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.
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
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.
Sunshine
5mo ago
No. Again, hate is bad. Hate does not help you make good decisions, and hatred-based law enforcement mechanisms are not known for their efficiency. The appropriate angle to approach social engineering problems like "How do we stop people from committing fraud and/or murder in the manner that gets us the best value for our tax dollars," is heartless rationality, not hatred.
Hatred is for suckers. It makes you easy to manipulate and prone to error.
Sunshine
11mo ago
The whole idea of there being groups is smuggling in so many assumptions, though.
Consider this toy example: The US population is 10% black descended from slaves captured from central Africa and 3% first-generation-immigrant black descended from the coastal warlords who enslaved the previous group (fake numbers I just made up). I, the official making the statistics, invent the concept of "black people" and decide that both the slave-descendents and the warlord-descendents are "black people." Since 13% of the population are "black people," I make sure that Harvard consists of 13% warlord-descended immigrant elites and 0% slave-descended locals. The slave-descended black people now have "representation," but the people representing them are the descendents of the people who enslaved their ancestors. This is supposed to help make up for the fact that their ancestors were enslaved.
Consider this other toy example: Atlantis contains many immigrants from countries around the Atlantic. 20% of the population of Atlantis are "British" Immigrants - 5% Irish, 5% Scottish, 5% Welsh, and 5% English. For the board of directors of my hedge fund, which has 10 members, I decide that 20% should be "British" so that there will be "representation." I choose the English son of the CEO of Lloyd's of London and the English daughter of famous football player David Beckham and famous musician Posh Spice. Are the Welsh, Scottish, and Irish "represented" by these "British" members of the board of directors? Are the English even represented by these two millionaires descended from other millionaires?
I say no. There is no such thing as British people. There is no such thing as black people. There is no such thing as white people. I would argue that there is such a thing as Jews, and in order to get that kind of reality into any of these other groups you need to slice them at least as finely as you slice the Jews. At this zoom level you'll find many groups that are just as overrepresented as Jews are. You'll discover that 1% of highly-connected families have almost all the power, and only some of those 1% of families are Jewish. The rest are "white" (or "Chinese") and smuggle their power in by unfairly grouping themselves with millions of random shmucks with whom they have nothing in common except skin colour.
Sunshine
11mo ago
The idea that any given demographic should have the same number of slots in any given position of power based on their representation in the overall population is dumb, whether you're talking about Jews or blacks.
Jews aren't overrepresented, they're just represented. White people may make up a majority of the USA population, but a big chunk of those are useless or stupid and so don't count. If you look at an AP math class in New York and compare that to the makeup of White House staffers, you'll see a more realistic comparison of Jews to whites.
White people and Jews are not the same kind of race. They're wholly different zoom levels, different layers on the cladistic tree of humanity. If white people are a kingdom then Jews are a genus. Jews have way more in common with the average Jew than whites have with the average whites. Whites include people from all corners of Europe in the same category for some stupid reason, Jews only count a single insular subgroup. If Jews are a race, then Anglo-Americans descended from people who lived in Ulster but aren't descended from Irish stock should also be a race. And if those Anglo-Hibernian Americans are counted as their own race, you will see a truly shocking overrepresentation among US Presidents (shocking if you assume that every European ethnicity should be equally likely to be President, which is a weird assumption).
Groups are different. White House staffers are not recruited by lottery. It is normal for their racial makeup to be biased one way or another by the makeup of the sorts of people who would apply for those positions. Also "white people" are a fever dream invented by racist nutjobs and everyone needs to stop pretending that "white people" exist. They don't.
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
1mo ago
As far as I can tell this is exactly what Israel is trying to do with the whole "We're going to flatten northern Gaze, so everyone who lives there should grab whatever they can carry and walk south" strategy.
Gaza is dense and Israel is small. I don't think there's physically enough room to sequester the Gazans in isolated reservations. That strategy worked for the Americans with the Indians, but America is huge and full of open space. The most effective tool of separation is a hundred miles of empty land, populated by nothing but rodents and without so much as a shed to hide behind.
If Israel had their own equivalent of Utah in which to banish their problematic religious nuts, they wouldn't have this problem.
Sunshine
5mo ago
I have no dog in this fight, but I don't think we should keep anything "highly hated." Hate is a bad thing. I think that there is probably an optimal level of social scorn we should direct towards pedophiles in order to minimize the amount of pedophilia in the world, and I think we should calculate that amount rather than just go nuts and hope for the best.
My best guess is that the target should be just enough scorn to dissuade them from committing crimes, but not so much scorn that we dissuade them from seeking professional help. I'm reasonably confident we've overshot the mark. It's quite possible that a modest reduction in hatred directed at pedophiles would actually result in fewer children being molested.
I think this is a false equivalence. Crime stats are about broad groups, not individuals (e.g. "Black men in America"). Even if you are a black man in America with a lived experience, it is impossible to have the lived experience of all black men in America as a collective whole. Thus, you can use lived experience to say "I have been victimized by a police officer," and most reasonable people would accept that, but you cannot use lived experience to say "all black men are victimized by all police officers."
But inflation is about the experience of individuals, not groups. No one is out there saying that inflation disproportionately affects Muslims because the CPI is racist (OK I'm sure someone somewhere is saying that, but I don't care.) A single individual can experience the effects of inflation on their personal food budget without needing to make any claims about the experiences of others. An individual saying "food costs more than it used to" is exactly what inflation is, and exactly what inflation statistics are supposed to measure. If the statistics don't match the experience, then the statistics are wrong.
Moreover, the same government agencies that purport to measure inflation have a pretty big incentive to say that inflation isn't a problem, since inflation reflects badly on the government that signs their paychecks. Not only would we expect them to downplay inflation, we've watched them do it in real time with claims about inflation* being low where inflation* is calculated to exclude food, rent, and education.
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
1mo ago
I'm talking about individual selection, not group selection. The exact result will vary depending on what kinds of battles you end up fighting throughout your life, but in general being courageous increases the individual's reproductive chances, not just the group's. If you flee the battle then you can't partake in the spoils of war. If you flee the battle, you may survive but the victors will steal your wives and daughters, and the next generation will be more like them than you. Thus, courage spreads even if cowards are more likely to survive.
Also, it must be said, the vast majority of violence throughout human history has been small-scale. For the majority of battles that most people have participated in, one man's individual courage does make a difference on the outcome. Skirmishes between groups of 20 men were far, far more common than battles between groups of 20,000.
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
7mo ago
He can't walk off and set up his own alternate, traditional diocese.
Why not? There have been multiple competing Popes at the same time before.
Antipope 2023.
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
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.
Sunshine
8mo ago
I take 'NPC' to mean
Sunshine
1mo ago
I agree with your premise but I disagree with your conclusion. I think it's too far of a jump to say this:
what educational and social institutions want are meek, inoffensive and productive men who do not question the rules of society
The fundamental flaw with any line of reasoning that puts agency into "educational and social institutions" is that it assumes way too much competence from those "educational and social institutions." The administrators in charge of school boards and government departments do not comb the web to identify thought-patterns that might move society in a dangerous dangerous direction so they can neutralize them with insidious social engineering campaigns. The administrators in charge of school boards and government departments read their Facebook feeds and uncritically absorb whatever their (overwhelmingly left-wing) social circles are talking about.
Accept this premise: Andrew Tate is a Bad Influence on Young Men.
Put five 30-60 year old out of touch midwits in a room and tell them to brainstorm a solution. By 'solution,' what you actually mean is some vaguely pro-social program you can announce to make it seem like you're doing something - the question of whether the problem can be solved never comes up. Also unmentioned are the question of whether the framing of the problem is useful, or even whether the problem exists in the first place. The metric of success is the amount of positive attention generated divided by the cost of the program - or likes/dollar, if you prefer.
What you'll get is something like, "Let's make our own influencer to be a positive influence and counter out the negative influence."
Sunshine
1yr ago
As a rule of thumb, prices don't go down. Inflation is caused by an increase in the money supply. In this case it's caused by the fact that a number of major governments decided to spend several years printing money like there was no tomorrow, and then tomorrow came. The only way to undo that would be to round up all the money they printed and destroy it. They would never do that, so it won't happen.
If inflation stabilizes, wages might eventually rise to match prices.
Sunshine
11mo ago
I think the concept of government is, like, melting. It used to be oriented around war, but wars are getting rarer and governments are getting disoriented now that they've lost their original reason to exist. Now they're just power for power's sake, unmoored from anything, floundering for a purpose and settling on something between welfare state and propaganda state.
They're not going to evolve into anything concrete because evolution relies on evolutionary pressure, of which there is none. Modern governments don't die they just change hands to whoever is crazy enough to accept unlimited responsibility in exchange for very little power. They'll just flail around forever, accomplishing nothing, sustained by the free energy in the political environment.
Short answer: The two-party system. I think there are young people in the USA who would vote for AfD but who wouldn't vote for the Republican Party. The Republicans suck in a lot of ways and are shackled to interest groups that make them unappealing to most people under the age of 40.
I think there are also a lot of young people in the USA who would vote for a far-left party in a parliamentary system but who have strong objections to voting for the Democrats - lately we've seen a lot of pushback from this bunch over the Israel-Palestine issue.
Well Jewish people tend to concentrate into a few cities, such as New York and Washington DC, so you would want to compare Washington DC to one of the other cities that contain large numbers of Jewish people. I expect that an AP math class in Beijing won't have very many Jews, for example. Cities that you could compare it to include Philadelphia, LA, Boston, and Chicago, all of which I'm sure have the expected demographics in their AP math classes.
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