FtttG
User ID: 1175
FtttG
2mo ago
Don't text her bro.
Joking aside, great post. I think you would enjoy Ted Chiang's novella "Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom", a much better exploration of the multiverse concept than the vastly overrated Everything Everywhere all at Once.
I saw some takes about this on Substack. Richard Hanania compares the people calling the ad eugenics propaganda to the Japanese soldiers in the Philippines in the 1960s who still thought the war was going on. Somebody else whose name escapes me commented that, if this had happened five years ago, everyone would be expected to weigh in on it and would be viewed with suspicion if they didn't, American Eagle would issue a statement apologising for the campaign and reiterating their commitment to racial equality (and making a large donation to the ACLU to prove it) and Sydney Sweeney would have been unable to get any roles for a year.
There does appear to have been a vibe shift. It's not that woke people were holding the whip five years ago, and now they're running scared. Woke people, even woke people in positions of considerable power and influence, are still able to express pretty out-there woke opinions to their heart's content, without any negative repercussions for their careers. The difference is that there's no longer any expectation for normies to play along. No one is going to get fired from their job for saying "I don't think American Eagle are crypto-Nazis, and I think it's silly to say so"; five years ago I don't know if that would have been the case.
Unfortunately, I think this ship sailed decades ago. In the public imagination, "paedophile" scans as synonymous with "person who has sexually assaulted a person below the age of majority, without penetration" or "person who has committed statutory rape" or "person who has been accused of committing statutory rape" or "person who seems interested in committing statutory rape" or even in some cases "person who is significantly older than his or her romantic or sexual partner (even if said partner is of the age of majority)". (Hell, in at least one case it was seen as synonymous with "paediatrician" - this article is twenty-five years old.)
A person who is eager to draw a distinction between "paedophilia" and "ephebophilia" will be accused of pedantic hair-splitting at best and nefarious motives at worst (honestly, I don't even think the latter is unreasonable, unless the person drawing the distinction is a literal clinical psychologist or similar); likewise a person who is eager to draw a distinction between "paedophilia" (a disorder of sexual attraction which does not imply a particular pattern of behaviour) and "child molestation" (an actual behaviour).
FtttG
2mo ago
they'll be dead before they can leave infanthood
Are you predicting that literally no Palestinian children in Gaza will survive to adulthood?
FtttG
2mo ago
I have no idea whether it's a plausible outcome. But it does have precedent in living memory, namely the post-war American occupations of Germany and (especially) Japan. It's not completely outside the realm of possibility.
FtttG
2mo ago
A product designer in a medtech company trying to develop a new way of diagnosing fertility disorders.
FtttG
2mo ago
we can finally stop sending them massive amounts of direct and indirect aid
I'd have no objection to that, personally.
Palestinians, whose relation with Hamas is between hostile and resigned for lack of better options... Israelis, who have a broadly voluntary and enthusiastic relation with their government
According to polls of Palestinians conducted between October 31st and November 7th, 2023, support for Hamas stood at 76%; for the Al-Aqsa Briagades at 80%; for Palestinian Islamic Jihad at 84%; and for the Al-Qassam Brigades at 89%. In 2023, Netanyahu's approval rating among Israelis stood at 47%.
FtttG
2mo ago
Over the weekend, I finished cutting things out of the first draft of my NaNoWriMo project. It now sits at about 113k words, 20k words (15%) shorter than the first draft. Under the assumption that the second draft should be no longer than 90% of the first draft, this gives me a "budget" of about 7k words to play with, to add in details that occurred to me since completing the first draft. I'm aiming to have the second draft finished by August 10th.
FtttG
2mo ago
The "completely unruly" part is doing the heavy lifting here. The only reason Hamas and the broader Palestinian movement keeps waging its pointless self-destructive war against Israel is because of its quixotic belief that Israel could ever be defeated militarily. As Richard Hanania argues, Israel must crush Palestinian hopes. If the current generation of Palestinian children are raised under the understanding that Israel will never be defeated (and hence they might as well learn to play nice with them and stop being completely unruly), that serves everyone's interests. If Israel can achieve a durable peace in the region without having to resort to genocide or ethnic cleansing, I'm sure they'd vastly prefer that over the alternative.
If the best you can say in favour of this country that it offers its citizens better survival rates than the civil war Iraq or Syria
Actually, I can do better. It has the 20th highest life expectancy in the world, ranking above numerous European nations including many in Western Europe. Its intentional homicide rate is marginally higher than most of Western Europe, but given that these murders are overwhelmingly concentrated among the Arab citizenry, the country seems to be doing a pretty good job at its stated mission of serving as a safe haven for Jews in particular.
FtttG
2mo ago
your own state security forces murdering you knowingly to avoid an awkward situation for the politicians is something again many orders of magnitude worse and more troublesome.
Sure, it's more troublesome. But as I've gone to great lengths to argue and contrary to your and the OP's framing, Israelis are not "very unsafe" because of the existence of the Hannibal directive. Ostensibly, this thread isn't about how "troublesome" the Israeli government is, but how safe Israelis are relative to peer nations.
Is the Hannibal directive a troublesome policy for which the Israeli government ought to face criticism? Of course, I've never suggested otherwise. Should it factor into any honest, disinterested discussion of how safe Israelis are relative to peer nations? No, obviously not. Surely no one would dispute that a random Israeli civilian is orders of magnitude less likely to die violently than a randomly selected civilian of any other Middle Eastern country - and none of those countries, to my knowledge, have any official policy analogous to the Hannibal directive. I'd even go so far to say that, given the rate of civil war, ethnic cleansing and political repression, a randomly selected civilian in any other Middle Eastern country is vastly more likely to die at the hands of that country's security forces than a randomly selected Israeli civilian is.
FtttG
2mo ago
The OP uses the Hannibal directive as an example of how Jews are very unsafe
Even saying "very unsafe" is an example of exactly the kind of thing I'm complaining about. In an actuarial table of how Israelis met their ends since the founding of the state, would "being intentionally killed by the IDF to prevent them from being taken hostage by groups hostile to Israel" even crack the top hundred most common causes of death? The top five hundred? The top thousand? No, obviously not. And yet critics of Israel have this obsessive fixation on the Hannibal directive as evidence of how uniquely barbarous the nation is - when in reality, a counterfactual world in which the Hannibal directive didn't exist would only mean a tiny handful of Israelis would still be alive.
Let me put this in terms that you might find more agreeable: being shot dead by a police officer is a live possibility for black Americans in a way it isn't for black Britons, or indeed black citizens of just about any European country. But if you were investigating the causes of the reduced life expectancy among black Americans relative to other ethnic groups, "risk of being shot dead by police officers" shouldn't even enter into the equation. It's evidence of a mindset warped by political partisanship.
FtttG
2mo ago
I'm not saying the Hannibal directive isn't real. I'm saying I find it very suspicious that the primary context in which it's brought up is to reflexively dismiss any and all claims that certain groups have mistreated the Israelis. I'm sure if you look at the ratio of "Israeli civilians killed by groups which are hostile to Israel" vs. "Israeli civilians who were intentionally killed by the IDF as part of the Hannibal directive", it would be extraordinarily lopsided - maybe 9:1 or higher. But critics of Israel seem to have decided that, because the Hannibal directive exists and has ever been employed, therefore they can dismiss all claims that Hamas or whoever murdered Israeli civilians by saying "eh, they probably did it to themselves". But of course, they're aware that this looks really bad, unserious and conspiratorial (perhaps even bearing a family resemblance to that great woke sin, "victim-blaming"), so rather than explicitly asserting "I believe that Israel is lying when they claim that Hamas killed these Israeli civilians, and they were in fact deliberately killed by the IDF", they'll just wave their hands and say "Hannibal directive, look it up", hoping the reader will join the dots themselves.
It's a cowardly, dishonest style of argumentation. If you believe in conspiracy theories, at least have the balls to be upfront about it.
At a cursory inspection, 1 million was the cheapest I could find, but far from the average: many houses were a significant multiple of that. Rathgar is posh but admittedly not as posh as, say, Foxrock.
I thought there was a tech driven housing crisis.
There is, although I prefer the term "shortage" to "crisis".
FtttG
2mo ago
Before 10/7, the slightest hint of anti-semitism was instantly denounced.
I don't know what world you were living in before 10/7, but it seems to be a very different one from the world I was living in.
the "Jewish State" will not pull all the stops to save your life but will instead attempt to murder you to prevent you from being used as a bargaining chip
I've seen countless crypto-Hamas supporters citing the existence of something called the Hannibal Directive as if they're masterfully laying down a trump card; in some cases, explicitly claiming that Hamas killed literally zero civilians on October 7th, and that 100% of the Israeli civilians massacred on that day were in fact killed by the IDF. These people seem to be engaged in a kind of curious doublethink: on the one hand, they want to express their support for Hamas and the broader Palestinian cause - but on the other hand, on some level they're aware that this means tacitly endorsing some rather monstrous and brutal tactics. The "solution" they've hit on is to assert that Hamas is entitled to fight back against oppression and colonialism, up to and including murdering unarmed Israeli civilians - but in point of fact, 100% of the unarmed Israeli civilians in question were actually murdered by the IDF themselves! How convenient - for a moment there I was worried I might have to confront legitimate moral ambiguity, acknowledge that this conflict isn't as black-and-white as I would like to pretend, or do something facially grotesque like actively endorsing the slaughter of music festival attendees. What a relief that I can instead fall back into the warm, comforting embrace of that isn't happening, and it's good that it is. (See also "Denial by a thousand cuts".)
But for all that such people are keen to cite the existence of the Hannibal Directive, they are generally strangely reluctant to cite specific cases in which they believe it was actually used by the IDF. The intention seems to be to conjure up a free-floating miasma in which all claims of Israeli suffering are responded to with reflexive suspicion, a permanent asterisk over any and all Israeli casualties in this conflict, while being careful to avoid specific (and hence falsifiable) assertions that this specific Israeli was in fact killed by the IDF. "Yes, yes, Israeli civilians being murdered is bad - but hey, did you know there's this thing called the Hannibal Directive? Sure is interesting, huh? Now, I'm not saying the IDF intentionally murdered their own people and then Mossad created some AI-generated footage to frame Hamas for the massacre as a casus belli - but I'm not not saying that. At the end of the day, I'm Just Asking Questions."
FtttG
2mo ago
Their CEO had actually floated the idea of coin-operated toilets a while back, but was stymied by airline regulations.
Michael O'Leary is famous for playing the media machine like a fiddle, making outrageous announcements for Ryanair's latest cost-cutting measure which he has no intention of enacting but which get the company's name in the papers for a press cycle.
FtttG
2mo ago
I've heard it's considered such an accurate representation of UK politics that some of its phrasings have entered the vernacular e.g. "omnishambles".
I'm getting a 403 from the website
I wonder if it's a region-locked thing. Annoyingly, Internet Archive doesn't have it. Here's the full text anyway.
can we get a check on Coulter's law? The quoted parts seem a bit cagey about the identity of "the assailant".
Yeah, I'd be curious about that myself. I would be surprised if the assailant turns out to be a white Irishman, but I can't say it's wholly outside the realm of possibility.
The latter - why'd you have to do me like that
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