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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   27825 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 13, 2025

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But why would Israel take that deal? You want one side (the stronger side) to just give the other side everything it wants, and in fact, to do so after an incident in which thousands of its citizens were killed, tortured, and raped in the most horrific ways possible.

This would be true Christlike turning of the other cheek from Israel.

But in the real world, that never works. To fail to defend yourself only invites contempt and more aggression, which applies as much in international politics as it does on the school play yard. If Israel did what you said, they would inevitably lose their country. And I would say they deserved it. Nothing is so contemptible as a person who doesn't defend their rights.

Turn the other cheek when there is a promise of heavenly rewards. In real life continued cooperation in the face of defection just makes you a chump ripe for the taking.

The Palestinians have played the game right. Continued defection when cooperation is externally imposed by greater powers, promising violence in arabic and pleading innocence in english, lying to internal stakeholders to keep momentum going.

There are plenty of well meaning Israelis who believed that defense is itself an aggressive proposition, that opening their homes and businesses to Gazans would foster cooperation and love. Those people set up open air festivals and farming villages next to Gaza to facilitate such endeavors. For their efforts they were slaughtered and raped on livestream, to the cheering delight of the very Gazans they tried to help.

The Palestinians have played the game right. Continued defection when cooperation is externally imposed by greater powers, promising violence in arabic and pleading innocence in english, lying to internal stakeholders to keep momentum going.

Let's grant their strategy has worked. What I'm then curious about is: why wouldn't it have been better to go even farther? Take whatever deal Clinton was trying to organize and then defect later from a stronger position?

The ones who signed the treaty are not the ones who wield the knife to stab the Israelis in the back later. Arafat signing the Camp David accords would have seen him deposed in an internal Fatah struggle, much less any Hamas action later on. Hamas signs the ceasefire now because all the other Gaza militants are similarly degraded, leaving Hamas relatively strong.

Also, they are pretty stupid. My characterization of 'playing the game right' is more a reflection of their maximalist strategy having unexpected payoffs, not that they received their expected payoffs. The expected Hamas payoff for launching the Oct 7 attack was to prove the IDF incapable and spark a regional war that would crush Israel in a tidal wave of West Bank and Hezbollah militants, or failing that to sit back and eat a campaign of retaliatory airstrikes that leave Hamas intact underground. That payoff did not happen, but the new allies of Hamas - western activists cosplaying as revolutionaries to attack proximate enemies - were happy to take up the Hamas cause for themselves, giving a payoff where one failed earlier. Even if there were no actual payoffs, Hamas and its supporters are perfectly capable of scribbling in their own reality to their internal stakeholders who are themselves predisposed towards conspiracism and matyrdom.

But why would Israel take that deal?

To save the lives of the hostages. They've given up and lost far more than they would have if they simply accepted the first deal that was offered to them - this is a worse outcome from any perspective other than "we need to wipe out the Palestinians for more lebensraum", and even that's debatable. Look at the big list of negative consequences from my earlier post and remember that none of this would happen if Israel just took the first deal.

But in the real world, that never works. To fail to defend yourself only invites contempt and more aggression, which applies as much in international politics as it does on the school play yard. If Israel did what you said, they would inevitably lose their country. And I would say they deserved it. Nothing is so contemptible as a person who doesn't defend their rights.

Actually, in the real world, when you ethnically cleanse undesirable populations for having the wrong religion you engender disgust and hatred in the majority of the rest of the world. Germany would have been better off if they simply gave the Jews the ability to vote and lived together with them - but they took your suggested course of action instead, and now Nazi Germany has been consigned to the dustbin of history. We're already seeing Israeli war criminals fleeing to Argentina to escape prosecution, but it is an open question as to whether or not history finishes the rhyme.

Actually, in the real world, when you ethnically cleanse undesirable populations for having the wrong religion you engender disgust and hatred in the majority of the rest of the world.

Ah yes, this is why Azerbaijan is having so much trouble selling their oil, considering their behavior towards Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh/Artsakh.

And why the world NGO-cracy condemned any attempts to help the Hutu genocidaire refugees in Congo, considering how they kept going after any Tutsis they could get their hands on.

It also explains why Turkey's continued repression of the Kurds got them kicked out of NATO, and why there's massive protests on every college campus about the genocidal atrocities being committed by the Sudanese Arabs towards the Christian and animist black Africans of South Sudan.

/sarcasm.

The Jews of Germany were not trying to kill every ethnic German they could get their hands on.

And the Palestinians released some of the hostages with no conditions, so they're not trying to kill every ethnic Israeli they get their hands on. Absolutes make for poor arguments.

Never before has an exception proven the rule quite so much.

I don't think the fact that the Palestinians released some of the hostages because those hostages were kind to the Palestinian community before being abducted is a particularly strong argument for the idea that the Palestinians are evil monsters who just want to kill all jews for no reason.

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