That’s a mechanism by which I might overestimate the support for Hamas. But the thing I’m trying to explain is the overall alignment between leftists and Hamas, which is not just a twitter bubble thing (e.g. see university encampments).
More generally, leftists profess many values which are upheld the most by western civilization (e.g. support for sexual freedom, women’s rights, anti-racism, etc). But then in conflicts they often side specifically against western civilization. This seems like a straightforward example of pessimization.
More generally, leftists profess many values which are upheld the most by western civilization (e.g. support for sexual freedom, women’s rights, anti-racism, etc). But then in conflicts they often side specifically against western civilization. This seems like a straightforward example of pessimization.
Not at all. The trend is that in any given context, American leftists tend to support the ‘weaker’ group against the stronger group, regardless of the merits of the individual cases. They have a world model that says that that most social problems come from “big” people hurting “little” people, and believe the focus of their politics should be remedying this. In the case of Israel-Palestine, Israel and the United States are much more militarily and economically powerful than Gaza, so ceteris paribus[1] they side with Gaza, just as they side with women, ethnic minorities, the poor, etc. You may disagree with this behavior but it’s fairly consistent.
By contrast, the argument that Israel is a bastion of western values and therefore leftists should support its war against a smaller neighbor is kind of abstract. The immediate outcome of Israel winning the war is just that Israel gets stronger, not that women in Gaza become more free. There’s also a thing there about Gazans being brown and Israelis not, etc...
None of this has anything to do with liberals pessimizing their own values, and it feels like you must have a blind spot somewhere if you’re reaching for that explanation when there’s a much simpler and more obvious one readily available.
Liberals’ protests in support of Palestine are additionally amplified as a result of a media diet that drip feeds them an artificially strong amount of Israeli war crimes, instead of western liberal hysteria.
This characterizes leftists sufficiently dishonestly that I think you’ve gotten mindkilled by politics. As people keep removing my (entirely accurate and if anything understated) soldier-mindset reacts, I will strong-downvote instead :)
I think you’re confusing levels of behavior, here. It may be that their net effect is to support Hamas, but that they don’t intend this, and that their actual intent does not make the mistake you’re (at least if I read correctly) attributing to intent here. I do think they end up on net having intentions that make them vulnerable to being manipulated by those in power in adversary groups, since their intent is to support the weak among any group. In particular, they typically are thinking in different group selectors than you seem to assign here; of the people I’d guess you mean, in my interactions with them, they don’t seem to profess support for Hamas, and in fact explicitly say they’d like to support palestinians without supporting hamas.
But, I strongly agree that leftists tend to pessimize their values on net, and that that is one of the biggest issues with leftist approaches to the world. So whether we disagree depends on what level we’re looking at.
Your reasoning seems like it would be improved by finding people who seem to exhibit the belief you suspect exists and want to model, and interviewing them without letting your opinions leak, to try to get a map of their actual opinions; before making this comment I spent some time brainstorming to find a way to do that fast, and didn’t come up with one, so perhaps it makes sense to not take this suggestion, but I maintain that it would be useful if practical. As a stopgap, going to the main locations that a group discuss things online can be useful, keeping in mind that then one will have uncertainty like the kind I have about you: you seem overall to be a good person as far as I’ve been able to tell so far, but you interact enough with people whose personal policies in practice support things that seem to me like they’re at imminent risk of causing human-induced catastrophic outcomes for many of the humans in the world that it’s unclear to me what your intentions are.
That’s a mechanism by which I might overestimate the support for Hamas. But the thing I’m trying to explain is the overall alignment between leftists and Hamas, which is not just a twitter bubble thing (e.g. see university encampments).
More generally, leftists profess many values which are upheld the most by western civilization (e.g. support for sexual freedom, women’s rights, anti-racism, etc). But then in conflicts they often side specifically against western civilization. This seems like a straightforward example of pessimization.
Not at all. The trend is that in any given context, American leftists tend to support the ‘weaker’ group against the stronger group, regardless of the merits of the individual cases. They have a world model that says that that most social problems come from “big” people hurting “little” people, and believe the focus of their politics should be remedying this. In the case of Israel-Palestine, Israel and the United States are much more militarily and economically powerful than Gaza, so ceteris paribus[1] they side with Gaza, just as they side with women, ethnic minorities, the poor, etc. You may disagree with this behavior but it’s fairly consistent.
By contrast, the argument that Israel is a bastion of western values and therefore leftists should support its war against a smaller neighbor is kind of abstract. The immediate outcome of Israel winning the war is just that Israel gets stronger, not that women in Gaza become more free. There’s also a thing there about Gazans being brown and Israelis not, etc...
None of this has anything to do with liberals pessimizing their own values, and it feels like you must have a blind spot somewhere if you’re reaching for that explanation when there’s a much simpler and more obvious one readily available.
Liberals’ protests in support of Palestine are additionally amplified as a result of a media diet that drip feeds them an artificially strong amount of Israeli war crimes, instead of western liberal hysteria.
This characterizes leftists sufficiently dishonestly that I think you’ve gotten mindkilled by politics. As people keep removing my (entirely accurate and if anything understated) soldier-mindset reacts, I will strong-downvote instead :)
I think you’re confusing levels of behavior, here. It may be that their net effect is to support Hamas, but that they don’t intend this, and that their actual intent does not make the mistake you’re (at least if I read correctly) attributing to intent here. I do think they end up on net having intentions that make them vulnerable to being manipulated by those in power in adversary groups, since their intent is to support the weak among any group. In particular, they typically are thinking in different group selectors than you seem to assign here; of the people I’d guess you mean, in my interactions with them, they don’t seem to profess support for Hamas, and in fact explicitly say they’d like to support palestinians without supporting hamas.
But, I strongly agree that leftists tend to pessimize their values on net, and that that is one of the biggest issues with leftist approaches to the world. So whether we disagree depends on what level we’re looking at.
Your reasoning seems like it would be improved by finding people who seem to exhibit the belief you suspect exists and want to model, and interviewing them without letting your opinions leak, to try to get a map of their actual opinions; before making this comment I spent some time brainstorming to find a way to do that fast, and didn’t come up with one, so perhaps it makes sense to not take this suggestion, but I maintain that it would be useful if practical. As a stopgap, going to the main locations that a group discuss things online can be useful, keeping in mind that then one will have uncertainty like the kind I have about you: you seem overall to be a good person as far as I’ve been able to tell so far, but you interact enough with people whose personal policies in practice support things that seem to me like they’re at imminent risk of causing human-induced catastrophic outcomes for many of the humans in the world that it’s unclear to me what your intentions are.