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.
I'm not surprised by the support for Palestine or even Hamas, given how much it's been a cause celebre for a while, but I'm pretty appalled by the number and profile of people cheering the specific tactics, here. The extent that the paraglider has become a specific signal while being pretty strongly tied to what was effectively a group of spree shootings, kidnappings, and rapes is a change of worldview to at least have a new symbol: it's just a change for the worse. Same for people putting "full responsibility" on Israel, or finding hope in a massacre, or what have you.
It'd be one thing if these folk just had their tail between their legs for a few days and then were right back into talking about the newest Israeli overreach -- and there's no small number of people doing that -- but this is the sort of thing that FCFromSSC's Charcoal Briquettes statement was criticizing, except to an even steeper extent.
And it's coming from a lot of people who supposedly should be much more vulnerable to social sanction than rioters or internet randos.
Yes, there were Right Wingers (or actual-fascists) people who did that post-Norway Attacks (or, more often, after the Christchurch), too. But they were both a much more constrained set and hounded out of both mainstream society and of the Right. (And generally not under their own names, because when they were doxxed they'd be rightfully excluded from their jobs). Maybe we're just on the first few days, and that will happen here as well.
Yeah, this is kind of what I was getting at. If they just stayed silent for a few days, gave a halfhearted condemnation about attacking civilian targets, and then waited for the inevitable Israeli killing of civilians in their response to start hating Israel again then I wouldn't really be shocked. But straight up endorsing terrorist attacks on women and children is a huge escalation in rhetoric.
I think the reason this is tolerated more than the same on the right is that most people just think of these people as kind of a joke. It's like in Succession when he tells his kids they aren't serious people. Someone in Harvard Law playing with these radical ideas will just end up a boring drone in corporate America. I had a friend who went to Berkeley Law and he told me that all the people that came in and had written sob stories about being refugees and how they wanted to change the world all took high paying corporate jobs that were the complete opposite of what they claimed they would do. So at the end of they day, these people really aren't going to do much. It makes sense too because to get into an elite school like that, you need to be disciplined and be a conformist. So their radicalism is conformist radicalism that is a playground where you're allowed to be a "radical" without having any consequences.
Meanwhile, the Right actually attacks real power structures. Say what you want about Jan 6 or the Trucker Protest, but they actually seriously threatened elite power structures
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Notes -
I'm not surprised by the support for Palestine or even Hamas, given how much it's been a cause celebre for a while, but I'm pretty appalled by the number and profile of people cheering the specific tactics, here. The extent that the paraglider has become a specific signal while being pretty strongly tied to what was effectively a group of spree shootings, kidnappings, and rapes is a change of worldview to at least have a new symbol: it's just a change for the worse. Same for people putting "full responsibility" on Israel, or finding hope in a massacre, or what have you.
It'd be one thing if these folk just had their tail between their legs for a few days and then were right back into talking about the newest Israeli overreach -- and there's no small number of people doing that -- but this is the sort of thing that FCFromSSC's Charcoal Briquettes statement was criticizing, except to an even steeper extent.
And it's coming from a lot of people who supposedly should be much more vulnerable to social sanction than rioters or internet randos.
Yes, there were Right Wingers (or actual-fascists) people who did that post-Norway Attacks (or, more often, after the Christchurch), too. But they were both a much more constrained set and hounded out of both mainstream society and of the Right. (And generally not under their own names, because when they were doxxed they'd be rightfully excluded from their jobs). Maybe we're just on the first few days, and that will happen here as well.
But I'm not optimistic.
Yeah, this is kind of what I was getting at. If they just stayed silent for a few days, gave a halfhearted condemnation about attacking civilian targets, and then waited for the inevitable Israeli killing of civilians in their response to start hating Israel again then I wouldn't really be shocked. But straight up endorsing terrorist attacks on women and children is a huge escalation in rhetoric.
I think the reason this is tolerated more than the same on the right is that most people just think of these people as kind of a joke. It's like in Succession when he tells his kids they aren't serious people. Someone in Harvard Law playing with these radical ideas will just end up a boring drone in corporate America. I had a friend who went to Berkeley Law and he told me that all the people that came in and had written sob stories about being refugees and how they wanted to change the world all took high paying corporate jobs that were the complete opposite of what they claimed they would do. So at the end of they day, these people really aren't going to do much. It makes sense too because to get into an elite school like that, you need to be disciplined and be a conformist. So their radicalism is conformist radicalism that is a playground where you're allowed to be a "radical" without having any consequences.
Meanwhile, the Right actually attacks real power structures. Say what you want about Jan 6 or the Trucker Protest, but they actually seriously threatened elite power structures
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