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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 27, 2024

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Sure. I'll go over her main points. Her position is that:

-College students and folks on social platforms are advocating for supporting their particular side of the conflict mostly for personal gain and/or to force their political ideologies onto others.Their views often lack any nuance, charity, or civility toward those that disagree. It has resulted in hostile demonstrations on college campuses and what may be considered to be "cringey" TikToks/shorts.

-This performative activism is contributing to the continued political polarization in the US and leaves no room for said nuance, charity or civility.

-Governments are also not immune from this kind of virtue signalling. She uses the example of South Africa calling for the prosecution of Israeli leadership before the ICC for genocide and suggests that their demand was purely a political move to help the ANC stay in power. She further opines that this is hypocritical as South Africa refused to arrest then-Sudanese president Omar Al-Bashir for the mass murder of 300,000 non-Arab Sudanese people in 2015, and that they even welcomed him warmly. (For what it's worth, Kidology was born and raised in South Africa but is now a UK citizen, and her tone turned markedly more angry at the start of this segment)

-Like governments, institutions of higher education (and their students) have engaged in performative activism for their own gain. The most prestigious of them have billions of dollars in endowments, government and corporate funding and donations from the wealthy that they use not in furtherance of academic missions, but to cultivate a student body that only subscribes to certain matters of social justice. This has resulted in the rise of mass demonstrations for social justice where dissenting voices aren't welcome, where demonstrators prevent uninvolved students from simply walking to class, where it's basically just a mob of people screaming and shouting for a cause they know nothing about and have no experience dealing with.

I think her view is pretty much my view of most protests. Most of the protesters (on any topic, mind) don’t actually know much about the things they protest. Get them off their talking points (something Ben Shapiro is pretty good at), make them defend their position without going back to slogans and references to things seen on video, and they fall apart.

The ICC and the various other countries suddenly “recognizing Palestine”, in my view have mostly their own credibility in mind, especially the ICC. They’re not serious proposals. The states recognizing Palestine have no trade agreements with Palestine. They have no trade deals with Palestine, they’re not recognizing a Palestinian passport. There’s no state to recognize, with no serious government, no exports, it is not a state to any real degree. At best it’s two reservations shooting missiles over a border completely controlled by Israel.

On the ICC side, the gain is legitimacy. It’s a toothless organization issuing meaningless “rulings” that it can’t enforce. They can’t arrest the people they want to try. No state is going to March into Jerusalem and perp-walk Netanyahu. Or nab Putin in Moscow or Biden in DC (if he gets convicted of something). They can issue calls for arrest, they can try leaders in absentia and sentence them to anything they want to. It doesn’t matter, as they cannot enforce any of that. If they sentence someone to death, it doesn’t matter because the person can live as they please within their own country. Sure, maybe if Netanyahu gets drunk and flies to Europe, something might happen. But if he stays in Israel or other friendly states, he gets to remain free and even remain PM of Israel until his base kicks him out.

Hey fam, for future reference this would have been better as part of your top post. You came in pretty hot with a video link and not that much background information.

Thanks. Will do.

So does she have any examples of this lack of nuance, charity and civility from people that represent positions she agrees with, or is it a phenomenon curiously concentrated in her opposition? On that matter, is she exhibiting nuance and charity herself in opining on why people she disagrees with advocate for their positions?

If you watch from 3:18 to 17:00 she shows several videos as examples.