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PaperclipPerfector  2yr ago (text post)   27452 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 29, 2024

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The campus protests are run directly by the propaganda arm of Hamas?

Spicy lawsuit just dropped: https://static.foxnews.com/foxnews.com/content/uploads/2024/05/National-Jewish-Advocacy-Center-the-Schoen-Law-Firm-and-the-Holtzman-Vogel-law-firm-vs-1.pdf

The American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) and the National Students for Justice in Palestine (NSJP) are accused of providing substantial assistance to Hamas. The plaintiffs, who are survivors and victims of Hamas's October 7, 2023 terrorist attack, are alleging that AMP and NSJP are Hamas's propaganda wing in the United States

Summary:

  • AMP and NSJP are successor organizations to groups that were previously shut down or held liable for providing material support to Hamas.
  • Within hours of the October 7 attack, AMP and NSJP allegedly disseminated a "toolkit" that identified them as "part of" Hamas's "Unity Intifada" and called for "confrontation by any means necessary," including "armed struggle."
  • The groups allegedly instigated riots, violence, and chaos on American college campuses, recruiting students as "foot soldiers" to support Hamas through intimidation and fear tactics.
  • AMP and NSJP are accused of providing crucial communication services to Hamas, which cannot legally hire American PR firms due to its terrorist designation.
  • Hamas and other terrorist groups have publicly recognized and expressed appreciation for the support provided by AMP, NSJP, and their campus allies.

I can't exactly tell how much of this is BS and how much of it is real just from the claim but it is definitely going to be an interesting argument. I cannot wait for discoveries.

Even if the lawsuit is successful though, I can't see the US government really clamping down on campus protests. The whole situation has been an interesting case study for the rest of the world as to how to infiltrate/affect US political sentiment and public unrest though.

Is that how lawsuits are typically brought? That thing reads like a reddit schizo post. I find myself constantly surprised how how loose lawyers are with their language in contrast to how precise engineers need to be to limit their risk exposure.

Keep in mind that this is only an initial complaint. Complaints are often necessarily rush jobs written when many facts are still unknown, and are therefore held to a lower standard than later filings in the case. Courts assume everything they allege is true, and judge only whether the plaintiff has plausibly alleged a valid claim. It's pretty common for allegations in a complaint to be significantly pared back or even dropped altogether as it becomes clear some of your shots went wide.

Theoretically, future filings should be more carefully written and more factually supported, though this also has a strong whiff of vibes-based lawfare that'll get quickly dismissed. This is not a particularly strong complaint, and I doubt the plaintiffs actually have the facts they need to pull this sort of thing off.

It's even possible the plaintiffs are perfectly aware of this, and are using the case to harass SJP and/or fish for embarassing information on the off-chance it survives long enough to get to discovery.

By definition, one party in a lawsuit is always wrong, so imposing sanctions or liability on being wrong is a dangerous game.

Lawyers can get sanctioned for filing frivolous lawsuits, but that's a higher standard than filing meritless lawsuits.

Billionaire Jewish donors and powerful Jews in the media are working overtime to pull the most powerful levers possible to put out Israeli propaganda

I ask this out of curiosity: what Israeli propaganda are you referring to? I feel like I only ever see the following messaging these days:

  • people and organizations denouncing Israel
  • people and organizations staying as quiet as they can
  • lone jewish people writing op-eds about how scared they are and how they think everyone is out to get them and they think everyone is antisemitic

I think maybe I only ever saw one billboard that was funded by a pro Israel organization that was specifically calling out Claudine Gay.

I could believe that well-situated individuals or organizations are using more shadowy means to put pro-Israeli pressure specifically on large organizations, but I don't really feel like I've seen much in the way of propaganda that's pro-Israel. I'm thinking of propaganda as big funded things like ads, flyers, commercials, demonstrations, people giving away free stuff, benefit concerts and generally things that are designed to change the mindsets of average individuals. Mostly things seem either neutral or anti-Israel, and certainly the popular mindset seems to be moving slowly towards anti-Israel, so I'm wondering what sort of things you're referring to.

Since then, the behavior of Israel, Zionists, and frankly Jews in general has made me hate Israel just as much as I hate Iran or Saudi Arabia

Once again, I am genuinely curious about what behavior you're referring to. This might be totally obvious to everyone, and I might just be the odd-man out simply because I don't pay attention to the news very much, but I want to know what things have you seen that have changed your mind. I have seen Jewish people and Zionists I know be very defensive and quick to call things antisemitic, but that's no different now than it was before, just ramped up a bit.

They are certainly powerful enough to get America to send billions in aid to a country that seems far more brutal in their war than Russia, as part of the same package that is meant to punish Russia for being brutal.

Edit: just remembered that American evangelicals have weird beliefs about Israel + geopolitical concerns. That might be a better explanation for the blatant hypocrisy of supporting Israel's actions in Gaza than Jewish power.

There's also geopolitical concerns; Israel counterbalances local oil powers, especially Iran.

My main exposure to mainstream messaging on the topic nowadays is German news media + administrative mailing lists from various universities including US ones that I have managed to accumulate subscriptions to over the years, but a common thread to all of them is a pretty unabashed tendency to have cut out the usual conflation with "antisemitism" and directly talk about anti-Israel sentiment as something that is or should be illegal and punished to the maximum extent the framework allows (expulsions, blacklisting, using discretionary hate speech/symbolism statutes). In the German news media, I mostly see war reporting spin techniques deployed to a level that comes across as comical - on one hand you get articles reporting about Israel losing 10 soldiers in an actual ground offensive in a tone as if they were kids murdered by terrorists on a shopping trip, and on the other claims of Palestinian deaths or suffering are presented as flat statistics with no contextualisation or attempt to give emotional colour, and couched in a wall of reminders that figures could not be verified independently and notes that "according to the Israeli MoD, they were actually Hamas militants" (no reminders that this could not be verified independently). The contrast not just between the reporting on the two sides but also this and the reporting on Russia/Ukraine is stark to the point of feeling like a flex ("Yes, this is propaganda. Dare to call it out? No? Good, so you know your place").

I feel like I only ever see the following messaging these days

This is probably milieu-dependent. The denouncing Israel thing is something I only ever hear of at second hand, typically in media articles that (IMO) massively overstate the risk to American Jews. This is a rare occasion where I agree with Hanania:

What’s notable to me is the combination of a complete lack of violence along with the hysterical accusations of such and hyperbole going back and forth between the two sides. Everyone deep down knows that no one is going to get hurt, not by the police and not by the protestors, but that it is to their advantage to pretend as if this isn’t the case.

This is in a well-to-do professional environment (without many Jews to account for the pattern thanks to being in a nondescript Midwestern city). I was aware of the existence of pro-ethnic cleansing arguments among online ethnonationalist types, but I’d never encountered it in meatspace before last October, let alone from non-Jewish (!) normies.

Conversely, my Brother, who has similar object-level views on Israel-Palestine but works in Brussels, has had to explain that massacring Israeli civilians is bad, actually, regardless of what you think about the overall conflict.

It's been shocking how bad the Israeli propaganda ops are, like there's now a complete disconnect between Israel and American jewry.
But on the other hand we can see signs of immense power still in the hands of older US Jews in media. Papers like the NYT have been relatively unbiased despite their junior staff wanting to turn it into the Hamas Daily. There's a moderating energy that was completely missing during the hysteria of 2020, and I think it's safe to ascribe it to Jewish senior staff putting their feet down.

What would you have done differently if you were elected PM of Israel on 10/8?

"Resign immediately" seems like the (morally+personally) least fraught option. It's not quite the trolley problem, because if you redirect the trolley the lone person gets to beat you up or worse before they get run over (or just elect a different switch operator).

What would you have done differently if you were elected leader of Germany at some point in the WWI/WWII interregnum, perhaps on 1932-12-03 for a maximum sense of historical inevitability? (...in 1944? ...of North Vietnam in the middle of the Vietnam war, for opposite political valence and ultimate outcome?) Nations and polities and the whole web of human interactions have enough momentum that at some point, their only available choices might indeed be surrender (wronging themselves) and villainy (wronging others). That Israel's population and Netanyahu in particular had no better options after the Hamas attack does not absolve them from moral responsibility for their actions, since decisions they (the Israeli people and their forefathers in general, and Netanyahu in particular) made before were what got them in this situation to begin with.

I don’t see resigning as a good answer here. If you resign you are personally absolved from having to make the decisions that will come up, and also unable to guide the response. It’s a cowardly way out. You know what will happen, you know what it likely means for history on both sides. You just don’t want your personal name on it.

As I meant to imply with the comment about the differences to the trolley problem, I don't want stakeholders to punish/assassinate me for what I would see to be a morally net positive choice (at this point, this would include both negotiating abode elsewhere for everyone in Israel, packing up and leaving, and going full unabashed genocide on the remaining Palestinians, trading future negative utils for present ones). Why would I be obliged to sacrifice myself for these people I have nothing to do with, just because they unilaterally put me in charge as part of a thought experiment?

What would be your answer for my Germany/NorthVN scenarios?

decisions they (the Israeli people and their forefathers in general, and Netanyahu in particular) made before were what got them in this situation to begin with.

Decisions such as being Jewish and alive at the same time?

Moving to/staying in Israel, not accepting a Turkey/Greece style population transfer two-state solution at the price of costlier territorial concessions earlier, and whatever miscalculation, if it in fact was one, made them not prevent the Hamas attack, among others.

Rounding that down to what you said is fairly comparable to how the US progressive coalition calls every part of the pro-trans agenda "trans people existing". Do you like that version of this argument too?

The question was about moral responsibility for having to defend themselves.

Your trans scenario would have to be something like "trans people have done things which anger cis people, such as demanding to be in the wrong bathrooms. If an angry person then attacks the trans people and gets hurt when the trans people defend themselves, the trans people are morally responsible for that". Under those circumstances, I'd agree that the trans people were defending their existence and aren't responsible.

In real life, "they just don't want trans people to exist" never means "trans people are not at fault for hurting someone in self-defense".

-Make a two state deal with with the West Bank that implies a massive land-swap ; in exchange for giving up on any claims of rights to the Gaza Strip and allowing its full annexation by Israel, full condemnation of 10/7 and declaring Hamas to be a rouge organization, Israel will abandon all settlements that aren't Ariel, move back the Wall correspondingly, and the map will be radically redrawn in order to give the West Bank a nice chunk of the Golan Heights (if Syria wants to give the piece it claims to own too, better yet), which is decently fertile and apparently has a boatload of oil (although it's not clear if it's any good to be refined and used). Israel will abandon all military occupation of the zone, recognize the Nation of Palestine as fully sovereign and will let them be whatever they want to be. Abbas gets to make Palestine a better place for its citizens, or to turn it into another corrupt petrodollar tyranny (or both!)

-All people and descendants of who left the place due to Nakba will get right of return to the Palestinian country, as all Gazans. All Israelis currently living in the Golan Heights region and the settlements will be moved to Gaza. Cities will be created on the Golan Heights from scratch in order to accommodate the massive flow of immigrants, while the already existing towns will be expanded if it's needed to. Gazan cities will be massively redesigned from scratch to allow Israeli high quality infrastructure. Both refugee groups will get free housing for the troubles caused. All this will require money, and looots of it; so the peace deal will be executed with the financial support from the international community (The G7 and the Gulf Tigers will pull 90% of the weight, BRIC the rest)

-Having gotten the two-state solution done and over with, in exchange for recognition of Palestine as a sovereign country, Saudi Arabia and the UAE agree to push all the buttons on Qatar and do a full blockade of the country in joint with the US until all Hamas leaders are turned over to the Israeli government to do with them as they please (and this is very important; the Israelis want more than justice; they want revenge; if they want to stone Ismail Haniyeh in the streets of Tel Aviv and broadcast it on TV, let them)

-The international community agrees to consider the Gaza Strip as belonging to Israel, the IDF invades Gaza by land mostly with troops on the ground and a very few targeted non-carpet bombing campaigns, in a no-prisoners-taken approach; anyone living in Gaza who collaborates in the IDF will be rewarded (and its identity shielded in order to avoid being punished for treason), anyone who fights for Hamas will be shot on sight short of dropping their weapons inmediately, laying on the ground/rasing the white flag.

-Turn the script I just wrote.

I mean, let's be fair, from a rationality point of view, I don't see any egregious with my plan (except for Jerusalem, which I don't know what to do about it); even with the logistical costs of the relocation of millions of people and building of cities amounting to hundreds of billions of dollars, they get easily compensated by avoiding WWIII and getting long-lasting peace in the Middle East. The problem is that it implies massive sacrifices to both sides; neither is getting what they want at all; they're just giving up things in order to avoid losing even more. Israelis want the whole land. Palestinians want the whole land. Neither is going to give an inch of it. But the two state solution thought about by the mainstream is impossible to work; two pieces of non-continuous land becoming a country? Get out of here.

Personally I would have annexed Gaza (and the West bank too for good measure) and made everyone there a citizen. Then treat any terrorists as common criminals and punish them to the full extent of the law. This would also solve the Haredim problem in one fell swoop (or at least delay it for two generations) and crush the Israeli far right because now there are an extra two million people who'll never vote for them.

In this scenario everyone wins except for the terrorists and far right nutters; both of which are groups that deserve to have a boot stamping on their face for eternity.

Personally I would have annexed Gaza (and the West bank too for good measure) and made everyone there a citizen.

Now the next time you have an election the Palestinian party wins and all the Jews get expelled or killed. Game over. Thank you for playing Middle East Peace, please come back soon.

Wouldn't there still be peace?

No, the Palestinians would not only continue to fight among themselves but also fight with their neighbors.

Would the US still arm a party to the conflict?

Maybe both.

Nothing, but do it faster. Israel lost too much time initially - if they had pacified Gaza completely with 100000 civilian casualties, but got it done before 1st of November it would have been probably forgotten by now.

I generally agree with this sentiment, but I think that the panic is also partly being driven by the fact that young Jewish Americans also don’t seem to be that big on Zionism either. I haven’t seen any numbers, but just the fact that these protests erupted at Columbia makes me strongly suspect that a fair number (which I define as a greater % than you would get if you just sampled the population randomly) of the pro Palestinian protesters are probably American Jews.

Younger Jews are at most culturally Jewish. I think you are seeing the progressive identity matter more than the Jewish identity.

It's simpler than that- the protesters are simply the classic story of the Golem who thinks he's a real boy. The protestors stupidly believe they are empowered by righteousness when in reality they are just walking LLMs who have been trained on a paradigm that was useful up until the point Israel needed to slaughter tens of thousands civilians and ethnically cleanse Gaza. Although it should be noted the paradigm is still very useful, the Golem is running amok on college campuses but is flexing as much political power as ever, directing legislation that continues down the European-style path of banning anti-Semitism, constantly flowing unlimited money to Israel, and controlling the media narrative.

All of this backlash is just reality hitting the protestors that they never had real power in the first place, and they do not now.

The jewish problem is that they want their country to be an ethnostate that steals land and ethnically cleanses neighbors while promoting multiculturalism everywhere else. White countries can't be white since then jews would be uncomfortable. This has been a cornerstone of the reasons why jews have not been liked. They often work against group interests of other peoples while pushing their own group interest to an extreme extent.

The left will have trouble reconciling the radical individualism they have been inculcated with and extreme jewish ethnocentrism. The right will be sceptical of jews because ADL wants them banned of twitter and Ben Gvir wants millions of Palestinians to become refugees 300 km from EU.

The left will be shocked at how they are treated in a diametrically different way than when they protested against white men sitting with their legs too far apart. However, jews are a small minority and won't be able to control all the goyim in the long run.

while promoting multiculturalism everywhere else

Do you have any evidence of this? Ideally from countries that aren't America.

Open society foundation, every mainstream jewish organization in Europe, Barbra spectre, Jewish internet defence force, ADL.

The Open Society Foundation isn't a 'Jewish' organisation, it was just founded by a Jew. George Soros may love multiculturalism, but that doesn't mean that Jews love it.

'Every mainstream Jewish organisation in Europe' - The fact that you haven't been able to name a single organisation here suggests that you don't actually have any examples.

Barbra Spectre is an individual, not an organisation.

The JIDF is, as far as I can tell, an Israeli nationalist group. I can't see any examples of them promoting multiculturalism outside of Israel.

As far as I can tell, the ADL is the only thing you've listed that is a Jewish organisation and promotes multiculturalism.

Look, there is a world outside America. American Jews may be left wing, but that doesn't make global jewry left wing. One of the most influential French anti-immigrationist is Eric Zemmour, an Algerian Jew. Britain's only Jewish Prime Minister was a proud British imperial nationalist. I could go on. This idea that western countries invited millions of third worlders because the Jews made us do it is a cope. Our own political class did it to us, not the semitic enemy within that you're imagining.

...

One of my thoughts on this issue is it highlights I am not a free speech absolutists. A quote from Godfather 2 highlights my view on this:

“Michael: The soldiers are paid to fight, the rebels aren't.

Hyman: What does that tell you?

Michael: They can win.“

When we had campus protests a decade ago I did not care. College kids being silly and they will grow up and take the corporate job and pop out a couple kids. Now I watch the protests and I see a future Supreme Court Judge, the executive team at Disney, and at worse a future HR executive whose rules I need to follow or I end up unemployed.

I do not care about your speech when I think it will just stay in academic circles or in fringe communities. Today I am increasingly pessimistic that it will stay only speech and instead fear that it will become the government. How does a liberal Democracy protect itself if it’s very values allow it to be attacked? Pacifism seems cool until the Mongol horde is outside your door.

It’s also made me greatly admire the Jewish community which seems capable of defending themselves while white people seem to just rollover when their interests are attacked. Judaism at its core is a people while White America’s core is the slave morality of Christianity. Conversion to Judaism in Christian white spaces is starting to become a small thing. Antonio Martínez García converted. There are rumors Milei wants to convert but has not for political reasons as the leader of a Catholic nation. If I was not a believer in Christ I would convert.

Becoming Jewish if not born one is a headache of all sorts, starting with what type of Judaism are we talking about:

https://imgur.com/U4XUYxL

Look at that flowchart. I mean reaaaaly look at it. If Jews are interested in not being thought of as a secret society that rules the world, would it hurt them to begin by making the process of becoming one of then a little simpler? Not even Masonry is that complicated; I was offered to become part of them without asking them just by knowing the right people!

That’s largely for determining the circumstances of your birth, though. For conversion you just need to find an orthodox rabbi who is widely accepted by other orthodox rabbis (the vast majority of them; easily discerned by visiting even English-language orthodox messageboards) and then convert under him. Not that I particularly recommend becoming Jewish, but still.

I mean, you could probably make a similarly complicated chart for Christianity to be fair. Make branching paths for Arianism, Nestorianism, Filoque, Transubstantiation, Marian and Saintly devotions, Apostolic Succession, Mormonism, etc.

I an am an ‘80’s kid. We had Reagan, Bill Clinton, and George Bush. Bill Clinton had to brand himself as a neoliberal because the GOP was crushing it.

For all George Bush faults we still worked off the old American deal of a meritocracy. I don’t know the exact date things changed but everything was normal then.

I think the Weatherman sort of prove my point. A few got academic posts but were no threat to me.

What if white people would have retained their tribalism in the absence of Jewish anthropologists and social scientists who promoted the elimination of white identity? Would this change things?

Conversion to Judaism in Christian white spaces is starting to become a small thing

A singular former Goldman Sachs analyst converts to Judaism and this is supposed to be a “thing” among white people? I don’t think so. What does Shia LaBeouf tell us, who has a much larger cultural influence?

Glad how you ignore my Milei comment who is a conservative icon. Who is a much bigger deal than the “Goldman Sachs analyst”. Whose accomplished more than that now.

https://m.jpost.com/diaspora/article-790350

I guess I did not give supporting evidence but here it is.

https://www.jta.org/2024/04/11/global/speaking-at-miami-synagogue-argentinas-javier-milei-reveals-he-has-jewish-heritage

He says he’s planning on converting.

Would this change things?

I suppose that depends on whether you consider the defining cause of the loss of white tribal identity to be those

anthropologists and social scientists

rather than something that precedes them.

What does Shia LaBeouf tell us, who has a much larger cultural influence?

I don’t think it tells us anything, but historically Jews converting to Christianity has been much more common than Christians converting to Judaism.

Was Shia even Jewish? I know he had some Jewish ancestry but thought he didn’t have much to do with it.

Nietzsche also considered Judaism slave morality, I just think that innate tribalism acts as a safeguard against the worst excesses thereof, in the same way there have been plenty of nativist Christian groups over the millennia with high levels of in-group loyalty.

And there are failure states. If Israel is doomed, it is because the secularized elite have completely failed to forcibly secularize and integrate the ultra-orthodox, who are feckless, work-shy, subsidized by the rest of the population, do not serve in the military and consider the highest occupational calling in life to be studying torah and talmud commentary for 70+ years until they die. Ethnic loyalty often leads to a failure to hold your own people to account.

One can fairly reply that unlike the Swedes with the Somalis and Syrians, at least the welfare users the Jews in Israel are subsidizing are actual co-ethnics.

But that does not change the fact that Israel is surrounded by ethnic and religious enemies and always will be (even if accommodation with the Arab elites is secured, common Arab Muslims will never like Israel or Jews) and will scarcely be able afford to stay ahead of them when 40/50/60% of the population are ultra-Orthodox in a few decades.

I mean it seems like it has to be pointed out- ultra-orthodox Jewry can in fact do productive work, even with the incredibly annoying religious rules governing their lives. They’re less productive than an equivalent gentile, sure, but ultra-orthodox Jews in the USA don’t live entirely off of welfare fraud. Israel can push to make workplaces more accommodating for the Hasidism and have counter part of the problem by getting them to work.

Okay. So it is not 100.0% parasitism. But are they economically net positive? The US East coast ultra orthodox communities that I'm vaguely aware of are net negative if I understand correctly. As you say, they subsist on welfare fraud and have large families of severely inbred special needs children.

It doesn’t have to be net positive. Getting the haredim to pay full freight and become Mormons is probably not doable; being able to take them from economically nonproductive to borderline productive is a much smaller and more achievable goal.

I've heard that in the original days of Israel, just after the Arab war, the ultra-orthodox who spent all day just studying the Talmud were an extreme rarity because they almost all died in the Holocaust. So Israel gave them funding as a sort of living museum piece/out of pity for an almost lost culture. But then they kept growing since they had such a sweet deal, and what was reasonable when they were a few hundred people was not reasonable when they are a few hundred thousand.

I’m curios what did Hasidic Jews used to do? Well fare is a pretty new invention, where they just like Amish who did subsistence farming?

Yes, like @hydroacetylene said, when the yeshivot were in Eastern Europe back in the day a family might send only their most intellectually gifted son (out of many) to them. Adult study in a full time kollel (for married men) was even more rare, it’s largely an invention of the last 75 years. Previously yeshiva students would graduate, become rabbis, and then marry and have children and become the religious figures in their communities. The idea of a large population of married men who were not community rabbis but who studied all day and were paid for it is modern.

Modern abundance, not just welfare but even the ease with which, say, one very rich Hasid can fund a thousand students indefinitely is a failure state of modernity. Most people don’t want to live off welfare because it provides a much lower quality of life than working, especially if you’re an intelligent people. But if you think Torah study is the highest calling in life then you can override that impulse.

I noticed this tension all the time in old Jewish novels, where characters are very proud his son is studying with the rabbi, and of course everyone else in the family is happy to work extra shifts to pay for it, oy

Historically? They worked, and the people who studied torah all day were a minority like Catholic priests or nuns. But once you could get paid to do torah studies, an obvious incentive structure developed.

Yeah, that’s pretty much it, there were a few thousand left between Israel and New York, a few thousand in Britain and the Netherlands together, smaller numbers scattered in some other countries. A remnant population survived in Hungary that left for Israel in 1956, and there were some in the Soviet Union who survived the holocaust. But it’s fair to say likely 90%+ of Hasidic and Litvak Orthodox Jewry was killed in the Holocaust.

Since the 80s a lot of ‘mainstream Orthodox’ Jews and even some secular ones also changed to being ultra orthodox, and there was a purity spiral in Arab/Mizrachi Jewish circles in Israel that led to them adopting a lot of Hasidic customs.

Lastly the Chabad ‘Rebbe’ (Schneerson) became a figure of great importance to the vast majority of religious Orthodox Jews in the late 20th century and he was also responsible for a lot of the Baal t’shuva movement of increasing observance. So what was once a whole spectrum of Judaism with many varying gradations of practice has essentially separated into secular/reform/conservative judaism, “mainstream” and modern orthodox movements which are closely related to religious Zionism, and then ‘ultra orthodoxy’.

Somewhat echoing @Primaprimaprima, I just don't care. When it was Russian mind control rays from Facebook, I didn't care. The current run of Chinese brainwashing from TikTok does not induce me to care. Now that I find out that American rioters are actually being puppeteered by Hamas, I likewise do not care. In all of these cases, there's the same belief that the Americans being mind-controlled lack their own agency and that an utterly trivial investment on the part of foreign actors can create a completely inorganic belief system within the United States. Efforts to suppress speech across borders didn't even work when it was literal printed text, we still wound up with a bunch of communist spies and Nazi sympathizers and they sure as hell aren't going to work in the modern electronic world. You have to deal with the reality that people will see, read, and hear things that you don't like and then address them where they're at.

I absolutely despise the campus "protestors" and it's irrelevant to me whether their puerile, idiotic ideas came from Facebook or the original Communist Manifesto.

In all of these cases, there's the same belief that the Americans being mind-controlled lack their own agency and that an utterly trivial investment on the part of foreign actors can create a completely inorganic belief system within the United States.

They can change the relative size and influence of existing movements even if they can't create movements from scratch.

Changing the size and influence of movements is actually pretty hard. If Hamas can do that for some fairly trivial investment, that's pretty impressive on their part. I find it a lot more plausible that the primary drivers aren't actually Hamas-controlled NGOs, but the academic elites at the institutions where the mostly peaceful protests are happening.

This is going to sound like edgy contrarianism for the sake of edgy contrarianism, so you'll have to take my word for it when I say that it's not:

I really don't care. And if you told me that counter-protesters were being funded by Israel, I wouldn't care about that either. In a conflict where moral fervor runs high, I am an advocate for the freedom to simply not care.

I'm just tired of the moral guilt tripping from both sides. If you want to criticize the protesters, criticize their tactics. There's plenty to criticize there. But their alleged ties to Hamas add nothing to the story for me. In general I have always felt that concerns over "foreign manipulation of political sentiment" were paranoia of the worst kind. If the governments of Russia or China or the US (organizations that have engaged in plenty of nasty unethical behavior in the past that could plausibly be classified as "terrorism") want to pay for a Times Square billboard and fund some student organizations to get their message out then I say let them. Free speech doesn't stop at our borders; I am for open trade in a global free market of ideas.

I can't reasonably bring myself to be invested in every ethnic and sectarian conflict that happens around the world, particularly when its direct impact on me seems rather limited. If the Sudanese Masalit want to organize protests in the US against the RSF then bully for them; whether they win or lose in their struggles, I'm not going to lose sleep either way. I view Israel-Palestine similarly: just another in a long series of ethnic conflicts in a region of the world that is known for being prone to violent ethnic conflicts.

In some sense I am forced to care, due to the generous financial aid that the US supplies to Israel. But my investment doesn't extend beyond that.

I agree, but I think it’s a lot of the media and social media have take over so much mind-space that it’s driving an obsession with events that most people left to themselves would not care about while causing people to neglect the boring and important stuff they should care about.

Gaza is a case in point to me. The country is the size of Vermont, it has some oil, but its strategic importance is much lower than other oil exporters in the region. For most people, unless they practice Judaism or Islam, it’s no more or less impactful than any other conflict going on right now. If this war happened in 1984 when the news was on for an hour a night, nobody would care outside of Zionist Jews and Muslims. The White House would be doing what it is now— trying to negotiate an end to the fighting while giving bombs to Israel and food to Gaza. As it stands, the world is watching because the world is watched everything all the time.

I always find this instructive stuff when it comes to the outrages of the day. Most of it, when viewed from the point of view of long distance or time frames not only don’t actually matter that much, or matter much much less than the attention paid to them. Most actually resolve themselves without anyone doing anything. Mark that it happens but in a week or a month, it will likely resolve itself.

Seems like a largely bullshit claim; it’s well established that aesthetically supporting a designated terrorist organization or even bragging about doing so doesn’t actually make you a ‘member’ of that organization.

If it did then half the Irish in Boston would have been arrested in the 80s.

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