naraburns nihil supernum
1yr ago
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Israel-Gaza Megathread #1
This is a megathread for any posts on the conflict between (so far, and so far as I know) Hamas and the Israeli government, as well as related geopolitics. Culture War thread rules apply.
Given a sufficiently high level of initial sympathy, “look what atrocities they’re committing” turns into “how far must have they been pushed to commit such horrible atrocities?”.
Which is why you don’t make decisions based on feeling. That’s the issue here. You have sympathy, but it’s turned off your brain, to the point that you can justify horrible things because the people who did it are the “oppressed”.
On the other hand, there does exist what I feel is a general demand, in these discussions and elsewhere, for people who have previously had a pro-Palestine stance (generally based on opinions like "occupations are bad" and "Palestinians deserve civil rights like all other nations) to drop that stance and reverse at once based on, essentially, the strong feelings aroused by clips of civilians getting killed and women's bodies paraded around on cars.
What percentage of people do you think would agree with both "decades of harsh occupation and blockade are awful" and "decades of harsh occupation and blockade do not justify terror bombing or massacres of civilians"? I'd think that those would both be supermajority positions, but it certainly seems that the people who speak most loudly about the problem tend to drop one claim or the other.
the strong feelings aroused by clips of civilians getting killed and women's bodies paraded around on cars
Inducing strong feelings is the whole reason why the murderers are performing the killing and the parading while filming clips of it, right? Nobody was thinking "we'd love to capture one more APC, but we can't spare the soldiers because the bomb shelters and music festival are more strategically significant military targets". If they're mispredicting exactly which strong feelings are induced, that's at least partly on them, though it's still tragic that innocent Palestinians will suffer for it too.
A civilization that parades around naked dead corpses of young woman civilians is a civilization that doesn’t deserve civil rights. Level up from your barbarism and sure, I can get behind that. Note there are Arab states — even if not western — that deserve civil rights.
Applying civil rights to "a civilization" is a category error; the people within each civilization are the ones who deserve the civil rights.
We're not quite 20 years out from the leak of photos which "show torture, abuse, rape and every indecency" among the abuses at Abu Ghraib, which included women. The people to blame for that abuse didn't deserve all their civil rights afterward, and to its credit the US legal system generally agreed (albeit with prison sentences of months to less than a decade at most...), but it would have been wildly excessive to spread such a high level of blame around to every American in the same civilization.
Ironically, collective punishment is itself a war crime, and its classification as such is one of the things we like to think distinguishes us from barbarians. That's perhaps still more of an aspiration than an accomplishment at this point, but so much the worse for our "civilization".
But that’s my point. Abu Ghraib was a shame to the US (and clearly the soldiers intended to keep it quiet). Here, the Palestinians writ large are celebrating the atrocities and making them known. The different reactions demonstrate the different culture assent.
I'm still solidly "Collective punishment is bad", but I have to admit: if we could mete out omnisciently accurate individual punishment, some collectives might have a much larger fraction of punished individuals than others...
People compare Hamas to Nazis.
That's not fair.
Nazis knew killing Jews was wrong.
(...) If you do not support Israel & the Jews, you are literally worse than the Nazis.
People that have lived perhaps for 4 generations under Israeli rule are worse than Nazis?
Who could be responsible for this state of affairs?
The experiment is not perfect, we would need control groups of Palestinians strictly administered by China, France, Russia, UK, Germany, Italy, etc, to see if Israel is just particularly bad at this exercise.
Comparisons can be made with various colonies...
Tough luck for Israelis to get involved in Western-style colonization so late in the game.
That's an large and important distinction, but even here I'd point out that a "culture" isn't a homogeneous thing. You don't pose for thousands of photos of something you expect to keep secret from everybody; you do so because you can observe you're part of a subculture, large enough to control a prison with several thousand prisoners, which assents to the photo contents. Turned out the assent wasn't universal enough to stop photos from leaking, which is another point in our culture's favor, I admit. The fact that Hamas fighters don't expect to be knifed in their sleep by any lone-wolf ashamed countrymen, much less put on trial and jailed as war criminals by a majority in power, isn't a point in theirs'.
I agree, I’m presenting my best guess as to the mindset of people discussed in the OP.
The key point is that worldviews tend to become self-reinforcing. The world is sufficiently complicated that an intelligent person can almost always find a way to (unconsciously) fit an unexpected event into their worldview. And the people who aren’t sufficiently intelligent will mostly follow their leaders.
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Notes -
Given a sufficiently high level of initial sympathy, “look what atrocities they’re committing” turns into “how far must have they been pushed to commit such horrible atrocities?”.
Which is why you don’t make decisions based on feeling. That’s the issue here. You have sympathy, but it’s turned off your brain, to the point that you can justify horrible things because the people who did it are the “oppressed”.
On the other hand, there does exist what I feel is a general demand, in these discussions and elsewhere, for people who have previously had a pro-Palestine stance (generally based on opinions like "occupations are bad" and "Palestinians deserve civil rights like all other nations) to drop that stance and reverse at once based on, essentially, the strong feelings aroused by clips of civilians getting killed and women's bodies paraded around on cars.
What percentage of people do you think would agree with both "decades of harsh occupation and blockade are awful" and "decades of harsh occupation and blockade do not justify terror bombing or massacres of civilians"? I'd think that those would both be supermajority positions, but it certainly seems that the people who speak most loudly about the problem tend to drop one claim or the other.
Inducing strong feelings is the whole reason why the murderers are performing the killing and the parading while filming clips of it, right? Nobody was thinking "we'd love to capture one more APC, but we can't spare the soldiers because the bomb shelters and music festival are more strategically significant military targets". If they're mispredicting exactly which strong feelings are induced, that's at least partly on them, though it's still tragic that innocent Palestinians will suffer for it too.
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A civilization that parades around naked dead corpses of young woman civilians is a civilization that doesn’t deserve civil rights. Level up from your barbarism and sure, I can get behind that. Note there are Arab states — even if not western — that deserve civil rights.
Applying civil rights to "a civilization" is a category error; the people within each civilization are the ones who deserve the civil rights.
We're not quite 20 years out from the leak of photos which "show torture, abuse, rape and every indecency" among the abuses at Abu Ghraib, which included women. The people to blame for that abuse didn't deserve all their civil rights afterward, and to its credit the US legal system generally agreed (albeit with prison sentences of months to less than a decade at most...), but it would have been wildly excessive to spread such a high level of blame around to every American in the same civilization.
Ironically, collective punishment is itself a war crime, and its classification as such is one of the things we like to think distinguishes us from barbarians. That's perhaps still more of an aspiration than an accomplishment at this point, but so much the worse for our "civilization".
But that’s my point. Abu Ghraib was a shame to the US (and clearly the soldiers intended to keep it quiet). Here, the Palestinians writ large are celebrating the atrocities and making them known. The different reactions demonstrate the different culture assent.
I know I shouldn't let myself be swayed further by an argument's rhetoric than by it's logic, but Michael Shermer really found a damning framing supporting your point.
I'm still solidly "Collective punishment is bad", but I have to admit: if we could mete out omnisciently accurate individual punishment, some collectives might have a much larger fraction of punished individuals than others...
Not the great argument Shemer thinks it is.
People that have lived perhaps for 4 generations under Israeli rule are worse than Nazis? Who could be responsible for this state of affairs? The experiment is not perfect, we would need control groups of Palestinians strictly administered by China, France, Russia, UK, Germany, Italy, etc, to see if Israel is just particularly bad at this exercise. Comparisons can be made with various colonies... Tough luck for Israelis to get involved in Western-style colonization so late in the game.
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That's an large and important distinction, but even here I'd point out that a "culture" isn't a homogeneous thing. You don't pose for thousands of photos of something you expect to keep secret from everybody; you do so because you can observe you're part of a subculture, large enough to control a prison with several thousand prisoners, which assents to the photo contents. Turned out the assent wasn't universal enough to stop photos from leaking, which is another point in our culture's favor, I admit. The fact that Hamas fighters don't expect to be knifed in their sleep by any lone-wolf ashamed countrymen, much less put on trial and jailed as war criminals by a majority in power, isn't a point in theirs'.
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I agree, I’m presenting my best guess as to the mindset of people discussed in the OP.
The key point is that worldviews tend to become self-reinforcing. The world is sufficiently complicated that an intelligent person can almost always find a way to (unconsciously) fit an unexpected event into their worldview. And the people who aren’t sufficiently intelligent will mostly follow their leaders.
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