roystgnr
11mo ago
Similar institutions, even. The Nation, October 2001, "blowback".
brought 9/11 on themselves.
The English language really needs to deprecate phrasing that can be interpreted as either attribution of causal influence or attribution of blame. It's possible for "X's actions made Y more likely" to be obviously true in cases where "X's actions made Y morally acceptable" is obviously false. Round them both up to "true" and you may find yourself excusing atrocities; round them both down to "false" and you may find yourself ignoring ways to reduce atrocities. But how easy is it not to lump such claims together when we can barely speak about them distinguishably?
roystgnr
11mo ago
What percentage of people do you think would agree with both "decades of harsh occupation and blockade are awful" and "decades of harsh occupation and blockade do not justify terror bombing or massacres of civilians"? I'd think that those would both be supermajority positions, but it certainly seems that the people who speak most loudly about the problem tend to drop one claim or the other.
the strong feelings aroused by clips of civilians getting killed and women's bodies paraded around on cars
Inducing strong feelings is the whole reason why the murderers are performing the killing and the parading while filming clips of it, right? Nobody was thinking "we'd love to capture one more APC, but we can't spare the soldiers because the bomb shelters and music festival are more strategically significant military targets". If they're mispredicting exactly which strong feelings are induced, that's at least partly on them, though it's still tragic that innocent Palestinians will suffer for it too.
roystgnr
11mo ago
Applying civil rights to "a civilization" is a category error; the people within each civilization are the ones who deserve the civil rights.
We're not quite 20 years out from the leak of photos which "show torture, abuse, rape and every indecency" among the abuses at Abu Ghraib, which included women. The people to blame for that abuse didn't deserve all their civil rights afterward, and to its credit the US legal system generally agreed (albeit with prison sentences of months to less than a decade at most...), but it would have been wildly excessive to spread such a high level of blame around to every American in the same civilization.
Ironically, collective punishment is itself a war crime, and its classification as such is one of the things we like to think distinguishes us from barbarians. That's perhaps still more of an aspiration than an accomplishment at this point, but so much the worse for our "civilization".
roystgnr
11mo ago
How many supply chains depend on Chinese parts at this point? If you can't buy a $25 drill/driver because Harbor Freight stops getting shipments of them from China, that's fine; the $50 drill is worth it anyway. If you can't buy a $25K car or get a job assembling $25K cars because the assembly lines got throttled down while they figured out how to re-source a bunch of little @$25 parts shipped from China, that could be a giant pain.
roystgnr
11mo ago
Only a slim majority of Democrats in last week's Reuters/Ipsos poll, 52%, supported helping arm Ukraine. Support among Republicans was down at 35%.
This kind of thing is incredibly sensitive to question phrasing and context and such, though. A poll last month reported 77% and 50% support levels. Questions about economic assistance are pretty much in line with questions about military assistance.
roystgnr
11mo ago
That's an large and important distinction, but even here I'd point out that a "culture" isn't a homogeneous thing. You don't pose for thousands of photos of something you expect to keep secret from everybody; you do so because you can observe you're part of a subculture, large enough to control a prison with several thousand prisoners, which assents to the photo contents. Turned out the assent wasn't universal enough to stop photos from leaking, which is another point in our culture's favor, I admit. The fact that Hamas fighters don't expect to be knifed in their sleep by any lone-wolf ashamed countrymen, much less put on trial and jailed as war criminals by a majority in power, isn't a point in theirs'.
roystgnr
11mo ago
Thank you for correcting my mistaken insinuation. I was intending to point out the magazine more than the specific author, but I did just assume they'd be in sync. I should have known better than to assume that someone (relatively!) isolationist must be leftist for writing about it in a progressive magazine; unpopular politics (and standing on those principles at that time wasn't too popular) make strange bedfellows.
roystgnr
11mo ago
Is Egypt assisting with the Mediterranean side of the blockade? There seems to be an significant difference between a "you can't travel through our territory" policy and a "you can't travel anywhere" policy.
roystgnr
11mo ago
Did Duranty praise the purges as they occurred, or did he just praise some sanitized version of them that he credulously swallowed? Honest question; after learning about his shameful Pulitzer I've never been motivated to seek out his later reporting.
Though I'm not at all a fan of the man, even with his most damnable reporting I know about, the thesis was "there's no Holodomor", never "the Holodomor is totally awesome!" I know the Law of Merited Impossibility ("it'll never happen, and when it does you'll deserve it") is a thing, but humanity isn't universally that awful, so I think it's still a huge disappointment when someone transitions from the first to the second half rather than properly reexamining their beliefs instead. Not every mistaken person is evil too.
roystgnr
11mo ago
I know I shouldn't let myself be swayed further by an argument's rhetoric than by it's logic, but Michael Shermer really found a damning framing supporting your point.
I'm still solidly "Collective punishment is bad", but I have to admit: if we could mete out omnisciently accurate individual punishment, some collectives might have a much larger fraction of punished individuals than others...
roystgnr
11mo ago
Soviets were clearly stagnating in hindsight, but at the time? Direct comparisons were few and far between, and the people who had a chance to make them certainly seemed surprised enough.
"Even the Politburo doesn't have this choice. Not even Mr. Gorbachev," [Yeltsin] said. When he was told through his interpreter that there were thousands of items in the store for sale he didn't believe it. He had even thought that the store was staged, a show for him.
...
He told his fellow Russians in his entourage that if their people, who often must wait in line for most goods, saw the conditions of U.S. supermarkets, "there would be a revolution."
The Soviets didn't even manage to send people to the moon, but until they were at the brink of dissolution they also didn't even admit they had been trying. Walter Cronkite even bought the Soviet line, ''It turned out there had never been a race to the Moon.'' The fact that Soviet lunar lander hardware and a Saturn-V-scale launcher had ever existed was only revealed decades later, by accident.
roystgnr
11mo ago
It's socially-policing those who support it immediately after a terrorist attack.
It's not even just that! There are a number of standard pro-Palestine viewpoints in that message, but "Israel bears full responsibility for this tremendous loss of life." isn't a middle-of-the-road pro-Palestine viewpoint, it's a pro-Hamas-massacring-civilians-without-consequences viewpoint. Merely pointing out Israel's past wrongdoing with such timing might have been tasteless, but excusing Hamas' wrongdoing is what crossed the line to outright evil.
But as long as I'm in @MelodicBerries ' thread:
explain why making anti-White statements rarely carry punishments but going against Jewish interests does.
My hypothesis would be that anti-White statements of this magnitude and timing aren't nearly so common (or perhaps even existent) among people in the "head of a broad public first-world organization" category. In the wake of that Las Vegas festival massacre, was there anyone like a student bar association president who said "Well, country music fans, you know they had it coming" but got away with that?
I'm not generally thrilled with the way "safety" gets used as a buzzword to cancel people, but there are "safety" fears where your potential coworker might say mean words in the office, and then there are safety fears where your potential coworker believes innocent blood is a good way to terrorize their enemies and you can't help but notice that you happen to be filled with conveniently located blood.
I'm sure this person has a history of anti-White statements (that is usually the case with black progressives).
Were any of these statements (which I'll presume you read, because just making that sort of thing up has no place here, right?) as bad as excusing mass murder while the bodies are still being counted? If so, then your ethnic bias theory would deserve another look. But if not, then I hope you'll reexamine the "terrorist massacres are especially bad" theory and figure out why (a different direction of ethnic bias, perhaps?) it wasn't as easy as it should have been to come up with that theory on your own.
roystgnr
11mo ago
I certainly do; right after my last child was born. My wife was unconscious and not in the maternity room, but when I read that the emergency life-saving procedures she was undergoing still had about a 1% failure (i.e. death) rate I was more afraid than I've ever been.
one which is increasing
The fear seems to be increasing even as the risk decreases. Today the maternal mortality rate is 1/10000 for most people and a spike up to 1/100 is a rare emergency "crash cart" situation. The death rate from childbirth used to be around 1/100 for everyone, and somehow humanity just put up with that. My wife totally would have; she's much braver than me. Before the incident we'd already decided on permanent contraception to stop at three kids; she now regrets not rolling the dice for a fourth.
roystgnr
11mo ago
Those are good examples, logically; I just doubt that public reaction is "logical but philo-semitic", I think it's "emotional". Jewish-Americans are classified as white, and average older than other white Americans, so they were also getting burned by the same policy.
You could argue that the issue is just that killing tens/hundreds of thousands through healthcare policy is much less dramatic that killing thousands through direct violence, even when the healthcare policy is explicitly racially motivated.
I think I'd have to. You're right that that policy was a heinous crime, but it's the sort of crime whose magnitude can only be reasonably grasped through statistics, rather than through video of screaming bloody women being kidnapped and festivals strewn with bodies.
Heinous crimes in healthcare regulation, from a logical standpoint, are a dime a dozen, and nobody seems to do anything about most of them. The FDA dragged its feet on approving beta-blockers for a decade, with something like a hundred thousand deaths in that time of people who could have lived years longer, and I think literally the only person I've seen vociferously complain about it was David Friedman, a source with negligible popularity.
COVID healthcare decisions were an especially weird instance of this. Pfizer changed its vaccine test protocols from their original design to avoid examining the results until after the election, with no better public reason than "er, we were kinda nervous" handwaving, in the face of public demands that they not give "the Trump vaccine" a big high-profile win right before people went to the polls ... and this time I think the biggest champion of "shouldn't we have gotten a bigger head start and saved tens of thousands more lives" was Steve Sailer, a source with negative popularity. When half the public seemed to think that the vaccines are a deadly big Pharma scam, and the other half of the public seemed to think that they're magic spells from technocrat experts (Biden said flat-out "You’re not going to get Covid if you have these vaccinations" during the Delta wave; even the original tests were only 90% effective!), is it really so surprising that nobody was rising up to complain that the technocrat experts were making mistakes allocating vaccine doses?
roystgnr
11mo ago
I thought you had to be joking, so I did a quick search to find sample questions. Four choices in the multiple choice, and among the first four sample questions I pulled up there's one homophone mistake and one typo. Please someone tell me "officialasvab.com" is actually unofficial and I should have gone to some sort of "asvab.gov"?
roystgnr
11mo ago
Do you have a citation for that? It wouldn't surprise me, but when I went to look for details it seemed like there were dozens of articles about EU assistance and nothing about Israeli assistance.
roystgnr
11mo ago
The first one actually impressed me more than the second so far
The second had much better characterization; the first a much better plot. I liked the gameplay of the first (except the Mako parts) equally or better, but IIRC most people disagree with me.
I think Shamus Young (RIP) had the best discussion textbook about the quality changes throughout the trilogy. [edit: probably should have loaded other replies before commenting too...]
roystgnr
11mo ago
I would hope that too, but we both hope in vain. The same genius can discover calculus and the laws of motion and universal gravitation on the one hand and waste half his life on the occult on the other. Sometimes being smart just means that when you want to rationalize something you're really good at it.
roystgnr
11mo ago
A religion is a cult with a track record, which is way more useful than social standing. Mass movements that turn into disasters over a decade or more are a dime a dozen; only if a movement has been around for several decades already do you have enough data to guess what disasters it's probably vulnerable to.
roystgnr
11mo ago
The clause "long development cycles or games which were still 2D" is doing a lot of work here, I think; "refines a base game into its ultimate form" from a creative standpoint is "long (multi-game) development cycle", a product that gets to reuse most of its source code, from a technical standpoint. Everquest still seems like a big exception, though.
I felt trolled too before I read the fine print. Please don't say such a thing! The drones need you. They look up to you!
roystgnr
11mo ago
Yes, and perhaps.
The point of several decades of data isn't that the group definitely isn't going to be an ongoing disaster, it's that there's been time for the disasters to be ongoing rather than sudden. If you joined Scientology in 1960 and couldn't stay on their good side, you might have been quite unpleasantly surprised by what was to follow. I'm told the Readers' Digest exposes in the 1980s were quite brave. But by 1995 or so, if you weren't a kid dragged in by parents, joining Scientology was kinda on you.
Whereas, these guys? They might be perfectly fine. But even if they're not showing the classic "cult warning signs" now, who knows what might be going on after a couple decades of social churn and personal change? Cult leaders have gone downhill on that time scale even if they weren't using psychoactive drugs from the start. Lots of people thought Jim Jones seemed like a decent guy for a long time before the eventual paranoid spiral and the mass murder-suicide.
roystgnr
11mo ago
it is “victim blaming” but the concept makes zero sense
I was whining last week about how lousy our language is about distinguishing "action X makes Y more likely" from "action X is to blame for Y" ... but it's not really a language problem, is it? We're just not good at thinking that way. Victim blaming makes sense as a concept, but it's so close to non-victim-blaming that even when you're trying to distinguish them you risk just falling down on the other side of the line. Compare "you should know better than to pay money to that sketchy-looking fraud; it's too late now" (fraud is a crime, a fraudster is to blame, and shifting the blame off the criminal is victim-blaming) to "you should know better than to pay money for that cheap-looking product; it's too late now" (caveat emptor, "no returns" policies aren't a crime, and aside from other "implied warranty of merchantability" sorts of considerations the most a customer is owed here is a chance to leave a bad review).
roystgnr
11mo ago
If there are any other interesting connections across distance or time, share them here! I’m an avid collector.
Is it safe to assume you're already familiar with James Burke's documentaries and books? They're mostly focused on causal webs with technological rather than military or political roots, but it's all definitely got this same flavor.
roystgnr
11mo ago
Wow, I'm glad I checked, then! "Connections" or "Circles" are exemplary books, and "Connections" (again) or "The Day the Universe Changed" for TV documentaries. Looks like YouTube has a few of the first Connections episodes.
Is Kennedy really likely to break double-digit polling and yet still leave Biden and Trump nearly tied? His biggest draw seems to be that he provides a face for vaccine skeptics, who are numerous and who are otherwise weirdly comfortable supporting the ex-President who first announced and to this day expresses pride about Operation Warp Speed ... so if Kennedy manages to win them over he's going to be drawing that population away from the Trump vote, not evenly away from both Trump and Biden.
I had my highest hopes in 2016, when Gary Johnson (a good governor, who won reelection 55-45 against a Hispanic Democrat challenger in a 40%-Hispanic blue state) was going up against the most-unpopular and the second-most-unpopular (as measured by opinion polls) major party presidential candidates ever. These hopes don't pan out. The mathematics of voting are complicated, but everybody has an intuitive understanding that a plurality vote for a non-frontrunner "doesn't count", so if someone's not neck-and-neck quickly or doesn't stay that way up to election day then they might as well be out of the race entirely. Kennedy's best chance lies in actuarial tables; an average 77-80 year old male has a 4-6% chance of dying in any given year.
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