quiet_NaN
7d ago
The sheer malice of Hamas is pretty much how they convinced me that they should be utterly destroyed.
I think that in the missile exchanges with Iran, there was little in the way of trading risk to soldiers vs risk to civilians.
I also believe that in the context of Gaza, a significant fraction of civilian deaths are the result of decisions with such trade-offs. Infantry is vastly less deadly to civilians than bombs are, but of infantry is also much more at risk from Hamas than bomber pilots are.
quiet_NaN
7d ago
I think that this hinges a lot on the distinction between soldiers and civilians. An enemy soldier for a side which does not respect the Geneva conventions is owed nothing more than a quick death when captured.
By contrast, non-combatants have a (limited) right not to be injured by war no matter whose side they are nominally on. If a bunch of neolithic tribe members were isekaied to the trenches of WW1, they would be entitled to protection, you can not just say "obviously their tribe is not a signatory to the Geneva conventions, so it is fine to bomb them".
It is hard to fight an enemy on equal footing when you are bound by some moral constraints, but often, either the moral constraints are not all that hampering (allowing advancing Jewish GI's to carry out mass shootings against German civilians in retaliation for what the Nazi's did would have been wrong, but it would also not have given the Allies much of an edge), or the fight is very much not on equal footing.
If a police unit is trying to catch a band of letter bombers, they have a lot of advances over their enemies. Sure, there might occasionally be situations where the best tactical option would be for them to send bombs to the band themselves, but they can still win without that.
quiet_NaN
10d ago
Nah, I do not think that the Hamas leaders had a financial motive for Oct-7, at least not raking in donations from Westerners. Before the attacks, Hamas leaders were living the good life: getting their cuts of bribes or taxes/protection money from the Gazans, as well as skimming of donations, while being left in peace by Nethanyahu.
Now, they no longer get cuts from Gazan "taxes" or foreign donations to Gaza, and on top of that they have to worry about Mossad murdering them. Still very much first world problems compared to their citizens, but likely not an improvement in material wealth.
quiet_NaN
10d ago
I think it is entirely reasonable to hold Israel to a higher standard than Hamas. If I held the Israel government only to the standard of Hamas (whom I consider murderous thugs who need to be wiped from the face of the earth), then I would have to concede that it would be a good thing if NATO invaded Israel and occupied them for a few decades until they learned better.
Per WP, there have been about 70k Gazans and 1k IDF killed since Israel responded to the Oct-7 attacks. Let's assume that 40k of the Gazans were civilians as a ballpark number.
The ratio at which your own soldiers die relative to enemy civilians is reflective of the value system of the society waging the war, what the factor before the count in the utility function is for enemy civilians and your soldiers.
Approximately, the relation of death tolls should reflect the quotient of these values. (The distribution of tactical options is also relevant, of course, if you only ever have to decide between two of your soldiers and one civilian, you might end up killing a zillion civilians and none of your soldiers despite valuing them equally, but I think it is unlikely that this distorts the effects too much in reality.)
A toy example would be that you are harassed by an enemy sniper in a building (back when Gaza had buildings), which is also expected to be inhabited by civilians. You can either call an airstrike, thereby killing an estimated X civilians, or storm the building with infantry, losing an estimated Y soldiers in the process.
I am not saying that you need to value enemy civilians as much as your troops. Few armies would gamble a soldier to rescue an enemy civilian (probably non-allied civilian would be a more appropriate phrasing) in a double or nothing scenario.
But if you have 40 civilans dead for every one of your soldiers, then it becomes reasonable to suppose that you have a callous disregard for the lives of the civilian population, and that is the point where the IDF is right now.
quiet_NaN
10d ago
I think that both sides can reasonably claim a fear of a slippery slope.
Have you heard of this obscure group called Hamas? They were kinda big some time ago, and seem really hell-bent to fast forward to the end of the slope where the Jews are drowned in the sea. Do you think that if Palestine was recognized as a state in the borders of 1968, they would think their jihad over and decide to become good neighbors?
And on the Israeli side of things, there are groups who want Jews to settle in the West Banks to establish a permanent Israeli claim to this land. Last time I checked, they were running the Israeli government. If I was a Palestinian, I might reasonably get the impression that they will take the next slice of land rather sooner than later.
Of course there are moderates on both sides, but fear of the extremists seems to be very appropriate.
quiet_NaN
10d ago
The person who is now Mrs Macron was born in 1953. Given the prevalence of people transitioning at that time, I think it is very unlikely that she went m2f before she was 30 or at whatever age she met her future husband.
If she was known as a "that weird cross-dressing teacher" back then, I think the media would have reported on it, the story of their marriage is obviously too juicy for the tabloid vultures to not have been picked to the bone years ago.
quiet_NaN
10d ago
I think that "aristocracy" is covering a lot of ground. Nobility has been around about as long as long as agriculture has. From Ramesses II to Wilhelm II, you have nobles in very different settings, from low-born leaders of troops who managed to conquer something and kill anyone who disputed their nobility to products of dozens of generations of inbreeding.
You have aristocrats who relied on vassalage, Roman patricians, figureheads of some anonymous imperial bureaucracy and centralizers of power.
Still, that I agree that for the most part, the aristocracy was likely very bent on avoiding precedents of "you can simply kill some nobles and take their land". You needed at least a flimsy excuse, like "actually it was rightfully my land all along" or "yes, but the nobles I killed were following an evil religion, they don't count".
quiet_NaN
10d ago
Look at it from the perspective of Hamas. Their victory condition is to destroy Israel and build an Islamic theocracy in its place. They might be fanatics, but they are not stupid to the point that they realize they have no chance to defeat Israel on the battlefield.
Before the Oct-7 attacks, Israel was in the process of normalizing its relationship with Arab neighbors. An entrenched peaceful coexistence would be the death knell to Hamas ambitions. While killing Jews is always seen as a good thing by Hamas, I think the real objective was to provoke Israel into destroying Gaza.
I think that on a grand strategy level, everything is going according to plan for Hamas. Gazan kids are getting killed through bombs or starvation, but that it just their purpose in this war, they become martyrs (which is a pretty great outcome for them, if you believe the nutjobs) and while Israel has certainly killed a lot of Hamas fighters (again, not a bad outcome for the nutjobs), they have barely made a dent in the population of Gaza. Now Israel is in charge of the caring for a civilian population which hate them and can not feed itself. This is a pretty sweet trap to place your opponent in. Sure, the IDF can start genociding in earnest, but likely even Trump's MAGA base will have enough before they are half-way done. Meanwhile, their support in the rest of the West is evaporating.
If the IDF wanted to enact an Endloesung to their Gaza problem, the best thing way to accomplish it would have been nuking Gaza directly in response to Oct-7. Most of the Western world (apart from the glider-button minority) was still in shock. People are generally scope insensitive, their reaction to "the IDF killed 2M in a day" will not be that different to them killing merely a few k. It would have been a PR disaster (nukes!) and likely cost them most of their Western support, but any way they try to genocide their way out of the Gaza mess now (starvation? targeted bombing of civilians?) would cost them a lot more support. Not that I think that genocide is the answer here, obviously.
I think that the two responses which would have been reasonable by Israel would have been to either not do much (drone strike a few Hamas commanders, rescue a few hostages) or to go into Gaza with the goal of occupying it for a few decades (in the knowledge that they will get a lot of their soldiers killed in the process).
quiet_NaN
11d ago
I think that there are plenty of people (myself among them) for whom porn is simply the most ethical way to deal with their sex drive.
I mean, sure, porn is to sex as instant noodles are to cooking and eating a nice meal with other people. Just as good sex is far superior to jerking off to porn, enjoying a nice meal with friends is much nicer than shoveling ramen into one's pie-hole. On the other hand, porn and instant meals are also much more limited in how bad they can go. No main dish which is completely burned, eating in icy silence because someone is pissed or suffocating because someone forgot your peanut allergy.
Happily, while living from ramen does not go too well in the long term, humans do not actually require high quality sex to survive. For people who find themselves in a situation where getting laid would require ethically questionable behavior or a lot of work, or who would prefer sex in the context of a romantic relationship but also have trouble finding such a relationship or worry about the potential drama, just masturbating to smut or porn seems like a totally fine solution.
This fuzziness alongside its other peculiar characteristics (irrational draw, propensity to create children, etc) is why it is not treated the same as other things morally by most societies.
I would argue that no society has reached a cultural equilibrium since effective contraceptives became widespread.
Consider: a nomad tribe which moves around, perhaps mostly sticking to certain lands but sometimes being driven a bit in one direction or driving a rival tribe from some good nearby land will have a fundamentally different relationship with the land -- at cultural equilibrium -- from an agrarian tribe which has plowed 'their' land for generations.
As humans who have recently found ourselves in a world where PIV sex no longer automatically results in pregnancies, we recognize that the cultural rules of old are no longer suitable, just as a neolithic tribe who had (magically, suddenly) discovered agriculture would. It is certainly not the case that throwing all rules which now seem vaguely adjacent to the old status quo seems good, "we will no longer eat animals because grain is our food" might seem obvious but will probably not become an equilibrium rule. Likewise, "now that unwanted pregnancies are out of the questions, having sex can become just as banal as shaking hands" might not be an equilibrium take. Of course, insisting that nothing has changed would be like saying "just leave the fields, we have to follow the herds".
quiet_NaN
11d ago
She says, after intentionally splashing her naked body on the internet.
There is a difference between streaming and putting a recording up.
At my local swimming lake, some women sunbathe topless. They do not care too much about men oogling their breasts. If a group of assholes were to start discussing the merits of their breasts, they could always cover up and end the show.
But if some jerk walked over and started to take pictures, they would certainly become very upset and hopefully call the cops. While they do not mind a few guys seeing their tits, they do not want to end with a topless picture of them ending up on the internet for eternity.
quiet_NaN
11d ago
I'm sure we could hash out some set of circumstances where it was not fine. Lets say there's a Married mother of children who does porn without the knowledge of her husband, and not only does this trigger emotional distress for the husband, it can also nuke his reputation and lead to a divorce fight over the kids.
If she is cheating on him to do porn, that would be bad.
All the reputational stuff is indirect, and applies to basically any behavior the public finds offensive, from talking to a black person, being in public with uncovered hair, saying "Guten Morgen" instead of "Heil Hitler", smoking, putting up a Dem/GOP lawn sign, or wearing a bikini at the nudist beach. The question of how much one should conform with expectations for the sake of one's (and one's family's) reputation is a difficult one and not specifically tied to porn.
So say that the wife is camming only (or in an open relationship) and is also blurring out her face (so there is no reputational risk). Or that her husband (in the case of an open relationship) is taking part in a gang bang video while wearing a mask.
I honestly do not see the problem. I mean, if the couple had agreed to a no-sexting-third-parties rules beforehand, that would be a breach of that, obviously. You might argue that in an exclusive relationship, such a clause is generally implied.
If we're going that route, then we have to also have to come to the conclusion that it is utterly fine for men to ogle up the pages of the high-class magazine with the naked women,
Why not?
AND to be a full-on gooner who consumes hours of porn portraying the aforementioned stuffing of holes and similar levels of degeneracy.
I will grant you that at some point, this will likely affect the ability of a politician to perform his duties as an elected official. My comparison would be smoking. A politician who is chain-smoking and can not function in a government building where smoking is forbidden would be problematic.
On the other hand, I could not care less if the politician was a chain smoker a decade ago, or if he spent half of his waking hours jerking off.
I will also state that I don't think there'll be any harm done by a blanket soft ban on anyone who stars in a professional pornographic film from holding a political position.
Fortunately for you, the Constitution leaves who is allowed to run in elections pretty much to the states (apart from a few protected categories like race, sex and age (over 18)), with the current SCOTUS, you might get away with disenfranchising porn actors.
Let us suppose for the moment that anyone who has ever participated in a porn movie is a terrible human being and any candidate who did not have a porn past would make a better government official, i.e. that your rule would improve things on the object level.
This is also a new rule, which always carries a cost on the meta level. It also establishes a precedent. At the moment, the only large group of adult US citizens who do not enjoy the franchise are convicted felons (in some states). Your rule would mean that states could decide to remove any non-protected group from the ballot: perhaps plumbers (after all, a lot of porn actors play plumbers, kinda suspicious). Or employees of oil firms. Or people who have been to a pride parade.
Now, if the current president had run on a campaign promise to fuck a person from every county which had voted for her in the oval office on lifestream during her term and won through the horny vote, then I might agree that the overbearing influence of porn actors is a problem which has to be solved, but in the actual world, it is totally a non-issue.
Some people do not like to be represented by Jews, porn actors, MAGA, SJW, men, women, nonbinaries, plumbers, oil execs, DC elites, Blacks, Hollywood actors, reality TV stars, draft dodgers, veterans and so on. There is a really simple thing you can do to avoid that outcome: don't vote for members of your disfavored group. Sure, sometimes the vote goes the other way and you end up with a president you find terrible, but that is still better than the equilibrium of someone disenfranchising their outgroup.
I am absolutely 100% fine with keeping people like this out of public office.
I do not see the problem with her. Clearly she was wrong believing that a live stream would not be recorded or that the voters were not going to care, but come on, she was fucking her husband. How much more traditional family values can you get?
Apart from the probability of people recording, streaming sex is like leaving the blinds open on your fifth floor apartment with the explicit intent that anyone in the next building who has binoculars could see you fuck. Not my kink, personally, but who am I to judge?
If this is the level of desecration of marriage which you think should prevent someone from holding office, you probably think Bill Clinton or Donald Trump are Satan incarnate.
quiet_NaN
11d ago
I think that it is a mixture of two things. First, I do not think that any formerly communist country has an abstinence-only constituency on par with the US evangelicals.
The other relevant fact is that Hungary is ranked the #82 least perceived corrupt country in the world by transparency international, an honor they are sharing with Burkina Faso, Cuba, South Afrika, Tanzania, Trinidad and Tobago. My perception from the outside is that as long as you take care to pay the ruling party off, you can get away with pretty much everything.
quiet_NaN
11d ago
Regarding Steam, I think it is fair to say that PC gaming is probably the least restrictive as far as content policing goes. While it hurt me deep in my soul to praise MS, compared to most of the walled gardens which have popped up since 2000, the PC is a rather open platform. Anyone can develop and distribute any game, no matter how disturbing or distasteful."Windows Defender has prevented the execution of Holocaust Simulator 3000.exe because it violates the PC content policy" is not a thing that happens.
For every other platform except the very niche (GNU/Linux) and Android (depending on what the OEM allows), you have exactly one software distributor for your hardware. While I do not own any gaming consoles or iThings, I imagine that Sony, Nintendo, Apple and MS/XBox are likely much more restrictive in what content they will allow than Steam was. For one thing, they are protecting the reputation of the platform. With PCs, there is no reputation to protect, any youth who owns a PC can download free smut games without restriction. (Personally, I would argue that the potential to run software from f95zone is more than offset by the potential to use computers for all sorts of creative tasks from CAD, 3d modelling, software development, game modding, video and audio editing, drawing, writing, and so on, but presumably some parents would disagree.)
Also, the power of the payment processors frankly sucks. If they were competing on a level playing field, I would not worry too much, if Visa rebrands itself as "smut-free" and Mastercard rebrands itself as "smut-friendly", then the market could sort it out and Visa would likely go the way of Betamax.
The problem is that both banks and payment processors are rather regulated, and the government has plenty of leeway to selectively enforce their interpretation of the law on uncooperative entities. So when some government official says off the record "trust us, dealing with porn companies/wikileaks/sex workers/arms dealers/... will be more trouble for you than it is worth", they are making a credible threat.
In theory, this could be solved with creating/enforcing a standard for real-time cashless money transfer, but the very entities which would have to push this are the governments who like to has this additional power without any judicial oversight.
In my opinion, cash transfer without government oversight was the real problem which cryptocurrency was meant to solve, but few except for dark net markets ever used it that way. Instead, the unwashed masses decided that BTC would be a great investment, so you got an endless procession of shitcoins and NFTs instead.
quiet_NaN
11d ago
Not every capital allocation decision is beneficial. Housing in cities is famously supply-inelastic: if you increase the prices of houses by another factor ten, this will not result in much increase in the supply. If we magically prevented billionaires from investing in cities with high rents, I doubt that there would be bad consequences.
Or take the stock market. Nvidia has a net profit of 76G$/year and a market cap of 4T$, so it is worth about 50 years of profit. If there was less capital around to be invested, it might only be worth 2T$ instead, but I fail to see what would be so bad about that.
Some "capital allocation decisions" are actually better seen as consumption in disguise. When Bezos invested in Blue Origin, or Musk bought Twitter, that read to me as much as a consumption decision as some nerd buying Magic boosters. Sure, it is always possible that the cards will appreciate over time, but the real value for the buyer comes from the joy and prestige of ownership itself.
I think that it is good that people who for whatever reason are good with investing money have capital to invest, at least assuming the investments are done is broadly pro-social endeavors (which can be controlled through regulations to some degree). I do not however think that this is the only good use of money, and for example would be opposed to giving taxpayer money to successful investors so that they can invest even more.
quiet_NaN
11d ago
who the heck actually believes that posing for a photoshoot in a completely mainstreamed, slick, high-class magazine which eventually shifted to a women's fashion and lifestyle brand is the cultural/moral/social equivalent of anonymously getting your holes stuffed and swallowing cum/urine on camera for a handful of cash?
Given that she likely appeared when she was a bit younger than 50, I do not think that what playboy eventually shifted to is all that relevant.
If you want to play purer-than-thou, I think appearing in a magazine which is famously providing jerk-off material is not very pure even if you don't have your tits out. If you are posing for underwear, you can always say "the main motivation is to sell a product by appearing sexy to customers (mostly women), and if the odd pervert uses the ads as visual aid for masturbation, that it entirely incidental". Appear in playboy, and it becomes much harder to argue that guys becoming aroused by your picture was just an unintended side effect.
Personally, I do not believe that sex work should matter for politics. If a male politician paid a hooker for a blowjob I do not care. If he paid a domina for getting his hole fisted, as you might phrase it, I don't care. If some politician of either gender appeared as the centerpiece of a gangbang video, I do not care.
Of course, the other aspect is hypocrisy. If you have a party which is very much into sexual purity, then at some point the opposition is might point out the difference in what you preach and what you practice. If you or your mistress had an abortion, that is fair to point out when you are running an anti-abortion campaign. If your party is very anti-gay, then you visiting gay nightclubs might suddenly become newsworthy.
I am not knowledgeable enough about Hungarian politics to say how much either party is into sexual purity. I know that Orban is socially conservative and anti-LGBT, which will likely not make him enthusiastic about titty mags, but likely not to the point where they would outlaw them. The MEP leader of that opposition party was formerly in Orban's party and seems to be more pro-EU, while avoiding any CW issues. I do not think he is campaigning against porn videos.
quiet_NaN
12d ago
The woke left is generally very tolerant of about anything except opinions. I think at this point they mainly attract people whose kink is to enforce social conformity.
The same people who reported their neighbors for keeping the Sabbath in 1600, or single people who received visitors of the opposite sex in their apartments in 1950. And in time, they will become just as cringe (or perhaps they are already).
As far as SJ is a subculture (which it only vaguely resembles), it is in the sociopath phase. The median leader might or might not be a true believer, but they surely know how to play zero-sum status games very well. At the end of the day, effectively reducing humanities carbon footprint might save the climate, but it will not secure your own status. Stabbing your own allies in the back and giving a speech about principles and painful decisions is much more likely to see you advance, at least until you slip up and use a term which was fine last year or some enemy digs out opinions you unwisely publicized a decade ago.
quiet_NaN
12d ago
Its not that Marx neccesarily supported Wokeism so much as the Woke copied the Marxists' homework and flipped few of the words around in the hopes the teacher wouldn't notice.
The analogy I would use is that they dug out the rotting corpse of communism from the graveyard cut of the head (caring about social inequity), and limbs (e.g. working towards a revolution), replaced the head and a few limbs with what had previously been sideshows on the left, and then sent comrade Igor to the roof with a lightning rod.
quiet_NaN
12d ago
I think that while Stalin is rightfully reviled, Hitler and his movement set a new cultural standard for evilness. Whenever we (as a culture) want to drive home the fact that something (e.g. abortion, factory farming, enforced political correctness) is maximally evil, the metaphors we reach fore are not "Stalin", "KGB", "political commissar" and "Holodomor" (a word which chromium does not even recognize), but "Hitler", "SS", "Gestapo" and "holocaust".
To be fair, the Nazis worked really tirelessly to earn the top spot on the evil assholes list. At the end, I do not think that popular culture dispassionately decided that Stalin might have killed more people, but Hitler managed a higher rate and should thus get the first prize. It was probably more that Hitler went to war with most of the Western world, so there was already a rather strong sentiment against him by the time the magnitude of his evil became common knowledge. "Turns out that the guy against whom we have been fighting one of the most bloody wars in history and who has been painted as a villain by our propaganda was actually also murdering people at a rate of a few trains a day, so if anything our propaganda painted him too flattering."
By contrast, Stalin died in 53, way before peak cold war. Subsequent propaganda focused on the USSR in general, not their dead worst leader ever. And of course there were plenty of sympathizers to downplay his atrocities.
quiet_NaN
12d ago
I know that maybe is a bit OT here, but I cannot wrap my head, after seeing communists argue on /r/wikipedia (that, as the wiki itself, is full of radical leftists arguing inside)
TIL. I find that there is something deeply ironic about a subreddit on Wikipedia. Like if I learned that Linux devs had weekly meetings on Microsoft Teams.
Only that I see only a single post which is meta ("how do I appeal a ban?"), while most other posts are simply "look at this cool WP article I found", so it is more like a bunch of Ubuntu users having a weekly Teams meeting.
scam you as a North African reseller on an Italian beach
I wish you would not do that. "Be no more antagonistic than is absolutely necessary for your argument." If we allow that kind of metaphor, we will also get "he went after her as fast as a Catholic priest would go after the altar boy" or "as stupid as a green card Trump supporter".
I agree that communism might seem to be defined circularly, and at times might be, but the same can be said of of the Christian claim that god is good.
Nor is it likely that any moral philosophy will fare much better. Personally, I am an utilitarian, but if someone goes "On a rather fundamental level, all matter seems to be made out of a few fundamental particles. Why should one configuration of these particles be better or worse than another one? You speak of utils, but so far these are so hypothetical that they make phonons look like real particles by comparison. Do you propose that we build an orphan collider to try to produce a few non-virtual utils, like we did with the Higgs?" then it is very unlikely that I will find an argument to convince them.
Of course, since the early 1900s communism has a bit of a "No True Scotsman" problem on top of that.
You claim that this circular reasoning something related to being on the autism spectrum? Do you have any citation for that? Or is posting on a text-enabled website like reddit instead of tiktok sufficient proof of autism these days? Did the APA update the DSM-5 again?
I think that with the fall of the USSR, most orthodox commies went the way of the dodo, mostly. In 1970 in Europe, you could definitely get laid if you signaled knowledge and support of communism. The texts people wrote about it were probably longer than what you would find on reddit, but I do not see how this is an argument that commies were less autistic. Today, Stephenie Meyer is probably inspiring more tokens of fanfiction per day than the work of Karl Marx.
I think that besides the fact that unlike Twillight, the dictatorship of the poletariat has been tried and found wanting, another reason is that the principal victim class for which communism claims to speak are no longer very sympathetic. In the times of Marx and Luxemburg, all you had to do to convince your friends of the worthiness of the cause was to take a stroll through the working class quarters.
But capitalism had mostly solved these extremely unpleasant side effects of the industrial revolution, at least in the first world. A member of the working class who has a TV set and uses it to watch Fox News is no longer someone who a saloon communist could mistake as a victim of capitalist oppression.
So the leftist middle class needed a new victim for whom they could claim to fight. Women. Ethnic and sexual minorities (except pedos, because everyone hates pedos). Victims of colonization. Of course, unlike Marx, they have much less of a master plan, a grand strategy, a theory of victory.
If affirmative action leads to equal outcomes, then historical wrong has been righted. If it does not lead to equal outcomes, then the historical wrong is even larger than previously thought and we need to put our hand on the scales even more.
But they are also much totally compatible with capitalism. Companies can cheaply signal their guilt and repentance by doing a few land acknowledgements, participating in pride month and hiring a few DEI candidates.
For the record, I think that they are less convincing an ideology than communism. In 1900, a communist could have appealed to my utilitarianism, pointed to the misery of the working class and convinced me that Marx's plan was better than ending up in a world where 1% own most of the stuff. By contrast, it seems pretty clear to me that from a utilitarian point of view, the optimal answer to racial discrimination is color blindness. And contrary to SJ, I still care about the overall distribution of wealth (because the utility a person can get out of it is roughly logarithmic, so one billionaire and 999 people without savings seems worse than 1000 millionaires). I mean, history shows that "murder all the rich people and take their stuff" goes extremely poorly, but I am convinced that we could raise the maximum income tax without stepping onto a slippery slope which ends with gulags.
quiet_NaN
13d ago
I think this his is straightforward a "can you believe the bad thing $outgroup has done?!!!11" comment, e.g. waging the culture war. The reporting quoted is certainly partisan. There is a slim chance that the other side had a point for this deportation beyond "we have a quota to meet and non-Americans do not really have rights here", not that I will cut them much slack here, because the part where they could sell their arguments for deportation would be a court hearing, which they decided is too much of a hassle.
Still, this is the kind of story which smells like it could end up being fabricated or misreported (say my subjective p(substantially correct)=0.7). If BC had made more of an effort to aggregate similar stories to make the -- imho highly plausible -- point that ICE is just deporting anyone they can get their hands on, I think this post would be ok.
Still, I think that with no prior record BC would have gotten a warning for that post, but one straw has to be the one which eventually breaks the camel's back.
quiet_NaN
13d ago
I think that for theguardian, such a story might simply be too good to risk ruining it with a fact check.
On the other hand, nothing in it seems implausible given my knowledge of the Trump administration. The only thing mildly surprising is that there is no allegation of excessive violence during the arrest.
The goons of ICE are likely working on a quota basis. Trump wants that many people deported per months, he does not care who it is. They know that Trump does not give a rats ass about following proper procedure, that guy had his mob try to stop the certification of an election before, and has shown a great willingness to pardon any deeds done by his side in the culture war.
If the courts overturn the deportation decision, that is still a win for Trump, because he can paint himself as following campaign promises to the best of his ability while being hampered by the cuddly justice system.
Deporting armed gang members who might prefer death to spending the rest of their life imprisoned without judgement in some hell in El Salvador is obviously a dangerous occupation. But luckily there are plenty of harmless immigrants which you can deport instead, and they will count just as much for statistical purposes.
Because of the CW, there is also zero consideration to the individual's case. Either you are MAGA and support all deportations, or your are left-wing and support none. The moderate position that deporting someone who came to the US age 15 and has served multiple sentences for assault is fine but that deporting an elderly man without a criminal record is bad is not shared by either side, because both see it as a slippery slope towards their enemies position.
quiet_NaN
16d ago
To get a reasonable, moderate perspective, you have to follow the kind of people who march around with tiki torches and scream "Jews will not replace us!" That's not much of an exaggeration; the statement that libs were right about misinformation came from Jason Kessler, the organizer of the Charlottesville goon march.
Come on. That is a cheap rhetoric trick and you know it. Anyone can read Mein Kampf, find an unobjectionable quotation which which their current political opponent would disagree and thus prove that their opponent is literally less reasonable than Hitler.
I think English has the idiom that even a stopped clock is right twice a day. I am sure that if I were to dig through all the stuff Trump had said this year, I would be able to find plenty of sentences which sound reasonable, even insightful in isolation.
quiet_NaN
16d ago
The whole "misinformation" thing has always seemed strange to me. The default was that everyone was always wrong about everything, 100% of the time.
This is a common misconception. For most things of life-or-death importance, people were usually at least vaguely right. The Middle Ages might have had a cosmology which was laughably wrong, but their farmers certainly knew what was the optimal time to plant grain, because no society which is wrong about these things can survive.
Would medieval Europe have benefited greatly from a time traveler infodumping all the actionable knowledge of our age, e.g. how the plague works, and how to bootstrap an industrial civilization a la planecrash? Sure.
But there is a difference between being wrong because you lack the tech to find evidence either way (e.g. microscopes and sterilization for germ theory) or because your epistemics suck (which to be fair they often did).
quiet_NaN
16d ago
Everyone always talks about how much money there is in politics. This is the wrong framing. The right framing is Ansolabehere et al’s: why is there so little money in politics?
Personally, I do not think that Jewish money is any worse than gentile money, and you would require significantly higher levels of antisemitism in the US before "I may be funded by billionaires, but not Jewish billionaires" becomes a selling point in US politics.
Even if billionaire money is a problem in politics (and it can be argued that it is -- look at the maximum marginal income tax and how it has evolved since 1950, not that I expect billionaires to pay even that), this is a coordination problem. Almost all of the present politicians are where they are because they are cozy with rich donors, cutting down on campaign funding would really disadvantage them over competitors. And unilateral rejection of funding would hurt your own side.
It is like going to medieval Europe and saying "if we all coordinated to disallow metal weapons and armor, wars would be a lot less bloody which would be better for everyone". Even if all the nobles could coordinate to accomplish that, no knight wants to be beaten to death by a peasant with a stick, so they would still not do it.
Also, there is this guy whose shtick is that he does not accept big campaign donations, but for some reason I think few of the "Jewish money ruins everything" demographic are going to vote for Bernie.
Unfortunately, if your enemy does not give a fuck about civilians, that does not mean that you do not have to give a fuck either. If a police department solved a hostage situation by bombing the building and killing everyone inside, they could claim that actually who was really responsible for the civilian deaths was the hostage taker. Still, it would reflect horribly on them.
As an aside, I don't recall that the IDF has made much of a credible move to get the civilians out of the Gaza war. If they had offered a ICRC run shelter where the IDF kept the peace to every Gazan who did not want to die for Hamas when they started invading, that would have updated me a lot towards "the IDF does their best to keep civilians safe". Instead, they told them "we are fighting here, go there" sometimes, but were generally unwilling to allow them into places where Israel would be responsible for their needs.
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