naraburns nihil supernum
6mo 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.
A civilization that parades around naked dead corpses of young woman civilians is a civilization that doesn’t deserve civil rights. Level up from your barbarism and sure, I can get behind that. Note there are Arab states — even if not western — that deserve civil rights.
Applying civil rights to "a civilization" is a category error; the people within each civilization are the ones who deserve the civil rights.
We're not quite 20 years out from the leak of photos which "show torture, abuse, rape and every indecency" among the abuses at Abu Ghraib, which included women. The people to blame for that abuse didn't deserve all their civil rights afterward, and to its credit the US legal system generally agreed (albeit with prison sentences of months to less than a decade at most...), but it would have been wildly excessive to spread such a high level of blame around to every American in the same civilization.
Ironically, collective punishment is itself a war crime, and its classification as such is one of the things we like to think distinguishes us from barbarians. That's perhaps still more of an aspiration than an accomplishment at this point, but so much the worse for our "civilization".
But that’s my point. Abu Ghraib was a shame to the US (and clearly the soldiers intended to keep it quiet). Here, the Palestinians writ large are celebrating the atrocities and making them known. The different reactions demonstrate the different culture assent.
I'm still solidly "Collective punishment is bad", but I have to admit: if we could mete out omnisciently accurate individual punishment, some collectives might have a much larger fraction of punished individuals than others...
People compare Hamas to Nazis.
That's not fair.
Nazis knew killing Jews was wrong.
(...) If you do not support Israel & the Jews, you are literally worse than the Nazis.
People that have lived perhaps for 4 generations under Israeli rule are worse than Nazis?
Who could be responsible for this state of affairs?
The experiment is not perfect, we would need control groups of Palestinians strictly administered by China, France, Russia, UK, Germany, Italy, etc, to see if Israel is just particularly bad at this exercise.
Comparisons can be made with various colonies...
Tough luck for Israelis to get involved in Western-style colonization so late in the game.
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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.
A civilization that parades around naked dead corpses of young woman civilians is a civilization that doesn’t deserve civil rights. Level up from your barbarism and sure, I can get behind that. Note there are Arab states — even if not western — that deserve civil rights.
Applying civil rights to "a civilization" is a category error; the people within each civilization are the ones who deserve the civil rights.
We're not quite 20 years out from the leak of photos which "show torture, abuse, rape and every indecency" among the abuses at Abu Ghraib, which included women. The people to blame for that abuse didn't deserve all their civil rights afterward, and to its credit the US legal system generally agreed (albeit with prison sentences of months to less than a decade at most...), but it would have been wildly excessive to spread such a high level of blame around to every American in the same civilization.
Ironically, collective punishment is itself a war crime, and its classification as such is one of the things we like to think distinguishes us from barbarians. That's perhaps still more of an aspiration than an accomplishment at this point, but so much the worse for our "civilization".
But that’s my point. Abu Ghraib was a shame to the US (and clearly the soldiers intended to keep it quiet). Here, the Palestinians writ large are celebrating the atrocities and making them known. The different reactions demonstrate the different culture assent.
I know I shouldn't let myself be swayed further by an argument's rhetoric than by it's logic, but Michael Shermer really found a damning framing supporting your point.
I'm still solidly "Collective punishment is bad", but I have to admit: if we could mete out omnisciently accurate individual punishment, some collectives might have a much larger fraction of punished individuals than others...
Not the great argument Shemer thinks it is.
People that have lived perhaps for 4 generations under Israeli rule are worse than Nazis? Who could be responsible for this state of affairs? The experiment is not perfect, we would need control groups of Palestinians strictly administered by China, France, Russia, UK, Germany, Italy, etc, to see if Israel is just particularly bad at this exercise. Comparisons can be made with various colonies... Tough luck for Israelis to get involved in Western-style colonization so late in the game.
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