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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 23, 2023

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sorry, is it "obviously" true or not that "Flood" is a clear reference to the Hamas-run terrorist attack?

  1. Obviously? No, because it also an extremely common English language metaphor for a large number of persons, items, etc, arriving somewhere at the same time.
  2. More importantly, given OP's claim, the issue is whether attendees at the protest understand it to bea reference to the attack. Because OP's claim is that broad support for Hamas has expanded.

As for the rest, you don't seem to understand my objection. As I said:

You are making a causal claim here, but in order to determine whether it is actually true, you need to have:

  1. Actual data, not just anecdotes re support for Hamas (not Palestine) before the attack
  2. Actual data, not just anecdotes re support for Hamas (not Palestine) after the attack
  3. The ability to control for the effect of the subsequent and ongoing air raids by Israel on Gaza

There might well be evidence of #1 and #2 that will come to the fore at some point. There might be survey data that has been collected by some researcher or another, or it might eventually be found in one of the many datasets of contentious poiitics that are out there, though they don't generally capture low level events such as might have occurred pre-attack. But as of right now, the evidence that there has been "increased support for Hamas in the West", as OP claims, let alone that any such increase was caused by "the brutality of the terrorism," as opposed to the Israeli response, is so lacking that it is silly to hypothesize about the mechanism behind that causal relationship, for the simple reason that we have no reason to believe that that causal relationship exists.

Note also that for every anecdote of yours, I can counter with someone who was formerly fine with the DSA's support for Hamas leaving the organization. I can spin that as a drop in support for Hamas. That's why we need actual data, not cherry picked anecdotes.