I promised some people longer responses:
- Thomas Cotter asks why people think “consistency” is an important moral value. After all, he says, the Nazis and Soviets were “consistent” with their evil beliefs. I’m not so sure of his examples - the Soviets massacred workers striking for better conditions, and the Nazis were so bad at race science that they banned IQ tests after Jews outscored Aryans - but I’m sure if he looked harder he could find some evil person who was superficially consistent with themselves.
- Hen Mazzig on Twitter is suspicious that lots of people oppose the massacres in Gaza without having objected equally strenuously to various other things. Again, he’s bad at examples - most of the things he names are less bad than the massacres in Gaza - but I’m sure if he looked harder he could find some thing which was worse than Gaza and which not quite as many people had protested. Therefore, people who object to the massacres in Gaza must be motivated by anti-Semitism.
- An r/TrueUnpopularOpinion poster argues that No One Actually Cares About Gaza; Your Anger Is Performative. They say that (almost) nobody can actually sustain strong emotions about the deaths of some hard-to-pin-down number of people they don’t know, and so probably people who claim to care are virtue-signaling or luxury-believing or one of those things.
Since 2/3 of these are about Gaza, we’ll start there. And since there’s so much virtue-signaling and luxury-believing going around these days, I assure you that what I am about to share is my absolute most honest and deepest opinion, the one I hold in my heart of hearts.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/my-heart-of-hearts
