quiet_NaN
1mo ago
The guardian on Assange and Biden considering to drop the charges.
Should Biden decide to drop the Assange prosecution it would bring him into line with the previous Democratic administration of Barack Obama. It held back from charging the WikiLeaks founder for fear of infringing freedom of the press rights under the first amendment.
The 18 charges against him were ultimately brought under the presidency of Donald Trump.
To my surprise, this is actually a take echoed by Glenn Greenwood:
So Obama ended eight years in office without indicting Assange or WikiLeaks. Everything regarding Assange’s possible indictment changed only at the start of the Trump administration. Beginning in early 2017, the most reactionary Trump officials were determined to do what the Obama DOJ refused to do: indict Assange in connection with publication of the Manning documents.
The facts go like this:
- In 2010, Assange fled from Sweden to the UK because he was concerned that his prosecution for some alleged sex crimes was a pretext for extraditing him to the US.
- In 2012 he took asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in the UK, citing the same concerns.
- In May 2017 the Swedish prosecutors dropped their charges
- In April 2017 the Trump DOJ announced that they wanted to prosecute Assange
- In 2019 he was arrested in the embassy and has been mostly greenlighted for extradition to the US by now.
The Guardian/Greenwood narrative would have to go like this:
- When Assange stated that he was afraid that Sweden would extradite him to the US in 2010, he was a poor delusional paranoid, because the Obama DOJ valued freedom of the press and all that. None of the prosecution he faced until 2017 was anything different than what any random citizen of Australia accused of similar crimes would have faced.
- When the evil Trump DOJ took over, they promptly decided to prosecute Assange, suddenly turning his paranoid delusions into reality and putting pressure on the UK to extradite him for his Wikileaks work.
- When Joe Biden took over, he just forgot to stop his DOJ from further prosecuting Assange.
My narrative would go something like this:
- Assange was right that the US was out to get since 2010. The sex crime allegations were played up for political reasons. Sweden would have totally extradited him to the US. The DOJ simply kept their mouths shut because there was no advantage for them to admit they intended to prosecute him while he was out of their reach, and playing the freedom of the press champion made Assange look like a paranoid fool.
- When the Swedes finally dropped their charges, Assange was still wanted in the UK for skipping bail. For some reason (probably something internal, possibly related to the administration change) the US decided to finally put their cards on the table instead of waiting until he was in UK custody.
- After Biden took over in 2021 he did not drop the prosecution because getting hold of Assange had been a goal of the US (especially the intelligence community) since 2010, not a partisan Trump pet project.
quiet_NaN
14d ago
If the weather seemed especially treif/haram this weekend, it is probably due to all these flying pigs. The guardian published an article on antisemitism in the US student protests which actually tries to be somewhat balanced.
They acknowledge that there have been unambiguous incidents of antisemitism.
Then there are gems like this:
“There is a distinction between being unsafe and feeling uncomfortable. It’s very notable to see the discourse around this issue because the right in this country that’s been talking about woke culture, and how young people are snowflakes, are suddenly adopting this narrative around safety, which is really a narrative around comfort,” he said.
“People do not have a right to feel comfortable in their ideas. This is a university. This is a place to challenge people’s ideas. Discomfort is not the same thing as danger.”
Of course, if issue one is "a work of literature containing rape" and issue two is "an Israeli student encountering protesters who say stuff like 'Zionists don’t deserve to live', I have my own ideas which of these I would classify as "making one feel uncomfortable" versus "making one feel genuinely unsafe".
Even so, Norman Finkelstein, the Jewish American political scientist who is a strong critic of Israel, advised the protesters to reconsider the use of slogans that can be used against them. Finkelstein went to Columbia to praise the students for raising public consciousness about the Palestinian cause but he advised them “to adjust to the new political reality that there are large numbers of people, probably a majority, who are potentially receptive to your message”.
[...]
Once Finkelstein has finished speaking, a protester took the microphone and led a chant of “from the river to the sea”.
I think that this illustrates nicely how most of the protesters are in it for the signaling value. This is not uncommon, after all, many things we do are mostly for the signaling value. My own position that Israel should do more to minimize civilian casualties while they crush Hamas is probably something a majority of US voters could get behind, but boy is it lackluster from a signaling point of view. A student protester expressing this opinion would not get any respect for their bravery from their peers. On the other hand, calling for an intifada might be utterly devastating to the aims of the protests, but it will earn the one expressing it a lot of respect for being so brave and likely get them laid.
quiet_NaN
9d ago
Repression of dissidents is a feature of every political regime. No exceptions.
The motte: To the degree that this is true, it is so vague that it is useless. It is like saying "every animal can survive outside water", implying (a) for some non-zero time span (b) in microgravity (c) with the correct air pressure.
The bailey: To the degree that it is non-vague, falsifiable it hints at 'repression is a key element in any regime', or 'the amount of repression is similar between regimes' this is false.
If someone asked you 'I want to have a system with minimal political repression, should I pick Stalin's Russia or Obama's US?' and you reply 'Repression is universal, so it does not matter', that is akin to answering 'what would make a good pet for my terrarium, a hamster or a gold fish?' with 'every animal can survive outside the water, so it does not matter'.
quiet_NaN
26d ago
Another day, another Guardian article.
Palestinian civil defence teams began exhuming bodies from a mass grave outside the Nasser hospital complex in Khan Younis last week after Israeli troops withdrew. A total of 310 bodies have been found in the last week, including 35 in the past day, Palestinian officials have said.
“We feel the need to raise the alarm because clearly there have been multiple bodies discovered,” said Ravina Shamdasani, spokesperson for the UN high commissioner for human rights.
“Some of them had their hands tied, which of course indicates serious violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law, and these need to be subjected to further investigations,” she said.
[...] Medics working for Doctors Without Borders described how Israeli forces attacked Nasser hospital in late January before withdrawing a month later, leaving the facility unable to function.
I have no doubt that the IDF commits some human rights violations. But if the UN high commissioner for human rights is disturbed about reports of mass graves, the subtext to me is "this is another Srebrenica". And I am rather sure that Israel does not systematically carry out mass shootings of prisoners. The optics would just be terrible, and in the age where everyone has a phone with a FullHD camera and some fraction of IDF soldiers presumably do not want to see every last Palestinian dead, the inevitable backslash would negate a thousandfold any perceived strategic advantage by reducing the population of their enemy. Israel is dependent on the US, and US voters care about genocides which make the news, and anything involving Israel will make the news.
From reading the executive summary from MSF, you would think that Hamas is a collective hallucination of the IDF, who find it necessary to lay siege to a hospital instead of just walking in to the front door and asking if it would be possible to search the basement for the existence of any secret tunnels really quick before moving on, looking for further windmills to tilt against.
Mithridacy is the art of misdirecting by omission without telling outright lies, and of seeing through them by noticing what is only implied instead of stated outright. If there was not a single armed Palestinian on hospital grounds, that would strengthen the story by making the IDF attack on the hospital a war crime. The fact that MSF does not claim that explicitly makes it unlikely to be true. While artillery shelling always carries the risk of collateral damage, snipers generally see whom they kill. If IDF snipers were systematically targeting civilians (doctors, elderly, kids, etc), that would be outrageous and well worth mentioning. The fact that the article does not mention that suggests that at least the primary victims of the snipers might have been some of the hypothetical Hamas fighters in the hospital.
Likewise, if the bodies in the mass grave all featured gunshot wounds to vital areas, which would be a clear indication of mass executions, you can bet that both the "Palestinian civil defense teams" (I am always amazed at the level of benevolence Hamas has shown in handing key functions of the Gazan government to decent people instead of consolidating all of the power in their own hands ) and the Guardian would go out of their way to tell you about it. So the fact that they do not mention it is somewhat strong evidence that it is not the case.
Also:
[...] Shamdasani said her office was working on corroborating Palestinian officials’ reports that hundreds of bodies had been found at the site.
So she has confirmed that there have been "multiple bodies" discovered, and also that some of them had their hands tied, but is still hedging on the total number of bodies claimed by Ham^H^H^HPalestinian officials? I would assume that if you have a trusted source in Gaza, you could confirm the latter quickly enough.
Also, I do not think that Hamas would lie about that. The Health Ministry numbers may be exaggerated, but they should certainly be able to find 310 bodies to put into that mass grave they discovered after two months. Or perhaps they legitimately found them and someone buried them afer the Nasser fighting.
More broadly, I wonder about the long term strategy of Israel. Assuming that Nasser was an important point of access for the Hamas tunnel system, they went in, smashed it, and left again? Why not occupy it long term, turning Gaza into an open air prison in earnest, with checkpoints and curfews, eventually establishing an alternative structure of government? Gaza is not exactly Afghanistan in size, after all. Going in, kicking Hamas a bit and then have them disperse hidden among the civilian refugees seems like it would cause a lot of civilian hardship without accomplishing the legitimate goal of wiping Hamas from the Earth.
quiet_NaN
6mo ago
The Guardian would clearly prefer for Israel to stop further military interventions. I am used to the Guardian being somewhat partisan, but still surprised by this level of one-sidedness. The alternative to an invasion of Gaza is the status quo. Hamas stays in power while Israel forbids the import of anything which could be used to craft weapons, thus severely limiting the quality of life inside the strip. Hamas continues to fire rockets, Israel continues to respond with airstrikes.
I think an occupation of Gaza (while obviously the thing Hamas wants Israel to attempt) might be preferable in the long run for the surviving Gazans. Gaza is not Afghanistan, size-wise. Instead of having an open air prison run by the most homicidal inmates, turn it into an panopticon. For those who would rather die than live under occupation, grant them their wish when they try anything. Be culturally sensitive by limiting the freedom of speech to levels customary in Iran or Saudi Arabia: imprison anyone who advocates violence against Israel. Don't let people starve, don't kill civilians when you can avoid it. Invest. If, a generation down the road, a huge majority is in favor of peaceful relations with Israel, give them self-determination.
It is less clear how such an occupation might benefit the Interests of Israel (or any other state), though. Winning the war against Hamas will take a huge toll both in IDF lives and bad PR (pictures of dead kids), and the occupation will likely be a drain on resources for decades. And then there is a decent chance that the moment you retreat, Hamas is back in power. The alternative of just continuing low intensity air strikes indefinitely (even the Guardian can hardly run stories about innocent airstrike victims for years) and otherwise fortify your border.
quiet_NaN
14d ago
I think that the issue with "unrapeable" is that it is not a tag that was applied to all of the classmates, the implication being 'the primary thing that keeps us from raping people (apart from strategic concerns regarding law enforcement) is people being ugly'.
If the boys had rated their classmates on a scale of one to ten, this would still be in poor taste imho (as it would be if the genders were reversed, like in that South Park episode), but probably not make national news.
Also, the one-dimensional scale of female attractiveness is certainly an oversimplification. Looking at porn categories, I think it is safe to say that while there is a common axis of attractiveness, there is is also a lot of variation in preference among men.
Finally, your physical attractiveness should mostly matter in so far as your goal is to bang all your classmates or find a partner who prefers a high status mate to underline their own status among their peers, neither of which sound like very worthwhile goals.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
If I had to describe my race politics in a word, I would probably pick 'color-blindness'.
Also, I do not vote on comments up or down, and do not think that giving people unlimited votes will result in voting patterns which give useful information. My suspicion is that when the motte was on reddit, there were a lot more non-racist lurkers with a reddit login which voted comments up or down.
Someone is wrong on the internet is not enough to get me to write a reply. If someone claims that ethnic Nigerians can never become "real" Americans, I tend to just shrug and get on with my life.
White nationalism seems silly to me. Classic historical ethno-nationalism is typically much more exclusive than just saying "if your skin is white enough, you are in", and instead select much smaller ethnicities like Romanians or Danes. Of course, anyone who wants to turn the US into a white ethnostate should consider if they might not be better served by emigrating to whatever country has the lowest non-white population. Russia looks pretty white to me, just saying.
The most successful states of their time were rarely ethnically homogeneous. Take the Roman Empire or the US. Functioning as a multicultural society seems kind of a superpower.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
I don't get why a campus should want to police free speech at all.
I mean obviously don't hand out benefits and special considerations to known hate groups, but if it is legal to stand at an intersection with a sign of "from the river to the sea" or (equivalently) "kill all the men/women/trans/Jews/Muslims/gingers", I see no reason to forbid them on campus.
Also, it is nice to know that for all their differences, the wokes and the GOP can at least agree on some things (i.e. fuck free speech).
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
65% (deductible) federal income tax for all income over $50,000 for anyone over 30 with fewer than one child.
I am sure that Canada would love for the US to adopt this policy. Are you prepared to go full Walter Ulbrecht to make it stick?
Divorce comes with a 10-year additional tax penalty except in cases of (convicted) domestic violence or other abuse (in which case all marital benefits can continue for the victim).
I am totally sure that knocking down the Chesterton's Fence of no-fault divorce will totally not have any negative side effects. Not.
Sure, a few people might get stuck in an abusive relationship because they can not prove to the standards of criminal justice that their partner is abusing them. But really serves them for marrying the wrong person, right?
And a few others might have a huge incentive to frame their partner for abuse to out of the divorce tax.
And I am sure that little Timmy will have a great intact family home if his parents are forced to stay together by economic necessity. Yes, perhaps there might be a lot of yelling, fighting and weaponizing kids, and perhaps both of his parents will bring their boyfriends/girlfriends home, but at least he will not be scarred for life by having to endure a divorce.
--
If you pass all these laws by some miracle, here is my business idea:
The company aims to provide tax benefits for people who are disinclined to raise children. For maximum benefits, unmarried men and women are sorted by state and will marry (potentially over zoom) in a minimal civil ceremony. Subsequently, a fertility clinic will be create a number of embryos from the germ lines of the couple, three of which will be implanted in surrogates in Mexico. After the births, the 'couple' will become the legal guardians of the children, getting full tax credits. As the parents, it is their legal right to task others with helping them to raise their kids, so they can just pay a Mexican orphanage to raise them. When they come of age, they will be US citizens who may or may not be eager to come work in the US. The parents pay the costs for the surrogates and however much it costs to raise 1.5 kid in rural Mexico.
--
Seriously, if you want to lower the costs of having a child to zero, I am ok with that. If you want to specifically incentive people who earn well to have kids (perhaps because you expect that by nature or nurture, their kids are more likely to be productive members of society) by also compensating them for lost earnings, I am okay with it.
But using tax cuts to bribe or bully people into having more kids feels deeply wrong. I believe that kids deserve parents who actually want to have them instead of parents who put up with them as an unfortunate side effect of some tax optimization scheme.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
The Oxford English Dictionary defines wokeness as being alert to injustice and discrimination in society, especially racism. To be woke, by that definition, is to be a noble thing indeed: a defender of the oppressed and downtrodden. This is the ethos of a fairy tale hero like Robin Hood, or Prince Charming, or the valiant huntsman who vanquishes the big bad wolf and saves Little Red Riding Hood and her sick, old grandma. Not coincidentally, it has also been the stated agenda of every mass murdering tyrant in modern history.
There are some possible interpretations of this paragraph:
- A. Woke implies an agenda of defending the oppressed, mass murdering tyrant also implies an agenda of defending the oppressed. In this case, there is very little to link wokes to tyrants -- if we observe that Nazis frequently wear uniforms, and postmen frequently wear uniforms that tells us very little if there is any unexpected overlap between Nazis and postmen -- anything from 'postmen and Nazis are exactly the same group' to 'there is no postman who is also a Nazi' remains possible.
- B. 'Every mass murdering tyrant in modern history had a stated agenda which was woke'. This is a much stronger statement. Unfortunately, even if I were to not dispute that every left-wing or communist regime from the Republican side of the Spanish civil war to the Khmer Rouge qualifies as woke there are a few counterexamples -- for example the Nazis, Imperial Japan, Saddam Hussein, the Ayatollah or the Young Turks all committed their worst atrocities for explicitly racist or religious reasons. (WP List) For convenience and tradition, let us focus on the Holocaust. If you prefer interpretation B, what is your explanation? Does Hitler not qualify as a tyrant? Was the Shoah the product of an anti-racist agenda? Do we start with our weekly epistemic discussion about the Holocaust?
That being said, I think your overall point is not wrong. Left wing ideologies could be classified on a splintered-dogmatic axis. The splintered left might agree on hating fascism and strongly disliking capitalism, but have a multitude of opinions on what kind (if any) of state they want, if feminism was a distraction from the class struggle or an essential problem to be solved first and so on. The central example of the dogmatic left would be the communist parties. I am not sure how the ratio of contrarians to dogmatists was at the best of times (say Western students in the 1960ies), but I think there were some genuine object level discussions not entirely unlike in the ratsphere. I was not born back then, so I can not say for sure.
Of course, the big atrocities of the left have mostly been committed by the dogmatists following the party line with a comical overconfidence that what they did was right.
I find social justice progressivism firmly on the dogmatic side. Where 20 years ago the Israel-Palestine conflict would have ripped apart leftist groups in the middle, today the consensus of SJP seems to be that Israel are the 'white' colonizers and therefore in the wrong, end of story.
And unlike my own Grey Tribe, the left (especially the dogmatic left) has never been very great at noticing the skulls.
quiet_NaN
26d ago
Do you have an experiment to determine if an individual exhibits free will as opposed to just making decisions based on its incentive landscape plus perhaps internal sources of randomness?
If humans have free will, do dogs too? LLMs? Frogs? Insects? A ball travelling through a Galton board?
How is free will compatible with a physics world view? The old "brain as a quantum computer" number? Does that mean that other quantum systems whose state we do not know would also exhibit free will? Or are the responses of our neurons remote controlled from our souls?
quiet_NaN
6mo ago
This question looks a bit like a scissor statement. I would argue that the first thing to do would be to taboo the word child, which sometimes means people under 14 and sometimes people under 21.
I think that the reason for the reaction by the general public is that the question can be seen as an attempt to either normalize prostitution among minors or sex between adults and 13-year olds. In an argument-as-soldiers mindset, asking that question would make Aella a terrible person. (Of course, people who elect to be on Twitter taking offense to Aella of all Twitter users seems bizarre to me, personally.)
The reason we criminalize most sex between adults and minors (unless the age gap is really small) is that the power dynamics in such relationships are generally lopsided and harmful to the development of the minor. Of course, the idea that the state of being a minor (let's say 15yo) voids consent in the same way that being to drunk to walk voids consent (unless the partner is a minor of similar age, when the minors consent is considered valid. Hm, does this also apply when both parties are dead drunk, or did they then rape each other? Is there a conversion factor between blood alcohol concentration and years under minority, or would a person below age of consent having sex with a drunken person both rape them and be raped in turn, legally?) seems factually dubious, but I can't think of a more plausible legal fiction to motivate this.
I would support a rule that for people permanently incapable of lawful consent (which would include Aella's case but also people ruled generally incompetent), actual consent plus the approval of a legal guardian (or family court or whatever) can substitute for legal consent. The idea would be that the guardian can substitute the common sense of a competent adult in avoiding separate exploitative sex without damning the patient to a life without sex.
In the end, this is something which intelligent people can have different opinions about. Some might prefer having hard and fast rules, even if they end up being harmful in some rare edge cases. Some might prefer to interpret the rules more loosely with an eye to the interests they are meant to protect, at the risk of making the Schelling fence porous.
quiet_NaN
7d ago
adolescent boys and young single men are no longer vetted by fathers, elders, brothers, uncles and other pre-vetted eligible men
From the context of 'manhood initiation rituals', I would assume that you primarily mean vetting by the family of the male, not the female? I think that in many patriarchal cultures, not being especially rapey was not part of the vetting process on the side of the man. I mean, if you are a medieval woman encountering an adolescent male Scandinavian in the woods, and notice that he bears the signs of a fully initiated viking warrior, that should probably be cause for more concern, not less.
The causal chain might go like this:
- Claim 1: Modern dating is frustrating for a lot of people, compared to patriarchal mating strategies.
- Claim 2: For women, this manifests as being more worried about rape in a dating context.
- Claim 3: This generalizes to being more worried about rape in general, hence the preference for the bear.
The patriarchal vetting process / manhood initiation clearly varied from society from society, Apache, Jane-Austin-England, ancient Rome, fucking Sparta and Aztec all did their own thing. If there was a common denominator, it was perhaps to certify that the male was able to fulfill their expected role in society and support one or more wives and their children. (Of course, such vetting processes are also heavier on the upper end of societies. I am not sure how it was on the lower end: "This helot man has managed to survive for two decades without starving or being slaughtered or maimed by the Spartans, that makes him husband material?")
I am also skeptical of claims that the female's male relatives filtered especially for a kind man. In societies where marital violence and rape were considered normal, why would they? They men were probably more concerned with political implications or making sure that the husband was not some wimp who would get himself killed in the first battle, leaving the woman a penniless widow.
If I were a woman, I would take tinder et al any day over a random pre-1900 mating system.
quiet_NaN
16d ago
Regarding not having a plan for a career, I have to say this was always the case for me. I am finished school because it seemed the default thing to do, then studied physics because I thought it was interesting (and to keep my options open with regard to kinds of jobs), then went for a PhD. Me being in Europe, living a modest life-style and being supported by my parents meant that I came out without debt at least. I am not sure if I would have been more careful about my career choices if I felt that I was less employable.
--
Another thing which you touch is that it takes money to raise kids, especially if one wants more than one kid, at least by contemporary Western expectations (i.e. one room per teenager). Typically, there are places which have affordable rents and places which have jobs. In previous centuries, a husband in his twenties could start working and earn enough to feed his family and eventually even buy a house. Today, plenty of people feel they need two post-grad incomes to even consider kids, and few have delusions of being able to afford to own a house from the money they will ever make.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
Propellantless propulsion flies in the face of the conservation of momentum. This is a law which is baked in the current Physics theories, including the standard model and general relativity.
From a theoretical perspective, it follows from the Lagrange function being independent under certain coordinate transformations with Noether's theorem.
The steelman version of this propellantless propulsion would be the claim that of course momentum is conserved, there are just previously undetected particles or fields which carry momentum. Just like a plane can accelerate while staying at the same height without violating the conservation of momentum by transferring some momentum to the air with a propeller, a spacecraft might do the same. Of course, the particles could not be reacting with anything else (like satellites or these fancy detectors we use for dark matter search), otherwise they would have been found long ago. A fundamental part of the universe being discovered by chance through an commercially interesting engineering application seems unlikely -- it would be like if Edison had created the light bulb and physicists had only discovered electricity afterwards to figure out how it works. (By contrast, my priors for observing complex systems exhibiting unexpected behaviors which will surprise physicists are much more relaxed, high temperature (that is, liquid nitrogen) superconductors were a total surprise, and the early experiments with heavier-than-air flight probably took place before we had any idea how a plane is generating lift.)
The priors for that would at least be slightly higher than "Archangel Uriel personally pushes the spacecraft forward", but still lower than for room temperature superconductors or even room temperature fusion.
The best way to convince the world that the "emdrive" works would be to put one in LEO in a cubesat. Even if you can only generate a very moderate thrust from solar power, the ability to create that thrust continuously will integrate to a tremendous delta v. A year at a thousandths of Earth surface acceleration would work out to 309km/s delta-v. Within three years, your spacecraft would pass Voyager 1 in distance. Humans have some capabilities to track satellites, so we could check easily enough.
quiet_NaN
25d ago
I can not help but notice that the first people who substantially increased the number of non-white, non-native humans in the US were the slave owners. Some flavors of Christianity played a substantial role in the abolition, but few people today would say "having a non-white population is fine as long as you don't treat them as human beings", so blaming the abolitionists is rightfully not done.
Christianity is not a religion tied to a specific ethnic group. Any human can become a Christian, and at least at that point hope to be treated by other Christians as a human being.
This is not to say that Christianity demands equality. Historically, Christianity presided over the most unequal period in European history. The serf and the lord might or might not be equal before God in some abstract way, but if God made the world so unequal then the serf should accept his lot. Given that Christianity is compatible with inequality in general, I think it is equally compatible with racial inequality specifically. I mean, the slave owners were Christians of some flavor.
I think the case is similar with Islam, which is also open to all humans. While it has certainly endorsed societies which were very unequal along racial and other lines, you can say that it is not intrinsically racist.
Judaism for example is designed as a religion for one ethnicity. The conversion process seems more like an add-on, fundamentally it is not about converting other humans.
I don't really know about Hinduism, but given that you are already stuck with your caste for life (afaik), I do not think that there is much emphasis on a process to adopt heathens into one of the castes.
quiet_NaN
1yr ago
While vegetarianism might still be a minority position, I can't help but notice that lots of countries have legislation in place regulating animal welfare. So it seems to me that a non-trivial percentage supports restricting the suffering of animals.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
If you are continuously denied justice in an existential matter, though, I don't think it's at all an alien viewpoint that you are morally entitled to do whatever you find appropriate to seize justice for yourself, including ineffectual and vile acts of revenge such as murdering the women and children of those who wronged you. To claim otherwise, to me, seems to amount to claiming that you can be absolved for arbitrary wrongs if you just amass enough power to make effective resistance impossible, and I don't like that even before we start taking into the account that the targets of Hamas terror were intended and more often than not happy beneficiaries of the original wrongs committed.
Our moral intuitions differ on this a lot. I am not per se against actions whose only purpose is to depress the enemies utility function. If the only move you have is to break into Hitler's villa and destroy all his paintings just to piss him off, I will not hold it against you if you do that.
But when you target third parties such as civilians, reality is typically more complex than that, because they are not only terms in the utility function of the enemy, but also of other's utility functions, such as their own or mine.
In my mind, there is a ton of difference between accepting some collateral damage and intentionally targeting civilians. If Hamas targeted IDF bases with their rockets but accepted the possibility that they might miss and blow up a school instead, or if the IDF decides to blow up 50 people to get one Hamas commander, that can still be viewed as evil because it assigns so little utility to the civilians, but it is very different from expressing a preference for killing civilians, as Hamas did on Oct 7.
If Hamas had targeted shot IDF personnel without offering surrender, I would not have liked this either, but I would also have recognized that there was some military utility to their action.
Instead, they elected to go after civilians. Intentionally. As I have written elsewhere:
Hamas leadership know that they their organization will never defeat Israel militarily. Their best chance to achieving their dream of wiping Israel from the map is a broad alliance of Arab countries who defeat Israel together. The way they get there is public Muslim outrage at Israel. And the best way to generate such outrage is dead Palestinian kids. In my opinion, their attacks were militarily completely pointless, but served the important strategic goal of getting Israel to bomb Gaza down. This will likely throw a wrench into Israel's diplomatic efforts to normalize relations with its Arab neighbors.
In short, the Gazan war is not an acceptable price for Hamas to pay for their day of impotent vengeance on Oct 7, but the motivation for Oct 7 was to get Bibi to blow up a lot of Gazan kids.
I firmly believe that an organization acting like this should be wiped from the face of the earth.
On a broader scale, the problem with the Palestinians is that they don't know how to lose.
Wikipedia has this helpful list. The overall effect is reminiscent of that black knight scene in Monty python: "You have destroyed our ability to fight you in the open? No matter, we can still do suicide bombings. You have walled in Gaza? No matter, we can still fire rockets".
Israel is evidently not incompatible with continued Palestinian existence, so absent a road to victory, resisting them seems counter-productive.
Sometimes it is better to accept accept a peace which feels unjust than fight on forever. When the Alsace became French in 1945 again, a lot of the German-speaking people living there were probably not happy about it. But somehow, the proud tradition of fighting a war every few decades about that region was never revived. It surely helped that nationalist fervor was depleted a bit on the German side after the Nazis, but I still consider this an outcome vastly better for everyone than the alternatives.
"They're both justified to continue murdering each other"
From where I stand, this seems a totally bizarre statement. If two sides fight about a thing, then whatever metric you use to decide who is right and what you would consider a fair distribution of the land or whatever, the rightfulness of all sides summed up has to be less than unity. Only if you optimized for conflict instead of post-conflict outcomes could you prefer both sides to fight each other.
In summary, I am not pro-Bibi, but I am really anti-Hamas. After Oct 7, Hamas needs to be crushed, and as Biden has not volunteered, it falls to the IDF to do the job. I don't think that the way the IDF wages this war is actually all that great, and I am very concerned that nobody has a plan to offer the Gazans a credible alternative. I also think that Israel should destroy the Israeli settlements on the West Bank and arrest the settlers who destroyed that Gazan aid convoy on charges of attempted murder.
quiet_NaN
12d ago
From my limited understanding, the president is the head of the executive, and any democratic legitimacy of the federal bureaucracy ultimately comes from the fact that the bureaucrats are enacting the will of a democratically (or however you call the electoral college system) elected president. While there are certainly mid-level bureaucrats who would do everything legal in their power to thwart his preferred policies (and some might even risk their job by going beyond that), I think the rest of DC pretending that Trump does not exist will not be an option. For one thing, do you really suppose the Supreme Court would play along with that? If they do not, should the rest of DC also pretend that the Supreme Court does not exist?
We already had four years of Trump. He was not my favorite president, but contrary to predictions from the left he turned out not to be the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler. I don't think he would build death camps in his second presidency. It would not be the end of the world.
On the other hand, democracy in the US had (with one notable exception) been a great success in avoiding conflicts being resolved by force of arms. Even if Trump's supporters would idly stand by while the executive defected, the long term effects of establishing that the federal bureaucracy is independent of the president would likely be violent.
Trump's second term would not be about replacing the constitution with the Fuehrerprinzip. If he gets the EC votes, he may get out of legal troubles which may or may not have been politically motivated in the first place. This will not be the end of the world any more than Nixon getting pardoned about Watergate was the end of the world.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
Given the effectiveness of missile interception, I think it is hard to argue with the results. From Israel's point of view, the Iranian regime already hates them maximally and is kept in check purely by military consideration, not a lack of desire to wipe Israel of the map.
Purely military speaking, trading two generals plus change against a random civilian is a tit-for-tat game that Israel wins. There is also the costs of attack and defense to consider, which might be more favorable to Iran (launching a rocket is way easier than intercepting one), but on a scale of a few hundred missiles this is a minor concern.
I would guess that Iran wanted higher casualties, but also did not want to invite instant retaliation. I guess they might have wanted to achieve a dozen causalities or so. They erred on the side of too few, which is a lot better than erring on the side of too many for everyone. On the plus side, they learned something about Israel's missile defense capabilities.
We're damn lucky things cooled down so fast, but again - what the hell was Israel hoping to achieve by this?
I think you are right that killing the generals in the embassy might have been a bad move for Israel because of tail-heavy risks. They put Iran in a spot where the decision makers felt they had to retaliate not for military reasons but just to remain credible to their own peers. If they had killed a few hundred Israelis instead, then that would have put Israel in exactly the same spot, resulting in a war which both sides would lose.
I think it comes down to what a general is worth, militarily speaking. If Persia had managed to kill Alexander 'the Great' early on, history would have gone quite differently, but we are not in the antique any more. Instead of depending on having a king who is by chance a military genius, meritocratic systems common in the modern world should churn out a reliable stream of competent generals. From my gut feeling, modern militaries do not depend on a genius who sees a weakness during battle and exploits it in a way which nobody has ever thought of before but more on skilled but replaceable craftspersons employing their craft. You do not need Alan Turing to build Amazon, after all.
So killing two generals seems more of a papercut than a decisive blow, and Israel's actions can be likened to climbing a wall free solo: the fact that it went well for them this time does not make it any less foolish.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
My takeaways:
- Security is hard.
- Binary blobs are bad. Ideally, there should not be binary blobs in the working directory during compilation of distribution packages. Test cases should be run with no write permission towards stuff which goes into the distribution package. Binary blobs which should be shipped in the package (e.g. images, sounds) should be added by the build process using a distribution-wide mechanism after the package specific stuff (makefile etc) has finished executing. Paranoid distributors might want to add low levels of noise to images and sound files to disincentive hiding executable code in them.
- Attack surface should be minimized for daemons which listen on network ports. This means loading only the libraries which are absolutely required. A compromised xz library should result in being exploitable whenever you unpack xz, not whenever you run sshd.
- The anonymity of github makes supply chain attacks by nation state actors less costly. Sure, you can get an agent into Google, but this is certainly much more difficult than just having your attack team maintain a plausible volunteer git account.
- Of course, if you can coerce your citizens who are already established open source volunteers, this is a cheap way to get around any requirements for meatspace identities. I think that in the Western world, coercion should not work too well, if the NSA puts CSAM on the computer of a senior linux dev and then tries to blackmail them with it, the chances of this backfiring are too high to make it sustainable. (Of course, if they have real dirt on some dev (say Reiser-level), then the NSA could well coerce them to apply some evil commits in exchange for their legal troubles going away. Still, the median developer probably does not have literal skeletons in the closet.) By contrast, the median developer in the PRC might be more vulnerable to coercion by the state.
- An automated way to compare the memory dumps of processes with the source code which purportedly defined them seems generally helpful. Preferably, these should not be open source, but be run by various big institutions (Google, Microsoft, NSA) internally, so attackers will have a harder time learning how to bypass them.
- Having persistent pseudonymous identities with some PKI authentification over multiple platforms would be desirable because it raises costs to attack. An anonymous comment on debian costs the attacker nothing, while burning an identity which has enough open source backstory to take some time to create will hurt.
Some more comments on the OP:
But a compression library seems just after cryptographic libraries are a reasonable thing to not roll your own, and even if this particular use for this particular library might have been avoidable, you're probably not going to be able to trim that much out, and you might not even be able to trim this.
I think there is a big difference. Rolling out your own crypto is a big no-no because they are hard to get right, and any mistakes likely leave you vulnerable.
Rolling out your own compression is much less evil: there is certainly some potential for arbitrary code execution vulnerabilities, but not more than with handling any other file parsing. With regard to generally reinventing the wheel versus loading wheels from a zillion different libraries, each of them with their own dependency chains, there is probably some reasonable middle ground. For something like sshd which sits on a security boundary, the obvious way in retrospect to add systemd logging would be to implement the interface from the scratch instead of including a bloated libsystemd.
and may not even recognize xz as a file extension
Data point: As some casual linux user, I recognize the xz file extension. Before last week, the main thing I could have told you about it was that it was a compression commonly used for tar files, the third one I am aware of after gz and bz2. GNU tar wants -J when handling xz. I would have guessed that the fact that it de-facto replaced bz2 is likely due to the fact that it is better on at least some metrics, but have no clue how the xz algorithm works in particular.
On the plus side, the fact that the attackers stayed in userspace instead of having /usr/bin/sshd load some kernel model seems to indicate that a stealthy compromise of the kernel is hard? Yay for NSA's SELinux?
quiet_NaN
5d ago
I think current LLMs are not remotely reliable enough to serve as politicians. Adversarial examples are a thing, after all. If we can not train an LLM to reliably avoid saying bad words, how can we expect it to reliably not vote for bad laws? And anything of truly human level intelligence would get us into alignment territory.
Then there might be a game theoretical cost if your opponents can just run your executive to determine what the reply to a provocation would be. If PresGPT was the head of the US executive, and China got their hands on a copy (one of the backups, or just a replication of the fine-tuning used on GPT5), they could have hard numerical probabilities on what the US response would be if they attacked Taiwan.
The problem with tyrants is that is attracts exactly the wrong people for the job even more than the office of president does. When Rome switched its political system from Republic to Empire, they certainly increased the variance of their leadership a lot.
And precommitting to following the policies of an assassination victim removes the incentives to kill them from the opponents of the policies, but might provide new incentives of supporters to throw them under the bus. I mean, if it is public knowledge that policy X will supported by politician P will pass with some probability p, then all you need to do is make sure that p does not change if they are killed. In practice, there is no such common knowledge, so situations where one side could act on private information will dominate.
And depending on the capabilities of the assassins, changing the mind of the successor on the policy might not be even their end goal. The end goal could be to change the mind of changing the mind of the one who succeeds the fifth murder victim or something.
quiet_NaN
13d ago
It is bad taste for any group whose primary purpose is not a dating pool to systematically rate the hotness of that pool, no matter the gender.
These lists tend to become common knowledge, and some people will end up on the bottom part of the list or being rated an average of 1.3 out of ten (but people -- especially people going through puberty -- might also be uncomfortable being rated really high). If the victim had actually asked to be rated, this would be different, but in all likelihood, they do not prefer an supposedly objective (it's a number! numbers don't lie!) rating of their hotness to become common knowledge.
The outcome of these lists is not so different from writing "X is an ugly pig" on the blackboard. As that is bullying, I would classify creating such lists as at least likely to lead to bullying.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
Meta: I think this post is not appropriate as a top level post.
The content thematic would easily qualify it for the culture war thread.
I would still think it is a bit short for the CW top level post, little more than a link and a few lines of context.
Compare with that natural selection post. At least that post was articulate enough, even if I also disagree with its content (but much less vehemently).
Having top level posts like this (from the quotations from other comments, I am not reading the link) makes us appear like a bunch of internet racists. At least we could try to appear to be a bunch of eloquent internet racists.
This Guardian article is a work of art as a culture war artifact.
The story: a Danish data scientist, Pallesen, who claimed that former Harvard president Gay had made "very basic" data errors in her PhD, a claim which was quoted by right wing activist Rufo.
But now the fearless investigators of the Guardian have uncovered that Pallensen also co-authored a paper called "Polygenic Scores Mediate the Jewish Phenotypic Advantage in Educational Attainment and Cognitive Ability Compared With Catholics and Lutherans" regarding the Ashkenazi, which was published by some people on the right fringe outside Respectable Academia. Some are into eugenics and "race science". Also they cited an 'antisemitic ' psychologist.
Of course, Pallesen promptly disavowed that paper when questioned by the Guardian.
Where to even start.
"Cite" in the title makes an especially bad verb in an academic context because you can generally not control who cites you. "Scientist who criticized Gay's thesis" would be more on point.
Then there is this whole five degrees of separation thing.
While both icky, there is an actual difference between eugenics and "race science" (or HBD or whatever). Eugenics is prescriptive and describes the belief that society should coordinate to affect their gene frequencies. This can go from "let's use CRISPR to fix hereditary diseases" to "kill all the kids with a disfavored eye color". This is completely separate from the claim that there are group differences between human subpopulations caused by genetic differences, which is trivially true for physical characteristics and icky for mental stuff.
My personal view is that most social science is unsound even when it is completely apolitical. If you add politics, be they woke or far-right, I fully expect the conclusions to be whatever the politics say they should be. In respected academia, genetic differences in intelligence are already a third rail. If you publish on racial genetic differences in intelligence, that will end your career faster than putting "I will increase grades for sexual favors" in your e-mail footer. The "fringe" researchers are of course also motivated by politics. So the Ashkenazi genetic intelligence hypothesis is probably undecideable in our society. (From what I remember of Scott's (who is Jewish and thus smarter than me) opinion, I would bet 75% on there being a significant (say, at least five IQ points average) genetic advantage for Ashkenazi.)
Also, I do not find the link between Ashkenazi intelligence and antisemitism all that plausible. The traditional antisemitic trope of Jews is them being shrewd manipulators, which is not exactly the same as being smart. Ask an antisemite why Jews are over-represented in the Ivy League, and they will probably say that it is because the Jews in academia collude to favor Jewish students over gentiles, helping them cheat and so on. If you convince them that the over-representation is due to raw honest brain power, that will conflict with the antisemitic trope.
Finally and foremost, the character of Mr. Pallesen is utterly irrelevant to his claims. He is not the only data scientist, so we don't have to -- and should not -- rely on his testimony exclusively. In the worlds where there is a problem with data science in Gay's PhD, I would not expect that someone who specializes in Intersectionality points it out, thereby -- in the Guardians words -- 'helping oust school’s first Black president'. In worlds where there is no such problem, I would expect that dozens of woke data scientists would jump at the chance to call bullshit on the claims.
More options
Context Copy link