Lewis
3mo ago
It’s like that funny /r/Europe thing recently where the Scandinavians all said it would be weird to offer your kid’s friends who came to play after school dinner, because the custom is that the child should go home for food.
Surely that’s true in America as well, right? Or is this an area where Midwestern Germans and Scandinavians have retained something of their ancestral culture? I don’t think I’ve ever heard of people serving dinner to their kids’ friends.
Lewis
6mo ago
How is it plausible that a mastectomy works better when you're 14 than when you're 18?
The idea is that it’s far easier for a person who transitions at 14 to pass as the gender of their choice than it is for a person who transitions at 18, especially for MTFs. I don’t think they’re actually wrong about this. At 14, most boys and girls are still fairly androgynous; by 18, most boys are clearly young men: tall, prominent jaw line, Adam’s apple, facial hair, muscular structure, etc. If a gender dysphoric boy wants to transition and pass as a girl, puberty blockers at as young an age as possible are his best shot. The same holds true for girls but in reverse.
Lewis
6mo ago
I believe the casualty level necessary to subdue Hamas and occupy Gaza would be unacceptable even to Israel’s closest ally. If Israel had gone in blasting in the first two days after the attack, they might have gotten away with it. By now, though, the moment has passed, and I don’t see any possible path toward occupation.
Lewis
6mo ago
A mastectomy specifically? I assume there’s no medical benefit to doing it earlier (though maybe it heals better the younger you do it?). I imagine the proponents of that procedure are solely focused on the psychological benefits—reducing the “trauma” of seeing your body change in ways you don’t want it to. They probably also don’t consider detransitioning to be a real future concern, so why not just get it over with?
That’s the best I can come up with; I’m not actually in favor of such things myself.
Lewis
1yr ago
If qualified immunity protects government officials who knowingly break the law, but who do so in a way that hasn’t yet been ruled to clearly violate their victims’ constitutional rights (e.g., police who steal $225,000 while on the job), wouldn’t you agree that a sane legal system should likewise protect non-government officials in a similar way?
Lewis
6mo ago
Two thoughts: First, Palestinian casualties since Oct. 7 are close to an order of magnitude higher than Israeli casualties on Oct. 7. Israel has already responded; who’s to say they need to keep it up?
Second, whatever they do, they should do it on their own, without a penny of U.S. aid. Since that doesn’t seem to be on the table, I support a ceasefire, and I hope international pressure succeeds in getting one put in place.
To be fair, I think of the worst public school as a fate almost like death.
Lewis
4mo ago
I don’t understand this. You seem to be saying that A) we have too few top-level posts; B) this one led to several “perfectly interesting discussions;” and C) this post should nevertheless have been deleted before those interesting discussions were allowed to happen.
If the OP led to an interesting discussion, who cares how insane it was? You’re letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.
an alleged call to genocide with a run-of-the-mill propaganda slogan like "Palestinians will be free in Palestine," when such slogans are common to every war in human history.
How else do you interpret “from the river to the sea”? That slogan clearly includes both Israel and Palestine, and Hamas’s original and 2017 charters both indicate that their ultimate goal is to wrest control of the entire area from Israel.
Look, I’m no fan of Israel’s actions, especially the settlements in the West Bank. I even argued here last week that we shouldn’t be supporting Israel in this conflict. But just because Israel isn’t a saint, it doesn’t mean Hamas is. Everyone who chants “from the river to the sea” while knowing what that means (most Americans don’t, including the ones chanting it) is mouthing support for genocide.
ETA: You can substitute “ethnic cleansing” for genocide if you prefer.
Lewis
6mo ago
Have you ever read Eichmann in Jerusalem or Scott’s review of it? Both speak to this point.
In Rumania even the S.S. were taken aback, and occasionally frightened, by the horrors of oldfashioned, spontaneous pogroms on a gigantic scale; they often intervened to save Jews from sheer butchery, so that the killing could be done in what, according to them, was a civilized way.
The Romanians started their own concentration camps to supplement the Nazis’, “more elaborate and atrocious affairs than anything we know of in Germany”, but they didn’t always need them – “deportation Rumanian style consisted in herding five thousand people into freight cars and letting them die there of suffocation while the train traveled through the countryside without plan or aim for days on end; a favorite followup to these killing operations was to expose the corpses in Jewish butcher shops.” Things became so bad that the local Nazi representative, German noble Manfred von Killinger, intervened and asked them to stop and defer to the Third Reich’s own efforts. I feel like when a Nazi named “Baron von Killinger” is horrified by your brutality, it’s time to take a step back and evaluate whether you may have crossed a line.
Lewis
5mo ago
You’ve mentioned this a few times, including the bit about HBD likely explaining the different outcomes between Arab Christians and Muslims. Do you have any idea how that could have come about historically? My possibly incorrect understanding is that Jews and Christians were ineligible for public service and positions of authority under the Ottomans and various previous Islamic states. They could remove this handicap, and many did, by converting to Islam; they’d also avoid additional taxes that way. Under those conditions, I would have expected the most ambitious (and therefore possibly more intelligent? I’m not sure how well correlated those two traits are) to have converted to Islam over the centuries, leading to a slightly dumber Christian population. Do you know of anything I’m missing?
Lewis
5mo ago
You might disagree, but I’d consider lack of female suffrage to be a pretty heavy restriction on the franchise.
Lewis
5mo ago
"Why should I care what God wants? Why is God's morality more important than any other?"
If an omnipotent, omniscient being thinks that A is good and B is bad, it would be an act of insane hubris to imagine that you could know better than him. The more so when this being has the power to sentence you to eternal suffering or bliss.
Lewis
6mo ago
Isn’t the UK’s sinking of the French fleet pretty well-known in the UK (and presumably also France)? Not that the two situations are comparable anyway. Israel’s attack on the USS Liberty was supposedly an accident; the UK’s attack on the French fleet was open and deliberate. The US, responding to the former, made diplomatic protests but otherwise did nothing. Vichy France, responding to the latter, broke diplomatic ties with the UK and bombed Gibraltar. In addition, my understanding is that the resulting rise in French Anglophobia lingered on for years.
Edit: If we had responded to the attack on the USS Liberty by breaking off diplomatic ties with Israel and bombing the Israeli coast, I don’t think anyone today would be complaining about a conspiracy to cover the whole thing up.
Lewis
3mo ago
Thanks for the link! I’ll have to see if I can find anything on the monarchism. I’m sure it would make for a fascinating read.
Lewis
3mo ago
That is interesting. Do you know what group that was? I know there were a few… attempts, if you can call it that; it would probably be more accurate to say idle day-dreams… to create a new Germany in the Midwest (every one of which fizzled out almost immediately as the immigrants realized that the USA was actually pretty great). I hadn’t heard of anything similar in Texas, but then I’m only really familiar with a couple of German communities down there.
Lewis
5mo ago
If you’re religious, the old Sunday morning ceremony followed by potluck in the parish hall is pretty cheap too.
Lewis
5mo ago
Thanks for the reply. I’ve found my own personal experience a bit interesting, since if anything, I’d have expected the more pro-Marcos people to stay and the more anti-Marcos to emigrate. You’re probably right that the economic prospects of immigrating to the States likely outweighed everything else.
Lewis
5mo ago
Given your ancestry, you might be able to help answer a question that’s been at the back of my mind for awhile. All the Filipinos and half-Filipinos I know were and remain very pro-Marcos (the dictator, not the current president, though they like him too). Assuming you’re Filipino-American, do you have any sense as to how widespread that attitude is among Filipino immigrants? Was there some sort of selection effect, such that only the more pro-Marcos folks came to this country, or is my small sample size just not very representative?
Lewis
6mo ago
I don’t believe any state in the union involuntarily institutionalizes sex offenders, even for crimes against children. After being released from prison, such criminals are almost always put on a permanent, publicly-available sex offender registry; is that possibly what you’re thinking of?
Lewis
5mo ago
While I agree with you that growing up in an ethnically homogenous community/state is nice and that the existence of such states is in theory legitimate, I recognize that this is not the current international consensus, and I applaud @Gillitrut for being consistent in his convictions. What annoys me more than anything is the blatant hypocrisy surrounding Israel: colonialism bad, apartheid bad, Lebensraum bad, blood and soil nationalism bad—but Israel good? If Rhodesia and the old South Africa government deserved to be sanctioned out of existence, Israel absolutely deserves it too. If the U.S. hadn’t done its best to destroy the former two countries’ governments, I would support Israel today. However, as things stand, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander, so “hey, hey, ho, ho, Israel has got to go.”
Lewis
7mo ago
I’m typing this on my phone, so I’m not going to mess with links.
First, the county assessor lists Mar a Lago’s market value as $37 million. If it’s true that the judge valued it at $17–25 million, there’s already a major discrepancy. It’s worth noting that Trump paid $12 million for it in 1995, equivalent to $24.3 million today. For the property to be only worth $25 million, the judge has to assume that property values haven’t risen faster than inflation, which seems awfully dubious from where I sit. He also has to assume that the county assessor overvalued the property by 1.5–2.2 times its actual worth, which is interesting given his complaint that Trump has been overvaluing his property. Perhaps he felt the best way to compensate for Trump’s overvaluation was to opt for a noticeable undervaluation?
Secondly, some neighboring properties’ asking and sale prices are instructive. 168 King Rd. (4,874 sq. ft., not ocean-front) just sold for $14 million, against an assessed value of $4.1 million (and a market value of $8.4 million; I’m not clear what the difference between the two is). Another nearby property (500 Regents Park Rd—6,488 sq. ft., ocean-front) is listed for sale at $40 million, against an assessed value of $6.4 million ($12 million market value).
Mar-a-Lago’s main building, by contrast, is 37,414 sq. ft. The property also contains five more buildings, two pools, and five tennis courts, to say nothing of the land. That it’s all worth a measly $17–25 million doesn’t pass the smell test.
Does Israel have any reasonable shot at both getting Hamas out of power and preventing the rise of Hamas 2.0? I don’t believe it does. If I’m right about that, the only question that remains is how much vengeance the Israelis should exact on the Gazans for the events of October 7. An order of magnitude more fatalities plus an unknown number of additional casualties doesn’t seem like a ridiculous stopping point. After all, if regime change isn’t possible, is it really moral to continue killing? It certainly violates most people’s idea of a just war.
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