Tophattingson
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User ID: 1078
Tophattingson
3d ago
I think there are parts of the war in Ukraine that are attributable to the US but they are far more near-term than the expansion of NATO. Russia was already de facto at war with Ukraine. That needs to be considered in any question, because Russia didn't start a new war in 2022, just massively escalate an existing one. Why did Russia choose that moment, instead of any other, to escalate? The most probable explanation to justify the timing is the spike in oil prices. It has since been weirdly memory-holed that the oil and gas price spike predates the escalation of the war in favour of the claim that the war triggered the spike. The cause for the spike was a long-term consequence of low investment in fossil fuel extraction due to environmental policies, and the medium-term consequence of the oil and gas glut that happened in 2020, which reduced production, slamming into the rise in consumption as economies got un-shuttered. The US, in part, is responsible for shuttering global economies in 2020. High oil and gas prices motivate Russia to make a move in two ways. First, by making sanctions more expensive to implement. Second, by providing the government a big budget surplus that might be put to use. However, judging by the initial invasion strategy (Russia basically trying to win in 3 days) that this was less intended to outright fund a war of attrition, and more intended to soothe over the costs of integrating captured territory into a victorious Russia while deterring sanctions long enough to make Russia's victory a fait accompli.
Tophattingson
10d ago
I wonder if this series will eventually cover the Tiflis bank robbery under "thuggery", because the number of people the Bolsheviks managed to kill in a single bank robbery is quite astonishing.
Tophattingson
11d ago
He wasn’t featured in any media or historical documentaries or video games or anything else prior to 2020.
Yasuke appears in Nioh, a 2017 game developed in Japan, as a boss. But the context to this is...
I find this impossible to take seriously. If he were that famous in Japan, surely he’d have shown up before the current mania for making visible minorities star in every piece of media made.
Yasuke is a factoid about the Sengoku period. Nioh's plot is framed around a long string of factoids about the Sengoku period. Quite similar to how Assassins Creed plots work, except with Youkai instead of Assassins and Templars. You even play as William Adams, who is another Sengoku factoid. Koei Tecmo practically specializes in games about random Sengoku factoids in general, so even having relatively obscure ones show up is not particularly notable.
Tophattingson
11d ago
Seems like a variant on merited impossibility. Perhaps merited possibility.
"It isn't happening and if it is, it's a good thing"
"It did happen, and if it didn't, why do you care?"
Tophattingson
12d ago
It seems to me that every single one of your arguments again places a convenient cutoff point on history.
I quite deliberately mentioned that you can keep finding earlier original wrongs. "repeat this process for pre-1948 wrongs". The point is that the origin mentioned by OP is definitely incorrect because these earlier wrongs exist.
The 1948 war was preceded by massive Jewish immigration into Palestinian lands
Massive immigration fits most of Europe and Europeans are generally not considered to be entitled to commit random acts of violence.
terrorism by armed groups representing it,
Same.
and them leveraging their ties to the international community to secure support for plans that already amounted to mass expropriations of Palestinians
The housing crisis in many major cities in Europe has this same de facto outcome.
The particular reason why Palestinians are more entitled to engage in unrestrained terror tactics than these groups is that they have been subjected to unrestrained terror tactics first and continuously.
And this would also apply to Israelis, who also believe that they were subjected to unrestrained terror tactics first and continuously. So once again we end up with no special reason why Palestinians are uniquely entitled to do this.
Tophattingson
13d ago
Feigned ignorance of Islamist motives is approximately the official position of law enforcement in Britain so it shouldn't be too surprising for it to be widely espoused.
Coleman Hughes puts the case for the Israel beautifully in this 2 minute video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZloHekt7WLo
This is missing something important that can strengthen the case, because this is not an ad-hoc argument used exclusively for Israel-Palestine, but instead has precedent. One much stronger than analogy. Consider child soldiers. Killing children in war is wrong. Willfully killing children is a war crime. Along comes some military genius who decides that because you're not allowed to kill children, he should recruit them into the military, and use the power of their anti-child-killing war-crime-fields to make them invincible. They can shoot you. You are not allowed to shoot back. Genius.
The typical policy on this, however, is that child soldiers are offered no special protections, and that the use of child soldiers, rather than their killing, is the war crime. This is because to allow for special protections for child soldiers would act as a perverse incentive for their use, beyond the morale effects that fighting against child soldiers already has. The ideal world is one in which child soldiers get gunned down with complete indifference, just as any other soldier would be, to deter their use.
Similar must apply to a state that treats the lives of it's own civilians not just with total disregard, but as a currency that could be spent for generating sympathy. It's a perverse incentive. There's just no more direct parallel because not even some of the worst regimes in history have attempted this (and even if they tried, getting e.g. Japanese civilians blown up even more would have generated very little sympathy).
The problem with positing an "original wrong" is that the 1948 war was started by the Palestinians and their Arab allies, and subsequently they lost. So the search for an original wrong already has a wrong that came before that origin. Yes, you can arguably repeat this process for pre-1948 wrongs, but the "original wrong" you suggest is definitely not correct.
Another counterargument seems to rest on something like statute of limitations (like, the Palestinians and Israelis alive nowadays are not the ones who got robbed and their robbers), which would be more persuasive if Israeli settlements were not still expanding, and there weren't still Palestinians who are quite directly being made to suffer at the hands of the Israeli men with guns for no other reason than that they do not accept the "become Bill Gates's domestic servant" deal.
Stopping the settlers would fall far short of Palestinian aims. It has repeatedly failed to be a sufficient concession in prior peace talks. And even when tried unilaterally by Israel, made things worse, not better.
If you are continuously denied justice in an existential matter, though, I don't think it's at all an alien viewpoint that you are morally entitled to do whatever you find appropriate to seize justice for yourself, including ineffectual and vile acts of revenge such as murdering the women and children of those who wronged you. To claim otherwise, to me, seems to amount to claiming that you can be absolved for arbitrary wrongs if you just amass enough power to make effective resistance impossible, and I don't like that even before we start taking into the account that the targets of Hamas terror were intended and more often than not happy beneficiaries of the original wrongs committed.
Do you apply this principle evenly? Does it apply to Germans expelled from Eastern Europe in the aftermath of WWII, for instance? Are they entitled to carry out unrestrained acts of revenge in Western Poland in response to being expelled? And since this applies to any arbitrary wrong, as you have written it, to beat my usual drum, are victims of vaccine mandates and lockdowns entitled to carry out unrestrained non-hypothetical fedposting? Are Trump supporters wronged by being under the wrong government, as Palestinians living under Israeli rule would be, and thus entitled to fedposting? And, of course, does this apply to Israelis who are wronged by Palestinian attacks and, therefore, entitled to seize justice by committing their own revenge?
Maybe you do think this. In which case, this position is just more might makes right (despite you objecting to might makes right), using arbitrary violence instead of precise violence to try to maximize the might they can exert from the weaker position.
More likely, you do not think this. But if so, you are missing any particular reason why Palestinians are uniquely entitled to engage in unrestrained terror tactics, and I'm yet to hear a good one. If it's the degree of political repression, then the majority of the world's countries including many western countries are on the fedpost list for some form of repression or another. If it's being ruled over by the wrong ethnic group, then it's ethnostate for thee but not for me, because I am also ruled over by a Prime Minister of a different ethnicity, and I'm not entitled to kick out all the foreigners. If it's that Arabs were turfed out by Jews after they legally purchased the land from absentee Ottoman landlords, consider the ethnic makeup of London and the financial impossibility of living in London for many natives. For every justification I've heard, there's been a parallel elsewhere where any resistance was considered unthinkable, let alone random acts of terror.
Tophattingson
26d ago
Context: Australian media and govt have been panicking about male-on-female violence for a few weeks now. We recently had a mass stabbing by a mentally ill man, who targeted mostly women. Accordingly, male on female violence has increased statistically and the government has thrown a lot of money at various NGOs.
They are going to use the tragedy to push through vaguely linked changes that they wanted to do anyway. The UK saw the same pattern happen when the government used the murder of David Amess by an Islamist to push laws seeking to censor social media even though this is completely unrelated to the circumstances of the murder.
The majority of murder victims in Australia (and most if not all other countries) are male. But men are treated as disposable, so that doesn't matter.
Tophattingson
26d ago
The argument was incomplete. It's not the use of unrapeable in isolation that's making the threat. It's the contrast between that section and the other sections. If you made a tier list of food, put dog-kidney pie in "inedible" and all the other dog meats in the other not-inedible sections, it would imply you consider other preparations of dog meat acceptable to eat.
To draw up a situation where the courts would find someone at fault for doing like this, consider a Mafia boss writing a list containing categories like "deal with soon" and "not to be killed" and handing it to a made man. Then, a few weeks later, some of the people under "deal with soon" are dead. This would be evidence connecting the boss to the crime, even though the literal interpretation of the list is that it never listed anyone to be killed, only those to not be killed.
but treating a group of posh high school boys as if they were seriously contemplating violent rape
The reason it should fail is because the threat is non-credible, and being done in private, couldn't have been used to coerce anyone.
Tophattingson
1mo ago
Sunak's current political strategy is an ambitious plan known as Net Zero Seats, where he tries to secure an overwhelming defeat in the next election.
The low growth low interest rate, low increase in government spending situation we had before wasn't great, but it was sustainable. After spaffing trillions up the wall on lockdowns, however, the economic situation is no longer sustainable. You can project every NHS worship, pension worship, build-nothing worship and debt interest trend out and by the end of the century it results in demands for government spending exceeding 100% of GDP.
If Labour blows another hole in the budget with another 20% increase in healthcare spending that doesn't actually improve healthcare at all, and voters get mad at this for the same reason they were mad at the Tories for doing the same thing (even if they can't identify why it didn't work), who do they vote for next? The NHS Uber Alles Party?
Tophattingson
1mo ago
It remains to be seen to what extent voters understand that development being illegal is the problem though.
Not at all.
In my experience, the average Labour voter (and thus the average voter) thinks that the cause of the UK's economic malaise is that Tories are channelling all the money to their mates, though they cannot name or identify any specific examples of this occurring. Unless "channelling" means pensions, and "mates" means all pensioners in the country, this doesn't explain the UK's budget problems. They just see a government taking in endless amounts of tax, no more services being produced, and assume MPs are personally pocketing the difference.
Tophattingson
1mo ago
A few years under Starmer might have people realise Labour have no policy for fixing housing.
It's this depressing feeling that I was never really friends with a person who existed, just a living chatbot that had a new gpt lobotomy update.
That was my 2020 experience with lockdowns, but add all of society to it. And even worse because at least the Hezbollah fans generally fall short of demanding everyone wave the Hezbollah flag, whereas lockdown fans made their political symbols into legal obligations. Because of this, afterwards, I tend to be rather unfazed whenever the latest lobotomy balance patch is released. My expectations are rock bottom so if anything other than everyone around me being as stupid and awful as possible happens, I get to be pleasantly surprised instead. And sure, maybe it's egotistical to think everyone around me is a lobotomite, but so what? If they're not, it's on them to demonstrate otherwise.
Tophattingson
1mo ago
Via conversations with the people who are most affected by this, those who use sites like Pixiv commercially, they seem to believe that there's a cabal of anti-porn American Evangelicals behind payment processing restrictions. This seems to be approximately a consensus. When I tried to question them on alternative hypotheses involving a Visa/Mastercard Duopoly, even the "moderate" suggestion that excess chargebacks is the primary motive for not wanting to deal with adult content, there was a lot of pushback. Didn't even risk discussing right-wing hypotheses involving debanking or Operation Chokepoint. My impression was that they pattern match all politics they dislike to political groups they dislike regardless of whether there's actually a link.
Tophattingson
1mo ago
(i.e. the same thing that made Pornhub pull out of Texas).
Pornhub loves the kind of regulations that Texas are doing. They just dislike that they don't get to be in control of them and use them to eliminate the competition.
Of course, this will not happen because the current state of affairs is not an accident. Remember Wikileaks?
If you look at the history of Apartheid South Africa, they still had a lot of support from the WH right up until the end
The end of Apartheid coincides with the collapse of the USSR, not some sudden shift in external political pressure on behalf of activists. That there was relative certainty that South Africa would not immediately turn into a Soviet satellite regime because the USSR was too busy collapsing was what enabled a consensus on ending Apartheid. That they'd later turn into vaguely anti-western, mixed political system basket case anyway wasn't really a concern.
Tophattingson
1mo ago
Policies for the one don’t work for and aren’t wanted by the other.
There is no particular reason to think that urban policies worked in urban areas either.
By false-centrism, I mean that taking the middle ground between an utterly unreasonable position and a reasonable position is not, in itself, inherently reasonable or centrist. For instance, the centrist position on self-nuking is the same as the ardent anti self-nuking position, not that you should compromise by only nuking yourself with half the number of bombs. Similarly, the centrist position on lockdowns isn't that you should do 'kind' lockdowns, or short lockdowns, but instead that there should be no lockdowns, the same position as was held by all German political parties until 2020. The FDPs position on the coronavirus response is still extreme, even if it's not as extreme as the SDP.
On the AFD, the FDP is explicitly on the record as being against the Verbotsverfahren.
I find myself questioning further why the FDP tolerates being in it's current coalition. Still, I prefer to look at what a party actually does as opposed to what it says, and being in a coalition government that is carrying out political repression is more important than their statements against that repression.
Tophattingson
2mo ago
Britain's a deeply broken country IMO, drowning in decline. Scotland has effectively permanent SNP leftist-progressive govt. Traditional heavy industry left, north sea oil is depleted. There's not much growing of the pie, only taking someone else's share - SNP policies lean in that direction.
Real GDP per capita: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.KD?locations=GB
This is indeed the crux of the issue, but it's also true for most of Europe. Britain's main difference here is we don't have bad unemployment figures to go with it. Instead, we have the peculiar combination of US very low unemployment but EU bad wage growth.
I know Dominic Cummings is a contested figure here but he did work in the British govt for some time and I think he was driven a bit mad by the cosmic horror of it all, he wrote these essays about how everything was broken and the leaders were clowns:
Dominic Cummings is not some outside figure diagnosing the problem. He, being pro-lockdown, was a contributor to it.
The FDPs milquetoast false-centrism position on the coronavirus response, and it's involvement in the current German coalition as that government seeks to disrupt, harass, or even outlaw political opposition in the AFD, makes me skeptical that they'd be a good match for your claimed political goals.
Of course, the centre-right refusing to ally with the right pretty much defines the entire current German political climate, not just you in particular.
See, this is why center-left people don't feel like allying with the right, despite our increasing frustration with the regressive far-left. I dislike their attitude of wanting to define reality and outlaw disagreement, but I just know that if the right gets into power they'll do the same, but harder.
I tend to regard actually existing, present threats as more relevant than an equivalent but hypothetical threat.
I have several friends who are as frustrated with the far-left as me, but who support palestine. I disagree with them about this, but I don't thing they should lose their job over it! And nor are they just getting what they're dishing out, no, now we have to take punches from both sides.
This is quite relevant to the UK. Our existing terrorism laws are so broad that throwing the book at Palestinian protesters would lead to tens of thousands of arrests and lengthy prison sentences. To say nothing of England's not-quite-as-strict but still menacing speech laws. But this hasn't happened. When vexatious edge-case imprisonments for terrorism happen, they happen to far-right non-terrorists. Similarly, the only time the police have chosen to start cracking skulls for our current wave of Hamas-related protesting is when there were right-wing counter-protesters. And this is to say nothing of the experience in 2020-21, where lockdowns de jure criminalized all protest, but de facto only criminalized anti-lockdown protests and one specific anti-police protest. As for our counter-terrorism efforts, Prevent is more interested in browns under the bed, hallucinating right-wing extremism where it doesn't exist while doing its best to ignore Islamism.
The threat that the right will fall down a slippery slope is not as strong an argument as the observation that the left already fell down it and hit the spike pit at the bottom.
There's about 8 years between the initial invasion and the escalation. The Winter Olympics would only be a factor for a small proportion of that period. And the main country responsible for disrupting them was China itself, with it's continued use of covid restrictions.
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