omw_68
4d ago
A point that MattyY makes is that acts of civil disobedience work because they play on existing faultlines and sympathies. Which is why stopping traffic for Gaza does nothing. It's just a cargo cult licensing their Main Character Syndrome.
I basically agree with this, although I would quibble with your use of the phrase "civil disobedience." To me, "civil disobedience" means that you (1) openly and notoriously disobey a rule which you genuinely believe is unjust; and (2) accept the consequences of breaking that rule as a way of making your point. (So for example, a black person intentionally sitting in the "whites only" section of a bus station.) Nobody who blocks traffic for Gaza is seriously claiming that the rules against blocking traffic are unjust. Moreover, instead of owning up to what they are doing, these people (typically) lie, cheat, and play games in order to avoid legal consequences.
I think that when you block traffic for Gaza (or some other cause), it's more akin to terrorism than civil disobedience. To be sure you are generally not killing or maiming people (although you might be if you end up impeding an ambulance) but you are still inconveniencing people and interfering with their legal rights, albeit in a minor way.
In another discussion, I called this "terrorism-lite"
But in any event, as mentioned above, I basically agree with you. For terrorism (or terrorism-lite) to be effective, there needs to be a minimum amount of sympathy in mainstream institutions such as the news media, college administrations, and so on. With Gaza, at least in the United States, there is some degree of sympathy, but there is also a lot of organized pro-Israel sentiment. So it's difficult to accomplish anything with terrorism-lite.
omw_68
4d ago
What does your tiny bit of respect matter to them compared to not being punished by the laws they believe are unjust?
That's an interesting question and I think it touches on one of the core parts of the issue I was raising. So there are laws against blocking traffic; disrupting gatherings; arson; destroying people's property; etc. Do Leftists believe that these laws are unjust? I tend to doubt it. If someone destroyed their property; disrupted their gatherings; etc., they would freak out and demand that the offenders be punished. So what's really going on is that they simply believe they have carte blanche to break the law because in their self-serving judgment they are "punching nazis" or "fighting fascism" or whatever.
omw_68
4d ago
Not just he jury. Usually they operate in areas where the prosecutor and judges are friendly.
I agree. I do think their biggest mistake was trying this in Texas.
omw_68
4d ago
As a side note, that's one of the things I find really annoying about these Leftist activist types. For example, suppose they block a highway and get arrested and prosecuted for it. I would have a tiny bit of respect for them if they would own up to what they did, take their licks, and accept their sentence of 100 hours of community service or whatever. But instead, their MO is to spin, lie, etc., do whatever they can to avoid punishment for their wrongdoing.
omw_68
5d ago
For a while during the Ukraine conflict, Ukraine was still getting royalties on Russian pipelines running through Ukrainian territory.
Imagine a goof-ass future where the United States occupies Iran's export terminals and charges Iran royalties to export oil, while the Gulf states pay bribes to Iran to keep Hormuz open. Everyone hates each other but can't afford a war anymore. Trump gets a nobel peace prize, but whines that it should be called the Donald Strait.
Nice . . I know you're kidding around, but I think there's like a 5% chance that Trump will try to grab that island and name it after himself.
omw_68
5d ago
Iran has been waging proxy war against Israel for 44 years via Hezbollah, Hamas and their other paramilitaries.
I am pretty sure that the anti-Israel crowd has two arguments in response:
-
Proxy attacks don't count.
-
Hezbollah was formed to resist Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon; and therefore (a) Hezbollah has carte blanche to do whatever it wants against Israel, including acts of terrorism; and (b) other countries can freely make use of Hezbollah's carte blanche by funding and directing terrorist attacks, and it doesn't count.
Both of these arguments are so ridiculous on their face that anyone reading this will naturally suspect that I am strawmanning, however these arguments were really made and I can demonstrate it with quotes.
omw_68
5d ago
Alternatively, the conflict never really ends and it's gitmo east.
Yeah, I think Trump likes the idea of territorial expansion. Is it feasible to build a naval base there? And if so, does that reduce the need of the United States to locate facilities in places like Bahrain?
omw_68
6d ago
It's difficult to get any of the leading foundation models to write a comment full of racial slurs. DeepSeek also refuses. (Grok is currently broken for me.)
It seems reasonable to expect that creating an LLM will get exponentially less expensive with time. Just as today's PCs are comparable to the supercomputers of yesteryear, there's a good chance that sooner or later something comparable to the ChatGPT of today will be much more widely available for different people to set up. If there are 100 actors with these things (or 1000), surely it will occur to a few of them that they can get a competitive advantage by enabling racial slurs.
omw_68
7d ago
I actually do prefer debating LLMs at the moment, and they're usually my first port of call if I want to work through an issue.
Well, I think you are about to get your preference granted in spades :)
omw_68
7d ago
Yeah, but every time the topic of "we invented intelligence" comes up, the fact that we really don't have a definition for it beyond Descartes' feels relevant.
I would have to disagree with this. For purposes of the subject at hand -- bot invasions of the internet -- some variation on the Turing Test will suffice. In other words, if there's no practical way to distinguish bots from humans, then for purposes of this issue, it doesn't matter whether the bots are "intelligent."
omw_68
7d ago
I personally do not understand why someone would create an AI bot to argue for them.
I think there are multiple reasons. For one thing, it would be like having a sockpuppet on steroids. For another, it seems like it would be a good trolling technique. But if nothing else, there are a lot of activists out there who would like to create a consensus cascade for their views.
omw_68
7d ago
With apologies to Descartes, "always has been". While cogito, ergo sum manages to demonstrate that I exist to myself (at least, I find the argument compelling), I've never been able to satisfactorily prove that the rest of the world and everyone else as I perceive it exists, and isn't some big simulation demonic manifestations or imagination.
I think that when @self_made_human referred to "proof-of-humanity," he wasn't defining the word "humanity" in the strict philosophical sense (e.g "maybe I am just a brain in a vat"), but rather in the more informal day-to-day sense. Possibly even David Hume, when he was having a beer in a pub at the end of the day, didn't wonder if the barman was actually some kind of illusion or robot. Or maybe he did, but I think you get my point.
omw_68
7d ago
I'm afraid I'm not your professor.
An interesting variation on the "It's not my job to educate you" line. Of course here, you could have simply used the "cut and paste" function to quote the relevant parts of the articles you linked to. Which you didn't. Because you couldn't. Because your sources don't support your claims.
Anyway, if you are unable to support your claims with actual evidence, I will draw my own conclusions.
And my conclusion is very simple: Your factual claims are false and therefore your conclusions do not stand up to scrutiny.
omw_68
7d ago
I don't necessarily think this is the case. There are plenty of laws that are impossible to enforce against a motivated actor, and almost all laws are not perfectly enforced, but they still have value in setting norms and shaping culture, for good and for ill.
I agree with this, but at the same time, it's difficult for me to see how a public discussion board is going to be able to stop the impending tidal wave of bots.
omw_68
7d ago
Realistically the public, anonymous internet is simply over at this point. The only ways forward are either the end of anonymity or accepting that you'll be writing to an LLM half of the time.
I don't think it's over quite yet, but yeah, I think we are pretty close. Surely it won't be long before you can give your computer instructions along the following lines:
Set up 5 or 6 different accounts on Discussion Board X. Sign up at different times and with very different user names so as not to arouse suspicion that they are controlled by the same person. Each account should have a different personality; different times of the day they like to post; and so on. They should all be thoughtful, friendly, and agreeable, but on issue A, they should all argue for position B; on issue C, they should all argue for position D.
Something similar could be done to infiltrate Facebook, Wikipedia, YouTube, and so on. It seems to me the only way to stop it is by very intrusive measures, such as requiring people to present their passport. And I think most people wouldn't bother with these sites if they had to submit to something like that.
Is this the same Human Rights council that has condemned Israel more times than every single other country in the world combined? Or is that a different part of the UN? If so, I'm not sure they're entirely unbiased... or I'm wrong, and Israel really is worse than Iran, Russia, North Korea, China, and everyone else on the planet put together.
In my experience, the anti-Israel types genuinely believe that Israel is the very worst country in the entire world by a wide margin. Any other position would require an admission that the UN is biased against Israel. And an admission that the UN is biased against Israel undermines a whole slew of UN pronouncements that they LOVE.
omw_68
7d ago
How will social media evolve? Will people move to invite-only sites like https://lobste.rs and Discord? Will most people accept AI discourse as natural or even prefer it? Will AI discourse become so good that we prefer it? Right now, it seems even the best AI writing (prompted to be consice and human) is unnecessarily wordy and has certain tropes; but what if someone discovers how to train an AI on a specific human's writing, so that it's effectively indistinguishable?
It's difficult to say, but I think that at a minimum, people who debate online will prefer NOT to debate against bots. I base this on analogizing the situation to online chess, which has a problem with so-called "(c)heaters" Most human chess players prefer to play against other humans.
I'm speculating a bit, but I think that if (1) large numbers of bots start being unleashed in online discussions (which seems very likely to me since people are motivated to want to make it seem as though there is a lot of support for their position); and (2) it becomes difficult to distinguish bots from humans (which seems likely because technology is always improving); then (3) most natural persons will simply give up and we'll end up with a sort of dead internet of discussion boards.
omw_68
7d ago
I did answer your question-
Not really. Here's what I had asked:
How long after the recent bombing campaign started did this school incident take place? I honestly don't know.
I'm also interested in the substance and timing of these negotiations as well. What proposal was submitted and when? How did the US respond, if at all? How long afterwards did the hostilities begin?
If I understand you correctly, your position is that "Iran offered to turn over its stockpile of highly enriched uranium and maintain enough enrichment for its civilian nuclear facility" and that the US (unreasonably) refused this offer. Is that right?
And if so, in your view, what was the timing of these events in relation to the start of hostilities?
Nobody has presented any evidence that Iran was trying to develop a nuclear weapon.
Well do you agree that Iran has (or had) underground bunkers in which it produced (or attempted to produce) highly enriched Uranium?
omw_68
7d ago
The term "Palestinian Territories" has a widely-understood standard meaning which includes Ramallah, Gaza City, Hebron, may or may not include East Jerusalem, and clearly does not include West Jerusalem or Tel Aviv. You know this as well as I do.
No I do not, and there's no need to insinuate that I am discussing this in bad faith.
These territories became "Palestinian Territories" by virtue of being the parts of Mandate Palestine which remained inhabited by Christian and Muslim Arabs who referred to themselves as "Palestinian" after the Israeli War of Independence. I suspect you know that too.
No, I don't know that either. Anyway, I am a little confused. Hebron is also inhabited by Jews. Why isn't Hebron "Jewish Territories" as well?
Also, if Jewish people hadn't been ethnically cleansed from Gaza City, would it still be "Palestinian Territories" in your view?
Also, please answer my questions from before:
I wasn't aware that you were using the word "aggressor" as a legal term of art. And assuming that the word is in fact such a term, I am extremely skeptical of your claim that proxy attacks do not count.
Please provide cites and links to support your claim. TIA.
omw_68
7d ago
Israel has built a nuclear arsenal already,
Agreed.
has been relentlessly attacking their neighbours
If by "relentlessly attacking their neighbors" you mean "relentlessly defending themselves," then I agree.
openly proclaimed their desire to become a regional and/or global power
I'll assume for the sake of argument this is true.
does this actually justify launching attacks against the Israeli regime?
No.
omw_68
7d ago
Then please don't make drive-by shitposts on the topic.
Funny, I was thinking basically the same thing about the post I responded to. Admittedly, it was tempting to rise further to his bait.
omw_68
8d ago
Do you have answers to my questions? I'm not demanding them, of course. But it seems that your quotes do not answer them.
The Witkoff/Kushner subversion is the "Iraqi WMDs" 2.0.
It seems pretty clear to me that Iran has been trying to develop nuclear weapon capability. I guess you dispute this?
omw_68
8d ago
Children are educated on military bases throughout the world. Iran was not living in a condition of war before you perfidiously started bombing them.
How long after the recent bombing campaign started did this school incident take place? I honestly don't know.
They submitted a pretty good deal to Kushner and Witkoff, who refused, by all accounts because they're at once illiterate and bloodthirsty,
I'm also interested in the substance and timing of these negotiations as well. What proposal was submitted and when? How did the US respond, if at all? How long afterwards did the hostilities begin?
omw_68
8d ago
Despite knowing all of this, the Iranian government chose to continue to have those children attend school nearby, in a former military building, risking their lives to a possible mistake such as this. If there is even a one in a million chance of a mistaken bombing, why the fuck would you continue to place children in that building??? Did the Iranian government have THAT much faith in the precision targeting of the US military?
I'm willing to accept the possibility that this was just a random f*ckup on the part of Iran, but I think what's vital is not to blame this on the United States (absent reasonable evidence of actual culpability of course). Anything else encourages Iran's leadership to start using human shields.
To anyone in this thread who is concerned about incentivizing Iran to obtain nuclear weapons, are you also concerned about incentivizing Iran to use human shields?
Matt Walsh recently pointed out another culture war angle in the current TSA situation. He claimed that the airports that were having the most problems with TSA workers calling out were in the South.
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