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.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
My understanding is that the present ruling population, that is, Eastern European Jews (as seemingly everyone on Wikipedia's list of Israel's leaders in the 1948 war was), derive from a population that was expelled from the Levant by the Roman Empire. The Romans don't strike me as particularly ancestral to the Palestinians; even if you find some genetic signature, sociologically and culturally they were if anything also in the enemies-of-Rome camp.
As far as I know, genetically the Palestinians can be traced back to pre-Roman-era populations of the area (the namesake Philistines? Canaanites?), so the comparison with Normans in England does not work. If you want to create a British metaphor, the closest I could think of is if after a St Patrick's Day celebration in Boston gone particularly awry, Irish-Americans decided to invade Scotland and push the resident Scots into reservations, arguing that the Celtic part of the British Isles is their ancestral homeland, there were already some Irish people in Scotland (true) and the Scots got thoroughly culturally assimilated by the foreign Norman invaders anyway.
By that same argument the only thing that makes a land the ancestral homeland of someone is conquest + time. So, if the Israelis just continue on this path another couple centuries they will own their land just as much as the Scots, English, or Palestinians do now.
(P.S. Your account of the genetic and cultural history of the Jews and Palestinians is very off. I can send you some of Razib Khan's substack posts if you actually care, but I don't think you do.)
By all means please do. I don't understand why you think I wouldn't care, unless you pegged me as running my argument due to some ideological stance that is very different from my actual one. The studies cited in this Wikipedia article seem to be broadly in line of what I believed, though.
That is not particularly at odds with my moral intuitions, though it is not quite equivalent to what I said - I think that direct descent from conquered and conquerors gives you moral license to reclaim much further into the future, and in the Palestinian case that descent is broken because the Jews only have this license against the Romans, who have long been expelled. The future is not now, though; the Israeli invasion is still very fresh.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link