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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

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I don't think that this original wrong has been made right to the Palestinians

Nor has the wrong Russia did to Hungary or Czechoslovakia.

more persuasive if Israeli settlements were not still expanding

To the extent that this is the goal, the continuation of terror/rocket attacks only fuels the right-wing Israeli government which in turn fuels those settlements.

The only climate in which Israel was politically capable of curtailing the settlers (for a bitter example, when they sent their own soldiers to violently evict settlers from Gaza) was that of peace and quiet. Doing so is already a huge lift, it's unthinkable in conditions like these. And of course the shadow and chaos of 10/7 has absolutely been used to accelerate these things.

Maybe the underlying difference in moral intuition is this: the presence of a moral imperative is not a license to ignore empirical cause and effect. For example, you write:

seeing an opening, you shoot the kid, I will find it hard to fault you for the murder even though the kid is technically innocent of the misfortunes that befell you and this did absolutely nothing to help your situation

Well, I have two kids. If someone killed them both, I might consider this as an option.

OTOH, if a mafia boss killed one, and I had the option of either killing him and dying myself or living with the shame & pain in order to raise the other, that's the obvious choice. Morally it might be better to off him and take the L myself, but I'm not about to orphan my only living child for it.