naraburns nihil supernum
1yr ago
(text post)
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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.
But I don't think 2rafa believes a pious 90 IQ Mizrahim settler is morally less worthy than a 150 IQ Persian academic (despite likely preferring the company of the latter);
Are many settlers Mizrachim? In any case I find the settlements project inanely justified by a religious ideology I don’t believe in and unnecessarily provocative at best. The ‘67 borders are amenable to me, although I’d have the Saudis run the Palestinian state. As for who should be in power, well you know my opinion of democracy.
Many of my friends were (gentile) Persians growing up, and many of them still are. It is entirely feasible that a smart Persian academic, even one committed to Israel’s destruction, might have higher moral worth than a 90 IQ Religious Zionist. Iranian hostility to Israel is the result of a PR exercise by the mullahs, it can evaporate within months of regime change. Palestinian hostility, due to the fundamental nature of dispossession, is much more intractable.
‘My people’ are smart, secular, Ashkenazim, although we have thrown our lot in with some I find much more unsavory. Nevertheless, when it comes to broad principles, Iran isn’t discriminating between the settlement fanatic (few or none of whom seem to have been killed on Saturday) and a version of me in Israel, so there is little choice in whom to support for now.
And you cannot disconnect IQ from moral worth entirely. It is immoral when something beautiful is destroyed by something uglier and more vulgar. This is in part why we find rape so abhorrent, it is why the Mongol horde razing civilization to the ground is such a deeply ingrained (often subconscious) cultural motif. So yes, Bronze Age savagery by a people who have not contributed to the wider human race in a millennium and who would rather live in poverty and squalor than kneel is morally less noble than, say, the settlement of the Americas by Europeans, regardless of the individual moral worth of members of that culture.
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Notes -
Are many settlers Mizrachim? In any case I find the settlements project inanely justified by a religious ideology I don’t believe in and unnecessarily provocative at best. The ‘67 borders are amenable to me, although I’d have the Saudis run the Palestinian state. As for who should be in power, well you know my opinion of democracy.
Many of my friends were (gentile) Persians growing up, and many of them still are. It is entirely feasible that a smart Persian academic, even one committed to Israel’s destruction, might have higher moral worth than a 90 IQ Religious Zionist. Iranian hostility to Israel is the result of a PR exercise by the mullahs, it can evaporate within months of regime change. Palestinian hostility, due to the fundamental nature of dispossession, is much more intractable.
‘My people’ are smart, secular, Ashkenazim, although we have thrown our lot in with some I find much more unsavory. Nevertheless, when it comes to broad principles, Iran isn’t discriminating between the settlement fanatic (few or none of whom seem to have been killed on Saturday) and a version of me in Israel, so there is little choice in whom to support for now.
And you cannot disconnect IQ from moral worth entirely. It is immoral when something beautiful is destroyed by something uglier and more vulgar. This is in part why we find rape so abhorrent, it is why the Mongol horde razing civilization to the ground is such a deeply ingrained (often subconscious) cultural motif. So yes, Bronze Age savagery by a people who have not contributed to the wider human race in a millennium and who would rather live in poverty and squalor than kneel is morally less noble than, say, the settlement of the Americas by Europeans, regardless of the individual moral worth of members of that culture.
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