Blueberry
6mo ago
The question by CrashedPsychonaut was why the UN were in any way justified to authorize a partition and the simple answer is that they were and are not. But if you deny this „top-down imposition“, and you can’t rely on a hegemon to keep the status quo as the British are leaving, you will instead have a bottom-up solution: civil war.
I don't really know what he thinks, he seems to be obsessed with the Ukraine war and the Gaza conflict (RT galore) but thinks it is stupid to fight (and die) as a low level grunt?
https://twitter.com/bronzeagemantis/status/1711513938511196289
The “Bronze Age” ruler would have smashed your idol group identities in a thousand pieces. Literally every state and group today is fake. And my book isn’t about celebrating your preferred ethnic pathic affectations when they engage in chimpouts or fake modern wars.
To simplify it: A Napoleon movie which isn't done by the French for a French audience is cultural appropriation.
Also Napoleon was 29 in Egypt campaign and 35 when he crowned himself Emperor. A younger sexier actor should play him.
Zoophilia and meat eating are made comparable by Singer because he frames it as such. He illustrates that himself as "Imagine that you are an animal etc". But if one rejects this framework, if I imagine myself as a human, than it is effective to cut short engagement by having a simplified emotional response, eg by being shocked or mocking the idea. Taboos (an old fashioned word, you can also describe this category as "infohazard" or maladaptive training data which derails your brain software) are best preserved not by studying them in ever increasing detail, but by making them unthinkable.
For example a different framework could be: "Moral is that which makes my village survive the winter and makes my tribe/family/progenity thrive". A diverse diet does that. Romantic/Erotic attachment to animals does not and triggers disgust (maybe even genetically encoded?). It is noteworthy that the recent rise in veganism was not caused by the old arguments against animal harm like "imagine being an animal", but by new egoistic pro-human arguments like "veganism is more healthy" or "red meat causes more colon cancer" or "vegan calories can feed the world cheaper" or "western diet produces too much CO2, destroys the rainforest for cattles and we should switch to something more sustainable".
But hunter-gatherers are primitive and elephants are animals. From noble man I expect more.
That Hamas murdered civilians on the music festival and paraded a half naked dead women around really moves the needle on my moral compass.
BUT, this is also a false dichotomy. There are not only two sides: Beside Hamas there is the Fatah-ruled Palestinian National Authority. While there is surely a lot to criticize them for, the GDP in the West Bank is twice as high than in Gaza strip. And Israel itself has plural opinions (I think Netanyahu is done after the crisis, this was a colossal failure of government on every level.)
Blueberry
3mo ago
sounds more like Wini, Widi, Wicky
A rose by any other name would smell as sweet …
Vici is related to victory. And the hard c=k is manly.
Blueberry
5mo ago
Looking at successful religions, dietary restrictions and the conspicuous observance of them seems ritualistically important in binding people together
I think this is also part of it. There is the "Veganuary" in January which is even tried by flexitarians/carnivores and sort of like Ramadan or catholic lent. And the dietary restrictions by the more fanatic minority have outsized influence on the more tolerant/flexible majority, which pushes culture in one direction.
It is a bit of virtue signaling (the vegan has bragging rights over the vegetarian), a bit atonment for our sins (at least eating vegan Pizza with fake cheese feels that way), good old market capitalism (aside from fake cheese many products got crazy goods. I don't care if I eat real chicken nuggets or plant based nuggets), but it is also development of a shared culture and being part of something bigger (which is universally regarded as good or at least not bad, which is nice). Also the small talk aspect, one can share recipes and cooking tricks.
Blueberry
7mo ago
There are 3 million people in the west bank and 2 million people in the gaza strip.
5 trillion Dollars to buy a solution to the middle east conflict is not impossible, but pretty steep.
Though the problem only compounds over time: Fertility rate is 3.2 and even 3.97 in Gaza. Look at this population pyramid:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_State_of_Palestine
Blueberry
7mo ago
Caesar’s final breath – exhaled as he was stabbed to death in the senate – would have contained about a litre of air made up of about 25 thousand million million million molecules. At the same time, a litre of air represents 0.000000000000000000001% of all the air on Earth. When you crunch these numbers, says Kean, you will find that roughly one particle of the last air that was breathed out by Caesar more than 2,000 years ago will appear in your next breath. “Across all that distance of time and space, a few of the molecules that danced inside his lungs are dancing inside yours right now.”
Blueberry
8mo ago
what they do to celebrate getting to Hawaii I will not spoil for those who haven't read.
Is it human sacrifices?
Blueberry
9mo ago
Elon also has to partner with Uber/Lyft/PayPal/Venmo/Amazon/Ebay/booking/Ticketmaster etc. I am sceptic that he will be good in that. Maybe a boring uncontroversial person could pull it of.
For Twitter to tacking a payment option onto itself is a monumental task. How many years would they need to be feature competitive with PayPal?
From a software-philosophical point of view my guess is that it will just bloat the X-Twitter app.
Hardware Stores / Home Improvement Centers are very popular in Germany and being able to build (or extend) your own home gives bragging rights. The slogan of one of the larger chains is "There is always something to do" and a competitor has "respect for making it yourself".
Ads:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ryg3BCRH0Nw
https://youtube.com/watch?v=AKdc6xdNu_0
One celebrity, a sport athlete who won the world cup, made with his wife home improvement ads, eg doing their own gardening. I just now realize how strange that is, as in other countries such super rich stars would instead advertise that they have servants for everything.
Part of it is the traditional image that a "real man" should be skilled in using power tools and be industrious (and the feminist idea that women should be too). And also because manual labor is very expensive, it is cheaper to do it yourself "as a hobby".
Blueberry
11mo ago
Who are the female counterparts to Harry Potter
Harry is totally average, aside that he has -accidentally- a piece of Voldemorts soul. But he is not the best wizard in the world or is the coolest guy ever. It is Longbottom in the end who wielded the sword of Gryffindor, it is Hermione who is most clever, the Weasley family who harbors the resistance.
The hardest flex of him is in the comments:
I've never understood why people think English is bad for dactyls. I really like them and wrote a piece entirely in dactyls once to see what would happen: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/08/17/the-goddess-of-everything-else-2/
WOW this has made me think of that post in a new light. Read it at least four times and had no clue.
Many people have said this! I'm torn between "I guess I wasted my time doing this" and "people seemed to find it beautiful, and I wonder if it's because subconsciously they noticed it was poetry even if they couldn't exactly put their finger on why."
A dactyl is a long syllable followed by two short syllables.
Blueberry
6mo ago
Along those lines, if IPGs truly are an effective tactic that's hard to stop, I gotta wonder where we're gonna see it next. Ukraine maybe?
The paragliders were like out of Mad Max. Like the cheap NOD buggies from command & conquer.
But:
I can't find the source video on Youtube, so sorry for the Twitter links. This is the fast-paced propaganda video from Hamas "rehearsing their deadly Israel attack". This is how they want to be seen:
https://twitter.com/Aryan_warlord/status/1710846439776297120
And from the ground it looked like this:
https://youtube.com/shorts/_UPSU2dEJbM https://twitter.com/OSINTNic/status/1712058746266849658
It is terrifying, but only if you don't have a gun. The gliders are slow moving, they are loud, they have zero cover. It is like shooting ducks. If you have a gun, which the festival people didn't.
One hot take a few days ago by Eetan was that the Israelis need gun rights:
https://www.themotte.org/post/705/israelgaza-megathread-1/146562?context=8#context
I wouldn't be so quick for this American solution. But I don't expect to see glider soldiers in the heavily armed Ukraine war and in principle it should be easy for the IDF to detect and defend against them.
Blueberry
15d ago
It is even more strange when they stay principled! There are people in the worldnews subreddit arguing that Ukraine should draft women.
Blueberry
1mo ago
Italy’s birth rate is decreasing further to 1,2:
Financial Times: Italy’s births drop to historic low
Just 379,000 babies were born in 2023, despite PM Giorgia Meloni’s efforts to reverse demographic decline
Meloni has continued a child allowance scheme introduced by the previous government in 2021 and slightly increased the monthly sums families receive for small children, but her rightwing government has also experimented with other incentives.
After coming to power in late 2022, the coalition government halved VAT on infant products such as baby formula and nappies, but it has since scrapped those tax cuts. This year, Italy has allocated €1bn in other measures aimed at supporting mothers, including temporarily making pension contributions on behalf of working women who have at least two young children.
But Maria Rita Testa, a demographer at Rome’s Luiss university, said policymakers needed to address other factors, including parents’ economic stability and access to affordable childcare, now in acutely short supply. “They should try to tackle the problem of reconciliation of family and work tasks,” Testa said.
Italy had planned to use some of the €200bn in EU recovery funds it receives to build new childcare facilities for 260,000 infants and pre-school aged children, but Rome has now cut that target to 160,000.
The article notes that Meloni is herself a single child, but fails to mention that she also only has a single daughter. Still the low birth rate is a core issue for her and her right-wing coalition, but as in leftwing governments elsewhere they can’t find policies to reverse course.
In the India Subreddit they take that as proof that Sikhs infiltrated the Canadian intelligence agencies:
hundreds of wiretaps of the suspects and other informants were destroyed.[140][141] Of the 210 wiretaps that were recorded during the months before and after the bombing, 156 were erased. These tapes continued to be erased even after the terrorists had become the primary suspects in the bombing
A witness was also murdered and „ a consequence of his murder, the affidavit was inadmissible as evidence.[149] This was later cited as a reason why the suspects in the bombing were eventually acquitted in 2005“.
A Security Intelligence Review Committee cleared CSIS of any wrongdoing. However, that report remains secret to this day. As of June 2003, the Canadian government continued to insist that there was no mole involved
Juicy fodder for conspiracy theorists!
Blueberry
6mo ago
Paul Morphy, the best player ever, has said:
"The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life."
Blueberry
4mo ago
Websites such as Pornhub, which is less targeted to specific sexual attitudes and is more a repository for a wide array of content, are designed to "push the envelope" with straight users by suggesting gay and transgender videos to them, Rice explained.
I noticed that. Pornhub is showing more gay/trans/kink into the little thumbnails. I dismissed that as changing mores, a neutral algorithm just showing what is popular. But now I wonder how much ideology is behind that? If one registers a PH account (shock!) instead of incognito browsing, is there a way to set preferences and filter effectively?
Blueberry
1mo ago
Yes, because their (now grown up) kids defend Allen & Soon Yi:
Whatever one can sneer at the marriage, it held better than many others. They will stay together until Woody dies.
Even with regard to Ronan Farrow
I bet good money that Allen doesn’t have any biological children. I subscribe to the Frank Sinatra’s theory.
That's a messed-up family dynamic.
True.
Interesting, the Samaritans are the closest (virtually identical because of endogamous marriage) to the ancient bronze age Canaanites:
https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&sca_esv=573522448&q=samaritan+people&tbm=isch&source=lnms&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiv0ZaC8faBAxXpwAIHHaa4DYIQ0pQJegQICxAB&biw=1127&bih=732&dpr=2
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