aqouta
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User ID: 75
aqouta
3d ago
"Mauritanians could be here" he thought, "I've never been on this island before. There could be Mauritanians anywhere." Made in the USA reverberated his entire airbase, making it pulsate even as the $9 Billion subsidy circulated through his powerful thick military budget and washed away his (merited) fear of soviet aligned countries. "With bombs you can drop them anywhere you want" he said to himself, out loud.
aqouta
6d ago
I think that, too, causes unease: some eager-beaver surgeon pushing for declaration of death while the patient is literally still breathing in order to get the organs as fast as possible.
I understand this is a common fear and I'm supposed to identify the doctor as some kind of monster for being insufficiently respectful of the likely dead. But, like, they're not chomping at the bit for those organs because they want to turn a profit, they need them to save other people's lives. I definitely do want safeguards put in place and to ensure the false positive rate is very very low and am in no way saying we should take healthy people's organs in some kind of utilitarian maximizing nightmare world. But sometimes the cynicism in this type of post rubs me the wrong way. We should all want the same thing here.
aqouta
6d ago
I find this a little strange. Yes, rote memorization is a good idea. But every time I see someone criticize the common core methods it just seems like how I naturally learned to think about numbers? You definitely can truncate most of the steps, the point is spelling it all out. People will say the squares are pointless when you can just carry the one, but the whole point of the squares is to show how carrying the one works mechanically and how it works the same way with multiplication .
aqouta
6d ago
Not allowing edits would be an extreme form of discrimination against my human right to correct egregious typos.
aqouta
6d ago
Sure, there are definitely bits and jokes to be told about biden. It's just a lot easier for something like the onion to do so in a headline with a couple paragraphs of puns. Southpark has to commit more to bits, most episodes have something like two plot lines going on and unless they're devoting one to presidential politics it's not super easy to just have a scene where the president is doing something. Family guy with it's reference thing can do that but south park is more situational humor so you need to devote like a whole b-plot to the president, and that's a harder sell for Biden than Trump.
aqouta
7d ago
they were suspiciously hands off the low-hanging fruit that was the Biden administration.
That's easy enough to explain. Low hanging fruit is kind of boring. They might have had a bit about biden like literally falling asleep in the middle of speeches but then they'd have to set up speeches that anyone cared about for him to fall asleep during. Trump is obviously a bigger fountain of controversy and slots in as a b plot more easily.
aqouta
8d ago
Scott linked it in one of his golden era posts, who by very slow decay
aqouta
9d ago
You've convinced me to give this a whirl with some of my secret smut writing and man, I had heard people complaining about the em dashes, and maybe I just didn't notice them on my more back and forth QA style questions but it managed to deploy not one, not two, not three, not even four but five em dashes in just 700 words.
aqouta
11d ago
I too, found this article extremely annoying. This guy is for real accusing, Scott Alexander of all people, of not laying out his opinions and justifications of ai acceleration in enough detail? Could he have maybe tried reading any of how his writing on the topic?
aqouta
14d ago
then research the 2002 Arab League peace plan, then at least read the wikipedia article on diplomacy and learn that it means give-and-take rather than just accepting people's demands.
Ah yes, the plan hamas refused to even acknowledge and included vague language about a "right to return" that was never clarified. Isreal has since normalized relationships with the member stares since then anyways. So say they went all in on 2002 what does that change today? Hamas wasn't party, iran wasn't party. The houthis weren't party(Yemen was but the faction of Yemen that isn't controlled by the houthis).
But the again the idea that the Israelis haven't been diplomatic is a lie. They just have a set of pretty reasonable non-negotiables like their ability to maintain security. And, the real sticking point, that they won't let in a vague number of refugees that would make them a minority. These requirements haven't prevented them from having normal relations with their neighbors like Jordan and Egypt or regional powers like the Saudis.
Your own theory is that Israel should intensify its bombing and destruction (with no further details provided, naturally), doubling down on a predictable political failure.
This is not my "theory", its what I believe the result of your plan to sanction Isreal world realistically result in.
You're not answering the question and I'm not going to address your gish gallop until you do. Who precisely do they do diplomacy with? A PA that they install over Gaza and no one recognizes? Lay out an actual plan instead of using every opportunity to litigate a plainly one sided retelling of history.
edit: my suspicion is that what you actually mean by "diplomacy" and why you're being weaselly around giving it definition is that by "diplomacy" you mean Israel should dissolve itself either by granting an unlimited right of return, essentially becoming an Arab state or by even more extreme means. Alternatively you could just not know anything about the region and not understand that dissolving itself as a state is the minimum demand from the other actors you're asking them to be diplomatic with.
aqouta
14d ago
Do you imagine there is some kind of "diplomacy" slider in the Knesset that the Israelis just refuse to toggle? Who are they doing diplomacy with? Iran? Hamas? If you think this is their best plan surely you have developed it past one word.
Your 'solution' is the fastest and surest route to disaster for Israel by torpedoing the source of Israeli strength, American support.
Israel won wars before America became involved in the region buying arms from places like Czechslovakia although they have a sophisticated home grown arms industry now. Maybe they could keep the Iron dome going without US support, maybe they couldn't and then they'd suffer more casualties. Despite what you seem to think those casualties would incentivize them to be more aggressive not less due to the asymmetries involved.
aqouta
15d ago
So the options you see for the Israelis are that they can do "diplomacy" which you cannot define, or some fantasy of the, nuclear armed, state collapsing into barbarism. I just don't think you've thought at all about this subject.
aqouta
16d ago
Alright, your solution is jews driven into the sea, got it. Glad we got to the bottom of it.
aqouta
16d ago
The ad you linked is from the same campaign but not the one that really best shows why people are outraged. The first segment of this one is where the heat is. I do think the outrage is a little overblown but eh, I kind of understand this one from the perspective of anyone who is thoroughly steeped in the blank slate camp.
aqouta
16d ago
It is really really important that you have no actual suggestion for a lasting peace. That's the entire problem and if you don't want to engage with it then I have no idea what would compel you to weigh into the discussion.
aqouta
17d ago
You didn't answer the question. What land concession, short of the river to the sea, could Israel make for an enduring peace?
aqouta
17d ago
Well in Gaza Israel pulled out their own settlers and things only got worse. I'm not sure I understand what the American Afghan informed model really looks like. They did try to have the PA control Gaza, the Gazans voted for Hamas and then Hamas ended elections. The US was able to drive the Taliban into the mountains separate from the main population where they could try their nation building. You could describe what Israel is doing now as the part where America drove the Taliban out but rather than separate mountains the Hamas compounds are endless miles of tunnels under Gaza itself so you can't actually achieve this separation. I'm basically at a point of pessimism on the topic, even in the more favorable Afghan situation the Americans with even more security failed to do what you're suggesting Israel should do, this just isn't going to work any way you slice it.
aqouta
17d ago
If Israel had to buy its munitions (either in the short term or long term) it would impose more pressure to finish the war quickly, or in general do more diplomacy and less bombing
The quickest way to win a war against an intransigent opponent when you have total military supremacy isn't less bombing and more diplomacy, rather the opposite. Same goes for people's plans to defund the iron dome. The cheapest way to do things is the bloodiest.
aqouta
17d ago
No! We gave them a shitton of money to rebuild stuff, tried mostly to avoid civilian deaths, helped them set up a new government for themselves, tried all sorts of education and policy interventions, lots of stuff
I mean Israel has done this too over the years, It tried to create a government for the Palestinians in the PA through the Oslo accords. You need to extend the Afghan analogy. All of America's, much larger, neighbors would need to explicitly support the Taliban. You have to remove the Ocean separating the countries so that the Taliban can plausibly be in any city in American in under an hour if not held at bay. You need the aim of the Taliban not to be to kick Ameicans out of Afghanistan but actually out of all of America or preferably kill every last American. The existential threat is pretty important, America could always have just left Afghanistan, that's just not an option for Israel.
aqouta
17d ago
You know, right now I'm listening to the news on the radio and it's another interview with someone about what is happening in Gaza.
Is it really such a stretch for people in this community to believe that a collection of NGOs staffed by the usual suspects who are the source of 100% of the information coming out of gaza might bend facts a bit?
aqouta
17d ago
Welp, 9 week visit went poorly, we're probably going to have another miscarriage, we'll know for sure in a couple weeks. I looked up the odds, seems like there is only like a 30% chance the problem is some kind of chromosomal thing that makes us totally inviable.
We found out a couple weeks ago my sister is expecting her second in January, they would have been similar ages. We're going to another baby shower in a couple weeks. This really sucks.
aqouta
18d ago
I do actually agree with you in this case, but it's kind of a funny claim to make when we have no idea how this ends.
Of course we have an idea of where this ends. The Palestinian aim to drive the jews, every one, out of the region and the Jews will not leave willingly. It can end with the Palestinians somehow accepting the Jews existing in the region or one side killing the other. Those are the options.
I mean there are philosophical arguments that can be made, and I'm sure people will make them. But there is also the cold hard economic argument to be made that a population collapse means a whole lot of old people in your cohort are going to die slowly alone in pools of their own waste.
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