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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   36103 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024

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I need to fisk this article.

Recently I have been faced with repeated assertions by people in my social circles, both offline and online, that "at this point the only possible reason to not vote for Kamala Harris is that you're an irredeemably evil human being." Now, I'm no stranger to extreme political rhetoric! Demonizing "the other side" is nothing new. But in the past month or so I have been getting it from people who are not usually prone to that sort of thing, even in an election year. These are people who have tended to say things like "I wouldn't vote for Trump, but I understand why someone in $CIRCUMSTANCE might." They are people who have at other times bemoaned growing partisanship and the death of discourse, or praised charitable reading and balanced presentation. Somehow, after making it through 2016 and 2020 without ghosting me and blocking me on social media (like a fair few others in my life), somehow 2024 has finally managed to convince them that Trump is a political emergency against which no exigency is forbidden.

I say "somehow" but truly, for most of them I think the real explanation is Dobbs. Or rather--not Dobbs itself, but the absolutely panicked response the progressive news media is having over the existence of any corner of the country in which any baby in utero, and a not-insignificant number of babies ex utero, is protected from destruction against its mother's wishes or whims.

I am myself weakly pro-choice, in the libertarian "decriminalize but don't legalize" sense--at least in the first few weeks of pregnancy. I oppose any sort of government spending on abortions, but I tend to oppose government spending on damn near anything, so that shouldn't surprise anyone. However, I simply will not vote for anyone who advocates abortions in the third trimester, much less the euthanization of born-alive botches. I find that level of pro-abortion sentiment to be astonishingly ghoulish.

So: the article. When I saw the headline "2 women die in Georgia after they couldn't access legal abortions and timely care," my first thought was, "Damn, seriously? That's really surprising!"

My second thought was--"Wait a minute..."

In her final hours, Amber Nicole Thurman suffered from a grave infection that her suburban Atlanta hospital was well-equipped to treat.

She’d taken abortion pills and encountered a rare complication; she had not expelled all of the fetal tissue from her body.

Ohhhh. So the headline could literally have been, "woman in Georgia killed by abortion pills" with no noticeable loss of information?

She showed up at Piedmont Henry Hospital in need of a routine procedure to clear it from her uterus, called a dilation and curettage, or D&C.

But just that summer, her state had made performing the procedure a felony, with few exceptions. Any doctor who violated the new Georgia law could be prosecuted and face up to a decade in prison.

Thurman waited in pain in a hospital bed, worried about what would happen to her 6-year-old son, as doctors monitored her infection spreading, her blood pressure sinking and her organs beginning to fail.

It took 20 hours for doctors to finally operate. By then, it was too late.

How do we know it wasn't too late, 20 hours earlier? Answer: we don't! Of course, I'm happy to point a finger at government bureaucracy as a contributing cause, as was the committee from which these two women's stories very conveniently leaked:

The otherwise healthy 28-year-old medical assistant, who had her sights set on nursing school,

Lest ye be tempted to believe we're talking about a low-value citizen! She was gonna be a nurse someday, probably maybe!

should not have died, an official state committee recently concluded.

Tasked with examining pregnancy-related deaths to improve maternal health, the experts, including 10 doctors, deemed hers “preventable” and said the hospital’s delay in performing the critical procedure had a “large” impact on her fatal outcome.

Their reviews of individual patient cases are not made public. But ProPublica obtained reports that confirm that at least two women have already died after they couldn’t access legal abortions and timely medical care in their state.

There are almost certainly others.

Did you catch that? There are almost certainly others! That's the sound of a journalist telling you "I could find no evidence that my beliefs are true, so I'm going to make shit up instead."

Thurman’s case marks the first time an abortion-related death, officially deemed “preventable,” is coming to public light. ProPublica will share the story of the second in the coming days. We are also exploring other deaths that have not yet been reviewed but appear to be connected to abortion bans.

Why would we report the news today, when we can drip-feed you artificially inflated horror stories once a week from now until the Fifth of November? Why would we tell you the facts we know, when we can wait for an unnamed "official committee" with unknown political biases to give us speculative inquiry into the hot topic du jour? Stay tuned for your daily dose of rage bait! (I say without a hint of irony, surely.)

Doctors and a nurse involved in Thurman’s care declined to explain their thinking and did not respond to questions from ProPublica.

No fucking shit they declined to explain their thinking, even if HIPAA didn't exist they probably wouldn't have deigned to defend their medical judgment to a muckraker.

Communications staff from the hospital did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Good.

Georgia’s Department of Public Health, which oversees the state maternal mortality review committee, said it cannot comment on ProPublica’s reporting because the committee’s cases are confidential and protected by federal law.

Shocking.

But Republican legislators have rejected small efforts to expand and clarify health exceptions — even in Georgia, which has one of the nation’s highest rates of maternal mortality and where Black women are three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related complications than white women.

Remember, it's not enough to be pro-choice; you have to be anti-racist. But let's not be unsympathetic, here: a woman is dead, and so is her baby. Or, it turns out, babies--

Thurman, who carried the full load of a single parent, loved being a mother. Every chance she got, she took her son to petting zoos, to pop-up museums and on planned trips, like one to a Florida beach. “The talks I have with my son are everything,” she posted on social media.

But when she learned she was pregnant with twins in the summer of 2022, she quickly decided she needed to preserve her newfound stability, her best friend, Ricaria Baker, told ProPublica.

We're talking about a woman who was already raising one baby on her own, so there's no question that she understood the consequences of sexual activity. Imagine if someone had suggested to her that she could "preserve her newfound stability" by finding a stable partner before engaging in sexual activity. Here is another equally-accurate alternative headline: "woman dies in Georgia as a result of premarital sex!"

On July 20, the day Georgia’s law banning abortion at six weeks went into effect, her pregnancy had just passed that mark, according to records her family shared with ProPublica.

Thurman wanted a surgical abortion close to home and held out hope as advocates tried to get the ban paused in court, Baker said. But as her pregnancy progressed to its ninth week, she couldn’t wait any longer. She scheduled a D&C in North Carolina, where abortion at that stage was still legal, and on Aug. 13 woke up at 4 a.m. to make the journey with her best friend.

On their drive, they hit standstill traffic, Baker said. The clinic couldn’t hold Thurman’s spot longer than 15 minutes — it was inundated with women from other states where bans had taken effect.

Perhaps the headline should be "woman dies in Georgia after getting stuck in traffic?" Or maybe "woman dies in Georgia after being turned away from a legal abortion clinic?"

Instead, a clinic employee offered Thurman a two-pill abortion regimen approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, mifepristone and misoprostol. Her pregnancy was well within the standard of care for that treatment.

Getting to the clinic had required scheduling a day off from work, finding a babysitter, making up an excuse to borrow a relative’s car and walking through a crowd of anti-abortion protesters. Thurman didn’t want to reschedule, Baker said.

"I would kill my twin babies to preserve my newfound stability. But only if it's super convenient."

And of course: Thurman is given a legal option "well within the standard of care." It would appear that she accessed a "legal abortion" with no difficulty at all! Right, ProPublica?

Deaths due to complications from abortion pills are extremely rare.

Deaths due to complications from anti-abortion laws are extremely rare.

This was the point where I knew I had to react to this article in a public way. I recognize that ProPublica is an advocacy group and that RawStory is like, maybe on the level of the Daily Wire in terms of ideological bias and propagandizing. But the only reason I saw the article was that it was being shared by a couple of the aforementioned friends in my social feeds--people who I might even have described, in the relatively recent past, as political moderates. This is the new narrative, same as the old (pre-Roe) narrative: all restrictions on abortions are woman-killing laws!

Except, you know...

Baker and Thurman spoke every day that week. At first, there was only cramping, which Thurman expected. But days after she took the second pill, the pain increased and blood was soaking through more than one pad per hour. If she had lived nearby, the clinic in North Carolina would have performed a D&C for free as soon as she followed up, the executive director told ProPublica. But Thurman was four hours away.

On the evening of Aug. 18, Thurman vomited blood and passed out at home, according to 911 call logs. Her boyfriend called for an ambulance. Thurman arrived at Piedmont Henry Hospital in Stockbridge at 6:51 p.m.

Look, I'm not a physician, but if you are bleeding through more than one pad per hour you go to the fucking hospital. This woman was bleeding like crazy and just didn't do anything about it for days.

But sure--anti-abortion laws are what prevented her from getting timely treatment, totally. And I've got a bridge you might want to invest in.

ProPublica obtained the summary narrative of Thurman’s hospital stay provided to the maternal mortality review committee, as well as the group’s findings.

Apparently not a HIPAA violation?

The narrative is based on Thurman’s medical records, with identifying information removed.

Well that's alright then! But ProPublica somehow managed to identify her anyway. Interesting.

At least we finally got the name of the committee! Not that there's much information on the web about it. Who are its members? What are their politics? How often do they provide conveniently timed confidential medical information to partisan "investigative" reporters?

The world may never know. Also:

The committee does not interview doctors involved with the case or ask hospitals to respond to its findings. ProPublica also consulted with medical experts, including members of the committee, about the timeline of events.

Here I will excise the precise timeline of the woman's hospital experience. If any of our physicians would care to comment on it, I'd be interested to know what a medical mind makes of the timeline as presented. It sounds harrowing, but mostly it sounds to me like the primary causes of this woman's death were, in descending order of contributory effect: poor life choices, abortion pills, poor self-care, medical bureaucracy, and then maybe legal bureaucracy. Georgia's particular abortion laws barely have any role to play at all in this tragedy.

Until she got the call from the hospital, her mother had no idea Thurman had been pregnant. She recalled her daughter’s last words before she was wheeled into surgery — they had made no sense coming from a vibrant young woman who seemed to have her whole life ahead of her:

“Promise me you’ll take care of my son.”

There is a “good chance” providing a D&C earlier could have prevented Amber Thurman’s death, the maternal mortality review committee concluded.

Which she would apparently have received if she'd driven four hours to the followup she was duly informed might be necessary. When people die because the steps required to stay alive seem so inconvenient that a 28 year old woman with a son cannot even communicate the situation to her mother, it seems wildly irresponsible to suggest that the problem is with the law. Especially when you drop this nugget:

It is not clear from the records available why doctors waited to provide a D&C to Thurman, though the summary report shows they discussed the procedure at least twice in the hours before they finally did.

"The law totally did this! Well, in fact we have no evidence whether the law had anything to do with any of this. But you stopped reading eighteen paragraphs ago, so now we'll mention that fact for completeness. Wouldn't want a lawsuit to interfere with our 'reporting!'"

ProPublica asked the governor’s office on Friday to respond to cases of denied care, including the two abortion-related deaths, and whether its exceptions were adequate. Spokesperson Garrison Douglas said they were clear and gave doctors the power to act in medical emergencies. He returned to the state’s previous argument, describing ProPublica’s reporting as a “fear-mongering campaign.”

Sounds like Garrison Douglas knows what's up.

Thurman’s family members may never learn the exact variables that went into doctors’ calculations. The hospital has not fulfilled their request for her full medical record. There was no autopsy.

For years, all Thurman’s family had was a death certificate that said she died of “septic shock” and “retained products of conception” — a rare description that had previously only appeared once in Georgia death records over the last 15 years, ProPublica found. The family learned Thurman’s case had been reviewed and deemed preventable from ProPublica’s reporting.

If there were any HIPAA violations involved, well... I wouldn't count on an investigation from the federal government. I'm sure they've got their hands full shadowing James O'Keefe.

The sting of Thurman’s death remains extremely raw to her loved ones, who feel her absence most deeply as they watch her son grow taller and lose teeth and start school years without her.

They focus on surrounding him with love but know nothing can replace his mother.

On Monday, she would have turned 31.

Her twins, had they survived, would be nearly 2 years old.

The Georgia law is a "heartbeat" law. If the fetuses are already dead, there should be no heartbeat and thus no issue. Of course, ProPublica might have mislead the reader about that too. Even if so, there's a "life or serious and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function" exception, and a "medically futile" exception. Both at the judgement of a physician.

We see it in every state with strict laws. Physicians refuse to perform the operation and declare that the mother's life is in jeopardy because of these laws, even though it directly contradicts the text of the law. Then, journalists run with it. I think physicians are using patients as pawns to further their own political beliefs. Plus, if you're a real believer, wouldn't you counteract unethical laws?

Really great write-up. Thank you.

Your response is valuable because it demonstrates the mix of slippery-slope, bad faith reporting, and sleight-of-hand that poisons the abortion debate. Americans are notoriously self-contradictory in their opinions on abortion. Thus, re-framing an issue has an outsized impact on changes in opinion. I like your consistent use of alternative headlines to point that out.

There are very few pro-life folks who are zero-exception pro-life. Rape, incest, and life of the mother are the default exceptions. But the focus shouldn't be on the exceptions (which will always be a small percentage) but on the modal abortions and the contexts that produce them. The article (and your response) do a good job of highlighting that abortions are often the product of repeated bad life choices and general irresponsibility. I don't think being generally kind of a fuck-up should be a life long sentence for poverty, but there is a limit to what you can be absolved of. Denying a child from being born is far, far past that line.

Going back to the culture war angle, it gets difficult to even "hear out" pro-life arguments because they get so slippery. Obama used to take the median liberal position on abortion that was summarized as "safe, legal, and rare." That last part made the conversation at least possible. It wasn't like we were having parades for abortion or anything. The median liberal position today seems to be on-demand abortion access for any reason, potentially into the third trimester or even at birth. Point out how crazy that is and you get responses like the ProPublica article - "women are literally dying because of these anti-abortion laws." It isn't moving the goalposts, it's making up new rules as you go while also manipulating the score.

If you bring up the fact that there's only one way to make a baby (sex) and suggest abstinence and/or sexual discipline, you aren't looked at as extreme, but as childishly out of touch. What, go without sex? Yes. Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying. No one has ever died from not fucking. In the most dishonest and illegitimate response to that idea, there are people who will say that practicing and preaching abstinence is actually some sort of reverse sexual-slavery that dehumanizes specifically women. Once we linked sexual activity to the amorphous "personal expression" we let the genie out of the bottle. The argument goes: "Anything you tell me to do is oppression and potentially violence. Anything I demand from society is actually a guaranteed human right that has been withheld because of systemic oppression." Heads-I-win-tails-you-lose.

Taking a look at my own history that went from casually pro-choice to rigid pro-life, I'd assert that if you draw any firm line in the sand you are setting yourself up for a slow (though possibly accelerating) drift towards a pro-life stance because the opposite end keeps getting more extreme. Yes, I know this is a version of the "we're the normies; they just keep getting crazier!" argument, but ... I think the craziest are saying their quiet part out loud.

If you bring up the fact that there's only one way to make a baby (sex) and suggest abstinence and/or sexual discipline, you aren't looked at as extreme, but as childishly out of touch. What, go without sex? Yes. Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying. No one has ever died from not fucking. In the most dishonest and illegitimate response to that idea, there are people who will say that practicing and preaching abstinence is actually some sort of reverse sexual-slavery that dehumanizes specifically women.

This is something I've always found odd, both from personal experience and more generally.

As far as personal experience goes, I am a single Christian who observes traditional Christian teaching on sexual morality, which is to say that I don't engage in it outside of marriage. As such I am functionally and voluntarily celibate, and have been for a long time. As far as I can tell my quality of life has not suffered significantly from this. Sex is not required for a fulfilling, satisfied life. It is not! Yes, you can go without sex. It is not difficult. Unless I'm some kind of bizarre mutant who feels sexual attraction much less intensely than most people (I definitely experience it), I take my own experience as evidence that it is possible. You can just not have sex! It's just one instance of the much wider principle that any good life will require some exercise of personal discipline, no different to avoiding overeating, or making yourself get enough exercise, or forcing yourself to roll out of bed and go to work even when your head is screaming that you'd rather sleep more. Life is a long exercise of self-disciplining. Why should sexual urges be any different to other urges?

Of course, it probably isn't just sex. Anecdotally I'd argue that the whole concept of discipline or self-control is suffering. I think of how Tanner Greer described the temperance movement, and how much voluntary self-control, in the form of things like pledges, was significant. Either making yourself do something unpleasant, or making yourself refrain from doing something pleasant, is a skill that you can practice and learn. But, not to sound too much like a grouchy old man, I feel like that's less the case now, and we have more focus on immediate, rapid gratification.

Now on the broader scale...

I feel obliged to note that in the wider culture, sex is decreasing in frequency, primarily among younger generations. It would appear that just having less sex is viable, because people are having less sex, to the point that conservatives worry about the sex recession (yes, The Atlantic, but Wilcox and Stone are both on the conservative side). If anything, we're probably having too little sex, collectively. So the idea that it's just impossible to avoid sex seems counter-intuitive. People aren't going outside and suffocating in constant opportunities for sex - rather, sex is happening less frequently than in supposedly more puritanical times.

Historically, I'd argue that the idea that abstaining from sex is dehumanising seems rather absurd - the counter-example to come to my mind is the liberatory effect of vowed celibacy or virginity for Christian women in the Roman Empire. Under the crushing weight of social expectation, renouncing sexual and family life in favour of pure devotion to God could be very attractive. Moreover, today, if you feel that marriage is an oppressive patriarchal institution that dehumanises women by reducing them to the role of baby factories or housebound servants, then the idea of renouncing sex might indeed appear liberatory on similar grounds? We might compare something like Korea's 4B movement. I'm not saying all those things are equally good (I think there's obviously a huge difference between voluntary Christian celibacy as commitment to God, and radical feminist celibacy as secession from patriarchal society); just that they seem like cases where deliberate abstinence from sex is experienced as humanising.

So I find the two implied arguments here - that abstention from sex is impossible, and that abstention from sex is oppressive - to be implausible.

Now I will grant that there are specific circumstances in which abstention from sex might be practically impossible or oppressive. If it were demanded of a married couple for an unlimited time, it may well be destructive to that relationship to the point where I would say it's not reasonably possible. Likewise abstention can be enforced or imposed externally in unreasonable ways - someone whose vocation is to marry might be forced into religious life inappropriately, for instance. But the fact of abstention by itself is not enough to conclude oppression or harm or anything unhealthy.

It’s possible to never take a nice, hot shower. You can live fine and happy without ever doing that!

Of course. Lots of people do and have done that.

I'm not sure what the point is?

Obviously I'm not arguing "it's possible to live without sex, therefore it is good to live without sex". I'm not asserting the superiority of celibacy as a state. I'm saying that living a good life requires some measure of self-control around sex in the same way that it requires self-control around food, or alcohol, or anything else. Whether necessity or luxury, self-control is an important virtue. Food is necessary, but we still expect people to exercise judgement and prudence around what to eat, where, when, and so on. Alcohol is not necessary but can be pleasant; we then expect people to show judgement and responsibility when indulging.

Likewise for sex, I would say. There's nothing wrong with desiring sex in itself, but of course judgement, discipline, etc., need to be applied to the choice we make around that desire. Thus the entire field of sexual morality.

As such, I submit that there are times, perhaps even extended periods of time, where "just don't have sex" is a viable course of action. You can just not, and depending on the circumstances, it may be prudent for you to just not.

Yah might be a mutant. I require sex at least once a week and usually much more. Have you been checked for low T?

Also, why do you want people to suffer for things? Isn't having things come easy a great joy?

Yah might be a mutant. I require sex at least once a week and usually much more.

Or what? You explode?

You might want to have sex multiple times a week and you might be unhappy if you don't get it, but you don't require it. Even high-T very horny men are perfectly capable of going without sex. They might not enjoy it, but it won't harm them.

Right, but you're at least going to jerk off in the shower right? Like sheesh. I am typical minding it again, I know. But really I've been scolded enough times by people saying we are only here to have kids. How do they think that happens and why do they think humans want or need sex? You can't have it both ways.

Jerking off in the shower is not sex for the purposes of this topic, because showers can't get pregnant nor impregnate you.

We were talking about abstinence for birth control purposes. Any act that can't produce a baby is still available.

You don't have access to the こんにちは、尊敬するお客様、どうぞ中に捨ててください。Auto Shower 3000? A kid every 10 months or your yen is refunded.

I'm sure most people would, but I am very confident the guys who do "No-Fap November" do not explode or die.

You're not typical-minding; you're hyperbolizing.

A bit of both I am sure. But damn, some folks need to eat some red meat and bust a nut, or get on Test.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=BR4R6kPI2g0

Should the tip of the spear of the hard right be lead by sexless online incels?

I don't know how I'd even go about testing my level of testosterone, and to be honest I find the idea of doing so pretty weird. I know there are people who are, from my perspective, strangely invested in their hormone level, but I don't think that's a very wise approach to take to life. I eat well, exercise, and feel energetic and healthy. That's enough for me.

I'm aware that I have a lower libido than some (I once knew a friend who admitted to masturbating daily, which sounds very uncomfortable to me), but it's definitely not non-existent. I do get attracted to people in daily life, have idle sexual fantasies, and so on.

In any case, as far needing sex goes, well, I confidently predict that if you were trapped on a desert island with a supply of food and yet no sexual partners, you would survive more than a week. You may strongly desire sex once a week or more, but I think you could go without it. It's not like food or water.

For the last point - I don't see where I said that I want anybody to suffer? I said that I think self-discipline is a good thing, to the point of being able to make yourself do unpleasant things, or resist pleasant things, but that shouldn't be taken to mean that I think unpleasant experiences are to be desired. I don't think it means that I want people to suffer if I think that people should be able to make themselves do hard yard work, or refrain from pigging out on an entire chocolate cake. I'd argue that this kind of self-control is actually essential for having a happy life overall.

I mean you can technically go without a lot of things. You don't need food 3 times a day, or water. But life is much better if you get those. Jerking off daily is also not odd, why would it be uncomfortable? Why not enjoy all life has to offer, we're only here for a short time and then back to nothing.

See above. I'm not asserting that celibacy is a superior state to marriage. Sex is pleasurable and there's nothing wrong with pleasurable experiences. I'm asserting that sexual self-control is both possible and necessary.

(I do think there are other conditions that apply to sexual morality - I'm pretty negative on casual sex, for instance - but you can just take as read that I have a Christian sexual morality. That's not necessary for my general point. Even if you have a much more robustly progressive sexual ethic, I think self-control remains a necessary virtue not only in one's sexual life but in all of life. If your ethics have any concept of illicit or inappropriate sex at all, you'll need some kind of guardrail or discipline between you and doing it.)

Sexual mores are byproducts of evolutionary kinship knowledge creation and gene propagation. Without being hijacked by culture or religion you should be negative on casual sex for your mate and positive for yourself. You have been deeply hijacked if I recall correctly.

Well, I'm a Christian, which I was quite open about. But I'd rather this discussion not be some kind of referendum on the existence of God. My point is just that - regardless of where you are on the God question - sexual behaviour can and should be limited in certain circumstances, and the idea of going without sex, whether temporarily or over the long term, is not so ridiculous as to be dismissed out of hand.

What, go without sex? Yes. Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying.

I don’t think it’s practical to expect humans, which natural selection has caused many to be horny, to avoid fucking entirely. And if they do fuck recreationally, there’s bound to be accidents.

Even Christian teens “sin” with premarital sex. I don’t see abstinence as a workable strategy for anyone but the asexuals and others who don’t enjoy or care for sex.

Metabolic syndrome and obesity are the leading causes of death in the western world. This says nothing of the economic and healthcare drains also caused by poor diet and overeating.

Is "eat less / eat better" invalid as a prescription? Is the hardwired need for food - especially carbohydrates - any less compelling than the sex drive?

The modern condition is one of hyper abundance among a species - humans - adapted for scarcity. Successful life strategies in the modern world mostly revolve around discipline and not doing xyz bad thing.

I agree that there will still be many, many humans who choose irresponsible sexual behavior. Teaching abstinence will not directly solve the problem, but it will open up a new approach to directly solving the problem. Specifically, social pressure. Right now, there is zero mainstream social pressure to support sexual self-discipline. "As long as it's safe and consensual" is the median take. I would argue that this is the equivalent to "eat whatever you want whenever you want" which is not the median recommendation of any doctor, dietitian, or even woo-woo online YouTube "wellness" influencers.

Teaching abstinence will not directly solve the problem, but it will open up a new approach to directly solving the problem.

Fair enough. I actually do agree with this take. But

Is "eat less / eat better" invalid as a prescription? Is the hardwired need for food - especially carbohydrates - any less compelling than the sex drive?

That is why I don’t believe advice that’s valid for individuals is workable for society. The more you design a society to rely on individual discipline to function well, the more dysfunctional it’s going to become. Humans by and large haven’t yet evolved to be more disciplined over baser needs, although perhaps the 21st century would exert greater selection pressure than usual. But not if a ban on abortions cause greater numbers of children to be born from those who can’t control their sex drives.

The more you design a society to rely on individual discipline to function well, the more dysfunctional it’s going to become.

I don't think this was your intention, but that statement's logical extreme is authoritarianism. "We can't rely on people to make good decisions, therefore, we have to take aware their ability to make those decisions."

Again, I don't think this was your intention, so I'm not going to hammer that point.

Humans by and large haven’t yet evolved to be more disciplined over baser needs.

This is correct. But humans do have yet another base need that is nearly as strong as food/shelter/sex -- social esteem. Sure, there's a small fraction of a percentage of people out there who literally need zero human interaction, but we can safely round them off for the purpose of this argument. We all need some level of interpersonal approval to live happy and healthy lives.

Status and social esteem matter a lot. A core theme of Lorenzo Warby's "Worshipping The Future" is that our need for status can get warped so that we begin to not only beleive but champion all sorts of awful horrible causes. If a culture can status-associate and amplify a certain thing then that thing will become more valuable.

I believe that for much of human history, chastity was a valued thing. This is where you can cue some antagonistic screeds about "chastity was about ConTRroLLing WomEns BodieSS!!" et cetera. I don't buy it. Chastity was held in esteem because it signaled a lot of valuable, pro-social, and pro-evolutionary traits and conditions. Technology changed the equation.

Much like mass produced food high in simple carbs (i.e. sugar), we, as a species, created a hack for mal-adaptive sexual behavior with the Pill. We then shoe-horned our social reasoning to fit into this technological capability by advocating for "enlightened" free love. But that's a red herring - the number one method of female-to-female character assassination is still largely gossiping about sexual promiscuity. I'd submit that our closely held, personal beliefs about sex are far from the generally accepted popular stance on sex. If anything, it's abstracted into "personal choice" much like saying "I'd never drink and smoke pot everyday, but if someone else wants to do it - and be safe about it - I'm not going to step in their way." Sure, from an abstracted freedom of choice perspective, that's a cohesive argument. But, come on, confront the issue; is smoking and drinking every day a good thing to do? No. Is hopping into bed with someone you've known for a matter of hours a good thing to do again and again in your 20s and 30s ... often with alcohol involved? No. It isn't. Even if "no one gets hurt."

I'm not advocating for a full RETVRN to a virgin-until-marriage situation. I'd simply like to re-link sex to the consequence of pregnancy. On top of that, I'd like to add that sex is emotionally resonant and causes non-physical consequences. The fact of the matter is the plurality of people who hurt women are their intimate partners. Phrased differently, if you are a woman in the west today, the man statistically most likely to harm you (although the absolute probability is quite low) is the guy you're currently sleeping with. I haven't found hard numbers, but it stands to reason that if you're sleeping with multiple guys concurrently, those numbers go up. In short, sex matters in many, many ways. But we treat it like it's a fun little handshake.

Excellent point but I'm going to quibble about what is tradition, what is virtue, and what we're returning to...

Chastity was held in esteem because it signaled a lot of valuable, pro-social, and pro-evolutionary traits and conditions.

But, come on, confront the issue; is smoking and drinking every day a good thing to do? No. Is hopping into bed with someone you've known for a matter of hours a good thing to do again and again in your 20s and 30s ... often with alcohol involved? No. It isn't. Even if "no one gets hurt."

I recently had a drink with a friend of mine. She was upset because her second grade son, together with his second grade boy gaggle of friends, had convinced a retarded kid in their class to make a "naughty" hand gesture. The retarded kid got into trouble, but under interrogation, it became apparent that he had been baited and hoodwinked. Parents were called. She was almost in tears worried she was raising a "bully."

I said that the optimal amount of bullying for a kid to engage in isn't zero. A kid who never does anything bad is probably a herbivorous, smarmy, teacher's pet of a goody-two-shoes. Bullying isn't good in and of itself, picking on retarded kids isn't a good hobby to get into, and certainly she should discipline him for it. But at eight years old, this is a good sign of development in many ways. He's clever, he has a group of friends that have espirit together, he's spirited and engaging in mischief to amuse himself, he's getting along with people and landing towards the top of the hierarchy rather than at the bottom of it. Those are all good things! Discipline him, make sure he isn't growing up to be cruel and take advantage of others; but the alternatives to him growing through this phase probably weren't "he's perfect and would never say anything mean to anyone" but "he's such a teacher's pet that he never has an independent thought or the courage to pursue his own desires" or "he's such a loser that he has no friends that would want to do mischief with him" or "he's at the bottom of the pile getting bullied."

Chastity is a virtue, it shows discipline to make good decisions. But it can also, particularly when taken to extremes, be a result of and indicative of character flaws. It's a pretty frequent problem in evangelical communities that you have the teenagers who are really good at chastity, and then they never grow out of it. It turns out the good chaste boy who never hit on girls was just gay, or that the good chaste girl who never snuck out of the house at night to see her boyfriend is frigid and doesn't "snap out of it" the moment she gets married in a church. The dropping partner counts for young people don't represent good trendlines for society, and certainly not for traditional values.

Similarly, sexual incontinence is mostly a character flaw, and whoring leads to all kinds of bad outcomes. But it can also indicate virtues vs the control group. Seeing something you want and making the moves to get it requires courage and risk taking. Someone who is attractive, who has potential paramours drooling to get with them, is going to require more discipline to achieve chastity than someone who is unattractive; hence why I think celebrity marriages are simply a different animal than ordinary folk.

Truth and virtue exist in conflict, in tension which creates balance. We need to be seeking to set up a tension that produces the virtues we want to see.

I don't think this was your intention, but that statement's logical extreme is authoritarianism. "We can't rely on people to make good decisions, therefore, we have to take aware their ability to make those decisions."

Again, I don't think this was your intention, so I'm not going to hammer that point.

I appreciate that. What I was trying to get at was that if you have a society which assumes most people will act in a way contrary to their nature, that society is not going to work well. Eg the communists and how they expected people to contribute “according to their abilities” without responding to incentives. I don’t know if there’s a better way to word it, but to me you're expecting something similar, of the average person to practice rational discipline instead of succumbing to baser biological drives.

I believe that for much of human history, chastity was a valued thing

Chastity was more reasonable when people were regularly getting married off during their horny teenage years. Not so much these days when many are putting off marriage until their thirties, if ever.

Even back then, with all the pious Christian emphasis on family values, there was plenty of infidelity. So if we could magically make chastity a thing again, there’d probably be less sex, but I’d doubt the effect would be that major.

But let’s assume that we could greatly reduce the amount of sex in society by shaming those who have too many partners. How does less sex make society better?

suggest abstinence and/or sexual discipline

Or suggest an IUD implant, those are super effective, last for a decade, and don't require sticking to a schedule (like with pills) or proper use (like with condoms). Also, IUD effectiveness leaves those others in the dust even with proper use.

Would you support making a free IUD implant to any female who wants one?

Potentially.

But an IUD doesn't deal with the social, interpersonal, emotional consequences of sex. One of the big lies of the sexual revolution is that you can divorce sex from emotion. I don't think that's true between healthy and reasonable adults. I think the only way to do that is to dehumanize one or both of the participants. This is what happens with prostitution. Outside of that, both men and women who are really into casual sex often fall into deep existential crises. This is the end to The Game by Neil Strauss, I think it's a subplot of Magic Mike (I've never seen it, but I remember this popping up in conversation when that movie came out).

I would worry that IUDs would function as (literal) talismans in the minds of some women and men. "You have an IUD? Great, sex has no consequences!" Not true on a physical level (STIs/STDs) and not true on the mental/emotional/social level.

Again, I'm not recommending puritanical sexual codes for society at large. I'm advocating for the hard re-linking of consequences with sex. You can have lots of sex with many partners if you want, but be aware of and accept the consequences. If you don't like the sound of those consequences, abstinence is a good option, and shouldn't be pilloried as some sort of "internalized sexual repression."

I would worry that IUDs would function as (literal) talismans in the minds of some women and men. "You have an IUD? Great, sex has no consequences!" Not true on a physical level (STIs/STDs) and not true on the mental/emotional/social level.

That's a good point. The consequences you list are serious, and they are carried by the person having sex (and that person's sexual partner). But if the woman has an IUD, the consequences of her sexual act won't be carried by a baby.

When I was a teen, it was generally known that one can drop by a Planned Parenthood and grab some free condoms, no questions asked. Quite a few of us availed ourselves of that option. Some didn't, but that didn't stop them from having sex. (They did ask friends for condoms sometimes.) Having a well-known option of easy-to-get free condoms didn't eliminate unprotected sex, but it reduced it.

I propose that if there was a well-known option of easy-to-get free IUD implants, then many more women would use that option, and that would greatly reduce the number of babies who must bear the consequences of their mother's sexual choices. The women who make poor life choices would still have plenty of natural consequences to deal with.

I would further propose valorizing the act carrying a baby to turn to give it up for adoption. Like in the 2007 film "Juno", for example. I honestly can't think of another popular movie, show, or book that presented giving-birth-for-adoption in a positive light, but I can think of tons that are from the child's perspective about the emotional pain of finding out you're adopted. I know some adopted kids, and they're fine. The whole mother-didn't-love-me-so-she-gave-me-up trope needs to die.

Again, I'm not recommending puritanical sexual codes for society at large. I'm advocating for the hard re-linking of consequences with sex. You can have lots of sex with many partners if you want, but be aware of and accept the consequences.

There's only one consequence of sex that conservatives seem to actually try to hard re-link to sex, though, that is having the baby. You can't force people to feel proper emotions when having sex, but you sure can deny them abortion and slut-shame them (the "social consequences").

I'm not sure what you're saying here.

Are you for slut-shaming? Or are you more pro free love? Genuinely confused.

I'm pro-emotional connection and anti-slut shaming, inasmuch as birth control makes chastity obsolete.

I'm pro-emotional connection and anti-slut shaming

These aren't mutually exclusive in your model?

Yes, I know this is a version of the "we're the normies; they just keep getting crazier!" argument, but ... I think the craziest are saying their quiet part out loud.

Whats the radical part of that sign?

Demanding for it to be free? I do agree that it should be the gentlemen’s responsibility to pay.

"On demand ... no apologies" is the radical part. Those folks are unapologetic (heh) about advocating for 9 month / partial birth abortions (for free) without any caveats like life of the mother, significant abnormality etc.

So this woman suffered a complication from legal abortion. It’s unclear whether the hospital screwing up the treatment caused it to turn fatal or whether she wouldn’t have survived. Either way, hospital care was indisputably legal.

This is, as you accurately note, 0% about Georgia’s abortion laws. But, of course, just like Kate Cox was going to die if she didn’t get an abortion(she wasn’t), that’s the narrative the media has to run with. And it’s right before an election, so the media needs to ham it up, constantly lying, for 6 weeks. Left wing misinformation it is.

Well as the right is so often doing, they are 'directionally correct', abortion bans do cost the lives of mothers the world over.

This is the first time the news media is claiming a woman died from an abortion ban. It is, of course, a lie- this doesn’t have anything to do with Georgia’s abortion law- but there seemingly haven’t been any previous cases of women dying in ways more plausibly connected to red state abortion laws.

When you get down to it, pro-choice arguments that women are dying are some sort of unfalsifiable motte retreated to when an individual woman turns out to be dead of her own bad decisions(as with this woman’s decision not to seek medical care during multiple days of bleeding through her pads hourly). If there are women dying from red state abortion laws, show me the receipts. The media’s eagerness to- falsely- tie this to Georgia’s heartbeat law is evidence that there aren’t any.

It might not be the perfect case, but maybe black people shouldn't have ride in the back of the bus.

  • -15

What the fuck does that have to do with anything? By all appearances of the case, this woman would still be dead if the same scenario happened in New York State.

My point was you won't always have the most sympathetic or logical subject to prove your policy goal. You just take what you've got and run with it. Blocking abortions does indeed kill mothers, even if it didn't in this case.

Blocking abortions does indeed kill mothers

Again, show me the receipts. The fact that the media hasn’t already done so points to it being because there aren’t any.

There is a history of famous cases of women in pro-life jurisdictions dying of pregnancy related complications, and without exception the care that would have saved them was legal, it just wasn’t administered either due to malpractice(the Irish case used as justification for repealing the 8th) or the woman’s own poor decisions(if this woman had gone to the hospital when she started experiencing complications she would probably be alive right now). The media clearly wants to point to unambiguous cases of pro-life laws killing women and it’s not doing so; the most plausible reason is because there aren’t any.

Wait what? Every abortion ban country has a ton of related deaths. What are you on about?

More comments

I think that there exist abortion rules which 80% of the country would find acceptable, but as it is a partisan topic, there is a lot of signaling value in either side making extreme demands. "abortion should always be illegal, no exceptions" to "abortion should be legal until the separation of the naval cord after birth".

A six weeks ban means that women has about two weeks after missing her period (per Wikipedia) to get an abortion. Now, a woman with regular periods and high executive function will notice that something is amiss within a week, and then can conveniently schedule her abortion.

But not every woman, and especially not every woman likely to have unwanted pregnancies will make it in that time frame. Perhaps her periods sometimes are a week late due to stress or whatever, and then it only takes a few more days of distraction to miss her window. (I don't have a very high executive function myself ('is it my week to deal with the garbage cans again?', 'I should really schedule a dentist appointment soon', etc), so I am sympathetic.)

Ethically, I am a Singerian who does not find anything fundamentally wrong with baby-killing, but politically that is not a hill I would be willing to die on. In practice, I would be fine with banning abortions without medical indication after a few months of gestation -- give the woman a bit of time to notice 'well, I did have sex and my period stopped, perhaps I should buy a pregnancy test'.

Now, there will be people who think that ensoulment happens at conception (I am not clear how this works with monocygotic twins, do they each have half a soul or is one of them soulless?) and people who have or perform abortions should always go to prison for murder. But I am somewhat hopeful that these are a fringe minority. On the other hand, the number of people who believe that killing what might already be a viable baby is wrong is likely much higher.

In a way, this is a late fallout of Roe v Wade. If the SC had not legislated that abortions are always legal, there might have been room for a sane compromise federal law before the issue became hopelessly soaked with partisan politics to the point where half the raison d'etre of the Republican party was to elect a president who would appoint justices who would overturn Roe.

Of course, opinion articles on both sides will try to dig up the most extreme cases imaginable. 'Woman living in a state with harsh abortion laws lost her life in a way related to her attempt to abort. This is why abortion should always be legal until your kids are of legal age.' or 'look at this poor baby being born alive in a botched abortion in the third trimester. This is why we must ban any abortions everywhere (and perhaps let's ban contraceptives too)!'

Her first pill was taken July 20, so according to Google she should have taken the misoprostol by about July 22.

According to the article, the first pill was taken on August 13th, at the clinic in North Carolina, after the missed appointment for the surgical procedure. She went into the hospital on August 18th.

Ah, thanks! I missed that detail, I will fix it.

Thanks for looking into this. I already suspected something contrived when reading the headline, but this is on the level of blaming a drunk driving accident on prohibition.

The New York Times reports:

Vice President Kamala Harris will give remarks in Atlanta on Friday focused on the stories of two Georgia mothers whose deaths she has argued show the consequences of the strict abortion bans passed by Republicans after Roe v. Wade was overturned.

The speech is part of an effort by the Harris campaign to push reproductive rights to the center of the presidential election, according to a person with knowledge of the event who insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the plans.

The deaths, reported this week by ProPublica, occurred in the months after Georgia passed a law banning abortion at six weeks. Amber Thurman died of sepsis resulting from an incomplete medication abortion after waiting 20 hours in a suburban Atlanta hospital for medical care. A second woman, Candi Miller, died after declining to seek medical care for complications from abortion medication.

Tactically, this is the sorta thing that's obvious logical: Harris is trailing Trump in Georgia in recent polls, it's a major state for many of her success paths to the Presidency, and abortion is one of strongest spaces Harris has. There's basically zero chance of the ProPublica article leaving the "There may be alternative explanations for that delay other than legal concerns. But I trust that the reporter on this asked those questions, and so far no one has offered any" zone before the election is over, if it ever happens, and even if final report drops and embarrasses ProPublica, there's minimal chance anyone going to a Harris rally will ever hear about it.

But I remember when a federal candidate repeating rumors under the aegis that they weren't disproved yet was a bad thing. Scroll up in that twitter thread, and you'll find that a ProPublica writer brought it up as a counterexample in response to a conservative comparing fearmongering over ectopic pregnancies to the "eating cats" thing.

...

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the sorta people who were found it atrocious when Trump squirmed to mock a disabled man but couldn't care about Biden calling an innocent guy a white supremacist are going to find their gumption here. I'll post one if I can find it.

The New York Times reports...

Huh. I admit I did not expect the article I was fisking to turn out to be at the start of a chain of information laundering for Kamala's campaign, but I guess I should have.

It's amazing to me how transparently false the narrative is, that these deaths are directly downstream of Dobbs. There seems to be more evidence that these deaths are directly downstream of the news media's scaremongering; I'd bet that both women honestly believed abortion laws in Georgia to be far more restrictive than is actually the case.

If there were any HIPAA violations involved, well... I wouldn't count on an investigation from the federal government.

ProPublica's website has the below addendum, it is not included on RawStory.

https://www.propublica.org/article/georgia-abortion-ban-amber-thurman-death

How We Reported the Story

ProPublica reporter Kavitha Surana reviewed death records and medical examiner and coroner reports to identify cases that may be related to abortion access. She first reached out to Amber Thurman’s family and friends a year ago. The family shared her personal documents and signed a release for ProPublica to access her medical information. The maternal mortality review committee reviewed Thurman’s case at the end of July 2024.

Interesting to me is the article's inclusion of Will Brewer, lobbyist from Tennessee. Yes, a totally different state than the death.

The state’s main anti-abortion lobbyist, Will Brewer, vigorously opposed the change. Some pregnancy complications “work themselves out,” he told a panel of lawmakers. Doctors should be required to “pause and wait this out and see how it goes.”

The above quote is the only time Brewer is mentioned in this particular article, and I got the feeling that ProPublica butchered whatever Brewer actually said. So here is what is the full quote, (with emphasis mine) courtesy of...Kavitha Surana via Oklahoma Voice:

https://oklahomavoice.com/2023/11/27/some-republicans-willing-to-compromise-on-abortion-ban-exceptions-activists-ensured-they-didnt/

When Tennessee Republicans introduced a bill to give doctors more protection to offer terminations when a pregnant patient faced a condition that could become life-threatening, Will Brewer, the lead lobbyist for Tennessee Right to Life, testified against it, arguing the patient’s condition needed to deteriorate before a doctor could intervene.

“There are issues with pregnancy that could be considered an emergency — or at least could possibly be considered an anomaly or medically futile — that work themselves out,” Brewer, who has no medical training, testified on the House floor. “I’m not talking about an eleventh hour, you know, a patient comes into the ER bleeding out, and what do we do? I’m talking about (a situation when) there is a condition here that some doctors would say constitutes an emergency worthy of a termination and other doctors would say, ‘Let’s pause and wait this out and see how it goes.’ I wouldn’t want the former to terminate when the latter says there’s room to see how it goes before this is urgent enough.”

So Brewer explicitly says that he wants to allow an exception in Thurman's exact situation! And Kavitha, the ProPublica reporter, knew he wanted an exception for this exact situation because she quoted him saying exactly so in an article she herself wrote less than a year ago! All on top of the guy being from a totally different state! Why include this detail in the article?

ProPublica has published their promised follow-up story describing the other death related to the Georgia abortion ban, and as you may have expected, the connection is even more tenuous than in the story you critiqued here.

Wow. Sure enough, another case of (headline font!) woman likely killed by abortion pills has death blamed on unrelated abortion laws. But also, good heavens:

An autopsy found unexpelled fetus tissue, confirming that the abortion had not fully completed. It also found a lethal combination of painkillers, including the dangerous opioid fentanyl. Miller had no history of drug use, the medical records state; her family has no idea how she obtained them or what was going through her mind--whether she was trying to quell the pain, complete the abortion or end her life. A medical examiner was unable to determine the manner of her death.

Her family later told a coroner she hadn't visited a doctor "due to the current legislation on pregnancies and abortions."

Of course, it seems unlikely to me that she knew anything about such legislation beyond what panicky, sensationalist journalists told her. To say nothing of the fentanyl (huh!?) and the possibility that she committed suicide.

This second article also repeats the "almost certainly other deaths" canard. Apparently ProPublica now exists to spread blood libel against conservative legislators.

So, after she arrived at the hospital, do you think they should have operated sooner or no? Or do you think we don't have enough information to make a determination?

(I'm not necessarily expecting a simple unqualified yes/no answer - I'm just curious about your take on the actual situation itself, independent of the issues you pointed out with the presentation in the article.)

So, after she arrived at the hospital, do you think they should have operated sooner or no? Or do you think we don't have enough information to make a determination?

I'm not a physician, so it's not clear to me whether the article gives enough information on this particular choice or not. The committee (which I assume includes some medical personnel, but which apparently does not consist exclusively of physicians) seems to think the operation should have occurred sooner, and that doesn't seem obviously wrong to me:

After reviewing Thurman’s case, the committee highlighted Piedmont’s “lack of policies/procedures in place to evacuate uterus immediately” and recommended all hospitals implement policies “to treat a septic abortion on an ongoing basis.”

The claim that Georgia's abortion law is specifically responsible for the "lack of policies/procedures" in question does not appear justified by the evidence available. Nobody in a position to know ever said, "we delayed this critical operation because of the law," and the article always stops just short of actually making that assertion. The whole essay is an exercise in suggesting a certain interpretation of events. From a purely technical standpoint, it's well-crafted propaganda. Ultimately, the story doesn't hold up, but in order to do the work it appears intended to do, the story doesn't have to hold up. It just needs the approximate "truthiness" of statements like "Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio are eating cats."

There's... also a really morbid question, whether the law clearly excludes the D&C here from its coverage. The statute is available online:

No abortion is authorized or shall be performed if an unborn child has been determined in accordance with Code Section 31-9B-2 to have a detectable human heartbeat except when: A physician determines, in reasonable medical judgment, that a medical emergency exists; [rape or incest and genetic abnormalities exceptions not relevant here]

What is 'medical emergency' defined as?

'Medical emergency' means a condition in which an abortion is necessary in order to prevent the death of the pregnant woman or the substantial and irreversible physical impairment of a major bodily function of the pregnant woman. No such greater risk shall be deemed to exist if it is based on a diagnosis or claim of a mental or emotional condition of the pregnant woman or that the pregnant woman will purposefully engage in conduct which she intends to result in her death or in substantial and irreversible physical impairment of a major bodily function.

There are certainly some state laws that have overly restrictive rules, but these exceptions seem, at least to my layman's eyes, reasonably well-written to include serious dangers to physical health, while excluding mental health or suicide/self-harm risk. There are fair arguments regarding whether it is good policy. There are probably even non-crazy reasons to argue that some of the other exceptions are insufficiently clear -- there's some clear tradeoffs around the fuzzy area between 'spontaneous miscarriage' and 'tots not self-induced'.

I've not seen a particularly credible argument why this case doesn't fall under this exception, even well considering hindsight bias. ProPublica doesn't seem to link the leaked report (for some reason!), but I don't think you need to wait til 9AM ("organs failing") or 645AM ("taken to the intensive care unit") is necessary, and the doctors here waited until 2PM. I think there's a very strong support about medical necessity 930PM the night before. That seems especially true given that these laws have literally never been used against a doctor in Georgia, where we have countless examples of insufficient care medical liability in the same time period. I don't think anyone individually made cackling laughter and then wrote down 'kill her' on Thurman's medical history eight hours in, but there's pretty serious and systemic errors if 'vomiting blood' and 'acute severe sepsis' isn't being considered a medical emergency.

It's a really controversial claim to propose that hospital as systems are willing to fuck around in deniable ways to make politically-useful arguments, while playing with their patient's lives, and incredibly bad claim if true. I would like to get some set of more serious arguments against it than other ProPublica authors are willing to attempt, because I'm gonna make it.

Instead, a clinic employee offered Thurman a two-pill abortion regimen approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, mifepristone and misoprostol. Her pregnancy was well within the standard of care for that treatment.

D&C

No abortion is authorized or shall be performed if an unborn child has been determined in accordance with Code Section 31-9B-2 to have a detectable human heartbeat except when

I am in agreement with you that there would have been no violation of the law as you have quoted, and that the hospital's behavior here sounds egregiously negligent. Under what circumstances is it permissible to wait 5 hours to treat acute sepsis? D&C is usually indicated when a fetus has no heartbeat, and the combination of mifepristone and misoprostol will stop the fetus's heart (mifepristone=shed uterine lining, killing the fetus, misoprostol=induce contractions to push the dead fetus out). So when she showed up at a clinic in Georgia, performing a D&C would have been within the letter of the law.

To steelman the opposing side, perhaps there is another exemption in the law for "care which aids and abets an illegal abortion," or the clinic was critically slow in offering treatment because there was no technician available to check for fetal heartbeats (ultrasound), and this nuance was lost on the journalist.

Anyway, after hearing about the sepsis the lesson is to never visit Georgia, and if you do, never go to Piedmont Henry Hospital in Stockbridge. Never know if doctors there will wait three hours to treat your heart attack because your wife is pregnant.

To steelman the opposing side, perhaps there is another exemption in the law for "care which aids and abets an illegal abortion,"

Don't steelman this. Let someone point to it, or check the law yourself. Otherwise you're simply failing to let yourself come to an accurate conclusion.

Fair point. That text is not in the law. Removing.

I think it’s important to know how backlogged the hospital was. Some are chronically slow due in part to people using the ER as others would use a primary care doctor.

It could be the case that this was a triaging error that had nothing at all to do with the specifics of her case.

Or maybe it was actually good triage and there were even more urgent conditions occupying doctors before they could get to her.

What if it was slow because of an influx of Haitian refugees in the area?

At the encouragement of a different ProPublica writer, I've sent an e-mail into the author of the story (and now realize that I've made a typo in said e-mail, dammit). Will comment further if I get a response.

Sounds like a great idea! Why not fisk any outgroup news article that's from the same tier as ProPublica on Wikipedia's "reliable sources" list. That should make it a fair comparison, right?

(That's "generally reliable for all purposes because it has an excellent reputation")

Can't wait to read your post, am sure it will be just as insightful as the OP.

My God, I can't believe it's really there after seeing such an atrocious article from them.

I'm more shocked that Al Jazeera has a green rating, to be honest.

That's why I said to pick a green outgroup source from this objective list to avoid any bias on my part.

Do you believe Wikipedia's list is fair? That's what matters for picking a source from it. My opinion about the list doesn't mean anything if I'm wrong about it (and by extension the quality of ProPublica)

So you agree the ProPublica article is garbage? Interesting.

Breaking down bias or bad epistemology is certainly within the scope here. Per the rules you can't simply be dunking on some fringe loon, of course. But effortful, sourced, particularized commentary that refrains from taking broad swipes at general groups is basically welcome, though, yeah. The rules do not forbid criticism of anyone's ideas, in- or outgroup. It's the approach that matters.

You can find writing with poor epistemological standards produced by any group.

But of course--my post was not about a group (except, perhaps, "journalists") per se. It was about a particular kind of argument that is driving huge chunks of American political discourse, of which this article was a particular examplar. In other words--

I'm not sure what is to be gained by dissecting arbitrary examples.

There was nothing arbitrary about this example, and instead of engaging on the substance you decided first to try meta, and failing that you're now retreating to "eh who cares it's not interesting."

On this forum, especially, the most common assumption is that every news article is trash

Sure. But as you observed--90% of everything is trash! So it must be a safe assumption, right? But also, if we're going to talk about anything at all, part of that conversation is going to involve sifting through the presumptive trash, or better yet--trying to transform that trash into treasure, through our own effortful engagement!

so I don't know what insight there is to be gained.

Maybe none? But you would have to actually try to engage on the merits to decide that, and so far you've made two comments declining to even try. Which is of course your prerogative! You are under no obligation to try to understand, or to find things interesting. But your commentary thus far has been even less worthwhile, or so it seems to me--wouldn't it be more interesting to actually engage on substance?

Honestly? Strongly in favour of! Particularly if they're from groups as well-regarded as ProPublica. I am always in favour of poor/yellow journalism being torn apart.

Yes.

The realignment continues..

Here's a history of Teamster union endorsements over the last few election cycles.

2000: Gore

2004: Kerry

2008: Obama

2012: Obama

2016: Clinton

2020: Biden

2024: No one

That's right, the Teamsters aren't endorsing anyone. I think we all know what this means. But just in case you need a hint, the Teamsters themselves are here to tell us.

In the past week, following the Democratic National Convention and recent Presidential debate, the Teamsters commissioned independent polling firm Lake Research Partners to conduct the union’s final national survey. In the poll ending Sept. 15, Teamsters selected Trump by 58 percent for endorsement over 31 percent for Harris.

Here's the crazy bit. When they did the same poll just three months ago

From April 9-July 3, nearly 300 Teamsters local unions nationwide conducted first-of-their-kind Presidential town halls, soliciting endorsement preferences from members via straw polls. The in-person voting was held prior to Biden’s withdrawal from the race. The Teamsters’ polling data shows members backed Biden** 44.3 percent to Trump’s 36.3 percent.

What can explain this 35 point swing in Trump's favor over just a couple months? I can think there a couple possible explanations. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle.

  1. Biden grew up working class and can relate to these people where as Harris cannot.

  2. The original poll was conducted in person. The second poll was not. Presumably the first poll was a "show of hands" type of affair where people felt social pressure to vote the way the leaders wanted.

Whatever happened, this is a shocking result. Who could have imagined 20 years ago that the Teamsters would be a Republican stronghold and that Dick Cheney would somehow still be alive and also a Democrat? Wild times.

To me, the more interesting question is how 44% gets an endorsement, but 58% gets no endorsement.

I have never been a union member. My only experiences interacting with unions have been profoundly negative. As such, I am unqualified to make any suppositions about why the leadership would act in such a way.

Is there anyone here who could speak to the culture and explain it?

Leadership wants to endorse Harris. It is almost certainly that simple.

That’s what I thought at first but it seems like they’ve got the same background as the members. How do you account for the split between leadership and members?

Unions, get captured just like any other org. The people interested in work will work. The people interested in advocacy and slacking off will get involved in the union.

Sure but where does the difference in politics come from? Why would Trump appeal less to a union boss than a union worker and vice versa with Harris?

The union worker is interested in his wages, which are dependent on the health of the company, the quality of his coworkers, and the strength of the union's bargaining position. The union boss's wages are often on a different payscale that rewards expanding his unionbase. He eventually no longer has much interest in any individual company his union operates in, and often was drawn from the ideological subclass interested in union advocacy from the start.

Union leadership and the rank and file often have different interests for iron law of bureaucracy reasons.

Union leaders are professional activists getting very nice checks for playing nice with democrats.

In this case Trump talked about firing workers who strike. Which is a pretty big issue for a union. And the union leader was very vocally unhappy about that. Without that he probably gets the endorsement, given the Union leader spoke at the RNC and the majority of members liking Trump.

Who would have imagined 20 years ago that a Republican candidate would be running on a platform that promised to upend the entire American economic system in order to protect union manufacturing jobs?

What we're seeing here is consistently the UAW votes for the candidate with a dumber economic platform, that wants to avoid free markets and engage in protectionism and subsidy to preserve high paying union jobs.

Trump, in the last few months, has pushed his promises of tariffs to ever more absurd heights. Vance has publicly said that there's no price for a toaster that is so high it is worth even one American factory job to lower tariffs.

I buy a lot of MiUSA stuff whenever I can, but there's no question that a shift to MiUSA stuff is going to represent a massive increase in consumer prices for most goods, especially if it happens all at once as a result of tariffs.

Who could have imagined 20 years ago that the Teamsters would be a Republican stronghold

The Teamsters have never been a reliable left-wing force - per Wikipedia they endorsed Nixon, Reagan and Bush Sr.

For a shift that large in internal polling within a union that isn't consistent with nationwide trends (which show a very small shift in favour of Dems after the obviously senile candidate is switched out), I would assume that there is a Teamsters-specific issue that the rest of us are not aware of - probably related to how trucking is regulated. Some of it will be youth sex polarisation, but not much given the average age of the Teamsters membership.

The teamsters have most of their membership in warehouses IIRC. I think a lot of it is just working class voters favoring Trump even when they’re making good money.

The teamsters have most of their membership in warehouses IIRC. I think a lot of it is just working class voters favoring Trump even when they’re making good money.

But "working class voters" in general haven't shifted to Trump by 35 points since April - they have supported him ever since 2016.

Sure, I think but don't have evidence for that Kamala's gains vs Trump have been overwhelmingly among professional-class voters. I think Biden as an old-school democrat had some ability to hold onto traditionally democrat constituencies that most are losing and that without Biden(and the huge backlash against Biden in the early-mid summer can't have helped) the DNC is probably just up a creek with these voters.

My mental image of the story is that the teamsters shifted from mildly favoring Biden, to way favoring Trump when his evident late stage dementia became impossible to ignore, and just haven't shifted back towards Kamala.

Probably a combination of some of them preferring Biden to Trump, but Trump to Harris, and the earlier poll being subject to social pressure.

Makes sense, why would you want a flood of competitors to lower your wages?

Whatever happened, this is a shocking result. Who could have imagined 20 years ago that the Teamsters would be a Republican stronghold and that Dick Cheney would somehow still be alive and also a Democrat? Wild times.

This is less surprising than you think. 20 years ago is 2004. Dick Cheney's daughter was already a lesbian (and gay politics was clearly rising) and Democrats were solidifying as the anti-Iraq party (notably Afghanistan was not demonized, not the insertion of ourselves into the Houthi conflict), had repudiated the Clinton welfare reforms, and had Obama as the star speaker at their convention. We were on a trajectory to one party clearly being against your average white guy, and the other winning most white guys. If anything, unions have been slow to embrace the fact that Democrats largely have assembled a coalition that rejects being a normal working person.

And then, of course, there is the gay stuff.

Dick Cheney's daughter was already a lesbian

This is ancient history, but I seem to recall her being thrown under the bus by her father and sister. This doesn't make it "less surprising" for me, the progressive reverence for the Cheney family is whiplash inducing.

Was she? My own recollection is that the Cheney family accepted her and her lesbian partner, and there were hints that Dick personally would have been fine with legalizing same-sex marriage, but as VP he wasn't willing to publicly disagree with his president or his party on the matter. I guess it depends on your definition of bus-under-throwing.

Like I said, this is ancient history, but I was hanging out at some Dawkins-era Internet Atheist forum at the time, and remember there being some buzz around what Liz Cheney said about her sister. What that buzz was exactly, I can't tell you anymore.

The Democrats heel turn to becoming the pro-war party is still surprising, right?

Obama was still pro-Afghanistan when he gave the convention speech and during both 2008 and 2012 campaigns. Their opposition to war has always been more who/whom than the romantics seem to think. Clinton was happily intervening in Bosnia and Rwanda.

Nevermind Vietnam, the Bay of Pigs, and both world wars.

Not really no, the Democrats spent pretty much the entire 20th century being the pro-war/international intervention party.

If anything it was thier brief flirtation with being anti-war in the early 2000s that was the surprise.

Who could have imagined 20 years ago that the Teamsters would be a Republican stronghold and that Dick Cheney would somehow still be alive and also a Democrat?

This universe/timeline is clearly a simulation programmed by Hlinka, Instapundit, and the ghost of Tom Wolfe. The rest of us are just living in it. ;-)

It's not really that much of a twist to me that no college education men continue to break for Trump even in the context of a union.

As for the town halls, I don't know how much to credit them. Town halls and "popular assemblies" are easy to pack and direct, and I assume union leadership would have directed them towards Biden.

What makes no college men in particular such Trump supporters?

What Nybbler said is likely the proximate cause, but the deeper issue is that in an increasingly globalized economy, America’s comparative advantage shifts away from physical manufacturing and resource extraction (which is the domain of no college men) and towards finance, technology, and intellectual property (which is the domain of educated professionals). This leads to a general resentment against “the system”, which Trump offers in bulk.

The Democrats offer them nothing but scorn.

I think an in-depth examination of this topic would demand its own thread. But to surmise, I believe the left is the political expression of intellectualism, and this is a secular pattern, not limited to any particular culture or nation.

A triumph for the substance-free politics of vague cultural signalling, unfortunately. Harris still supports the centrepieces of the Democratic pro-labor agenda such as the PRO Act, but because she doesn't give the right cultural signals a portion of the membership turns on her. Ridiculous.

Crazy news out of the Middle East today.

While Iran plots its big revenge via Hezbollah, Israel isn't just waiting around for them to strike. They're pre-emptively disrupting their operations. And today's attack is next-level.

Somehow, Israel hacked the pagers used by a couple thousand Hezbollah members. And then they made the pagers explode simultaneously, leaving over 200 of them seriously injured. People on Twitter are speculating that Israel confiscated the pagers, then implanted explosives, and then returned them to Hezbollah who stupidly continued to use them . It seems unlikely that a software hack could make a battery explode. Edit: A better explanation is that Israel somehow intercepted the pagers during shipping and implanted explosives.

Whatever happened, its more evidence of both Israel's ability to strike at its enemies, and also the incompetence of those enemies.

From a strategic standpoint, it seems that Israel is now grimly determined to win the war militarily as they (accurately) perceive their enemies as unreliable partners in peace.

Of course, the Guardian is not happy with this:

Reports continue to come in but, with at least nine dead and about 3,000 wounded in dozens, if not hundreds, of coordinated explosions the episode demonstrates a ruthless and indiscriminate desire to target Hezbollah.

I think it 'indiscriminate' is a curious word here. Per Wikipedia, "From the inception of Hezbollah to the present, the elimination of the State of Israel has been one of Hezbollah's primary goals." Of course, the tactics employed by Hezbollah have included suicide bombings and indiscriminate rocket attacks on Israel.

I think that if you manage to kill your mortal enemies without turning their neighborhood into rubble, that is commendable. Of course a few civilians will also die in such attacks, but certainly a lower number than would in any conventional form of warfare.

Given that the pagers were meant as an alternative to a trackable cell phone which could attract Israeli missile strikes, it seems reasonable that the persons using them were mostly people who thought that they might become a target of such strikes otherwise, that is military personnel and especially leadership.

My main beef with Mossad would be purely operational -- nine killed, (one of whom seems to be a ten years old girl who was unlikely to belong to the higher echelons of Hezbollah leadership) with 3k wounded seems pretty inefficient. Of course, without knowing how these are counted (are most of them pager owners who survived, or is everyone who had ringing ears after hearing the blast counting as injured here), it is hard to say for certain. And I get that there were operational constraints -- if the pagers suddenly weighted as much as a 1995 phone, the terrorists would have become suspicious. But even if we are generous and say that the eight killed were all military commanders, and that another sixteen were permanently injured in a way which prevents them from continuing to destroy Israel, I don't think that the outcome is very impressive.

Of course, this is just an armchair analysis. Perhaps using the compromised pagers to keep tabs on Hezbollah would not have been worthwhile because they were scheduled to be swapped for fresh, uncompromised ones in a week. Perhaps using something deadlier than mere explosives was not politically feasible.

While I think Hamas and Hezbollah are quite similar in a lot of ways, I think I still have more understanding for the Hamas grunt than for the Hezbollah grunt. The former has been raised on Hamas propaganda in fucking Gaza, which is not known for its economic growth and upwards mobility. The latter is much more likely to have heard the opinion that destroying Israel is perhaps not the most important thing in life, and has a Lebanese passport which offers economic alternatives to 'become a jihadist, Iran pays well' of which Gazans could only dream.

I don't think that the outcome is very impressive

There's another point you brushed against, but moved past: the pagers were used as a safe alternative to cell phones. As a morale downer and paranoia increaser, this will hit Hezbollah pretty hard.

I agree, the impact is mostly morale. Getting maimed by your pager is certainly not the most glorious kind of martyrdom.

Of course, I would also not oversell the psychological impact. The more senior commanders will simply keep some expendable kid nearby to handle their pager.

Yeah this is psychological warfare par excellence; the message is clear that the enemy can reach you at any time and you’ll never be safe.

Perhaps using the compromised pagers to keep tabs on Hezbollah would not have been worthwhile

My guess is that this wasn’t a useful option for the same reason that Hezbollah opted for pagers in the first place: pagers are passive, lacking transmit capabilities, meaning that Israel would not be able to collect useful data from the pagers remotely.

That is a very good point.

Mossad could certainly replace the circuit board with one which has an additional UMTS modem and a GPS tracker on it, but this would be rather trivial to detect once you open the device and compare it to the manufacturers PCB.

If you assume that Hezbollah is smart enough to do the that, but not smart/paranoid enough to short circuit one of the lithium batteries to verify that it will not cause a bigger fire or explosion than normal.

Of course, if I knew Mossad was after me, I would at least disassemble the PCB layer by layer, looking for any chips hidden within it, then open up any chips, compare the silicon to the original under a microscope, then worry about how programmable they are, then consider the possibility that Mossad would build custom chips which look identical to specs on the top layer and finally decide to find myself a job compatible with the continued existence of Israel so that I don't have to live a life full of well-justified paranoia. Thus I would make a terrible jihadist.

TX capability also requires much more power, and these pagers run off a AAA battery.

Agreed that most of the fun 'send real time GPS coordinates every ten seconds' options are off the table.

OTOH, with a capacitor, the pager could still send out a short, triangulate-able burst when it receives a certain message.

I was kind of assuming the pagers were coming with their own lithium batteries, which would be a pain to replace. Someone here claimed the devices were in use for months before exploding. I would think that most of the devices would no longer be running with their original (rechargeable, presumably) battery at that point.

Edit: The Guardian says (or implies) that it was an Apollo AR924 pager powered by a 90g Li battery. This is roughly similar to the ~115g battery found in Nokia phones from ca. 2000 and should easily be powerful enough to do the odd transmission.

I think it 'indiscriminate' is a curious word here.

It's not the targeting of Hezbollah but the method that is indiscriminate. If you can't see your target and you detonate an explosive device, you've probably committed a warcrime - you can't be sure you didn't blow up a pager in the pocket of a terror cell member currently working his day job as a bus driver, or while he was pumping gas at a crowded station, or carrying his 10yr old daughter on the hip directly over the pager. It's a lot less indiscriminate than peppering an area with antipersonnel mines, and quite a big improvement over bombing houses in civilian neighborhoods* but it's still bad.

*even though the latter is explicitly not a warcrime if the enemy has stationed military assets and personnel among the civilians - or rather, the warcrime was committed by the other side by using human shields. So why are the pagers no good if blowing up suburbia is ok? You don't know where the former is going to go off, and you need to know. A bomb you can aim, though the collateral damage may be horrible it is something you can estimate. You can choose not to bomb a school, or a hospital, at the very least without 'knocking' first. When you fire blind, you're saying that the worst possible outcome is acceptable, and IMO that's a bright moral line in the sand that should never be crossed. **

**And yeah, Hezbollah and Hamas and their like go there all as a matter of course, which is precisely why I'm fine with blowing them to pieces in a discriminate fashion.

I think that any method of warfare comes down to statistics. Just about any attack has a risk of collateral damage.

For some attacks (such as targeting a wedding reception with a hellfire missile, which I am generally against), you know the exact amount of dead civilians beforehand. For some, you only have an estimate of the distribution beforehand.

I would argue that the correct thing to worry about is the expected count of civilians killed (or QALY lost, if you are into that). 'The pager blows up a crowded gas station' is on the far tail, high body count but also unlikely.

It helps that the pagers were extraordinary weak explosives, not enough to kill the person holding them in their hands in most cases. If instead they had the deadliness of a fragmentation grenade, obliterating any unarmored target within a six meter radius, then the calculation would be quite different.

The context of the attack is that the IDF is fighting Hezbollah's sister organisation Hamas in Gaza, and the collateral damage there is abysmal (because IDF killing Palestinian kids are a great outcome for Hamas). In one case the IDF killed a high-ranking Hamas commander and 50 bystanders in a refugee camp (which was a bad call to make, IMO).

I will assume that out of the nine killed by the pagers, only the girl is an obvious civilian -- if there were more dead kids, Hezbollah would be sure to tell the world. Likely they were the intended targets. Let us say that the tail risks of vehicular accidents and causing larger explosions amount to another expected civilian death.

An enemy:civilian ratio of 4:1 is not bad for an enemy who is likely to fight an asymmetrical style of war a la Hamas. It is sad that civilians were killed and injured, but if you need to kill your enemies, you can do a lot worse.

Of course, one can debate if Hezbollah needs killing, or if they were in the middle of deradicalization, building hospitals and slowly forgetting that there was something about destroying Israel in their mission statement. Extrapolating from Hamas, I think it is likely they need killing, though.

Soleimani was killed by a supply chain attack. He had couriers go to other countries and buy cell phones for him. And he kept switching phones so no one could tell which phone was his and track him.

The CIA learned about this and intercepted all of the cell phones in those markets and installed spy software on all of them. Then they waited for one of those phones to be sent to Soleimani and then travel to Iraq. Then simply bomb the phone and he is dead.

That's merely a software change. The Israelis appear to having gone one step further and performed some hardware modifications.

I feel confident various CIA suits are mad Israel deployed this before they could.

First thing I though of:

”Losing a conflict with a high-powered cognitive system looks at least as deadly as ‘everybody on the face of the Earth suddenly falls over dead within the same second’.”

Israel has 20 IQ points max on the Arabs, and this is already what it looks like.

As of a few minutes ago, reports sourced by Sky News Arabia claims that Mossad had placed "Pentaerythritol tetranitrate" within the batteries, and then triggered it by remotely causing a battery overheat, so kind of an inbetween scenario for my "should I be worried that the opening salvo of a war involving my country will be my cellphone blowing up my crotch?" question.

Source

Inbetween scenario because there would have been tampering, but also it doesn't seem to have been big obvious bombs. It's concievable that China could be putting this in devices shipped to adversaries undetected.

I would be happy if we see again removable batteries in devices.

Didn't help Hezbollah despite pagers (I presume) taking AAAs.

On one hand, it's impressive that they actually could pull off such a scheme that seems like it's straight out of the movies; on the other, it's clear that there would be a lot of collateral damage, and I can't help but think that my feeling of being impressed is very similar to how I felt about the 9/11 attacks. I can't imagine this having a positive effect on the levels of sympathy towards Israel, which was already fairly low, among the all-important Western public, no matter how much supportive media coverage they get. Is this a sign that they do want to accelerate the timeline towards a big showdown, perhaps thinking that delaying it for longer would only make their enemies stronger (Iran getting the bomb?) and their allies weaker/more distracted (derivative of public support in the West negative anyway, plus US/EU might get occupied by Russia and eventually China)?

I can't imagine this having a positive effect on the levels of sympathy towards Israel, which was already fairly low, among the all-important Western public, no matter how much supportive media coverage they get.

Really? I don’t know, this just seems too badass and super-competent to not inspire some level of positive reaction among people who are not already committed to the pro-Hezbollah position. Having seen a video of one of these pager bombs going off, the explosions don’t seem large enough or destructive enough to cause significant collateral damage to anyone who wasn’t carrying such a pager on his body. How much evidence do we have that a large number of individuals who aren’t Hezbollah employees/members/contractors were harmed?

I don't know, I thought that the whole Mossad/Krav Maga memeplex of Israeli hypercompetence had already persuaded those who would be attracted by strength regardless of the ends. Would you say the same thing about 9/11 with respect to people who were not already committed to the pro-America position? If anything, there it was more realistic that there would have been converts, because Arabs were not known as legendarily competent while you can't swing a cat in memespace without hitting some form of hostile or friendly praise for Israeli skill.

There was the video of the pager exploding while being placed on the counter at a grocery store, which at least suggests that the owners do not always keep them on their body, and reports of injured hospital staff (who would plausibly be handed pagers if the de-facto rulers obtained a large stash of them) and children. I'm sure Israel and media allies will deny and cast doubt upon those as only reported by Hezbollah (as it's not like there's some other agency on the ground keeping track that could not be painted as biased), but my sense was that even in cuckold countries like Germany people have lately been dismissive towards the routine Israeli claims that only militants were hit as those appeared a little too automatic and unrealistic.

Would you say the same thing about 9/11 with respect to people who were not already committed to the pro-America position?

Support for the 9/11 hijackers outside of the Arab world seems pretty nonexistent, largely because the primary target (or at least the target that ended up getting all the news coverage) was a pair of buildings occupied by thousands of civilians. If they’d just stuck to ramming planes into the Pentagon and the halls of government in DC, I frankly think that there would have been a much larger sense of “Holy shit, I don’t agree with these guys’ worldview, but that was extremely impressive.” Instead people can’t really separate the means from the ends because of the very visually-evocative optics of a bunch of middle-class office workers leaping to their deaths or crushed under rubble. Similarly, while even people who broadly support Zionism still mostly squirm over the carnage in Gaza, I doubt many people feel all that bad for guys who work for Hezbollah.

I don’t know, this just seems too badass and super-competent to not inspire some level of positive reaction among people who are not already committed to the pro-Hezbollah position

Some of us don't want a regional war, but Israel obviously does. What is the point of this except provocation? Intermingling hidden explosives among civilian populations is not impressive, it's called terrorism.

Israel intermingled explosives among the enemy combatants. Intermingling said combatants among the civilian population was, as usual, the decision and the primary tactic of their enemy.

The precision repeatedly shown by Israel in such conditions is, indeed, impressive.

What war has ever contained enemy combatants entirely separately from the civilian population? Even when a massive percentage of the military is deployed to a warzone, there are certainly plenty of personnel who still go home to their families each night.

It seems to me that the real argument becomes what qualifies as a warzone, and when.

Please. There's the usual grey-zone mixing of combatants and civilians, and then there's the Western islamophilic media front that the Palestine and co primarily fight on as opposed to the physical warzone.

Gaza is roughly 141 square miles, with around 15.6k inhabitants per square mile. It's not like they'd have room for a military base even in the upside-down world where Israel allowed them to. They've been fenced in and treated like literal prisoners. So obviously any militant uprising is going to be near civilians by virtue of having zero alternate choices.

None of this should surprise anyone, and none of it should have happened in the first place.

True, but it’s also true that for many years the status quo was that Palestinians could live and work in Israel relatively freely until they started committing large numbers of terrorist attacks against civilians.

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I mean this is just one more permutation of the classic problem in the Middle East, which is that in many of these countries terrorists (or people who are employed by terrorist organizations) are walking around intermingled with the civilian population, and therefore fighting those terrorists inherently risks significant harm to civilians. I’m sympathetic to the position that in such a scenario, it should be considered unacceptable to expose those civilians to risk even if it means forgoing a clear tactical victory, but I’m also equally sympathetic to the opposite view. I don’t particularly care if there is a “regional war” or not, provided that nobody I personally care about gets conscripted to fight in it, but I’ve made my weakly pro-Israel position clear, and this certainly didn’t move the needle away from that position for me.

I don’t particularly care if there is a “regional war” or not, provided that nobody I personally care about gets conscripted to fight in it

That's a really silly perspective. So if it causes a lot of damage to your home country- economically, politically, geopolitically, militarily, you don't care as long as you don't know someone who was conscripted?

It’s not clear to me that such a war would cause all of that damage to the United States. It seems like it could go all sorts of ways! I simply do not feel as though I have a strong enough grasp of all of the possible outcomes to have a strong opinion on the issue. When faced with this level of uncertainty and complexity, I think it’s pretty reasonable for a person like me - a random civilian whose job and livelihood seem not to stand much of a chance of being seriously impacted either way - to throw up my hands and say, “Not my problem!”

Iraq and Afghanistan and Syria all being strong data points that ME war has negative effects on the home-front doesn't persuade you? Or maybe you don't think Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syrian wars have had negatives impacts on the US and Europe?

Iraq and Afghanistan had terrible effects on the home front in America primarily because American troops themselves were fighting those wars, at great expense to the United States.

Syria doesn’t appear to have had any massive negative effect on the American home front. It has had a very bad effect on Europe, because European countries pursued incredibly stupid immigration/refugee policies. (I know, you likely believe that Israel or Global Jewry strong-armed them into those policies, but I just don’t think the evidence is there.)

I don’t see that previous wars in the Middle East - say, the Iran-Iraq War, or the wars Israel fought against its neighbors in the 60s and 70s - did actually have a significant long-term negative impact on countries outside of the region. Perhaps I’m simply too ignorant about the subject.

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Yes, it's called nationalism.

on the other, it's clear that there would be a lot of collateral damage

How so? A pager is mainly made of plastic and can’t hold all that much high explosive (especially if you’re not gutting the internals). It’s not even a 100% guarantee that such a device will kill the wearer, let alone anyone else near by.

I’ve seen several videos posted of these pagers blowing up while the wearer is beside other people, and in all of them, it seems only the wearer was harmed. Obviously this does not confirm that zero bystanders have been injured, but based on the size of the explosions in those videos, I don’t see how there’s going to be “a lot” of collateral damage.

it's clear that there would be a lot of collateral damage

How is that clear? How many people, who are not the people holding them, can an exploding pager hurt? Supposedly these were all pagers bought by Hezbollah and distributed to their operators? Sounds like the most targeted strike, with the least collateral damage, that I've ever heard of or could ever imagine.

Supposedly these were all pagers bought by Hezbollah and distributed to their operators? Sounds like the most targeted strike, with the least collateral damage, that I've ever heard of or could ever imagine.

Even if it's not killing these operators, consistently maiming them seems like an obvious way to prevent them from blending into the civilian population. If I were Israel planning a ground invasion of Lebanon, temporarily injuring my unwitting enemies is great, but being able to filter out those with hip injuries for additional screening or capture seems a potentially-existential threat for such an organization.

But I can't speak to whether a ground invasion is actually likely, and I haven't been following the region very closely in the last few weeks.

Yeah, it seems like they aren't really trying to play the PR game anymore.

But attacks like this make enemy leaders think they can be killed at any time. It might be an effective strategy. I think there's a bit of grift involved for high-end leaders of groups like Hezbollah and Hamas. By fanning the flames of hatred they bring money into their organizations and get rich personally. Attacks like this alter the calculus, as now these leaders have to think about their own personal safety. No longer can they just send teenage zealots into a market with a suicide vest. They, personally, will be found and killed.

In any case, this is a lot better than aerial bombing.

Israel routinely kills Hamas and Hezbollah's leaders, they are fully aware that they are in grave danger. Before they got the head of Hamas, they wiped out about 60 of his relatives.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ismail_Haniyeh#Killing_of_family_members_by_Israel

Characterizing these guys as grifters is a bit far, they have always had skin in the game. They are true believers. Israel's been trying to assassinate them for years, this is nothing new: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ismail_Haniyeh#Killing_of_family_members_by_Israel

Attacks like this alter the calculus, as now these leaders have to think about their own personal safety. No longer can they just send teenage zealots into a market with a suicide vest. They, personally, will be found and killed.

Uh, no? There's no need for those leaders to alter the calculus or think any more about personal safety than they already do. They were already thinking of their own personal safety and have for an incredibly long time - it isn't like Soleimani was the first leader to get whacked. What it will actually do is force them to take a long, hard look at their supply chains and how they actually procure electronics. The biggest change I can see coming from this is a market opportunity for Chinese/Russian pager manufacturers.

what about open source?

The Chinese can be bribed and there are plenty of rich Jewish Russians in senior positions in industry and manufacturing, so it’s unclear that that’s a great path for them.

If the Chinese are so easy to bribe why aren't they giving Israel their full-throated support right now? From where I'm sitting it looks to me like China has no real motivation to assist Israel and they definitely don't act like it (understandably, in my view, given how Israel has treated their last imperial patron). As for Russia, I don't actually believe in the antisemitic conspiracy theory that jews are a fifth column who will abuse their economic power to subvert the will of the nation they live in - so I don't think the presence of jews in industry/manufacturing actually means anything when it comes to geopolitics.

Very impressive. The question that comes to mind is the value of blowing all of these up and mostly maiming many Hezbollah agents versus having full, unfettered access to their communications. This makes me think that Israel likely has full interception capabilities, no matter how Hezbollah communicates electronically.

I think there is certainly an advantage in making your enemy distrust all possible forms of communication. If they have to abandon pagers it's on to carrier pigeons next.

Could also be that they knew the pager gambit would be compromised eventually, either by an unplanned explosion or by someone in Hezbollah tinkering and alerting the rest.

First thought: this is totally a hypothetical, some sort of intuition pump, and the responses will explain how actually it was about offshoring semiconductors.

Second: wait, it’s a fair description? What kind of James Bond plot line is this?

Third: I don’t think I’ve seen 200 pagers in my life. The past is literally a foreign country.

If you go to the Museum of Spies in Berlin, you'll quickly find that a lot of the "silly" gadgets from the Bond films were really not that far removed from reality. Cameras disguised as bras, dart guns hidden in umbrellas, the whole shebang.

I think on the whole that's pretty cool, despite the harm to some innocents as collateral damage.

I think the whining about terrorism and medical professionals being harmed falls flat. If they're hezbollah members and medical professionals, they're terrorists first and foremost and therefore legitimate targets.

But I wonder about the timing? Why now? Why not in combination with something else?

Hezbollah is functionally a state in southern Lebanon; it’s entirely possible that these medical professionals were working for Hezbollah for the same reason that doctors work for the government the world over.

Why aren't people in the middle east ever allowed to engage in armed resistance when they are occupied? When Iraq was under a brutal occupation they were still labled terrorists despite having every reason and right to defend their country from occupation.

The same goes for the Lebanese. They are under attack and should be expected to fight back.

The Lebanese are neither occupied nor under attack. A non-state group has been conducting military activities from Lebanese territory, which the state is alternatively unable/unwilling to stop, but the incapacity of a state to maintain a monopoly on organized violence does not negate the sovereign right of other states to retaliate against belligerents.

Lebanon has been bombed regularly for decades, has had large groups of Palestinians pushed into its territory and Israel is fighting wars in both Syria and Palestine. They have every reason to militarize against Israel

And yet the Lebanese are neither occupied nor under attack. Whether they militarize against Israel is irrelevant to that, and if they initated a round of conflict as Hezbollah did it would even further invalidate claims of the later.

Being bombed surely counts as being under attack. Why does the case for Israel's cause always have to be made by way of gaslighting?

Being bombed surely counts as being under attack.

Depends- was this an initiation of hostilities, or a retaliation of a non-state group conducting military activities from Lebanese territory, which the state is alternatively unable/unwilling to stop, but the incapacity of a state to maintain a monopoly on organized violence does not negate the sovereign right of other states to retaliate against belligerents?

Or are we going to conflate 'attack' between the contextual of 'who started it and bears moral onus' and tactical 'a retaliation is an attack'? I enjoy a good motte and bailey as much as anyone, but I will fully acknoweldge starting in the motte on this semantic dispute, as I am and was using the former sense of instigation rather than later. We can restart from that if you'd like.

Why does the case for Israel's cause always have to be made by way of gaslighting?

Given your choice reubtal to Lebanon not being under attack was a conflict not started by Israel but from actors within Lebanon nearly two decades ago, I would propose that accusation of gaslighting would be a demonstration of gaslighting.

Whether Hezbollah is state or non-state seems fairly irrelevant to me, as they surely must enjoy broad popular support to function. (Something like 90% among Shiites, who are a majority in the parts adjacent to Israel) For all means and purposes, I think they can be modelled as a shadow government prosecuting a continuing low-key war against Israel on behalf of their people.

Lebanon and Palestine/Israel were separated by enemy action, and up until the colonization it is difficult to see the residents in the south of the French Mandate and the north of the British Mandate as separate peoples. Thus, it may be formally correct, according to the "rules-based international order"/maps drawn up by Anglos and their allies, that the 1948 war constituted an initial attack by the Lebanese against Israel, but if you don't put much stock in Western mapmaking then it is easy to instead see as a desperate attempt by a people to resist the occupation of part of their lands. This brings us back to the original question - why do Arabs not get accorded this right? I would be happy, in the sense of seeing a "master morality" system that is at least honest if not necessarily agreeable, if proponents of continued support for Israel simply argued that Israel is an ally, a superior civilisation and strong enough to deserve victory. However, its supporters can't seem to be able to stop to make their argument on the "slave morality" basis, saying that Israel deserves our support because they have been unfairly oppressed, undeservedly attacked and we owe them a moral debt (...to help them steal from and slaughter a third party?). I don't see how the latter can be done without trickery.

(...but all that being said, I now remember that we have basically opposite value systems and preferences regarding anything to do with international politics, and so it is probably not particularly productive for us to continue this discussion as we will both just get upset with no resulting shift in beliefs. Ceasefire?)

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Gang members who are attacked by police don't get to attack back on the grounds that the police are enemy combatants. The gang members aren't a state.

Because they are either a terrorist group that strikes outside their nation's borders, a sovereign protecting a terrorist group, a citizen who supports that sovereign, or one of the few unfortunate citizens that do not. In the last case, what they should be doing is forming a terrorist group to strike at their evil sovereign. Very few such people it seems.

Will this lead to any kind of generalized panic about mobile phones and other electronic devices? There are already rumors spreading that there were no explosives in the pagers and that this is something potentially any mobile device could be made to do if hacked.

I had the same thought, although from the looks of things there were absolutely explosives planted in these pagers; batteries don't just explode like that.

Yep, lithium-ion batteries will burn like a rocket and produce copious amounts of smoke, but no boom, or even pop.

Anyone who’s watched Mythbusters knows that high-explosives look very different from overpressure failures.

This looks like high-explosives to me.

Yeah, I've intentionally (and, uh, unintentionally) lit off some pretty high-capacity lipo batteries; even with direct punctures crossing multiple cells (don't do this!) it won't light off anywhere like these. Really big ones, scooter- or car-sized, can push out enough energy that people trying to put them out can inadvertently produce hydrogen gas that can detonate, but they're not fitting in a pager and you need a ton of water.

LiPo fires are scary because they burn so damn hot and so damn fast.

These obviously had explosives physically implanted in them. If someone is reporting there were no explosives, they are either 1) an Israeli operative trying to propagandize to make Israelis seem more powerful than they are or 2) someone who can't identify explosives, or someone looking at pagers that weren't modified.

The real risk for supply chain attacks is spy software and backdoors: information is power. And yeah, any country where all its electronics are made or handled by a hostile foreign adversary should be worried.

The problem is two-fold:

  1. Even if there were explosives in the beepers, the rumor is already out there.
  2. Having to worry that someone put C4 in your cellphone at some point in the supply chain is pretty bad too.

That's a pretty cool trick but how is it going to achieve the political goal?

Israel has blown up leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah with bombs and now pagers. They have all these sci-fi ways of killing Iranian scientists, remote controlled machineguns and such.

No war in history has ever been won by assassination. If they want to win militarily they need to actually march in and crush Hezbollah, there's no shortcut. Hamas shows that much. If Russia blew up Zelensky, that wouldn't solve their problems. They have to smash the Ukrainian army until it stops moving, or come to a negotiated peace.

If Israel actually follows this up with an air and ground campaign that blasts through Hezbollah and achieves their surrender or obliteration, that will be really impressive. But if it just leads to more skirmishing with rocket and airstrike exchanges, then what's the point?

I don't think there was any intent to achieve a significant political goal, they were forced to use it because it was about to be discovered.

https://www.al-monitor.com/originals/2024/09/exclusive-hezbollah-suspicions-forced-israel-expedite-lebanon-pager-attack

It was not Israel’s preferred course of action to detonate the pagers ahead of a full-scale war with Hezbollah, but security officials made an 11th-hour decision after at least two Hezbollah members suspected something was amiss with the devices.

Israel has been posturing for an invasion of Lebanon but clearly aren't ready for it just yet.

No war in history has ever been won by assassination.

I think it was happened in feudal times. E.g. this might be an example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anabasis_(Xenophon)

Cyrus died in battle, is that what you're talking about?

well it just first that got in my head. I don't think if Cyrus was killed by lone wolf changed anything, in the end, Greek army was left with no person they could legally install as ruler as so had so leave. Assasinating Cyrus opponent would be probably effective.

If Russia blew up Zelensky, that wouldn't solve their problems.

But it will solve Ukraine's biggest problem. Zelensky is better as martyr than as a narcissist in lead that cares only about Zelensky.

Technical part is not interesting. Many ways to do it. I am not sure how exposing this capability now helps Israel.

This is one of those - it can work only once things. So they either had some imminent threat to deal with or...?

Technical part is not interesting.

I don't know about you, but I carry a cell phone close to my crotch daily, I am really interested as to whether this is a lithium battery detonation due to software abuse, lithium battery detonation due to physical tampering or the detonation of implanted explosives, as it would change my behavior, especially in times of heightened geopolitical tension.

If it's purely software, maybe I'll carry my phone in a bag instead of pockets. If it required physical tampering, maybe I'll reconsider used devices, or maybe it will increase my worry about letting my phone be handled by people I don't trust (airport security in a country I don't trust, for instance, or dodgy phone repair shops).

The videos I saw certainly didn't look like a plain lithium battery failure. There appeared to be much more energy in the explosion, then much less fire afterwards.

Later reporting apparently sourced from Lebanese security says that less than 20g of PETN (Pentaerythritol tetranitrate) was placed on the batteries and then detonated by remotely overheating the battery.

Which is still terrifying to me, tbh, as I have a device in my pockets that has a significant amount of components built in a country that my country could realistically be at war with within this decade.

IMHO this doesn't scale well.

A few thousand targets, who are trying to stay in hiding, who you know you'll be hitting within months, who are already at war with you, and who are soldiers in that war? Sure, slip some explosives into their pagers. What are they going to say if they catch you, "Gosh, we only launched seven or eight thousand rockets at your towns this year, but now the gloves are off!"

A hundred million targets, a million of whom take their cell phones through airport explosive detectors each day, another 20,000 of whom have their cell phones dismantled for repairs each day, who are a mix of 99% civilians not at war with you and 1% soldiers who are also not at war with you but who still have a few thousand nuclear warheads ready just in case? You would have to be completely insane to start loading their phones with explosives.

China could realistically be at war with us within a decade, but it'll be a "gosh, Taipei really wanted to reunify with us and we just had to very suddenly send over a bunch of troops to what's really also our own territory to deal with the criminal terrorists who wanted to oppose the will of the people" sort of war, not a "the trouble with Pearl Harbor was it didn't piss off the US enough" sort of war. I wouldn't be surprised if every chip they manufacture for us is compromised with a you-can-find-it-under-an-electron-microscope plausibly-deniable-backdoor for SigInt or DDOS purposes, but I would be astonished if they tried to pull off a you-can-find-it-with-a-screwdriver obvious-killing-Americans-preparation for unclear purposes. Your phone may stop working when WW3 starts, or it may start transmitting every word spoken around you to Chinese AIs to sieve through for intelligence, but it's not going to explode.

Yeah, but Israel targeted pagers because few normies have or use them, so blowing them up is fairly constrained. On the other hand blowing up lots of cellphones is basically just carpet bombing, which is widely recognized by military theorists as pointless.

It's not purely software. Too valuable to waste on such small target.

I doubt it is too, but I hope we'll find out more within the few weeks.

Maybe this phone trick only works once. But intelligent people can come up with all kinds of attack vectors. Next time it will be something else. This sends a pretty clear message: we are smarter than you and we can get to you. Whatever you do, it won't work, so don't try.

And, in fact, Middle East peace will be achieved when Arab countries stop trying to attack Israel constantly. The sooner it happens, the fewer Arab lives will be lost.

Someday, people will realize that Arabs are happy to fight wars that never end.

But today is not that day.

I don’t think the Israelis are uninformed about the Islamist view on martyrdom. But what other choice do they have? Their enemies refuse to even consider any victory condition in which they still exist, and overthrowing the Iranian government is not possible for a variety of reasons, so their only option is to continue the way they currently are.

But what other choice do they have?

Buy Sharks Bay from Australia and move there?

I prefer the "swap land with Taiwan" strategy, personally.

Huh, Shark Bay is apparantly bigger than Israel. I'd unironically be in favour of this if Australia made the offer.

As an Australian, nope. We're already going through a real estate crisis and have a population that's already causing strain on significant water systems - moving Israel there would make those problems substantially worse. But there's actually a better option on the table anyway - the Israelis should just be moved to the American deep south, where they can live with all the evangelicals who love them so much. There's plenty of room, and I'm sure the Israelis would be better migrants than the Haitians - dogs and cats aren't kosher, last I checked.

The other explanation for the timing is that a limited time window to use it was closing, either because of an inherent limitation in the bomb design or because the cover was about to be blown.

Or because the political leadership was in crisis and needed something big and flashy to show off to the public to boost credibility. Or because there is a forthcoming military action that they needed Hezbollah leadership confused, partially-disabled, and disrupted for. There are many potential reasons this capability was triggered now.

True, I should have said "another explanation".

a limited time window to use it was closing

If it is planted explosives, the time window to use it would have been very short to begin with as it would all be dependant on the explosives not being detected, and no accidental detonation occuring that would give away the plot. If I were planning something like that, I wouldn't wait more than a week or two after deployment. Apparently they waited 5 months.

It doesn't just work once but it imposes an ongoing cost to your enemies operations to avoid the same thing happening again.

I mean... wouldn't they just make sure to dismantle a handful of pagers before distributing them from now on? They'd have to pack the things with high explosives to get a result like this, would be easy to find, not much of a cost.

They'll likely short term want to change up suppliers if that info is compromised, but by blowing up all the pagers Israel has revealed this which means it can't be used in the future and if there are other capabilities downstream from this supplier compromised like wire taps etc. Now Hezbollah knows to toss the electronics.

Yeah with the phone hacking it’s plausible that they can always find another exploit, but with this kind of physical modification it doesn’t actually invalidate the pagers as a method of communication at all.

I think the main benefit is likely psychological. Conspiracies about Israel being behind everything are already very common in the Arab world, 22 year old Hezbollah recruits aren’t familiar with the specifics of what Mossad can and can’t do. If they’re handed the next pager and promised “I swear, this one won’t blow up”, they might not believe it.

Agreed. Even if they hide the explosive in the battery, using a sympathetic detonation one would still be able to find out if that battery was explosive.

Of course, next time, Mossad might not modify all of the pagers, but just 5%, so just testing a few is not enough to prove that the bunch is safe. So they either have to destroy 90% of the pagers they buy or live in fear that their pagers might explode in their face, perhaps not even granting you a martyr's death, but just maiming you for life.

Yeah with the phone hacking it’s plausible that they can always find another exploit, but with this kind of physical modification it doesn’t actually invalidate the pagers as a method of communication at all.

Depends what you mean by 'invalidate.' A system generally isn't validated when everything fails all the time, but when a critical mass of things fails enough that the reliability isn't high enough to keep doing. In some systems you only need one part to not work for the whole system to fail.

In this case I'd agree that pagers will probably still be used- I imagine they'd be used to prompt agents to go look at more secure means of communication- but if the psychological effect of the operation is that people don't trust the system enough to use it, you're going to the reliability issue alluded to.

Maybe not just in the Arab world at this point.

If I was the sort of person inclined to try to convince people that "They" didn't get Epstein, shit like this would certainly make my job harder.

The argument against ‘them’ doing Epstein was always obvious. If you want to convince a bunch of rich Jews to support Israel, you don’t need to blackmail them with footage of them fucking teenagers lol.

you don’t need to blackmail them with footage of them fucking teenagers

The operative word the media used tended to be "children", not "teenagers".

The masses are stupid enough to believe a 17 year old is a child, so it works.

True, and indeed it was rarely remarked upon in the Prince Andrew case that - unless he explicitly paid her for sex - sleeping with a 17 year old Virginia Giuffre was entirely legal under British law at the time and now.

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I mean... wouldn't they just make sure to dismantle a handful of pagers before distributing them from now on?

Depends. Could be their procurement or distribution functions are compromised.

Supposedly the batteries were swapped with equivalent batteries with added explosives. Merely looking at its insides may not be informative. Are they also going to cut apart batteries and other components? On a sampling of units or every one?

As a trust issue: the next time a member of hezbollah is given a device for communication, will they trust it or fear it is a bomb or tracking device or otherwise compromised?

Yeah that'd still be pretty easy. You wouldn't need to sample every one. Just one per 50, a few per shipment, that sort of thing. I imagine they fear pretty much all electronics could be used for tracking since Israel or the US might drone strike them at any time and anywhere anyways.

You any I have a different understanding of easy.

Cutting apart every component large enough to plausibly hold a bomb and correctly inspecting it by people who know what they are doing on a sampling of every incoming shipment is an enormous burden. I have spent months of my life going to other countries and telling people who assemble and test electronics "do this thing like I'm showing you now". And then later they don't do what I showed them.

I think these people would have the obvious idea to check their equipment for bombs, and then almost entirely fail to actually check their equipment for bombs.

Or degrading hezbollah’s organizational capabilities for a few days was the goal of the operation, they won’t be able to get new devices out right away.

This is one of those - it can work only once things.

It happened again today, this time with PTT radios. This is great, I hope it keeps happening and people treat known Hizballah members like lepers.

This is great, I hope it keeps happening and people treat known Hizballah members like lepers.

Do you really think that would actually happen?

Assuming you live in Israel (given your flair), would IDF soldiers randomly exploding due to surreptitiously placed Iranian bombs cause you to start treating known members of the IDF like lepers? I think it would just bolster your determination to fight back against the Iranians rather than treat the soldiers fighting for you like social pariahs. To use a specific example...

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/18/world/middleeast/lebanon-funeral-pager-attack.html

I don't think that murdering this 9 year old girl (which I wouldn't really call "great", personally) is making these people support Israel. In fact, from the photos of the funeral, those Hezbollah scarfs look pretty new - and the quotes they give make it sound like this attack was one of Hezbollah's greatest recruitment efforts to date. I know personally that if my 9 year old daughter was murdered by a foreign state I'd be signing up for whatever military organisation wants to fight back against them as soon as they'd have me.

Did you know that, roughly speaking, Lebanon has 3 major ethnic/religious groups that aren’t super-friendly with each other? So everyone who isn’t a Shia Muslim isn’t really on their side anyway. Christians in Lebanon have already been blaming Hizballah for bringing Israeli wrath on Lebanon for a conflict they have no interest in. When Muslims from Beirut’s Dahieh started looking for places to move to, some Maronites and Druze simply refused to rent them. Now this is further pulling these groups apart, who would want to associate with a group that at any moment could either blow up or be bombed, and you already hated anyway?

You’re modeling this as if it’s all of Lebanon fighting Israel, while in truth it’s one part of Lebanon dragging the rest into unwanted war - AGAIN. Did western media not show you the Syrian opposition groups giving out candy in the streets after the pager attacks? Where do you think that comes from? Or did you not hear of the Sabra and Shatila massacre- blamed on Israel, but perpetrated by Lebanese?

Did you know that, roughly speaking, Lebanon has 3 major ethnic/religious groups that aren’t super-friendly with each other?

Yes. I just don't believe that will convince any Lebanese people who aren't already Israel supporters that the dying children are to blame rather than the nation which is currently bombing them as we speak.

Did western media not show you the Syrian opposition groups giving out candy in the streets after the pager attacks? Where do you think that comes from? Or did you not hear of the Sabra and Shatila massacre- blamed on Israel, but perpetrated by Lebanese?

I don't recall ever claiming that Lebanon was some kind of land of milk and honey where all men lived together in harmony, but I don't see how this really matters. If those distinct subpopulations were already murdering and massacring each other, it isn't like being targeted by Israel is going to change that all that much.

If those distinct subpopulations were already murdering and massacring each other, it isn't like being targeted by Israel is going to change that all that much.

You’re applying contradicting logic to the same group. Once, Shia can somehow hate Israel more because the daughter if a Hizballah operative died, then secondly non-Shia cannot hate Shia more since they’re already hostile to one another. Please pick one lane so we can further discuss.

By the way, you could just go to /r/lebanon and see what they think of Hizballah there.

Here is a Reuters link.

I do wonder when people will stop picking fights with the Jews. None of them seem to learn that it never ends well.

Painting the Jews as historical winners is definitely a take.

They're still around, in recognizable form even, and there are few from Western or Middle-Eastern antiquity who can say that. (East Asia has had a lot more continuity though.)

How many Latins have you seen around lately? Even though they were the founders of Rome and nobody tried to genocide them (well, not anymore than anyone else back in the day), by the time of Augustus they were already gone and forgotten as a people and a culture, and nothing of theirs survived. The only thing that has endured in some form is their language. Rome still exists, but its people have been entirely genetically replaced several times over, just by people moving in and out.

Meanwhile the Jews have maintained their distinct culture and even genetics, even though they were in exile for give or take 2000 years.

Ashkenazi Jews are descendants of a founder population that was apparently half-Italian, half-Jewish, so it’s not like there hasn’t been assimilation there too.

I wouldn't go that far, but I stand by my position that those who decide to try to persecute Jews don't tend to have great things to show for it.

(Although post WWII, you could argue they have been historical winners, which is arguably more relevant for deciding whether going to war against them is a great idea).

laughs in Latin

Although if you believe that Christianity helped to take down the empire, that was kind of born out of Jewish resistance.

True. At the very least though, the Romans weren't following the current trend of ME nations impoverishing themselves for the sake of killing Jews not within their own borders.

They only have to win once, whereas Israel has to win every time. In addition, as @Tanista says, martyrdom (which Islam sees much more broadly than other Abrahamic faiths) is glorious to them in any case.

Israel has hundreds of nuclear weapons including long range missiles and probably ICMBs and nuclear armed subs. They will without a doubt use them in the event that they are overrun on their own soil. Pardon the consensus building, but does anyone reasonably doubt they wouldn’t put them to use both preemptively and offensively to glass Iran, Yemen, Lebanon, Syria in that case? Israel isn’t fighting wars of choice in which it can pack up and go home. There is no winning condition for their enemies, only death for everyone.

they wouldn’t put them to use both preemptively and offensively to glass Iran, Yemen, Lebanon, Syria in that case?

So? There will be one billion Muslims (including still plenty of Arabs) who survive and who will gladly reconquer the Holy Land after the dust settles. That’s still a victory condition for them.

Different incentive structure? Death guarantees heaven, victory guarantees glory, and heaven. Eventually.

People on Twitter are speculating that Israel confiscated the pagers, then implanted explosives, and then returned them to Hezbollah who stupidly continued to use them.

An interception during shipping is surely possible, but that isn’t really ‘confiscation’. Anyway, it is impressive, if pointless. I suppose the idea is to inculcate some degree of fear, but I don’t think anyone in Hezbollah thinks they aren’t at very high risk of being killed in an Israeli attack if a war breaks out.

I don’t think anyone in Hezbollah thinks they aren’t at very high risk of being killed in an Israeli attack if a war breaks out.

This is the war. It’s happening right now.

A communications disruption can mean only one thing: invasion.

... that's a line from The Longest Day, isn't it?

Anyway, it is impressive, if pointless.

I've seen it suggested that one of the main aims of this incident was to throw H's communications into disarray. They were already avoiding standard modern telecoms for fear of being spied on, now they've found out that their alternative isn't safe either.

Having big chunks of your chain of command and logistics network in hospital or recuperating at the same time is a major hit to capability as well.

That makes more sense.

Somehow, Israel hacked the pagers used by a couple thousand Hezbollah members. And then they made the pagers explode simultaneously, leaving over 200 of them seriously injured.

I've seen posts on Twitter suggesting the casualty numbers could be in the thousands.

Not sure I entirely trust the surely unbiased statistics I receive from JewishWarrior13.

Reuters and other mainstream sources are saying thousands.

That's fair, I was feeling lazy and posted the last account I saw reporting it. FWIW I'm pretty sure I heard it being reported to be in the thousands by the national broadcaster in Sweden.

Yes, it's thousands. My 200 number was the number of seriously wounded.

Ah I misread 200 as referring to people affected. My bad.

Israeli Terrorism?

It dovetails with our recent discussion of how Israel has normalized the practice of assassination as a core strategy of warfare. And now watching these videos of pagers exploding reminds me of the videos I've seen of Islamic terrorism: Life going on as normal in a marketplace or something, then an explosion with women and children around. We will get more details about the deaths/injuries, but there are rumors of an Iranian ambassador being injured and there will most likely be injuries among women and children across Lebanon and Syria.

I just don't understand the point of an operation like this except to provoke fear and a regional conflict. It's not going to cause Hezbollah to surrender or significantly disrupt their wartime capabilities at the northern front. It's just a terrorist attack. Is the US going to publicly disavow this, or is rote terrorism now going to be normalized by Israeli operation in the region?

nAd now watching these videos of pagers exploding reminds me of the videos I've seen of Islamic terrorism: Life going on as normal in a marketplace or something, then an explosion with women and children around.

One is an explosion coming from a suicide belt or backpack which is designed to harm and kill everyone in the immediate vicinity, particularly those women and children.

The other is sabotaging a pager handed out by a terrorist organization to its members with a small enough amount of explosives that even the person wearing the pager or keeping it in their pocket isn't reliably killed.

These are not the same.

I just don't understand the point of an operation like this except to provoke fear and a regional conflict. It's not going to cause Hezbollah to surrender or significantly disrupt their wartime capabilities at the northern front.

Are you sure? Knocking out a major communication system sure seems disruptive to me, to say nothing of putting a couple thousand officers, cell leaders, logistics people, etc. in the hospital all at the same time.

It's just a terrorist attack.

I know words are just vibes now, man, but come on. This is an attack on the participating personnel of a combatant organization during ongoing hostilities. That's not terrorism.

Attacking enemy combatants while in conflict with the organisation they fight for isn't terrorism, attacking civilians to create spectacle and fear is.

I don't think it's uncharitable of me to suspect that you're making this false equivalence because you hate Jews, Mr SS.

I don't think it's uncharitable of me to suspect that you're making this false equivalence because you hate Jews, Mr SS.

Ok, what's the real equivalence? Is this attack closer to a terrorist attack, or is it closer to something the US has done in decades of waging war in Iraq and Afghanistan? Can you point to any conduct in the US in engaging in those wars that compares to this? It's unprecedented, and the closest base of comparison are terrorist attacks. If you don't agree, you can just point me to where the US has engaged in this in its own "War on Terrorism".

Drone strikes seems like a reasonable one. I'm not a fan of Israel by any means, but this seems straightforwardly preferable to the classic "hellfire missile into a compound that turns out to be a wedding". As I recall, there were a lot of incidents along those general lines, any one of which was almost certainly much more objectionable than this entire attack.

What exactly is the basis for objection here?

  • The targets are Hezbollah agents. I don't see any reasonable objection to Israel targeting Hezbollah agents.

  • The method involves explosives, which are not perfectly discriminate, so there's risk of collateral damage. Only, these appear to be very small bombs, such that you need to be either touching them or quite unlucky to be seriously maimed or killed.

  • The explosives are delivered "blind", in the sense that when they're detonated, the people detonating them don't know where they are or who actually has them, raising the risk of collateral damage. On the other hand, they were delivered in a way that provides a very high probability that they will, in fact, be in the direct personal possession of legitimate targets, and those not in the personal possession of legitimate targets probably got there by the actions of the legitimate targets, not the attackers.

My distaste for the Israeli state comes from them frequently being indiscriminate in the application of violence, either maiming and killing people who I do not consider legitimate targets. This attack in particular seems orders-of-magnitude better than the average in terms of target discrimination.

US drone strikes are a lot worse than is widely reported. Any male from 12 up in the combat zone was classified as a military target.

You think this is closer to a drone strike than it is to an IED?

My objection is that IEDs in marketplaces are a terrorist tactic, and that we are probably closer to this becoming normalized.

You think this is closer to a drone strike than it is to an IED?

"Your honor. I spent hours meticulously crafting these. To call them 'improvised' explosives is an insult."

Jokes aside, yes, it is very clearly closer to a drone strike than to an IED, and it is not particularly close to a drone strike.

  • You can think of it in terms of energy-in-the-system. IEDs in a middle-east context are generally remote-detonated artillery shells, suicide vests, or vehicle bombs. Drone strikes are usually a hellfire missile. In any of these cases, we're talking about dozens of pounds of high explosive and almost always significant added fragmentation. Recently, the US has been deploying the R9X hellfire, which trades the HE warhead for deployable blades, relying on pure kinetic impact... but even that is less discriminate than these pagers; people standing within arms-length of one of these are extremely likely to be unharmed. These are not "bombs in a market", because that implies that the market, in general, suffers the harmful effects of the bomb. They are literally bombs in someone's pocket. The fact that the person might be in a market when they go off is irrelevant; unlike IEDs or hellfires or even the r9x, the market and the other people in it will almost certainly be fine.

  • You can think of it in terms of discrimination in lethal effect. arty-shell bombs, suicide vests and car bombs are all designed to maximize lethal effect across the widest radius possible. Hellfires are not optimized for lethal radius, but their warhead and kinetic energy often deliver a similar effect. The R9X is directly intended to minimize lethal radius, and these pager bombs take it to about the minimum possible value while maintaining effectiveness. This minimization is possible because the attacker delivered these bombs in a way that maximized the chance of intimate contact with the target before detonation. IEDs are "to who it may concern"; these are, again, literally in the targets' pockets. And again, the Israelis did this blind, so they can't guarantee that it's a Hezbollah guy holding the hot potato when it pops. But you can't guarantee that the target of a sniper attack doesn't turn out of the line of fire at the last second, and you hit someone in the background instead. Mistakes happen, but this method seems to be quite optimized for minimizing them.

A drone strike also requires a chain of command to strike a certain target at a certain place, an IED does not. So some of these may have been detonated in schools, hospitals, or diplomatic facilities, crowded markets, places which would not be targets for drone strikes following a chain of command. Apparently the Iranian ambassador to Lebanon was injured, was the Iranian ambassador a target? There's no accountability like there would be for a drone strike.

The insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan also planted many well-placed IEDs which only harmed American military personnel. That is regarded as a terrorist tactic regardless. And obviously this attack is closer to an attack by IEDs than it is to a drone strike.

These are not "bombs in a market", because that implies that the market, in general, suffers the harmful effects of the bomb.

Obviously a bombing in a market causes the market to suffer the harmful effects? What are you even denying at this point? It causes obviously immediate disruption and panic and potential injury to bystanders. In the long term it creates fear and instability.

A drone strike also requires a chain of command to strike a certain target at a certain place, an IED does not.

I think it's probable that these bombs were better targeted than the average drone strike. The chain of command observably sucks at identifying and designating targets, and often resulted in significant collateral damage. I care about striking particular people at particular places because I want harm to bystanders minimized. These bombs seem likely to have done a very good job of minimizing harm to bystanders.

So some of these may have been detonated in schools, hospitals, or diplomatic facilities, crowded markets, places which would not be targets for drone strikes following a chain of command.

This would concern me if they had been randomly airdropped by a helicopter. It would concern me if Israel simply put charges in every pager in the country, and then detonated them all. But the story at the moment is that they compromised Hezbollah's pager supply specifically, which means that anyone harmed by one of these pagers is overwhelmingly likely to either be a member of Hezbollah, or was gifted a pager by a member of Hezbollah. Maybe that impression is mistaken, in which case I'll happily agree that my assessment is invalid. But if it is accurate, I think my assessment stands.

I don't particularly think that schools, hospitals, diplomatic facilities, or indeed crowded markets are intrinsically off-limits to war. They are vulnerable and valuable, and efforts should be made to minimize harm to or within them... But if the above holds, then the reason these areas were bombed is because an active member of Hezbollah entered them. Further, the places themselves were not harmed in any significant way. If the Iranian diplomat was injured, it sorta raises the question of how he got within area effect of a bomb this small, likely being held by a Hezbollah operative. My sympathy is limited.

There's no accountability like there would be for a drone strike.

Could you unpack the word "accountability" in this sentence? What "accountability" applied for drone strikes, and how does it differ from the accountability applying here? Some agent of a government did both. If either kills innocents, there's going to be negative consequences, but probably not serious ones. What's your model here?

Obviously a bombing in a market causes the market to suffer the harmful effects? What are you even denying at this point?

That the market structures, contents, or occupants generally were harmed by the physical effects of overpressure or fragmentation, which are the central examples of "harm" caused by a "bomb". Here's some examples of the destruction caused by central examples of "bombs" in a market.

It causes obviously immediate disruption and panic and potential injury to bystanders. In the long term it creates fear and instability.

War tends to cause disruption, panic and potentially injury to bystanders, as well as fear and instability. If you don't want that, avoid war.

If you think the people hit weren't actually Hezbollah, say that. I'm willing to believe it if there's reasonable amounts of evidence.

If you think the people hit were Hezbollah but this method of hitting them was inappropriate, I'm curious as to what a more appropriate method would be better. This method seems on the order of individual bullets from a sniper, which is pretty damn selective.

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Obviously a bombing in a market causes the market to suffer the harmful effects? What are you even denying at this point?

That these particular bombs were a threat to anyone in the market, other than their intended targets.

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An "IED" is merely an "improvised explosive device"; whether something fits that description says nothing about whether the use of it is according to the laws of war.

Ok? It's obviously an IED. Traditionally, terrorists and insurgents in Iraq/Afghanistan have used IEDs to target American military personnel within planted, hidden explosives. Now Israel is using IEDs for the same purpose against Hezbollah. So why object to my statement that Israel is embracing/normalizing tactics using by terrorists? Just admit they are and argue it's a good thing if you're inclined.

Ok? It's obviously an IED.

If they made them in a munitions factory, they're not "improvised". My point is your use of the term "IED" adds no light, it's nothing but heat.

Traditionally, terrorists and insurgents in Iraq/Afghanistan have used IEDs to target American military personnel within planted, hidden explosives.

Insurgents in a US-occupied country using IEDs to attack American military targets are fully within the laws of war in doing so.

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If it is an actual explosive, and they deliberately manufactured the devices they are no more improvised than a tank shell.

They are bombs of a sort, and bombs can be more or less targeted. It can be put on a street, it can be put under a soldiers car, or fired into an army barracks from a mortar.

Tactics used by terrorists are the same tactics used by states. The US dropped a nuclear bomb on civilians with the intent to intimidate Japan into surrender. But that isn't regarded as a terrorist attack, even though it fits most of the criteria to a tee. States plant mines and other explosive devices that are hidden, and if they can will drone strike someone, killing them and people around them. But none of that is terrorism. So it can't be that hidden bombs or collateral damage or targeting civilians that mean it's terrorism.

Taboo the term terrorism and IED for the moment. They don't add anything concrete to the discussion.

What specifically is the issue? Risk of collateral damage/deaths? Being sneaky and underhanded? Being unfair? Lack of targeting? Something else?

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The point of operation seems to be extremely clear. As a first-order effect, they just took out at least hundreds of enemy combatants at no personnel costs of their own, which is what any military would consider a good result. As a second-order effect, Hezbollah and other Israeli enemies will now have to exert a certain amount of care and nervousness over a lot of other foreign-imported gear, which will presumably have compounding hampering effects down the line.

Obviously if they want a full-scale war it makes sense to do this. I said it doesn't make sense unless they want a full-scale war.

I just don't understand the point of an operation like this except to provoke fear and a regional conflict.

Do I have news for you. The region is in conflict. Hezbollah and Israel have been in a hotter-than-usual shooting war for nearly a year.

The point to me looks like it is to damage and degrade Hezbollah operations by attacking their communications network. Fear is an element and tool in all conflicts. If you can scare your enemy into using messenger boys on bikes instead of instantaneous, encrypted communications you've made their decision making process much slower. Presumably, the reason Hezbollah has so many pagers is that they moved away from cell phones due to Israeli capabilities and actions.

If you only accept unequivocal victory as a meaningful action in conflict, then there's no point to much of war. Maybe it's true and a sad reality that much of conflict is pointless. Rocket Attack #3019 seems pretty pointless, yet everyone seems pretty dedicated to continue without points.

It's just a terrorist attack.

Terrorist attacks typically target civilians. If reports are true, then this attack targeted Hezbollah operatives embedded in the the Hezbollah supply chain. That would explain why an Iranian ambassador was hurt.

Most civilians don't use pagers anymore. Even civilians in the African bush have fancy cell phones with big screens. I'd wager in a place like Lebanon that possession of a pager is so highly correlated to being involved in Hezbollah operations that saying "everyone that has a pager in Lebanon helps Hezbollah" is largely a fact.* Downstream of the pager supply probably includes some doctors, logisticians, and other adjacent support personnel, but it probably it includes a lot of invested decision makers and operatives as well.

  • Some professions still use a lot of pagers. For now it seems there are still functioning hospitals, so not ever doctor's pager was blown up.

Presumably, the reason Hezbollah has so many pagers is that they moved away from cell phones due to Israeli capabilities and actions.

Real life imitates The Wire.

I just don't understand the point of an operation like this except to provoke fear and a regional conflict. It's not going to cause Hezbollah to surrender or significantly disrupt their wartime capabilities at the northern front. It's just a terrorist attack

I see this attitude - you can't beat Muslim terrorists and militias and will only make it worse so don't even try- a lot amongst Americans (usually left leaning ones) and I don't get it.

What's the alternative? Full scale war? Some peace deal?

you can't beat Muslim terrorists and militias and will only make it worse so don't even try- a lot amongst Americans (usually left leaning ones) and I don't get it.

How did 20 years of bombing Afghanistan go?

Why should they not fight back when getting occupied? Why should I as a right winger support people who went to the middle east and try to bring wokeness and globalism to the third world? The neo con/globalists wars have caused massive waves of refugees to Europe. There is no critical race theory and gender studies in Iraq. They fought back and kicked the globalists out.

These wars have given us nothing but a surveillance state, migrants, and debt. It is a good thing that the locals manage to resist.

How did 20 years of bombing Afghanistan go?

The bombing went fine. It was the pretending that building schools for girls in a muslim nation was a good idea that went poorly.

I have no qualms with Palestinians trying to reconquer everything from the river to the sea. I have a problem with them expecting any sympathy from me when they do it. No other historical border in world history is talked about in the way the "1967" borders are. That sort of thing is tiresome. If they want that land they can get good and win. Or else they can accept a peaceful 3 state solution with something similar to current borders.

This using your own women and children as human shields because you know antisemites and progressives will cry foul is totally lame.

“Skill Issue.”

I agree.

At this point enough precedent has been set to paint the Arab / “Palestinian” / Islamist resistance to Israel as what they are; sore losers and pathetic failures who start fights and continually get their asses handed to them, no matter the price to their people.

Any dialogue about this issue that conveniently skips over this very obvious point I just automatically flag in my mind as fundamentally dishonest. It’s incredibly tiresome.

Stop starting wars with Israel and losing. Or don’t, I really don’t care.

This makes me far less anti-anti_dan. What a well reasoned comment. The quadruple think required for all of this can be reduced down and you have done so. Please continue.

Why should they not fight back when getting occupied?

If the battle is to stop the occupation of Lebanese land, then Hezbollah can make some ploughshares now.

I obviously get that it's a GWOT hangup, it's the first response you get. I was being polite: I don't "get" it in the sense that I think there are significant disanalogies I often see the sorts of people making the above argument or your comparison simply ignore for unclear reeasons. If OP gave an alternative to violence, it'd explain why he thinks those don't apply.

Also, you switched the question. Nobody is really asking why Hezbollah is doing this.

The question was why Americans seem to behave with not only with absolute fatalism but also with condemnation that others don't take them at their word that, because they lost, nothing can be done. And why they think that's an option for a nation that can't just fly away and let any Afghans dumb enough to believe that they were now global citizens fall to their deaths or be beaten back into niqabs.

Why should I as a right winger support people who went to the middle east and try to bring wokeness and globalism to the third world?

Also not the question. These people, like OP, don't say they don't support it. They actively condemn. "Their bed to lie in" is totally different. Because that goes both ways.

What does "actively condemn" mean? Few people are going as far as saying that the US should bomb Israel. The condemnation is only relative to a baseline of close to unconditional material and political support. Not that I'm American (though I'm a citizen of another major IL supporter), but I don't see why I can't vote and advocate to withdraw all support and let the situation solve itself, or how I could do this without condemning the load-bearing parts of the overwhelming consensus to continue support.

Declaring the government structures of your enemy terrorists and therefore outside of normal conventions of acceptable wartime conduct is all fun and games until it is done to you and yours. Israel has performed targeted assassinations of scientists involved with the Iranian nuclear programme; I would like to see the reaction if Islamists killed some US academic involved in DARPA, or any Israeli scientist involved in defense projects. Ukraine has killed journalists and lobbed basically unguided ordnance at Russian cities; I doubt it would be framed as an acceptable wartime move if Russia pulled something like the pager trick on Ukraine's leadership or even merely on GRU/whoever is behind the assassinations on the Ukrainian side by any of its cheerleaders.

but I don't see why I can't vote and advocate to withdraw all support and let the situation solve itself

This would be "their bed to lie in" I think.

or how I could do this without condemning the load-bearing parts of the overwhelming consensus to continue support.

The cynical answer to perceived hypocrisy (often on the left anyway) is that it's all power all the way down. If America's enemies aren't terrorists because that is a cynical judgment on the US' part, it doesn't necessarily follow that the US are terrorists. They may all be hypocrites.

Then it's just a pragmatic judgment what you prefer.

But it often doesn't go like this. America's judgments of its opponents are false, but their judgments are correct.

What's the alternative? Full scale war? Some peace deal?

No just Xinjiang is enough

Israel doesn’t have the resources or political cover to go full Xinjiang in Gaza.

then an explosion with women and children around

That's the similarity.

The difference is these are micro-target explosions in the pockets of the targets rather than the entire market blowing up. So really quite different in the important metrics by my estimation.

Yeah, Israel should have been good boys and waited around for Hezbollah to attack them as they promised to.

As others have pointed out, this is about the least collateral damage that could be imagined. But no matter what it does, Israel can't win with its critics. What the critics really seem to want is for Israel to stop defending itself. As if Hezbollah would deliver one final punch and then both sides are even and the boys won't fight anymore.

Israel can defend itself and stop trying to use terrorist tactics to draw the United States into another ME war.

Israel can defend itself

This is Israel defending itself against a group which has, over the past 11 months, fired tens of thousands of explosive rockets (you know, explosive devices) at random into civilian areas (i.e. your definition of "terrorism"), forcing the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of Israelis from hundreds of square miles of territory.

We have ZERO evidence that the U.S. was involved in any way in this, and since I'm given to understand the U.S. generally sucks at the types of infiltrations that sabotaging all of Hezbollah's pagers would have required, I place a low likelihood on the U.S. being significantly involved.

and since I'm given to understand the U.S. generally sucks at the types of infiltrations that sabotaging all of Hezbollah's pagers would have required

Does it? I know nothing about this area, but I'd have assumed the US would have the resources to become top performers in any field related to national security.

I am very curious to know what you and @functor would consider to be the ethical options available to Israel when it comes to defending themselves.

You act like it's a hard question, but the United States has managed regime change and military occupations, Israel can follow that playbook if they want to go to war. Calling this "self defense" is not even a stretch, that's obviously untrue, it's a major act of provocation.

Israel should negotiate a settlement, but also their conduct in waging war should be held to US standards to receive US support.

You act like it's a hard question

The last 80 years of history would suggest it is.

Israel can follow that playbook if they want to go to war

I find it difficult to believe that if Israel went all-in with the regime-change-and-occupation playbook, you would be less critical of their actions.

Israel should negotiate a settlement

What settlement should they negotiate with an adversary whose only win condition is "You stop existing"?

I am actually not all that sympathetic to Israel, except in comparison to their enemies. But their enemies have made it clear that there is no permanent negotiated settlement that leaves Israel extant. Israel's options are to do what you suggest, and just put a boot on half the Middle East, or keep playing a tower defense game while hoping the Arab world eventually has a generational change of heart.

but also their conduct in waging war should be held to US standards to receive US support.

I think if we were fighting a war against an asymmetrical adversary who uses terrorist tactics, setting off bombs in enemy combatants' electronic devices (and accepting a small amount of civilian collateral damage) would be within our standards. It has certainly done less collateral damage than we did with drone strikes in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I find it difficult to believe that if Israel went all-in with the regime-change-and-occupation playbook, you would be less critical of their actions

They are clearly not aligned with our geopolitical objectives. If we were a serious country we would withhold aid, confiscate military weapons that have already been delivered, and demand Israel align with US objectives in the region. But our news media, University system, and government are all controlled by Zionists so there's nobody to stop them.

Israel escalating the conflict with IED tactics that not even the US has used in its wars/occupations is a level of insolence that is only accepted because we are an occupied government.

I think if we were fighting a war against an asymmetrical adversary who uses terrorist tactics, setting off bombs in enemy combatants' electronic devices (and accepting a small amount of civilian collateral damage) would be within our standards.

We did fight wars against asymmetrical adversaries who used terrorist tactics. We did not, nor would we ever, boobytrap civilian office supplies with explosives and send them among the civilian population. That is an IRA tactic or a tactic of the Iraqi insurgency.

They are clearly not aligned with our geopolitical objectives.

This is not clear to me. You might disagree with our geopolitical objectives, but Israel and the US seem to be pretty much on the same page about them, even if we don't always agree on strategy and tactics.

If we were a serious country we would withhold aid, confiscate military weapons that have already been delivered, and demand Israel align with US objectives in the region. But our news media, University system, and government are all controlled by Zionists so there's nobody to stop them.

When you said:

Israel can follow that playbook if they want to go to war

I claimed that you would not, in fact, consider that to be more ethical than what they are doing now. So you have now admitted that that's correct. My original question was "What can Israel do in its own defense that you would consider ethically defensible?" So the answer from you is clearly "Nothing" and the answer from @functor is "They can cease to exist, or they can fuck off to a backwater of Russia (and cease to exist)."

So now that we've gotten that out of the way:

Israel escalating the conflict with IED tactics that not even the US has used in its wars/occupations is a level of insolence that is only accepted because we are an occupied government.

"Insolence" implies they owe us fealty, which is ironic when you then claim we are an "occupied government." How can ZOG both be insolent and secretly ruling us?

We did fight wars against asymmetrical adversaries who used terrorist tactics. We did not, nor would we ever, boobytrap civilian office supplies with explosives and send them among the civilian population. That is an IRA tactic or a tactic of the Iraqi insurgency.

That's not remotely close to what the IRA or the Iraqis insurgents did. I notice how very carefully you phrased this: "boobytrap civilian office supplies." It must have taken you some small amount of time to figure out the best way to describe "boobytrapped communications equipment used by the Hezballah" in a way that sounds like they were doing something like planting bombs in copy machines. Golf clap for the clever wording. But we've all seen the news and the videos. They targeted Hezballah pagers and walkie talkies, and almost nobody but Hezballah were injured. Yes, I'm sorry for that 10-year-old girl who was killed (I am certain, in fact, that I feel more genuine regret for this than you do), but no war in history has avoided civilian casualties.

Now let's be real here: you aren't morally offended by Israel's tactics. If they sent snipers to take out Hezballah leaders, you'd be accusing them of escalation. If they dropped bombs and rockets, you'd be accusing them of war crimes. If they sent troops, you'd be accusing them of unprovoked aggression and imperialism. If they used Jewish space lasers to target Hezballah leaders from orbit, you'd accuse them of space terrorism. If they had Harry Potter wands and could Avada Kedavra Hezballah soldiers with zero collateral damage, you'd accuse them of black magic. You don't actually care how Israel responds to its enemies. You object to the fact that they exist.

Which brings me to my other question which I'm sure it just slipped your mind to answer, as you so often forget to answer inconvenient points when pressed:

Israel should negotiate a settlement,

With who? What settlement? What is your brilliant plan for peace in the Middle East? @functor's idea is at least rather straightforward about acknowledging that he doesn't think Israel should exist. But you speak of a "settlement" as if you think there is some meaningful and workable deal the Israelis could actually make that allows them to continue to exist but isn't "insolent" or doesn't cause you to shed crocodile tears over dead Arab children. I remain fascinated to hear what it is.

Israel should negotiate a settlement, but also their conduct in waging war should be held to US standards to receive US support.

How? With who? Why would they think the other side would abide by said agreement? Why would YOU?

Fundamentally the solution to this war can't be from an Israeli perspective. We have hundreds of millions of middle easterners and then we have Europe close by. The solution needs to be one that benefits arabs and Europeans.

They have been kicked out of countries 109 times and seem to be a fairly nomadic people. If they want to settle somewhere it has to be on land that is available and doesn't cause a constant headache for the rest of us. The jewish autonomous oblast is bigger than Israel and available to jews.

That seems like a terrible deal in every way for the Israelis. Why would they agree to it?

"They're just Jews, they don't really mind wandering around, and we can stick them in a bumfuck corner of unproductive land under the control of a country that historically pogromed Jews often and is currently their enemy" is a proposal only someone who deeply hates Jews would think serious and reasonable.

What Israeli tactics are not "terrorism" in your book?

The chances of the U.S. getting drawn in are very low now. Israel is winning militarily and Iran has been absolutely humbled. It's not that they don't want to do something, it's just that they can't because they are weak.


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