FtttG
User ID: 1175
FtttG
5d ago
if one day the shoe is on the other foot and the Palestinians achieve military supremacy?
I'll believe it when I see it.
Ashkenazi (European) Jews, who make up most of the Israeli population
Untrue. Ashkenazi Jews only make up 32% of Israeli Jews, or 23% of Israel's population. The single biggest Jewish demographic in Israel are the Mizrahi Jews, representing 45% of Israeli Jews or 33% of the population of the country.
European and good at science you say?
Among Israeli Jews, 45% are Mizrahi, who are about as European as the Arabs are. I'd hazard a guess that if I conducted a survey in which I showed respondents a photo of a Mizrahi Jew and a Palestinian Arab without telling them which was which, people would perform no better than chance at identifying them. 3% of Israeli Jews are Ethiopian. Less than half are Ashkenazi or Russian.
The idea that the Israel-Palestine conflict reduces to anything as simple as "white settler-colonialists oppressing brown people" is a ludicrous fantasy.
The Nakba is estimated to have expelled 750k Palestinians from their land i.e. 7.4% of the current total population of Israel. From a purely pragmatic, logistical perspective, expelling 10 million people is going to be a lot harder than expelling 750k people.
FtttG
5d ago
First, there's this idea that Israel is the primary/principle cause of all instability in the region, and that if we suddenly removed all the Jews and gave back the land to the Palestinians, we would have peace. This is absurd. The violence in Lebanon between shiites/sunnis/christians, the question of the Kurds, and the Sunni/Shiite Cold (I guess hot now) war are all conflicts that have their origins long before the founding of Israel. Heck if Israel wasn't there to focus hatred on, the Arabs would probably fight among themselves even more.
As I pointed out 8 months ago, since the end of the second world war, the average Middle Eastern state has been involved in 10 conflicts, including civil wars and revolutions. My interlocutor characterised Israel as a state which is in constant conflict with everyone and everything around them, but this seems to describe pretty much every Middle Eastern state, and Israel is actually the outlier in having undergone zero civil wars or revolutions since its founding.
FtttG
5d ago
Israel has repeatedly offered Gaza back to Egypt, and Egypt has always refused. They don't want millions of dysfunctional and violent Palestinians inside their borders any more than Lebanon did.
FtttG
5d ago
There is a criticism of ethnonationalism that since every ethnic group considers itself God’s gift to humanity, ethnostates will be especially prone to lash-out and start wars when they don’t get the respect they think they deserve.
How many wars have Japan, Korea and Liberia been involved in recently?
Even if Israel is an ethnostate, it's more diverse than several of these nations e.g. the 2 million Arab Israelis.
FtttG
6d ago
Yes, I could just marry a Filipina, but Chinese women are more intelligent, and more beautiful.
Filipinas are more well-endowed though.
FtttG
7d ago
My boss has wanted me to build a report for him for months, and I haven't been able to figure it out. Yesterday I tried asking ChatGPT, but after iterating on its suggestions for hours, I was no closer. Girlfriend suggesting asking Claude: Claude suggested much the same nonviable solution as ChatGPT, then demanded I pay for the pro version before it would offer me any more help. The nerve.
Today a colleague suggested asking Gemini. The first two solutions it suggested didn't work. The third one worked perfectly.
I am seriously impressed. I had no idea how good Gemini was relative to other LLMs.
Seconded doing it in instalments. You can use our comments as feedback when you're compiling a second draft which combines all four into a single post/article.
FtttG
7d ago
New year's resolutions check-in:
- To make up for only going to the gym twice the week before, I went to the gym four times last week. Can deadlift 1.8x my bodyweight for 3 reps, squat 1.05x for 6 reps and bench press .85x for 6 reps.
- Have not consumed any pornography since waking up on January 1st.
- Have completed the SQL course.
How goes it, @thejdizzler, @birb_cromble, @falling-star and @Tollund_Man4?
FtttG
8d ago
Completed the fourth draft of my novel on Sunday. It's just shy of 96k words, about 17k shorter than the third draft and, I think, much stronger for it.
FtttG
8d ago
Personally, I hate the Turkey teeth look almost as much as lip filler. People cutting about like they've a mouth full of bathroom tile.
FtttG
9d ago
I don't think genetic profiling is necessary: these women tend to make themselves known via dyed hair and tattoos.
Well we're talking about two different things which are loosely correlated, and I'm basically just summarising an argument I made elsewhere.
When it comes to promiscuity, I think the proportion of women for whom it is a net-positive is very small. Most women will feel sad the morning after a one-night stand. Stigma and internalised slut-shaming may play some role in this, but I'd hazard a guess the same is true even in free love communes.
When it comes to pornography, among circles of friends, it's generally seen as poor form for a woman to directly tell one of her female friends that she isn't very good-looking: deranged yasslighting seems to be the rule rather than the exception. As a consequence of this, many women end up with an inflated perception of how physically attractive they are, and some decide to open an OnlyFans account on that basis: after all, if you're a 10/10 bad bitch, you're sure to make bank. But they're in for a rude awakening when, after a few months, their account is pulling down somewhere near the median of the OnlyFans income distribution, thousands of dollars below the US minimum wage, and potentially for far more hours worked. No matter how much we end the "social stigma" associated with sex work, if a woman joins a platform in which her expected revenue is heavily correlated with her physical attractiveness, and then she doesn't end up making much money, that's bound to be a disheartening experience. (I think this is what @coffee_enjoyer's comment upthread was arguing: that OnlyFans sells woman a fantasy of being able to use their sex appeal to extract money from wealthy men, but most of these women, by virtue of being insufficiently attractive, are being sold a bill of goods.) It will be an even more disheartening experience if the only way she can make ends meet is by appealing to the fetishes of perverts: I can't imagine anyone feels that good about themselves after a long hard day of producing golden shower videos. And we can talk about "ending the stigma" til the cows come home, but short of a nudist colony, every employer will look a little askance at someone (male or female) if they Google their name and the first result is a photo of their rectum.
FtttG
9d ago
There would be nothing problematic about widespread promiscuity and sex work (certainly not about cyberpornography with zero risk of STDs etc.) if it carried no social stigma
Hard disagree. Most men (most "male people", if we're still doing the trans-inclusive thing) see a boost to their self-esteem the morning after a one-night stand, while most women see a decrease to theirs. Claim that this is purely the result of social stigma, internalised misogyny, internalised slut-shaming etc. all you like: from an evolutionary perspective, I don't think it's hard to understand why the sex which does the impregnating would feel good after carrying out the act which is a reliable evolutionary proxy for impregnating, while the sex getting impregnated would feel bad after doing that act without extracting commitment from the impregnater.
FtttG
9d ago
Pretty much what I argued in May last year, expanded to my second-most popular post on Substack. There are a small subset of women for whom sexual promiscuity and a career in pornography will be a net-positive to their quality of life. For the majority, it will be net-negative.
@ymeskhout drew an evocative comparison:
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