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 -
I have actually been following news from Gaza, not just the bits you might catch now and then on CNN, but by watching Western, Israeli, and Arab news channels ( including in Arabic). So I have a pretty good sense for how it's covered, including the biases most frequently exhibited by each side.
Bluntly, I do not trust anything reported directly from Gaza, especially from the people on the ground there. This is not to say I think Israelis or the IDF are always trustworthy (they are not), but no journalist is in Gaza without explicit permission from Hamas. That is just how things work there. There are literally Hamas soldiers in Gaza hospitals, but you will never see them shown by the journalists walking the halls to show you how terrible conditions are there. You will never see them criticizing Hamas, interviewing someone who criticizes Hamas, or presenting anything other than a Palestinian-sympathetic point of view. There are two reasons for this: (1) Most of them are sympathetic to Hamas, if not actually affiliated with them. (2) Even the ones who aren't know they will be expelled (at best) or disappeared (at worst) if they don't observe the ground rules. The ground rules are "Hamas is in charge here and Hamas controls the narrative."
This is a level of credulousness, and confidence, that I know for a certainty you would not display - especially from the NYT - on any other subject. This is not "high quality evidence." This is evidence that pleasures your priors. You took a sketchy story and from it wrote a carefully written polemic that argues, essentially, that Jews are taught by their religion that shooting children for fun is fine. You have already ignored a pile of contradictions to even your most specious claims (e.g., that the Israeli military is mostly made up of religious extremists), and ignored any sort of logical analysis. So let's take a few points in order:
Why would the doctors lie? Most aid workers in Gaza, unsurprisingly, are sympathetic to Palestinians and believe the "genocide" narrative. Some, like the journalists, are actually Hamas supporters. That doesn't mean they would all be willing to make up stories about children regularly being shot by Israeli snipers, but many of them would. Many others, if told this was happening, would be willing to believe it and/or at least not publicly display any skepticism. And if Hamas says "The narrative is now that the IDF is sniping children," doctors still working in Gaza are certainly not going to say "No, that isn't happening." Especially since they probably have seen a lot of children killed, a few might have actually been targeted, and so they're going to be willing to go along with "The IDF is now doing this regularly" – even if they know it's not really true, maybe the outrage will result in fewer children dying.
You have made it clear often enough in the past that you despise Jews and consider them a kind of invidious predatory species, so a story that portrays them as moral mutants clearly appeals to you and is easy for you to believe, but let's try starting from an assumption that Jews aren't monsters. Contrary to your careful argument above that Judaism is an alien and inhumane ethical system completely divorced from Western thought, Israeli cultural norms are mostly Western ones, especially considering how many of them came from the West. The IDF mostly behaves like Western armies, which is to say: they have rules and they follow the Geneva Convention. There are definitely breaches, as happens in all wars, but they aren't monsters who are given a doctrine of "preteen children are legitimate targets." Most people would not do that. It's only plausible that Israelis think sniping children is fine if one accepts your premise that Jews (all Jews!) literally Other gentiles into a "not human" category. You might believe this, but it's not actually accurate.
Do I believe that here and there, some fucked up soldiers have done fucked up things, like sniping children? Yes. Shit happens in war. Do I believe this is either explicitly or implicitly endorsed by the IDF? No. They might not spend a lot of time investigating claims by Al-Jazeera or looking too deeply into an accusation that Sergeant Steiner shot a kid, but they haven't been given the go-ahead to individually target civilians.
People have already talked a lot about the unlikelihood of military rounds (whether 7.62 or 5.56) entering a child's head and staying there, rather than turning it into an exploding pumpkin as it exits. Ballistics can be weird and unlikely things can happen, so one or two X-rays of kids with 7.62 shells in them? Maybe. Happening on a daily basis? A rash of children with 7.62 rounds in their skulls who are still alive? Come on now.
Basically, this story does not pass the sniff test on any level, and the NYT writing outrage porn with heavily biased sources is something you would normally readily pick apart.
There’s a reason why I trust the NYT on this specific topic. If the NYT tells me that Assad used poison gas against civilians, I doubt it pending further evidence because it is aligned with American geopolitical interests and the interests of the NYT’s Democrat + wealthy bent. Same with the hilariously biased title reporting on Kamala’s plagiarism today. This is par for the course of NYT. But NYT has no compelling reason to post anti-Israel falsehoods. It doesn’t help Democrats, it doesn’t help their financial status, and it goes against the values of some of the execs who have ties to the Jewish community (CEO and chief editor). Why would the NYT be particularly critical of Israel? I think because the truth actually compels them here. There’s no financial, status, or political reason for them to criticize Israel. Now in this particular article, there is also an element of objective reporting, not pure subjective storymaking. No, it’s not perfectly objective, but polling a good sample of doctors is better than your usual Israel-Gaza coverage.
Re: your point that the doctors are forced to testify like this, they can simply abstain from answering if that were so, or they could answer anonymously. Is Hamas forcing them to answer with a gun to their head? I don’t recall reading this from previous medical workers. One of them is bound to spill the beans.
See: “Israel’s army, for much of its seven decades the country’s pre-eminent secular institution, is increasingly coming under the sway of a national religious movement that has made bold moves across Israeli society in recent years. About 40% of those graduating from the army’s infantry officer schools now come from a national religious community that accounts for 12 to 14% of Jewish Israeli society and is politically more aligned with Israel’s right and far-right political parties and the settler movement. Critics charge that its growing influence – including from the more orthodox portion known as Hardalim – is pursuing its own agenda within the army. Two-fifths of infantry graduate officer cadets now come from section of Israeli society aligned with far-right parties and settler movement” […] “In 1990, 2.5% of the graduate officer cadets of the infantry came form the national religious,” Shaul said. “By 2014 it is 40%. That is three times the representation of the national religious in Jewish Israeli society.” […] “Already we have seen discipline issues [related to national religious ideology] become almost unenforceable, and that has consequences elsewhere, including on issues like the rules of engagement.”
No, it is sufficient to show that there is an extremist section of Jewish Israeli society which is so radical that it would kill enemy children. And that such a section serves in the military at a higher rate. I think I proved this. I also made a general point about how this is a unique vulnerability of the Jewish religion.
Strong disagree. The NYT is emblematic of where the Democrats will be in the future, and the future of the Democrats is a consistently expanding Hamas caucus.
This is why Hamas and Hezbollah felt emboldened to do 10/7 and the expanded rocket attacks, and also why Israel feels pressure to deal with both problems NOW in a significant matter. The Democrats are signaling that within a few cycles sanctions on Israel akin to South Africa or Rhodesia are on the table.
More options
Context Copy link
I know you have not missed the last year of media coverage, therefore I do not believe your conviction that the NYT would not criticize Israel unless they really had the goods and were compelled by a sense of commitment to accuracy to report it.
The NYT does have a wealthy Jewish constituency. It also has a very large and very woke constituency that has been criticizing Israel and signal-boosting the Palestinian narrative since October 8. (Well before that, actually.)
You know this. The NYT is not some bastion of Jewiness that was suddenly forced to admit to Israeli atrocities because they had no choice. Now to be clear, I doubt any NYT reporters are deliberately reporting falsehoods. They might or might not really believe that Israeli soldiers are now routinely and intentionally shooting 5-year-olds. Maybe they think the doctors in Gaza who are claiming this believe it and deserve to be reported, because it's "close enough" to the truth. But they are certainly being as willingly credulous as you in accepting a narrative at face value that tells a story they want to tell.
This isn't what I said, and you know this isn't what I said.
I don't suggest Hamas is holding guns to doctors' heads to force them to make up stories. The NYT clearly did not interview every doctor in Gaza. Do you think any doctor in Gaza would say "No, that definitely isn't happening"? At most, they might say "I haven't seen this."
I do expect at some point we'll hear stories from people who were in Gaza who will be more honest about the Hamas militants in hospitals (I mean, these stories have already gotten out), but (a) they will have to have left Gaza, as will their families; (b) they will have to be people who don't want to cover for Hamas. Which is not a lot of people.
Most medical workers in Gaza, asked "Have you heard of the IDF shooting children?" will probably say "Yes, I've heard that's happening." Some will also have seen children brought to the hospital who've been shot.Were they shot deliberately? The family might say so. Is the medical worker going to disbelieve them?
Take a handful of actual incidents, a large proportion of sympathetic and biased medical workers, and a heavily censored reporting environment, and unsurprisingly it's easy to get a story like "Yes, everyone agrees the IDF is sniping children." Every war produces these kinds of atrocity stories; many turn out to be untrue. We already have a lot of conflicting narratives about October 7, and about what has happened in Gaza so far.
I cannot resist pointing out the obvious: the evidence for the Holocaust is far more voluminous and convincing, and yet strangely your skepticism comes out in full force on that subject. Why, one wonders, are stories of atrocities committed by Jews so believable, and stories of atrocities committed against Jews so hard to believe? Could you possibly suffer from bias?
That's still 40% and it's their infantry officer schools - a subset of a subset. So you tried to quietly move the goalposts from "Most Israeli soldiers are religious extremists" to "40% of infantry officers are from right-leaning religious communities." While this might be cause for concern within Israel, it still does not follow that even these 40% believe the things you claim, that murdering children is totally moral.
This is not sufficient when your claim is that the IDF is now routinely sniping children and Israelis are okay with it. There is an extremist section of every society radical enough to say "Kill the enemy, including their children." We have no shortage of them here in the US, and they come in right, left, secular and religious, woke and Dissident Right.
The number of people in the Israeli military who believe it's fine to shoot children is greater than the number of people in the general Israeli population? Yes, I am confident you could say the same thing about the US military (or nearly any military) as well.
Yes, and your point was weak and poorly argued; it amounted to "Jews are awful and they are different from Christians, therefore it's easy to believe awful things about what they believe." There are plenty of Christian extremists with awful views and some of them join the military. A while ago there was a spate of stories about white nationalists infiltrating the Special Forces. I suspect you would be both more skeptical about the threat and protest about the unfair characterization of so-called white nationalists.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link