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PaperclipPerfector  19d ago (text post)   29279 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024

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I do wonder when people will stop picking fights with the Jews. None of them seem to learn that it never ends well.

laughs in Latin

Although if you believe that Christianity helped to take down the empire, that was kind of born out of Jewish resistance.

True. At the very least though, the Romans weren't following the current trend of ME nations impoverishing themselves for the sake of killing Jews not within their own borders.

They only have to win once, whereas Israel has to win every time. In addition, as @Tanista says, martyrdom (which Islam sees much more broadly than other Abrahamic faiths) is glorious to them in any case.

Israel has hundreds of nuclear weapons including long range missiles and probably ICMBs and nuclear armed subs. They will without a doubt use them in the event that they are overrun on their own soil. Pardon the consensus building, but does anyone reasonably doubt they wouldn’t put them to use both preemptively and offensively to glass Iran, Yemen, Lebanon, Syria in that case? Israel isn’t fighting wars of choice in which it can pack up and go home. There is no winning condition for their enemies, only death for everyone.

they wouldn’t put them to use both preemptively and offensively to glass Iran, Yemen, Lebanon, Syria in that case?

So? There will be one billion Muslims (including still plenty of Arabs) who survive and who will gladly reconquer the Holy Land after the dust settles. That’s still a victory condition for them.

Painting the Jews as historical winners is definitely a take.

I wouldn't go that far, but I stand by my position that those who decide to try to persecute Jews don't tend to have great things to show for it.

(Although post WWII, you could argue they have been historical winners, which is arguably more relevant for deciding whether going to war against them is a great idea).

They're still around, in recognizable form even, and there are few from Western or Middle-Eastern antiquity who can say that. (East Asia has had a lot more continuity though.)

How many Latins have you seen around lately? Even though they were the founders of Rome and nobody tried to genocide them (well, not anymore than anyone else back in the day), by the time of Augustus they were already gone and forgotten as a people and a culture, and nothing of theirs survived. The only thing that has endured in some form is their language. Rome still exists, but its people have been entirely genetically replaced several times over, just by people moving in and out.

Meanwhile the Jews have maintained their distinct culture and even genetics, even though they were in exile for give or take 2000 years.

Ashkenazi Jews are descendants of a founder population that was apparently half-Italian, half-Jewish, so it’s not like there hasn’t been assimilation there too.

Different incentive structure? Death guarantees heaven, victory guarantees glory, and heaven. Eventually.

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