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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 2, 2023

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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).

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.