At the time of this writing, it’s become expected for everybody on social media to have an opinion about the Israeli-Palestine conflict. Much like Gamergate or the election of Trump in 2016, Israel-Palestine is the gift that keeps on giving. It’s what I call the “Current Thing”: the one topic society expects us to speak out about. Current Things are basically topics that are so politicized and tribal that both political tribes demand that you must form an opinion on it and preach it loudly at all times. If you try to avoid the subject on social media and just keep posting adorable cat pictures instead, pretty soon members of both tribes will start circling you on social media, saying menacing things like “Your lack of comment about (Current Thing) is very telling,” or “Your silence on (Current Thing) speaks volumes.”
I usually try not to form an opinion about Current Thing, because most of our mainstream media is so retarded and lazy that they never bother to fact-check things, even though that’s really the only thing that justifies their continued existence. A hospital in Gaza blew up? Well, Hamas said it must have been the Israelis, and CBS repeated it, so now the BBC and CNN have to parrot the same information. The idea that maybe you should hold off on making a claim until you’re certain that it’s true just isn’t a part of mainstream journalism anymore, which is why I believe in waiting a couple of days for the fog of misinformation to clear. But it isn’t just the mainstream media that does this: it’s everybody. Remember the death of George Floyd? A lot of ignorant BLM protesters were rioting about this, saying that it was “a miscarriage of justice” that his murderer wasn’t punished. But in fact, the wheels of justice worked perfectly fine: Derek Chauvin was sentenced to prison for murder and many of the cops who stood by got correspondingly heavy sentences. The reason BLM was rioting was because they were upset that justice wasn’t delivered immediately. Like children having a temper tantrum, they wanted Chauvin to be thrown in jail right away, and the idea that legal trials take time never seems to have crossed their mind. Apparently we were supposed to lock a man in prison and throw away the key without even hearing out both sides of the story, just because a lot of people got upset.
For reasons like this, I prefer to hold off on talking about the latest “Current Thing” until the news cycle has had the chance to go through a few iterations, and we have a better sense of what the facts are. However, I’m making an exception here because very few people have expressed anything similar to my opinion. Clearly I have some unique views on this subject, and you deserve to hear them.
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