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Any urge to smash things or ideas you disagree with is deeply human.

After ISIS took over parts of Iraq, they did what many have done before them through the millennia of destroying art and beauty because they disagreed.

A modern take is the climate activists destroying art because they fear the end of the world.

Fear manifests in interesting ways.



These differ in intent. The climate activists don't hate the underlying art, they just want to do some kind of stunt that gets people in the news. That's why these protests targeted art that was stored behind plexiglass; they wanted a protest medium that was highly disruptive and shocking but caused minimal harm.

ISIS on the other had specifically wants the art destroyed because their particular brand of brainworms is opposed to anything that isn't worm-shaped. The goal wasn't to shock people, it was to cause deliberate damage to human culture.


I believe many scholars said the goal of ISIS was to shock the mind, because shock creates abstract entities in the power of observers that can be used to wrestle control of and over them.

It was easier to terrify people into surrendering their mind than to defeat them physically (and have them surrender their SUV in the art example).


I don't believe scholars said any of that.

ISIS wanted to recreate the Caliphate, and shocking, violent videos were one of the most effective methods of recruiting young, belligerent, impressionable males. Martyrdom, beheadings, and violent Jihad were things long before ISIS, and they simply put on the mantle.

to put it another way, you only saw the violent propaganda, since it was in the interest of the US Gov, Israel, Turkey, et al, to make sure the world saw how brutal they were. You didn't watch the hundreds of hours of non-violent propaganda or theology, such as the recruiting videos aimed at young Islamic women.


This whole thread is full of takes like this - “how awful they have the wrong morals and erase things I agree with or don’t erase things I disagree with”.

It’s all power games. Trying to pretend your morals are correct is hypocritical.


> This whole thread is full of takes like this

Takes that destroying art is worse than defacing some unremarkable plexiglass?

I mean... yeah, it is.




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