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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   25227 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 30, 2023

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But being neither Muslim nor Jewish and having only one friend who's either, I struggle to think of a plausible conduit by which shenannegains in the holy land could ever become relevant to me.

"But being neither Austrian nor Bosnian, and having only one friend who's either, I struggle to think of a plausible conduit by which a political assassination in the Balkans could ever become relevant to me."

I mean, really? Israel is a nuclear power, backed by the biggest superpower in the world. Hamas is backed, formally or tacitly, by a host of Middle Eastern nations, at least one of which (Iran) is a nuclear power has an active nuclear program. The Palestinian conflict has been threatening to spill over and become something much graver than a territorial squabble for decades.

Even without literal WW3 breaking out, there are lots of ways the conflict could directly impact on you, personally, even without you being Jewish or Muslim. One example off the top of my head: a full-scale boycott of Israeli companies modelled on that enacted upon apartheid-era South Africa (as advocated for by Ilhan Omar, among many others) would have all kinds of unforeseen and potentially destabilizing effects upon the global economy.

Is the Palestinian conflict less relevant to the average Briton than, say, Rishi Sunak's economic policies? Of course. But I'd argue it's more relevant (or at least potentially relevant) than what Meghan Markle had for breakfast, or "underrepresentation of BAME people in BBC radio dramas", or Trump's dirty laundry - so it seems odd to use this as an example of the general trend of "media pushing non-stories to distract the hoi polloi".

Adopting your attitude would make investing impossible, for example: the commodity might go down instead of up, just as the news might prove relevant rather than a nothingburger.

I think there's a world of difference between making an educated prediction that [story] is unlikely to have any direct impact on your life, and explicitly stating that it never will. OP sounded closer in tone to the latter, at least as far as my reading went.

Hamas is backed, formally or tacitly, by a host of Middle Eastern nations, at least one of which (Iran) is a nuclear power.

I don't think Iran is known to be a nuclear power, at least as I understand the phrase (possessing nuclear weaponry).

Upon further investigation you are correct, but the country does have an active nuclear weapons program and are working towards the goal of having nuclear weapons at their disposal. Or perhaps it might be accurate to say that any nuclear weapons Iran might possess are not a matter of public record as in the case of the US, Russia etc.

As with Isreal, it's not officially acknowledged but it is essentially an open secret.

It's well known that Iran wants to be a nuclear power but I've never seen even one bit of credible speculation that Iran would actually have a working nuclear weapon.

Perhaps I’m playing devil’s advocate, but the assassination’s significance was immediately noticed.

War Declared By Austria Against Servia; Russia Will Help Serbs To Resist Invasion; Germany Rejects British Mediation Proposal

The Washington Post, 14 July, 1914.

Sure, but imagine you pulled a list of the names of the British soldiers who died in the battle of the Somme. Do you think that if you went back in time to January 1914 and asked them for their thoughts on Archduke Ferdinand, the majority of them would have the slightest idea who you were talking about? I'm quite confident the default response would be something to the effect of "never heard of him, nothing to do with me". Maybe some of them would have been vaguely aware of who he was in the same way that I know the leader of France is named Emmanuel Macron, but surely the majority would never be able to foresee a future in which Ferdinand's death directly leads to their own.

I'm not saying that anyone living in the UK is likely to die as a direct result of the conflict in Palestine escalating. I'm simply trying to illustrate that you never actually know which world events will eventually end up affecting you, and it isn't hard to end up with egg on your face. And if I was trying to pick an example of a global issue which has a negligibly small chance of affecting me personally, the conflict in Palestine wouldn't be at the top of my list.

Maybe some of them would have been vaguely aware of who he was in the same way that I know the leader of France is named Emmanuel Macron, but surely the majority would never be able to foresee a future in which Ferdinand's death directly leads to their own.

Frank Ferdinand was de jure commander in chief of the Austrian military(as was at that point the norm for Austrian crown princes) and asking a British soldier ‘how does the top Austrian field marshal’s death possibly relate to your own’ would not seem terribly implausible even if the chain of causes would probably be wrong.

Sure, but lots of soldiers who died in the Somme weren't soldiers in January 1914 - a million men enlisted between August 1914 and January 1915, and the UK introduced conscription in 1916.

‘How does an Austrian field marshal’s death lead to yours’ has a pretty obvious answer for a British man in early 1914, though- I go into the army during a war.

Try asking young American men how a high ranking Russian/Chinese/Iranian military officer’s death could be connected to theirs. Most could point to an at least plausible chain of causality, even if they’re not that geopolitically aware.

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