FtttG
User ID: 1175
FtttG
4mo ago
One creator (read: one single internet girl) has certified gross earnings in 2024 of $82 million.
Who is it?
According to the Not the Bee, the shooter had also emblazoned "Israel Must Fall" and "6 Million Wasn't Enough" on their firearm.
Obama-Trump transition of power.
You mean the transition of power where, upon Trump's election, Obama immediately directed the federal government to investigate bullshit claims that Trump was secretly a Russian asset, with the explicit goal of having him impeached on that basis? "We go high", indeed.
FtttG
4mo ago
thank you for accepting the claim
I don't accept the claim.
The genocide in Gaza would be impossible for the Israelis to carry out without extensive western support and American taxpayer dollars.
I don't believe so. Per @ymeskhout, formerly of these parts:
Yes, the $3.8 billion sent to Israel every year is a lot of money, but it’s nothing compared America’s $850 billion military budget. And Israel on its own remains an extremely wealthy country that enthusiastically prioritizes its military capabilities, with a $24 billion budget and an advanced domestic industry that is a major weapons exporter. If you really believe Israel is committing a genocide, vanishing all American financial assistance would barely leave dent in their efforts.
From another article:
Israel has been receiving around $3.8 billion per year in military aid from the US since the 2000s, constituting roughly 15% of Israeli military funding.
US military aid has since increased to $17.9 billion total in emergency military aid since Hamas initiated the current war. Israel’s military budget on its own has surged 65% to $46.5 billion in 2024. This now constitutes 8.8% of Israel’s GDP, the second highest in the world, right after Ukraine’s current 34.5% (for context the US spends 3.4%). This remains a significant decline from 1975, when Israel was willing to allocate a record 30% of its GDP towards its military.
Obviously, America’s military aid to Israel is significant. But let’s say Uncommitted got what they wanted and the US stopped all aid and imposed a total arms embargo on Israel. Given the significant chunk involved, we should reasonably expect Israel’s military capabilities to be hobbled. At least, temporarily.
The problem that few protesters seem to consider is that while Israel started out scrimping and scrounging for whatever military equipment they could get their hands on (including Soviet hand-me-downs via Czechoslovakia in their 1948 independence war), it now has a robust and healthy military industry that is both iconic and prolific. Israel designs and manufactures a wide range of its own advanced military equipment, including the Uzi submachine gun, the IMI Galil rifle, the Merkava main battle tank, and precision-guided munitions like the Iron Sting 120mm mortar and the SPICE family of guided bombs.
Major manufacturing sites include Israel Military Industries (IMI) for small arms and ammunition, Rafael Advanced Defense Systems for precision-guided bombs and missiles, and Elbit Systems in Haifa. Elbit recently secured contracts to supply thousands of heavy air munitions and establish new raw materials plants, with the explicit aim of reaching “full independence” in bomb and munitions manufacturing.
It is particularly relevant to note that Israel has already been subjected to arms embargoes several times before: France in 1967, the US in 1971, and the UK in 1973. Israel’s world-class military industry was developed in response, and it would not have reached its level of sophistication were it not for the embargoes. Now, this tiny country barely the size of New Jersey, is the 8th largest weapons exporter in the world, comprising 3.1% of global arms exports.
What the US gives that Israel cannot readily make itself are advanced fighter jets (F-15, F-35), and certain precision ordinance (JDAM kits, GBU-39 Small Diameter Bombs). Were that supply source suddenly vanish, there is no universe where the IDF just shrugs and says “ah we don’t have GBUs, let’s pack it up and go home guys.”
Making things go boom is very easy. It takes little technical sophistication to drop an unguided bomb from a plane when gravity does all the work. The eye-watering invoices of modern munitions come from the integration of guidance systems, sensors, and networked targeting computers — features that reduce collateral damage but are harder to replace quickly if US supplies are cut off.
If you’re genuinely and earnestly concerned about the civilian death toll in Gaza, there is a serious risk that an arms embargo would make that worse! Both by further entrenching Israel’s domestic military industry, or by encouraging a reduced reliance on precision munitions.
There's also the fact that, as noted by many commentators, Israel has nukes. If they wanted to exterminate the entire population of Gaza, they could have just dropped a nuke on it in October 2023 and called it a day, no US military aid required.
Moving on:
I do not think that you have a very good picture of the average left-winger's thought process
We were talking about the liberal Overton window, not the left-wing one. Some people use the two terms interchangeably, but I am not one of them. I will reiterate that "blowing up brown people in the Middle East" is a policy proposal that does very much reside within the liberal Overton window in a way that "wiping out large chunks of American citizenry, or people residing within the US" does not.
for white settlers
45% of Israeli citizens are Mizrahi Jews, while 20% are Arabs. Even if your use of the scary term "white settlers" was meant to gussy up your accusation, it's just false on its face. The majority of Israelis are not "white" by any conventional definition of the term.
FtttG
4mo ago
Yes, that was my takeaway from the OP as well. My question is who might Fuentes endorse instead of Vance?
FtttG
4mo ago
I suppose I should have said a credible candidate seeking the Republican nomination.
FtttG
4mo ago
Now at the tender age of 27, Fuentes won't be eligible to run in 2028, so when you say he's the most important person in the Republican camp to watch (after Trump), I take it to mean you think his endorsement of a politician could swing the primaries. Do you have anyone in mind? That is to say, a credible candidate (perhaps a sitting governor, senator or congressman) who Fuentes might plausibly endorse?
FtttG
4mo ago
I think it's fair to say that @netstack was referring to "killing some percentage of the population that resides within one's own country". Even if one accepts your claim that the Palestinians in Palestine are being "genocided", they are neither American citizens nor resident within the US.
FtttG
4mo ago
FtttG
4mo ago
The anime image is stupid annoying, the video is "why are these brats running around with knives and hatchets in public? they need discipline, have they no parents rearing them?"
It sounds like you had a stronger emotional reaction to the video than to the AI-generated image.
FtttG
4mo ago
I suppose not. In the link under "sorry my finger slipped", Scott explains the chain of reasoning better than I can.
FtttG
4mo ago
I can't remember the payoff matrix for the iterated prisoner's dilemma, so it's possible.
In On Writing, Stephen King outlined his writing process in broad strokes:
- Get the first draft down on paper as quickly as possible while the idea is fresh in your mind, aiming for 2,000 words a day.
- Leave it for six weeks.
- Read over your first draft, ideally in one sitting.
- Revise the first draft into a second draft.
- Allow one or more people you trust to read the second draft.
- Using their feedback, revise the second draft into a "polish" (or third draft, depending on how you look at it).
My girlfriend finished reading the second draft of my NaNoWriMo project, and rated it somewhere between a 6.5 or 7 out of 10. She confirmed that it was never boring or cringe, often very entertaining to read and emotionally affecting in places. She had two major criticisms which I'm taking seriously, and a couple of smaller criticisms and suggestions. Work now continues on the "polish", or third draft.
FtttG
4mo ago
I can't comment on the specific tactical wisdom of Trump buying stakes in private enterprises. I'm not even persuaded that his motivation for doing so was anything as simple as "revenge" or "retaliation".
FtttG
4mo ago
It's a known issue of pretty much any system that those who seek power are disproportionately those who wish to use it for their own personal gain.
More than that - it's a known issue of every system that agents who are optimising for seeking, maintaining and consolidating power within that system will outcompete agents who are optimising for anything else.
FtttG
4mo ago
“When they go low we go high” was the motto for quite a while.
I would love to hear some specific examples of occasions on which Democrats went high while the Republicans were going low during the Obama administration.
FtttG
4mo ago
Note that tit-for-tat recommends cooperating until you are defected against. If there's no first defecter, cooperate-bot and tit-for-tat produce identical behaviour.
FtttG
4mo ago
When he's not being a thin-skinned emotionally incontinent manchild, Freddie deBoer can be remarkably perceptive:
Do you want to know what ideology is? What we mean when we say “ideology at its purest”? It’s not a collection of policy positions. It’s not a political party you vote for. It’s not even your conscious beliefs about right or wrong, your philosophy about how humans should act individually and collectively and the relationship between those acts and the public and private good. No, ideology refers to those beliefs you do not examine because you do not see them as beliefs at all. Ideology isn’t a matter of ingesting arguments about better or worse, right and wrong, and evaluating them to determine your own beliefs. Ideology is fundamentally the unexamined framework of the system through which you perform such an evaluation, the part you can’t and don’t see; it’s the assumptions that you cannot understand as assumptions.
FtttG
4mo ago
For clarity, when I said "no argument here", I meant that I wasn't disputing that many MAGA types are calling for their opponents' heads. My point is that I don't think this observation in and of itself disproves that MAGA types are making the game-theoretic-optimal choice at this point in the decision tree.
To steelman the political revenge framework, consider it from a game-theoretic perspective. Alice and Bob are playing iterated prisoner's dilemma and raking in money by cooperating with each other. One turn, Alice hits the defect button and makes more money than Bob. Bob says "what the hell" and Alice says "sorry, my finger slipped". Even if she's (probably) lying, Alice likely isn't stupid enough to pull the same trick on the next turn, so in the short-term, Bob's best bet is to hit cooperate on the next turn too. But if he does this, Alice will realise that she can occasionally hit the defect button and face no repercussions for it. So in the long term, it might make more sense for Bob to hit the defect button in the next turn (even if Alice pre-commits to doing so as well) in order to send a credible signal that defection will be punished: if he doesn't, he's incentivising Alice to repeatedly defect in future. Thus, the tit-for-tat strategy which (as I understand it) outperforms all others in iterated prisoner's dilemma.
A member of the Red Tribe may not think it's in the best interests of the country if Blue Tribers get fired from their jobs for opinions they expressed privately, a fate which befell many Red Tribers (or even insufficiently ideologically pure Blue Tribers) between 2009-16. But they may also be aware that, if the Blue Tribe faces no repercussions for the cancellation campaigns they wrought in the period, then they're bound to give it another try as soon as the boot is back on the other foot (as it inevitably will be sooner or later). From a game-theoretic perspective, the best solution might well be sending a credible message that "if you do this to us, we WILL do it back to you, so don't do it to us in the first place and we'll all get along just fine".
The obvious rebuttal is that there's a missing mood and the Red Tribe aren't dispassionately weighing up their options and reluctantly opting for tit-for-tat as the best of a bad bunch: they're baying for blood. No argument here: lots of MAGA types really are calling for their opponents' heads. But I refer you to The Whole City is Centre. Evolution gave us a set of instincts which approximate the game-theoretic-optimal choice that a learning algorithm would naturally arrive at by trial and error. The fact that two people learned how to play iterated prisoner's dilemma using different algorithms doesn't necessarily mean there's any difference in the course of action they would opt for at any point in the decision tree.
My point is just that the only difference between you and the pro-punishment faction is that you are following an explicitly-calculated version of the principled consequentialist defense of punishment, and they are following a heuristic approximating the principled consequentialist defense of punishment, and their heuristic might actually be more accurate than your explicit calculation.
When Alice hits defect and Bob hits defect in retaliation, his blood is pumping and his face is bright red. If Alice was playing against ChatGPT and hit defect, ChatGPT would weigh up its options and calmly, dispassionately hit defect in retaliation. But both Bob and ChatGPT hit defect in retaliation.
I speculate it might be down to the size of the two groups. There must be at least an order of magnitude more Catholics in the US than Jews. It's entirely possible that every Jew in America is no more than three degrees of separation away from the couple gunned down outside the embassy, whereas in this case there are probably many American Catholics who are six degrees of separation removed from the children shot in the church.
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