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
1yr ago
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:
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Killing women is wrong.
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Killing Stalin is fine.
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There are axes on which men in general are more like Stalin than like women.
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These are the relevant axes.
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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?
quiet_NaN
1yr ago
I think judging animals (including humans) by there cognitive capability is a valid approach. Peter Singer does this in Practical Ethics.
I am, however, not convinced that the newborn has all that much cognitive advantage over the chicken. Still, I would object to factory farming a third trimester fetus or newborn as well.
quiet_NaN
1yr ago
Of course we are haggling over the price, it is the way of utilitarianism.
Just like we all are deciding to draw the line between personal hedonism and morally abhorrent behavior. Some people might not read a book at night to save electric energy, and some people might be okay with hunting humans for sport, but most of us fall somewhere in the boring middle ground.
quiet_NaN
1yr ago
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?
quiet_NaN
7mo ago
I think there is a lot of grey area between "two recognized countries are fighting a war" and "internal police action". There are civil wars, insurgencies, non-state actors operating out of failed states and all other sorts of corner cases. An occupation requires a hostile army, which I guess requires a state-like entity to which they are hostile. I don't think an army being in some territory where some fraction of the population would rather they were not (which is every army, everywhere) is probably not sufficient.
Also, if something is a human rights violation is somewhat in the eye of the beholder. It is not like the Hague will deploy paratroopers to stop any human rights violation happening within 24 hours.
Politically speaking, if by some miracle Gaza was a recognized independent state, do you think that the people currently protesting that explosion in a hospital parking lot which they assume IDF caused would switch their stance and say "well, I suppose article 51 gives Israel the right to nuke Gaza after being attacked"?
quiet_NaN
7mo ago
I don't think genocide would happen (the world would step in)
The track record of the world stepping in to prevent genocide is not actually that great. If the world is stepping in, it would be before Israel is defeated.
I have no doubt that Hamas would do their best to genocide Israeli citizens if they had the power to do so.
quiet_NaN
7mo ago
I agree.
As an intuition pump, suppose the Germans started using the first stanza of the Deutschlandlied again, which contains the lines
Von der Maas bis an die Memel,
Von der Etsch bis an den Belt,
(See here for where these rivers run.)
Given the German history in the last century, I do not think that most of our European neighbors would view this as a call to charm them into ceding substantial parts of their territory out of their goodness of heart. They would clearly and correctly interpret it as a call to drown Europe in recidivist warfare again.
The history between the Palestinians longing for their own state and Israel is no less bloody than the one which lead to the current borders of Germany. Hamas, one of the most influential Palestinian organization which also happens to subscribes to the "river to the sea" territorial claim gave the world a clear taste of the means they prefer to accomplish their goal. While they thankfully don't have a realistic path to victory, I am not aware of any Palestinian group whose strategy is to charm Israel into ceding all of their territory to a Palestinian nation state out of their goodness of heart. I fully expect the Israelis would defend the existence of their state until their last soldier and nuke.
Under these circumstances, I see little semantic difference between “Palestine shall be free from the river to the sea” and "Go Hamas, drive the Jews into the sea!"
(Another debatable point would be the concept of a "free" nation state. As a person without strong nationalist sentiments (a trait I likely share with the wokes parroting the slogan), I think this is a curious choice of adjective. I suppose states like Afghanistan or North Korea would qualify as "free", because their despotic rulers are not beholden to any foreign power, while Scotland, Texas or Bavaria are not because they are part of larger states. If one focuses on personal freedom, the most free Palestinians in the Middle East are Israelis (because they are (2nd class) citizens of a western democracy) and the least free are Gazans (because they are ruled by Islamists (who in my experience are not great at respecting gender identities) who clearly place their suicidal terrorism over the welfare of their subjects.)
quiet_NaN
7mo ago
I think it is uncontroversial ones behavior can affect ones chances to be victimized. If you leave your bike unlocked in a city, you don't deserve to get it stolen: the thief wronged you as much as if you had locked the bike. Of course one never has control over all the circumstances, sometimes a thief might break into your garage and steal your bike despite it being locked down.
The same applies to rape and false rape accusations. What really bugs me is the text:
she might need to, for the defense of her reputation, say, “He raped me.”
I feel that is a bit too much sympathy for a criminal. If we turned the genders around, the text might read:
However, if he is really sexually frustrated, he might need to release that frustration by raping you.
Both of these versions excuse something which is inexcusable.
Also, just as date-rapists generally don't have "DATA-RAPIST" tattooed on their forehead, the face tattoo "CRAZY" is equally uncommon. In my experience, "just have sex with one of the five certified sane, sober girls who have been trying to flirt with you all evening" would probably not capture the reality of the median guy looking to get laid.
quiet_NaN
6mo ago
While the main reasons for the direct neighbors were already mentioned (Muslim Brotherhood, civil war, attacks on Israel which invite reprisals), for the bigger well established, oil-rich Muslim countries further away from Israel, one reason might be that they see the Gazans as a welcome thorn in Israels side. You would think that the Iranian or Qatari leadership, if they really cared about that Palestinians being subjected to "war crimes", the first thing they would do would be to open their borders to refugees. Instead, they sponsor Hamas.
quiet_NaN
6mo ago
I would contest that probability. From my understanding, there is no confirmed case of a plush octopus used to signal antisemitism.
Basically anything can be a dog whistle. If there was a pound note or anything related to money in the background, they would claim that it was related to claims that the Jews controlled global finance. If it was a plush wolf, people would point out that the Nazis named lot of things after wolves. If it was a German Shepard plushy, that is obviously a reference to Hitler's dog. A goblin is /obviously/ just a stereotype of a Jewish person, so a Harry Potter book would be Problematic. Gas stoves are dog whistles for pro Holocaust positions. The signs in the photo were not written in Fraktur, just like the Nazis got rid of Fraktur. They are also written in English, a Germanic (!) language. Of course, England expelled the Jews at some point, so this is a clear call for the Jews to be expelled from both the UK and Israel. Any visible number which contains the digit sequence 18 or 88 is also antisemitic.
If Greta had placed her plushy on a globe, then I would concede that there is a significant probability that this is meant as a homage to Nazi caricatures. As it is, the octopus is the most unobjectionable part of the picture.
quiet_NaN
6mo ago
TL;DR: at the moment, "free Palestine" is to me way more objectionable than any plushy short of Hitler.
In politics, timing is everything. If Greta had posted that picture before the Hamas attacks, I would have thought it much more acceptable. (Discuss: which is more of a lost cause: limiting global warming to 1.5K or creating a Palestinian state.) To post a "free Palestine" picture so soon after the Hamas attack strongly indicates a causal chain between the attacks and the picture. I strongly oppose rewarding terrorists with attention for their cause.
Hamas, the government of Gaza, has just proven what they prefer to do with what little independence they have. This is literally the worst time to demand more freedom of Palestine in decades.
I think if people on the same side of an issue as yourself commit atrocities on such a scale, that is a great time to shut the fuck up about that issue for a while. "Free Palestine" with or without the "river to the sea" bit (the latter explicitly calling for the destruction of Israel, the former just implicitly demanding it because an independent Palestine would very likely try to conquer Israel) is the explicit goal of Hamas. If you ride on the wave of attention brought by terrorists, don't be surprised if people claim your are doing PR for the terrorists.
Of course, political protests strictly against the Israel response are acceptable.
- "Don't bomb Gaza"
- "Forgive and forget"
- "Restore water for Gaza"
all do not push (much) beyond the status quo.
quiet_NaN
6mo ago
Last time I checked, the IDF was fighting with assault rifles and the like, not sticks and stones.
If you get hit with an assault rifle, there will be little difference if the shooter was a man, woman or child.
I think it would be sensible to tie commando roles to physical ability, which would make them overwhelmingly male, but sometimes you just want a warm body with a rifle.
Child soldiers exist, and likely are on average weaker than adult women. If they were very ineffective (like one adult male being as effective as ten of them) African warlords would likely prefer to use their limited amount of weapons to arm adults (even though they are harder to control).
And if you go to complex weapon systems, the male advantage gets even smaller. Even if there was some inherent male advantage to steering drones or driving trucks, you likely have so many drones and trucks that you will look for "ok" and not "best of the best" when hiring.
I do not share your intuition that women are more likely to surrender in life-threatening situations. Especially when the enemy is Hamas, where the only sex difference in a surrender outcome is that they might rape women before they kill them.
quiet_NaN
6mo ago
Most people are scope insensitive. If Hitler killed only half as many Jews, do you think he would be any more popular with the survivors?
If Israel killed 5000 Gazans instead of the 500 Hamas claimed they killed in that one instance, do you suppose that ten times as many Muslims would protest?
Like The_Nybbler said, Western response is one constraint on genocide. Another is that violence begets violence. If Israel turned Gaza into a parking lot, that would technically solve their Hamas problem. It would also change how the West Bank and Israeli Palestinians would feel about them and the prospect of peaceful coexistence. They might even face violent opposition from the liberal Jewish population. Unless they are willing to go full Macbeth and just murder their way into some totalitarian theocracy, they would be in a worse spot than where they started out.
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
6mo ago
I agree that the label "conspiracy theory" carries a connotation of "only an idiot would believe that".
Apart from the label, there is still the epistemic issue of assigning probabilities to various claims about the world.
quiet_NaN
6mo ago
Regarding 23 (J6), generally, there is a difference between a mob which might be somewhat inclined to violence and a riot. Without agents provocateur, a situation might nor might not ignite. The Asch conformity experiments are a thing, it takes a lot less courage/stupidity to be the third person to scale a barrier or throw a rock or smash a window than it does for the first.
Regarding 26, proponents of that theory can easily salvage the theory by claiming that these chips transmit bio-data not available from the victims mobiles.
quiet_NaN
6mo ago
Of course, it would not have been in the short-term interests of the current Israeli administration to do so, so it was not going to happen.
I agree that this over-determined the Israeli response. "Hamas breaks out of Gaza and attacks Israeli citizens" is not exactly the type of black swan event as "Jihadists crash planes into the WTC". So Hamas did not only commit their atrocities, but they also showed up the Israeli administration (which has security as a big part of their platform, I think) and their intelligence services and military which failed to stop them.
Under these circumstances, the people involved in deciding whether to invade are unlikely to decide that it is in Israels best long term interests not to do so.
quiet_NaN
6mo ago
Or is it simply advocating for a coexisting independent Palestine in both the West Bank (river) and Gaza (sea)
I think "from ... to" would imply a continuous state, so at the best this is asking for a corridor. Realistically, it is a call for replacing all of Israel with a Palestinian state, in which Jews might or might not be safe (realistically the latter).
Slogans need to be evaluated in a cultural context. When Hoffmann von Fallersleben wrote "Deutschland ueber alles", it was very possible that he meant that as a call to create a German nation state. However, this slogan had a very different interpretation when some Germans tried to conquer the world. Anyone singing that post-1945 can hardly claim that he means the innocent interpretation and not a call for world conquest.
Likewise, Hamas has their interpretation for what "the river to the sea" means, and has recently focused a lot of attention on the Palestinian cause with their atrocities. Using that slogan only weeks after their bloodbath and claiming that one means the goal of a state where Jews and Palestinians live in peace and friendship is basically asking to be excused on grounds of insanity.
Other than that, I mostly share your assessment. I would perhaps have emphasized a bit more how the far-right-coalition of Netanyahu with it's policy of slowly annexing the West Bank was not helping the peace process or him previously not focusing on Hamas so that that they would form a counterweight to the PLO/Fatah has now spectacularly backfired, but this is mostly because I hold Western countries like Israel to a higher standard (with great GDP comes great responsibility, and all that). I would prefer to live in Bibi's Israel to living in a Palestine run by the likes of Hamas any day of the week.
I really enjoy your podcast, btw. Keep up the good work!
quiet_NaN
6mo ago
I think that in many fictional narratives, the correlation between being the good guy and being the underdog is high. "David kills Goliath" is a story, "David becomes the 35th person to be killed by Goliath" is not. Hence Frodo vs Sauron, Harry vs Voldemort, Asterix vs the Romans. Of course, in reality, the correlation between good guy and underdog is, to the first approximation, zero.
quiet_NaN
6mo ago
I think pre-committing to orthogonal violence is sometimes rational. Response nuclear strikes in mutually assured destruction are purely orthogonal violence: you destroyed our cities, therefore we destroy your cities. The point is not that the decision is reasonable once the nukes are approaching you, but that being a country which responds tit-for-tat will make it less likely that you are nuked in the first place. Just have enough Petrovs to avoid any false-positives.
Ideally, such orthogonal violence remains counterfactual.
I also agree that there are circumstances where the best you can do is to scratch the enemy with whatever resources you've got. My go to example is the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. If the enemies plan is to send your family to Auschwitz, it is entirely permissible to turn your family into weapons which are supposed to hurt the enemy in the process. Under such circumstances, I would be okay with turning children into suicide bombers if they would otherwise be killed in the gas chambers.
The big difference between the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto and the Gazans is that the latter group do not face a genocide. Most of the hardships of the Gazans is a consequence of decisions of their leadership. If you find yourself being an inmate in an asylum, it might strike you as a good idea to attack the orderlies, giving them a black eye in the process. Unfortunately, this will end up with you in a straight jacket, which will lower your quality of life a lot more than the black eye you gave the orderly. If you then proceed to kick, bite and headbutt, the main thing which will change is that you will have more and more constraints. This is the situation Gaza finds itself in. (Of course, this metaphor glosses over the differences in interest between the Gazans and Hamas. Hamas has every interest in turning Gaza into hell on earth, because flourishing people make bad Jihadists.)
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
6mo ago
The pasted content would IMHO be ban-worthy in a comment, and the original content by the author seems rather low effort. I think in the ratsphere, when encountering a baseless claim, it is customary not to dismiss it with another baseless claim, but actually cite sources. If the OP had cut the citation two one or two sections and actually put in the work to source their counterclaims, this might be a good faith post. Well, unlike previously "critically cited" sites linked from the OP, at least ZHPL was linked by SSC in 2019 back when they were not an Alex Jones imitation. Still, this drivel is unlikely to spark any good-faith discussions.
If the OP spent equal effort to elaborately "critically" cite stuff from other political corners than the extreme right (say Hindu extremism, or anorexia boards or Putin fans or whatever), this would be some Bayesian evidence that they are not in it for posting the extreme right content.
quiet_NaN
6mo ago
Of course there is a big difference here - modern progressive censorship and propaganda is not(at least not directly state-based) it emerges from a self organizing space of intellectuals who are very close to each other ideologically, but this is not very important to me personally if the outcome in the media that we consume is the same.
I think it makes a world of a difference. Contrary to common belief, Netflix, Disney and Marvel is not an exhaustive list of the cultural palette available in the western world. While it is true that the big productions cater to the wokes, you have also access to countless hours of movies which were made in the last century and are not particularly woke by modern standards. It is not like TNG is blacklisted because it does not have enough openly gay characters. Even in recent and big productions, I think that there are quite a few which are not terribly filled with woke ideas. I don't think there was a very high concentration of gay characters or racial justice themes in either "The Man in the High Castle" or "Game of Thrones". I don't think either got Cancelled over not being on message enough.
Personally, I can deal with some catering to the wokes just fine. Season one of "The Last of Us" had this rather sentimental gay couple episode, but I don't think I would have liked it better if it was a straight couple. "American Gods" had that "Vulcan's town of cracy gun nuts" episode, which basically hit you over the head with their political message, but whatever.
For award-winning SF&F literature, I think nowadays you earn points by being good and by being woke. The implication there is that among award winners, there could be a negative statistical correlation between being woke and being good. All else being equal, I would thus rather read the book whose Wikipedia "critical reception" section does not mention it being praised for racial justice or LGBT themes in the first sentence, even though I have enjoyed stories with non-binary main characters before.
Replace human with ingroup and (non-human) animal with outgroup, and you see a patten of thought which has been used to justify all sorts of stuff we today regard as horrible.
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