JulianRota
1yr ago
There are 2 basic theories for how to win elections. One is that you win by convincing moderates who might plausibly vote either way to vote for your guy. The other is that you win by convincing your supporters to actually turn out and vote. Given the state of partisanship and the participation rate in even highly contentious elections with massive media attention, it seems likely that the second is the dominating factor in most elections. If something drains the enthusiasm of people who would have voted for you such that they fail to actually show up and vote, you can very much still lose, even if the other side is (in your opinion) objectively further from the point of view of the people who are sitting out.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I refuse to pay or watch ads for Google specifically, because they have shown themselves to be ideologically opposed to me and prepared to devote their resources to removing and hiding things I agree with and want to watch or read. I do have direct paid subscriptions to several creators via Patreon and a paid subscription to Nebula where I watch videos that are interesting and not ideologically opposed to me, as they give their creators a significant direct cut.
It's pretty challenging to consistently and definitively refuse to give any form of support to these massive monopolies that have shown their dedication to squashing my ideology, but I do what I can, and I feel no qualms about cheating them and taking advantage of them any way that is convenient.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I don't have any particular plan right now. I am firm on not caring to watch much youtube on any platform where I have to suffer through their full ads.
Things are weirdly erratic right now. I expect Youtube and uBlock Origin are actively fighting each other. Some devices can play video normally sometimes, and other times get the blocked video thing. Other devices it works fine every time. Firefox without being logged into Google and a bunch more ad and script blockers seems to work pretty consistently. I set up a redirector Chrome plugin to redirect youtube watch links to an invidious instance, which also seems to work pretty well but is a bit clunkier. Using yt-dlp to download videos and watch on desktop is also an option.
I also already got a paid subscription to Nebula, since I figure there's enough quality interesting content to be worth paying for, and reportedly a fair amount goes to the creators.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I believe Jim Crow segregation persisted for at least 50 years, depending on exactly how you define things. So you could almost certainly pick a number of years where this rule would define that as something we should just accept and move on from.
I suspect you didn't mean that, but then we have a much tricker problem about defining what constitutes ongoing oppressions versus historical grievances for the purpose of such a rule.
JulianRota
1yr ago
Maybe we're getting a little far off topic here, but this is touching on one of my bigger general concerns. Many of our problems do seem pretty big. To be specific, I'm talking about things like how much control near-monopoly tech companies and national mega-corps are coming to have over our lives, specifically retail and news and entertainment media, how much influence a united and stable Russia, China, etc are able to wield over world affairs, etc. I'm not so sure that a United States with the Federal gov effectively throttled and the many State governments ascendant would be better able to deal with these issues.
JulianRota
1yr ago
This actually feels pretty close to my thinking on it. Every time I start to think along the lines of, those Palestinians did get a pretty raw deal, getting booted off of their land effectively permanently mostly due to things that had nothing to do with them, they go and do something so freaking savage that it's hard to think anything but that the only thing they deserve is the same savagery pointed right back at them.
The left / blue team tries to excuse it with "that's how the oppressed naturally behave", to which I would reply that plenty of groups have managed to rebel against oppression without resorting to the laundry list of awful things the Palestinians have been known for.
JulianRota
1yr ago
Yes, I would think something like this is better. If you use any type of poison gas, after you deploy it, you will eventually have to clean it out, make it safe, and check out what's in there. A major pain in the ass and high risk of friendly casualties if you don't do it perfectly. If you use flammables or explosives, then you know it's safe after the stuff goes boom and it has a little time to cool down.
Goes along with the argument I read somewhere else - poison gas isn't used anymore because it isn't a very good weapon, not because its effects are so horrible or it's banned by treaty. It was probably possible to ban by treaty because it's not a very good weapon more than being horrible.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I actually asked it that way on purpose, hoping to cover both people who don't have one at all, and people who have one but don't carry it with them sometimes or often.
I do feel a little weird sometimes about seemingly needing to carry a smartphone everywhere, but it does do a really good job of replacing a bunch of other devices and tools.
JulianRota
1yr ago
Too far away. I looked it up for a previous comment on this thread.
Basically the published combat range of the aircraft in their inventory just barely reaches the closest border of Iran over the most direct possible route. Any worthwhile targets are even further. And those routes go over Jordan and Iraq, both of which are not particularly friendly to Israel. Any attempts to avoid them or fly evasive routes to be less visible to their air defense just makes the range problem even worse. The Israeli air force does have some tanker aircraft in inventory, but one or more midair refuelings in hostile airspace sounds like a recipe for disaster.
Missiles may be possible, but missiles without nukes just aren't very destructive and may not be worth the bother. A conventionally-armed missile is a strange enough thing to do that it's probably reasonable for any country to assume any medium range ballistic missile is nuclear and respond accordingly.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I do agree that when I'm out with anyone, I'll generally only use my phone to coordinate other people meeting up with us or find the next place to go, not to just chitchat with others or scroll social media
JulianRota
1yr ago
I don't understand? You asserted that "A wider middle eastern war means Israel will fall unless christian troops enter the fray". Exactly what war are you picturing that would plausibly lead to Israel falling without direct intervention? I mentioned several actual wars that happened. Multiple times, the nations surrounding Israel united to attack them, and each time, Israel did not fall. A number of other wars have also happened in the Middle East, none of which involved Israel at all or led to them falling.
I actually can't think of any war in the modern era in which any of the Arab nations displayed impressive offensive capability, as in assembling a large force and sending it outside their borders to capture foreign territory held by determined adversaries. Usually they only attack each other, and mostly bog down pretty quickly unless the region they're attacking basically gives up to them. They tend to smash their faces into a brick wall every time they try to attack territory held by Westernized forces.
Whether you or I think that the area is "ripe" for a united pan-Arab movement now, the fact is that it's been tried a bunch of times over the last century and failed every time. I don't see any reason to expect anything to be different now.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I understood them to only involve state power indirectly - a pogrom may be directly the action of independent individuals, but is only really possible if the proper state powers ignore them.
JulianRota
1yr ago
A wider middle eastern war means Israel will fall unless christian troops enter the fray.
Why would it mean that though? There have already been at least 3 wars (48, 67, 73) involving full-scale armies from multiple Arab nations attacking Israel, and they haven't fallen yet.
On paper, the Arab nations would appear to have ample forces to do the job. But historically, they've had trouble actually coordinating and committing to attacks. I see no reason to presume that that has changed. Syria and Egypt seem to have enough internal problems these days that it's hard to see them pulling off a large-scale offensive action.
JulianRota
1yr ago
Point of curiosity - how many people do not carry some sort of smartphone with them basically everywhere they go? Trying to focus on either you personally or somebody you personally know, not just speculating.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I think it's a pretty low-quality over-the-top hysterical take. Nukes flying is pretty unlikely even if America does nothing at all. Israel made it through several other full-scale wars with multiple larger countries with proper militaries without any direct foreign intervention and without nuking anybody. It's pretty unlikely they get pushed to the point of feeling the need to do that no matter what happens here.
Granted a substantial American carrier force standing by probably makes it less likely for anyone to get too carried away even without them actually doing anything, which I guess is a good thing.
JulianRota
1yr ago
Ditto from me on basically everything you said.
Under the theories that power Keto, most of the food that's easily available in the Western world is completely terrible for you. Eating food that's terrible for you and also taking a drug that probably makes it have less of an effect for life seems like a worse idea than just eating better food.
I advocate a gradual approach to moving onto Keto. Start by making a list of everything you eat. One at a time, replace each thing with something more Keto, ideally starting with the worst. Keep going until you notice positive effects. The usual standard of 20g of carbs a day is probably not necessary to get down to if you're not trying to lose hundreds of pounds of weight. If you can stay under 100g or so of carbs a day and not notice at least some positive effects, then it's probably not going to work for you.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I think I would dispute that part actually. Actual paratroopers seem to be similarly vulnerable - also slow moving, without cover, and very big and obvious. Not as loud, but also no ability to maneuver. But they were dropped anyways. In the era when large-scale parachute drops were more common, they seemed to be considered not too vulnerable. It's probably harder than it might seem to hit a moving airborne target with a small number of rifles. Presuming neither one drops directly onto a large formation of highly alert troops, they're usually pretty survivable.
I don't expect to see America or China going that way. It may not be terribly likely to be used in the Ukraine war either. But it seems plausible that the kind of low-budget forces that field things like technicals might try this too.
Incidentally, I would also argue for better Israeli gun rights. I doubt it would have had all that big of an effect on this attack though. Maybe some of the villages that were attacked would have fared somewhat better. I doubt a giant rave is ever going to be heavily armed though. And the military bases were surely armed, but didn't seem to be alert or organized to repel this sort of attack.
JulianRota
1yr ago
Reading more about it, it is indeed sounding like their real force multiplier was not so much the IPGs, but the much better than expected intelligence, planning, and execution on the part of the militants, and how they managed to keep it completely secret from the vaunted Israeli intelligence services. Which suggests we should expect over-reaction on the part of the Israeli security forces and decision-makers due to not so much due to the sheer outrageousness of the brutality against civilians but instead how many people must have been asleep at the switch for this to be possible.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I think this is one of those things where the devil is in the details. I like the idea, but I think it would be impossible to decide on any particular exact amount of time for it. No matter what the exact amount of time was, there would always be one group whose claims were just barely within the limit and another whose were just barely outside of it. Then both sides of both of those conflicts would get angry / happy that it wasn't just a little bit off in another direction. And everybody would be throwing every possible kind of influence at whatever organization was responsible for deciding exactly what the timeframe was, etc.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I've been thinking about the bigger implications of the Improvised ParaGliders that Hamas apparently used as part of their Oct 7 attack (I'll call them IPGs for short). I don't think we've gotten much hard information about them yet, so I'm going to be making some guesses.
What was the security plan for Gaza before Oct 7? I don't have access to the full one, and it's probably too long anyways, but for some suppositions, the basic idea was, a relatively light but carefully watched fence all around Gaza, no IDF personnel inside Gaza under normal conditions, Hamas is responsible for all internal security, and decently equipped quick-reaction forces on bases near the fence to respond to any observed breaches. Careful checks of all items coming through the border to stop actual weapons and anything that could reasonably turned into a weapon from coming in. It's probably impossible to keep order among 2.1ish million people without at least some weapons, and would be impossible to strip them out completely given the history of the region, so we accept that Hamas has some number of infantry weapons including handguns and rifles, and probably some machine guns, RPGs, grenades, etc. They would be decisively prevented from having anything bigger like artillery, proper armored vehicles, and aircraft, plus precision stuff like guided anti-armor and anti-air rockets, though perhaps with somewhat less success.
What was Hamas's attack plan for Oct 7? As far as I know, no proper military strategist / historian has actually assembled enough info to put it together yet. But I gather it looked something like, send in a wave of lightly armed IPG troops first, aimed at all known QRF bases and a few other juicy targets, like the rave and some towns. They may not win all of the battles with the QRF bases, but the goal is to cause enough chaos, confusion, and distraction to allow several substantial convoys of more heavily armed ground troops to storm through the fences faster than anything strong enough can be organized to stop them. The plan after that seems rather fuzzy and less relevant to the point, so I'll leave it aside here.
It appears this IPG tactic was novel and effective enough to substantially disrupt the normal response to this sort of thing. So then, what is the new security plan for a future Gaza strip to prevent this sort of thing from being effective? I believe this is an important question - if we want a future for the Gaza Strip that resembles the pre-Oct 7 status quo of ~millions of people living there in a peaceful-ish way, we need to have a practical and effective security plan. Can we hope to prevent enough construction supplies from getting in there to build these things? Banning I guess small gas engines, tarps, and cords? Can we hope to build some sort of system to track and shoot down these things? How detectable are they on radar? Antiaircraft rockets are probably too big, expensive, and more firepower than needed. Maybe we need smallish drones with regular machine guns on them? It feels like it's a sticky problem.
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? They have at least some actual helicopters, but probably not as many as they'd like. Maybe Yemen or Sudan? The Israel-Gaza war and Russia-Ukraine wars seem to be sucking up most of the energy on war reporting, I'm actually not that sure offhand what else is going on around the world.
I do know that, but I don't think it changes anything regarding what I said. They did win the last election, regardless of it being kind of a while ago and however much the Israeli government might have helped. As far as I know, Hamas didn't make any secret of what they believed when those elections were being held; everyone who voted for them must have known what they were all about. There aren't any free opinion polls there, so all we really know is that nobody has managed to successfully overthrow them yet.
I'd honestly love it if the residents of Gaza truly were 80% Jeffersonian classical liberals whose demands for peace and prosperity are not being heard solely due to the brutal oppression of Hamas - that means there is a possible peaceful solution to all this. Sadly, regardless of how much you or I would like for that to be the case, we just don't have any proof of it, and all of the indirect signs suggest it's not.
What if it truly is the case that upwards of 80% of Gazans really do hate the idea of Israel existing at all so much that they don't mind giving up things like running water to hit back at them somehow? What evidence would you accept that that's the case?
For me, a lot of this comes from the, I guess you would call it hangover or backlash from the Iraq war. We were told the same things during the runup to that. Hey, the only reason this place is a mess is because Saddam Hussein is a big fat jerk. If we just bump him off, it'll be a nice stable Democracy in a snap. The Bush admin said it. I remember reading all of the blogs saying it at the time. I probably said it to a few people myself. I wanted to believe it. Then, reality hit us all in the face. Saddam was actually keeping a lid on a lot of beefs that promptly blew up in our faces as soon as his regime was out of the picture. Through a tremendous effort in both blood and treasure by the most powerful military in the world, we eventually managed to get it sort of kind of under control. At least until ISIS gobbled up a good chunk of it. But let's not get too far into recent Middle East happenings. Bottom line is that it is a nice and seductive idea that there's all a bunch of nice kind peaceful people in these places who are being oppressed by a minority of nutcases, but it's just not the case. We've had our faces rubbed into it good and hard by now.
I think often of this old-ish, since deleted article I read a while back during the Iraq war and Arab Spring. A Western blogger / journalist meets an Egyptian political blogger for a little tour of Cairo and a few conversations. In one, he asks this Egyptian guy, a classical liberal there, "How many people here think like you do?". The answer was "Few, very few. Less than ten percent probably." Also note how the Taliban took over Afghanistan about 20 minutes after the US Military left. The way I see it, it's just a fact that a majority of people in that region really do think this way. Nothing we try to do in the region will work right if we continue to refuse to accept this even when it's staring us in the face.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I actually agree with most of what he said. It's more what he hasn't said that's the problem.
Please also remember this: Hamas is still an extremist group. The Palestinian people do not have a government or leaders who legitimately represent their interests, and it sure as hell isn't Hamas.
I'm gonna say, source on this? (not necessarily to you Pasha) Hamas is the legitimately elected government of Gaza. So Mr. Isaac Saul does not believe they "legitimately represent their interests", but who is he to say? They won the last election, how does he know better? Perhaps he is personally friends with a number of reasonable Palestinians in Gaza, but there's no solid indication that they represent a majority. So why isn't it him and whoever he is friends with who do not legitimately represent the actual interests of the majority of Gaza residents? For better or worse, if they are free people, their opinions are what they actually are and what they have proven them to be, not what we would like them to be.
Israel is forever stuffing these people into tinier and tinier boxes with fewer and fewer resources.
So this is technically true, but it misses the why. They're not doing it because they're great big jerks who just wanna smash some Palestinians (or at least, they weren't before this most recent spate). They're doing it because the Gaza residents have consistently prioritized hurting Israelis any way they can over everything else. They've displayed pretty remarkable levels of cleverness in turning what we would think of as ordinary objects into weapons. If you legitimately try to stop anything that could possibly be turned into some sort of weapon from coming in, you're not left with much. What materials do you think they used to make those para-glider things to drop basically paratroopers into a music festival, and would you block all of those from going into Gaza?
Ultimately, I have no idea what to do with a people who refuse to accept any sort of peace and bend all their efforts towards destroying you no matter what you do to them. Maybe sitting on them hard enough to mostly stop them from attacking you just makes them angrier, but then exactly what are you supposed to do?
JulianRota
1yr ago
Taking civilian hostages is also a war crime. As is murdering civilians, and raping them. All of which Hamas, the legitimate government of Gaza, did to kick off this little war. Exactly what remedy would you propose for these war crimes?
Also note that the Geneva conventions explicitly do not apply unless both nations either have signed them or have agreed to abide by them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_Conventions#Common_Article_2_relating_to_international_armed_conflict_(IAC)
JulianRota
1yr ago
I think this one needs the asterisk that it's the Law school, and the company that dropped their job offer is a law firm. Law is probably one of the most Jewish careers out there. It's entirely plausible that the law firm has enough Jewish associates that they would have major problems if a bunch of them quit, or threatened to, because they hired a Hamas-supporter as a new junior associate. That's gotta be the easiest decision in the world for that firm.
It's also very plausible that if this individual happened to be starting in a substantially less Jewish career, this would have been brushed under the rug.
I suppose it's a bit semantic, but I would consider that part of my second way. Perhaps better classified, the first way is to operate primarily on logically persuading people to support your candidate versus the other based on proposed policies. The second way is to operate primarily on the enthusiasm of strongly partisan voters to actually turn out, which would include both getting your supporters to want to turn out and vote, as well as getting the other guy's supporters to sit out the election instead of voting.
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