site banner
PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   16282 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 15, 2026

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

2
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

The MOU Homesick Blues

Over the last two days, Donald Trump and JD Vance have been selling their embryonic Iran Deal to the American public and to the world. Trump has said, among other things:

  • Hamas is behaving very well these days.
  • Iran should have missiles. Why not?
  • We're going to unfreeze Iran's money. It's their money. Why should we steal their money?
  • If the war kept going there would have been an economic catastrophe. So we had to end it.
  • Some of the guys in the Islamic regime are really nice.
  • If Iran didn't open the Strait of Hormuz our oil reserves would have run out in 4 weeks. We had to make a deal.
  • Netanyahu is crazy. They keep killing innocent civilians. He needs to be more responsible.
  • Without me and America, Israel wouldn't exist.

Directly he states:

“The alternative to this deal was a global recession. There are stupid people who want to see a global recession. They are just stupid people. The Strait of Hormuz would never have been opened."

Along with this banger

“I think [Israel] could do better … I'm not saying they shouldn't protect themselves. I'm saying when two drones are shot into the desert and drop harmlessly, you don't have to knock down buildings in Beirut. They could behave better…”

JD has said:

“If I was in the cabinet of the Israeli government, I might not be attacking the only powerful ally that I have left. 2/3 of the defensive weapons that have protected your homeland have been built by American hands and paid for by American tax dollars. The problem for Israel is not Donald J. Trump, and anybody in Israel who thinks their biggest problem is the President of the United States needs to wake up and smell the reality of the situation that country is in”

"Do I think there are people within Israeli society who would like to turn Iran into Libya, basically a failed state with 90 million people? Probably."

"What is your exact proposal? You’re a country of 9 million people. You can’t just kill your way out of solving every single national security problem that you have."

Israeli ministers have been striking out against the deal

For every tear of an Israeli mother, a thousand Lebanese mothers must weep. All of Lebanon must burn! With all due respect to the Americans, Israel must make it clear to the entire world that the blood of our sons and the security of our citizens are not forfeit. All of Lebanon must burn. Our supreme duty is to protect the citizens of Israel and the soldiers of the IDF, and this commitment takes precedence over every other consideration. I told the Prime Minister, even in our private meetings: For every tear of an Israeli mother, a thousand Lebanese mothers must weep. Enough with the ping-pong. In the Middle East, you don’t win with measured responses and restraint—you need to go berserk. To obliterate. To crush the terror.

The entire first line of Lebanese villages has been destroyed. We are destroying all the houses. The residents will never see them standing before their eyes again.

Now reports are coming in that Israel does not consider itself bound by the MOU, and intends to keep bombing Lebanon without reference to it.

The IRGC has stated today:

“Since Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon, the complete lifting of the naval blockade, and the withdrawal of American terrorist forces from the Persian Gulf and the region are among the main conditions of the agreement between Iran and the United States. The Strait of Hormuz will remain closed until these conditions are met. All ships are requested, for the sake of their security and safety, not to approach the Strait of Hormuz. Any vessel that defies this directive will be targeted.”

With the United States executive committed to the MOU, and Israel committed to the opposite policy, Yeshiva World News reports:

Israeli officials told Maariv that Trump’s demands are not merely theoretical and that issues concerning Lebanon, Syria, and the Syrian Hermon were raised in recent discussions with Netanyahu, adding that the prime minister made it clear that Israel will not agree to withdrawing from its security positions in the north. A senior Israeli official told Reuters that Israel is carrying out “stubborn negotiations” with the US on maintaining its military presence in southern Lebanon and has no intention of backing down. The officials warned that the messages coming from Washington are no longer limited to difficult discussions. The US is signaling that if Israel continues to insist on its position, it will consider practical measures, ranging from delays in weapons shipments to restrictions on operational assistance, and even more severe steps that could potentially amount to a de facto arms embargo.

So, what now?

How does the USA navigate this problem with its erstwhile ally?

Part of me feels very strongly, the patriotic Toby Keith, regardless of your feelings about US policy or about this administration, that we can't have our president get cucked like that on the world stage. Trump has publicly signed, endorsed, justified, sold the MOU. He's stated clearly that it is necessary to the interests of the United States in maintaining the global economy. If Israel is our ally, our greatest ally, then they can't be allowed to do this to us. They can't insult and undermine the clear foreign policy of the POTUS and be allowed to do so. From the beginning I've said that Israeli forces, inasmuch as they are allied to the USA, should be under the command of an American general, Spartan style. They can't be allowed to go against us and continue to suck off the teat of the American taxpayer.

So plan trusters, antisemities, pro-Palestinians, shitlibs, anyone. Where do we go from here with Israel? What happens next? How can you, as the American President, allow your ally to undermine your own clearly stated foreign policy goals and, in your own opinion, wreck the world economy? At this point in the process what pressure can even be put on Iran?

This feels bad.

In the Middle East, you don’t win with measured responses and restraint—you need to go berserk. To obliterate. To crush the terror.

I wish we could stop it with the "this is the middle east'. Just stop it.

The first great test of the Revisionist’s claim to understand the Arab came with the Western Wall controversy, of 1928-29. That Jews could use the area for prayer was established by long precedent, repeatedly affirmed by the Ottomans in the late 19th and early 20th century. Fanatic madman, Hajj Amin Al Husseini, was trying to use the wall as a wedge issue in his campaign to cement control over the Arab community, and, like the rightoid shithead he was, pursued a dual strategy of provoking and funding violence against Jewish worshippers, whilst also spreading rumours of Jewish intentions to take over the Temple Mount among the Arab public. The Zionist leadership was trying, with mixed success, to handle the issue through a mixture of appeals to the British administrators, and domestic and international hasbara campaigns.

That’s cucked and bugman, though, and so, tired of Jewsniping impotently from the sidelines for a year, the Revisionists decided it was time for them to step in. In order to demonstrate their enormous understanding of Arab psychology, they unveiled a truly brilliant and strategically adroit plan, so cunning in its methods and delicate in its design that it could not fail to win the day. They would - get this! - organize a gang of oafs to march to the wall and shout stuff. This would ‘assert Jewish pride’ and ‘demonstrate resolve’ and ‘show that Jews are not victims’ and other important goals of Retard Revisionist Zionism. That it happened to be precisely what Hajj Amin Al Husseini had been trying to engineer the whole time was but a minor detail. When you truly understand that Arab mind like a Right Wing Zionist does, you don’t even have to game out his plans.

Fast forward a few months, of course, and there were riots all over Palestine, and over 100 Jews were dead, many of them murdered in appallingly bestial fashion. To cap matters off, after imposing their Iron Wall on the Arab rioters, the British authorities decided it was time to review the policy of open Jewish immigration, with the Hope Simpson Enquiry paving the road to the White Paper, and ensuring the doors of the Holy Land were slammed shut just in time for the Holocaust. Great job, knobhead. But when YOU HAVE SUCH AN INCREDIBLY GREAT GRASP OF ARAB PSYCHOLOGY, you don’t have to say sorry. You just blow up a hotel or whatever.

...

The truth is that the Middle East is a mess because it is full of people whose thought process extends to ‘but this is the Middle East’ and then respond to real or perceived disrespect by chimping out, then cry when other people chimp back. Those Middle Eastern countries that have managed to turn lemons into a measure of lemonade don’t do it by inciting their dumbest and most violent people to start provoking everyone around them. They do it by taking out Pakistani generals on loan to kill them.

Wait, Trump and JD say (some) things which sound obvious and true to my ears? Is today opposite day or something, or has Trump's handler been replaced?

At least the Israeli ministers are still acting like comic book villains. They think that if they can thwart a US/Iran peace, perhaps they will still get their favorite outcome of Trump glassing Iran.

Personally, I think Trump should simply give Netanyahu 24 hours to retreat from Lebanon before we find out how well protected the IDF troops there are against US airstrikes.

Personally, I think Trump should simply give Netanyahu 24 hours to retreat from Lebanon before we find out how well protected the IDF troops there are against US airstrikes.

There's a lot of steps the US can take to ramp up the pressure on Israel before it reaches that, like cancelling arms purchases, stopping intel sharing, etc...

We should encourage Israelis to forget about their ancestral homeland and resettle in Florida and start a new defense hub with a specialty in cyber arms. Also maybe try to improve the food situation.

Is that not what we’ve been doing?

If Israel is our ally, our greatest ally, then they can't be allowed to do this to us. They can't insult and undermine the clear foreign policy of the POTUS and be allowed to do so.

Replace "Israel" with "USA", you funnily enough get how it has felt to be a European for the past year and a half. Trump has instituted an era in which alliances are no longer treated with the sanctity they deserve. If betraying your ally has marginal benefit to you, then that is the done thing.

While I am not in favor of the war continuing, part of me does see this as karmic justice. Finally America gets to know how it feels to be shafted by your "greatest ally".

Replace "Israel" with "USA", you funnily enough get how it has felt to be a European for the past year and a half. Trump has instituted an era in which alliances are no longer treated with the sanctity they deserve.

I'm not seeing it. The Greenland thing was blown way out of proportion, and other than that what have done that's such an insult? Slowed down the gravy train somewhat?

The US has demonstrated that the Europeans are useless, which is certainly quite insulting. While previous US Presidents generally treated the form of the alliance with sanctity, the Europeans allowed the substance of the alliance to wither.

It still blows my mind that European NATO countries can do things like "miss NATO spending goals and fall behind on military readiness for years despite years of increasingly pointed US signals that there will be consequences for this" or "make preparations to literally give away territory that is crucial to American defense preparedness" and then act as if Trump arrived ex nihilo and his actions have zero context and make no sense besides a wanton betrayal for no reason.

To be fair, what Trump did to his NATO allies was much less of a betrayal than the move Israel is now pulling. If he had invaded Greenland or made a deal where Putin gets to invade the Baltic countries without US interference, that would be in a much more similar ballpark.

The US has been waging war against Iran on behalf of Israel. Israel considers Iran to be a threat to their existence (not entirely without reason, though at this point who is ultimately responsible for the bad blood between them is akin to the hen-egg-problem).

If you call on your big brother to help you in a fight, that means that you are conceding control of the fight. Of course, a smart elder brother would refuse to fight for a younger sibling just itching for blood, and consider that their sibling will likely throw their interests completely under the bus, but that does not make Israel's behavior less bad.

There aren’t a lot of options. Burgerland and Israel got their assess kicked, the news just isn’t reporting it. The “laundry fire” on the Gerald R. Ford was so bad that there are now serious concerns the ship will never sail again. Basically every American base in the Middle East has been glassed. The final kicker was when most of IAF got unexpectedly blown up on the runway a few days ago. This was in exchange for attriting about 10 percent of Iran’s missile stockpile. Your only options are Operation Overlord 2.0 or nukes.

Where's the satellite (or other) evidence that "most of IAF" was destroyed on the runway a few days ago?

The “laundry fire” on the Gerald R. Ford was so bad that there are now serious concerns the ship will never sail again.

The Ford is currently in Norfolk. If the US had the ability to transport it there from Greece without it sailing, then I seriously doubt Iran is winning the war.

...anyway, on that note, the Ford is currently in Norfolk, within camera range of passing ships. Should be pretty trivial to determine if she's been hit by antiship missiles.

Where's the satellite (or other) evidence that "most of IAF" was destroyed on the runway a few days ago?

Indisputable video footage of the entire Israeli air force being destroyed here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=7FwDMzIbZrg

This has got to be one of my favorite YouTube genres.

It certainly takes a level of shit-eating grin to embrace hyper-nationalist military propaganda to the point of parody. Makes me feel commonality across cultures and ideology.

That pales before the footage of the mighty T-59 tank!

Average Broken Arrow experience

So, what now?

How does the USA navigate this problem with its erstwhile ally?

Same way everyone else in the world navigates problems with earstwhile partners: talk shit when frustrated and marginal costs are low, hype bromides of commonality when you want something from them and/or they are doing what you want, and recognize that it goes in both directions. No one is above being undercut.

For the rest of people who are trying to understand the world, don't over-rely on the propaganda of either narrative swing. Such people would understand the swings are themselves exaggerations serving a moment rather than literalisms, and not try to enforce arbitrary rules based around cultural chauvenistic hyperagency about how they 'allow' an ally to behave... not least because the first thing to understand about the world environment is the principle of anarchy, and part of that is the limitation of your own state's agency over others. Allies are based on coincidence of interests, not expectations of compliance to non-existent standards.

This feels bad.

Was there ever a period that you felt good about the middle east that wasn't also a period you would have felt bad if you paid more attention to the middle east?

My opinion is that I don't mind a bit of hypocrisy in politicians, or flip-flopping, or even outrigh lying sometimes. It's part of their job.

We don't want politicians to be perfectly honest, consistent, straight shooters. If they were, countries would go to war over basic disagreements, and then just stay at war forever because no one could ever forgive or forget. The job of the politicians is to smooth over those disagreements however possible, and words are cheap.

So for the past few months, Trump and Vance have been saying pro-Israeli and anti-Iran stuff, because they were allies with Israel against Iran. Now they're trying to make peace with Iran and get Israel to stop fighting, so they're saying anti-Israel and pro-Iran stuff. That's just how the game of politics works. But as far as I can tell they would never actually do anything against Israel, and the deal with Iran is still basically "stop bombing, allow shipping through Hormuz, all other details TBD."

How does the USA navigate this problem with its erstwhile ally?

The first question is whether the US actually has a problem. Right now Trump is making nice to the Iranians and disparaging Israel, but he did the same thing to both sides (alternately) when trying to negotiate a peace between Ukraine and Russia, so it likely doesn't mean much.

Obviously the Iran deal isn't as good for Israel as the US forcing regime change in Iran, but Israel will have to live with that. The US agreement in the MOU for its allies to not attack Lebanon is worth about as much as past (or future) Iranian assurances not to fund terrorism -- that is, nothing at all. Obviously Israel does not feel bound by the MOU -- they are not in fact a party to it. And the US is not going to attack Israel to ensure the territorial integrity of Lebanon. Israel will continue to act as a loose canon, and the US will continue to occasionally pretend to be upset while being able to do nothing about it, and Iran's choice will be to blow up the deal or live with that. I suspect they'll complain but live with it.

While I wish to be hopeful this could be the beginning of the end of Israeli control over domestic politics, I'm still quite wary. Trump is very unique. In a "only Nixon can go to China" sense, perhaps only the egotistical chaos beast with a base single mindedly devoted to him rather than a consistent idealogy can ignore Israel. The Israel idealogues are simply outgunned by the massive blob of Trump fandom. They tried their best to sway him but the chaos beast did what it does best, and betrayed them out of boredom and frustration. He could probably even threaten to invade Israel like he did with Canada and Greenland and his base would barely move, just like the latter.

But this is a Trump thing. He radically reshifted politics and turned up the entertainment dial from a 5 to an 11. Consistent clear and reliable policy is out, doing whatever you want whenever you feel like it is in. But can the next presidential hopefuls capture that magic? I doubt it. There's a 60% chance the 2028 pick is either Vance or Rubio. Rubio is an obvious "return to establishment and respectability" pick, and Vance is a slimy little worm hanging out of Trump's ass instead of really pulling in people much by himself. Vance seems to view anti Israel politics as the future, but will he stick with that when the winds blow back? Well, he hasn't stuck with much else so I'm doubtful.

But there is that ~40% chance it is someone else previously unseen. Maybe that someone else will be a Mega Trump who is even more entertaining and chaotic, in which case it depends on their own unique beastness in how much the Israeli interests can sway him. Or maybe it'll be a return to form politician who disavows the increasingly flailing Trump approval rating and doesn't need any swaying from the Israel side to begin with. Who knows.

And that's of course assuming the Republicans win again in 2028, which is the less likely result. The Democrats are waking up far more to Israeli abuse of politics (even if the older holdouts cling on to their cries of antisemitism) to the point that supporting Palestinians has become a culturally embedded sign of moral goodness as Armand Doma points out. I can't imagine they're going to be too friendly to Israel. But again you never know.

What exactly is Israel supposed to do? Not make a fuss about jihadist Muslims killing their citizens because it will mess up Trump's "peace deal" (read: humiliating capitulation virtually unparalleled in US history)?

If Trump wants to prostrate himself to the IRGC, he's free to do so, but when the Israelis said "Never again", it wasn't just an empty statement.

What's really funny is that Israel's enemies don't understand that it's America that protects them from Israel. The dissolution of the friendship between the US and Israel is not good news for Iran, Syria, etc.

For every tear of an Israeli mother, a thousand Lebanese mothers must weep. All of Lebanon must burn!

Not say this? For starters? Israel was actually doing pretty well with restraint and measured responses right up until Oct 7th when they (somewhat understandably but very foolishly) let Hamas provoke them into an orgy of violence that makes them look like just another band of murderous ethnic psychos.

Oct 7th definitely gave Israel a blank check... for Gaza. What the fuck did Lebanon do?!

I'm almost hoping that tweet by Israel's defense minister is misreported or... something. But it's all too believable regardless just from Israel's actions. Absolutely unhinged shit.

Yes it’s always lucky when a conveniently timed terrorist attack gives you an excuse to do exactly what you already wanted to do anyway. Russia, America, and William Randolph Hearst would approve.

It’s like someone who wants to blame Britain for WW2 since they were the first to declare war on the other party. But the fact that the bell only rang after the first punches were already thrown on the continent is irrelevant.

What the fuck did Lebanon do?!

Fail the foundational responsibility of a sovereign state, which is to maintain a monopoly on organized violence within their territory.

When your territory becomes the basis of extended artillery campaigns against your neighbor as part of another conflict, one of you is going to lose sovereign control as a result.

I repeat the quote by their defense minister

For every tear of an Israeli mother, a thousand Lebanese mothers must weep. All of Lebanon must burn!

Even taking everything you said at face value, does that quote not seem completely insane? I'd expect some diplomatic concerns about pacifying a restive region, not bragging about committing a second genocide.

I repeat the quote by their defense minister

I note your quote of the defense minister does not address, or refute, what Lebanon did (or failed to do), which was the topic of your question and it's direct answer.

Even taking everything you said at face value, does that quote not seem completely insane? I'd expect some diplomatic concerns about pacifying a restive region, not bragging about committing a second genocide.

Even if I took that quote at face value, it is neither bragging nor is the situation in Lebanon a genocide unless you scope the term down to the level routinely noted as undeserving in other contexts- including the context of the previous Hezbollah artillery campaign from southern Lebanon that led to mass regional evacuations of jews from northern israel, i.e. technically genocide by ethnic cleansing definitions if you stretch it to a small enough area. I don't mind if you want to call the Israeli dislocations of border villages genocide, so long as you consistently apply the standard to the dislocation of Israeli border villages by the Hezbollah artillery campaign, but consistently applying the standard provides the answer to your earlier question.

Which returns to the point of what Lebanon- or at least the state of Lebanon- let its sovereign territory be used for.

What the fuck did Lebanon do?!

Lebanon was supposed to disarm Hezbollah and couldn't and basically allowed them to continue as is. Post-Oct 7th they started shelling northern Israel and forced many people to evacuate.

Essentially, they declared a (limited) war in support of Hamas and refused to back down until the situation in Gaza was resolved. America invaded Afghanistan for similar reasons.

No, they did not attack Israel until Israel attacked them first. On October 8th they fired some volleys at Lebanese territory, in the Shebaa Farms area, which is definitively not Israeli territory. These were symbolic attacks, on their own territory, which did not even harm any of the invading Israelis who had built illegal outposts there. Israel responded by attacking Lebanon.

They played a high risk strategy by convincing Trump to start the war in the first place (yes alongside long term Republican hawks) and telling him it would be quick and easy. There was never public support for this war, or any real attempt to build support. Now they've run into the obvious problem that the public doesn't want to pay any cost to support this war, so Trump has to back down before the mid terms to retain some popularity. All of this is the predictable bad case outcome of Israeli strategy to start the war in the first place and they can either take the L or double down on continuing the war and undermine their relationship with the Republican party after completely torching their relationship with the Democratic Party.

I'm not sure why you wrote a serious response to OP assuming he was arguing in good faith; he explicitly called for Pro-Palestinians and anti-semites to help him feel less bad about Israel responding to rocket fire. I don't think he's interested in non-groyper perspectives.

People are allowed to post pro-Israel diatribes and they are allowed to post anti-Israel diatribes, so long as they follow the rules, though in my opinion, the OP was not really a diatribe so much as honestly asking for opinions.

Unlike you, @FiveHourMarathon does not have a history of bad faith posting. You do have a history of antagonistic call-outs and you've been told repeatedly to stop doing this. Banned for five days this time.

I don't like calling out people who attack me, especially when I've been blocked, but if we let this kind of discursive spiral continue, we're going to end up instituting woke speech norms on a forum explicitly existing to avoid them.

What exactly is Israel supposed to do? Not make a fuss about jihadist Muslims killing their citizens because it will mess up Trump's "peace deal" (read: humiliating capitulation virtually unparalleled in US history)?

Do they want to continue receiving, in Vance's estimation, two thirds of their defensive weapons from the United States?

So Trump started a war with Iran and failed to achieve his ends, folded, and is now trying to buy his way out by forcing the Hezbollah situation to a stalemate again (when they were supposed to be disarmed decades ago, talk about cucked) and because Israel makes some noises via their most demented minister Israel is cucking the United States?

What about the nation whose nuclear program Trump claimed to have destroyed, whose civilization he threatened to extinguish who he's now backing down to and paying and helping maintain the efficacy of their proxy and basically making it clear that blackmailing the world via the strait is now a-okay? Their cock isn't in his mouth?

Question: what's to stop Hezbollah from taking a breather and going back to shelling Israel and demanding nothing be done lest their ally close the strait again? Who'd be to blame then?

I mean, on some level this is delicious karma for Israel. They put all their hopes on the most transactional and changeable man in politics and somehow expected him to take a massive L before the midterms when he could just cut and run and are reaping what they're sowing. Trump isn't Bush, he isn't just going to hang around because global economy/rules-based, liberal international order/blah blah.

But the shamelessness here in the pivoting and scapegoating on the Trump side is intolerable.

What about the nation whose nuclear program Trump claimed to have destroyed, whose civilization he threatened to extinguish who he's now backing down to and paying and helping maintain the efficacy of their proxy and basically making it clear that blackmailing the world via the strait is now a-okay? Their cock isn't in his mouth?

Question: what's to stop Hezbollah from taking a breather and going back to shelling Israel and demanding nothing be done lest their ally close the strait again? Who'd be to blame then?

Not really part of the question here. How we got here and what decisions Trump made are kind of irrelevant. At some point it's the stated policy of the POTUS and to allow a putative ally to undermine that policy isn't acceptable if they want to remain an ally.

because Israel makes some noises via their most demented minister Israel is cucking the United States?

Israel isn't just making noises. They're continuing the war in Lebanon and stating that they intend to continue the war in Lebanon regardless of its impact on the stated policy goals of the USA.

Not really part of the question here. How we got here and what decisions Trump made are kind of irrelevant.

Ridiculous. It has everything to do with it, and this sort of pivot into fake grievance due to actions people chose to take is not irrelevant.

I’d like to see America exercise complete control over Israel. We have their billionaires, we have their Haredi baby factories, we are holding their militant neighbors at bay, and we should be justly rewarded for this. America should completely take their tech sector. We should not allow a single tech company in Israel; they should be coerced into coming to America to do business. This is something that it’s in the realm of possibility as America becomes increasingly anti-Israel, though not anytime soon. I don’t see a good reason why we shouldn’t treat the country as a kind of serf state, whose citizens only work to support the prosperity of America. What are they going to do, go to Han-supremacist China or FSB-controlled Russia? They are trapped with us. If we can manage to wrangle back control of the country we can really exploit them for everything they have.

Why wouldn't they go to Russia?

Impossible to penetrate Russian society today. FSB goes after oligarchs like Browder, they are heading further in the direction of Christian nationalism, etc. If they flee to Russia they are surrendering their influence.

Don’t imagine it would be much different than the 10,000 or so some odd Jews that live in Tehran or Shiraz, in Iran. People misunderstand just how delicate and fragile Israel is, especially when much of its economy is held up by its secular, high-tech development, driven forward by only a few thousand or so rugged and enterprising pioneers inside the country. It only takes a small amount of Jews to exit the country before things get really bad for them. The remaining ultra orthodox are mostly unproductive as far as their relevance to the modern economy goes.

I thought there were some changes to get the ultra orthodox men into jobs and even drafted military service. It should be axiomatic as they grow into a larger percentage of the Israeli population, otherwise Israel would be reliant on women to do all the fighting and other typical male work.

That's if the influential Jews physically flee to Russia. Why wouldn't they just invite Russia in to offer a marginally less shitty deal than the one you're proposing USA should offer them? Or China, for that matter.

Many Israeli are Russian Jews anyway (or just Russians with very thin Jewish ancestry).

They could offer Russia a buffer of tech that's not completely pozzed with Western values yet is better than the feeble attempts of Russia to create its own internet, for example.

And if they decide to do that, we can expropriate the wealth of their loyalists in America and allow Israel’s neighbors to invade with the help of our military intelligence. Why shouldn’t we do this? The threat of losing the land traps them into doing what we want.

Aside from the problem that you can’t confiscate the human capital, all you can do is take the property produced by it, I don’t imagine they’d just idly sit around and do nothing about it.

It does not seem to me that the super high IQ Israelis are the same as the super tribalistic Israelis. If we allocate tens of billions into paying and retaining the high IQ portion, then it concretely benefits America and is cheaper than defending Israel.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats