fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
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User ID: 2896
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
1yr ago
A couple of weeks ago, the NYT Magazine had a long in-depth article about certain factions of Israeli society who tend toward violence against Palestinians. If you ignore the click-baity title of the article, the body seems mostly descriptive, and like the sort of investigative journalism I want to see more of. It's not an overview of the entire conflict, not about the Palestinians, and mostly not about the many Israelis who don't do this. It focuses on groups connected to Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, and their respective Mafdal-Religioius Zionism and Jewish Power parties, which together have 11.67% (14/120) of seats in the Knesset and got 10.84% of the votes in the last election back in November 2022. (Ignoring the existence of Noam for simplicity.)
The upshot seems to be that there's an active minority of Israelis who are intentionally engaging in hostilities against Palestinians, and who are subverting attempts to mitigate those hostilities. The only comparisons that come to mind are areas where gangs and mafia have hollowed out the state, and the example of the US South after the Civil War, working around Reconstruction. Since the number is at least 10%, we have to assume that they're present at most levels of civil society and the military.
Then there were these tweets from Haaretz, about the IDF command losing control over some units. It didn't sound like full "Apocalypse Now" donkey-slaughtering, but still worrisome.
(And there was the IDF reservist who posted a video which effectively threatened mutiny. Of course, it would be wrong to judge an entire group based on the most extreme thing one of them posted online.)
I've got questions in two main areas.
First, how accurate is all this? This stuff passes my "bounded distrust" filter: it seems plausible from what I know of human nature and society, matches what information I have about conditions in Israel and the settlements, and makes sense of some contradictions I'd been seeing regarding the Gazan war. But I'm hoping that people who know more (@Dean seems like one) will chime in. Maybe I'm suffering from Gell-Mann amnesia.
Second, assuming this is roughly accurate, what the heck does Israel do about it? More generally, how can a state recover when a substantial minority refuses to go along with its orders? As anarchists delight in telling anyone who'll listen, a lot of what we think of as "government" is a consensual hallucination. There's fiction about what happens when people say "I won't" or "mind your own business" or "fuck off", but how often does it happen in real life? If we're supposed to "never give an order that won't be obeyed", where does that leave legitimacy when 10% won't obey certain types of orders? Maybe an Israeli Eliot Ness could put together a modern day group of Untouchables, but (going by vote totals) there's over 500,000 Israelis who at least nominally support this agenda. And the political factions that represent them are in the government coalition.
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
1yr ago
Where do I even go in 10 years?
We're on a site five steps removed from a LiveJournal called squid314, and I certainly wouldn't have predicted this back in April 2014. Scott had been doing SSC for about 14 months, the events that would result in GamerGate were still playing out, and I don't think /r/slatestarcodex was even around then (June 2015?).
I'd posit something like "the openness of the system can only be in proportion to the quality of the general population". As the population gets worse, more gatekeeping is required. Unified logins, generic codebases, and modern web design are on average bad signs; single-site authentication, custom codebases, and archaic design are on average good signs. A lot of commercial web design is to make it easy and attractive for anyone to participate, and in a way, I think we want the opposite. We want people who value the content enough to step outside the path of least resistance.
But there's also the problem of keeping population growth above replacement.
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
1yr ago
So how does things look for Israel?
Frankly, I blame Israel, either for failing to discipline the IDF, or for failing at PR. Those videos of Palestinians being shot dead for no apparent reason ought to have been treated like the pictures of naked human pyramids from Abu Ghraib, as a national scandal. Instead, what I've seen is justification via showing worse atrocities committed by Hamas. Maybe I've missed a debunking or something, but for someone who is essentially pro-Israel because they're a modern liberal democracy, this has been extremely disheartening.
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
1yr ago
Congratulations, you've successfully de-lurked me by writing about my city. I largely agree with what you say about it, but there's some stuff I'd like to add.
- @atelier already mentioned the "documentary" "Seattle Is Dying" from 2019 (https://youtube.com/watch?v=bpAi70WWBlw), which seems roughly accurate if you ignore the hyperbolic narration and music. What they show is real, but they draw too many breathless conclusions. It could have been a solid look at the city's problems, but instead it comes off as culture war propaganda.
- You missed a chance to take the light rail one stop north; the next exit is on Cal Anderson Park, former home of the CHAZ/CHOP. (It's been mostly cleaned up, although it's still apparently a center for drug dealing at night.)
- You also may have missed the bus stop on Pike (one block south of Pine) between 3rd and 4th; I'm there on a weekly basis, and I've seen two purses snatched in the last year, one of which involved several people laughing at the victim.
- I have no idea why the city is ripping up perfectly good streets and adding traffic calming, or replacing perfectly fine crosswalks with red cement ones, while there are streets elsewhere that are almost literally composed of potholes and patches ("almost" because the sides where cars park are mostly fine). I think that the city government is divided into parts that want to make the city better, and parts that want to pursue progressive policies regardless of where they lead, and they each do what they can within their areas of authority. Seattle is libertarian in some weird ways, but I do truly love our privatized DMV replacements. They compete on customer service.
- One trick you may not have noticed is that, while the police can't clear people off of sidewalks, maintenance can do a lot of pressure-washing, which accomplishes the same goal, as well as its ostensible purpose of reducing the formerly-pervasive smell of urine and feces. You didn't mention those, so I assume it's back to whatever passes for normal levels in the rest of the world. I'm not sure I can tell, anymore.
- Part of the answer to why the police are doing what they do, downtown, is that we've finally gotten a fair bit of tourism back, concentrated on the market and 1st Ave, but also to a few of the high-end stores. I think the city government is trying to keep that safe. Most of the rest of the city relies on private security these days.
- If the British-themed restaurant you went to was Kell's, I'll just say that the owner is someone who can opine on the kind of pastie that you eat and the kind of pasty that you cover up certain body parts with. ;-)
- University Village is where University of Washington students and faculty shop. The grocery store there has one of the better wine and liquor selections (for grocery stores). But I'd disagree that it's "near the city center": maybe by some other cities' standards, but not by Seattle's. It's an entirely different neighborhood. For some reason, Seattle has lots of little urban centers that have identity, if not character, and there's not much organic foot traffic between them. To get to the U District from downtown, you'd probably have to climb a few hills, cross a canal, and cross I-5.
- I have a friend from Atlanta who refers to a "murder Kroger" there; I've taken to calling that McDonald's the "murder McDonald's". It's probably the sketchiest corner in the city that anyone's likely to visit by accident. Tellingly, they don't let people inside the restaurant any more, and only serve takeout.
For context, when 2020 hit, the city's mayor was Jenny Durkan, who as a white lesbian former-prosecutor lacked the identity credentials to shut down the George Floyd protests. Our new mayor is Bruce Harrell, a half-black half-Japanese man, who does have those credentials. And believe it or not, the city's been getting better since then. Everything you saw was worse a year ago, and worse a year before that, etc. Downtown is positively bustling now, compared to the wasteland that it used to be, although it's nothing like what it was before 2020. The radical DSA councilwoman retired, and was replaced with the "more conservative" of the two choices, a progressive black small-business-owner (pot shop) who wants more policing, probably because she doesn't like her neighborhood getting shot up.
Still, I think national businesses have correctly gotten the message that Seattle now lacks the consistent political will to create a good business environment. By which I mean, keeping the streets clean and sane, and criminalizing looting and shoplifting. It's a shame, because for quite a while the city had competent, business-friendly governance, which allowed all the "cool parts" to flourish. Perhaps chalk it up to ideologies which fail to propagate themselves.
If anyone wants to see a microcosm of what this looks like, check out this article from a neighborhood blog. Pay attention to what's said, and how they say it, and the range of views expressed in the comments. https://www.capitolhillseattle.com/2023/12/how-joy-hollingsworth-flipped-city-council-district-3-seattles-most-progressive-district/
And yes, I regularly visit Portland, and it is worse. Although like Seattle, it is starting to recover.
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
10mo ago
It looks like the current state of the art is to avoid answering questions, and instead treat them as an opportunity for impromptu rambling on a vaguely related topic, or a canned sound-bite on a vaguely related topic. Why not, there are no negative consequences.
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
11mo ago
Teddy Roosevelt is still the GOAT, IMO.
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
1yr ago
But they seem incapable. The article looks at how the Shin Bet (Israeli FBI?) is systematically hampered in investigating crimes by settlers against Palestinians, at all levels, and can't even trust its own members.
In my city, there's been a massive increase in gun violence since the BLM protests in 2020. It doesn't seem gang-related, it seems like people feuding, independent drug dealers warring over turf, that sort of thing. The police, in addition to being demoralized, are largely incapable of doing anything about it because the surrounding community won't talk to them, and at least in some cases actively works to hide evidence. Are those police complicit?
We've also had a wave of petty crime because a city attorney refused to prosecute certain types of crime. Eventually this meant that the police stopped making arrests, and then people stopped reporting the crime (and then the crime rate statistics went down, but not because crime stopped happening). That was from just one guy in government making a stand, backed by enough political support that he couldn't be easily replaced. It sounds like Israel has many more people like that.
I suppose the boring answer is to, in whatever order possible, a) get those parties out of government, b) reform government agencies at all levels to enforce the law even-handedly, and c) actually go after anyone and everyone involved in the crimes and cover-ups. Hopefully with a side order of d) removing the settlements completely. But I literally cannot recall an instance of a modern state pulling something like this off. That might well be on me, though - if you've got some examples, I'm all ears.
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
1yr ago
fairly reasonable(cops wear body cams)
I am all for this. But then when it started to be implemented, BLM's rhetoric turned around, at least locally. The stated rationale was privacy. But cynically, I think it was because too many (but not all!) of their rallying cases wound up having video evidence that contradicted the simple narrative that spun out of the initial reports.
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
11mo ago
I ... take the position that some of this is simply responsible journalism, and the way things should normally be done. We don't need minute-by-minute hot takes from official news sources, and usually when they happen they say more about the reporter's biases and expectations than they do reality. Not that I'd expect this level of caution from the same outlets if Biden were nicked, but still. I semi-seriously applaud their journalistic restraint, and wish they'd apply it more often.
"Trolley delayed by shark"
https://readcomic.me/comic/kurt-busiek-s-astro-city-1995/issue-tpb-part-1/58
Time for me to sign off and have a beer or two.
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
1yr ago
I think for me they're "intelligence and competence porn". Roughly, it's the idea that an intelligent and competent person, put into a dark and evil situation, can use the light of reason to restore order and uncover hidden secrets. Thriller novels, of the techno- and military- varieties, also do that for me. As with porn, I worry that over-consumption by susceptible demographics can induce unrealistic expectations of human behavior. ;-)
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
11mo ago
That's great too. Teddy was actually shot, though, and I kinda prefer the dismissiveness of Teddy's reaction. "Pff, whatever, I have enough medical knowledge to know that this chest shot isn't fatal, so I'm going to deliver my speech now." On the other hand, he lost.
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
1yr ago
This is mostly a joke, but... Jewish grandchildren?
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
11mo ago
Looks like NYT photographer David Mills actually captured the bullet in a photograph!
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/07/13/us/biden-trump-election
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
1yr ago
who the fuck is running the country today while Biden is apparently unable to carry a conversation?
There's a theory that it's Obama. Who is living in DC (which I think is highly unusual for a former President), and who has connections to a lot of the members of the Biden administration.
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
1yr ago
Bezalel Smotrich infamously had that 2015 quote about Hamas being an asset:
“The Palestinian Authority is a burden and Hamas is an asset. On the same international field, in this game of delegitimization, and think about it for a moment: the Palestinian Authority is a burden, and Hamas is an asset. It is a terrorist organization. No one will recognize it. No one will give it status at the ICC. No one will let it put forth a resolution at the U.N. Security Council. ...”
That's some galaxy-brained thinking, right there.
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
1yr ago
Wow, that thread is a gold mine. I'm not sure about "exemplars", though, it seems more like a pattern that they learn from osmosis, because "that's just how people act". But maybe if they had people modeling a coherent vision of how to be "cool" that didn't involve such self-destructive behavior, they might choose a different path? (Wow, that sounds so 80s Reagan-era anti-drug...)
There's some other quotes that might point in a different direction: the scene is full of people whose entire life is riding on their image, but the image isn't based on anything real, and it's all become a social Red Queen's race. (Is this level 4 simulacra?)
I had lots of friends from high school who went on to do freelance art/media/music in my city. But the problem with freelancers is they cannot have honest social relationships because their social life is how they find work.
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The main issue is that the scenes all suck now so the only people left behind are the nitpicking dweebs. All the cool people that actually wanted to fight Nazis left when the Nazis did.
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The irony of course is that anybody who's actually emotionally invested in these circles is definitively not safe, and the only way to survive in these circles if you actually care about the people involved is to curl up into a little ball and delete more and more of yourself while making sure not to run afoul of any of the arbitrary, inconsistent, and continually expanding de facto rules and regulations pertaining to what you're supposed to believe and how you can be. If you've got a bone in your body that leans towards independent thought, or any natural proclivity towards mirth or joie de vivre, it can really alienate you from yourself.
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Some people know how to frame anything in such a way that it looks like a me too allegation (or whatever sj topic, its not important what the subject or allegation is whats important is the format they are using) and using all the right buzzwords to make it sound sinister and then you read through 7 pages of Instagram slides and you get to the end and its like "wait...what did they actually do?"
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They do it for a sense of community. That’s why extremists exist at all. They’re insecure and will adapt any ideology that will give them a community to feel like they matter and people like them.
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I think it’s flipping a bit. In my city people in the punk scene make fun of the PC punk shtick now. There definitely is a lot of “i present completely masculine and im a guy but im nonbinary / trans” though.
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
1yr ago
The Brits have a phrase, “overly personal” for getting too deep in someone else life story. Sometimes I want to enjoy a colorful cast without a therapeutic analysis.
Oh, wow, thanks for the phrase. That's precisely the thing that bugs me about so much sprawling Internet fiction (fan- or otherwise). The author feels the need to delve into the inner depths of so many different characters, and then the plot bogs down because anytime anything happens, we have to see the event from everyone's perspective, because each viewpoint is precious and important. G.R.R. Martin used to be a model for keeping this in check, but I think he started to succumb in his last few ASoIaF books.
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
11mo ago
I'm not exactly sure what to call this, but I salute you. Brav-statistically-o.
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
1yr ago
OK. Perhaps you could try to explain? That's one of the things I was asking for. Just a few paragraphs would help; there's no need for a 5,000 word essay.
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
1yr ago
Other criticisms aside, I think EY was trying to do three things at once, but fell short with two of them due to internal contradictions. He wanted it to be 1) a teaching tool for rationality, and also 2) to have a literary character arc where Harry learns and grows, and also 3) to max out his personal sense of cool (hereafter "EY-cool"). But 2 and 3 hide 1, making it hard to tell what's actually a recommended course of action, because the bad stuff seems precisely as EY-cool as the good stuff. And 1 and 3 hide 2, because Harry is relentlessly portrayed as EY-cool, whether or not he's making mistakes. And so what comes through is a lot of EY-cool, sprinkled with a bunch of rationality lessons where you need to read the entire thing, possibly several times, to figure out what's a recommended approach (not to mention keeping up with the replication crisis), and a character who goes from being portrayed as smarter and more mature than everyone around him, but slightly silly, to being portrayed as smarter and more mature than everyone around him, but slightly sad. (But maybe that's how EY views his own personal development.)
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
1yr ago
Kim Stanley Robinson's "The Years of Rice and Salt" has some of this. The premise is that the Black Death killed 99% of Europeans in the 1300s, instead of 30-50%.
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
1yr ago
This is probably not what you want, but "Remnants of the Precursors" is a MoO1 adaptation with a number of flavor-retaining enhancements. I think the largest galaxy I ever played for a while was something like 50,000 stars and 500 empires, but it's possible to go up to over 500,000 stars. The game interface can be made to work crudely at that scale (but it's open source and allows mods), and at some point your machine may grind to a halt between turns, once there are enough large empires. But it was a fascinating experience.
It felt like I was an orchestra conductor, shifting the pressure and direction of expansion. And it was very much in keeping with the grabby aliens theory: my empire was surrounded by an ever-expanding wave of scouts, followed by a wave of colony ships and guard fleets, and here and there actual battle fleets, all pulsing out from factory worlds on the rim of the developed core, with dozens of turns before they get close enough to the front to even be pointed at an enemy. (The deep core of my empire being too far away, and thus devoted to research and taxation.) I no longer cared about individual ships, it was more about how best to allocate the ones that had arrived at the frontline waypoints this year. When a new serious threat emerged, I had to do some long term balancing, figuring out what technologies and resource base they had, whether my fleets could defeat it in sufficient numbers or if I'd need a new design, which of my existing ship designs could afford to be scrapped, whether all my other ongoing conflicts could stand the loss of a class of ship, and so forth.
Eventually, as I expanded along the spiral arm of a galaxy and into the body and reached the dense core, I found that I was too late. Instead of being 1-2 orders of magnitude more powerful than the empires I'd been encountering, a Meklar empire had taken over the core and had expanded so much that, although I still had a slight tech lead (Psilon pride), my size graphs were indistinguishable from 0. Alas, then the game started taking too long between turns on my 10-year-old laptop. But it's been a number of years, and the game engine has improved substantially since then.
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
1yr ago
Compare this to the 80s and 90s when every action-oriented movie ever had sex scenes, if not also completely gratuitous nudity.
I'm still amused at how "Demolition Man" had gratuitous nudity that was completely separate from its "sex" scene.
One note about HBO is that 10 years ago the app had a "Late Night" section that was soft-core porn. And given the amount of nudity in its flagship series, including having parts of The Sopranos and The Wire set in strip clubs, I strongly suspect that a certain amount of female nudity was a requirement, at least for early seasons of a series. Nowadays HBO presents as more respectable, but I lay that mostly on Warner and AT&T exerting more influence - HBO went from a sub-sub-brand that had freedom to innovate and pursue quality, to the face of the media conglomerate owned by AT&T, and I fear that their glory days are over.
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
1yr ago
Doesn't the US also have a much bigger problem with violence? I seem to recall lots of complaints about high gun violence rates. The correlation we want is between crime and prison.
In case you're interested, some previous discussion is here.
Someone else somewhere on the Internet came up with the theory that part of what was going on with Chani was that she was being used to externalize Paul's internal ambivalence about the jihad. Jessica being pro-jihad was basically in the text, not so much that she explicitly wanted it, but that all her choices and actions would lead directly to it. And so Chani was used to represent the other side of the struggle, where Paul wanted to live amongst the Fremen, have a normal relationship with a girl/wife, raise some children, and not soak the galaxy in blood. This sounds like a very clever idea for avoiding a lot of boring voice-overs. But unfortunately, it led to Chani's character being unrecognizable.
Also, and this is just personal opinion, I have yet to see evidence that Zendaya can play someone who is happy and emotionally healthy. Her resting face seems to be a cynical scowl, or possibly a pout if you want to go that direction. I can hardly imagine it showing joy.
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