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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   29117 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 18, 2023

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Again, I do not want to be right about this, but I have encountered no other plausible explanation why for example posters of kidnapped Israelis has whipped up so many into a frothy rage.

The purpose of a Missing Poster is to raise the level of community alert to be on the lookout for signs of a missing person. The purpose of these posters of kidnapped Israelis is war propaganda. It's easy to understand why posting war propaganda posters for a side of a war you do not support would draw high emotions. "Missing" posters of Gazan children buried under rubble or portraits of dead children or gore photos would also rightfully be regarded as war propaganda and not an unambiguous support for innocent victims.

A week ago in downtown Chicago by Daley Plaza, there was a large van with LCD panels on every side of it showing dead Palestinian children, and it's stereo blasting uncreative rap lyrics about free Palestine. I deeply regret not getting footage of it, but I did say "Look, a semi-automated propaganda van! Boy do I love living in a cyberpunk dystopia."

Hamas themselves kidnapped the Israelis on purpose and broadcast the acts worldwide. It's Hamas's own war propaganda; it's just being shown to a less sympathetic audience.

Israel did not intentionally bury children under rubble.

Israel did not intentionally bury children under rubble.

Did somebody stumble on the big red button to drop the bomb? A thousand times? Perhaps they have a kosher bomb button, which makes it nobody's fault if children are buried under rubble?

According to the manufacturer, the switch is based upon "un-grama"[3][4] (non grama). The basic idea is that the switch activates only sometimes, and only after a delay, making the action indirect and uncertain. Several Orthodox poskim have ruled as thus makes the device permissible for general consumer use.[5][6] Others, however, have reached the opposite conclusion.[2]

Apparently people gave this 13 upvotes without reading the source. This is taken out of context. The switch is used because of the prohibition against the rules against using electricity on the Sabbath. Your insinuation that Jewish law lets it be used in bombs to kill without anyone being responsible is a lie.

Oh I was merely deriding the logic by which you seem to justify Israeli soldiers' actions. Perhaps you operate in a similar manner as the people who think they can trick their own God with a specific contraption to go around the Shabbat rules.

Well how do you explain that Israel is not intentionally burying children under rubble? Don't they know that the apartment buildings or hospitals they are dropping bombs on contain children and bombs cause buildings to turn into rubble? "I'm just shoving people into a fake shower room at gun point, I don't know what happens after that"

This is a really good point and I hadn't thought of this.

If someone put up missing posters of Gazan children buried in rubble, it would still be a pretty awful move for someone to tear them down. You don't tear down other people's posters, and doing so looks especially bad when the posters are raising awareness of dead kids.

raising awareness

I do not wish my awareness raised.

I don't like ads, but I don't tear them down.

You don't tear down other people's posters

I do it routinely with illegally placed ads. (if not easy to remove, I notify local government so they remove it)

I also did it with propaganda stickers.

(note, I am from Poland)

(bonus note: be careful, there are reports of razors being glued below stickers, more likely to happen with aggressive propaganda than ads)

If the posters are placed illegally, then yeah, you can tear them down. If they're not illegally posted, then tearing them down is suppressing the speech of fellow citizens, and you don't do that. It's un-American.

I disagree, I think tearing down both sets of posters is fine. America has no dog in this fight and I'm sick of both sides trying to propagandize us into it. Neither side cares about dead kids except in so far as they can use them to manipulate us into sending them bombs to kill even more of them. It's cynical and dishonest and we shouldn't tolerate it. There's no moral obligation to let all of our public spaces get plastered over with war propaganda for a war we're not even in.

You don't get to decide what speech is or is not appropriate! That's the whole point! If you don't like it, put up your own poster: but what is or is not allowed to be said in the public square is not based on your opinions. That's the whole point of the 1st Amendment.

Tearing down posters is a much a sort of speech as putting them up in the first place. Consider the natural limit if we could only put up posters and never take them down: the whole world would be tiled with posters. Since you don't own the public square in the first place, you don't have a right to have your displays persist there indefinitely. And the only productive way to communicate "this discussion isn't important in the first place" is to shut down the conversation. Allowing it to evolve into a debate implicitly accepts that it is a debate worth having.

Silencing others is not speech, it's censorship.

If speech can be used as a weapon to silence others by overwhelming them with speech, then the antidote - censorship - must also be a form of speech.

That doesn't logically follow at all: that's like saying that if poison can be used as a weapon, then the antidote to poison is also a form of poison.

If someone uses their speech to overwhelm someone else's speech (for instance, if someone is giving a lecture and someone else starts screaming on a megaphone so that you can't hear them) then they're engaged is censorship. Their speech itself is not censorship, but the form they are presenting it in is censoring others.

No it wouldn't be am awful move. Putting the posters up was the awful move, tearing them down is restorative justice. You don't get to spread propaganda in paper form on public surfaces.

Yes! You do! Unless it's a place where it's illegal to put up posters, you totally get to do that!

Depending on exactly where the posters are placed, you kind of do, given the First Amendment.

Yeah, uh, fuck that noise. Buy a billboard ad. Better yet. Make "advertising" on walls or visibly from the street illegal in general.

You might not tear down other people’s posters, but progressives do. They did it to the pro-life group on campus when I was a college student. They did it to “All Lives Matter” posters when that became an issue (and even got the progressive administrations to do it for them). They’ve done it to any number of student groups who tried to advertise a conservative speaker, after which they’ve often followed up with a heckler’s veto over the speech itself. Progressives, especially progressive college students and, increasingly, faculty, aren’t used to operating on a level playing field with their opponents.

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