“I Ain’t Reading All That; Free Palestine”
The meme enrages Israel supporters because Israel apologia depends on mountains of verbiage to spin obvious atrocities as reasonable and appropriate. At some point the kids noticed this was happening, and started dismissing all the narratives.
…Without mountains of narrative, all you’ve got is a nonstop deluge of raw video footage depicting the blatant genocidal criminality of Israel. No narrative overlay is required atop a video of a baby beheaded by Israeli military explosives. It stands on its own. You’d only need narrative to explain why the footage of the headless baby doesn’t say bad things about the side that’s dropping the bombs.
…Manipulators understand that they can use narrative to promote material agendas if they can get people to believe those narratives, and it enrages them when people handwave away the narrative and stick solely with the raw data of material reality. If you’ve based your life around trading empty narrative fluff for real material resources and gains, having your narratives dismissed can feel like holding a huge pile of currency that suddenly got devalued to zero. Of course the manipulators would be upset about this.
Honestly though whenever people say this I just assume they are absolute morons. Like if you aren’t willing to read a few sentences then I don’t l know how you could possibly think your opinion on anything is in any way informed.
What’s one thing you read and researched that really makes you sympathize with Israel?
Israel is a country so I don’t know how one could sympathize with such a conceptual idea. But I generally try to sympathize everyone who is negatively affected by a conflict and there certainly are some Israelis who have been (hostages for example). But of course, in the current moment, that is a distraction from the primary issue of ongoing ethnic cleansing by the IDF.
I don’t know what that has to do with what I’m saying though. Ignorant people can still be on the right side of an issue by chance. But I don’t think we should be celebrating willful ignorance like this.
They didn’t flip a quarter, they’ve made up their minds having seen the atrocities. Ignoring hasbara is a critical reaction.
Instead of a quarter they trust information from their peers and the media they happen to consume. Through the same uninformed process, many people also support Israel. This is why genocide happens, and if you navigate the world in willful ignorance, you will find yourself on the wrong side of a future issue.
People who get like this are the ones tired of dealing with morons. You, for example.
Ra ra me tribe good, you tribe evil!
Is that better?
That’s about the level of intelligence I get when I make actual arguments. Much better.
If only there was some way to influence people into taking political discourse and educating themselves about complicated topics more seriously. Maybe we could even write something advocating for that on a public forum.
But where would we find the people who need to see this message? Maybe in a highly upvoted meme post that lionizes willful ignorance?
What you fail to understand is that when you’ve dedicated hundreds of hours of sincere effort trying to take down a wall and realize you’re no closer now than you were at the beginning, you just step back and look at the people bashing their head against it and say: “Hey, this isn’t working. It might not be worth the effort.”
So hey, it’s not worth the effort, free Palestine.