Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
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Notes -
I apologize for this poor source, but the only other one coming up is the WaPo which I would rather not link to directly because it annoys me.
RFK Jr's MAHA report seems to have at least 7 non-existent sources suggesting he (or someone involved) made use of an LLM and it hallucinated. This does not engender confidence.
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Some headlines for discussion:
4 Palestinians die after the storming of a UN food warehouse in Gaza. A distribution center from a group that agreed to work with Israeli restrictions meant to prevent aid being diverted or controlled by Hamas was also overrun. The head of this later group also resigned
Iran may pause enrichment for a year and ship off its highly enriched uranium in exchange for the US to recognize its right to enrich uranium for its civilian energy program and unfreeze funds.
Israel receives new U.S.-backed Gaza truce proposal: state media-Xinhua
Malta announces plan to officially recognize Palestine
Cholera outbreak in Sudan kills 172 in one week
Amnesty says over 10,000 killed in two years in Nigeria
Trump used offers of trade access to broker India-Pakistan ceasefire, claims U.S. Commerce Secretary
Eric Schmidt warns against China bombing US datacenters
UK announces $1B investment in cyber warfare
Ethiopia reports first mpox case
Trump admin cancels $766M in funding for moderna.
God damn these idiots. Most vaccine candidates against bird flu are reliant on fucking eggs for production. It's kind of a good idea to use mrna.
Oh noe.
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Offers from Hamas to give up the hostages remind me of Zeno's paradox. Right now they're offering ten living hostages, of the twenty suspected alive. Presumably at the end of the 60 day truce they'll offer five of the remaining ten. Then two of the remaining five. If living hostages could be divided up I'm sure they'd try that.
It's like the biblical test of Solomon (or was it David) to find out who the baby' mother is, except Hamas wouldn't even wait for him to finish speaking before pulling out the saw.
"What do you mean? I'm not wise, I just like dismembering babies!"
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A 25% chance of giving back a hostage as decided by two fair coin throws by the Patriarch of Moscow
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On May 21st, a woman in Galway commenced a hunger strike in protest over a) food not being let into Gaza (?) and b) the Irish government's failure to pass the Occupied Territories Bill, which would "ban trade with and economic suport for illegal settlements in territories deemed occupied under international law". In other words, it's a Boycott, Divest and Sanction bill, which would criminalise economic actors from doing business with Israeli companies. Last I checked she was on day 6 of her strike - she should now be on day 9, assuming she hasn't given up or been hospitalised yet.
Now, obviously a hunger strike isn't quite as dramatic as setting yourself on fire, but same ballpark. And I have to ask - what is it about this issue that seems to attract so many histrionic, mentally ill people? If you take them at their word, the Free Palestine people believe that, if left to their own devices, Israel will exterminate the entire population of Palestine (~5.5 million people), while the Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion think that, unless we acquiesce to their demands, literally everyone on the planet will die in a matter of decades. Given the respective stakes, you would logically expect the latter group to engage in more dramatic forms of protest than the former - 1,470 times as dramatic, to be precise. But instead it's the reverse: it's the Free Palestine people who are going on hunger strike and setting themselves alight, while the worst the Extinction Rebellion people can muster is hurling soup at paintings and gluing their palms to tarmac.
I think the motte is that Israel will continue to salami slice into Palestine, occupying any fertile or defensible land and forcing the Palestinians into dense urban ghettoes in the badlands where they will have to either rely on humanitarian aid from other countries, commute to Israel to work as day laborers or emigrate. They will be given some autonomy so that the IDF doesn't have to police inter-Palestinian disputes, but anything more substantial, like protesting against the status quo or disagreeing with an Israeli, will be punished with overwhelming force.
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AI people are similarly nonviolent...
People are hard-coded to care more about concrete issues of killing, status and land as opposed to abstract matters like environment or AI.
Also I bet the more abstract you are inherently, the less violent and dramatic you are. The most violent people are stupid and thus swing towards simpler causes. Bolshevism wasn't built by 'blah blah blah theory' people but 'see landlord, kill him' peasantry and resentful would-be elites running on 'see power, take it'. The West did not see any successful violent Bolshevik revolutions despite an excess of theoreticians and abstractionists.
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Apparently now ended.
I'm glad she didn't starve herself to death. And yet, is it terrible that I read this and immediately think to myself "do a flip faggot"?
There's something so contemptibly safetyist about voluntarily signing up for a task which is dangerous by nature - then refusing to do it, because of how dangerous it is. It induces the same feeling of disgust in me as those photos of Secret Service agents cowering behind Trump while he was being shot at. What the hell did you think being a Secret Service agent entailed? Vibes? Papers? Essays?
It's the "how do you like being a firefighter" joke all over again.
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Babes at the beach, possibly.
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Out of all suicidal actions in furtherance of Hamas cause, this is one of the least harmful I think. Should be encouraged.
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I was thinking about hunger strikes recently. And I figured out there are two things to be done - either force feeding them, or locking them in a room to make sure they won't cheat for at least 60 days.
Hunger strikes are a stupid strategy outside of prison. When the hunger striker is in prison, the authorities have to pick one of the two terrible optics choices of either force feeding them or letting them starve to death. Margaret Thatcher had to make that choice once regarding an imprisoned Member of Parliament, chose wrong, and the ensuing hullabaloo singlehandedly reignited the Troubles for another next fifteen years. If some rando civilian who’s loose and free and on the street decides to give themselves an eating disorder, and no one really has a responsibility to do anything about it, that doesn’t really reflect badly on anyone but the person themselves.
This only works if the prison guards are the good guys or at least try very hard to pretend to be ones. Otherwise neither of those options are a big problem for them. Case in point: Putin murdered Navalny in prison (not by hunger but same point stands) and what happened? Absolutely nothing.
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The Israel/Palestine conflict is concrete and producing real deaths, whereas environmental issues are speculative and we’ve had them around for a while now.
Even for really serious environmentalists, the world has demonstrably failed to end for a while now. Whereas tens of thousands of Gazans really have died and more are being starved. It’s no wonder it inspires people to greater efforts.
(Of course, other concrete horrors happen all the time but people hear much more about Israel/Palestine for path dependency / antisemitism / whatever reasons.)
Experience shows this doesn't work on cultists. They just move the world end date further in the future without updating anything else. Can be done unlimited number of times. Also the public has very limited memory - all the failed world end predictions over the last 50 or so years are available, and make absolutely zero impression and present zero problem for anybody predicting world to end again. Same btw about hundreds of thousands of Gazans starving - no matter how many times those things turn out to be lies, every next time it is claimed people believe it instantly and uncritically.
My favorite instance of this is the Church of the SubGenius prophesizing that the X-Day was July 5, 1998. When the day arrived but without aliens, they did a facepalm and said they had it upside down! X-Day is actually in the year 8661.
They really put every other cult to shame.
The church of the subgenius was, to be fair, actual satire.
"satire" is what the Conspiracy calls truth when it’s afraid people might believe it!
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Gaza activists believe that Palestinian lives, lots of time, are on the line right now, which is indeed at any given moment true to some degree (tens? hundreds? thousands? tens of thousands?). They also believe that the West has, within it hands, power to stop Israel on its tracks right now, though typically this doesn't go all the way to promote a direct military intervention. Climate activists, even the most fervent ones, tend to believe in longer timescales - even if they believe that climate effects are killing people now, they acknowledge that any law that might be passed due to their actions will only have an effect within a longer period, and that effect will be at most something that blunts the effect, not stop it completely.
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