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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
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1d ago
You used "happened" yourself in your post, when you said "get them to concede ... the October 7th attacks happened". This is because this turn of phrase is natural in English, and you are trying to make a lot of tea from very little leaf there. I have no problem with the wording "Hamas performed, fully agentically, the Oct 7th attacks", nor would I take any issue with the converse "the levelling of Gaza happened"! Not every random stylistic choice has to be a dog whistle for whatever proves your grand theory.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1d ago
And yet you still refuse to assign any moral responsibility for the escalation in hostilities to Hamas.
Can you show me where you think I said they have no moral responsibility? Of course they do; both parties do in an escalation spiral. I just think the Israelis have more, while it seems to me that you, in your attempts to frame the story as a simple "the Palestinians started it", think they have none.
I do think that, in a very basic sense, the Israelis do have more agency, because to begin with, unlike the Palestinians they have a very plausible option to simply abandon their project of conquest and gtfo. If they used a fraction of the lobbying power that they have accumulated, they could secure citizenship in a rich Western country of their choosing for every one of their people, generous starting package of funds included.
"in a day"
I dispute that how many days the killing was spread out over is particularly relevant.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
2d ago
"Low-level" is relative. Yes, Oct 7th was an escalation. So was the Israeli response! Israel kills n people in 2023, then Hamas kills about 1.2k, then Israel kills 71k. It doesn't look like n is much smaller than 1200/(71/1.2)! Conveniently place your arbitrary cutoff between "high-level" and "low-level" somewhere else, and you can say there was a low-level conflict prior to Oct 27th followed by a sudden and dramatic escalation of hostilities. (Certainly Hamas reduced no Israeli cities to rubble.)
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
2d ago
A lot of things happened in 2023 before Oct 7th, too. Look in particular at entries such as June 19th and 21st. Of course no single one of those events will have been "the reason"; and to begin with, mirroring your (1) and (2), from the beginning of its existence, the stated goal of Israel was to create a Jewish state in that territory, which implies expelling the Palestinians or at least codifying their status as second-class citizens in their own home, and Israel acted aggressively towards them immediately following its founding (and, in fact, its predecessor organisations did so before the founding). (3) seems completely irrelevant, since the Egyptians presumably did not do any of those things. I think "Israel's stated purpose entails expelling the Palestinians"+"Israel takes actions that have the shape of expelling the Palestinians" is a pretty compelling and plausible motivation for Oct 7th.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
2d ago
But the fact remains: in the most recent conflict, Hamas struck first. That part is not open for debate.
Please show me where I said any such thing.
To define the "most recent conflict" as starting on Oct 7th, you either have to assert that there was no conflict before that date, or you can set the beginning of the "most recent conflict" at any point at all for your argumentative convenience. If it's the latter, then, well, I'll say that in the most recent conflict (the one that started on Oct 27th 2023 or so), Israel struck first. That part is not open for debate, etc.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
2d ago
I for my part find it extremely frustrating to deal with the recurrent tendency of Israel apologists, and you in particular in this case, to treat Oct 7th as having happened in a vacuum, as opposed to being another iteration in a long chain of action and reaction.
We can argue about who escalated more and which reaction by what side was uniquely disproportionate to the preceding ones, or who started the chain and whether they were justified in doing that, but having the same old argument where you start out by pretending that Israelis and Palestinians were living in peace and harmony until Oct 7th and then Hamas attacked out of absolutely nowhere, and you even go as far as painting a picture where your opponents agree with this framing and just have some obviously silly weaksauce arguments that try to justify Oct 7th against that putative backdrop of peace and harmony over and over again is not productive. It is particularly frustrating here because I'm sure you have been involved in past discussions where the same topic came up, and it is kind of looking like you just abandoned those discussions, waited for things to cool down and then reposted the same premise under the guise of a long-form "effortpost" hoping to roll the dice again for a pliant choir of allies and newcomers that you can preach to.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
4d ago
I do think a "freedom of speech + freedom from exposure" set of norms is conceivable, but doing that in a principled manner, too, would require deep changes to how societies are organised. You do get at a key problem in suggesting that the town should decide (because you can't unify one individual's freedom from exposure with another's freedom of speech and his audience, if all three+ of them have to share a space), but (1) why is the town the natural unit and (2) would the results you get really be that much more satisfactory for anyone, if acceptable exposure were fully devolved to towns? You would get quite a lot of blue towns, in which drag queens and Democratic politics are considered decent but Christianity and Republican politics (all rape PTSD triggers!) are not, and red towns, with the converse; and many of them would have a pretty large captive minority of people with their speech much more constrained in practice than it is at the moment.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
4d ago
I never claimed that this is actually the argument that blue-hair campus activists used, historically, to argue for censorship; only that they could use that argument, and it's not clear how you would refuse it on principled ground while allowing the argument against drag queens. The Schelling fence around free speech can only be reliably drawn around all speech, including speech that is optimised to make you imagine sexual scenarios that you find highly uncomfortable.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
4d ago
I think sex has always been the weakest link of free speech in Western societies. There was a long-standing fragile cope with the "know it when I see it" "rule" for porn, but the bottom line is that once sex starts becoming involved, even the most principled free-speech advocate runs out of tolerance for views that go against their preference. Being a drag queen is "speech" in the same sense that performance art is (it is meant to convey something), but it is speech that evokes the horror of the object of your sexual desire being replaced by a male caricature of it, so you label it "indecent" and invoke the right to not be exposed to it. What is the principled way to distinguish this from an argument that speech for any political system that relates to human sexuality at all is likewise "indecent" as it may invoke sexual horror in those who are repelled by some aspect of the system's programme? If you can be protected from disgust at drag queens, why can't a blue-hair campus activist be protected from disgust at Christians?
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5d ago
With all that said, ostensibly nationalistic people like Leo Kearse who think zionists are a natural ally are simply wrong.
Well, I would go even further and say that for the true nationalist, there can't be any allies, because allies who would never help you when it is against their own interest are not allies at all but just entities that your interests temporarily happen to align with. An ally has to help you even when it goes against their own interest, which, if they are nationalist, is the interest of their nation. Once you enter that slippery slope, though, you will probably not stop sliding until you end up in global liberalism all over again: if the principle of being a good ally can override the interest of the nation, who is to say there aren't other principles that they could consider?
Instances of nationalists claiming to have an ally are either expedient lies, or enemy-of-my-enemy delusions. With Zionists, it is probably the former on the Zionist side, and the latter on the gentile side, as gentile nationalists had their minds broken by fighting against Muslims and human rights proponents and Israel is the most celebrated scourge of those groups globally.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
6d ago
Which is why, in the first place, she can't just say "a man who espoused violence," she has to emphasize his racial identity, she has to establish that he's white: What Kind of Man Is He?!? A White Man! It's really simply plain racism.
Would you say the same to right-wingers who complain about the race and national background of criminals/suspects being left out when they belong to a left-favoured group? Because this complaint really just looks like plain old culture war stuff that both sides run on to me: make bad acts by the outgroup and good acts by the ingroup stick, but insist on individuality for the converse.
My sense about character deaths is that they are bellwethers for how serious the author is willing to be about following the plot where it is taken, like a sort of "will the ACLU defend actual nazis?" question. If the writing bends over backwards to let everyone survive, chances are it will also opt for the simple, emotionally safe option in other less obvious aspects, since it seems like a small sacrifice to make if you have already given up on allowing death, and only by removing all other sources of emotional discomfort does it become possible to capture the emotionally fragile segment of the market.
It might be too much of an ask to make a realistic war story child-friendly, but if you already wrote a story about war with no casualties, then going further to make one party a Disney villain with zero nuance and never letting the good guys tell a noble lie seems a more acceptable price to pay for getting the money of 10 year olds and polytraumatised sociology students.
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