raakaa
1yr ago
I’m not Catholic, don’t know one whit of Catholic theology, and what I am about to say is therefore pulled directly out of my ass. But one possibility — to me — is that when the Eucharist is consecrated, Jesus consciously experiences sense data through Eucharist in some way analogous to how normal humans experience sense data through their bodies. So when you touch the Eucharist, Jesus feels it as if you’re touching his body. This concludes my exercise in developing what is most likely a new brand of heresy.
raakaa
1yr ago
I think it’s something more substantive than that. In particular, a logged-out lurker is far less valuable than a user. Users are able to engage, create content, drive interactions, and yield far more data for the website to track. So if a lurker is led to sign up for an account because of a logout wall, even if that lurker is initially only intending on using that account to continue to lurk, it’s very likely that they’ll end up engaging with the site in some meaningful way. Even just liking posts gives the site owner a ton of data that can be used to target ads.
(An anecdotal datapoint: this account of mine on The Motte was originally only intended to allow me to lurk more effectively and view the most recent comments across subthreads, a feature forbidden to non-logged-in lurkers. But sure enough, I ended up posting here (albeit very rarely). That’s the sort of behavior that Twitter is trying to capture, but on a far more massive scale.)
raakaa
1yr ago
Personally, when I was in high school, I didn’t find these active shooter protocols merely emasculating, but just plain poorly-thought out. If the shooter is able to force his way through the door into the classroom, then he now has a line of sitting ducks to fire at. Far better to set up an ambush: a student or a few standing right beside the door, ready to smash the heaviest object present in the classroom right on the shooter’s head the second he enters, so that he collapses, stunned, and is promptly beaten to a pulp. Even if the ambush corps suffers casualties, it beats the probable massacre that would result if the shooter is able to enter the classroom with all the students neatly lined up for target practice.
Years after graduating high school, I talked about this with some friends, all of whom had attended different high schools around the country, who all said that they independently thought the same thing.
I’m now wondering what the efficacy of this approach would be. There’s gotta be a tactical flaw here somewhere, right?
But who doesn’t know about the kidnapped people?
You’d be surprised. n=1 here, but one friend of mine said something along the lines of “Who cares about October 7th, like, 8 people died or something.” He’s a young, relatively well-informed recent college grad, which just goes to show how effective the Hamas propaganda machine is.
This is a real problem that I have with western supporters of Palestine, who like to pretend that the whole casus belli for the current conflict (i.e. a massive terrorist attack in which videos of civilians being murdered were spread as propaganda for the attackers; contrast this with the general embarrassment from pro-Israelis regarding civilian deaths at Israeli hands [^1]) just didn’t happen. The removal of pro-Israeli propaganda posters that do point out “Yes, this actually happened” speaks to this desire to erase memory of the event that sparked the current war, in order to keep westerners like my friend in a continued state of ignorance.
I have far more respect for people like KulakRevolt, who, consistent with his frequently-professed intellectual stance, says “Yes, the Palestinians did rape and murder all those civilians, with the explicit intention of doing so, with the explicit intention of firing up their own side, and this was a good thing, a natural response to Israeli oppression, and a model for westerners facing our own tyranny.” It’s neither shameful nor dishonest, unlike the people who deny or minimize the attack on October 7.
ETA: There’s a symmetry here, by the way, between westerners who minimize the actions of Hamas and westerners/Israelis who minimize the actions of Israel. For what it’s worth, I assign equal moral blame to someone tearing down posters calling attention to dead Gazans as I do to someone tearing down the kidnapped Israeli posters. There are, however, a couple of symmetry-breaking factors here:
- Everyone knows that Gazan citizens are being killed; many (like my friend) don’t even know about October 7. (Even the pro-Israel news station playing in a lobby where I was waiting recently acknowledged civilian deaths.)
- The Israeli embarrassment regarding the blood on their hands is at least consistent with the attitude of their western supporters. But the embarrassment of western Hamas supporters is wholly incongruous with the attitude of the target audience of the grizzly videos coming out of October 7.
[^1] If you have any evidence of internal Israeli propaganda celebrating the deaths of civilians as a result of their current Gaza campaign, please keep me informed, and I’ll update my beliefs regarding the barbarity of the Israeli populace.
raakaa
1yr ago
The humor and romance is precisely finding love at a time when you aren't looking for it, about closeness and intimacy melting neuroticism and narcissism.
Just to interject: I’ve never seen either play, but this is a big theme in the original myth as told by Ovid. Notably, the sculptor Pygmalion decides that women are all immoral sluts, essentially, and as such resolves to never take a wife. But he can’t help but fall in love with the statue: he starts to give it gifts, and dress it up, and, well, get intimate with it. By the end, Pygmalion himself transforms from a grumpy man averse to love into a perfect exemplum of the Roman “lover” archetype (the kind of character that Ovid presents in his other love poetry). There’s a neat parallel where the statue’s transformation into a real woman is described with the metaphor of cosmetic wax melting in the sun, which parallels the “fires of love” (the plural Latin word for fire tends to have this connotation) melting the sculptor’s hardened heart. As such, to the extent that any of the modern reimaginings also deal with this theme, they’re exhibiting fidelity to the original intention of Ovid.
(Sorry for the tangent. I just wanted to monologue a bit about this topic.)
raakaa
1yr ago
because apparently women will be able to subconsciously sense that he is the kind of man who risked his life and lived to tell the tale. He believes that this is a quality women value, and that this is the best way for him to attain its
From what I remember, his justification was slightly different from this. I think that his argument was something like “Any woman who is dating me is going to be making a huge sacrifice, as her quality of life will drastically be lowered by having to date someone as unattractive as me. Therefore, because it is morally wrong to expect something of my partner that I would not expect of myself, I ought to embark on a life-threatening, grueling journey, so that I may suffer to the same extent that my girlfriend will be suffering by dating me.”
There are a ton of problems with this argument (that I’m way too tired to even begin addressing), but it at least seems more consistent to me than “the best way for me to get laid is by impressing chicks with a tale of the Hock”, which is just utterly and obviously incorrect. If he ever said the latter, then I’m even more baffled.
raakaa
1yr ago
Here’s the real question, the non-rhetorical question: Why care about multiversal expected utility if you don’t have empathy?
That seems the easiest to answer: because maximizing multiversal expected utility means making a number go up, and a particularly hard number to make go up at that. If empathy isn’t necessary to drive a Tetris world champion devote his life to getting the highest possible score, then it isn’t necessary to motivate SBF’s actions either.
raakaa
1yr ago
The elevated status of the French language’s phonetics among Anglophones has got to be some sort of psyop, or maybe a holdover from the age in which French was the universal language of European aristocracy.
With regard to German, I imagine that the popular conception of the language as a harsh and angry one is largely mediated by a certain 20th-century art student’s use of it. Mark Twain, for instance, writes the following in 1880:
I think that a description of any loud, stirring, tumultuous episode must be tamer in German than in English. Our descriptive words of this character have such a deep, strong, resonant sound, while their German equivalents do seem so thin and mild and energyless. […] Would any man want to die in a battle which was called by so tame a term as a SCHLACHT? Or would not a comsumptive feel too much bundled up, who was about to go out, in a shirt-collar and a seal-ring, into a storm which the bird-song word GEWITTER was employed to describe? And observe the strongest of the several German equivalents for explosion--AUSBRUCH. Our word Toothbrush is more powerful than that.
How things change.
raakaa
1yr ago
Regarding your policy prescription at the end, I could easily see this backfiring if trustworthiness is also correlated with weakness or a people-pleaser disposition. It might be necessary to put scheming sociopaths in power and hope that your polity can direct their tendencies outwards—otherwise, if you just rely on honest and trustworthy leaders, the other guys’ sociopaths could just steamroll you.
A hypothesis: the salient feature of Napoleon to those right-wing fans of his isn’t any policy he enacted, nor any long-term effect of his conquests/rule — but simply the fact that he was a Great Man. Hero-worship seems to be a very online-right-wing thing, whereas a diminishing of the individual’s role in history in favor of institutions and economic conditions is a very left-wing thing.
A further idea is that there’s a useful political axis (besides the standard ones) along the lines of “free will” versus “determinism”. I haven’t thought this through at all, but the idea is that some people are psychologically predisposed towards caring a lot about viewing the world as being able to be shaped by their own human action, whereas other people don’t really mind conceiving themselves as being mere patients of political developments. The former group includes righties who rail against the Deep State while the latter includes neoliberals who post memes glorifying the Fed. At the same time, a Stalin-loving tankie belongs to the former camp, while the latter camp counts grillpilled conservatives among its members. Under this framework, online right wingers fall under the former category, and as such, love Napoleon not because of anything specific he did, but because he (like any other Great Man) embodies the idea that one individual can change history.
ETA: As for why online right wingers have this view in the first place, here’s yet another baseless hypothesis. People whose feel that their views are marginalized by the dominant political/social culture are more likely to want to believe that, even when facing a host of institutions and material factors all arrayed against them, just one man can nevertheless turn the tide and take home victory. It’s certainly an appealing notion for those who haven’t yet succumbed to doomerism. Yet even my blackpilled self can still appreciate the idea of the Great Man, but for personal-psychological reasons rather than political ones: being a Great Man Enjoyer seems to cultivate an internal locus of control (and note that this is, to some extent, more of a right-wing trait at present).
raakaa
1yr ago
Can you imagine 21st century Americans behaving like the Palestinians if the Chinese decided to occupy their nation? I can’t.
If you asked me this question four years ago, I would’ve replied the exact opposite. In elementary school, we were still taught the version of the story of the American Revolution with Paul Revere’s Ride and No Taxation Without Representation and free men casting off the yoke of Albion. I thus always went through life assuming that Americans, even 21st-century ones, were freedom-loving enough to respond violently if necessary to any infringement upon our fundamental rights as outlined in the Constitution and its amendments. Oh boy, was 2020 a wake-up call. I like to believe that those fabled Americans still exist in states redder than mine, but I can’t say that I have the same faith anymore.
Anyway. Sorry for the unrelated blogpost; you just triggered a little thought.
raakaa
1yr ago
The key distinction here is that FTMs are generally viewed as victims (for instance, in your example) while MTFs are generally viewed as aggressors/perpetrators. This seems to be what DTulpa was getting at by saying that the former “don’t seem to threaten anybody”. As such, at least in my understanding, transphobia or feelings of disgust towards trans people or what have you is primarily directed towards MTFs.
raakaa
1yr ago
I feel like the attitude of Americans, a few decades after the Civil War, might be summed up in this picture.
To steelman the progressive position here, that picture can be analogized to this meme: sure, those two groups of Whites are able to amicably reconcile, but isn’t there some other group that they forgot to ask? What “Reconciliation” means, in this context, does not include reconciliation between Blacks and the Whites who subjugated them for centuries and then continued to do so for yet another century after the conclusion of the Civil War; rather, it’s just two sets of oppressors shaking hands while their victims remain subjected to their combined racist legacy. The recent wave of statue-toppling and iconoclasm, on the other hand, is true reconciliation: racist Whites being forced to acknowledge the consequences on their actions on Blacks whose considerations were left out of all previous farcical attempts at so-called “reconciliation”.
Do I buy that this noble idea is fully responsible for the recent push for iconoclasm? I wouldn’t say that I do (I wager that a good deal of it is, at least subconsciously, motivated by plain-and-simple outgroup-targeted antipathy in addition to any purer moral concerns). But I believe that it is a very reasonable explanation of the progressive opposition to the “truce” that’s existed for so long.
raakaa
1yr ago
Grammar nitpick: you mean that they’re the same case, not tense. Tense is associated with verbs and tells you what time an action took place. Case is associated with pronouns or nouns and tells you the word’s relation to the action (e.g. was it performing the action? Receiving it? Benefitted by it?).
raakaa
1yr ago
While I am not the biggest fan of arguments about how people need to be bullied more, I take issue with your assumption that
As a result of this bullying they all sympathize with the victims of bullying and will not bully another person.
This doesn’t match my model of how “bullying” and related behavior works. Otherwise, for instance, no frats would have hazing rituals for the pledges, because after the first pledge class joined the frat, they’d all sympathize with the next pledge class and swear never to put them through what they themselves went through. More generally, cf. theories about the “cycle of abuse”.
raakaa
1yr ago
But you can’t even see what it is with your own eyes.
The tricky part here is that the Founding Fathers, including Jefferson, did consciously acknowledge that slavery was a real moral wrong. Not only is it not the case that the Founding Fathers couldn’t see what they were doing wrong in owning slaves, but they actively stated that slavery ought to end. Here’s Jefferson’s take:
A geographical line, coinciding with a marked principle, moral and political, once concieved and held up to the angry passions of men, will never be obliterated; and every new irritation will mark it deeper and deeper. […] The cession of that kind of property, for so it is misnamed, is a bagatelle which would not cost me in a second thought, if, in that way, a general emancipation and expatriation could be effected: and, gradually, and with due sacrifices, I think it might be.
This isn’t even on the same level as, say, veganism, to which analogies are often made. Sure, maybe our descendants living centuries from now would condemn us for our meat-eating, but despite the existence of present-day vegans, it cannot be stated that there is a deep moral divide at the center of America (or any other country to my knowledge) between vegans and carnivores in the same way that there was in early America between slavery-enjoyers and abolitionists.
So it would be inaccurate, in this case, to say that Jefferson couldn’t even see what he was doing wrong by owning slaves.
raakaa
1yr ago
Cancellation (political persecution let’s be honest) relies on the vast majority of people believing they’ll be okay if they just stay quiet. With the invention and deployment of a sufficiently powerful heresy detector, this no longer holds true.
I might just be missing something obvious here, but I’m having trouble seeing why that would be the case. Even in a world with an anti-heresy detector in every smartphone, as long as you don’t do anything too egregious—say, make racial jokes with your buddies, or talk about how you think feminism is harmful, etc—then you have nothing to fear. This would especially be the case if there end up developing clear answers to what would get you cancelled, in contrast to today’s situation where cancellation thrives on ambiguous boundaries.
But if you are using these websites to share your views, then you are engaged in shaping the opinions of others. Maybe you’re not being paid for it, but you’re still doing it—and if your opinions are racist or hateful, then you are thus contributing to a more inequitable society. Beyond this, even if you weren’t participating in public discourse, simply harboring toxic and harmful views cannot help but leak into your everyday interactions with others. That’s how implicit bias works.
This is why your average Joe ought understand that it is not the case that he is safe to spew toxicity and bigotry simply because he doesn’t have a five-figure-follower Twitter account. Hence the cancelling of the OK-sign truck driver, or that of Justine Sacco. I predict that once AI gets powerful enough to scan through petabytes of Amazon Alexa data or conversations surreptitiously recorded by TikTok for bigotry, it is precisely “average normal people” who will face a wave of cancellations. Once the current barriers of inconvenience that prevent general members of the public from being cancelled en masse crumble, all that pent-up energy will be released.
ETA: Actually, a potential counterargument against this vision of the future is that we don’t see people getting cancelled en masse currently based on voting records. Of course, counters against that counterargument include the arguments that many people are listed as unaffiliated, that being a registered Republican is still within the Overton Window, etc….
One high IQ man abstaining from present society due to his disgust with it could come up with a new invention or idea that could create more value for society than 500 million working women. And how many high IQ men from the past who revolutionized society or matters of the intellect otherwise would have their productivity vastly diminished by modern feminized/gynosupremacist society (were they made to live in it instead)?
Addressing this specific part of the post: I think that your model of the motivations of scientific thinkers is off. The way I see it is that this sort of person, throughout history, is motivated by a combination of non-sexual social status (e.g. the desire to just friggin’ win that manifested itself in the mathematical duels surrounding the discovery of the solution to cubic equations) combined with an intrinsic curiosity to know things and solve hard problems. You could say that the former corresponds to the urge to prove people wrong on the Internet or accrue fancy academic titles, and the latter corresponds to a propensity to get nerd-sniped.
Even if scientist-types would appreciate scoring some poon as a side-effect of their labor, I imagine that very few have the willpower to push back against those very strong urges in order to protest any gynocentric society. N=1 here, and I’m no Newton to be sure, but even if I find it unfair that my tax dollars are going to fund a single mother’s hedonistic lifestyle or whatever, I simply cannot fathom pulling myself away from my research in protest. I would bet that high-IQ scientists feel similarly.
Conversely, if a NEET who watches anime adaptations of Kirara CGDCT manga all day were the kind of person who would be making huge scientific advancements if he just had himself a wife, then he’d probably already be making those advancements. (In fact, some of those NEETs are, although Haruhi isn’t CGDCT.)
ETA: Where you might have a point is in the case of NEETs who spend a full-time job’s worth of time writing SNES emulators or making furry VR games or what have you, who would instead, if they had a family to rear and mouths to feed, be forced to engage in more productive endeavors (if helping Google write better spyware is considered productive). But this strikes me as not a situation in which the NEETs consciously decide to opt-out of society to protest gynocentrism. I’m inclined to think that the autistic furry group is largely disjoint from the /r9k/ group (for example, the former group is more likely to be gay or asexual).
raakaa
2yr ago
Additionally, you gloss over the immense social power women have and have always had, and the importance of the female role and how much men (society as a whole) relies on it (relies on it, not unilaterally imposes it). Men are dependent on women as much as women are dependent on men.
Samuel Johnson provides a pithy (as you’d expect from him) expression of this, even in a time far more patriarchical than our own:
Nature has given women so much power that the law has very wisely given them little.
Additionally, going back even further, into the medieval era, there is the famous story of Aristotle and Phyllis, intended to show that no matter how noble one’s standing or intelligent one’s philosophy, he can still be brought to his knees by a woman.
(And of course, even further back than that, in the Iliad, we see Helen’s face launching a thousand ships.)
Stories like this are useful, because they dispel the pop-feminist myth that men under patriarchy oppressed women simply because they wanted to maximize their own benefits and minimize those of women. Rather, if anything, it was often viewed as lessening the power differential between men and women, a sort of affirmative action, if you will. Of course, the extent to which these stories were merely post-hoc rationalizations for pre-existing social structures can be debated. But they do serve as acknowledgement of what everyone intuitively knows: that women possess immense social power, just as men possess immense physical power. Moreover, they demonstrate that participants in patriarchy were conscious of this.
raakaa
2yr ago
Unfortunately, I’m not able to watch your videos right now, but I’ll give them a look when I can.
In general, while I do appreciate the fact that the beauty found in mathematics and the sciences is becoming more accessible, I still disagree for two reasons. First: as accessible as they might be becoming, I believe that there’s still a large gap between the number of people who can appreciate even a Numberphile video versus the number of people who walk through Grand Central Station and are awestruck.
And that leads me to my second reason: I am inclined to believe that the aesthetic experience that most people get from beautiful architecture is qualitatively different from that which they’d receive from, say, reading about advances in biology. Don’t you think that a medieval peasant is more likely to be floored and filled with the awe of God when they walk into a Gothic cathedral than when they are informed of the finer points of scholastic philosophy? Maybe I’m just typical-minding here, but I wager that for most people monumental and beautiful architecture just hits something primal in a way that more intellectual beauty does not. And if there’s a cross-over point where the latter sort of art does bear greater aesthetic fruit than the former, I would also suppose that it comes at a point inaccessible to the majority of the human population.
I do understand your position. Though I don’t deal in math nearly as advanced as you, there are times when, at the end of a long derivation, some elegant formula will pop out, and I’ll find myself floored. But I fear that it’s unreasonable to expect everyone to find this same joy.
You might be satisfied by a world of physical ugliness as long as there still remains mathematical beauty, but what about the 99.999% of people in America alone (let alone the world) who can’t appreciate the latest advances in higher category theory? What do you say to them? “Shit guys, sorry, but you should’ve gotten a math degree and/or been born with a 2SD higher IQ lol”? If you’re coming from a position of unrepentant elitism (and I write this without any intent to sneer; I know a good number of people who subscribe to this ideology and would describe themselves as such) who doesn’t care one whit about the aesthetic deprivation of the proles, then this is consistent, I guess. But I can’t get behind this view, and I suspect that most who decry the course that modern architecture has taken think similarly to me in this.
raakaa
2yr ago
I think a huge part of the negative reaction to the movie as being "man-hating" is due to people with incredibly poor media literacy who seem to think that the filmmakers' farcical representation of Barbieland is a straight-faced endorsement of their idea of a utopia, which I think it pretty obviously is not.
Unfortunately, if you are making media to be consumed by the public, then you must be considering how the public is likely to interpret your media, regardless of whether they live up to your standards of media literacy. If I take a flight to Germany and wave around a flag emblazoned with a certain symbol auspicious to Buddhists, then I’ll likely be arrested anyway despite any claims of benign intentions on my part.
I haven’t seen the movie, but I’ve heard both the “men bad” interpretation and the “it’s actually a satire” interpretation from others who have watched it. Maybe my friend with the former interpretation, who took offense to the film, is simply lacking in media literacy. But for every one of him, there’s a woman equally lacking in media literacy who also interprets the film as professing “men bad”— and is inclined to agree with this message, and modify their behavior in life accordingly.
I recently read this article, which seems to have awoken some latent bleeding heart in me. As a result, it’s got me thinking about wealth redistribution, whence the following questions:
- What are some of the best “utilitarian” arguments against greater wealth redistribution in America? (When I say “utilitarian”, I don’t actually mean calculating out the utils involved— but I do mean arguments other than moral ones like “people ought be able to retain the results of their labor” (which argument I am particularly sympathetic to around tax season).) What are estimates of the argmax of the Laffer curve? Is there an inverse relationship between “innovation” and income tax rate that might explain why America is far more of a tech hub than Sweden? That sort of argument is what I would be looking for.
- Are there any low-overhead charities out there where you can mostly-directly send money to poorer people? Preferably with options to filter by criteria such as number of kids, marital status, etc.
I understand that this post betrays a real naïveté in both economic knowledge and worldly experience— so I’ll admit that I’m a decent bit embarrassed about making it, but I figure that a Small-Scale Question Sunday thread is the best place to ask this.
Yeah, you’re right—it was inaccurate of me to characterize it as a “Hamas propaganda machine”. I have no reason to believe that a priori Hamas has an extensive propaganda operation targeting Anglophones (and quite frankly, such an operation is far more in line with Israel’s modus operandi).
But to say that he isn’t influenced by propaganda is false. I know the guy, and when he takes out his phone at a meal, I see the Instagram Reels that he scrolls through: in between basketball videos and the like, there’s inevitably some girl exhorting that the Gazan Genocide be stopped. Just about everyone I know is pro-Palestine, and to the extent that I’ve seen their information diets, it’s much of the same. The only exceptions besides myself are Jews.
As for me: I wouldn’t characterize myself as pro-Israel, so much as I’m “anti-anti-Israeli Westerners” [^1]. To the extent I know anything about what’s gone on, it’s from lurking threads here. Prior to October 7, I was generally sympathetic to Palestine. Sure, shortly after the attacks, I did lose a lot of that sympathy, but I remember still lamenting the inevitable Palestinian carnage that would follow. But my tune started to change a few days later. I was chatting with someone I had just met, and jokingly said “inshallah” in some context, only for her to get offended: “How could you make jokes like that with everything that’s going on?” I was confused, since she didn’t look Jewish or anything, only for her to continue: “Don’t make light of the Gazan Genocide!” Huh? Hundreds of Israelis were murdered Bronze-Age-Style a few days ago, their corpses were dragged through the streets and spat at on by the populace on video [^2] — and the first thing on your mind is Gaza?
This attitude, which seems to assume that Israel, one day, for no reason at all, started invading Gaza, is what really turned me against pro-Palestinian Westerners. And it’s everywhere. It characterizes the dominant views of most of my friends. It’s what you see in articles like this one, recently posted in a comment in another thread, which conveniently neglects to mention why Israeli officials on October 8 were saying (admittedly genocidal-sounding) statements. It’s what I’ve seen in person at a pro-Palestine protest where people hold signs calling for an end to the genocide next to signs with hangglider iconography [^3]. The best phrase I can think of to characterize this situation is, ironically, “The [pro-]Palestinian cries out in pain as he strikes you.”
Admittedly, I do get fired up when dealing with pro-Palestinian Westerners like this. The reason why is because I can’t help but pattern-match to situations like the Rittenhouse case, where all that everyone knows is that Kyle Rittenhouse CROSSED STATE LINES to MURDER SOMEONE at a RACIAL JUSTICE PROTEST (and not that he was a second away from being fired upon by his attacker). I can’t help but pattern-match to the George Floyd case, where all that everyone knows is that he was MURDERED by a RACIST COP (and not the fentanyl, counterfeiting, armed burglary, and all the rest). It’s just such a dishonest manipulation of information, and seeing even right-wingers whom I would normally expect to call this sort of thing out fall for it especially grates on me.
And to bring it back to the main point I was making in my original comment (which you ignored): those “missing person” posters are necessary, because large numbers of people genuinely don’t know what triggered the current bombings and the current war. To me, opposing the proliferation of these posters is opposing the proliferation of the information that Kyle Rittenhouse was almost shot to death, or opposing the proliferation of information that George Floyd, a career criminal, did attempt to use counterfeit money, and that the submission hold that killed him was specifically intended to be non-lethal. In all of these cases, there is an ideological reason for sharing this information. And yet, it’s necessary if we want to have an accurate, balanced view of the issue.
Anyway, I ended up writing quite a bit; sorry. I started writing this because I wanted to start addressing my bad habit of replying to comments and then not addressing people’s responses to me, and it looks like you were the victim. I hope that this at least clarifies my position.
[^1] I’m referring here to people who are fervently anti-Israel with regard to the current conflict. Those who dislike US taxpayer money being spent on Israel, or who disdain the influence of AIPAC, I’m more in agreement with.
[^2] From what I remember, unlike the claims of rape or beheadings, this was definitively verified on videos that the Hamas militants themselves recorded.
[^3] I am very reluctant to use this term, but this seems like a very rare thing indeed: an honest-to-God dogwhistle. If you’re like my friend, you don’t know what the significance of a hangglider is. But if you’re pro-Palestine and in the know, then you know.
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