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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   26715 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 20, 2023

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In the Xth best world, the media would stop signal-boosting all the evil cardiologists. Assuming that this actually happened as described, there's a difference between a non-representative person and a representative one. Rejoicing in the death of innocents is official activity of Hamas and common among Gazans. Signal-boosting the extremists on the other side to make it look like both sides do this equally is media deception.

Also note that "former X" is a variety of "not actually X".

Rejoicing in the death of innocents is official activity of Hamas and common among Gazans.

What if your opinion was not rejoicing but "we have to break some eggs", except you want to take it far farther than most reasonable observers or even Israelis want to? Is there a point where it gets problematic from a consequentialist perspective?

Second the evil cardiologist point. Don’t agree that Gazans in Gaza are the relevant comparison group - this behavior wouldn’t be as bizarre or noteworthy coming from some Israeli official living in Israel, where it makes more sense for tensions to run hot.

Random related detail - looked up a very prominent IR professor, Bruce Hoffman, the other day due to a favorable reference in another book. His twitter was full of retweets of pictures and videos of people tearing down the missing signs with requests to identify them (still has a similar one as his top tweet as of this writing). Hard to picture what the point of that is if not to encourage targeted harassment, so it’s not limited to this guy. Still just anecdotal though, not hard to evil cardiologist a group in a setting like this.

this behavior wouldn’t be as bizarre or noteworthy coming from some Israeli official living in Israel

And that is exactly why this resonates. Here we have a person who ostensibly was responsible for an equitable peace between the Palestinians and Israel, but whose response clearly shows an extreme bias to one nation, more like being a citizen of that one nation.

In the Xth best world, the media would stop signal-boosting all the evil cardiologists. Assuming that this actually happened as described, there's a difference between a non-representative person and a representative one.

If this person was just old geezer of no importance, no one would care about dispute between Stuart the Pensioner and Mohammed the Halal Vendor.

But this person is someone of note, and it is worthy to ask whether he is representative of his class and milieu, and, if so, what it means for understanding of American diplomacy and foreign policy, what it means for trust in American-negotiated "Mideast peace process".

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