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It's not technically culture war, but Hamas has just attacked Israel en-masse, overwhelming the Iron Dome with 5000 rockets and even sending raiding parties into Israel. It looks like Haman and/or Shabak haven't done their job at all, and Israel has been caught with its pants down.
For the culture war angle, I think the biggest question is of retribution. On one hand, Israeli public will now demand a reaction that makes the ongoing Hamas attack pale in comparison. On the other hand, what can Israel do to a very densely populated Gaza strip that won't be branded as a war crime or ethnic cleansing?
Just as an aside, what value I continue to see in this forum is that it offers at least some sort of a dispassionate ground to discuss the tactical and strategic aspects of a conflict like this, which I find far more interesting than endless decriminations over modern dating or trans stuff or whatever. Twitter, certainly, is currently almost unusable for a discussion like this, even the local Twitter (in a country where the I/P conflict has far less valence than in many other European countries).
I'm reading mostly what the 'rational' pathway towards Israel's victory is. Which, so far, is mostly achieved through some form of PR friendly killing of non-combatants.
I think the line between 'dispassionate' and whatever 'passionate' is in this context is aesthetic at best. I personally prefer the honesty of passion over the pretense that whatever is being discussed here by overt and covert Zionists isn't just as barbaric and tribal as the 'passionate' expressions. That goes for those who forgo commenting on this topic as well.
I certainly wouldn't have entertained the notion of proposing that the end of the conflict can only be achieved through strategic culling of civilians and the routine killing of jewish first born boys. A comment which spurs the question of why we wouldn't kill potential jewish mothers instead... But here we are.
Plenty of this is indeed people simply living out their genocidal fantasies with a veneer of HDB/rationality/geopolitics. But there is good reason to suggest that the half-humanitarian/half-murderous approach of Israel towards this issue in the last generations have collapsed entirely yesterday and things will be different in the future. There is still value in discussing "how", even from nasty viewpoints, because people making these decisions also often have such viewpoints.
I don't care about the discussion happening. Unlike the mods here I don't have a chance to discriminate like that. Overt and covert jew supremacists can talk all they want as far as I am concerned. I appreciate that these events at least manage to draw out some human honesty in people who otherwise sit on the sidelines as two of their outgroups clash whilst giving dispassionate and rational commentary on what's happening. Which sure is easy when your team isn't playing, let me tell you.
I care about the proposition that the thin veneer of calm and collected rationalism that it shrouds itself in is in any way a relevant distinguishing factor from any of the discourse that is and would otherwise be sneered at as being low brow or insane.
There are posters here who get called out as being holocaust deniers and neo-nazis when they post. Just as a reminder or warning to others of what they are. Well, how many of the Zionist jew supremacists here are the exact carbon copy of that sort of poster? 'Israel did nothing wrong!'. Minimize and deny atrocities, flex history to suit their narratives and do it all under the guise of rationality and 'dispassionate discourse'. Can I call out the jewish supremacists here who pontificate on the culling of children to suit their nationalist ideology? At least the neo-nazi here has the tact to deny past atrocities rather than openly plan for new ones.
I mean, lets be honest here, if anyone in the past had suggested that the only peaceful end to the I-P conflict could be found with every jewish first born boy staring down the barrel of a shotgun I think the fine jewish supremacists here would find it very easy to report the comment. Let alone if someone was psychoanalyzing themselves to get past the hump of just killing would be mothers before they had a chance to give birth to a 'problem'. No, I've seen comments here designed by trolls to incite exactly the sort of nasty viewpoints you are talking about and they get banned.
I would say that this place is kind of insane, but it's not. It just has no self awareness. I wish it would gain some so we can stop pretending that there exist rifts between the neo-nazi and the average jew supremacist here. Having sat through years of dispassionate moral grandstanding at the hands of people who now either sit awfully quiet when the ball is in their court or are going full oy-vey-88... yeah.
I don't see why these events should change anything from a rationalist perspective. After all, there are still people here in favor of mass immigration despite the harm its caused in Europe and the US.
My advice to jews everywhere is to turn the other cheek and genuinely open their hearts and society to the Palestinians who are obviously hurting a lot right now. Violence is never the answer. This is the only way for Israel to survive.
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Yes, looking for interesting commentary in the sea of nationalist rage, confident posts by people who don't know what they are talking about, and various kinds of copium/hopium gets annoying. I get why people who either live in the war zone or know people who live there get that way, I am pretty sure that I would too. But it's not just coming from those people, it's also coming from people who have no direct connection to the conflict. There is usually a bunch of moralistic grandstanding that is so simplistic it could have been written by a 1970s-era computer plus a bunch of people chiming in who think that they have something interesting to say because unlike the average person, who reads zero things about geopolitics a year, they read five or six.
The above applies to supporters of both sides. And not just to this conflict.
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