4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
12hr 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?
"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.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
1d 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").
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
1d 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.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
1d 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".
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
5d ago
The judgement isn't made just on the basis of a past figure's actions or beliefs considered impartially, but rather whether the person's overall agenda is seen as contributing to or opposing an overall agenda, which is projected backwards into the past.
"We have Roko's Basilisk at home"
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
6d 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.
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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