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2d ago
Would Hezbollah even be anti-American without the American support for Israel? The situation may be different from Iran whose present political system emerged as a direct reaction against past American chicanery, but on the other hand even Vietnam, which got treated a lot worse than Iran, is basically friendly to the US nowadays, and the Taliban are also acting all conciliatory since their comeback. I'm sure that if the US wanted to be friends with Iran in a post-Israel world, they could do so quite easily by just promising to keep Saudi Arabia on a leash and pushing them to agree on mutually acceptable spheres of influence. The barriers would actually be on the US side, since it seems like the deep state can nurse very old grudges over matters such as BP and the embassy hostage taking.
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2d ago
"Justice"/moral right is what I mostly see being invoked to convince populations of third-party countries including ones I live and pay taxes in to support Israel, transfering things of value and exposing themselves to risk. This is why I see the need to argue against it. If I am asked to sacrifice for a cause for the sake of justice, I would like to know if the cause is actually just.
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4d ago
Would you still find the fourth point bad if the resulting mask-off mandate were primarily used against your tribe - say, retroactive dragnet identification of the Jan 6th protesters from photos, or police demanding that any future garden-variety right-wing protester unmask while being fully aware that the leftists are already standing by with cameras to feed a well-oiled machine of crowdsourced doxxers ready to send form letters to his bank and employer?
This sort of thing has been a long-standing concern of lefties dating back to when they had a more credible claim that institutional power is aligned against them. The way I see it, the right wing, in its knee-jerk opposition to masks and affinity towards police powers, is interrupting the left in the midst of making a rare mistake borne of their denial that they are in charge. The train of a sympathetic police getting to use this to unmask and prosecute someone like BLM rioters has long left.
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22d ago
I don't know if it's a resume line item checklist - "getting arrested for social justice ❤️💙" might play well for a political career? - or just people making reckless decisions.
There might be an element of that, but I figure that "soandsomany people got arrested at protests for X" also is a necessary item for any media narrative about X being oppressed by the authorities. Note how no report of protests (say, Navalny-related ones) inside Russia is complete without some mention of hundreds of protesters taken away in prepared police vans, and most Westerners are also quite happy to read that and nod along about how brutal the regime is. Other protests such as climate activists gluing themselves to roads are also designed to elicit a violent-looking police response, and the overall effect of any well-crafted report incorporating such footage tends to be that genuine fence-sitters and normies conclude that the response was excessive. If you have any sort of sympathetic media that knows its craft and participants willing to sacrifice themselves, you would be foolish as a protest organiser to not make use of the opportunity; if you are a participant who cares more about the cause than about the expected adverse effects of being arrested, you would be foolish to not volunteer.
But approximately nobody wants to ban the penis-in-vagina conduct, and generally nature conspired to make the straight option the one that has the most unique options available. To get a purely conduct-based rule that prevents same-sex activity, you'd have to write something tortured like "you must not let two penises come in contact", and this would not only give lawmakers the vapours just having to put these words to paper but would also only capture some subset of same-sex activity (and the state would struggle to dispute a claim by a gay couple that they fastidiously avoided that particular act).
Maybe you could criminalise all sexual conduct that is also possible for same-sex couples; good luck with convincing a majority to make that sacrifice just to get at those pesky gays at last, or else to convince the higher courts that any selective enforcement is purely accidental.
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2d ago
I thought we had enough previous interactions on other similar topics before that you'd know that I find the notion of "international law" to be somewhere in the class of Mohammad (PBUH) claiming that he received a revelation from God saying that Mohammad is his prophet and you must obey him, and so certainly whatever proportionality argument I make would not be intended as a reference to a "proportionality argument from international law".
Re: the other question, I think I responded to similar ones in parallel threads already. I leaned too far out of the window there and don't actually believe the Palestinians were de-escalating; I just don't think the Israelis were either.
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25d ago
Again, how would the state prove that this happened, against a claim by a gay couple that they didn't do that? My understanding is that anal penetration as the sine qua non of gay sex is largely a product of the imagination of homophobes in a narrow sense, as it lives at some sweet spot of triggering their disgust reflex and being easy to describe.
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16d ago
Moving to/staying in Israel, not accepting a Turkey/Greece style population transfer two-state solution at the price of costlier territorial concessions earlier, and whatever miscalculation, if it in fact was one, made them not prevent the Hamas attack, among others.
Rounding that down to what you said is fairly comparable to how the US progressive coalition calls every part of the pro-trans agenda "trans people existing". Do you like that version of this argument too?
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29d ago
Eh, the locker-shoving thing was (intended as) hyperbole, but as a working academic (CS) my impression has always been that the majority of high-achieving people in the field are hopelessly substandard in matters of politics and coalition-building, easily walked over by those who are not, and often somewhat terrified of them for that. If you're not willing to take it from me, take it from the Y Combinator guy. Note that this does not imply, in either my case or Graham's, that one becomes an actual social outcast; most socialising is not adversarial.
I don't think the complaint is fully general with respect to measures that help with policing. Police are already capable of physically arresting people in the midst of rioting or other illegal acts (at the cost of public scrutiny), regardless of whether they are masked. Forcing everyone to be unmasked during protests will help police prosecuting illegal and broadly disliked acts a little, in those cases where they are too overwhelmed to catch individuals in flagranti; it will help them a bit more in situations where they want to avoid public scrutiny, so rather than visibly arresting people for political crimes they can quietly come after them later; and it helps with extrajudicial punishment such as cancellation and debanking, where the punishers have no right to perform a physical arrest, a lot.
In concrete terms, for example, I would have been quite happy to turn up to a masked protest against excessive COVID measures (not that such a deliciously ironic event was on offer anywhere I lived). I would not go to one if I were compelled to show my face, since I'm in a line of work where an easily identifiable photo in that context could be career-ending.
AI War is an asymmetric RTS where armies/fleets scale into the thousands/tens of thousands. I can vouch for the original game being quite fun, but I haven't tried AI War 2.
There is also Planetary Annihilation (:Titans), an RTS played across one or more planets (yes, spherical maps), which is intended as a spiritual successor to Supreme Commander which is mentioned below. The micromanagement there feels more finicky than in AI War, but the graphics and feeling of scale are vastly better and I would still consider the game to be an underrated gem (hobbled by the typical Kickstarter project issue of having been half-baked at initial release).
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16d ago
As I meant to imply with the comment about the differences to the trolley problem, I don't want stakeholders to punish/assassinate me for what I would see to be a morally net positive choice (at this point, this would include both negotiating abode elsewhere for everyone in Israel, packing up and leaving, and going full unabashed genocide on the remaining Palestinians, trading future negative utils for present ones). Why would I be obliged to sacrifice myself for these people I have nothing to do with, just because they unilaterally put me in charge as part of a thought experiment?
What would be your answer for my Germany/NorthVN scenarios?
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29d ago
Well, I kept hearing from people that Georgia-Russia war is not going to happen, that supposed Russian invasion is fake and they are solely local rebels (in 2014), that Russia surely will not launch full scale invasion and any predictions about it is NATO hoax and vile russophobia and so on.
I am pretty sure that if Russia would invade Estonia people will keep telling me that idea of Russia invading Poland is absurd.
I think you are applying inappropriate Dunbarian intuitions to the output of an algorithm that feeds on billions of people here. "Someone said X" is really not a statement that is surprising or has any information content, and consequently "I kept hearing X" is not surprising either as long as some entity stands to benefit (clicks, engagement, whatever) from funnelling that opinion to you.
Revanchism for fall of USSR, attempt by Putin to secure his place in history and genuine belief that it will be a cakewalk.
The third one seems plausible enough, but do you have any concrete evidence for the former two? Is there something you consider sufficient proof that the former were not reasons or at least not primary reasons, or is this an irrefutable belief?
But I mentioned it that it is not some personal witchy insanity. At the very least it is a widespread paranoid reaction to our history.
That's fair, but where for one people paranoid overreaction to their own history might still be arguably adaptive as a meta-reasoning, it seems like insanity for others to go along with it.
Would need to recheck but AFAIK "most" was never true (not checked this one, prefer to not get irritated - Smoleńsk was so absurd humiliating fractal fuckup that it is hard to find something comparably embarrassing in Polish history).
I checked and apparently it's only about ~35% believing in it to ca. 45% not, though the last polls are from before the war and the tendency has been slightly rising. Mea culpa for assuming it is more.
Well, if PO, PIS, Lewica, Tusk, Kaczyński, Miller and basically all politicians and parties (and other groups) actually agree on something it is quite strong hint that either something is widely agreed to be actually a good idea or South Korean arms manufacturers deployed mind control beams.
It seems to me that playing up the Russian threat has been unambiguously good for Poland's position in European politics, since as long as they position themselves as an steadfast, and morally unassailable due to personal trauma, bulwark against Russia within the EU, this assures them American backing that is qualitatively almost comparable to that given to Israel, even it's quantatively far from the latter. During the PiS years there was tremendous appetite in the rest of Europe to punish Poland somehow, for ideological nonalignment, non-cooperation within EU structures such as refusal to participate in refugee redistribution, trade scuffles with Germany, environmentalist misdeeds etc.; somehow these never went anywhere, and more than once I heard sentiments like "cracking down on Poland would just give Putin what he wants" fielded to defend that. Now there is talk that Poland is or might become the strongest land army in Europe, and their overall prestige and weight has risen in particular at the expense of their other historic enemy to the West. Surely this is tremendously appealing to politicians, who dedicate their lives to the pursuit of prestige and power.
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3d ago
The participants depicted in the pictures and videos here look pretty gender-balanced to me, and my FB feed seems to have one person each being virulently pro-Israel and pro-Palestine, both male and getting maybe 2-3 likes per post. Are you sure your view doesn't just reflect the demographics of college activists?
As a somewhat related observation, I moved to Europe with my SO from the US a few years ago, and the single biggest culture shock experience for her was when we ran across a massive anti-COVID-measures protest and the participants were mostly women. I remember at the time this forum would also have periodic posts that it is only natural that women are the ones pushing for masks and vaccines because of conformism, risk aversion, valuing care over freedom and being for social pressure; however, it turns out that almost always random contingencies override grand theories of how and why the genders believe what, usually formed deep in the bowels of a single cultural bubble.
"Resign immediately" seems like the (morally+personally) least fraught option. It's not quite the trolley problem, because if you redirect the trolley the lone person gets to beat you up or worse before they get run over (or just elect a different switch operator).
What would you have done differently if you were elected leader of Germany at some point in the WWI/WWII interregnum, perhaps on 1932-12-03 for a maximum sense of historical inevitability? (...in 1944? ...of North Vietnam in the middle of the Vietnam war, for opposite political valence and ultimate outcome?) Nations and polities and the whole web of human interactions have enough momentum that at some point, their only available choices might indeed be surrender (wronging themselves) and villainy (wronging others). That Israel's population and Netanyahu in particular had no better options after the Hamas attack does not absolve them from moral responsibility for their actions, since decisions they (the Israeli people and their forefathers in general, and Netanyahu in particular) made before were what got them in this situation to begin with.
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29d ago
I think it meshes nicely with a understanding (that I might have tried posting about in some more detail before, or else at least planned to) that ideologies like grey-tribery are for those who on the margin prefer to extract additional resources from nature, while ones like SJ is for those who extract resources from other people.
If your skill points are in wrangling people, then the "utils are withheld by scheming political coalitions" world is the comfy familiar scenario where you figure things will work out for you somehow, and the "utils are withheld by cold unfeeling nature" world is the maths class where no amount of conformism got you partial credit for the calculation you couldn't do, except now your life is on the line. On the other hand, if your skill points are in wrangling nature, as is probably the case for most people here, the dangers and missing utils of nature are another engineering challenge to overcome with Yankee ingenuity, Bayes and game theory, while the schemers world is like that time in high school you tried to join the cool kids table with Bayes and game theory and got shoved in a locker, except now your life is on the line. Perhaps relate to sentiments on Factorio vs. Diplomacy.
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7d ago
Then make it a taser or something. I would've thought firearm sentiment to be more who/whom - not that this is actually realistically going to be championed by anyone, but would a "guns for women only" policy be instinctively opposed by most blue tribers?
Based on the steady torrent of Israel-Palestine threads, the general impression I get is that a majority of people here is quite solidly pro-Israel in this conflict. I would like to understand the pro-Israel position better; in particular, I wonder if there are arguments for the Israeli position in the current war that don't mostly rest on one of the following:
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An arbitrary cutoff of historical reckoning either shortly before the most recent Hamas attack, or else somewhere in the early '90s following the general Western mode of thinking about other geopolitical conflicts. Unilaterally declaring all scores settled is not a persuasive or universalizable moral principle.
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Invocation of inherent superior qualities of Israeli Jews relative to Palestinians, be it intelligence, education or general "civilizedness". You would almost certainly either need to cut out a very contrived set of conditions to make the principle only apply to this case, or accept some hypothetical corollary you probably don't want that involves similar abuse being heaped on morally/intellectually/civilizationally inferior people that you care about or feel kinship to.
The way I see it, the moral case for Palestine is pretty clear, and unlike some seem to assume does not require you to subscribe to a lot of oppressed-are-always-right slave morality (though you do need to stop short of maximally might-makes-right master morality). The present ruling population of Israel mostly moved to that territory in the late '40s, and from the start has continued violently expelling the ancestors of present Palestinians from their homes to acquire their land for themselves. I do not think that Palestinians' stupidity or backwardness or whatever are so great that they can't be afforded what we otherwise consider basic human rights to property and safety, even if the people who want to take those from them for themselves were all literal Von Neumanns.
I don't think that this original wrong has been made right to the Palestinians, and the argument that some Palestinians submitted and got to live better lives under the Israelis than they would have had in an independent Palestine does not morally convince me either. If Bill Gates steals the plots some rednecks built their houses on, builds a mansion in its place and then offers them lavish jobs as domestic servants, do the ones who don't accept forfeit their right to complain about the theft? Another counterargument seems to rest on something like statute of limitations (like, the Palestinians and Israelis alive nowadays are not the ones who got robbed and their robbers), which would be more persuasive if Israeli settlements were not still expanding, and there weren't still Palestinians who are quite directly being made to suffer at the hands of the Israeli men with guns for no other reason than that they do not accept the "become Bill Gates's domestic servant" deal. It seems pretty clear to me that there is no recourse left to the Palestinians who do not want to to take this deal that preserves their human dignity - their conquerors certainly won't hear them out themselves, and they are backed by the US machine which not only could produce a personal cruise missile for every Palestinian if it put its mind to it but also has enough intellectual and propaganda firepower that they could make even the Palestinians doubt that they are themselves humans with rights.
If you are continuously denied justice in an existential matter, though, I don't think it's at all an alien viewpoint that you are morally entitled to do whatever you find appropriate to seize justice for yourself, including ineffectual and vile acts of revenge such as murdering the women and children of those who wronged you. To claim otherwise, to me, seems to amount to claiming that you can be absolved for arbitrary wrongs if you just amass enough power to make effective resistance impossible, and I don't like that even before we start taking into the account that the targets of Hamas terror were intended and more often than not happy beneficiaries of the original wrongs committed. (If you have been driven out of your house and into a corner at gunpoint by the mafia, the mafia boss's kid stands by watching the show and mocking you, and, seeing an opening, you shoot the kid, I will find it hard to fault you for the murder even though the kid is technically innocent of the misfortunes that befell you and this did absolutely nothing to help your situation. As a bonus, the corrupt police (my country) is then called in to arrest you, after sharing a smoke with the mafiosi.)
Though I said that the moral case for Palestine is clear, this is emphatically not to say that I rule out the possibility of a clear moral case for Israel existing at the same time. "They're both justified to continue murdering each other" is a sad reality of a lot of tribal conflict. However, in this particular case, I actually do not even see that case, or at least what I have seen seems much weaker to me, given that Israelis still have the option to leave Israel at any time as a large part of the world would welcome them with open arms (while the anti-Palestinians like reiterating that not even other Muslim countries want to take in the Palestinians, as if that helps their case), and even though in some sense they would also then be "driven from their homes" it's not like they are usually unaware of those homes' provenance.
edit: Thanks for everyone's responses, there were certainly a lot of interesting points to think about there. I'm too overwhelmed with the volume to respond to everyone, though to the extent there were some overlaps between the points I would be grateful if you could check my answers to sibling posts.
The standard commentary says that it's mostly just meant to focus a chaotic redeployment from other sectors of the front on the UA side, since even losing some irrelevant frontline villages would have an adverse impact on UA morale that is already cracking. The Ocheretino breakthrough seems to indicate that rotations and redeployments are currently Ukraine's weak spot - single brigades hold stretches of the front successfully even if they grumble as they have been forced to do so continuously for over a year, but the moment they are rotated out it's a gamble whether their green replacements will even take their positions or flee upon their first encounter with a FAB shockwave. Entrenching a new defensive belt presumably requires at least some experienced troops to be pulled from elsewhere (rather than throwing new conscripts into a new frontline to figure out things for themselves from scratch), creating a myriad of such opportunities as their former positions have to be replenished with new troops.
RU might also correctly expect that in that particular area, the remnants of the RDK (for whom Ukrainian leadership evidently has little love, but who are also a priority target for Russian spite) will be used as first-echelon cannon fodder.
Finally, do we know the 50k actually represent an upper bound on what could be committed to this offensive if it develops in a promising direction? How hard is it to rapidly redeploy troops to somewhere within 50km of the old Russian state border? Surely attacking with ~200k right away if you can afford to would be better, but in this conflict in particular massing so many troops at once might actually just make them an easier target.
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7d ago
2 sounds like nonsense, but 1 and 3 are at least plausible. I think another underdiscussed component of the dress colour of the bear question is that in recent years, the threat of bears seems to have been massively memed up in American outdoorsmanship-adjacent circles, at least based on sheer volume of "this is how to survive a bear encounter" videos that Youtube injects into my feed, the comments on them and the vibes of the 4chan "innawoods" greentext corpus. If you are a host of this meme (which is likely to correlate with being male), you might think of it as common knowledge and not consider the possibility that women responders don't actually think of bears as uniquely threatening (as in some other cultures), instead parsing the answers as saying that from a baseline of your threat level assignment to bears, they think men are worse.
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3d ago
I have been wondering to what extent anyone with real influence on international relations actually believes in the notion of an "international rules-based order" when they invoke the term, as opposed to considering it as a particularly good tool for gaslighting. (Though perhaps I'm being too autistic in expecting someone operating at that level of social skill to have a single well-defined belief, as opposed to navigating cognitive dissonance as effortlessly as a mathematician switches between equivalent formalisms. Yes, it is a rules-based order with fair customary rules agreed upon by the community of nations; no, claiming that the US might have run afoul of the rules is a category error.)
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16d ago
My main exposure to mainstream messaging on the topic nowadays is German news media + administrative mailing lists from various universities including US ones that I have managed to accumulate subscriptions to over the years, but a common thread to all of them is a pretty unabashed tendency to have cut out the usual conflation with "antisemitism" and directly talk about anti-Israel sentiment as something that is or should be illegal and punished to the maximum extent the framework allows (expulsions, blacklisting, using discretionary hate speech/symbolism statutes). In the German news media, I mostly see war reporting spin techniques deployed to a level that comes across as comical - on one hand you get articles reporting about Israel losing 10 soldiers in an actual ground offensive in a tone as if they were kids murdered by terrorists on a shopping trip, and on the other claims of Palestinian deaths or suffering are presented as flat statistics with no contextualisation or attempt to give emotional colour, and couched in a wall of reminders that figures could not be verified independently and notes that "according to the Israeli MoD, they were actually Hamas militants" (no reminders that this could not be verified independently). The contrast not just between the reporting on the two sides but also this and the reporting on Russia/Ukraine is stark to the point of feeling like a flex ("Yes, this is propaganda. Dare to call it out? No? Good, so you know your place").
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17d ago
I haven't lived in England in over a decade now so any respect for bus stop queues has atrophied. I regularly "jump queue" just by standing closer to the kerbcurb than the other aspiring passengers, thus reaping the rewards for my lower risk aversion.
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17d ago
Stumbled upon this unreasonably catchy parody of a Cheburashka (famous Soviet cartoon series) song on Youtube. Like most of the best Russian memes, apparently the lyrics themselves are way older than the rendition (70s? 80s?).
This made me think - I seem to know a disproportionate number of political songs, grassroots parodies (this one is about siphoning off ethanol rocket fuel to get wasted) and snowclones from Russia. Do other cultures make much of those? The only one I can think of off the top of my head is "Napalm Sticks to Kids".
Does this argument generalise into one against animal rights/welfare?
(It doesn't seem so ridiculous to me. Noblesse oblige.)
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