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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   29093 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 18, 2023

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The following is a comment about US media, not about the war in Gaza.

Whenever the mainstream US news covers the humanitarian disaster in Gaza (and the suffering is absolutely horrendous), the underlying subtext I get is "Israel should stop assaulting Gaza". But there's another path that would also end the humanitarian disaster, and that's the unconditional surrender of Hamas.

I'm not shocked that Hamas doesn't surrender, but I am shocked that the option is never even mentioned in passing by the talking heads. Do they not think of it? Is it too far outside the bounds of normal discourse? If this were any other military conflict in all of history, it would be considered decided by now, and Gazans would be suing for peace.

There's presumably very little outside of direct massive intervention (of the sort that Israel hasn't asked for and almost certainly doesn't want) that US could do to make Hamas surrender, whereas there's a large amount of levers US can use to affect Israeli policy, including making it stop assault Gaza.

I've often seen these demands of "why condemn country/instance X (a Western country, or an ally/vassal of the West) but not country/instance Y (hostile to the West)" from various instances (media, "the left", whatever), and I cannot help to think that, insofar as the country Y is indeed the kind of a country/instance whose policy the West can do very little to affect outside of direct violence, this is a demand for a literal virtue signal. There's no perceivable point beyond "you should do this, because I'd consider you doing this a positive demonstration from you".

That just incentivizes countries to be anti-USA and irrationally belligerent in the future. You have to think about this from a time consistent perspective.

Not really, considering that being anti-USA and irrationally belligerent, unless there are special conditions like here, create an increasing risk of the said direct massive intervention.

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