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.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
If Vance wants to actively investigate the Epstein case, doesn't he have the political power to do just that?
Apparently Vance said: "[Epstein] clearly had connections to the upper, the highest levels of American intelligence. He clearly had connections to the highest levels of Israeli intelligence".
Does the Vice President of the United States really not have the power to discover and communicate concrete specifics about something like this?
If you watch the whole interview, Vance gives a pretty good answer to this (although more so in the context of UFOs).
Basically his argument was that, as much as he might want to investigate this, he's only one human and his time is limited. He has to deal with nonstop crisis like the latest developments in the Iran war. It's not like there's some file marked "the real top secret truth" that he can read. Investigating means interviewing tons and tons of different people, who mostly only know a small part of it themselves, and reading though a million pages of mostly boring routine court documents. On top of which, a lot of physical evidence was either destroyed or never collected during the early parts of the investigation, so they're stuck with mostly just a lot of vague reports.
For what it's worth, he did explicitly deny that Epstein was working directly for any intelligence agency. He didn't give any real proof of that, but he did say he had looked into it.
More options
Context Copy link
It's like the metaphor about what happens when you go witch-hunting. If you find some screaming wailing maiden and burn her to death, she's probably not a witch or her power level is pretty low.
If however you're investigating a Grand Elder of the High Coven, the investigation hits a total dead end, the relevant people find that nothing more can be done after saying they themselves personally are clearly exonerated, records are lost or must be redacted or the cameras just failed... well either there's an awful lot of bad luck or an awful lot of magic going on.
More options
Context Copy link
I hate to be gauche, but he probably enjoys having a non-dead wife.
More options
Context Copy link
For a long time it was political suicide to go against the Israel lobby. I don’t think that’s the case anymore, but maybe Vance still feels that it is.
I will never understand Joo-posters' obsession with the USS Liberty.
I was recently listening to an interview with one of the survivors who was there.
After the ship was hit by a torpedo plane (I think), the ship sunk. Dozens of Americans abandoned ship. The Israeli planes then strifed the Americans in the water with machine gun fire from their aircraft - presumably to kill everyone and keep the story contained.
I always wondered, do people think this is a fake story? Or is it just not a big deal?
Or they believed they were firing on enemy personnel from an enemy vessel they had just sunk. Not exactly very sporting or within the norms of modern western nations, but not that crazy.
Mistaken identity/friendly fire incidents happen all the time, the US has a somewhat infamous reputation for blue on blue incidents with allied nations.
Not that crazy? Shooting at shipwrecked sailors is a clear violation of the Geneva Convention; it's literally a war crime!
From the Second Geneva Convention, Chapter II, Article 12:
You know what they say, it's only a war crime if you lose the war.
More options
Context Copy link
The whole concept of "honor" has been so lost that even those who profess to defend it are constantly in the act of denigrating it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Well, it happened 60 years ago, agonize over it now makes as much sense now as being still really angry about Gulf of Tonkin incident.
The USS Liberty is the case in point example for zionist influence in American politics. If zionist influence had vained or stopped being a relevant factor then yes, bringing it up constantly would be a little off. But zionist influence has only grown.
To that extent JIDF posters can only pretend to not understand the context or attempt to denigrate those who do.
More options
Context Copy link
Yet on the other hand people especially on the US right still regularly invoke the memory of the 1979 Iranian hostage taking of US diplomats. How important an event seems to remember greatly depends on how well it meshes with the narrative you are weaving.
(Also, isn't the consensus nowadays that the Gulf of Tonkin Incident was a US intelligence fabrication, almost up there with Sender Gleiwitz?)
It also depends on whether the country involved knew what they were doing. The Israelis thought that they had located a vessel belonging to the Egyptian military, with whom they were in a state of active warfare. The Iranians knew that they were targeting diplomatic personnel.
It furthermore depends on whether they apologised for their actions. The Israeli government, upon realising their mistake, apologised to the United States and subsequently paid a total of, adjusting for inflation, over $80 million. Has Iran ever acknowledged wrongdoing in the matter?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Well the linked write-up explains that Israel killed 34 American soldiers, the president and his advisors and most of the surviving crewmen all believed it was on purpose, and Israel then conspired with American Jews in government to threaten the president not to talk about it, while conspiring with Jewish journalists to quash the story, all this done through their consulate. Decades later they balked at ever paying restitution to the families, even with American pressure. To top it off, the event has a symbolically resonant name: the Attack on USS Liberty. And this happened in 1967, which was not the height of the lobby’s power.
I'm not familiar with this incident in any great detail, but what would the Israelis possibly hope to gain from a deliberate attack on a US warship, in the middle of a major war?
If Israeli influence was so strong over the US that they could effectively puppet the government and its armed forces, why even strike the ship at all?
Why not just use all that shadowy influence to covertly achieve whatever goal they were trying to achieve instead?
I'm struggling to come up with an explanation for Israel being malicious rather than simply mistaken that doesn't sound like;
According to our then-president, it was to prevent the ship from spying. It’s possible the Liberty had obtained comms about the slaughter of surrendering Egyptian soldiers.
But it could have obtained other valuable information:
—
They do not have much influence within the meritocratic military that they largely do not serve in. They have power in politics and media, where money buys influence.
According to the crew, this was impossible. The flag was clearly visible, and they even had a passing Israeli pilot wave to them overhead.
The crew aren't in a position to make that judgement, I've read far too many accounts of seemingly very dumb friendly fire incidents, particularly involving airstrikes, to believe that it is impossible to screw up this badly. During WW2, a little over 20 years before this incident, Allied planes mixed up what country they were attacking and bombed Switzerland something like 70 times. War is a confusing mess and shit does indeed happen.
Yes, if I was planning to blow up an allied nations spy ship as part of a cover-up, I would make sure to have my planes fly low and slow so that everyone on board can see whose air force the plane belongs to, for good measure I'd also transmit to them and ask in plain, unambiguous language to tell me that they have positively identified the American ship that we are going to bomb in order to cover up our nefarious wrongdoings. After all, even if my foolproof plan of sinking the ship and doing a few strafing runs on the survivors in the water fails, the famously hostile-to-life mediterranean sea will take care of the rest.
There is absolutely nothing that the USS Liberty could have recorded that is more dangerous to the state of Israel, or those in power in Israel, than deliberately bombing a US warship. This is the cold war, the US does not care about the rights and wrongs of the war Israel is currently fighting, who started it or who is massacring who. The Soviets are backing the Arabs, so the US is going to back the Israelis to try and counter-balance the strategically significant middle east.
If you can do this, you aren't afraid of a grainy 1960s recording of intercepted radio messages from a war zone. You just aren't.
You are disagreeing with the NSA director (“It couldn't be anything else but deliberate”), the CIA board of inquiry ("no doubt that the Israelis knew exactly what they were doing"), the 18th chief of Naval Operations from 1967 to 1970 and 7th chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1970 to 1974, and the President before he was threatened. I imagine all of these people have heard accounts of dumb air strikes, but they didn’t file this under “shit happens”. In WWII the allies flew more than one million sorties over Germany, so 70 dropping in Switzerland is a pretty low amount.
If you have decided to give orders to blow up an American spy ship (and America was not quite allied with Israel at the time), you would not be the grunts tasked with identifying ships over international waters. Those are totally different men.
I don’t think there’s any way to know that. And it depends if they knew how much power they had in the American Jewish community. Evidently they had enough power to threaten the President’s career and reputation and alter news stories on the incident while stifling the influence of the main intelligence branches. Their question is “can I get away with this?” or “can I plausibly deny this?”
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The stance he describes in the rest of the interview is basically that something fishy may have been going on but at this point literally decades later (and Vance seems to assume after the first series of legal events everything dried up) no further evidence is around.
We do know various intelligence agencies have done a good job at throwing out documents and "forgetting" about things which complicate matters.
Vance also argues that even for things he wants to look into he doesn't necessarily have time to go knock on doors and be like "hey 20 years ago did you know this Epstein guy?" He also uses this excuse on the UFO thing.
I suspect if pressed a bit more Vance would argue that there wasn't an organized conspiracy, just that Epstein knew people in intelligence and leveraged those relationships. This would be certainly be consistent with the way he knew a lot of people, and if you believe the court stuff is above board it would explain things drying up after being acquittances but discovering the malfeasance. If you think the court stuff isn't above board it would explain him using relationships to get out of trouble but then being burned afterwards. Both of those require a lot less conspiracy stuff (in contrast with an organized operation).
Who knows what Vance actually believes, it's entirely possible this is just him politicking for various reasons.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link