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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
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User ID: 355
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
4hr ago
Israel had 86.5% favourability for the IDF last year, seemingly up to 93% now but I'm only finding paywalled articles. Unfortunately there are rarely polls that measure trust in the system of government modulo the parts that it allows the public to influence (since favourability for the Netanyahu administration would more accurately correspond to something like favourability of the current Hamas leadership).
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5hr ago
Hamas invaded Israel, committed a bunch of war crimes, and now has no method nor seemingly intention of feeding their own people. Which apparently is Israel's fault?
Israel was blocking the delivery of aid, and after begrudgingly letting some through they were shooting at people going from and to the distribution points. Yes, both of those are their fault.
If you think the two cases are asymmetric, the better difference to observe is perhaps that the Israeli government routinely engages in war crimes against Palestinians, whose relation with Hamas is between hostile and resigned for lack of better options, while Hamas routinely engages in war crimes against Israelis, who have a broadly voluntary and enthusiastic relation with their government. The average Israeli seems to deserve suffering for the Israeli government's crimes a lot more than the average Palestinian deserves suffering for Hamas's.
(And lest we go there, history did not start on Oct 7 2023.)
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6hr ago
About as insightful a comment as "Eh, they are not 'free Palestine' raped yet" would have been about Oct 7th.
There are several parallel subthreads already discussing to what extent the starvation actually affects Hamas, and you choose to ignore them and instead post this Twitter-level dunk.
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6hr ago
Israel is a small country, and they can only afford spending this much of their economic power on military before they would start looking like North Korea. This whole narrative that the aid isn't actually necessary because our allies are strong and can win on their own just fine (but we must urgently Do The Right Thing and send more of it!), seen also in the context of Ukraine, is among the more intellectually galling aspects of Western propaganda.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
6hr ago
· Edited 6hr ago
I have argued before that the morally obvious solution after WWII would have been to create the state on the territory of the Axis powers. The Gdansk/NE German corner would have been the obvious choice given how much of a Jewish homeland the South Baltic already had been, and the German population was already getting purged from there either way, but if Soviet buy-in could not be obtained, then Holstein (putting them on the bloc border as a tripwire) or even Swabia (putting them next to neutral Switzerland) would also have been a reasonable option.
(I know @Southkraut hates this idea for obvious reasons, but there is a causal path from Israel in its current borders to US Middle East policy to refugees being generated and from insufficient direct German atonement after WWII to German self-loathing to refugees being accepted. Would giving some clay to the Jews back then really have been worse than slowly giving all the clay to the Arabs now?)
Besides, even for broadly the current location, there would have been better solutions (proper ethnic cleansing followed by the establishment of a firm border, not the current slowly expanding blob with partially incorporated territories).
(Also @ZanarkandAbesFan)
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21hr ago
The idea that the only choices were "no sovereign Jewish state" and "sovereign Jewish state that is approximately akin to the present-day institution", which seems to be the premise of your second point's interpretation, is a false dichotomy.
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1d ago
Okay, fine, take the quantitative fields from among the Nobel prize winners vs. some random German environmentalist club (first non-university picture on Google Images found by searching "Bielefeld [group photo]"). Do you actually think the latter look more attractive on average?
(...or are Nobel Prize winners still an insufficiently exclusive bunch? Who is an example of the tendency you are talking about, then?)
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2d ago
In my observations, the median person on the street is far uglier than the median person working (to filter out the obvious confounder of youth if students were considered) at a university. I think any effect to the contrary people notice might just be an artifact of attention - it is easy to ignore the ugly and unremarkable people in everyday life and only notice and remember the beautiful ones, while the exceptionally smart people will be remembered regardless of their appearance.
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3d ago
"Do not judge" (as stated)/"judge only deniably, or based on a narrow set of acceptable criteria (socks with sandals etc.)" (as implemented) is an American cultural value. You could argue that it serves some purpose on a societal level, in a Chestertonian way, but many societies without it mostly work fine, which puts an upper bound on how important it can be.
To maximise personal advantage, it is rational to always update/"judge" on everything that you can extract a meaningful evidential signal from, which surely includes all of your examples. It seems like a pretty complex question which criteria should be kept to maximise the elusive societal advantage (i.e. what set of judgement taboos maximises social welfare?) - the most obvious advantage of any such taboos is that they facilitate coexistence between different groups with divergent aesthetic values, and thereby also encourage such groups to form to begin with, enabling distributed experimentation on value systems. For example, if it turns out pro-tattoo values actually carry some unexpected advantage (aliens invade and kill everyone without?), the societies which did not suppress pro-tattoo aesthetics because they had a taboo against judging based on tattoos would come out ahead.
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4d ago
INTP, reliably. I think the "horoscope" comparisons are nonsense propagated by an unholy alliance of IFLSciencers ("Don't you know THE SCIENCE says you are not supposed to use it?") and people who are vaguely aesthetically annoyed that its fans have some intersection with the horoscope crowd (people who just like labels). The questions the classification is based on ask about real and reasonably stable personality traits - why would the classification that results not capture personality? Is "people who said in a questionnaire in ten different ways that they are not perceptive of others' feelings will be seen as insensitive" comparable to "people born in October will be seen as insensitive"?
The only potentially valid objections are that it doesn't categorise along principal components or "cleave reality at its joints".
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
4d ago
Ok, then why are we supporting them?
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5d ago
There exists a hope in the Palestinian cause, that there will be a tipping point where they can present to the international community of some Israeli atrocity that will bring about a external intervention.
I assume the hope they are holding out is not for external intervention on their side, but an end of external intervention on Israel's. If governments in the US and Europe were compelled by popular pressure to stop supporting Israel with materiel, money and intelligence, could it really keep going against the weight of its neighbours as it is going now?
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5d ago
Less. Stefferi is from Finland.
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6d ago
The Untergang jokes (no umlaut!) all just use that one scene though, which notably depicts Hitler in a state of complete dissolution. It's basically impossible to take that scene as a signal that Hitler is deserving of respect - even if you put a valid complaint in his mouth, it is understood that an actual Hitler apologist could and would have picked any other depiction over that one.
And well, if ambiguously positive or unambiguously nuanced discussions are not enough to amount to "getting a pass" by your standards, consider the case of Lenin. In my assessment, he was actually by far creepier and more evil than his successor, more on the Pol Pot end of the scale of communist leaders, a sadistic enjoyer of violence for its own sake, while Stalin's paranoia and ruthlessness was more of an adaptation to the environment he was a creature of (that Lenin created to begin with). Yet, there is no shortage of mainstream depictions of him that could read as being a flawed but fundamentally good anti-hero (no doubt in part because of systematic ignorance of things he actually said and did).
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6d ago
I figure the assessment is different in countries that fought directly against him. I've seen people in Stalin t-shirts, Stalinface parodies of the Andy Warhol campbell soup photo, and academics having a printed image macro with "you're just mad / cuz I'm Stalin on you" taped to their door, in Germany and various parts of the anglophone sphere.
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6d ago
France truly is the 4chan of philosophy. Everybody likes its memes, but few can stomach the environment which was necessary to produce them.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
6d ago
· Edited 6d ago
All arguments, apart from being factually false, are reduced not on "policy" or "government", but on words, and how to define words, how to use words in a different manner, how words can be used in different ways, how different ideologies are different because "words" says so. A typical argument goes like this: "Communism is good because, unlike Fascism or whatever else, has a good objective. The objective is good because Communism say so.
This seems backwards. Do you think communism just popped into existence one day, fully formed and respectable, and brainwashed the masses into thinking that their goals are good because they say so? The fundamental ethos of communism, that it is unfair for the better-born to cash in on their innate superiority (and all the more so on compound interest from the superiority of their parents), evidently resonates with many across time and place - the ancient Christians, who steamrolled over the strength-is-beauty-is-justice pagan ethos of Rome, did not need mustache-twirling wordcels in high places berating anyone on their behalf to gain followers, nor did the French Revolution with its cries for égalité.
I fully understand how cosmically unfair it seems to rightists that Hitler and Stalin can kill masses of people on the same order of magnitude but only the latter gets a pass because supposedly his end goal is the virtuous one (and you can't at all relate to this assessment of it, leading you to conclude that it must be a wordcel conspiracy), but to that I can only respond, git gud. You are supposed to be the ones who celebrate natural excellence and letting the superior prevail; why do you then kvetch when your value system loses in the marketplace of ideas? You are not going to win with an argument to the effect of "wordcels are too good with words, it is unfair that they get to push communism and win" when you are trying to argue against the very premise of your own argument.
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7d ago
Does Iran not count as having a modern multi-layered air defense system? They had S-300s, so second-tier Russian tech, which is mostly Ukraine had when the war started.
Per this page, Iran had 4 batteries, and their radar system got disabled by hackers before Israel attacked (surely a unique mistake enabled only by Israel's complete intelligence penetration of it) - Ukraine, it says, had 100. And still, from what I gather, Israel did not do manned overflights but just launched ATGMs over Iraq. The Americans did one overflight, but that was using rare bombers that don't scale and might well have been preceded by a backchannel "let us bomb you unopposed once for the symbolism, or shoot back and we will go all in" threat.
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7d ago
I wouldn't be so dismissive of the possibility that solutions exist which simultaneously make Ukraine too weak to make it attractive for it to resume the war at a later point and reclaim territories (what is really Russia's minimum condition) and too strong to make it attractive for Russia to do so and capture more. The most obvious option is for NATO to provide a binding, boots-on-ground guarantee to defend it should Russia attack again. As far as I can see, the problem with this option is strictly that neither the current Ukrainian government (which surely would collapse in such a situation) nor the West (for whom a neutral Ukraine with present borders is of little value, and they would have to credibly signal that they would defend it, vs. the option to have it cheaply continue killing Russians and gamble on the absolute bonanza that a surprise Russian collapse would be) would actually want it.
Without EU membership/emigration opportunities/gibs, even the Ukrainian people (who are largely happy to accept a chance of death for a chance of climbing the butter mountains and swimming the wine lakes) would see no reason to accept such a peace, though I thought Russia at one point softened its stance on accepting an Austria-like "EU but no NATO" arrangement.
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7d ago
· Edited 7d ago
My suspicion is rather that the main consideration behind non-delivery of Taurus is that it weighs heavily on one side of a mutual restraint agreement. Taurus can hit Moscow; having to evacuate the Kremlin into hardened command bunkers would certainly be a symbolic and morale hit on Russia, cause friction on its entire government apparatus and possibly destabilise the country down the line regardless of what else happens in Ukraine. However, Russia also has plenty of militarily eminently sensible moves that it has not taken yet, presumably because of Western sensibilities, such as bombing Ukraine's NPPs to actually turn off the lights or turning to indiscriminate bombing of cities to obstruct the civilian economy implicitly supporting the military one (surely Ukrainian drone innovation would be hampered if its drone innovators can no longer buy a warm meal, take a shower or have a warm bed to sleep a full night in).
Would they still not take them if countries like Germany exhausted all escalation steps short of boots-on-ground? Would Germany go boots-on-ground over bombed out NPPs? (I am skeptical that this would necessarily entail significant radiation leaks. Russia could even announce their targets in advance and demand a preemptive shutdown, leaving the offense against the West to be limited to the vague notion of "nuclear terrorism", especially toothless after the latest Iran happenings.)
Unfortunately, the Western propaganda posture requires denying this (as it must be asserted that Russia is maximising for evil, and non-manifestation of any evil outcomes is strictly due to its incompetence), and therefore prevents questions like "What could Russia do if we delivered Taurus? Would it actually be a net positive for Ukraine?" from entering the public discourse.
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7d ago
Tactical drones are nice and all in trench warfare, but good old-fashioned air dominance is even better when you can get it.
Well, can you? The closest we have seen to an attempt to get it over a country with a modern multi-layered air defense system was in fact Russia over Ukraine, and it failed. Of course, the question is to what extent the conclusion should be "Russia sucks" and to what extent it should be "this is a hard problem", but it's not like Ukraine can fly manned planes close to Russian-held territory either. I imagine the US is actually not convinced that it could pull it off either, and is more interested in maintaining the strategic ambiguity (that maybe it could) than risking rolling the dice and establishing that the answer is no for all to see. (Of course, the possibility that the answer being yes leads to nukes is also a factor.)
I can only say I am looking forward to the day China goes for Taiwan, as it will finally re-peg some of the nationalist hypothesizing about who could win if they really tried to reality.
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7d ago
I expect that German conclusion that pipeline was blown up by Ukrainians is correct.
Even assuming that this is true, could they really have done it without support or at least acquiescence+aftercare from the US? The way the adjacent Baltic states froze Germany out of the investigation and conclusions seems implausible if it was a Ukrainian solo gig that they were not appraised of, and without US pressure it seems quite strange that Denmark and Sweden would choose to snub Germany (if not the government, then at least its public) so heavily to give a small PR edge to Ukraine. (Meanwhile, with the Assange case, we have precedent showing that the Swedish legal system is happy to engage in perversion of justice at US behest.)
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7d ago
Yeah, it was quite a lot - on more productive days I'd easily average more on the order of twice that. I was somehow blessed with a fairly generous metabolism, which allowed me remain slightly underweight through all that and have no problems (in terms of blood sugar levels/functioning) with suddenly going cold turkey, which I believe would suggest that my insulin/glucagon system was fine. Perhaps relatedly, I also used to easily flipflop between eating ridiculous amounts and skipping meals altogether while hyperfocusing on something.
In the end it was simple stomach irritation (enough to cause an intermittent IBS suspicion) from the US variant - and the bad ergonomics of the half-liter glass bottles that mexicoke came in - that got me to drop it (instead replacing it with a more expensive, and painful during withdrawal, coffee habit), and now that I'm back in the EU I have rebounded to maybe 1l/day.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
8d ago
I don't know. When I moved from Europe to the US, taking my 2-liters-of-soda-a-day habit with me, it resulted in a slew of crippling gastric issues which responded well and quickly to (1) forcing myself to not drink soda and/or (2) switching to "Mexican coke". Now, of course, there are more differences in the formulations than the type of sugar used. I am however generally very skeptical towards food sensitivities, so it seems unlikely to me that this was pure nocebo.
Even if the guilt tripping had happened either way, I think it is plausible that it would not have translated into so many Middle Eastern refugees - both because American entanglement in the region would have been lower, and because admitting them is now also seen as part of our duty towards Israel (I have seen multiple instances of "Israel should expel the Palestinians and we should take them all in" in the deep-green comment sections of German papers at this point).
Also, under some versions of the idea, not that much clay would even have to be taken from Germany - Poland was already shifted far more west than it had to be, at the expense of Germany. It's counterintuitive from a modern perspective just how Jewish the Bloodlands used to be - percentages in the typical larger city ranged from 10 to 40.
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