gattsuru
1yr ago
But neither is this isolated - just the previous week I saw you call out someone for being the lone poster to defend Ibram Kendi's book.
I don't think that's an accurate summary of this post, which as far as I can remember is the last time I've discussed Kendi.
((To be explicit: I don't think that gemmaem position was shameful, nor do I think she's the only one to promote Kendi before his disgrace.))
gattsuru
1yr ago
I've got a long memory on a lot of posters, and point out that he was far from the only user to have a different opinion on that topic. And, uh, the previous poster was asking about things that happened three years ago; by necessity any honest discussion will necessarily be about people saying things years ago.
My frustration with Darwin wasn't that I disagreed with him. In no small number of cases, I actually don't -- and almost all of those made it tempting to respond "stop helping me". Whether I agreed or disagreed with his object-level position, he'd argued it primarily and sometimes solely through strawmen, insults, insistence that clear facts weren't proven or unknown matters must have happened in the most convenient way, standards of behavior or evidence evolved and deployed and denied and recreated within the context of single arguments, outright falsehoods, so on and so forth. He'd call basic legal terms deceptive rhetoric, could not imagine what Jim Crow looked like, and made random claims that couldn't fit a basic timeline.
That wasn't universal, and there were rare times where he could make decent arguments and I'd point out that out well before his actual permaban. But given that one of his biggest 'contributions' ever was slamming people over not commenting on the Smollett hate crime, it's hard to comment about BLM support without mentioning him, and also not fair to the BLM supporters here to use him as the first example.
gattsuru
1yr ago
... yeah, a lot of what people think of as immigration-friendly is mostly the backpacker's / working holiday visa, and that's really a short-term labor thing that's near-impossible to turn into long-term residence.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Both. It'd be a massive humanitarian crisis just by raw numbers, but every country anywhere near that area knows of Jordan's past principled commitment to generosity and absolutely doesn't want to be them.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Points for thinking about it, but I'm skeptical on both the political and pragmatic side.
Israel isn't a signatory to the Ottowa Treaty, but large deployments of landmines near a civilian area would be a long-lasting cause celebre even before some teenager became an example, and their use in the past at the West Bank / Golan Heights in much more conventional military contexts had previously been a matter of a lot of international fuckery. There are also just pretty high upper limits to the utility of landmines in an open environment where your sappers would be near-constantly observed. Electric fences are so simultaneously useless (defeated by gloves!) and politically controversial that they've been a goto slur for electronic monitoring.
A lot of the remainder of your suggests are just things already present, but harder, in ways that may not be possible. Israel hadn't closed all but one border crossing, but the number of crossings dropped dramatically from 2005-2011, culminating in the closure of the Karni crossing, while the remaining handful had been heavily fortified. Of the three major remaining ones, Rafah is in Egyptian territory and Kerem Shalom is politically necessary as part of relationships with Egypt. There's already some use of anti-vehicle ditches and other terrain.
10/7 seems like it depended on overwhelming observation, surveillance, and quick-response features so fast and so heavily that the IDF response took hours; I'm not seeing how 500m would have changed much of it.
And, yes, as 2fara points out, you need to block of not just the tactics from 10/7, but the whole class of any successful attack of this scale.
I have no idea what extent, if any, the State dissent memo has any real meaning, or even if the claimed numbers are genuine.
Providing aid and funding to Hamas without credible commitments against military use or for searches by a third party to limit weapons smuggling is what I'd consider failing to bring table stakes. The public emphasis on antisemitism and Islamophobia wouldn't be nutty if it came from Red Tribers, but for the same reason that All Lives Matters were unacceptable slogans for two years straight, it's a very specific sort of message to have on an official account. (EDIT: the message has now turned into just Islamophobia). More generally, there's been no serious (and arguably no) Sister Souljah moment in response to the Squad and especially Tliab, even as they've gotten pretty brazen.
gattsuru
1yr ago
I dunno how common it is to use the phrase without being familiar with the book. At least in my case, I read the first two, though I haven't gotten around to Outies.
The phrase was important enough in the story to be the title and a central conceit of the second book, but the Moties series never had the cultural niche of Ringworld, even among scifi fans. While the phrase itself ended up in the Jargon File (and without a lot of the important context), it's kinda important to the series and the phrase's early use among hackers that it be not just the third item in a list, but that it also represent something unexpected or breaking from a false belief of only two options.
The Mote In God's Eye is much weaker as a character story, but I'd argue it's better as speculative fiction than Known Space series. And I say that not just as a specific critique of genetic luck or the Fruit of Life stuff.
gattsuru
1yr ago
I'm not sure that Israel wants or would prefer 'genteel' ethnic cleansing, even ignoring the US and EU reactions to such a thing. Some of the individual settler-groups, sure, but from the IDF's perspective it's kinda a white elephant. And as bad as the issue of the Gazan Strip is today, at least the IDF wasn't considering a war with Egypt every time a few hitch-hikers get kidnapped.
Of course, on the flip side, I don't think Egypt wants to handle just the civilians who want to leave the Strip, or just the civilians for only a few months, and is willing to threaten to mass ship them to the EU even if Israel could credibly commit, and Israel can't credibly commit. So it doesn't really matter.
On the gripping hand, there were a lot of options on the table that involved ground forces (or prolonged active bombing campaigns), without permanently taking the Gaza Strip, but I'm not sure the delays -- especially in when combined with unsearch humanitarian aid -- are compatible with them. Maybe Biden's just trying to buy time before those more energetic efforts start, either to try to line up some Muslim custodian government or for hostage negotiation or both, but a lot of stuff coming from the White House right now seem like they're just pivoting really hard to the Squad alignment.
Which... boots on the ground in the Gazan Strip seems like a recipe for years of bloodbaths, so maybe that just works out? But there's a limit to the model of war as politics by other means. Trivially, 'just barrier down Hamas and lob a bomb in there when you spot someone with a big hat' was the pre-2023 Likud philosophy, and it doesn't seem like there's some obvious way to prevent a re-occurrence of 10/7 or some similar category of catastrophe. Yes, obviously the intel failures and work permit program and some imports will be getting a lot of scrutiny, but that's a really fancy way of saying 'try again harder' that isn't likely to be perfect for forty years.
And even if you can persuade Netanyahu to make the 'right' decision today, there's little or no reason to suspect that he'll be in charge forever: the opposing coalition is in a double-digit lead right now, and not especially dovish right now. If you persuade them without persuading the people voting for them, they'll just get replaced in turn. And if you could persuade the broader populace, you wouldn't need to set up a game of musical chairs for the political leadership.
gattsuru
1yr ago
... I'd be interested in something more in-depth than just 'sounds like': this guy sounds like he's treating rocket(s), bombs, and an artillery shell (wtf?) as if they could sound very similar, and while I generally caution that microphones and especially cellphone camera mics can obscure a lot of high-volume sound, I'm... somewhat sure they don't eliminate that much data.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Looks like a hall near the church rather than the church itself, but this is more of what I'd expect from an actual larger explosive. Looks confirmed by the IDF, although the number of reported deaths has dropped by about half what people were saying last night (from 40-100 to 17-18, and that's the Gazan sources).
The IDF claims the destroyed council hall was used as a command and control center, but there's not really much way to prove or disprove that.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Two days ago I gave decent odds that a majority are already dead, and the 'perfidious hospital attack killing hundreds of children' will have if anything made that estimate too optimistic.
There has been some escapees, although I won't expect many (and maybe not any) more, and there might be a couple successful hostage negotiations eventually, but it's really difficult to come up with an optimistic number. Kinetic efforts are hard in the best of circumstances and Hamas has turned preventing them into a science, there's not much Hamas can ask for that the IDF is willing to give, no way the IDF can trust Hamas to turn over hostages with a deal, and the rest of the Gazan populace doesn't really have much of a hope of changing any of those calculations.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Americans not knowing about geography is unfortunately fairly common, and it's at least plausible for them to not know what river (or even sea) is in mention, or think it's a shortcut given Gaza being at one and the West Bank at the other. While a modern-day college student should know better or at least check, most don't; cfe Vox's famous 'land bridge'.
Further toward the outside bounds of plausible charitable, a lot of people do clearly want Israel gone but might be advocating a Palestinian single-state solution, either having ludicrously optimistic hopes of a peaceful Palestinian single state or expecting the Israelis to flee. The latter is still ethnic cleansing under international law, but it's not mass murder.
...
But there's a lot of stuff that's not really got that excuse, with either a transparent fig leaf or none at all. Sometimes the authors can't plausibly be mistaken: when Coates calls one of the largest Israeli cities and the one furthest from any Palestinian claims, Haifa, part of Palestine, he doesn't have the excuse that a dumbass college student might. There's a lot of celebration of October 7th, especially paraglider symbolism, with people trying to pretend that it's plausible to celebrate the military or territory victories (which ones, you might ask?) from the mass murder of civilians. There's a lot of people who just hate those 'Zionist' Journalists, with about the same level of fortitude and intellectual coherency as you'd expect from conventional actualfa.
And then you have people who just think the final solution wasn't final enough (caveat: the author has given not-very-compelling claims he was 'hacked'; no one seems interested in verifying that, nor has his publisher spoken out one way or the other).
On its own, that's not a huge surprise! There have been a lot of anti-'Zionism' that happened to care about anything involving non-Israeli Jews or domestic Israeli politics, and there's nutty antisemitism around most political aisles.
What's really concerning is the institutional support. The rehabilitation of Al Sharpton and the curious willingness to treat with Farrakhen-adjacents has long been a problem for principled anti-racists, but for the most part this had at least tried to keep invisible -- less visibly with internal conflicts for the Women's March, famously up to and including the Obama dinner meeting that wasn't. That doesn't really seem on the table, or even considered, by a lot of people now. It's not weird that a handful of nutty Harvard students exist; it's a problem when they're going to get paid for it. The students in question here might get marked absent, if the teachers don't play along, but I doubt we'll be seeing them face the sort of opprobrium that calling the walkout stupid might.
(though note that this points to the org behind the walkout and that particular video being bugnuts, who probably do mean at least the Israeli-exclusionist version of 'from the river to the sea'; note the approving retweet of this October 8th CNN piece that's still up).
I'm not sure if it reflects changes in the leadership of the Democratic coalition -- beyond the number of recent immigrants from countries with a lot of anti-Israeli politics, who tbf often themselves aren't often the nuttiest, there's just a lot of people who were raised around anti-Israeli -- or the passing wake of the Bush era, or if it's more a philosophical thing, or if it's another "march through institutions" bit where this was always present but it's reached a tipping point where (people believed) it stopped being expensive to say publicly.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Trivially, you need state guard or state cops willing to deal with Trump in person, and Trump not doing something stupid, and nothing Weird happening with the Secret Service.
More seriously, that's the sort of behavior that gets federal jurisdiction in the courts and a very quick contempt of court orders for the gov in question. If the US Marshalls don't want to do it, the courts have fun tools that don't involve them. (Fines per day?)
gattsuru
1yr ago
The state cases he can avoid by staying in a red state, and the federal cases he will - at worst - be pardoned by the next GOP president.
I don't think that works.
At least since 1987, interstate extradition is not optional, and governors must cooperate with an extradition request so long as the paperwork is correct. And even were a red state governor willing to flip the bird to SCOTUS (or order his entire executive branch to pretend they can't find him under a lamppost), and willing to get jailed for contempt themselves when they receive an order from a court, the federal government has a pretty big branch capable of serving arrests and then finding out whether the arrests were 'right' or not later.
((I'm... also skeptical that a Republican President other than Trump pardons Trump.))
gattsuru
1yr ago
'Winning' a rebellion can be as suicidal, especially for the leadership. In the last decade we've seen rando schizophrenics hit both sides of the aisle at the Congressional level and only by grace of God and emergency medicine did they fail to kill. Garland has a home address, and he's given tacit 'moral' sanction for protests of homes, and the only reason that's not a day-by-day thing is that the sort of Red Triber who recognize his name knows the rule doesn't generalize.
Like, that's supposed to be one of the motivations for the gag order here.
((In practice, I think this is insufficiently cynical; if you start getting non-LARP non-schizo people devoted to hating you with every fibre of their being, there's a lot worse options that just being dead yourself.))
gattsuru
1yr ago
The larger munitions (MK84s have 2000 lbs warheads) do have a certain cinematic sense to them in real-time. They're not really bright in the way movie explosions, are, though, and to the extent that there are flashes at all they're vastly outweighed by the dust kicked up. A number of videos with slow-motion cameras (MK82s have 500-pound warheads) from test fires do look more cinematic, but it's important to keep in mind that those blasts are over in tenths of a second, and at real-time unless they drop at a shallow angle you're going to catch them primarily by the dust clouds.
((I'll skip over some weirder configurations, like inert bombs or naval mines.))
The trick's that the fire and heat, barring some very specialized cases like explosions in an enclosed area or secondary explosives, are generally not the main source of damage for detonations. What kills and destroys is the pressure wave. The fire and heat is usually remnants of remaining explosive material that didn't burn off before the pressure wave overtook them.
FEMA has a good document (cw: probably will get you Put On a List) on this from a Blue Team perspective trying to reduce harm, and also what sort of buildings are more or less vulnerable to explosives. Chart 4-11 gives a (very approximate) point for where concrete columns fail. Unfortunately, it's harder to predict for buildings as a class; most modern buildings are designed to require near-complete failure of all main supports to collapse rather than merely being unsafe, but sometimes you'll find a dumb decision come in that lets sections peal off from relatively minor hits. Older US residential buildings are often more vulnerable due to the frame structure leaving the building vulnerable to hits on one or two major supports, while contrast Australia, where cinderblock and concrete everything means buildings often will stay up. I dunno Israeli architecture but I'd expect it tends to the latter side.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Hamas has done some development over the last decade, both with newer and heavier variants of the homemade Qassam, and with more imports with much larger payloads. I don't know enough on the matter to say whether the larger payloads of a Fajir5 or M302 could take down a building without being a golden bb, but they're large enough to start hitting the 'evacuate nearby barricaded structures' part of the ATF bingo card.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Yeah, and Hamas has a tendency to make pretty dubious claims for casualty counts even when they've had enough time to count bodies.
(along with a tendency to conflate military, combatant, and noncombatant injuries and fatalities)
This is bizarrely blatant even compared to the typical stuff, though. Similar in scale to the Jenin "massacre" (West Bank, rather than Gaza), but Jenin took some effort to disprove and a lot of the formal structure for reporting didn't have any way to check. Some media groups are going to provide cover anyway, I guess?
"JDAM" is a really broad category (if you really want to be technical, it's the guidance kit rather than the weapon system), but at least common ones are 200 lbs to 1000 lbs of high explosive. That's... really not consistent with what we're seeing here, even in airburst configuration, nor was the videos.
Similarly, the impact pattern just isn't anything like you'd expect from an airburst; things are pushed away from the impact site, not crumpling from a big overpressure wave, not just in the cars immediately around the impact site but also nearby roof tiles or building windows.
Fires and especially fuel fires can be more deadly than they look at first glance, particularly in crowded areas or if people were sleeping in the cars, or if people were trampled trying to escape.
But yeah, even if I'd put higher than twenty in the realm of the possible -- if people were actively sheltering in the cars, I could see mid-fifties at the higher end of the plausible -- there's no way this was anywhere near the sort of humanitarian disaster that was getting publicized the previous night. Still bad, but duplex-fire rather than Grenfell. I'd expect Hamas to exaggerate casualty counts, but this isn't even the sort of thing you could squint at and pretend it sounds legit.
This is... actually less ground impact than I expected just given the videos of the initial impact. More evidence in favor of a rocket breakup, I guess, along with either a 'golden bb' hitting some fuel storage (though it's not in the impact crater?) or a lot of unused rocket fuel being left.
gattsuru
1yr ago
There's allegedly been at least a couple Fajar-5s launched already, which at 175-200kg payload could pretty easily do that, and the R160s are bigger. And there's supposedly texts from PIJ committing to the use of one just before this launch. The explosion isn't really what's weird, so much as the extremely high casualty numbers, but a bomb in the wrong enough place can do that.
Separately, there's no way the IDF was unaware there was a hospital here. It's a big hospital, and it's been there for freaking ever. If the IDF is firing off JDAMs at hotspots without crosschecking a zone map, that's just culpability with extra steps. Maybe some sort of technical error with the JDAM guidance system, but this sorta distance is margin-of-WWII-era aiming tech.
gattsuru
1yr ago
I want to know if Kentucky’s RFRA has been used for anything other than defending Christian practice. Or even that.
It's been cited for everything from COVID closures to the Kim Davis gay marriage case to abortion, though I don't think any have been productive. Baker v Hands On Original was more of a first amendment case than RFRA-specific, but it did cite the state RFRA at length, so that's one successful use.
That said, the law was motivated in part by a Gingerich v Commonwealth, a case about Amish rejection of road safety signage, which... is not at least the typical things people think of as Christian religious practice.
gattsuru
1yr ago
There's a lot of mid-information social media users that don't really get updates as they come around, and it hasn't helped that a lot of the initial pushback came as complete denial (Hamas spokesman saying that their soldiers wouldn't hurt women or children) or in ludicrous ways (that LA Times moron). A lot of more casual observers just saw the initial confused claim, then people getting dunked on for a bizarre claim that the photos of some of the baby corpses were a photoshopped live dog, without the intermediate bit bringing the specific claim from "40 decapitated babies" to "at least some decapitated babies and a lot of children killed in other ways".
I think referring to this, unless I misunderstood. It's been claimed to have 400+ signatories, but I don't know if a draft has been made publicly available or how much I trust those numbers.
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