the_dunk_tank

explaining to a crying dust-covered Palestinian child that they can't have an opinion about their parents and cousins all being torn to shreds by US-sourced Israeli-fired bombs because

"There are too many variables! We can't tell what is going on" is simultaneously the reason we can't have health care and the reason we have to keep dropping bombs all over the Middle East.

If anybody tries to tell you that a geopolitical situation is "too complicated" to understand, in 99.9% of situations they're some combination of a) trying to make you stop caring about it because they know it counters their ideology, or b) they don't understand it themselves and don't want to embarrass themselves trying to explain it. The vast majority of people on planet Earth have the capacity to understand what is going on in Palestine.

There's certainly a good amount of history there, but most history can be adequately simplified, and this conflict is no exception: it began with the British Empire giving away their Middle Eastern colony to fledgling Zionists, and the Palestinians who were native to the land were forcibly driven off in the late 1940s. The land that the Palestinians occupy shrank over time due to continued oppression and wars until the present day. The Zionists fought wars with neighbouring countries like Egypt and Lebanon over the decades, with both victories and defeats, and have conducted sabotage and economic sanctions across various countries in the region with the help of the United States to crush states that would not bend the knee to them (Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Iran) and install Zionism-friendly leaders in other countries (Egypt, Jordan, the various gulf monarchies outside of Qatar). Zionism, by definition, relies on settlers to come along and take land that was once owned by Palestinians, and their explicitly stated, proud goal is to expand their settler-colony across a wide swathe of the Middle East, into Iraq and Egypt.

Not a single word of that was remotely opinionated. I could give that summary to a Zionist and they could think I was being pro-Zionist, and I could give that summary to a Palestinian and they could think I was being pro-Palestinian. Many (I would hope most) people would agree that settler-colonies that drive people off the land are an anachronism that belongs to, like, the 19th century, and not the 21st. Zionists think that doing all that is fine because they believe that the Palestinians are subhuman; I know this because - beyond all the ones you can find online telling you that that is what they believe and being proud of it - believing a certain type of people to be subhuman is a prerequisite for approving and conducting bombing raids that kill tens of thousands of civilians with only a very minor military advantage to be gained.

With all that out of the way, I also expect this person believes that the Russia-Ukraine conflict is extremely simple (Putin = very bad evil man, Ukraine = epic good guys Avengers), despite, again, there being significant history there that MUST be understood. It's not a difficult history to learn if you have about half an hour of free time and, most importantly, an actual willingness to learn that information.

"I haven't done ANY research on this topic, but I keep getting owned by people who have done A BIT of research on this topic. Clearly this is because those people are a bunch of arrogant nerds who are so smart that they are stupid. My purely vibes based take on the situation I got from passively consuming popular media is the moral and nuanced take on the issue!"

-Every Lib Ever

Don't you know that you need a PhD to understand that genocide is bad?

"The U.S. wants a vassal state in the Levant to further it's own geopolitical interests" Damn that relationship is 2Complicated4me.

Gonna pull my good 'ol Chomper card

The last paradox is that the tale of Palestine from the beginning until today is a simple story of colonialism and dispossession, yet the world treats it as a multifaceted and complex story—hard to understand and even harder to solve."

Noam Chomper

Fuckin everyone on Reddit becomes a scholar of several dozen disciplines at the drop of a hat. The smarm is unbearable.

"Never underestimate stupid"

Say the libs who believe everything the state department says about US enemies

I absolutely can't with people anymore

soy Ted Lasso fascist NPC dialog lol

If it's too complex for you to understand, how can you know it isn't ultimately all one sides fault? And if you've come to the conclusion it isn't, surely you could show how you reached that conclusion?

Also lmao at it being the "most complicated conundrum" ever.

Yes, slaughtering people and stealing their land is just too complex for anyone to understand. Even after watching (or reading about) it for centuries.

Notice how they are excluding themselves from that metric of needing to be a scholar in "several dozen disciplines" in order to "even remotely fathom the complexity", since they are themselves making assertions on what the complexity is.

This is no different than the "neither left nor right" people who are always right wing.

"Both sides just want to murder each other" is what I got from someone who has a history degree and should know better

Israel is evil.

Computer, display OP’s profile, expand his posting history, and search for the key words “Idiocracy”, “documentary.”

The complexity is that sure, Israel is a terrorist state indiscriminately slaughtering thousands of innocents and that's not great, but we also really really really want a military base in the middle east so, yknow, we can't just tell them to stop.

What lack of class awareness does

I think this is a very interesting insight into how their minds operate. It seems that when they call things "complicated" what they mean is "my team supports this thing, but that seems wrong, so it must just mean there's a really intelligent and good reason why they do and I just don't want to admit I don't actually know why I'm supporting this obviously wrong thing."

In other words, the louder libs shout about things being "complicated" the harder they are trying to drown out and ignore their cognitive dissonance. This being the "most complicated conundrum" means that this guy is being called an amoral scumbag for doing this, but he's utterly bewildered, because he's on the good guy team, which means he can't by definition be amoral. So his only conclusion is that people just "don't understand" because he's an intelligent liberal and he doesn't understand, therefore those other people certainly don't, after all, it's just soooo complicated. cognitive dissonance resolved, ego preserved.