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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   20682 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 26, 2026

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With three days until Election Day, is there still enough time for the Democrats to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in Michigan?

Cenk Uygur's Rebellion PAC dropped a controversial new ad supporting the Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El Sayed featuring a grocery store conversation about Israel. Some are calling it the most antisemitic ad of all time:

"You're going to have to put those eggs back."

"They don't like eggs anymore?"

"No, they like eggs. But we have to set that $7 aside for killing Palestinians."

"What? I mean, don't we give Israel $4 billion a year anyways?"

"Yeah. And now we're giving them another $26 billion. Do you know how much that is per American taxpayer? It's like $161 per person."

"Apparently, it's costing us a lot of money to drop bombs on Gaza. It's terrible."

Now, I don't think this is a very good ad. It's poorly acted and a bit too on-the-nose, but accusing the political opposition of wasting money on unpopular special interests while regular citizens deal with rising prices is probably the most common political maneuver in modern American politics. Apparently, this ad is at the center of a possible last-minute fracture of the Michigan Democratic coalition.

Haley Stevens, El Sayed's defeated challenger in the dem primary, released an incredibly passive aggressive statement preemptively thanking El Sayed for his "Expected Condemnation of Antisemitic Campaign Advertisement". Amusingly, long-time TYT host Ceng Uygur has been demoted to "Hasan Piker's Uncle". In case you didn't catch the subtext, this is a threat to pull her support (as explained by Haley Stevens's fiance on TMZ for some reason?). Abdul appears to have no intention of disavowing the ad.

This doesn't seem to have affected El Sayed's chances in the prediction markets. He is now up to an 80% chance to win, but I guess we'll see what happens at the black church on Sunday.

Per my LLM of choice, the Cost Per American (Full Footprint) of the Israel war is about $90 to $96 per person to empty Arab territories in the Levant of weapons of medium destruction, logistics chains, and terror cells, while having a surprisingly low death rate of civilians and Israeli soldiers.

Meanwhile the Ukraine war is costing $560.64 per American to empty Ukraine of non-disabled men, freeze the lines of battle as long as the money lasts, and bring the world closer to nuclear exchange. And that’s before counting the higher price of diesel fuel since the refinery bombings.

The faction of conservatives who want Ukraine to concede the lost provinces are counting utilons, and those who want Israel to stop fighting are counting hedons.

That count is too naive to be useful for decision-making. Ditching Ukraine would cost the US the affection of a big chunk of the European political class, which would not be unlikely to catalyse all sorts of downstream costs from further lawfare against US tech megacorps to rich countries ditching Mastercard/Visa/the petrodollar. It would make Russia more friendly, but these would be very modest gains. Ditching Israel would cost the US the affection of Israel, and some subset of the Jewish diaspora, and in return gain it massive soft power with the entire Islamic world. Nobody knows how to quantify those expectations, and so there are no objective utilons to count.

in return gain it massive soft power with the entire Islamic world.

The us us is cozying up with pretty every islamic dictator besides the Iranians. What would dropping Israel really gain?

If they made themselves popular with the populations rather than just the leadership, maybe terrorism would be less of a problem.

Unlikely. Israel is kind of a distraction on that point. They absorb a lot of the pent up demand for terrorism that foments in the Arab world. If they were gone the focus would likely swing back to America.

Israel's prime enemies are Hamas and Hezbollah which are regional Jihadist groups with local concerns. International terrorist groups like Al Qaeda and ISIS have never really done much towards Israel. And A lot of the focus on America is because of US support of Israel take away that and combining with the decline of international Jihadism in general and there's not much left.

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