site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 18, 2023

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

6
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

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 is evidence that Israel is “punishing” the civilian population, which is a war crime. The party that is morally responsible for the misconduct is the only party that should be asked to stop. The US has influence over Israel, but has zero influence over Hamas. It’s brought up that Hamas has tunnels under buildings, and this is to explain Israeli actions, but saying “Hamas should surrender” because of potential Israeli war crimes would be a bad precedent for human rights. Consider a Russian and Ukrainian war where Russia targets civilian homes in Kyiv because they could be housing reserve troops. Would you expect the media to bring up the option that “the Kyiv Regime can surrender to avoid being war crime’d”?

(Just in the past couple weeks we saw Israeli snipers shoot women outside of a Catholic church (leading the Pope to condemn the attack as terrorism) and Israel killing their own hostages, who were walking outside waving a white flag without a shirt. This last one is the strongest evidence we have of Israeli misconduct / war crimes. What is the probability that they accidentally shot these men, versus that they shoot men in most situations where they come across young men?)

People who have cancer often undergo chemotherapy. This procedure involves pumping toxins into the body to kill cancerous cells. Of course some healthy non-cancerous cells do get caught up in this and die. Like many other things in life, chemotherapy comes in different strengths, if a cancer is small you go for low dosage chemotherapy where very few helathy cells get killed in the crossfire. But if the cancer is very big you need to go for agressive chemotherapy because the low dosage stuff won't get rid of the cancer. This agressive chemotherapy will kill lots of healthy cells too, but that doesn't mean the chemotherapy as a whole was a bad idea.

In much the same way Hamas is a cancer on the face of this earth this has grown way too big. Low dosage stuff like precision strikes and being 150% extra sure you're not shooting at people who aren't threats (when by and large 90%+ of the people you encounter will be threats) before pulling the trigger isn't strong enough to excise Hamas from this world. That requires high dosage chemotherapy which will regrettably have side effects including some number of civilian casualites. It's sad, but the alternative (Hamas is left to fester) is even worse.

You understand this comment reads exactly like something Hitler would say in a speech about Jews, right? I suppose he would use the term parasite, or diseased vermin. Just like not every Jew was a Bolshevik extremist (see: Winston Churchill’s comments), not every Palestinian is a Hamas extremist. Punishing Palestinians as a collective is not morally permissible. And incidentally, were Britain to treat the Jewish colonizers like this in the 30s and 40s (punishing the collective for hiding terrorists), it’s doubtful Zionism would ever have got up and running. Their maximum collective punishment was a curfew — should they have bombed them to the abyss instead?

Punishing Palestinians as a collective is not morally permissible

The Palestinian people as a whole are not being punished as a collective, they are just collateral damage which Israel doesn't care about. It's a different thing. If on my way to work I step on some ants and crush them to death I'm not punishing them, they are just collective damage that I don't care about in pursuit of my goal (for me getting to work, for Israel the eradication of Hamas).

it’s doubtful Zionism would ever have got up and running

Zionism has a long and storied history going back to Theodor Herzl since the time of the Dreyfus Affair in 1894. The British promised the Jewish community a home in Palestine in 1917 with the Balfour Declaration (even ignoring the fact that simultaneously they had promised the land to Hussein bin Ali, king of Hejaz, an Arab leader, for his support vs the Ottomans as well as secretly dividing the exact same land between themselves and France in the Sykes-Picot Agreement, but Perfidious Albion is like that; and of course after WWI when it came time to make good on their contradictory promises the Sykes-Picot Agreement won out and the British kept the land for themselves, giving it to neither Jew nor Arab), not just the 30s and 40s.

Their maximum collective punishment was a curfew — should they have bombed them to the abyss instead?

Not initially no, you start light and ramp up until the terrorism stops. They should have been as severe as needed to stop the violence and no more. Same with Hamas, Israel has already tried all sorts of lighter punishments to improve Hamas's behaviour but so far they haven't worked.

The idea that it's ok to kill thousands of innocent people so long as you were indifferent to killing them instead of wanting to kill them, is exactly why everyone needs to get the fuck away from virtue ethics before it does any more harm.

This is bog-standard international law that's been around for ages. One cannot intentionally kill civilians but attacks that incidentally kill civilians are permissible so long as the attack is intended to achieve a significant military goal.

Perhaps it's wrong, but if it is wrong, the problem is much deeper than virtue ethics.

Sure, but I think we were talking about morality and what we think Israel should do, morally speaking. Not what the law allows or doesn't. There are good reasons for those to be different things.

A subset of X attacks Y. Y responds in part to deter future attacks by X. Y kills some of X accidentally (including those uninvolved in the attack). Z claims “that’s collective punishment.” Y responds I am not trying to collective punish X; the only way to eliminate the capacity of X to attack Y is this attack. Otherwise, you effectively give X a deadly analog to the heckler’s veto.

Not sure why virtue ethics requires this. Seems like you can also get there using utilitarian reasoning.

That's an ok argument for why Israels actions are ok. It's just not the argument I was responding to:

The Palestinian people as a whole are not being punished as a collective, they are just collateral damage which Israel doesn't care about. It's a different thing.

I think that’s the exact argument.