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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?
The thing that's gotten me the most is the cheering crowds in the UK who have zero fear of being arrested on "hate speech" charges (unlike anyone who criticizes them), and the academics justifying it saying "Postcolonial, anticolonial, and decolonial are not just words you heard in your EDI workshop," with reminders that they're going to do it to Americans next
It's endless: Dartmouth, Berkeley, Columbia, CUNY, journal editors, professors, HR bureaucrats, the entire blue ecosystem all cheering rape and torture and kidnapping and screaming that my children are next with no fear of any consequences. Armed american terrorist groups who get hagiographies from NPR accusing anyone opposed to massacring children of being pearl clutching racists.
Random union twitter accounts posting "Palestine is rising, long live the resistance🌹" as if it was the most natural thing in the world for them to be doing, while the DSA organizes to support the attacks.
Spend an hour reading the "decolonization" tag. They are telling you what they are, and like Noah Smith I am getting "sort of negatively polarized against these people."
It feels less like masks dropping than like it happened so suddenly that everyone forgot to put their masks on in the first place. The Bataclan attack and European truck massacres developed slowly enough that people could adopt effective strategies: /r/news managed to delete all mention of the attacks for an entire day, and by the time it was acknowledged to have happened the party line was "this awful event had nothing to do with any cause we support."
Now we're just getting the raw unfiltered reactions, just like the combat footage, and we see what the real intentions are.
We implemented a rule against culture-warring precisely for that reason. It doesn't matter who you are, your brain is fundamentally susceptible to letting its emotions trump its rationality and logic. This is precisely why engaging the culture war at all is a highly dangerous task, the risk of neutral observation slipping into partisan advocacy is too high.
I would highly encourage 99% of people reading to just not bother reading that tag. It's not going to do you much good.
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With all due respect, I'm surprised more people didn't see this coming earlier. "Decolonisation" in its best form has always been one of those failed movements that inadvertently made way to more radical elements that are far less subdued in their hostility towards so called "western values", given the volatile nature of these polities and all around frustration stemming from within due to a lack of economic growth. It's like if the Ashraf Ghani government tried to "decolonise" and is shocked to find himself shaking hands with the Taliban. China did not really "decolonise" either, not any more than Japan or SK did, as much as they claim to be the alternative to western hegemony. The reality is the vast majority of Chinese in all major cities very much live as a westerner does. I'm sure both the government and the general public is well aware of this, though they may not publicly admit it.
That video of Hamas parading that woman's body and accounts of rape, child murders, etc., and several big Muslim names playing apologia, including a liberal Muslim journalist who used to write for Indian Express, might just be the straw that breaks the back for the hard left's camaraderie with 3rd world nationalisms.
The hard left is very much okay with 3rd World Nationalism by any means as long as it is from the "Oppressed". It is only a problem if it is a sentiment expressed by the outgroup.
I looked through the twitter likes of a few prominent Open Source Software developers. I lost any taste for writing Software outside of 9-5.
I don't know how much Social media furor translates over to the real world but I am seeing a lot of white collar (leftist) westerners finding their latent "It is nuanced" superpower in response to the Israeli girl with bloody pant bottoms.
EDIT: Forget "nuanced" most of them say they had it coming, as the posters up the chain mention. I find this horrifying despite regarding the creation of Israel deeply unfair for Palestinians (though they haven't given a good showing since then).
...so you basically went around looking for pro-Hamas-offensive leftist comments to get angry at and then got angry at them?
Like I said earlier, the idea that "most of them say they had it coming" does not match my experience in social media at all, unless it's some sort of a circular definition of "most people who support Hamas say that what Hamas did was good". The feeling I'm getting is that American left is currently mostly in disarray over the events, and the "decolonialists" are at the very least getting a lot of pushback from the other sectors.
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It is nuanced. You can freely debate whether the Versailles treaty drove Germany towards Nazism or not and neither position means you gleefully approve of either death camps or strategic bombing of population centers.
My "It is nuanced" was more in reference to the rhetorical device used to downplay something you don't want to discuss. I think it is important for a civilization to unconditionally condemn acts that cross a line of barbarity. Being able to understand and empathize with the motivations of a murder should not stop one from condemning the act.
This is different from an emotional "let's turn Gaza into a parking lot" response which I consider as problematic as the "they had it coming" arguments.
Some folks even drew equivalence to condemning Hamas' brutality against Israeli civilians with "All Lives Matter".
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I’m not sure I believe in Noah’s takes right now. Though I do think he’s correct in “sort of negatively polarized”. That stuff I think really helps Trump being the main factor. We will end up having a close election and these fringy parts of the Dem coalition will turn off voters.
But his end of Pax Romana take seems off to me.
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/youre-not-going-to-like-what-comes
This is definitely possible. And one reason I support the Ukraine War. But I still think this is more in the column of “potential” and probably <50%. These Hamas attacks are not it. It’s so far more like 9/11 and the best reason for it seems to be to break the Saudi-Israel growing alliance. His main point for the end of the Pax Romana is China’s growing might. Concerning but I still tend to think they will try and fit in the system.
I think the bigger issue is internal fracturing of America harming our ability to act.
Why?
What possible motivation could the Chinese have to support the Pax Americana? They have been talking loudly for decades about the need to shift to a multipolar world and the replacement of the current system. They are explicitly allied with Russia in order to destroy the current system, and they have been working on projects to take the place of the current system for decades.
They are human. It’s in their own best interests. Pax Americana made them rich.
Pax Americana used to be good for them but no longer is, because Chimerica is over. The Chinese are not willing to stop being a superpower that flexes its military muscle at the very least in its claimed turf, and the US is not willing to suffer any unaligned superpowers with turfs to exist; nor allow them to catch up technologically even if they pinky-promise to behave. We'll most likely have a big war within 10 years or so, unless they collapse like the USSR.
China isn’t going to collapse. It’s possible they stagnate like Japan. I could agree with you on mistake theory grounds and China is making a policy mistake but the rules based international system led by America is still very beneficial to them.
I can also agree some of the culture package coming out of America isn’t ideal today. But countries in the system grow more and get richer.
Russia decided to suicide themselves. But rationalist would not do that.
Then you're free to conclude China isn't rational when they invade Taiwan.
...Don't you believe that China is likely to invade Taiwan?
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Have you listened to any political statements made by the Chinese government recently?
Pax Americana didn't make the Chinese rich, the US government corruptly selling the manufacturing base of the entire west to China made them rich. China is currently actively implementing alternatives to the USD for trade and actively forging alliances with countries violently opposed to the Pax Americana. They took what they needed from the Pax Americana and they're now just delaying their final exit in order to minimise the costs associated with that transition.
I don’t see any evidence we are living in a zero sum world. The only thing negative about western is the pride crap we export but you can just ban some movies for that.
Have you heard of Taiwan? I don't think the Chinese government would agree with you on this front, and their opinion actually matters quite a bit when it comes to this topic!
Yes obviously I have, explain to me why an independent Taiwan is bad for them? A city-state of ethnic Han Chinese that pumps out of a ton of advanced tech and invest heavily in mainland China.
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Pax Americana has worked out really well for China so far. Maybe they like getting richer and richer in the current system.
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A bit unrelated, but this give credence to the Fisted By Foucault theory on how Anglo-Saxon Academia is still an anti-systemic force. The Biden administration was quick to condemn and give support in any case. The Marcusian strategy "no enemy to the left" still holds strong, but at this point not many people are going to support the most extreme left-wing cause.
Btw, probably the most important point for the right that came from all of this is the fact that "decolonization", as all Marxian jargon like Anti-Imperialism, is only an academic term to justify whetever happens to the enemy.
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I honestly don't get the point of this tweet. Yes, radical Western left supports third world resistance movements. They did this for a century now. When it was safer to do so, they would even go and get military training in the El Fatah camps. All of this has been common knowledge there is no masks in the first place.
The DSA are supposed to be the good friendly leftists. The demsoc motte to the revolutionary communist bailey. "We're just trying to expand medicare" etc.
When the motte of your opponents goes "actually this is good thing" you are allowed to point out how mask off they've become.
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You literally linked to tweets showing that the "entire blue ecosystem" is not cheering for Hamas. If it was, then presumably the quoted persons wouldn't feel the need to make tweets stating their surprise that most people they know are expressing horror and disappointment regarding yesterday's events.
They might be going to far with saying they are happy.
But if I go to the front page of NYT it’s Israel blowing up an apartment building in Gaza. It’s not the brutal things your seeing on what I believe is mainstream twitter but perhaps I filter to people who find women in cages and men executed as brutal.
Israel doesn’t have the Christian/wokism religion of the west. In years past America would send there missiles with Democracy pamphlets; today with BLM stickers. Israel is going to go Old Testament vengeance on them and it’s not going to be couched in terms of improving Palestinian society. It will be eye for an eye (or probably 10 eyes) vengeance.
I’m probably an anti-Semite to the ADL. But I’ve got no problem greenlighting what will come.
Here’s more https://twitter.com/antoniogm/status/1710720164071973139?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ
"A building gets blown up" has been a standard mainstream media imagery conveying the basic message that there's fighting and a war going on for a long time. "Kino", yet sterile - no-one can blame them for directly putting bloody, traumatizing images where kids can see them. Standard operating procedure. And any way one sees it, it is an extremely far cry from "the entire blue ecosystem all cheering rape and torture and kidnapping", an extremely risibly untrue claim that bears absolutely no relation to what I'm seeing on social media (which basically ranges from right-wingers eagerly calling for Israel to flatten entire Gaza to centrists and center-leftists condemning Hamas and eagerly bashing the few far-leftists who are going "Yes, this is bad, but the Israeli occupation..."
It’s not that they put a “building gets blown up” I found significant. It’s that they chose to show a Gaza building first instead of like a gang raped bloody Israeli female or even just the sanitized version of videos of Israeli women civilizan locked up in a basement.
They made a clear choice on whose violence to highlight. Though in the case of the apartment building the Israelis chose to warn the civilians first versus the Bronze Age violent committed by Hamas.
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If "ecosystem" refers to people in charge, there is no contradiction between them cheering for Hamas and everyday leftists not doing so.
You don't stay in charge for long if your inferiors think you a monster.
…Well, in some cases you do, but that's not about normie Western PMCs.
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Well, are these people in charge? The quoted tweeters seem to be basic worker-bee academics.
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Advocating for terrorism has been a criminal offence in Canada since 2015, but I doubt we'll see any prosecutions even though the current government supported that legislation.
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