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Israel announces largest West Bank land seizure since 1993 during Blinken visit
This is particularly jarring after Biden has made more overt moves indicating he'd like to see deescalation, most recently the (failed) UN ceasefire resolution.
Most striking to me, personally, is the overwhelmingly negative sentiment on r/neoliberal.
For those who don't know, /r/neoliberal are very pro-Biden (and anti-Trump), generally pro-free market (and hence anti-anti-capitalist), and (imo) generally see themselves as moderate Democrats. Until today I'd have characterized them as pro-Israel, but this seems like a marked change. A top 1% subreddit changing its political beliefs is pretty rare.
I want to say this foreshadows a change in broader public support, but perhaps I'm a bit late to the party -- Gallup has already shown dropping support for Israel generally:
Fifty-eight percent of Americans, down from 68% last year, have a “very” or “mostly favorable” view of Israel. This is the lowest favorable rating for Israel in over two decades. At the same time, positive opinions of the Palestinian Authority have dropped from 26% to 18%, the lowest since 2015.
(Last sentence is just to give some context: yes support for Israel has dropped, but, it's worth noting, so has support for Palestine)
And, perhaps to be expected, this is most pronounced among young people:
Young adults show the biggest decline in ratings of Israel, dropping from 64% favorable among 18- to 34-year-olds in 2023 to 38%. Middle-aged adults (those aged 35 to 54) show a smaller but still significant drop, from 66% to 55%, while there has been no meaningful change among adults aged 55 and older.
I can't imagine that whatever Israel has gained in the last year is worth the long-term cost of burning its support with the next two generations of Americans.
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1mo ago
The speed with which the Americans committed to the ISIS story speaks in favour of Ukrainian involvement a bit.
I’m not sure why US intelligence is supposed to be slow to confirm this — the Islamic State claimed responsibility for an attack that the CIA has been waiting for them to conduct for a month (the US had issued a public warning that US citizens should avoid Russian crowds).
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1mo ago
princess Kate announced that she has cancer. for some reason it was such an important secret that she first released a doctored photo of her with her kids
God I hate celebrity gossip. Imagine not knowing how tell your kids you have cancer while your 10-year-old reads rumors that his dad is having an affair, that his parents are getting divorced, and that his mom has an eating disorder.
mass shooting in a Russian concert hall. the US embassy was warning about an attack a couple of weeks ago. ukrainians, islamists, false flag, some other mystery group?
The Islamic State claimed responsibility and US intelligence confirmed it.
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1mo ago
If your tribe is more courageous, then you'll win the battle, massacre the opposing men, and capture their women, thus propagating your courageous genes. Over time this results in more courage among men.
While I can buy this as a means of propagating the memes of a society, your individual genes would have an exceptionally small effect on the outcome of a battle with hundreds/thousands of soldiers. Moreover, how likely was a man to actually participate in a battle so large that routing was possible? I have a hard time believing the selection effects here would be anything but incredibly weak.
"We show that if we make an effort to reconstruct the CPI of Okun’s era [1970s]—which would have had inflation peak last year around 18%, we are able to explain 70% of the gap in consumer sentiment we saw last year."
I'm really confused at why this is supposed to be compelling. Can't you say this about any two things that changed by roughly the same size?
But maybe that's because I'm confused by what the units on "user sentiment" are in this tweet. Without that, it's not even clear why you'd expect "user sentiment" to be linearly related with inflation — if the gap between inflation metrics was higher, would he be saying this explained 110% of user sentiment?
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1mo ago
Young people want their TikTok and will do what it takes to get it, including installing and configuring VPN. Yes, only minority is going to do it, but active minority is what always mattered.
Leaving aside the apparent assumption that there is a strong correlation between “know how and is willing to pay for and download a vpn” and “politically active”, how is going from from 30% MAUs to (eg) 3% MAUs immaterial?
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1mo ago
Thanks. For some reason I thought Microsoft owned Capcom
large western studios have done everything in their power to eradicate attractive women in AAA releases
I don't know how anyone can believe this unless their primary source is Internet controversies, rather than playing video games.
Here are some popular games released by large American studios with attractive women: Cyberpunk, Street Fighter 6, and Overwatch 2, Rise of the Tomb Raider (et al), League of Legends (et al), Red Dead Redemption 2, Fortnite, Alan Wake 2.
I'd buy the claim that there are more, less attractive women in modern western games than there were 10 years ago, but I don't know how you can claim the The Woke are preventing American corporations from making games with attractive women at all.
Could you show me a AAA game with more than 2 women where none of the women are attractive?
All this is now verboten. All games have some random fucking girlboss lecturing you about your privilege. There are no more offline servers. All behavior is closely monitored and you get suspended. Mods get you banned. It's the worst fucking dystopia I could have ever imagined being a 90's PC gamer.
I am a white man who games fairly regularly and I have never had a lecture about my privilege, nor have I been banned.
I'm also sad about the death of LAN parties, but it feels very weird to complain that social norms (and their enforcement) on non-LAN servers are not the same as on LAN servers. On a LAN server the enforcement comes from your friends, but external enforcement is absolutely required for public servers. Rule enforcement means that League of Legends today is much more enjoyable today than it was in 2012 (because there is less flaming and intentional feeding), and definitely better than if there was no enforcement at all.
Yes, lament the death of LAN servers, but try to appreciate that a tyranny under social-defectors is not actually better than tyranny under a company preventing that defection. Ultimately public servers are common spaces, while your basement is private.
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1mo ago
Many have pointed out that a version of a captcha for chatbots is if they are willing to say naughty words or not. What you're basically doing with this ban is saying "you have to sound like a chatbot in order to post here". I think this is a bad idea.
Producing heat in a place dedicated to productive political discussions is a bad idea.
You say consequentialism is self-evidently wrong, and then you define morality as “the end goal ideal state we're working towards”? And you say you support punishing intent because “it works” — ie because of it’s consequences.
It seems to me you agree with the underlying framework of consequentialism, you just insist that the label “morality” apply simultaneously to both states and actions, whereas Utilitarians throw a InvalidTypeError for the latter.
If you agree that morality is the end state we want to achieve, how can you apply the same word to apply to actions and not have it be about achieving that state?
There is a difference between saying "The world is incidentally a better place because Alice stabbed Bob in a tumor" (what Utilitarianism is happy to say) and "we shouldn't punish Alice for stabbing Bob" (what Utilitarianism does not say).
This is because Utilitarianism doesn't justify punishment on the basis of right/wrong or, indeed, even intent. It justifies it on whether the punishment would increase utility (yes, shocking).
It happens to be true, in this universe, that punishing based on intent often yields to better societies than punishing based on results. But if you lived in an upside-down universe (or were governing a weird species, say one that didn't arise from evolution) where punishing Alice increased her propensity for violence, then Utilitarianism gives you the tools to realize your moral intuitions are leading you astray – that the deontological rules that work sensibly in our universe would be actively detrimental if applied to the other one.
So no, punishing based on intent doesn't necessarily lead away from consequentialism, because it's plain that we live in a world where punishing people who merely try to inflict harm (and mitigating punishment when the perpetrator's intent is good) is a more effective social policy (or parenting policy, etc.) than ignoring people's intentions.
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1mo ago
Could you make your comment a little more concrete?
Are you conjecturing the man in this story didn't respect his parents enough, and that that is the fault of liberal policy? Or that his parents didn't teach him self-control, and that is the fault of liberal policy? That this kind of aggravation happened less often in the 1950s because people went to church, and liberal policy is driving people away from Christianity?
Right now the your fourth option is vague, and it is appropriately supported with a vague appeal to some idealized past.
Are 3 minor pieces worth about a queen? Certainly not, what nonsense! TypeDoesNotExist. Pieces don’t have values, all that matters is checkmating your opponent.
But since I’m not the physical embodiment of a trillion trillion trillion GPUs… I’m going to need a way to model the chess game that’s a bit more sophisticated (read: “wrong”). And if you start telling me piece values don’t exist I’m going to call you out for excessive pedantry.
This is how I feel when people complain that free will is incompatible with determinism. Like, yeah, you looked at the quarks and didn’t find any free will particles, sure. But that says nothing about whether I should keep modeling other people (and myself!) as agents with goals, who run some kind of shitty statistical inference, and who respond to incentives.
I’m not the embodiment of a trillion trillion trillion GPUs, so I’m not going to be modeling my barista as a complex set of atoms when I’m ordering my coffee.
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1mo ago
I’m equally confused that the man told his friend. “Two can keep a secret if one of them is dead”, indeed.
my churning viscera limits my rhetorical strategy from being much more sophisticated than…
If all you have to go on is an internal sense of revulsion, I’m not sure you should be trying to convince him the first place.
The argument that you want to disincentive teens from becoming prostitutes seems weak to me, since it seems really inefficient — how many girls are you saving from a year of prostitution in return for condemning this woman to never have a family for the next 60 years?
I’m guessing very small — probably less than 0.1. Prostitutes are pretty rare in the US so it’s hard for interventions targeted at random people to actually hit their target, and even then, how many teens are going to know she’s single because she was a prostitute (the answer is zero), and finally, your targets are unlikely to have great impulse control anyway.
Or, to make it simpler: how often did you, as a teen, think about the life of an adult you knew when making a decision? The answer is: never, because you didn’t know anything about the personal lives of more than 6 adults, and you didn’t see their lives as relevant predictors of your own life anyway.
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2mo ago
Based on my social circle, the norm "people who are unusually financially successful compared to their parent should give something back, unless those parents were abusive" is a supermajority view even among white people.
The claim "children doing far better than their parents, financially, should give some small fraction to their parents" is miles away from the claim that most parents are entitled to a significant share of their children's income.
The controversial claim here isn't whether somebody making $500k should give $20k/year to his parents, who are making $40k each. It's that the kid making $80k/year owes his parents, (who are also making $80k/year), $10k/year for 10 years, because he owes a significant fraction of his success to 18+ years of his parents' labor.
How do you divide profits fairly when there are N contributors whose contributions are necessary, but not sufficient, to create the profit?
The game theory solution to the general problem of arbitrary possible coalitions with different "profit" is the Shapley value
The setup is as follows: a coalition of players cooperates, and obtains a certain overall gain from that cooperation. Since some players may contribute more to the coalition than others or may possess different bargaining power (for example threatening to destroy the whole surplus), what final distribution of generated surplus among the players should arise in any particular game?
(The page even includes an example of a capital owner and m workers).
In the simple case where there are two people, Alice and Bob, who can make A or B by themselves (respectively), or $100 together, the payoffs are simply:
phi(alice) = $50 + (a - b) / 2
phi(bob) = $50 + (b - a) / 2
Kevin Durant couldn't have won the MVP award if his mom hadn't given birth to him
I think it's theoretically defensible to claim that parents ought (in an economic / game theoretic sense) receive a significant fraction for the value their kids provide society. It definitely screams against most people's moral intuitions though.
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2mo ago
I tried to be pretty clear on which part of my post was addressed to you and which part was addressed to TheMotte more broadly.
Expecting people to not delete comments the community hates seems at least as unreasonable as asking people not to downvote posts they disagree with.
Downvoting posts that are valuable enough you don't want them deleted is also bad behavior; @greyenlightenment deleting downvoted posts is giving TheMotte exactly what it's asking for. If that makes TheMotte a worse place, that's not on him. It's on us.
If TheMotte doesn't want people to delete comments that contribute to the conversation, it shouldn't be downvoting comments that contribute to the conversation. If you want those comments to persist, my actionable advice is to upvote comments that you think are valuable, but that you think are going to be downvoted.
This is actually a much better reason to upvote than the absolute "quality" of the comment, because 5 "high quality" comments that are all saying the same thing provide a single comment's worth of ideas. If TheMotte wants ideological diversity, it should vote in favor of ideological diversity.
Instead people upvote comments they agree with and downvote comments they disagree with, and then wonder why we all believe the same thing.
To say it doesn’t matter whether it’s causal… and then to immediately make the causal claim that polyamory is dysgenic is baffling. Clearly it does matter to you that the effect is causal!
It’s annoying when people are crying “correlation doesn’t imply causation” when the causal claim seems intuitively true to you. That doesn’t mean those criticisms of your argument aren’t valid (regardless of the truthfulness of your conclusions).
The truly maddening thing is that, due to a lack of centralized criminal enforcement data, as well as the ridiculous amount of lag of reported data, it's extremely hard to sanity-check your speculations.
a bunch of cameras which will only punish those who choose to abide by the laws
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2mo ago
Historically the community has regulated love quite closely, and its recent failure to do so has led to plummeting birth rates
Big, if true.
My best guess is Christianity/traditionalism are popular arguments here, mainly because they act as a foil for progressivism -- the benefits of radically different systems put the costs of progressivism into sharper relief.
I suspect the vast majority of our community would have been against white nationalism/Christianity/traditionalism before the 1960s, and would be against it today if it actually regressed to that point. I think they'd change their tune quite quickly once millions of Mexicans were living in tents across the border, or teachers were telling their kids they have to believe in God or they'll go to hell, or their daughters weren't allowed to go to college.
Whether they don't bring this up because those scenarios are so unlikely they're not worth mentioning, or because it ruins their catharsis while railing against leftists, is probably more a narrative question than a factual one, but I really doubt the readers here were pro-Christian when Christians were more influential and (e.g.) trying to stop Evolution from being taught in schools.
In that sense, it's probably more true to say that this forum hates ideologies that are currently messing with their lives (Progressivism is seen as the primary culprit today), rather than that it hates Progressivism or likes Christianity specifically.
Achilles and the Tortoise isn’t a paradox due to building up something from parts. It’s a paradox due to doing it sloppily.
By analogy, there are various “proofs” that 0 = 1 that rely on bad math, but nobody would argue that the problem is with math. The problem is with people incorrectly using math.
For Achilles, the problem arises because, just as the distance covered gets cut in half, so does the time it takes to cover it.
If it takes you 1 second to cover 1 meter, 0.5 seconds to cover 0.5 meters, etc., the fact that this series never exceeds 2 says you can’t pass 2 meters in less than 2 seconds.
The "paradox" is that Achilles will never pass the tortoise, and "how far can Achilles get in 2 seconds" says nothing meaningful about this.
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