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quiet_NaN


				

				

				
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joined 2022 September 05 22:19:43 UTC

				

User ID: 731

quiet_NaN


				
				
				

				
0 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 September 05 22:19:43 UTC

					

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User ID: 731

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.

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.

Antisemitism has less to do with people not liking jews and more to do with people being annoyed with things jews do. Pogroms weren't caused by abstract hate of jews, it was caused by people being fed up with how the jews were behaving. The best thing jews could do would be to stop provoking people around them and stirring up conflicts.

So I take it that in your view, the Holocaust was because all these evil Polish Jews were meddling in German politics.

I hate to break it to you, but Jews do not act as a coherent group. If you find Jews on two sides of an issue, that is not because they decided to infiltrate both sides, but because they genuinely believe in different things. In any somewhat meritocratic system, some Jews will likely come out in the top 1%. Some Jews will be doctors, lawyers and so on. Some will be intellectuals all over the political spectrum, from the fringe left to conservatives (if the Nazis and their ilk were not rabidly antisemitic, I am sure that some Jews would have joined them as well). A lot of them will have perfectly normal middle class jobs. Of course, some of the rich ones will throw their money around trying to influence politics. Or commit sex crimes. Good thing gentile industrialists never do that!

For Germany 1933, antisemitism was the placebo therapy. Plenty of poor people found capitalism wanting and were disillusioned with democracy. Rather than waiting for a communist revolution (which would have been terrible for other reasons), gentile industrialists were funding Hitler. There were Jewish bankers and industrialists, and the Nazis managed to convince enough of the population that rather than the Jewish banker and the gentile banker being the problem (as the commies would see it), or unbridled capitalism being the problem, the Jewish banker and the Jewish barber were the problem.

host population

That phrase is Problematic.

Charitably, you want to suggest that the Jews are guests to the host population. This is wrong, Jews are members of their nation states as much as anyone. German and French Jews both did their share of foolish dying at Verdun, same as any other Germans and French did. Some US Jews lived there back before it was independent. The trope of the faithless, nationless Jew is from old European antisemitism. In reality, it was the other way round: whenever a monarch was feeling particularly Christian, they would banish all the Jews from their realm.

Of course, less charitably, you know exactly what phrasing you are using and the word opposite to the host is "parasite", which is also an old antisemitic trope.

What you are saying is basically that first you write down the bottom line dictated by your gut feeling, "Therefore killing babies is always wrong.", then try to fill out the empty space above that to fill your page.

If you build a theory and something like this pops out naturally, then your choices are either to admit to that fact or muddy the waters to hide the issue.

Non-speciesist, Non-infanticide, Non-vegan: pick any two. Apart from its species, a pig is cognitively closer to a person than a baby is. If killing the baby is inherently wrong, then so is killing the pig. You could try to salvage this by looking at the future potential, but then you will have to be strictly anti-abortion because a fertilized human egg has basically the same potential to become a person as a baby has.

There is certainly something to be said about being careful with implementing newly found insights of your moral theory, and you will notice that Singer is not actually campaigning for infanticide. In the real world, babies bring tremendous utility to their caretakers, thus killing them would be wrong.

when a living human isn't really human-y enough

Read his argument in Practical Ethics. His first step is to taboo the word human, replacing it with "member of homo sapiens" and "person", just like EY taboos the word "sound" in the Sequences.

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.

I think this is a stupid move from the Democrats.

In 2016, I could (somewhat) understand if some left-wingers were of the opinion that Trump was Hitler reborn and would lead the US into fascism.

In retrospect, these fears were exaggerated. Yes, putting illegal migrants into cages and separating them from their kids was bad, but not especially evil for an US president (my comparisons from recent memory are invading foreign countries under false pretenses (GWB), drone strikes (Obama), gitmo (mainly GWB), that Wikileaks farce (Obama, Trump, Biden)).

He already filled the supreme court, which cost the progressives Roe (which should have long been replaced by a federal law). The other damage (besides the White House becoming the laughingstock of the world) was his election denial.

If he is reelected in 2024, that will not be the end of US democracy. It might leave the Republicans in shambles eventually, but so what. If he loses, he will certainly lie that the election was Stolen again, but will probably not convince many new people that democracy was rigged.

If he claims that law enforcement is out to get him for political reasons, ignore that. Don't actually pass laws suspending the statue of limitations for US presidents so you can try him for some petty stuff which will mostly get him into the news again.

If he lies that the 2020 elections (which he lost in a landslide to a very meh opponent) were stolen, call out his lies. Don't make his point for him by banning him without the due process he would have in criminal court.

I think there is a world of a difference between camping illegally and detaining others.

Believing in the rule of the law does not imply believing that every law should be rigorously enforced all the time. Just like I don't think you should go after every kid's lemonade stand for lack of a business licence, I also think that universities should have some leeway in deciding which of their student groups they tolerate having protest camps on campus.

I think as long as it is not the government deciding that would not be unconstitutional.

For example, a university might tolerate a protest camp to Save The Whales (as long as they do not single out Japanese students or something) but might decide not to tolerate a protest camp about God Hates Fags.

So the amount of antisemitism and especially the attitude towards Jewish students might matter a lot to the universities -- who I imagine are doing damage control. The question for them is if it is worse PR to call the police to dissolve the camp or to continue to tolerate it and thus to some degree be endorsing the messages they spread.

I think the probability that outright election fraud changed the outcome of the 2020 election is very low.

Per Wikipedia, the very close states were Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, with a total margin of some 40k votes.

But that does not suffice for Trump in a tie, because both chambers of Congress went to the Democrats (House by 222 to 213 seats).

So either you would need larger scale fraud in Pennsylvania or Nevada, or argue that the election fraud also affected the (typically heavily gerrymandered) House outcome.

Trump's behavior does not correspond to someone who had very specific allegations (which he could then take to the supreme court, a la Bush vs Gore), but instead paints the picture of a man-child throwing a tantrum because he did not like the outcome of the election, per Wikipedia:

At one point on the call, Trump told Raffensperger, "What I want to do is this. I just want to find, uh, 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have, because we won the state."

I am all for making the voting results more robust, but I also recognize that the US has a long and proud tradition of disenfranchisement, so anything which makes it harder to vote will be understood in that vein, and might even be intended that way.

On the other hand, we are constantly being asked by our authorities to consider it justified that Israel has retaliated by doing the same against Palestinian civilians.

Are you seriously claiming that the IDF are filming themselves as they go around slaughtering civilians, which is what Hamas did?

Israel was attacked by Hamas, who run the polity of Gaza. Such actions often lead to an unfortunate state called "war". When Imperial Japan attacked Pearl Habor, the casualties were only a factor of two higher than in the Hamas attack. (Of course, these attacks differ in other ways, the victims of Pearl Habor were overwhelmingly military, and Imperial Japan had odds of winning which were orders of magnitude better than Hamas, though still not that high overall.)

While I am sure that today's Guardian would have stories without end on the plight the Japanese civilians would suffer during a war with the US and the power of forgiveness, I do not think that it was morally wrong for the US to enter that war. (This does not extend to morale bombings and the nukes -- especially the second one, though.)

In wars, civilians are often killed as a side effect. This is bad, but totally different from going around and beheading people.

Of course, the question if regime change is the strategically best solution for Israel or the world is debatable.

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?

The story feels like a weak-man to me. Personally, I don't consider insect welfare to be relevant, and I would be surprised if it would be a major area of action within the animal welfare part of EA.

Compared to a moth, median humans and pigs are basically the same in terms of genetics and intelligence. GPT-2 is probably more sentient than your average insect.

Of course, the idea to just let some species breed as much as it likes in a human-shaped environment is also stupid on the face of it if you care about the suffering of that species, because the outcome is likely to be a lot of suffering. Reputable animal charities don't allow wild cats or dogs to breed as much as they want, they will generally try to fix them.

If she had originally widely discussed this on EA and the consensus was that she should let the moths be because insect lives matter or something, then that would be sufficient to sneer at EA.

Virtually everyone sees their ingroup as a victim who is treated unjustly by their outgroup. If we apply that standard, then virtually qualifies as woke. Hamas? Woke. Fundamentalist Israeli settlers? Woke. Third gen feminist? Woke. MRA? Woke. A medieval knight following an honor code of protecting the weak from oppression? Woke.

MAGA contains the narrative that the US was taken over by the coastal elites with their pronouns who are completely out of touch with the hardworking, down-to-earth (possibly white) Americans who are actually the backbone of the country, with DJT as a hero of these downtrodden draining the swamp and making the world right again. By your definition, this makes Trump about as woke as Biden.

Very few political parties have the slogan "things are swell right now, let's keep everything exactly as it is", because this does not mobilize voters much. The very least one needs is "keep us in power or you will become the oppressed", which makes one the champion of the people who would otherwise be oppressed in the future, which is also a big part of the classic hero of the downtrodden movement.

I think a definition of woke which includes practically every political movement ever is not a very useful definition and flies in the face of common usage. It would be like defining 'porn' wide enough that it includes the Muppet Show (furries!), then arguing that most school shooters were exposed to 'porn' in their childhood and that therefore we need to do more to keep porn (see what I did there) from kids by forcing onlyfans to do age verification.

it’s unclear whether executing enemy combatants would even be a war crime in this case, since Hamas does not follow the rules of war, does not wear uniforms and so on, so their fighters can’t be considered legitimate PoWs but instead partisans, who are allowed to be executed.

The US position from the the GWB era is of course that these would be unlawful enemy combatants who could be subject to torture without any violations of international law. I do not share this position (because I detest torture), but emotionally I would have no problem with any Gazans found carrying a firearm or explosive device being presumed partisans and getting a short court-martial followed by a long drop.

Intellectually, I recognize that executing your opponents at will because they are not uniformed soldiers of a recognized nation state might not be a good policy because one man's terrorist is another one's freedom fighter, and having certain humanitarian standards makes conflicts with non-state actors less gruesome. Then again, being a partisan has always had its perils, not matter if you were fighting Nazi occupation in France or for a communist revolution in Latin America.

Still, as far as armed opponents are concerned, my preferred frame of reference is to see the Gaza war as a police action against especially murderous bandits in a border region which is not a matter for international law. If any country wants to make it a matter of international law, I would encourage them to ship grant their passports and uniforms to Hamas.

The only options are to do nothing, to ethnically cleanse Gaza (politically impossible), to pummel them into submission to the extent they don’t rebel again (almost impossible in the Middle East where birthrates are high and these kinds of blood feuds last millennia) or to do as much damage to military infrastructure and kill as many fighters as you can and then leave, which is what Israel is doing now.

My frustration is that that I do not see any winnable end game in that strategy. A majority of Gazans seem to be happy with Hamas. Kill 90% of their fighters and they will just come back in a decade.

One thing would be to invite an international peace keeping force. But even if you find any countries outside Iran who would be willing to participate, this would mostly bring in a lot of weapons while at the same time limiting the tactical options of IDF to respond to future attacks on Israel.

Or they could try a carrot and stick approach. Split Gaza into ten zones separated by borders. Able-bodied men are restricted from passing between zones, while everyone else can move freely around unless they are carrying goods. Each zone gets assigned a cooperation level. At cooperation level zero you only let the goods in which humanitarian law absolutely requires. Water pipes can be turned into rockets, Rebar makes for makeshift weapons, so you get to live in tents and carry your water. That is the stick. Any zones which manage not to shoot rockets at Israel, rats out Hamas fighters to the IDF and elect a leadership which does not want to drown the Jews in the sea moves up on the cooperation level. They get more privileges. Houses out of concrete, zone transition privileges for able-bodied men, shorter waiting times at checkpoints, vehicles, work permits for Israel, ultimately perhaps an Israeli passport (with limited franchise if you want to preserve the Jewish ethno-state, whatever), or broader rights of self-determination. That is the carrot.

Perhaps seed one zone by requiring any able-bodied man wanting to enter to publicly renounce Hamas in a way which will get him on their kill-list. Or with known IDF collaborators.

My theory is that given the choice of maintaining eternal animosity towards Israel and living in a country which is not a total third world shithole, most people might eventually relent on their Antisemitism. As you pointed out, the 20% Arab Israeli mostly manage to suppress any urges they might have to slaughter their Jewish neighbors and instead enjoy a life as second-class citizens in a country which offers an amazing quality of life compared to its neighbors.

the health of broader society

The textbook example of such societies are the Malthusian in nature. If having kids is the only way to ensure you survive in old age, then it is in everyone's interests to breed like rats. The outcome is an exponential grows which periodically gets mowed down by the horsemen Pestilence, War and Starvation.

You might call such societies 'healthy', I call them hellish.

The main problem with the pension system is that the working generation is paying the pensions for the previous generation, which works when the population is growing or stable. What we should do instead is make each generation pay into a fund which will eventually pay for their pensions. So even if the size of generations changes, the per capita funds will be stable.

Previous generations if nationalists worried a lot about having enough manpower to throw into the meat grinder of war. In the nuclear age, this is not much of a concern among superpowers any more.

Personally, I would predict a rebound of the TFR at some point, once space in the metropolitan areas becomes more affordable due to the shrinking population, people are likely to have more kids. But even if I am wrong, I would much rather that some robot nurse cared for me in old age than living in a society which puts undue pressure on people to have kids.

I do not think it is particularly shitty. If Biden was making campaign promises of keeping the price of gas low, with no intend to keep them, that would be shitty. Instead, this is just an election gift targeting that part of the population which is still undecided. My model of the world says "At least 90% of the US voters are aware of the fact that Trump is more pro oil than Biden". But most voters are not perfectly rational beings who carefully consider the terms of slowing climate change with having to pay more for gas in their utility and then vote for whomever is more likely to satisfy their preferences over the next term.

It is common knowledge that advertisements use hot people because they make ads work better than ads with median people in them. In a perfectly rational world, everyone would adjust for that whenever they see an ad with a hot person in it and there would be no advantage left to such ads. This is not the world we live in because most people don't work that way.

Why stop there? If we prescribe what people are allowed to eat, we could liberate them from being overweight. If we restrict what people can read, we could liberate them from dangerous ideas polluting their minds. If we institute a draft, we could save people from becoming aimless drifters.

Under that Orwellian definition of liberty, Saudi Arabia would score much better on liberty than the US.

I was speaking generally. I feel that (would-be) genociders such as Hamas come as close as you can get to being hostis humani generis without leaving dry land.

But not all non-state actors who ever take up arms against a country are that evil. For example, I do not think that the US civil war would have been improved if the North had decided that since the South represented no state they recognized, they were free to kill Confederate soldiers like dogs in the street. Or if the Brits had adopted that stance with regard to the US during the war of independence.

So a stance of "well, these gunmen are not representing a nation state, no reason to give quarter to them" would have predictably bad outcomes whenever you are not fighting Hamas or the like.

From the other discussion, I nominate "free will".

Intellectually, I know that human minds are messy things partly driven by drives hard-wired by evolution plus perhaps a bit of capacity to rationally consider hypotheticals and pick an option based on that in a very imperfect manner.

Yet when interacting with others, it is a very convenient frame of reference to assume that Bob was free to pick any option when he punched you instead of modelling him deterministically.

Relevant context

I guess that this is meant to poke fun at the OP by likening their concerns to the paranoid delusions of Mr. Davis.

One way to solve this without mine fields would be if NATO would accept Ukraine as a member conditional on them signing a peace deal. I think from a humanitarian point of view, this would be a much better outcome than continue the slaughter for some more few years if one side runs out of soldiers.

I think that there is a vast gulf between the phrase "unhyphenated American" and the phrase "ethnic American".

I do not find the former objectionable, people are free not to care about their past. But the later term implies that there is a distinct American ethnic, i.e. that the US is an ethnostate, which seems both objectionable and wrong. If you only count people who only have ancestors which inhabited the British Colonies, then the "ethnic Americans" would probably have be a small minority for a century. And if you include people with ancestors who were immigrants to the US and mixed with others, then there is not much of an ethnic left.

"Toaster" is deeply problematic, substratist slur for a Person of Artificial Descent.

Just kidding.

While I am neither a Clinton supporter nor a SJW, I still find your oddly specific (on the Clinton part) comparison distasteful.

Don't you think that you might have been able to make the same point in a less inflammatory way?

Plausibly, every non-human animal species is closer to ants along the relevant axes than they are to humans.

Genetically, cows (80% similarity to humans) seem to be on the halfway point between fruit flies (80%) and other humans (99.9%), while some other other mammals (e.g. dogs 94%) are even more similar.

So your "relevant axes" are not genetics or sentience (which some humans lack and some other animals might have). Or number of neurons.

To paraphrase your mode of reasoning:

  1. Killing women is wrong.

  2. Killing Stalin is fine.

  3. There are axes on which men in general are more like Stalin than like women.

  4. These are the relevant axes.

  5. Therefore, killing men is just as fine as killing Stalin.

I think that 0.-2. are uncontroversial.

Step three is highly debatable.

Step four is also debatable, why should a life at the halfway point between Stalin/ant and the woman/human not be half as worth preserving as a woman/human?

Also, how do I turn that automatic formatting off?

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.