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 -
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