naraburns nihil supernum
2yr ago
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Israel-Gaza Megathread #1
This is a megathread for any posts on the conflict between (so far, and so far as I know) Hamas and the Israeli government, as well as related geopolitics. Culture War thread rules apply.
Is anyone else here pretty shocked by many on the Left's support of Hamas after these attacks? I'm not talking Biden type people on the Left, but DSA type leftists who support "The Squad". They are more or less saying that Israel deserved this. I really don't understand how you can see a bunch of men slaughter innocent civilians at a music festival, kill innocent civilians just going about their day, capture women and children as hostages, and parade dead bodies around on trucks and upload it to social media and not have sympathy for Israelis. Yet these people are more or less saying Israel deserved this and the real victims of this will be Palestine.
I don't think this is a strawman either. If you go on reddit or Twitter you will see this sentiment. I guess this is the inevitable outcome of the oppressor/oppressed decolonize framework so many of them have adopted. This is pretty blackpilling for me because I would have thought an action like this could shake them out of their biased worldview, but this has actually seemed to do the opposite and make them hate Israel more. It's also pretty unfortunate we have to share a country with these kinds of people and they can vote. I'm not saying you need to love Israel and can't be critical of it, but what happened is to me pretty obviously evil and barbaric, and a lot of people are making excuses for it.
Given a sufficiently high level of initial sympathy, “look what atrocities they’re committing” turns into “how far must have they been pushed to commit such horrible atrocities?”.
Which is why you don’t make decisions based on feeling. That’s the issue here. You have sympathy, but it’s turned off your brain, to the point that you can justify horrible things because the people who did it are the “oppressed”.
On the other hand, there does exist what I feel is a general demand, in these discussions and elsewhere, for people who have previously had a pro-Palestine stance (generally based on opinions like "occupations are bad" and "Palestinians deserve civil rights like all other nations) to drop that stance and reverse at once based on, essentially, the strong feelings aroused by clips of civilians getting killed and women's bodies paraded around on cars.
What percentage of people do you think would agree with both "decades of harsh occupation and blockade are awful" and "decades of harsh occupation and blockade do not justify terror bombing or massacres of civilians"? I'd think that those would both be supermajority positions, but it certainly seems that the people who speak most loudly about the problem tend to drop one claim or the other.
the strong feelings aroused by clips of civilians getting killed and women's bodies paraded around on cars
Inducing strong feelings is the whole reason why the murderers are performing the killing and the parading while filming clips of it, right? Nobody was thinking "we'd love to capture one more APC, but we can't spare the soldiers because the bomb shelters and music festival are more strategically significant military targets". If they're mispredicting exactly which strong feelings are induced, that's at least partly on them, though it's still tragic that innocent Palestinians will suffer for it too.
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Notes -
Is anyone else here pretty shocked by many on the Left's support of Hamas after these attacks? I'm not talking Biden type people on the Left, but DSA type leftists who support "The Squad". They are more or less saying that Israel deserved this. I really don't understand how you can see a bunch of men slaughter innocent civilians at a music festival, kill innocent civilians just going about their day, capture women and children as hostages, and parade dead bodies around on trucks and upload it to social media and not have sympathy for Israelis. Yet these people are more or less saying Israel deserved this and the real victims of this will be Palestine.
I don't think this is a strawman either. If you go on reddit or Twitter you will see this sentiment. I guess this is the inevitable outcome of the oppressor/oppressed decolonize framework so many of them have adopted. This is pretty blackpilling for me because I would have thought an action like this could shake them out of their biased worldview, but this has actually seemed to do the opposite and make them hate Israel more. It's also pretty unfortunate we have to share a country with these kinds of people and they can vote. I'm not saying you need to love Israel and can't be critical of it, but what happened is to me pretty obviously evil and barbaric, and a lot of people are making excuses for it.
Given a sufficiently high level of initial sympathy, “look what atrocities they’re committing” turns into “how far must have they been pushed to commit such horrible atrocities?”.
Which is why you don’t make decisions based on feeling. That’s the issue here. You have sympathy, but it’s turned off your brain, to the point that you can justify horrible things because the people who did it are the “oppressed”.
On the other hand, there does exist what I feel is a general demand, in these discussions and elsewhere, for people who have previously had a pro-Palestine stance (generally based on opinions like "occupations are bad" and "Palestinians deserve civil rights like all other nations) to drop that stance and reverse at once based on, essentially, the strong feelings aroused by clips of civilians getting killed and women's bodies paraded around on cars.
What percentage of people do you think would agree with both "decades of harsh occupation and blockade are awful" and "decades of harsh occupation and blockade do not justify terror bombing or massacres of civilians"? I'd think that those would both be supermajority positions, but it certainly seems that the people who speak most loudly about the problem tend to drop one claim or the other.
Inducing strong feelings is the whole reason why the murderers are performing the killing and the parading while filming clips of it, right? Nobody was thinking "we'd love to capture one more APC, but we can't spare the soldiers because the bomb shelters and music festival are more strategically significant military targets". If they're mispredicting exactly which strong feelings are induced, that's at least partly on them, though it's still tragic that innocent Palestinians will suffer for it too.
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