Asmongold's Twitch channel temporarily banned following racist rant about Palestinians

You've made some excellent points that I'd like to address.

I know people who've spent most of their life studying things like the various conflicts in the middle east, and they're all a hell of a lot less sure about the right and wrong of those situations than the people who spent a few days reading one op ed from someone they liked.

This is anecdotal evidence. It may not be (and I dont think it is) representative of the larger population. I won't reject it, though, because there is still a lot of value in your examples, and I appreciate you making a good response.

I'll say confidence ≠ knowledge. I asserted that the 'media literacy' and 'working from topics you know' will make you more knowledgeable, not more confident.

Your life-long-learning friends likely do know more about these particular conflicts, and are able to understand the nuance required to navigate that conversation.

A hesitance to support one side or the other, or label certain actions as 'right' or 'wrong' is still a deliberate choice. I am reminded of the saying (which i feel i'm butchering), "even inaction is action"

It's, in my opinion, easy to be well informed enough to know how uninformed you are

This is a philosophical landmine that I can't really defuse. I think that knowing what we don't know is one of, if not the singular most difficult aspects of thought that history's greatest thinkers had trouble with. You're not wrong, but I disagree.

but actually getting a meaningful grasp on any of these issues, ESPECIALLY as a foreign outsider who doesn't even speak the language, is so much harder than people want to admit.

'Meaningful grasp' is very loose and can mean a lot of things. 'Actionable understanding' is a term that I prefer, if that's the idea you were aiming for, I disagree. But I could be misunderstanding this.

On this part: "ESPECIALLY as a foreign outsider who doesn't even speak the language". I don't think a distinction needs to be made on language. Sure, cultural differences may play a part, but I'm not sure about language itself. Could you provide an example here on how language may play a part so I can better understand?

My example on this: I don't speak Chinese, which limits access to first-hand sources of prominent societal problems like the Chinese government's censorship of its people (or Tofu Dreg construction), but I can still understand what's going on, and I do have access to translation services. (I will recognize that this could be considered difficult for some people, so your view has validity here.)

For this part: "…is so much harder than people want to admit." I don't really have a baseline for this. So I'll give you that point: 100%. I trust you on that.

I wasn't trying to assert that someone will become an expert quickly or easily. If that is how it appeared, I apologize. I also didnt mean to diminish the work it does take to become an expert.

I am speaking specifically on having a working knowledge of an issue like an international conflict to the point of holding an educated stance to work as a small part of a whole in developing a plan of action to remedy that issue (or, to add in now, even just being knowledgeable enough to see what is coming ahead of us and prepare).

If you want to test this (I'd kind of like to, just to see firsthand because I genuinely want to know); let's pick an esoteric topic, and see if it is truly easy or difficult to get a workable grasp of the topic (enough to have a serious debate perhaps)

For my previous paragraph: I will say, after some short deliberation before posting, it may be cheating on this experiment because I feel like we are primed to be good at digging deep, far better than a layman. I already have the framework myself to do research, like the CIW papers.

Hmm…I'm not so sure now. What are your thoughts? This conversation with you all has provided me with a lot of material to contemplate on and mull over.

Edit: one thing I will say about people who avoid the news is that they avoid the major brunt of the American Culture Wars. They still get ripples of it, but it's not a massive personality-changing overload.

As silly as it sounds, what's the point for someone that already knows the vague details about various happenings in the world and votes for the right people?

It doesn't sound silly at all. You've asked a good question.

Knowing only the vague details results in having an incomplete view, which will warp our opinion, which warps the actions we take to remedy the situation. It's also hard to tell what level of 'vague' our vagueness is (if that makes sense) without the reference point of the more nuanced information. It's even harder to tell if that information we have is truthful.

Let's use the Israel-Palestine conflict (also referred to as the Palestinian Genocide) as our example. First level of vagueness: Israel is fighting terrorists that keep attacking it. Israel = friend, terrorist = bad guys. So those who exist at this level support Israel wholeheartedly. You and I are well-read enough in the topic, I think, to understand how the simplification of the conflict completely warps the perception of who to support (or if we should support anyone at all)

Next level, which i think is what most online activists sit at: Hamas is a reaction to Israel killing Palestinians. Israel is committing war crimes and human rights violations. So, hamas = good guys, Israel = bad guys. So people who exist at this level fully support hamas's fight against Israel. Once again, I feel that we both know this is not right.

So we get further into the nuance. We delve into the origin of Israel in ancient times, the conflict between Judaism and Islam in those times. We move forward, we look into the holocaust, we look into British solutions to a new Jewish homeland. We see the anti-british/anti-american terrorist, paramilitary origin of the IDF high command. We look into the two-stste solution. History of Jihad. Organization and funding of Hamas. Why the people who fund them are funding them (Hint-hint one of their funders are AQ, and another is a well-known US adversary). We analyze why Israel has US connections, what that means for the homeland and the security of the Middle East. That level of stuff.

So we then can understand that this is a nuanced issue, and one we may not know everything. Maybe people at this level of knowledge will say something like: "I support the people of Palestine, and empathize with the citizens of Israel because it's the government that is the problem. But I also don't condone the actions of Hamas who use civilians as cover to commit their terrorist actions."
Or the flip side, people who think that Israel's citizenry are culpable in their inaction against their government, but still maintain that it's a problem with Israel, and not the Jewish religion. Maybe people at this level urge world powers to start an investigation and hold Israel accountable for their crimes, but also give it protection from Hamas and their funders.

Hopefully that long-winded passage helped explain my view. If there are any problems with it, I can reconstruct or reinforce points. It's essentially a Cliffnotes version of the conflict. Even just the origin of Haganah could be days worth of conversation.

To some extent, the job of politicians is to deal with politics. I don't think everyone needs to be an expert that's constantly aware of what's going on.

Those same politicians use public inattention or lack of knowledge to manipulate them, furthering the politician's own agenda. In an ideal system the populace wouldn't have to fact-check their leaders, but modern politics is far from ideal. Remember when the American populace was told by Colin Powell that there were WMDs in Iraq, such as nuclear weapons and 18 mobile Anthrax/Botulism toxin labs and we had to act immediately?

While there was a great deal of good (and bad) that came out of the toppling of Saddam's regime, the pivotal reason (dare I say the catalyst?) for the invasion of Iraq was based on vague information that we didn't fact check. That informatikn turned out to be wrong when third-party organizations started asking questions. That questioning was ignited by people, you and I, going "that sounds wrong."

We choose who gets into office and we choose them (ideally) on their solutions to current problems. Our politicians are representative of our views (ideally) and we establish those views based on our knowledge. Bad knowledge = bad politicians (look to the past 8-12 years).

If someone genuinely doesn't enjoy keeping up with the news, what's the benefit as long as they show up when it counts?

The issue is that they aren't 'showing up when it counts', unfortunately. The person who does the right thing unknowingly isn't made good because of that action, and more often than not they are outnumbered by people who are unknowingly (or knowingly) doing the wrong thing. Being knowledgeable is a form of protection.

Political philosophy doesn't require reading the news though.

Initial impression: I want to disagree, but I haven't encountered this point before. I need to do some additional thinking before I can agree or disagree.

I hope this response was helpful. I did try my best to pull real-world examples where I made critical points.

I largely agree with you, but I think that there's a lot of variation in what counts as "showing up when it counts". Is that only at elections? Is it elections plus communications with your representatives to make clear your priorities? Is it that plus local community action? Is it community action and not bothering with your representatives? Any choice is a political choice, and there's broad disagreement regarding what the right choice is. I do agree that staying aware of the broader political landscape isn't the right choice for everyone. But if they don't, they're operating at the direction of whoever they trust who is aware of what's going on. That's half of why we're in this mess in the USA. Too many people "doing their own research" when it ends up just listening to con men.

You’re taking about apples and oranges. I haven’t mentioned the morality at all. The question is was whether or not Asmongold was being genuine. Having said beliefs be common amongst Americans makes it far more likely he is being genuine.

On the other hand, if Asmongold was from Lebanon, his beliefs would be very much an outlier, and it would be more likely he is pretending to have the opposite opinion of his actual beliefs for the purpose of incitement.

Again, I’ve opined not at all about the ethics of the situation. I feel like you’re trying to push back on an impression that I’m making an insulting implication on “Americans” when that’s completely tangential.