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sarker

It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing

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joined 2022 September 05 16:50:08 UTC

				

User ID: 636

sarker

It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing

0 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 September 05 16:50:08 UTC

					

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User ID: 636

It's not clear to me if that's their current net contribution (given the ages of immigrants today) or their lifetime net contributions.

I wish they had a cumulative version of that graph because it kind of seems to me that even Danes might just break even or be a loss over the course of a lifetime. Are they trying to make lose money on every citizen but make it up in volume?

These are all just facts about the way the world is--and the way the world has suddenly changed. Expressing concern about that is not plausibly "anti trans."

Of course it is. Can you imagine if suddenly everyone started dressing in blue and someone writes an article about how concerning it is that young women are dressing in blue en masse? The only people who would care would be those who were against blue.

Well, adult human females don't have penises, by definition.

Defining "woman" as "adult human female" is already the anti trans position, so by (it seems?) implicitly ascribing this definition to Rowling you are proving my point.

This seems relevant to Rowling's interest in protecting women, insofar as that language resulted, in some cases, in male rapists being put into female prisons, which does seem like a pretty terrible idea to me. Does it not seem like a terrible idea to you?

It does seem like a terrible idea to me. Did you just assume my gender my position on trans issues because I corrected you about Rowling's position on trans issues?

Aaaaand here we get to the motte of the argument. What, then, does "anti trans" mean "these days?" Why?

It's simple and there's no motte and no bailey and no ruse. Being anti trans is to not believe that trans men are men and trans men are women. This is because the entire trans project is to be treated by society as their target gender, so if you are against that, you are against the whole thing.

I am not aware of anyone laboring under another definition, least of all JK Rowling, who as far as I know, has never claimed to not be "anti trans", but I admit I haven't done a comprehensive survey here.

Imagine claiming that someone must be anti-Semitic because they do not subscribe to the metaphysical commitments of Judaism. This would clearly be absurd, an abuse of the term in furtherance of some tribal aim. The discourse on transsexuals and the transgendered today is often exactly this absurd, approaching dissent and disagreement with reductionism and ostracism of exactly the kind deployed against Rowling.

The difference is that we Jews don't demand that everyone else should subscribe to our metaphysics. Now, Christians do, and while they don't think that someone who doesn't believe in the trinity is anti-Christian, they do believe he is the next best thing.

Huge gazongas on a skinny frame aren't functional.

Rowling is very much not anti-trans. She's totally down with people dressing, speaking, and acting however they want, to a degree that no sex or gender conservative would ever approve.

That's not the point, right? She thinks it's a bad thing that young women are transitioning in larger numbers:

I’m concerned about the huge explosion in young women wishing to transition

She believes that women can't have penises. She believes trans kids don't exist. She's not anti trans in the sense that she doesn't think that they should be discriminated against, whatever that means, but that's not what anti trans means these days.

Israel has been doing all those things for months. The vast majority of structures in Gaza are destroyed or damaged.

Which effective measures are we talking about?

Japan and Germany were centralized states. The centralization that made it coherent to talk about Japan or Germany surrendering was what allowed Japan to quash the holdouts, and that lack of coherence is what makes it difficult to imagine a Hamas instrument of surrender.

Has there ever been an insurgency quelled by immiserating the population? Successful counterinsurgency campaigns I can think of usually revolve around convincing the citizens that they are better off the supporting the state than the insurgents. A little hard to do that when the citizens blame the state for starving them.

Those both involved a huge amount of death and destruction and both of those nations ended up surrendering

My back of the envelope calculation suggests Gaza is somewhere between the relative death tolls of Japan and Germany. I doubt Hamas is going to surrender if you kick them harder in the balls.

I guess the end state there is an impromptu group of civilians form and say that they're tired of getting bombed and that they will become the government and carry on the policing of their radicals, including any Hamas remnants, so that terrorist attacks stop happening.

This is simply impossible given the Palestinian psychological makeup. I don't even think the Israelis are banking on this. Happy to place bets on this not happening.

You seriously exaggerate the ungovernability of India, your description fits Afghanistan better. Modi has a 75% approval rating. America is way more fractious.

In my opinion your hypothetical Raj would have to be significantly MORE brutal on the population than the current military operations conducted by Israel are to have any hope at success.

The key distinction is that a civilizing mission has an obvious aim that can guide decisionmaking. There is no obvious aim that drives Israeli decisionmaking right now except kicking the dog in the balls. It is entirely not obvious how this is supposed to lead to a long term solution.

I'm not sure if I'm missing something here. Has there ever been a method devised that starves everyone except for exclusively babies?

I admit I'm not an expert in siege tactics. However, one modest proposal might be to not order soldiers to fire on people trying to acquire food. That seems like the kind of thing that might cause starving babies on the margin.

From where I'm standing, that looks literally impossible.

I believe the three options I listed are exhaustive, so I'm curious if you think there is a fourth that I missed or if you think one of the other two that I thought was impossible is actually possible. Or perhaps you think they are all impossible?

Some dogs are just impossible and dangerous and they get put down, kind of a downer for this metaphor.

Indeed, but as the article suggests, there are people who have managed to train this particular dog.

You'd have to specify what that looks like instead of gesturing vaguely at it for me to take it seriously. How do you get from "kill all Jews which we hate with religious zealotry and take back the Holy Land which they stole from us 70 years ago" to "yeah 2 states are okay, I'm okay with giving up my important holy sites now"?

The Germans famously also wanted to kill (all?) Jews and now they perhaps kowtow excessively. Japan was raping Nanking and now they produce anime. It is possible for a foreign power to change culture, drastically.

Are you seriously suggesting that Israel is purposely targeting babies to starve?

I think the best case scenario here is that Israel is criminally negligent when it comes to avoiding starving babies. Certainly there are starving babies.

starvation has long been a legitimate tool to bring armies to their knees.

Agreed, but again, how is starving babies going to bring an army to its knees?

But that's not really what interests me. If you think starvation is a bad tactic for dealing with Hamas, that's totally fine, and I think I probably agree with you. I just wonder what tactics would be good for dealing with Hamas. What should Israel do?

There's only three options I see here. The first is to kill the Palestinians, which would be a horror that Israel would not recover from. The second is to move them, which is impossible because nobody is foolish enough to take millions of Palestinians.

The third:

When Kahane wasn’t condemning normie Zionists for having contempt for the Arabs, he liked to call them dogs. Not the most original metaphor, but vivid enough, so let’s run with it. Imagine a dog, not a Pitbull (that’s racist), but a Belgian Shepherd or similar. We observe one person who tries to reason with the dog, discusses with him the categorical imperative, and performs random unsolicited acts of kindness to appeal to its better nature. Another, swarthier person enters, perplexed at this cringe European, and pushes him to the side. He takes a good long look at the dog, walks over and kicks it square in the nuts, returning to high-five his friends. Rinse and repeat for three decades. Who is surprised that the dog is deranged?

What you do with a dog, obviously, is you train it. You don’t respond to its barks and snarls by getting down on all fours and barking back because ‘this is the yard’ and that’s what is done here. How do you train the dog? Well, go find someone who’s good at it, and ask him.

What does this look like? I don't know. But directionally, perhaps it's something like the British Raj. A civilizing mission is basically the only way to turn things around.

I agree that simply killing every Palestinian would entail eliminating Hamas, but I am not convinced that killing, say, 10% of Palestinians will do that. I am especially doubtful that starving Palestinian babies will bring an army to its knees, on account of babies not being part of the army.

But how is starving babies supposed to deal with Hamas?

Why would his being Jewish prevent you from being a fan?

What heritage?

HRV should give a decent indicator of stress levels.

The work of getting a business off the ground doesn't differ that much whether your business becomes a trillion dollar company or goes bust. The labor theory of value is wrong.

Mackenzie was also working at Amazon in the early days, doing accounts, packing orders, etc. So I find it entirely reasonable that this made her rich.

Really? Based on the recent ACX alpha school review, I was under the impression that cash for books does work.

As far as I know Fryer has not done any super-long-term studies of the impact of his experiments, but he did look at the mid-term effects. After the “read books for $$s” study ended he followed the test and control group for what happened to their reading habits when they were not getting paid. He found, in contradiction to concerns about loss of internal motivation, that the test group continued to read more than the control group.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-alpha-school

Which studies do you mean?

This tree seems to block much of the road behind the light on the right.

https://postimg.cc/McGZvDyV

It would be hard to notice a car until you are almost in the intersection.

You're right, and I was mistaken about my state too.

People in my area run reds all the time, but I never saw people try to beat the green like this except in Puerto Rico.

It's nearly impossible to "make observations" for cross traffic when you're traveling at 55mph and the vegetation blocks line of sight to the traffic in question.

It's illegal to be in the intersection when the light is red.

246 BC is emphatically not the iron age. Rome as a civilization famously did not require all conquered peoples to become culturally Roman so long as they colored within the lines.

The 5.8% figure is from two months ago and was already part of an upward trajectory. The writeup you linked largely confirms that Gazans are starving, though it argues that it's not due to Israel withholding aid.