Clementine
6d ago
Doing my best to!
Clementine
6d ago
Thank you
Clementine
6d ago
- Regardless of whether some people saying Death to America only mean it idiomatically, we know not all of them only mean it idiomatically since they have proven, through action, their non-idiomatic desire for Americans to die.
- Even if the original Persian has a more idiomatic meaning, the entire discussion was about Western English speakers saying the phrase in English. They (probably) don't mean it literally, of course, they're just using it to signal how they're the good kind of kafir you definitely shouldn't stab or bomb or shoot while you're idiomatically deathing to X.
- Of course the same people saying this is fine would have a total meltdown over something similar or lesser reversed. I think it's even funnier if you have more context about the metafilter purity death spiral as they've progressively purged their ranks of anyone guilty of wrongthink.
I remember on October 8th the feeling of going online and seeing people celebrating the rape and murder of Israelis. It was a complete shock, I was totally unprepared for the sheer glee in the online progressive spaces, the instantaneous "pray for Palestine" posts combined with "this is what decolonization looks like" posted approvingly under dead bodies.
Two years later I am able to be a good deal more amused than traumatized by the repulsive shenanigans of the bot army. Partly it's because I am now more aware that much of it is a bot army, a carefully coordinated effort not organic sentiment. Partly it's because compared to when our hostages were still in Gaza I can breathe more freely now.
Partly it's because it's funny. /r/worldnews had multiple users posting their analyses about how Iran has these massive stockpiles of 50,000 missiles and 5,000 launchers that they're keeping hidden in reserve, they're just gonna wait until the defense stockpiles disappear and then theyre totally gonna unleash the hell they haven't managed to until now. (It's easy to imagine them gnashing their teeth as they write this.)
Meanwhile metafilter, which is a site that after its leftist death spiral is so tiny and inactive I'm not sure it's worth deploying a bot army to, had an (Australian) user immediately saying Death to America and discourse ensuing between the people who thought that was totally fine and the people who thought that wasn't "helpful" which yielded the following gem
for what it’s worth, “death to X” is an idiomatic phrase in the Arab/Persian world that just means “down with X” or even just casually “frickin’ X,” not a literal call for everyone in a given country to be executed, in much the same way that English-language “sucks” is no longer regarded as having homophobic implications as an idiomatic usage
I know this kind of stuff would have infuriated me two years ago. It would have made me so angry and depressed. And now I can't help it, I laughed out loud reading that comment. Wow, it truly is possible to be this level of distilled stupid.
That doesn't mean I wish well on these people — I don't, I think they're disgusting. I've had a post brewing in me for two years about how I find it so much easier to sympathize with some terrorist in Gaza who is attached to home and his family and hates me, then with some keyboard warrior in the west with a moral compass directed straight up his ass. The terrorist may also be wishing death upon me (and attempting to enact it) but there's something more morally clean about him.
We've had a much quieter week than expected (thanks to all those thousands of launchers the iranians are stockpiling for the right moment). There's at least 1-3 sirens a day but often not more than that, where I live (other areas of the country have much more because they're more in the flight path of debris). The very beginning of the war had the most, up and down and up and down and up and down like I described, by it's tapered off pretty dramatically.
The houthis don't appear to have joined in with their Iranian friends at all this time around. Hezbollah did join in, which has pissed off the non Hezbollah Lebanese enough we might, maybe, perhaps, if I'm being crazily optimistic, actually see some significant meaningful backlash against them there.
I've been working from home. We are hosting my siblings-in-law who don't have access to a bomb shelter near them and have a newborn, which comes with the expected tensions but has been ok overall.
My poor team lead is Muslim so he gets to have the rocket induced sleep deprivation and also fasting for Ramadan. At the beginning of the week he told me between those two things his brain was barely functioning, but as the rocket fire has decreased we've had more peaceful nights and he's been doing better, as have we all.
It's still uncomfortable and hard, my kids still struggle with waking up to sirens, I know people who lost their homes, I've read about the people who died although I don't know any personally. But I go online and read about all the dead my government has been allegedly covering up and it comforts me, I like not living in the alternate reality these people are living in.
Unlike many many people online who seem to know a tremendous amount about all sorts of things (so many bombs have hit us and been covered up so effectively that no one who actually lives here knows about them — but these people magically do) I know almost nothing. Just the daily experience here, and hoping things turn out okay.
Hope everyone here is ok as well.
Clementine
13d ago
Peace would be wonderful. Sometimes a bit hard to believe in, but stranger and more wonderful things have happened over the course of human history...
So far it's ok. Only light injuries today in Israel, thankfully.
School is cancelled and we will probably be expected to wfh but the corona years + years of war have made this stuff (sadly) a kind of routine we're used to.
Clementine
14d ago
No, I just live in an apartment building.
Lots of people also have a reinforced room in their house, and then some people just have community shelters in their neighborhood they have to run to every time. Which is pretty miserable, so a lot of times people just camp out in the shelter for a while.
Clementine
14d ago
Since I sort of semi promised a post about the previous war and then didn't really follow up on it I had hoped to at least provide one for the inevitable next one, but since Trump likes wars on weekends because of the stock markets and I do not use my phone/computer on Saturday you don't get anything too live, sorry. And frankly might know more than me since I'm only now catching up on the news.
The first war was a pretty big shock, we were woken up by an earthquake siren (Israel has been overdue a major earthquake for a few centuries now) which was followed by a text message clarifying that there was no earthquake, but we had attacked Iran.
This time around was, uh, well they evacuated the embassy Friday so it wasn't really a big surprise. On the other hand it's already been a month of will they won't they. We had a siren early morning, went down to the bomb shelters, came back up, went back down, came back up, went back down, came back up. "Iran trying to raise our average life expectancy by forcing us to do some cardio" was the joke (perhaps funnier for the people not doing eight flights of stairs each time...). At some point in the afternoon the early warning systems came up (I don't know why they weren't initially up) so we were able to have advance warning that a siren might be coming shortly instead of having to run immediately each time.
One of the things I realized trying to write a post about the previous war and am running into again with this one is that aside from the personal angle there's not so much of interest I can share because we just don't know anything. Like this would be a more valuable post if I had interesting geopolitical takeaways rather than just "wow I don't know what's going to happen guess we'll find out haha".
I still remember the Iranian protests in 2009 and how they came to nothing, and the many many protests between then and now, so it would be pretty incredible if finally 16 years later something actually changed.
(The timing is, uh, interesting from a Jewish perspective since we're celebrating a prior defeat of a person from Persia who tried to wipe out the Jews this Tuesday/Wednesday. In the moment it does mean the celebrations planned for tomorrow in the schools are all cancelled since everything is closed)
Clementine
30d ago
We've discussed the past being a foreign country and we've discussed fertility, a small intersection of both:
In the book A Good Time to Be Born, by Dr Perri Klass, she starts with establishing that child mortality was just a normal part of life. I borrowed it as an ebook so I'm just going to quote the blurb instead
Only one hundred years ago, in even the world’s wealthiest nations, children died in great numbers―of diarrhea, diphtheria, and measles, of scarlet fever and tuberculosis. Throughout history, culture has been shaped by these deaths; diaries and letters recorded them, and writers such as Louisa May Alcott, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Eugene O’Neill wrote about and mourned them. Not even the powerful and the wealthy could escape: of Abraham and Mary Lincoln’s four children, only one survived to adulthood, and the first billionaire in history, John D. Rockefeller, lost his beloved grandson to scarlet fever.
But I do remember from reading the book how one of the founding fathers wrote to comfort his wife that losing a child is part of the universal human condition that everyone gets to experience, a line of thinking very similar to what I've heard in the modern era about losing a parent ("joining the world's largest suckiest club")
In Chaim Weizmann's autobiography, Trial and Error, he comments in a casual throwaway line that his mother had 15 children and 12 survived to adolescence which was considered very impressive and unusual.
He also comments, in a longer paragraph, that for years his mother was only ever pregnant or nursing. She wasn't really a full human presence in his life, she was exhausted and physically ill basically all the time. Then she hit menopause, and suddenly he discovered that his mother was an entire interesting person he could and did have real conversations with.
Human have obviously always been K strategists — we have the highest parental investment needs of any species (only elephants, great apes, and orcas could plausibly be offered as counterexamples if you want to get argumentative about this statement, and the most I'm willing to concede is that they come close¹).
However, there used to be a need for what I guess I'll call a little bit of r strategy in the k strategy. Children just died too much for you to viably have only a few of them, you risked the extermination of your gene line that way.
Nowadays losing a child isn't considered a basic part of life everyone goes through. It's considered a rare and unusually tragic event.
It therefore shouldn't be surprising if in high fertility societies the number of total births has gone down— this is re discussion below that even highly religious populations have had their tfr go down.
Obviously another large factor is reliable birth control enabling the religious to reliably space births — birth control methods have existed for millenia but after silphium went extinct and before rubber (1839) or better yet latex (1920s) condoms (let alone the pill in the 1950s) the available options were mostly significantly less reliable barrier methods or things like nursing sometimes being a contraceptive for some people. Latex condoms do align closely with when birth rates dropped², but so does the drop in child mortality.
But I do think — again, limiting myself to societies that are high fertility, not the below 3 ones — that when every child is near guaranteed to survive you have fewer of them.
¹Actually I have now distracted myself into a side tangent, so here's fertility numbers for the other high investment species from Claude:
Elephants: Females typically have 4-6 calves over their lifetime. Gestation is 22 months, and they usually wait 4-5 years between births while nursing and caring for the previous calf Reproductive lifespan spans roughly ages 10-50
Orangutans: Females typically have 3-4 offspring in their lifetime. They have the longest interbirth interval of any mammal - usually 7-9 years between births.
Orcas: Females typically have 4-6 calves over their lifetime. They reproduce between roughly ages 10-40, with 3-5 year intervals between births. They can live into their 80s or 90s but stop reproducing around age 40 (menopause)
² Claude again:
United States: Dropped to around 3 children per woman in the 1900s-1920s (from 7+ in 1800), then fell below 3 during the Great Depression (1930s), spiked during the Baby Boom (1946-1964), then dropped below 3 permanently by the late 1960s/early 1970s
It doesn't neatly correlate with child mortality or birth control methods, the great depression dip is evidence for the "it's the economy stupid" people who think the reason is children are too expensive but maybe just stressful time periods in general do that?
Western Europe: Most countries dropped to around 3 or below between the 1920s-1960s, depending on the country. France was an early adopter (late 1800s), while others like Ireland remained higher longer
China: Below 3 by early 1980s (One Child Policy implemented 1979)
India: Reached 3 around 2000, now around 2.0
Clementine
1mo ago
I can't bring myself to care about this when humans have been writing wildly inaccurate and politically motivated historical fiction since at least the Epic of Gilgamesh (and almost certainly much much earlier)
Clementine
1mo ago
Then the first few days the nurses tortured us by waking us up every 2 hours sharp (independent of the babies actual sleeping pattern, of course) to make absolutely sure the baby drinks enough
I had something quite similar. I got about 5 hours of sleep over the course of 96 hours in the hospital because the hospital had precisely zero respect for any need on my part to sleep. So yes I definitely skipped over the -1 to +3 days of the baby's life but they are a peak of badness relative to the entire rest of the experience. Not really the baby's fault though that's definitely an "adults caused this suffering needlessly" situation.
(This was the first birth. Subsequent births were at other hospitals and I got more sleep)
Pregnancy is a horrible experience, after three pregnancies I still think we basically lie to women about how bad it is.
My SIL just gave birth. For the last two months of the pregnancy she said she never wanted to have another kid after this one. I asked her how she was feeling about that post the kid and she said that basically as soon as the baby was out she was no longer as opposed.
That wasn't my experience with the kid who gave me PPD, there's a reason it took years to have the next one, when a kid literally drains away your ability to feel happiness that doesn't make you want another one. Although the PPD was also a pregnancy thing, because pregnancy is a garbage shit experience. It's possible if we had incubators I wouldn't have even had the hormonal imbalance that turned off my ability to feel happiness.
That said, overall I think you're wildly exaggerating how bad the actual kids are once you've finally expelled them from being literally parasites in your body. The first four months are basically the hardest it gets because they're not really cute yet and (if you're unlucky) they scream all the time and do nothing else worthwhile. But at least you can put them down occasionally instead of having them permanently pressing against your internal organs, which in the first few months is still enough of a relief to keep you going.
After four months they're usually cuter, they can do things like "move in a direction" or "smile", and things improve pretty rapidly from there.
Toddlers are annoying again mostly because you have to potty train them. I think some people also mind the tantrums. I found tantrums, like dirty diapers, to be significantly less annoying on my own kids than on other people's kids and in general this appears to be a common experience, so you can't assume you will find your own kids tantrums as obnoxious as other kids tantrums. Otoh, unlike new babies, toddlers are actually genuinely cute to help you not feel tempted to kill them. They love you very much and find ways to show it like sharing their treats with you. Being loved feels nice.
By the time kids are five years old basically all the things online parents complain about are over. Like your entire litany of complaints about them making life impossible sounds bizarre in the context of a five year old, I can eat, sleep, go to the bathroom, read a book, etc, all completely fine around a five year old. And as they get older they improve further. My nine year old is already a net benefit to the household. She helps with her siblings, we pay her to do small sewing repairs, she offers to make supper for fun, she's an actual entire human being. Yeah we still have conflicts over things and yeah she can still get moody, have tantrums, etc, but basically she's just a nice person to have around.
So yeah the pregnancy is truly awful, way beyond what it's sold as, and the early years are approximately exactly as hard as they're sold as, but it's around 2 years of peak difficulty once you survive the ten months of pregnancy.
I've been able to have an enjoyable career, maintain a workout schedule, have creative hobbies, and go travel to new countries, with three kids. And all this without much in the way of grandparents around, and without having ever found a reliable babysitter, so if you have those it's even easier.
(Yes obviously some of this is because I have a great husband but you too can acquire a good spouse and having kids is a lot nicer when you feel positively about increasing the copies of that person's genes anyway)
Now, to address some of the hyperbole
Whatever things you might have enjoyed in life before them is completely gone, for the rest of your life.
Not only is it not completely gone, to the extent that your amount of time free to do whatever you want is reduced it's certainly not for the rest of your life. Kids eventually leave home.
Every waking moment of your life outside of work will be completely occupied by taking care of monstrous creatures that make every single bodily function besides breathing as difficult as humanly possible. Eating, sleeping, farting, shitting, drinking, etc. will each be a torturous ordeal that you will have to deal with multiple times per day.
No? None of these things are as difficult as humanly possible with kids.
It's backbreaking, thankless, and absolutely positively unfulfilling.
Backbreaking — no, they start out very light and you get stronger as you lift them
Thankless — no. From a very young age kids try to reciprocate, my baby would try to feed me back at six months or so. By the time they're writing they'll start making cards to you that they love you. I am not a person super comfortable with receiving thanks so I appreciate them less than others might I guess but my kids give me cards covered in hearts telling me thank you multiple times a year. And that's formalized thanks, they'll also just randomly hug me and say thanks pretty frequently.
Unfulfilling - listen, I personally am very low on the bell curve of how fulfilling I find kids, a combination of being naturally quite selfish and a little bit emotionally stunted. But I wouldn't call them unfulfilling either. I consider something to be unfulfilling if it feels totally pointless. Keeping another human being alive and happy isn't really able to be unfulfilling.
After having kids you will finally understand the men who work 18 hour days every day despite having kids. They're actually doing it because of the kids. Because work obligations are the only excuse they can give themselves to let them spend less time dealing with kids and instead doing something relaxing like writing TPS reports or updating excel spreadsheets. Getting into the office and getting a stack of work from your boss is sweet relief compared to the torture of taking care of the kids.
There's a grain of truth here. I would hate to be a SAHM. I really don't enjoy childcare in more than small doses. So going into work is a nice change of pace. But I wouldn't describe taking care of kids as torture, it's just something I don't like too high a dose of.
I'm pretty sure the lie around it has persisted for so long because of the corresponding hard social stigma against saying you absolutely fucking hate taking care of the kids. Anyone who even hints at that idea is going to get completely crucified in the comments section. It's like the Havel's greengrocer, where if he doesn't put up the sign with the approved message, he's going to get hauled off to the gulag. Except for parents the punishment will be worse.
The internet is anonymous. There's subreddits for parents who regret having kids. I've read them, and I don't get at all the sense it's nearly as widespread as you're trying to suggest.
I do think wanting a break can be very common though. It's definitely a common complaint that parents don't get sick days. Doesn't matter how crappy you're feeling, you still gotta do the basic parenting tasks. So yeah that aspect sucks. But from there to "every moment of the rest of your life is torture" is a huge leap.
Clementine
1mo ago
One Chinese deficit—which is arguably not even a deficit except from a Western, Christianity-inflected moral standpoint—is that they just don't seem to have an interest in much of the rest of the world
I'm not sure where this perception comes from or if it's a specifically western blind spot, maybe some wildly out of date leftover stereotype from after the Opium Wars?
But the Belt and Road Initiative did not come from a country totally disinterested in the rest of the world. China is keenly interested in the rest of the world and quite involved in foreign policy. All that foreign policy is blatantly towards China's own ends, not some abstract ideal like "democracy". But they have lots of it. And they will apply lots and lots of pressure across many many miles to make you do what they want.
Clementine
1mo ago
If the government acts in its own interests at all times and does not care about the people whatsoever except as pawns to be managed and leverage for labor, then you can accomplish a lot of things as a government.
I think about this a lot with things like the pyramids, "how were ancient people able to build these" well a lot is possible if you have lots and lots of slaves and don't really care about the conditions they're working under.
Clementine
1mo ago
As sun_the_second explained, I meant isekai, I specified permanent because that's the specific kind that became not allowed so a bunch of books I'd read added epilogues where ta-da the protagonist is suddenly back in the real world, it wasn't permanent after all. But in webnovel sites it's tagged as and pretty consistently referred to as "transmigration".
I wrote up a long high effort reply to this and then my browser app froze and when it returned the page refreshed and my in progress reply was gone. So I apologize but my second attempt is going to be shorter
1: I knew vaguely there were "rumours" about China doing forced organ harvesting. I only learned very recently the rumours are basically not rumours and have a lot of evidence. My mental model was also maybe dozens of such cases if they were real and not a conspiracy theory. The actual mathematical discrepancies suggest I was wrong by several orders of magnitude. There's a ton written about this if you Google it, I had just so automatically dismissed it as a conspiracy theory I never had. I apologize for not getting the links I originally included but it really is very simple to find.
Edit: I'll add some now
Last month, the American Journal of Transplantation – the top peer-reviewed publication on the subject – published a large-scale computational textual analysis of 2,838 Chinese-language articles published in Chinese academic journals between 1980 and 2015 which supports the inference that transplant surgeons in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) removed organs, including hearts and lungs, in violation of the internationally-accepted “dead donor” rule, i.e., before donors have been (or could be) declared “brain dead.”
The PRC is widely alleged to be a major harvester and trafficker of forcibly acquired organs. Available information indicates that Falun Gong practitioners have been the primary victims of this cruel practice, and there are now allegations that imprisoned Uyghurs and other ethnic and religious minorities are also victims, based in part on accounts of mandatory medical testing in Xinjiang consistent with preparation for organ removal. Since 2015, Chinese authorities have claimed to only source organs from voluntary donors, but there are doubts as to the veracity of the claim. Data suggests that Chinese hospitals have performed many times more transplants than the highest estimates of ethically available donors can account for
The final judgment of the Independent Tribunal into Forced Organ Harvesting from Prisoners of Conscience in China Tribunal, published in March 2020, concluded that forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience has been practiced for a substantial period of time involving a very substantial number of victims.
As of 2015, China declared that all organ donations would be “sourced from voluntary donors,” repealing an earlier policy that allowed the government to source organs from death row prisoners. Accordingly, in 2017, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) reported that the voluntary organ donor list of approximately 375,000 people “yielded 5,146 ‘eligible’ organ donors,” resulting in over 16,000 organ transplants.
Yet scholars and experts, such as those who form the China Tribunal, an international organization tasked with investigating transplant practices in China, find a different reality. They estimate from data, including hospital bed counts and medical personnel, that China conducts between 60,000 to upwards of 100,000 organ transplants annually.
Given the overwhelming gap in these statistics, from where did China source tens of thousands of organs?
The answer lies in the illegal operation of forced organ harvesting. Recent congressional testimonies estimate that 25,000 to 50,000 prisoners in China undergo forced organ transplants annually. Imprisoned and detained religious and ethnic groups, including the Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities, account for the majority of victims.
https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/76845/html/
- Implausible increase of transplant numbers in China between 1999 and 2004.
- Increased transplant numbers cannot be attributed solely to executed prisoners.
- Implausible growth of China’s organ donation numbers.
- Discrepancy between officially reported transplant numbers and other transplant infrastructure parameters.
- inexplicable medical exams in Chinese detention camps.
- DAFOH estimates that more than 150,000 Falun Gong practitioners have become victims of forced organ harvesting in China in the past 16 years.
UN human rights experts* said today they were extremely alarmed by reports of alleged ‘organ harvesting’ targeting minorities, including Falun Gong practitioners, Uyghurs, Tibetans, Muslims and Christians, in detention in China.
The experts said they have received credible information that detainees from ethnic, linguistic or religious minorities may be forcibly subjected to blood tests and organ examinations such as ultrasound and x-rays, without their informed consent; while other prisoners are not required to undergo such examinations. The results of the examinations are reportedly registered in a database of living organ sources that facilitates organ allocation.
“According to the allegations received, the most common organs removed from the prisoners are reportedly hearts, kidneys, livers, corneas and, less commonly, parts of livers.
2: The level of censorship in China is very extreme. My penpal told me as a funny story that when they banned stack overflow the software engineers rioted and they backtracked, but in general they ban things freely and arbitrarily. As someone who does follow lots of Chinese media I get used to tv shows getting cancelled or the plotlines getting massively changed because someone decided that from now on you're not allowed to have zombies. The latest development is now you're not allowed to positively portray permanent transmigration, they think it's a suicide risk. It's very much not just the "obvious" don't say anything about tianenmen square, don't criticize the government, etc, it's constant stupid nonsense.
A link to an article about kids toys somehow led me down a rabbit hole to this article
https://lydialaurenson.substack.com/p/why-i-was-part-of-the-neoreactionary
Which I am still processing right now so maybe it's too premature for me to be posting it for discussion.
In any case I haven't been around here for a while, and I guess I still owe you all thoughts from the war, but one thing I've been doing is dipping my toes into activism in the "reducing extreme polarization" sphere and this article was from a totally different country and politics from my own and yet way too terrifyingly similar. The feeling of people existing in two different realities and erasing any evidence that threatens their specific chosen reality and starting to feel like you're going a little insane from being able to sympathize with both sides instead of comfortably siloing yourself into one black and white self-righteous viewpoint.
(Sometimes I wonder if we all just know too much and read too much these days. In my moments of debating whether I even should be doing activism trying to set up coexistence circles and hikes I wonder if everyone needs to just never read the news ever again and only talk to people they know personally face to face. I don't know, surely I'm not the only one here wondering how many truly obnoxious unbearable people I meet online are secretly bots created solely to make me and the rest of the planet miserable...?)
Anyway I'm interested in the motte's thoughts and I guess I'm once again shamelessly using you as a sounding board while I try to figure out my own.
Edit: she quotes from another article but the link is a dead link, it's fortunately available on webarchive, so if someone wants to read that one as well, it's here: https://web.archive.org/web/20250904220910/https://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2007/02/liberating_iraq.html
Clementine
4mo ago
That's the kind of thing that sounds good in theory but has at least two major issues I can think of in practice:
- Geographically/logistically I'm not sure how it would work. Would it be just maintaining the status quo in the west bank but on a village by village basis giving the entire village citizenship? I don't have a good mental model of how the handover of administration from PA to Israel would work, I also suspect the PA would just... Not be pleased to be doing that handover.
- Peaceful Palestinians are at risk of getting lynched by their less peaceful compatriots. If I write that coexistence event thing as a separate post I'll address it in more depth but we couldn't take pictures of any Palestianians attending in case they got murdered as traitors. I don't really know how high the risk of this is — presumably non-zero or we wouldn't have been given those instructions — but I do know that generally if a Palestinian talks too much about maybe coexisting with Israel you'll get a lot of public disavowals, his family saying he's a disgrace to the family and they don't agree with him, etc. There's a lot of pressure to toe the line and that pressure it not just social/verbal.
On the other hand, perhaps if approached on a clan-by-clan level it could be doable? That's not really very different from village-by-village (because a clan usually stays close together anyway). This is the kind of thing where it would help if I had better knowledge of clan politics, but all I know about it is things I absorb second hand from coworkers etc. Maybe I'll ask my husband later, he's active in hebrew-arabic language exchange groups and might have a better idea.
Anyway basically: I don't think the majority of Israelis would be opposed but that doesn't make it a feasible solution. Maybe someday though, if things develop in a promising direction.
Clementine
5mo ago
So the war is (at least temporarily) over.
No one, myself included, fully believed Hamas was going to actually hand over the live hostages until they did so. They are now withholding the dead ones, which is more typical.
The joy about the hostages' release was obviously mixed with other feelings, hence Israeli social media being full of posts commemorating the dead, and Israeli talk in the streets full of mourning the release of terrorists and the inevitable encouraging of more kidnappings (an attempt at kidnapping was foiled the day before).
Still, there was a lot of joy to be had.
As for the long term repercussions of these two years of war... No one knows yet, obviously.
One thing I am somewhat curious to see is what happens with Gazans getting work permits to enter Israel — before the war that was a thing (thousands of permits and millions of dollars in wages), but in the wake of the revelation that they then gave maps of the places they visited to Hamas (in fairness — they were probably being threatened by Hamas if they didn't) I don't know if the communities surrounding Gaza will be willing to allow it again. A lot of those communities were pretty left-wing and peace-minded and I don't know to what extent that position changed after the massacres.
Also before the war the government was pursuing a strategy of "surely with enough money Hamas will just focus on governing" hence the (in Israeli terms) scandal over how much money Netanyahu was giving them from Qatar. I think the dream of them being pacified with money is pretty thoroughly dead on the Israeli side these days, and that might also affect the work permit equation.
West Bank Palestinians have been having a lot more difficulty getting entry permits since the war as well, I actually do expect that to ease up pretty significantly now, especially if things stay calm for like, a month. I hope I'm right about that.
A lot of I/P coexistence initiatives went into hibernation mode after the outbreak of the war. They had already started to come back before this ceasefire — I went to one a few months ago, a meeting of West Bank Palestinians and Israelis in a relatively more safe area of the West Bank (so Palestinians could get to it without needing entry permits and Israelis would be less scared of going than if it was held in other areas of the West Bank). I feel like that meetup is probably worth a separate post (it was fascinating) but in any case I do expect the coexistence initiatives to start doing a lot better if the sort-of peace also sort-of holds. The veterans of those groups say they're used to these kinds of ebbs and flows.
I am skeptical we get a break from the decades of missiles from Gaza because of the ostensible ceasefire — that hasn't been the case in all previous "ceasefires", so if it happened it would be a sign something is actually different about this one.
We're due an election in a year but historically Israel very very very rarely (aka: it happened one time) makes it all the way to the actual official due date instead of calling early elections. So we'll probably get one soon.
Anyway. For now it's "wait and see". I'm not optimistic about the summit in Egypt leading to any real change but I truly would love to be proven wrong and something good happens for once. And whatever the future holds, in the moment, right now, I am really happy that the last two years are over.
Clementine
8mo ago
Have to take a break from the motte. Since I had a previous post discussing some anxiety about being here, am posting to make it clear it's nothing to do with anyone here, the discussion was fine and respectful (although I ended up regretting defending Turok lol). I also hope to eventually be back, joining was me dipping my toes but turns out I'm not quite ready for it, might be ready for it someday though. Just wasn't managing to do it with the proper balance for myself.
Clementine
8mo ago
You can’t sustain such systems long term.
Lots of duty based systems eg confucianism lasted long term. I'm not sure how well adapted they are to modern day life, where a lot of the scaffolding¹ that helps maintain the systems is crumbling. But these systems usually specifically have moral parables about people behaving virtuously — dutifully — even when they're reciprocated not just with nothing but with active ingratitude and disrespect.
¹ things like belief in a god who will reward you for virtuous behavior if you're not rewarded by the beneficiary here, stronger community bonds, staying in the same place for decades or centuries so that having a good reputation meant more than it does today, etc.
Clementine
8mo ago
Duty without reciprocation is just exploitation.
No, that's precisely the kind of rights-based mindset that I'm describing as not being duty-based.
Duty without reciprocation isn't exploitation, it's virtue. That's the entire point of duty-based thinking. That you might not get jack shit in return and you do it anyway, because it's your duty. The entire concept is of having things you do simply because you are supposed to, not for other incentives.
It is, admittedly, a very traditional mindset. But it's a fundamental lynchpin to how the whole thing holds together.
Clementine
8mo ago
...gotta say my reaction to that is a firm "ew". Delicacy, modesty, discretion, not saying everything out loud in public are all virtues.
Clementine
8mo ago
I had a vague post in mind that sort of overlapped with this one, which was just... The general lack of a sense of "duty". There's just a lot of talk about rights, or privileges, it feels like. Or of being taken advantage of (eg paying for children). Not "obviously if it's my child I have the responsibility to pay for them, what possible use for my money is more important than giving them as much support as I can".
I think the most basic component of a (successful) traditional marriage would be shared duty, both to the marriage itself, AND to something higher than the marriage itself. It's very different from marriage as a romantic fulfilment. Which you can still have, which is still even treated as something you can want, but when the marriage isn't romantically fulfilling but everyone is still doing their duties that's still considered a successful marriage, whereas in more modern culture I think it's considered a failure. (Fwiw I think the modern view has seeped into more traditional circles as well, but there's a clear generational shift I can see, because older couples are much more likely to think as I described)
I usually wonder about this kind of thing in a different sense, because men in spheres bemoaning lack of trad values often mention virginity but I'm never clear on if they're offering the same virginity themselves. And also if they're offering to respect their (prospective) girlfriend's desire for virginity until marriage and would indeed marry her without having sex.
Fwiw I don't think comments like yours are signs of bots. To me an obvious sign of bots would be multiple separate accounts repeating a claim that Iran has thousands of launchers waiting to be used. Or one account that's constantly posting comments on this topic and no other topic round the clock and spreading misinfo. It's mostly on reddit or Instagram that I've seen that kind of thing. But I do also believe there's coordinated attempts at pushing narratives on social media that aren't just fog of war misinfo.
I do hope there were very solid strategic reasons for America to join and that they pan out but it's not like the Trump administration is clearly communicating them, hence "hope", that the 4d chess board or whatever becomes obvious in a few weeks. It's really early in the war, but it definitely from my perspective with so little information feels like a big big gamble so I'm really hoping that for the people who have access to way more secret intelligence than I do it's much more of a sure thing.
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