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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   25728 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 4, 2023

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There's probably even a few people doing that! But it's not the bulk of what we're seeing.

What you're seeing is driven largely by what is most outrageous to see, and thus most likely to be shared and appear on your feeds and in the news. The people saying "damn this sucks, I don't even know what a good solution looks like but murdering innocent civilians in their homes for offenses committed by their countrymen doesn't seem like a good solution" are not having their opinions amplified to the whole world.

Maybe I just have an unusually levelheaded community, but most of the takes I've heard from people I actually know in real life look more like "damn this sucks, I hope it doesn't get too much worse" than for cheering for the deaths of Israeli or Palestinian civilians.

The people saying "damn this sucks, I don't even know what a good solution looks like but murdering innocent civilians in their homes for offenses committed by their countrymen doesn't seem like a good solution" are not having their opinions amplified to the whole world.

They're not running Penn, MIT, or Harvard either.

Are the presidents of MIT, Harvard, and Penn calling for genocide, or are they instead refusing to act against the people who are?

Refusing to censor an idea isn't the same thing as supporting it. I would prefer if university presidents moved towards a policy of just not censoring bad ideas, but failing that I don’t think "let's pressure them to censor bad ideas from both sides" is likely to actually produce better outcomes.

Refusing to censor an idea isn't the same thing as supporting it.

By Progressives' own standards (applied fairly), it absolutely is; I see no reason not to apply that bad-faith standard in kind when it's inconvenient for them.

Are the presidents of MIT, Harvard, and Penn calling for genocide, or are they instead refusing to act against the people who are?

I'm pretty sure that in the context of Palestinians killing Israelis, they haven't said "damn this sucks, I don't even know what a good solution looks like but murdering innocent civilians in their homes for offenses committed by their countrymen doesn't seem like a good solution". Which is what you just referred to.

Have they said anything at all in terms of object-level opinion about Israel and Palestine, as opposed to meta-level statements about the policies? Genuinely curious, maybe they have given object-level statements and I just haven't run across them.

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