aqouta

aqouta 1d ago

They could unconditionally surrender. That's what I'd do if I found myself having started a war with a superior power despite having no actual army. Their other choices are set up shop where civilians aren't and get immediately destroyed or keep up what they're doing and getting their people killed. They've taken that option and are responsible for the obvious consequences.

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aqouta 1d ago

No, I'm saying hamas purposefully colocates military targets with civilians knowing that this will inevitably end up with dead Palestinian civilians which they record and use in propaganda.

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aqouta 1d ago

Yes, I had the same thought, this is very much just exactly the divisive stuff you'd expect Russia and Iran to push as much as possible. There are of course people who lap up the narrative and horrific images, the propaganda wing isn't so incompetent not to get some organic opposition with access to dead children and an organization happy to putting their children in the kind of danger that produces fresh horrific images.

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aqouta 2d ago

This seems like a misunderstanding of the reasons our democracy is failing to deliver compelling candidates. It's not the system, it's not the candidates, it's not some shadowy "they" at the top that will see the signal in your blank vote and adjust things to compensate. It's that we, the voters, have no single coherent thing that we want or can demand. Some few individuals, over represented on this forum, have thought out coherent ideas but as citizens in general we collectively want lower taxes and more government spending. We want less immigration but cheaper labor. We want our burgers to cost less but the guy flipping them to be paid more. What we would want is impossible so we can't have it.

What's the platform you imagine a better class of candidate would even run on? We've all had the self indulgent experience of imagining the speech we'd give on the campaign stage to bring the nation together. But after your elegant and coherent vision is expressed to the camera the other guy is going to accuse you of wanting to raise taxes or failing to support some popular increase in services and they'll be right.

The truth is that we're a divided people under a system that is designed to lock shut if there isn't a mandate. Our representatives can't push through what we want because it's not popular enough but they can shut down the other guy's thing that also isn't popular enough and we're going to keep supporting them in that shutting down because we find their radical ideas repellent. That's the way things are and they way things will stay until we as a nation are able to come back together and unite under a shared vision.

Vote blank if you want, it won't do anything because it can't do anything. You're screaming into a void and no one is listening.

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aqouta 5d ago

I understand "can humans be vermin" sounds like it could be on the 'IS' side of the Is/ought distinction but I think it's actually on the 'ought' side. I don't think "is there such a thing as an internal gender experience such that it can be out of alignment with a person's sex" is on the is side. I believe this because I think there is some amount of proof that could sway me into believing that gender as an innate felt experience is real while there is no proof that would cause me to believe that some humans are vermin.

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aqouta 6d ago

It seems like common sense to suppress the manifesto. Same reason you don’t publicize suicides. These things all have a huge amount of social contagion.

This is one of those things that seems like a good principle but when not applied evenly is a weapon. If the Christchurch shooter's manifesto was suppressible do you think it would be suppressed?

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aqouta 7d ago

This feels like quite a stretch. Maybe it's just the time I've spent among the progressives in my life but I know the type of people who, through blinding empathy, advocate for things like the WPATH guidelines.

There are certainly leftists who resent, hate and advocate for violence against people that I can see as analogous to nazis, as there are rightest for whom the comparison would be taken as high praise. So I don't think I'm just incapable of comparing modern people to nazis.

Rather than thinking of the consequences would you rather live with empathetic but misguided people or slightly more correct, with their own wrongness, people who advocate for and are willing to partake in violence against their out group?

Consequentialism in a moralish society has this quirk where straightforwardly evil people can't get public support and thus can't do much harm and thus rank low on consequential harm measures. While moral empathetic people can get lots of support and thus can cause lots of, inadvertent, harm and thus can score high on harm measures. This is a dynamic to look out for and we should always be critical and careful with those we entrust with great power. But it seems a horrible mistake to conclude that the moral empathetic people are as bad as the straightforwardly evil people on these grounds. It really matters that if we entrusted other groups with the power that the progressives are entrusted with that things would be much worse and they should get some reasonable credit for that. Not absolution, not a free pass, but they're not nazis.

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aqouta 8d ago

I think the thing is that these people do mostly share some distorted version of my values in the way that the Nazis don't. The Nazis tried to exterminate a people that they thought were vermin while invading their neighbors in a war of aggression. While the WPATH people are doing what they're doing out of a mistaken application of empathy and harm reduction. The modal true believing Nazi is a hateful bigot, the modal true believing WPATH person is someone who cares a lot about trying to alleviate suffering even if circumstances tragically end up such that they are causing more suffering. The camps weren't the Nazis trying to turn the jews and undesirables into Germans, they were built for the horrible purpose that they were used for. Trans healthcare is built to help people.

-2

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aqouta 8d ago

Yes, despite deep skepticism of the trans worldview I've always modeled it as more confused than evil or anything. The people behind it clearly think they're making the world a better place and that there are tons of kids that are suffering immensely worse lives for not being found and allowed to be "who they really are". They don't seem to adequately grapple with the possibility that someone could be deluded into believing strange and untrue things about themselves especially when those things are packaged into appealing memes that contain soothing explanation for why they don't fit in or are confused at puberty. They genuinely believe that if someone say they're trans there is a special sense that definitely have in their head that is providing them total proof and that it can't possibly be imagined.

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aqouta 9d ago

pro tip, windows key + left/right arrow key has the same effect as dragging all the way to the side. If you continue to hold the windows key after doing this you can then hit the up or down arrow to quarter the window.

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aqouta 11d ago

heavy taxes on the parties who benefit directly from the loans over the decades.

I look forward to this meaning those of us who paid off our loans but are in the wrong industries get hit by this twice and those that didn't and are in the right industries get a double boon.

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Moderations, Bans, and the State of the Motte - Let's have a Discussion

aqouta 11d ago

The main problem is just the source of new blood since leaving reddit. I've dropped a couple links to vault on twitter as a bread crumb and can't really know if we've caught anymore. Improving the vault, updating it with more links might help. I think more or less the moderators do an excellent job and I have very little criticism, I could give or take the hlynka ban.

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aqouta 15d ago

And during the ottoman empire land ownership was created, given to Arabs, some of which became absentee landlords(often by tricking the people who lived there into thinking the land rights were a scam) and later sold some of that land to the jews who moved in and kicked the Arab tenants off the land they bought. Hundreds of thousands of jews didn't show up out of no where, that's not an accurate paraphrasing of what hat happened and the details matter. The ottomans were in no way the same people as the Arabs in the land that they ruled over.

I'm not even fully on the side of the zionists but your description is cartoonishly one sided.

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aqouta 15d ago

I'll drop my take in the interest of breaking that 1000 post mark. I am not a big fan of this, I do not like Trump or the deranging effect he has on politics and wish for him to be defeated the normal way. That said he's probably guilty of this and more likely guilty of the documents case.

I long even more than before for an end to the Trump era. I miss the ability to have actual substantive discussion between the parties that aren't dominated by a rehashing blow by blows of nationally embarrassing stories. The president should be above these kinds of thing. I understand the slippery slope of letting petty scandals give your enemies a veto over who you can rally behind but can it at least be made hard? Would that be so much to ask? That a candidate not actually cheat on his wife with a porn star such that the legality of hush money paid needs to be debated? Surely that bar is low enough.

The toxic Israel Palestine debate where the protestors chant inane slogans at the decrepit president that stands behind Israel no matter what is a breath of fresh air because as stupid as most of the narratives are at least they're about the conflict.

Some have noted that we're already almost into June and it doesn't really feel like a race is on yet. A normal outcome of having two relatively uncontested primaries after two hotly contested elections in a row but even with things not yet ramping up I'm already exhausted. A feeling I think I share share with our two presidents both born in the 40s before disposable Diapers and the Transistor and Color TV.

I don't have a great way to wrap this comment up, or this election. It's probably going to be pretty consequential who wins but I feel like I'm holding my breath until 2028 election.

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aqouta 15d ago

The Palestinians were in Mandatory Palestine peacefully living their lives and doing their thing when hundreds of thousands of Jews invaded their country, formed a fifth column, and declared independence at gunpoint.

One of the most interesting thing abouts this conflict that I've had the pleasure of learning since I too like @Folamh3 have taken to catching up on the history is how much you can tell about someone by how they read the tea leaves on this conflict and decide to characterize events. There is enough back and forth over many years that one can justify just about any framing and find facts to fit the pattern. The story to you starts with as some sudden wave of hundreds of thousands of Jews all at once showing up, in a place where there was some kind of coherent community to even betray.

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aqouta 16d ago

Then why the constant talk about appeasement and Hitler, if not to get people psychologically ready for a war?

The appeasement of Hitler is just the most recent example of appeasement not working and people keep suggesting that Russia should be appeased by letting them take over Ukrainian territory. You'll note that after Hitler was stopped the rest of the west did not colonize Germany and it still exists as an influential independent country in good standing.

The United States does many things that are not rational. The invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, for example. Both were unsuccessful in the long term and huge wastes of resources. But, nevertheless, the Americans reasoned themselves into doing these things.

These were not wars of conquest nor was proximity to NATO countries a major factor.

Maybe it will happen, maybe not. Maybe it won't go as far as hot war, maybe it will. But, when I see so many people calling here and elsewhere for dramatic escalation, saying Putin is the next Hitler, calling any move for de-escalation "appeasement", drawing maps of a partitioned Russia, yes, I think the west wants war with Russia. Even knowing it would be stupid.

I'm just not really interested on whether we've hurt Putin's feelings because after he invaded neighbors unprovoked in a war of conquest he gets compared to the last guy in Europe to invade his neighbors in wars of conquest. It doesn't somehow retroactively justify the whole invading your neighbors in wars of conquest thing. You don't get to act like an unhinged lunatic because you're concerned that people around you might treat you like an unhinged lunatic and then pretend your subsequent treatment justifies your behavior. when you escalate and have all the ability in the world to de-escalate you can't call the people you're currently invading unreasonable for not de-escalating, this isn't even behavior we'd accept in our toddlers.

All Putin and Russia need to do is get the fuck over themselves and step out of the 20th century. The whole high school bully act was lame after you graduated and decades on it's just pathetic.

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aqouta 16d ago

Until he started invading places caring about Russia was something that got you literally laughed at in US politics. And that some people hate him does not at all imply any kind of invasion. There is zero interest in the west to occupy Russia. Get rid of Putin so he stops fucking around in Geopolitics? Sure. But what is the upside to invading and occupying Russia? Why would anyone bother even if it were realistically possible?

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aqouta 17d ago

I'm trying to understand how you and other people on this forum think the war will end. I suppose a frozen conflict like North Korea/South Korea is possible and if you're advocating for that I can accept it's a reasonable position.

Hard to make predictions like that. Some chance Russia eventually grinds through ukraine and wins. Some chance Ukraine expels Russia outside of its pre war border and putin walks it off. Some chance Putin kicks the bucket in the near term naturally or otherwise and then it's hard to predict but seems unlikely a predecessors decides to bother trying to finish the job.

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aqouta 17d ago

I wouldn't be willing to condone firing a nuclear weapon into Russian territory. But supplying Ukrainians with weapons is not even in the ballpark of when we start talking about "any cost", those are the minimum table stakes.

reclaim Ukrainian territory.

You're trying to change the frame. There is no such offer where Ukraine draws new borders and returns to peace with Russia, It's fictional and the Putin's equally fictional Casus Belli remains, no serious person would trust a peace agreement he has already broken.

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aqouta 17d ago

It's just not really reasonable to call people who support the defense of a nation "pro war". If someone attacks me after making it clear they want to kill me I am not pro-fighting when I defend myself. People who support me defending myself are not pro-fighting. It's unreasonable to demand I or the people supporting me should allow the person attacking me to merely severe a limb or two despite them at no point actually making any sign they'd stop after doing so. There is precisely one pro-war faction and it's the one that started the war and could end it at any time, attempting to frame it otherwise is an absurdity.

And yes, we do have some obligation here, Ukraine get rid of its nuclear capabilities under the promise that this would not be allowed to happen. Where Ukraine goes so does nuclear non-proliferation and frankly and kind of mantle of justice.

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aqouta 17d ago

NATO forms a bright line that Russia knows it must never cross. Here is a map of NATO. Russia is encircled and powerless: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Member_states_of_NATO#/media/File:NATO_32_Members.png

What on earth is the fear here? Are we seriously still entertaining the idea that the west wants to invade Russia? For what possible reason? NATO doesn't expand by rolling tanks into its neighbor's territory, it expands by offering protection from Russia which does appear fond of the whole rolling tanks in approach.

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