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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 6, 2023

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This whole Israel-Palestine issue has made it even more clear than ever that politicians and many of the "elites" have literally no critical thinking skills or the ability to reason out one or two steps into the future. First there is the "Cease Fire People". It's understandable that people are upset seeing what is going on in Gaza with women and children, but what do they think a cease fire will accomplish? It is literally just kicking the can down the road again. Do they think Hamas will be more reasonable and someone people can negotiate with? If not, you are literally just allowing them to regroup and commit another terrorist attack that could destabilize the Middle East again in a few years. It's really that simple. If you want peace in the region, Hamas cannot be allowed to be in charge in Gaza. And if you asked the Egyptian government, they'd probably tell you the same thing since they just had their own issues wit the Muslim Brotherhood.

Then you have the people who think there will be peace if the Palestinians get their own state. Throwing out for a minute whether or not the Palestinians will attack Israel, the real question is how quickly they will start attacking each other an a civil war. We already know there was a Fatah–Hamas conflict recently, and why would they not fight each other again in a civil war that could very possibly be even worse than what's going on in Gaza? Looking at the neighboring countries, it's not exactly a place known for political stability.

I understand people seeing things on television that makes them sad and they just want it to stop. That's understandable. But has anyone in the State Department revolting against the Biden Administration for their stance on Israel given any reasonable plan for what comes next after a cease fire with Hamas? And I say this as someone who is not a Zionist or a huge fan of Israel.

Westerners just don't seem to be able to understand Muslim extremists. Hamas fighters are literally Islamists that can't be reasoned with. This should be obvious by now to everyone on planet earth after Al Qaeda and ISIS, but apparently some people still haven't learned this obvious fact. I don't know if it's because Westerners don't think that people could actually sincerely believe in their religion like that so they must be ACTUALLY motivated by something else (wrong, as their writings tell us), or their belief that inside everyone is a Westerner waiting to come out who supports gay marriage and diversity, a combination of this, or something else entirely. But if these people think that a cease fire with Hamas will lead to a long standing peace then they are delusional.

Westerners just don't seem to be able to understand Muslim extremists. Hamas fighters are literally Islamists that can't be reasoned with. This should be obvious by now to everyone on planet earth after Al Qaeda and ISIS, but apparently some people still haven't learned this obvious fact.

If you look at polling, in America at least, there's a wildly obvious correlation between how long someone's lived on the planet (and thus dealt with Muslim extremists) and how they view this conflict. There's also a neat little cliff at the line of people who experienced 9/11 and did not.

Finally, there's another vast gulf between social media and reality. The Economist had a whole article on just this phenomenon:

Do such views reflect overall opinion? At our request dmr, an ai-technology firm, collected 1m posts from Instagram, Twitter and YouTube from October 7th to 23rd. All contained hashtags from a list with similar numbers of pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian terms in English, or replied to such posts. dmr then built a machine-learning model to classify posts as backing one side, the other or neither. It was trained on content in English, but also processed posts in any language that included English hashtags. dmr found a sharp shift against Israel over time. On October 7th the two sides had roughly equal shares of support. By October 19th pro-Palestinian posts were 3.9 times more common than pro-Israeli ones.

Israel has fared far worse online than in surveys of overall public opinion. A poll of Americans by YouGov found three backers of Israel for every Palestinian supporter on October 20th—a day with twice as many pro-Palestinian posts on American social media as pro-Israeli ones. In Britain, another YouGov survey found equal support for each side that day, when the Palestinians won the British social-media battle by a six-to-one margin.

(and thus dealt with Muslim extremists)

Funny how large parts of the world have no muslim extremists whatsoever. It isn't a problem in places that don't have large scale immigration or a historic muslim population. The endless war on terror combined with mass immigration was a fiasco.

There's also a neat little cliff at the line of people who experienced 9/11 and did not.

9/11 was a valuable lesson. Due to immigration policy, people living in a cave in Afghanistan were let into the US. After predictable results the US decides to invade Iraq, a country with no connection to 9/11. The result is massive waves of refugees in to Europe and more terrorism, crime and social issues. Islamic terrorism exploded as a problem post neo con wars in the middle east. Young people have grown up seeing the 20-year fiasco of nation building in the Middle East.

If there is anything learned from dealing with muslims it is that the best outcome is stable arab states with no wars in the middle east. Interventionism in the middle east has been a resounding failure. Bombing Libya let a million muslims into Europe while creating a terrorist bastion on our boarder. Arming moderate jihadists in Syria led to waves of terrorism across Europe along with waves of refugees.

As for social media I remember the days before the invasion of Iraq when the entire media and population were against the war in almost the entire world. The exception was the US which was in a frenzy over wanting to invade a country that had done nothing to deserve it. The difference was the media in the US promoting the war while media in most other countries the media wasn't in a pro war frenzy. The US has a more pro Israel media than Israel itself and it is one of few countries in which Israel is popular. Americans being pro Israel is largely caused by the US mainstream media heavily pushing a pro Israel agenda. WIthout an extreme pro israel bias in the information space the opinions on the conflict would normalize to what it is in most of the rest of the world.

Immigration policy didn’t have anything to do with 9/11, and neither did afghanis(the people involved in 9/11 were Saudi nationals).

were they operating out of saudia, or somewhere else?