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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024

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Why should they not fight back when getting occupied?

If the battle is to stop the occupation of Lebanese land, then Hezbollah can make some ploughshares now.

I obviously get that it's a GWOT hangup, it's the first response you get. I was being polite: I don't "get" it in the sense that I think there are significant disanalogies I often see the sorts of people making the above argument or your comparison simply ignore for unclear reeasons. If OP gave an alternative to violence, it'd explain why he thinks those don't apply.

Also, you switched the question. Nobody is really asking why Hezbollah is doing this.

The question was why Americans seem to behave with not only with absolute fatalism but also with condemnation that others don't take them at their word that, because they lost, nothing can be done. And why they think that's an option for a nation that can't just fly away and let any Afghans dumb enough to believe that they were now global citizens fall to their deaths or be beaten back into niqabs.

Why should I as a right winger support people who went to the middle east and try to bring wokeness and globalism to the third world?

Also not the question. These people, like OP, don't say they don't support it. They actively condemn. "Their bed to lie in" is totally different. Because that goes both ways.

What does "actively condemn" mean? Few people are going as far as saying that the US should bomb Israel. The condemnation is only relative to a baseline of close to unconditional material and political support. Not that I'm American (though I'm a citizen of another major IL supporter), but I don't see why I can't vote and advocate to withdraw all support and let the situation solve itself, or how I could do this without condemning the load-bearing parts of the overwhelming consensus to continue support.

Declaring the government structures of your enemy terrorists and therefore outside of normal conventions of acceptable wartime conduct is all fun and games until it is done to you and yours. Israel has performed targeted assassinations of scientists involved with the Iranian nuclear programme; I would like to see the reaction if Islamists killed some US academic involved in DARPA, or any Israeli scientist involved in defense projects. Ukraine has killed journalists and lobbed basically unguided ordnance at Russian cities; I doubt it would be framed as an acceptable wartime move if Russia pulled something like the pager trick on Ukraine's leadership or even merely on GRU/whoever is behind the assassinations on the Ukrainian side by any of its cheerleaders.

but I don't see why I can't vote and advocate to withdraw all support and let the situation solve itself

This would be "their bed to lie in" I think.

or how I could do this without condemning the load-bearing parts of the overwhelming consensus to continue support.

The cynical answer to perceived hypocrisy (often on the left anyway) is that it's all power all the way down. If America's enemies aren't terrorists because that is a cynical judgment on the US' part, it doesn't necessarily follow that the US are terrorists. They may all be hypocrites.

Then it's just a pragmatic judgment what you prefer.

But it often doesn't go like this. America's judgments of its opponents are false, but their judgments are correct.