aqouta
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User ID: 75
aqouta
2yr ago
The FBI's regular meetings with people like Yoel Roth were characterized by the latter as telling him that state actors might try a "hack and leak" operation prior to the election.
One thing I've always found weird about this story is why I'm supposed to care about the provenance of the leak so long as it's credible. If it's a "fabricate and leak" operation, sure, and if the hackers are breaking the law I'd like them punished for it. But if the information is true and pertinent to voter why would that justify suppressing it? We aren't a court of law and the character of the people on display is most of the point. If Rittenhouse was running for public office that video they didn't let into the court of him talking about wishing he had his gun while watching shoplifters should definitely be in play. Same is true for the shit on Hunter's laptop. If someone has burned a zero day to hack something totally disqualifying on Trump no one would be batting an eye at spreading it as widely as possible.
aqouta
2yr ago
As did Tolkien, who intentionally loosely modeled the dwarfs off of Jews and even had their language be Semitic. A people pushed out of their homelands. It was notably not a thing done with animus as he was fond of Jewish people.
aqouta
2yr ago
I don't like that the culture war is taking place over control of the platforms themselves but this does seem like people who live by the sword dying by the sword. I just wish there were more places one could live without swords. I deeply hope that a lesson is learned here and that it isn't "fight even more underhandedly at platform control."
aqouta
2yr ago
I'm not sure if you're referencing this intentionally but some male writers did do something like this and it was quite controversial. I had just searched out the first article I could find on the subject without much care to the content besides that it got the basic details right and man is it a funny read. It tries to thread the needle on why publishing under a male sounding pseudonym to target a male dominated audience is good and empowering but publishing under a female pseudonym to captured a female dominated audience is bad and cannot be legitimized. The idea that people shouldn't judge books by their author's genitals is not addressed.
I don't take super strong sides on the conflict. It seems to have been a game of tit for tat that the Palestinians have always kept playing despite being very bad at it.
The present ruling population of Israel mostly moved to that territory in the late '40s, and from the start has continued violently expelling the ancestors of present Palestinians from their homes to acquire their land for themselves.
This is not a reasonable summary of events. I'll give a slightly more broken down version from my understanding, if I got something wrong let me know and I'll probably update it:
- There were always some Jews in that region
- The Jews are having a bad time as minorities basically everywhere they are and recently had an attempt at genocide committed against them so they are anxious to establish a state where they are the majority.
- the Ottoman empire needs money so they establish the right of land ownership and a number of Arabs end up living as poor tenants under absentee Arab landlords
- Jews buy up ~5% of this land and kick the tenant Arabs off this land (I do think this was a wrong committed but not terribly out of step with the morality of the time) They set up kind of leftist Kibbutzim on this land
- The Ottoman empire collapses and Britain takes over the area which is now called Mandatory Palestine which includes bits of modern day Jordan and Syria. The Mandatory system is kind of where Britain rules for a while and after the mandatory period ends they intend to draw up state lines and hand the reins over to whatever state(s) form.
- There are some small scale Massacres of jews leading to the jews forming some militia like groups, the largest of which is mostly reasonable but there was at least one smaller militia that did its own massacres.
- Tit for Tat escalations continue the brits are pretty unhappy with the whole thing
- Mandatory period is supposed to end in 1948 but a single peaceful state doesn't seem like something either the Arabs or Jews of the region are interested in.
- 1947 there is a UN plan to establish two states Palestinians don't send representation and deny the legitimacy of the plan.
- Israel is declared a state and surrounding Arabs immediately attack.
- Israel surprisingly wins the war and takes lands beyond even the 1947 proposed borders, many Arabs are expelled at this point and this is what is referred to as the Nakba.
- at the same time as Arabs are being Expelled from Israel the Jews are being expelled from the surrounding Arab nations and mostly going to Israel.
- From then to today a pattern repeats of Israel very obviously wishing it could take over the whole region and expel the rest of the Arabs but they never actually need to instigate this because the Arabs in the region reliably attack them and provoke retaliation.
I'm left thinking there isn't a clear "good team" here, the Palestinians did get screwed over but usually in ways where they were at least somewhat to blame. Israel's settlements in the west bank are really ridiculous and should probably be dismantled. It's true that Israel isn't giving Palestinians full autonomy in their region but this is understandable given than Palestinians are nearly constantly lobbing rockets at Israel. Israel seemed, at least before Oct 7th, to be willing to go down a de-escalatory path but the Palestinians Seem totally unwilling to walk that path instead harboring the delusion that they're going to some day expel all the Jews and take all the land.
Given this I will say I do mostly side with the Israelis. They're more western and seem to at least attempt to minimize their atrocities in a way that I don't expect the Palestinians to do. A war where Palestinians were wearing the shoes of the Israelis would be an actual Genocide.
I find the autonomy listed a bit misleading for a couple reasons. First, they know exactly what kind of teacher is going to sign up for teaching this course. But more importantly they control the fundamental curriculum with the test design. AP teachers teach to the test, they'd be failing their students their valuable college credit if they didn't. We can pretend like the teachers get to pick the curriculum all we want but if critical theory is on the test critical theory will be taught, simple as that.
aqouta
2yr ago
I'm not going to try to do the thing that Trump supporters still do where they justify all of the actions in some 4D chess move. I've been quite disappointed by a lot of Musk's handling on Twitter. That said the doom posting on it seem incredibly excessive. It would not surprise me if Musk has lost and will not recover a lot of twitter value. It also wouldn't surprise me if behind the scenes all that really mattered was cutting the costs by firing tons of people and this will all come up Milhouse. What I really object to are all the people that are pretending they have any clue whatsoever what the future holds on this matter. Sometimes the skeptic is a fool for not seeing the obvious but I think far more people are going to seem far more foolish when we do a retrospective in 5 years.
aqouta
2yr ago
I'm not a big fan of him definitely not living up to his hype but I will say I'm mildly more comfortable with him running it than the type that were running it before purely on who/whom grounds. The main place that political topics are discussed in public being run by people who loudly hate you is a low, dull weight lifted off my back.
aqouta
2yr ago
Ah, speculating on the happenings of a conference I hadn't even known existed before reading the comment, my specialty. I'm registering a prediction that this is an entirely fabricated happening meant to raise awareness of the Eradicate Hate Conference.
aqouta
2yr ago
Those of us with libertarian tendencies are left wondering why our institutions needs to be captured by tyrannical dogmatic ideologues in the first place. I've lived in strongholds of the illiberal left and right, in a lot of ways they're different, in a lot of ways they're the same. It's the certainty that is the problem,
One thing that proponents of noble lies like the falsehood of HBD or Healthy at an size seem to never account for is that by publicly denouncing the truth and harshly punishing any deviation they are feeding credibility directly into the kind of people who shouldn't have any. If you're a young man today and all you see from the mainstream is easily debunkable nonsense and thinly veiled contempt for you and what you see on the fringe is people comprehensively calling out those plain lies, coupled with their own nonsense but at the same time clearly not holding you in contempt then... I mean it's not convincing to those of us who contrarian enough to assume everyone involved in probably wrong but we're a rare breed. To many others even if they don't internalize it this is just as simple as siding with the liars who pander to you over the liars who demonize you. The solution is to stop. fucking. lying. so. god. damned. much. But this isn't going to change for many depressing reasons.
aqouta
2yr ago
The leftist debate bro rat types who actually engage with HBD topics have all debated HBD types, and complete, utterly smashed them on the rhetoric and the facts when it comes to racial IQ gaps, but have all retreated on the heritability of IQ.
I've yet to see this happen even once.
aqouta
2yr ago
What massively bothers me is that this gender as social and sex as physical is completely thrown out of the window when talking about transgender people's need to physically mimic the opposite sex. Both of these narratives can't be true at the same time. And that isn't the only issue that is solvable but I never see people grapple with. If we're going to start taking seriously that womanhood has certain gender characteristics and throw out the "women can be and do anything" framework that implies some female people who think they are women are wrong. Otherwise the category is meaningless.
There are some frameworks of gender ideology that actually make sense, and as I care very little about gender itself I'd be willing to adopt but what mainstream gender advocates are offering is not one of those frameworks. It's all of them at once carefully switching from one to another in order to dodge the uncomfortable implications.
Can you put a little more effort into formulating your point here? This really just seems like a bunch of Russel conjugations. You take issue with the concept of ownership and then go on to describe consequences of this concept in unflattering terms. Ownership is a useful concept for many reasons, principally because it solves tragedy of the commons problems once society scales up enough that free riding becomes a problem. You really need to propose an alternative to ownership as a concept and not just leave it hanging out there if you want this to go anywhere. It's very difficult to actually build any organization without the concept of ownership without it being incredibly brittle. Not just in the case of physical goods but ownership in decision making.
aqouta
7mo ago
Sick of the bots and echo chamber that X has become
It's very easy to make your X feed not like this. block or mute a dozen or so accounts and the algorithm mostly takes care of you. You get more of what you interact with so if you're arguing with right wingers you'll see more right wingers. Every time I look at the profile of someone who complains about this sort of thing I always find pages and pages of arguments with the people they're complaining about also that they're following tons of people with pages and pages of arguments with the people they're talking about. It's so obvious to see too, go on X and reply to one of the China shill accounts, you will very quickly start seeing tons of them. I'm convinced most of the calls of people who think X has changed since Musk took over are really just seeing that the algorithm is no longer suppressing right wing accounts that they were used to "dunking" on and are getting the adjustments that were normal to suck you into any other group on X.
aqouta
1yr ago
I think they spend the same or similar amounts of time, it's just the learning seems secondary to the selection and socialization. All colleges have been suffering through becoming more and more instrumentalized as they become a necessary Goodhart's check box for middle class life. I think this process is downstream of the internet bringing all the contours of the various credentialing systems and their bounties to the attention of everyone. You can see this in the sharp plummeting in the ivy league acceptance rate starting in around the 90s.. If you offered someone either the education they can get at Harvard or the connections and credentials which one would it be more rational to choose?
There is undoubtedly learning at Harvard, but is the point of Harvard the learning? And if it's not, if its primary purpose is as an exclusive club for hand selected elites to rub shoulders then the willingness to throw out merit to service political goals makes perfect sense. And also I'd quite like to burn it to the ground.
aqouta
2yr ago
I'm kind of surprised you are surprised. I was permanently ip and device banned from reddit for using the /r/place thing the way it was intended to be used because an admin had a personal bone to pick with the community associated with the logo, a community that really is less objectionable than other allowed logos like 4chan. The whole phenomenon is why it was important for us to get off of reddit, they want an echo chamber and will have one. Only controlled opposition, complete with admin politically aligned moderators in control, is allowed and it's been that way for years.
aqouta
2yr ago
People should be allowed to make their own decisions with what to do with their body. When we stop sending men into the bowels of the earth to break their backs and risk collapse in order to supply our society with necessary materials I'll take the idea that people shouldn't be able to trade use of their bodies for money more seriously. If people are being coerced, as always, that is different.
aqouta
2yr ago
Can I ask all the men blaming women, the hussies, for not getting married at seventeen and pumping out a baby a year for the next ten years - are you fathers?
Working on it, plan to be in the next 2 years or so. Fiancé wants to get through the most busy period of residency before starting. In response to the rest of the comment, there are actually meaningful asymmetries between the sexes that make these swaps not really work that.
Because I'm fed-up right now of this stream of comments as if women magically are the only ones having babies or not.
In the society most of us actually live in women do pretty much get unilateral decision making on this topic.
Men who have sex are going to become fathers, or else they can wait until a woman decides to marry them.
I really think you're misreading the room if you don't expect this to be responded to with yeschad.
And let's make it harder for men to waste their prime fertile years going to college. Get them working good honest blue-collar jobs out of high school, married to their childhood sweetheart, and having babies by the time they're twenty.
This is definitely not how male fertility works, and has about a 50% chance of getting a yeschad response anyways. There is nothing like a consensus on the importance of going to college in this place.
Men can wait ten or so years to have a career, they'll easily pick one up when they're thirty-plus and asking an employer to take them on for full-time white collar work for the first time ever. It's much more important that they be around to be the head of the house and raise the kids right. Women can take a year out to have a baby and then go back to work, but it's a full-time job for a father. And since women have it so soft and easy in this world, and it's easier for women to get degrees and white-collar jobs, let Mom be the worker but Dad should be there for his brood because who else is going to teach them the right ways?
Economic incentives for men to marry early, father lots of kids, and postpone further education/career-building will surely change the fertility slump! If it would work for a woman, certainly no man would object to having his freedom curtailed in this way - after all, his duty to society and the future trumps any petty personal ambitions, right?
This survives reversal somewhat better but not all that well, it wasn't just some weird arbitrary coincidence that pretty much every culture in the world had mothers as primary caregivers and despite the artificial roadblocks men do still out earn women. I am open to and would like for where any fertility intervention to be fair to both sexes, I'm engaged to someone with two doctorates, but we do need to acknowledge that we are sexually dimorphic species. Your discomfort with the way this discussion is being had is well raised but I don't think you've actually done much damage to the argument.
This is a ridiculous sentiment in multiple ways. first and most obviously the 'eat the rich' types are definitely more in favor of things like open borders and increased immigrations. Just the lines you're drawing are hopelessly confused. Secondly there is a much easier way to target people pushing harmful policies than using wealth as a proxy, you know, just pick the people actively pushing those policies most are not billionaires, most are the type of people to unironically post 'Eat the rich'. Thirdly, and probably most importantly,
Then they waste this money on whores and yachts, like Bezos, and a few pet progressive projects.
The problem with the economy is not that too much money is being spent on yachts, yacht spending isn't even worth mentioning on economic analysis. These Billionaires by and large are not using their billions to meaningfully distort the market, their wealth is stored inertly in companies that do pie growing business with everyone else. A dollar in Amazon and thus some fraction of a dollar propping up Bezos' net worth is not a dollar out of the pocket of an American, that's a child's understanding of economics. When you "expropriate", which frankly can only be interpreted as nationalizing companies like Amazon, this wealth you'll watch amazed as it evaporates into thin air. This deep resentment people feel towards the wealthy is just ugly crab in a bucket mentality. Punish people who cheat and abuse to become billionaires for cheating and abusing, if you're right that this is the only way to become a billionaire then no sweat off your back, but I think you're dead wrong.
aqouta
2yr ago
They're perverting the very reason the lock in is required. The whole point is so that the people on the annual pass have to give up the bikes to people who are paying the higher per ride cost. You're not even supposed to be able to use the ebikes on the annual pass.
aqouta
2yr ago
Let's flip this around, and imagine her male counterpart, a short mottizen on the spectrum who wishes his software engineering job was more attractive to women. He decides he's going to work out, dress better, and put himself in social situations to improve his lot in the dating market, and he's aiming a little high. Would he be the target of derision here? Of course not.
I'm not really on team "let's ridicule her" but the answer to "would a socially awkward guy be a subject of derision here?" for doing something as socially awkward as this is absolutely and obviously yes. You're out of your mind if you think men aren't held to a higher standard on weird awkward behavior.
aqouta
2yr ago
I find poly evangelicals just as annoying as the next guy and don't think it's a good lifestyle for most but what movement exactly do these people think they're joining? Yes, it's mostly weirdos, quite a bit of whom are on the spectrum who are interested in weird ideas. Where are these advertisements where it's pretending to be something else? All of the rest of society follows your moral beliefs. Yes, EA has control over some funding and useful roles, but they created them and it's theirs you have no right to it without putting up with the weird community that made it possible.
aqouta
2yr ago
I don't even really understand the question. People, at least in wester democratic countries, believe that the legitimacy of rule comes from the consent of the governed. This isn't a perfectly consistent belief as few beliefs are shown in a kind of status quo bias that has them opposing forcible annexation but also opposing many secessions. But the underlying belief is quite simple. It is axiomatically evil to use force to make people join compacts that they do not want to join, Russia is doing this with their invasion and allowing Russia to be reward for breaking this rule sets an unacceptable precedent.
You seem to think they should be operating on some crude non-iterative maximization of total utility in the near term like unthinking animals. But they learned from the Nazi days that appeasement doesn't work and expansionist tyrants can only be adequately answered with absolutely no tolerance.
It's worse in the very trivial way that it leaves a whole lot of the population fighting dice that are incapable of rolling in their favor. Yes, it actually feels quite bad to know that you automatically lose any tiebreaker no matter what for something you have no control over to fight a disparity you had no hand in.
edit: and of course there is the other factor which is that I have literally zero faith that the people making these choices are actually not rounding everything down as to what counts for qualifications for people with my phenotype and rounding everything up for qualifications that count for people like Brinton before they declare that several candidates are of equal qualifications. I have seen the faces of this kind of person when they see an unrepresented minority in a prestigious position.
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