The USA is not a hive mind, and it is possible to question election results without descending into anarchy. Who is 'we' in this "Should we"? Who is the final judge as to whether an election has "cleared the threshold to being authentic"?
These are not nitpicks. In ancient Rome, the person who decided whether elections were legitimate were the outgoing consuls for that year (consuls are like co-presidents who serve for one year terms, Rome had two). Pompey and Crassus were the consuls overseeing the elections for 55 BCE. When it looked like one of Pompey's enemies would win his election, Pompey would suddenly discover bad omens and cancel the vote. Then his men would go around the voting pens having 'discussions' with people, and when the vote resumed the outcome would be the way Pompey wanted it to be. This wasn't technically illegal. Consuls did have the right to cancel public events when the omens were bad. A partisan in ancient Rome could argue that there was nothing fraudulent about the outcomes of those elections.
A few years later, Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon and marched an army into Rome.
Not long after that, Pompey was beheaded in Egypt.
Not long after that, Julius Caesar was assassinated on the floor of the Senate.
Not long after that, a special election was called. A centurion stood at the gate of Rome and said, "If the Senate will not make Octavian* a consul, this will," resting a hand on the hilt of his sword.**
A few years after that Octavian became Augustus, the first Emperor of Rome. So it goes.
Octavian wasn't legally old enough to run for consul, but that didn't mean anything anymore. The laws that were supposed to guarantee fair elections had been destroyed in spirit. Elections weren't fair. Given that, who can blame the centurion for demanding his own brand of fairness? Julius Caesar was, to the thousands of men who served him, their man in Rome. He was the only person they could trust to stand up for their interests. The Senate tried to put him on trial for treason, rewrote laws to stop him from running for office, and ultimately assassinated him. Who can blame the centurion for doing with the sword what the Senate had already been doing for years with paper-thin legal justifications, and ignoring Republican tradition to put his picked man into office?
Thus the Roman Republic was destroyed and the Roman Empire created in its place.
*By this point Gaius Octavius had legally changed his name to Gaius Julius Caesar, but we call him Octavian to avoid confusing him with his more famous uncle. We could just as easily call him Caesar II, though. It does highlight the fact that, after the Senate assassinated Caesar, Caesar's army returned to Rome with another Caesar to replace him.
**This exchange probably didn't actually happen. Ancient historians tended to make up speeches and conversations to highlight important events.
An expectation that tenants have some remaining claim on the land they live on after it's been sold is worth exactly as much as the paper it's not written on. On every continent, the imposition of modern property rights involved the dissolution of these supposed expectations without compensation. It happened in Britain with the Enclosures, in China and Russia during their respective Communist takeovers, and in the Americas when the colonial governments got out their maps and started drawing rectangles so they could sell them to people.
In fairness to the former tenants, this dissolution often caused mass human suffering. In fairness to everyone else, there was no vote to give these arbitrary land-based privileges to that particular handful of tenant farmers. Neither the people at large nor the governments in charge agreed to perpetuate any such rights. You can't run a modern state on vague feudal expectations.
It would be arbitrary and unusual to single out this one strip of the former Ottoman Empire to operate under the rules of the feudal system when practically every square inch of the rest of the world had either been converted to private property or was in the process of being converted to private property.
The privilege of forcing other people to live according to your arbitrary and whimsical ideas about property rights is exclusively reserved for those too well-armed to evict.
Well, the foreign policy administration of the US Government disagrees with you on that. Now-President Joe Biden once made a speech in which he argued that Israel is "The best $3 billion dollar investment we make," and that “If there were not an Israel, we would have to invent one to make sure our interests were preserved.”
You could argue that he was lying for some reason, and that he actually thinks Israel is a bad investment but is trying to mislead the American people. That strikes me as a bit too conspiratorial to be true. I don't think the US Government has that many layers. It would require that Joe Biden, current president of the United States, is funnelling huge amounts of government money into a project that he secretly believes is bad for America, in order to support a foreign country, for some reason. You could also argue that he thinks that what he's doing is right, but that he's wrong. That's certainly possible, but then it becomes self-defeating; if the United States supports Israel because the President thinks that's good foreign policy, but he's actually mistaken, that would be pretty normal. World leaders sometimes make mistakes. It certainly wouldn't make the alliance somehow illegitimate or unworthy of consideration.
Supporting Israel is in-character for the USA. They support lots of countries in order to spread their influence around the globe. They've supported South Vietnam, South Korea, West Germany, Taiwan, various South American military dictatorships, and let's not forget about Ukraine. They've put bases in Canada, Japan, and Germany. They like to have leverage they can use to exercise control. None of this means that South Korea ought to give up and let Korea be reunited under the Kim family, or that West Germany should have fought a one-on-one grudge match with East Germany to decide once and for all who should get to form the united German government. The whole point of American power is that they can use their advanced training and military hardware to pick winners, ideally without putting American boots on the ground.
You're saying that "Western interests" should "compel a single-state solution," but, like, why? The Palestinians have nothing to offer the West. The result of a one-state solution would be a sudden regime change as the Islamist majority inevitably elects a new Islamist government in the new state of Palestine. Do you think refugee crises and regional instability would be less likely after a genocidal Islamist government takes over a previously Jewish-majority nuclear power? If so, why?
If there's one thing you can say about Israel, it's that they definitely won't nuke Istanbul. I could not say the same about Hamas.
The case for a right-of-conquest is seriously undermined by the fact that Israel owes its existence - its entire conquest as such - to foreign powers and continued foreign aid in its defense, and foreign intervention in destabilizing or outright destroying its adversaries.
No? The case isn't undermined by the fact that Israel has allies. Why would it be? It would be seriously undermined if Israel didn't have allies. Allies make you stronger, and right-of-conquest is about being strong. This isn't some kind of faux chivalry thing where it only counts if it's a fair fight between equals.
The whole point of my argument about right-of-conquest is that, when it comes down to the quality of life of the people who actually have to live there, it doesn't matter how you came into possession of your new territories. Right-of-conquest is just an acknowledgement that you do possess those territories and that you aren't going to give them back, so the sooner everyone accepts that the sooner everyone can get on with their lives.
At the end of the day, most of the borders that we accept as lawful were only drawn over the strenuous objections of the defeated. Having allies often helps you win, and many of the borders that exist today were drawn by coalitions of powerful nations. The Dutch are independent from their larger neighbours, France and Germany, in large part because the British kicked the French out in 1815 and the Germans out in 1945. The Dutch certainly didn't defeat either France or Germany in some kind of absurd no-allies-allowed fair fight. They made a strong ally over religious ties and shared interests and that strong ally backed them up when it counted.
Almost all modern wars are fought between coalitions of allies, and both the Israelis and Palestinians have drawn on coalitions of more powerful allies in their various conflicts - just as Israel's allies often draw on its support in their various conflicts. In fact, if anything, Israel is almost unique among modern nations in that it fought some of its wars without the support of allies, an extremely rare event in the modern era.
Sunshine
1yr ago
This comment feels like it's in bad faith, to me. I think the little dog should make a positive argument in favor of its position instead of being sarcastic and disingenuous.
Sunshine
1yr ago
My take is that Israel exists by right-of-conquest.
The point of right-of-conquest isn't that it's morally right - often it's morally wrong. The point of right-of-conquest is that at some point wars have to end because the alternative is that wars don't ever end, which is much worse. At the end of the day you have to call a ceasefire, negotiate a treaty, redraw the map, and let everyone get on with their lives. The alternative is to live in a state of neverending war.
The Palestinians have had more shots than most would-be countries get. They could have won their initial civil war, but they didn't. They could have protested nonviolently and kept the moral high ground, like India, but they didn't so they can't win with the moral high ground. They could have lost their war but negotiated a treaty that gave them the freedom to win their freedom, like the Irish, but they refused to accept any treaty so they can't do that. They could have won their independence in a war waged with the help of their foreign allies, like the Polish, but their foreign allies lost that war so that's out, too.
That's it. Like I said, that's more shots than most would-be countries ever get. Sardinia doesn't get to be independent, Quebec doesn't get to be independent, Catalonia doesn't get to be independent, the Confederate States of America don't get to be independent, Wales doesn't get to be independent, Tibet doesn't get to be independent, and now Palestine has unofficially joined the ranks of countries that tried to become independent and failed. That's life.
Independence is a privilege, not a right. At some point, for the sake of those still living, you have to let the war end so that those still living can live in peace. Everyone has land claims. Everyone has grievances against the central government. What everyone does not have is the right to continue a lost war through terrorism.
I expect that the status quo will continue for the foreseeable future, to the detriment of the Palestinians, because the Israelis have no reason to make any more concessions than they already have. The Palestinian people have a choice: Make peace or live in war. They should make peace.
In my country, large parts of several major cities actually have been sold to rich Chinese looking to store their wealth somewhere the CCP can't get to it. This has materially harmed many of my countrymen by exacerbating the housing crisis and driving up rents. Yet, somehow, it never occurred to any of us to resort to terrorism. Given a choice between coexisting with some rich Chinese and starting a civil war, we did in fact choose to shrug our shoulders.
Nonviolence is almost always an option, and moreover it's almost always a better option.
I strongly disagree with the equivocation between immigration and invasion. There was a legitimate transfer of land-ownership from absentee landlords to immigrants looking to settle. It is a sad fact of life that many of these purchases involved the eviction of previous tenants, but that doesn't justify violence. You don't get to own land just because you live there, and I don't want to live in a world where every aggrieved tenant can start a civil war over every land sale.
Sunshine
1yr ago
I think that coming up with a just-so story explaining why or how a species evolved the way it did is usually a mistake. I prefer to look at it this way: If you flip a coin 100 times, on average it will come up heads 50 times and tails 50 times. The odds that it will actually come up heads exactly 50 times is actually pretty unlikely, though. If you actually took 5 fair coins and flipped each one 100 times, it's very unlikely that all 5 would come up heads exactly 50 times. What you'll see instead is something more like -
(I used a random number generator to flip 5 coins 100 times each)
Coin A: 49 / 51
Coin B: 45 / 55
Coin C: 48 / 52
Coin D: 57 / 43
Coin E: 48 / 52
Sub in any trait you like for coin flips, and it's obvious that a little bit of variation is to be expected, especially when conditions are different. On close examination, the idea that all 5 would come up with exactly the same result is a strange and unjustified supposition. The real question is how much variation there is, and whether or not it matters.
All that being said, I don't like the cold winters theory because if it's true then it should imply Inuit supergeniuses. My preferred just-so story is that complex cultures with advanced technology demand more intelligence, and interconnected cultures become more complex and develop more technology. There is a ribbon of trade running from the tin mines of Cornwall to the silk plantations of China that has existed since the Bronze Age, and along that ribbon you'll find all the most advanced civilizations that have ever existed. The less-advanced civilizations of the Americas, Sub-Saharan Africa, Polynesia, and Australia are all separated from that band of trade by oceans and/or deserts.
Sunshine
1yr ago
Personally, I don't have any objection to what another individual chooses to do with his or her own body. However, even in this hypothetical future, I would have a problem with someone else telling me what I can and can't say. If I want to refer to someone using the pronouns they were born with, that's my right as an independent being. Just as getting whatever sci-fi surgery you want is your right as an independent being.
If there's some kind of punishment for calling a him a him or a her a her, or calling anyone anything, that's where I start to have a problem. Because at that point I feel like it's not about an individual's freedom to exercise control over his or her own body - at that point it's about power. The power to force someone to say something they don't believe in.
You don't even have to go into the future for that. Just look back to ancient Rome, when they forced people to make the libation and acknowledge the divinity of the Emperor as part of the suppression of Christianity. Note how they never bothered to force people to make the libation until they had a heathen religion to suppress. That's what I think of modern trans ideology, with its demands that everyone go around the circle and announce their pronouns - a libation. A forced conversion. A compulsory pledge of allegiance. Havel's Greengrocer. There's a fresh example in every generation.
To borrow a phrase: Everything in the world is about sex, except sex. Sex is about power.
I'm a free speech absolutist, but I am willing to sacrifice Kanye West's free speech if it helps us win. I could tolerate a world where speech is free except for one unprincipled carve-out banning antisemitism. Twitter probably has to do that anyway to comply with German laws against Holocaust denial.
I guess the question is whether it helps. I think it does. The ban might reassure moderates. It's probably better to let this one go by and wait for a more favorable example to fight over.
Sunshine
1yr ago
I have also been experimenting with AI art generation (although I only had the basic StableDiffusion model, so thanks for showing me these other ones). Like you, I've found that in order to get what I want I need to use AI as one of many tools, iterating over AI generation -> make a collage in an art program -> run it through AI img2img -> edit in an art program, and repeat until I get what I want.
My drawing skills are a bit stronger, and I have a drawing tablet on hand, so I've been going a bit harder in the editing direction. One of the things I've noticed is that AI is really good at shading and texture, but really bad at composition. One of the things I can do is have the AI generate a texture, draw an image in flat color, edit the texture onto the flat image, inpaint the flat image but leave the texture alone, and the AI will shade the image in the style of the texture. (Obviously this only works for one texture at a time, so for a e.g. a person wearing jeans and a t-shirt you would need to do it three times: once for skin, once for denim, and once for the t-shirt.)
I'm not sure if I see AI generating meaningful images from scratch any time soon. People don't really want to see random pictures of landscapes or people standing with their arms at their sides. What people want is action.
What I do expect to see is for AI to be used as a tool to make faster art. Coloring lineart is a massive job, and AI can already do a pretty good first draft with img2img. In ten years maybe comic books will be one creator doing lineart and a highly-trained AI assistant filling in backgrounds and colors. Maybe cartoons will cut out the Korean animation studios and just feed their storyboards into an AI. As with all mechanization, this probably won't eliminate artists, but it will allow one artist to do the work of ten.
Sunshine
1yr ago
If you can't tell if anyone you're interacting with online is real, that means that the best content online can be mass produced by AI. That would be awesome. I could spend all day watching the top-rated 0.0000001% of Youtube videos on the exact subject I want to see. I could read a thousand books that are equally as good as the best books I've ever read, in the exact genre I want to read.
If you haven't spent a few hours playing with Stable Diffusion, I highly recommend it. It's like a whole new world is opening up.
"A political drama about the Nixon administration in the style of Shakespeare," could be a click away. "A gorey superhero deconstruction like Invincible or The Boys, as written by James Joyce, as an animated film in the style of a Disney Movie, with watercolour art style," could be something you can watch just by typing that prompt into a computer. "An Isekai anime with writing by J RR Tolkien, music by Metallica, and art by Gerald Scarfe" could be yours too. In fact, if you generate it and then delete it, you could be the only human being ever to watch it.
It was Lydia who ran off with Mr. Wickham, not Kitty. Lydia married Mr. Wickham, Kitty married a clergyman, Mary married a law clerk at her uncle's firm, Elizabeth married Mr. Darcy, and Jane married Mr. Bingley.
More options
Context Copy link