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 -
I am confident that people meeting this description exist, somewhere in the world. But I'm being completely honest when I say that I've interacted with dozens of people who could be characterised as "pro-Palestinian" or "anti-Zionist" over the past three years, and not one of them expressed any opinions even remotely similar to these. Moderate pro-Palestinians of this sort, so far as I'm aware, simply do not exist in Ireland. Unhinged conspiracism ("they rigged the Eurovision!!!") and barely concealed seething hatred of
JewsZionists is the norm, not the exception. My modal interaction with a pro-Palestinian type does not look like a sober-minded, dispassionate analysis of how to bring about a lasting peace in the region and what a two-state solution might look like in practice: it looks like them accusing me of being a paid Mossad bot who positively delights in the murder of innocent Gazan children for no better reason than sheer bloody-mindedness. Even my own mother (who I ordinarily consider fairly level-headed and even-handed when it comes to politics, Covid excepted) has, in my opinion, become radicalised by a deranged moral panic.It's one thing to request that I represent the pro-Palestinian movement fairly and charitably. It's quite another to demand that I represent it in a manner that bears no earthly resemblance to my (for lack of a better term) "lived experience".
For context: I've mentioned on several occasions that the Crown Prosecution Service was considering charging the hip-hop band Kneecap over their yelling out "Up Hamas" and "Ooh! Ah! Hezbollah!" during live performances. They eventually declined to press charges, which I believe was the right decision. But of all the people I've spoken to about this case, exactly one agrees with me that, while yelling "Up Hamas" shouldn't be a criminal offense, it's a shitty thing to do.
So yeah. "Hamas are finishing the heroic job dear old Adolf started" may not be an accurate representation of your experience of the pro-Palestinian movement, but it is an accurate representation of mine, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.
I don't think seething hatred of Israel and its supporters as you describe it is particularly incompatible with neither being pro-uncle-Adolf nor being low-information. "Expel all non-Muslims", the one position I suggested you didn't quote, is surely a pretty uncompromising position (and not exactly peaceful or sober-minded, if you try to imagine how this would have to play out in practice). The problem I had with your Instagram dig is that it suggests Instagram was instrumental (and hence that the position would fall apart with a "better" source), but I don't believe that and your description of your "lived experience" is not really giving evidence of it either.
(Perhaps you are making the mistake of thinking the conspiracism is upstream of the hatred, rather than downstream. For most people, once they find someone repellent, attributing additional evils large and small to them is just the natural course of pro-social action.)
I'm sorry, I'm afraid I really don't know what you're talking about.
I'm confused as to what you are confused about.
Correct me if you disagree with anything in this summary: You gave two caricatures of pro-Palestinians, which seem to broadly be glossable as "naive person whose views are attributable to tragic pictures on Instagram" and "actually wants all Jews to die". I disputed that this is a charitable or reasonable taxonomy. You counter-objected that the people you encountered in real life are asserting unhinged/implausible things ("they rigged the Eurovision!!!" - is that actually so unhinged? I thought it was common sense that Eurovision results are always 100% inside baseball astroturf theatre) and that they are cheering on Hamas. I didn't address the latter (though I think it's at most consistent with "expel them from the Levant" which falls well short of "kill them all" - no evidence that they wish death, even indirectly, upon any Jew outside of the Levant), but asserted that the former is not evidence of being fairly described by either of your two caricatures.
Well to start with, I disagree that my "caricatures" are any such thing. I personally know a great many young women who really have learned everything they know about the conflict from extremely selectively composed Instagram infographics, including many now known to contain false information. This was obviously true during the BLM craze of 2020, so I don't know why you're acting so shocked that it's true now.
Likewise, when a person who explicitly supports Hamas, thinks the October 7th attack was a good thing, explicitly states that they no longer feel any sympathy for the victims of the Holocaust etc. – I think it's reasonable to conclude that such a person fundamentally supports Hamas's stated mission of exterminating all Jews, even if they wouldn't say so in so many words, even if they would get very defensive if you suggested they have a terminal goal in common with Hitler. The point of the OP was that I would like to devise a gotcha question that would force these people to be more forthcoming about their opinions than they are currently being. When you say "be more charitable – many of them just want to ethnically cleanse Israel of the yahud!" – well, my response is that these people would never openly cop to supporting ethnic cleansing, even though that's obviously the logical endpoint of their worldview.
(And, seriously – you're getting so defensive about how I characterised the pro-Palestinian movement. "How dare you say we want to kill all Jews – we just want to forcibly ethnically cleanse them from the nation-state they've lived in for the better part of a century!" Is that seriously the moderate option? Is this what a "reasonable" pro-Palestinian person looks like?)
Even if that's the case, that's a completely different claim to the claim that Mossad and Shin Bet rigged the votes without the EBU's knowledge. And if they were capable of doing this, I cannot fathom why they'd rig the vote so that they'd come second, making the conspiracy theory doubly inane.
I don’t believe you have to want to exterminate the Jews to believe that Palestine is the historic homeland of the Palestinians and a bunch of Europeans with some shared genetics with the historical population are basically colonizers.
The Ashkenazis basically did colonize Israel. Leftists are universally against colonization. At this point Ashkenazis do have alternative places to go. I’m not against colonization so I don’t have a problem with Israel.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: in Israel, Mizrahi Jews far outnumber Ashkenazi Jews.
I agree that being opposed to the existence of Israel doesn't necessarily imply that you want to see its citizens exterminated. But the two do often seem to go hand in hand, explicitly or implicitly.
Grok tells me it’s 30-45% Ashkenazi. Mizrahi outnumber Ashkenazi but it’s not far outnumber. But more importantly the Ashkenazi are the ones who conquered Israel. That’s where the military and money to support Israel originates.
I think it's more like 32% Ashkenazi to 45% Mizrahi.
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
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link