercy in the whole English language is literally someone trying to persuade a Jew to be merciful to an outsider:


PORTIA: Then must the Jew be merciful.
SHYLOCK: On what compulsion must I? tell me that.
PORTIA: The quality of mercy is not strain’d,
        It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
        Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest;
        It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:
        ’Tis mightiest in the mightiest: it becomes
        The throned monarch better than his crown;
        His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,
        The attribute to awe and majesty,
        Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
        But mercy is above this sceptred sway;
        It is enthroned in the hearts of kings,
        It is an attribute to God himself;
        And earthly power doth then show likest God’s
        When mercy seasons justice. Therefore, Jew,
        Though justice be thy plea, consider this,
        That, in the course of justice, none of us
        Should see salvation: we do pray for mercy;
        And that same prayer doth teach us all to render
        The deeds of mercy. I have spoke thus much
        To mitigate the justice of thy plea;
        Which if thou follow, this strict court of Venice
        Must needs give sentence ‘gainst the merchant there
SHYLOCK: My deeds upon my head! 
        I crave the law, the penalty and forfeit of my bond.

So maybe there is a peculiar lack of compassion for outsiders in the Jewish worldview. This has explanatory power. If this is so, then it’s something they can work on in order to repair their reputation in the West globally.

I do note that EA and various other ‘bleeding-heart’ movements also tend to be disproportionately Jewish.

One might fairly argue that almost every movement is disproportionately Jewish, due to high IQ and great verbal skills, but there’s something there IMO.

Effective altruism is most interested in the formulation of rulings which permit the outsourcing of compassion to rationality altogether, so that the correct moral choice can always be made without the evolved intermediary emotion of empathy, which never has to be consulted and thus can fade out of human phenomenology altogether. This leads to endless quibbling over whether we should donate most of our money to shrimp welfare or to African malaria nets. An issue with this legalism is that compassion is an instinct, an evolved emotional reflex rather than a “strain’d” rationality. There is no human instinct to allocate compassionate concern based upon abstract calculations involving shrimp farms we have never seen. A genetically compassionate person will help the unfixable homeless vagrant for the umpteenth even though it is irrational because his instinct compels this response to suffering per its evolved utility, when healing a visibly hurt tribe-member aided the reproduction of the giver. In the EA dystopia, the bleeding heart compassionoid is sidelined (receiving little status) so that the bleeding brain rationoid can “produce the most good” through his sheer intellectual output alone, no feelings required, indeed feelings only getting in the way. But what happens if you select for such legalistic rationalists, these Alt-Man entities, who can memorize and answer the correct decisions without any feelings behind the curtain? What happens over time? You will eventually find that there are fewer people around who have the instinct for compassion, and they will apply the same legalistic thinking to things that have no basis in human welfare, and will demand a pound of flesh because that is the law and the law should be followed because the law is intellectual and the first principles, and there’s no instinct or ambient social valuation which pops up to feel disgusted at a first principle which makes no sense (like giving all your charity to shrimp).

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