nomenym
2d ago
My point being that Israel has another path: re-educating and reconciling with the Palestinian civilian population such that they no longer support Hamas (or whoever).
But why would they do that? If I were a Palestinian, I'd want revenge--terrible, horrible, unconscionable revenge forever, and I'd still go to heaven.
nomenym
2d ago
The world made a rule that ethnic cleansing was never justified under any circumstances. Unfortunately, the Palestinians evolved a culture to exploit that rule. If they could only be so belligerent that the only way to defeat them would be by ethnic cleansing, then they win by default no matter how militarily superior their opponent. This is effectively the propaganda game they play with the West. It's almost like they're daring Israel to ethnically cleanse them, and then double-dog daring them, and then triple-dog daring them. They know that if Israel breaks the one rule against trying an ethnic cleansing, then they'll lose Western support. They intentionally do not want Israel to have another option. There is no peace, no two state solution, no compromise. If Hamas can just persevere and stay the course then they'll eventually win. Israel can either carry on essentially at war with Hamas for the foreseeable future, or it can just take the risk and ethnically cleanse the Palestinians. The latter might be a Pyrrhic victory if the rest of the world turns against Israel.
nomenym
2d ago
There have only ever been three options: ethnic cleansing, ethnic cleansing, or forever war. Pick one. All are terrible and wrong.
nomenym
9d ago
When people talk about tribalism, they're usually only talking about the psychology of inter-tribal competition. The failure mode is xenophobia, and it codes masculine. But when our ancestors started to live in tribes, they also developed a psychology for intra-tribal competition. This is also a kind of tribalism, but it is usually ignored. It's failure mode is oikophobia, and it seems to code more feminine.
The types of people who join geen parties and such seem to excel at the intra-tribal competition. They tend to thrive in institutions, especially when there are few outside threats to their society (which they tend to not recognize and ignore). They join factions that push against or subvert the existing hierarchy, often surreptitiously. But whe they become surrounded by people just like them, their inherent oikophobia kicks in and they start to push against and subvert their own faction and start the cycle all over again. I think it's like a evolved social strategy that is now firing in an evolutionarily novel habitat, and it tends to create a lot of dysfunction.
nomenym
10d ago
In this case, I think foreigners are probably right to describe the British justice system as their own, because it seems to serve them more than it does the British.
nomenym
1mo ago
Perhaps history's most infamous materialists were also dogmatically blank slatists.
nomenym
1mo ago
Palestinians appear to value a dead Israeli more than the lives of multiple Palestinians.
nomenym
1mo ago
One of my first thoughts after reading about Lana was "Did she start seeing a therapist before or after divorcing her husband?" Then I realized that you didn't say she was seeing a therapist.
Ashli Babbit FAFO, but it was also a bad shoot. This is kind of like sure the guy was doing 30 mph over the speed limit, but the person he hit shouldn't have been dancing in the middle of a busy highway.
nomenym
3mo ago
I do not think it wise to empower the state to torture people, but that's not because nobody deserves to be tortured.
nomenym
3mo ago
The withholding order was literally a bureaucratic technicality. It should have been removed before deportation as a matter of procedure, but it wasn't. The withholding order was based on threats that no longer exist. If it had been removed first, then the ONLY substantive difference between the present situation and the one where the government didn't make the error is that maybe Garcia's deportation to El Salvador would have been briefly delayed. Somehow I don't think that would satisfy critics. Neither does this error, which was rather peculiar to Garcia's cirumstances, set any kind of dangerous precedent that applies to other people, and certainly not citizens.
The only real argument here is that it the US is essentially outsourcing its prison sentence to El Salvador, and this means they can send people to a prison in another country without charging or convicting them of any crime. While this probably does not violate any law, it is very much against the spirit of the justice system and due process. The Trump administration can wash its hands of responsibility and say that they're just sending these people to El Salvador, and it's all on El Salvador to decide what to do with them from there. However, we all know the actual arrangement; we know they are for all practical purposes being sent to prison by ICE.
All that said, I don't really care, Marge. The treasonous failure to secure the border for almost my entire adult life, the literal conspiracy to import as many people as possible, resulting in millions of illegals and quasi-legals fundamentally warping and perverting the economy and culture of the country, is a far greater wrong. Unfortunately, the scale of this problem is so huge that only swift and aggressive action can possibly address it, and so there will likely be many more edge cases, errors, and happy little accidents. Personally, I'm okay with that. It's priced in. For this, I blame the people who created the problem in the first place, not the people who are now trying to fix it.
nomenym
3mo ago
Most of the people in that prison deserve a worse fate if half the accusations against them are true.
Personally, I see Zegler as essentially racially white European. However, she's obviously not white enough for Snow White. The precise phenotype is important in this case. The apparent attempt to prove that actually the phenotype doesn't matter appears to have backfired on Disney. If Zegler had enough talent and charisma maybe it could of worked out.
Putting aside the colossal screw up and perhaps criminal negligence, the actual content of the conversation was surprisingly exactly what I might have expected. That itself is rather alarming because I shouldn't be in a position to form accurate expectations about how these conversations should go, right? I appreciate the transparency of the Trump administration, but this is a bit much. Heads should roll. Although we're unlikely to get an honest explanation for why Signal was been used for these communications, I would really like one. Worst case scenario is that they don't trust more official channels.
nomenym
4mo ago
Mostly stories like this are reassuring. Any crackdown on abuse of the immigration system is going to produce false positives. If there were no stories like this, then that would be an indication that it's all fake. The ICE agents involved in egregious cases of bad judgement should be reprimanded appropriately, but I applaud their zealousness.
The scale of the problem in many Western countries is so severe that at this point there is no appropriate response that won't look extreme and even tyrannical. That is an unfortunate byproduct of the last 3 decades of wholly extreme and reckless immigration policies and enforcement sabotage.
nomenym
4mo ago
Of course he's serious. Trump loves Canada, and he thinks Canadians are great. He thinks they could be even better as part of the US, and they could help Make America Great Again. He thinks they are weak alone, and their current political and economic trajectory are unforunate, and if they continue as they are then Canada may become liability rather than an ally.
If Trump wants to annex you, that's a compliment, a huge compliment. But he's not going to send troops into Canada. He wants Canada to want to join the US. He sincerely does not understand why so many Canadians dislike the US. He thinks he's offering Canada a good deal, the best deal.
In the long run, I think he will be proven right, but he'll be gone before then.
nomenym
4mo ago
For a non-citizen, if you have only 6 months left on your visa and you have to get your drivers license renewed, then then that license will only be valid for 6 months. Moreover, if you go to a local courthouse to renew it, your number won't come up on a regular search. It is necessary to go to a DMV building to get a license renewed. The drivers license number database apparently flags when a license belongs to a non-citizen, or at least flags it when additional steps for renewal are necessary. I don't know if this flag is visible to law enforcement when they search a license number, but there's a good chance it is. I suppose if you violated the conditions of your visa, then you could be residing illegally while still appearing to have a valid license. However, I suspect since they can't issue a license that is valid beyond the expiration date of a visa, that violating the visa would then automatically void the drivers license
I presume drivers license numbers must be flagged in searches to show if the holder is not a citizen, because green card holders can't just renew their drivers license at a local courthouse. If they try, their number doesn't come up in the search. They have to go to a DMV building. The database knows they're not citizens (or at least it knows they have this special condition on renewing their license), so it's definitely possible to infer citizenship from a drivers license number search. I don't know if ICE officers are capable of conducting this type of search.
nomenym
4mo ago
I think some kind of deal for illegals who turn themselves in might work. No guarantees, but perhaps waiving certain restrictions on them applying for legal entry. It could reduce the workload while getting some of the more sympathetic cases into the legitimate system.
nomenym
4mo ago
MAGA are bad Christians, but progressives are anti-Christian. MAGA are ostensinsibly Christian, or at least like Christians and will generally let them be, but progressives hate Christianity and will continue attacking it at every opportunity, or at least just stand by and watch while it is destroyed by their extremists. It's not a difficult choice, though Schmidtz seems to have misunderstood the situation.
The ship was heading for an iceberg anyway and they were running articles called "Why Hitting Icebergs is Actually a Good Thing".
A strange situation has arisen over the last 15 years or so where mild sexual titillation became taboo while extreme hardcore porn became easily available. There was such a glaring contrast. Nerds were wrong to enjoy attractive female characters in their videogames, because misogyny, patriarchy, and oppression of women. But at the same time these nerds were two clicks away from the most graphic hardcore pornography that has ever existed. OnlyFans is tolerated if not celebrated while milder forms of sex appeal were being erased. It's almost like the hardcore porn was, ahem, sucking all the sex out of everything else, but there has definitely been a shift against internet porn now as people who grew up with it start to resent it. I wonder if that latent energy is now pushing mild sexual titillation back into the mainstream.
Of course, this taboo was mostly or entirely focused on the preferences of straight white men, so perhaps that alone better explains why it was tabooed.
More options
Context Copy link