naraburns nihil supernum
7mo ago
(text post)
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Israel-Gaza Megathread #1
This is a megathread for any posts on the conflict between (so far, and so far as I know) Hamas and the Israeli government, as well as related geopolitics. Culture War thread rules apply.
How would Zionists behave if they were in the Palestinian position?
This is a key question for determining the moral severity of the terrorist attacks we saw this weekend. A common criticism of Hamas is that they engage in terrorism against civilians whereas their morally enlightened (ostensibly) Israeli cousins only attack military targets. But I think this ignores the fact that Israel has the luxury of successfully hitting military targets. Israel can kill just as many civilians as Hamas by targeting military sites, while also killing relevant military leaders and defending against unwanted criticism. Yet at the end of the day, the same if not more civilians are killed, and the same terror is instilled in the enemy’s civilian population. Regarding an Israeli missile attack in May which killed ten civilians, Amnesty writes:
They were launched into densely populated urban areas at 2am when families were sleeping at home, which suggests that those who planned and authorized the attacks anticipated – and likely disregarded – the disproportionate harm to civilians. Intentionally launching disproportionate attacks, a pattern Amnesty International has documented in previous Israeli operations, is a war crime.
The idea that it is morally acceptable to kill civilians when you also kill military targets at the same time is often brought up when American bombings in Japan during WWII are discussed. However, I’m not convinced that there is a clear moral difference between Hamas actions and, say, the firebombing of Tokyo, where as many as 100k were killed, the vast majority being civilians.
Back to the question at hand, we know that Zionists had no issue bombing embassies and killing non-combatants in order to colonize the land of what is now called Israel. In the 40s, they notably bombed a British embassy, and in the 50s the Israeli government pressured Britain and Italy not to investigate the bombing. Recently, an Israeli historian has claimed that Zionists were responsible for the bombings targeting the Jews of Baghdad in order to pressure Jews to migrate and settle Israel. So, back when Israel’s position was more similar to Palestine, they did in fact engage in terrorist activity. If Israeli militants would behave as Hamas militants were they in that position, then the immorality of Hamas conduct is greatly diminished in severity.
Not all people, not all civilizations, not all tribes, are equal. This is a core conservative conceit, it’s also inherent to ideas like HBD that you yourself agree with. Human progress has always involved the conquest of some peoples by others.
“I do not admit that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit, for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, or, at any rate, a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place. I do not admit it. I do not think the Red Indians had any right to say, 'The American Continent belongs to us and we are not going to have any of these European settlers coming in here.' They had not the right, nor had they the power.”
Winston Churchill on Palestine (1937)
‘Punching down’, in other words, may be more moral than ‘punching up’. The many settlers of the Americas did what they did and so, perhaps, will the Israelis.
Not all people, not all civilizations, not all tribes, are equal. This is a core conservative conceit...
No, it certainly is not, in the sense of moral worth that you are explicitly appealing to.
it’s also inherent to ideas like HBD that you yourself agree with.
I thought HBD was just about population averages in performance, not moral worth? Have I not been told that over and over again for years now? ...In any case, I do thank you for the citation.
I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, or, at any rate, a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.
We learn nothing. The foolishness of Enlightenment Progressivism is without bound. You and everyone else making similar arguments here know for a fact that you have no rigorous, objective, scientific materialist standard for "better" or "higher-grade" or "worldly-wise" other than raw strength. Your appeal is pure Might Makes Right, and you make it because you have lost the ability to even imagine that the roles could be reversed.
It is possible that some violence is more moral than others, because it is directed by ‘higher grade’ civilizations against lower grade ones.
No, that is not possible, nor has it ever been possible. When you design a better microprocessor, that does not give you or your culture additional moral value. Technological advancement does not, cannot, and never will imply moral value. It doesn't matter if I'm knapping flints and you're building star destroyers: our moral responsibilities to each other remain entirely unaltered. To think otherwise is to fatally misunderstand both morality and technology on an extremely basic level.
Describe for me the moral gradations between murder with a stone versus a flint knife, a bronze sword, an arrow, a bullet, or a laser-guided fragmentation submunition. Show me the moral difference between strangling a person with my bare hands and disassembling them with sci-fi nanotechnology. Show me the objective moral difference between oral storytelling around a campfire and Avengers: Endgame, or between a horse and an airplane. What is the moral value of refined aluminum, and what is the exchange rate in charred corpses of your friends and family? What is the atomic mass of love or mercy, or the molecular weight of justice?
Of course, you and most other rational materialists don't actually believe in moral value or morality in any meaningful sense, as these threads have amply demonstrated. They are just words to you, made-up labels to be applied where convinient, because ultimately there is no meaning or value to anything at all, no final accounting, no judge and therefore no justice, beyond that enforced by your own strong arm. And of course, when the nuke goes off in Tel Aviv some day, or the tech shifts the wrong way and its Israelis getting slaughtered down to the old men and the infants, that will not be "a stronger race, a higher grade race, or, at any rate, a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place", will it? Because chip fabs and language models, right?
I thought HBD was just about population averages in performance, not moral worth?
That's obviously true. But I don't think 2rafa believes a pious 90 IQ Mizrahim settler is morally less worthy than a 150 IQ Persian academic (despite likely preferring the company of the latter); and the 160 IQ Netanyahu certainly would rather have the latter assassinated to ensure the safety of the former.
It's all friend vs enemy; or worse yet, hot take vs hot take. Descriptive frameworks are used to justify normative beliefs that themselves are little more than habitual verbal behavior. It gets pretty tiresome.
«Он знает, что ничто не застанет его врасплох и ничто не заставит сделать какое-нибудь отступление от той сети пустых и насквозь прогнивших афоризмов, в которую он закутался с головы до ног. Для него не существует ни горя, ни радости, ни ненависти, ни любви. Весь мир, в его глазах, есть гроб, могущий служить лишь поводом для бесконечного пустословия.»
But I don't think 2rafa believes a pious 90 IQ Mizrahim settler is morally less worthy than a 150 IQ Persian academic (despite likely preferring the company of the latter);
Are many settlers Mizrachim? In any case I find the settlements project inanely justified by a religious ideology I don’t believe in and unnecessarily provocative at best. The ‘67 borders are amenable to me, although I’d have the Saudis run the Palestinian state. As for who should be in power, well you know my opinion of democracy.
Many of my friends were (gentile) Persians growing up, and many of them still are. It is entirely feasible that a smart Persian academic, even one committed to Israel’s destruction, might have higher moral worth than a 90 IQ Religious Zionist. Iranian hostility to Israel is the result of a PR exercise by the mullahs, it can evaporate within months of regime change. Palestinian hostility, due to the fundamental nature of dispossession, is much more intractable.
‘My people’ are smart, secular, Ashkenazim, although we have thrown our lot in with some I find much more unsavory. Nevertheless, when it comes to broad principles, Iran isn’t discriminating between the settlement fanatic (few or none of whom seem to have been killed on Saturday) and a version of me in Israel, so there is little choice in whom to support for now.
And you cannot disconnect IQ from moral worth entirely. It is immoral when something beautiful is destroyed by something uglier and more vulgar. This is in part why we find rape so abhorrent, it is why the Mongol horde razing civilization to the ground is such a deeply ingrained (often subconscious) cultural motif. So yes, Bronze Age savagery by a people who have not contributed to the wider human race in a millennium and who would rather live in poverty and squalor than kneel is morally less noble than, say, the settlement of the Americas by Europeans, regardless of the individual moral worth of members of that culture.
I thought HBD was just about population averages in performance, not moral worth? Have I not been told that over and over again for years now? ...In any case, I do thank you for the citation.
HBD is a fact, what policy implications you draw from it are a function of the rest of your values.
Me? I think we should gene therapy the living shit out of the human population until everyone is at least a 180 IQ Ubermensch, potentially to the limits of human biology and other relevant tradeoffs. Skin color should no more determine your more relevant qualities than the shade of lipstick you choose to wear.
Should. Not does, at present. We look for trillion dollar bills on the pavement, not realizing that it is the pavement. Or at least I hope a bill for a sum so large should reflect it.
I also happen to be less than sympathetic to the accusations of racism of the gaps that provoked the Great Awokening, since any discrepancies are best explained by HBD instead.
Skin color should no more determine your more relevant qualities than the shade of lipstick you choose to wear.
Yeah, that's never going to happen. We don't have full control of our genes and I'm going to bet even slight tweaks to skin color will have a measurable effect on intelligence. (In either way. Who knows, maybe 300% melanin will actually make us hyper intelligent or whatever).
Whatever genes you alter to change faces, hair, body size. Literally any structural or outward appearance of a human will also alter their brains. It's all interconnected.
I find this a very dubious assertion, within my limit of understanding of genetics. Which I would hope is better than average, even if I don't claim domain expertise like say, our Chris Pratt Dino Wrangler friend can say.
Yes, DNA is unadulterated spaghetti code, but it's not so intractable that something like melanin production can't be targeted without, a priori, not expecting it to blow up the kidneys of something. If I was designing something, I would look for a way to down regulate melanocyte stimulating hormone, to the degree feasible without say, causing visual problems as seen in albinos.
While skin tone isn't a Mendelian trait, I see no reason to think it can't be managed.
As for other phenotypical traits, it depends, but once again I have reason for optimism, or at least faith in plastic surgery. It doesn't have to be a germline modification, you can probably pull it off in-utero or later, the bones have to grow, unless you have a really bad case of baby face.
And since my end goal is liberation from biology in the form of an existence as a mind upload, then I'd say I don't particularly care either way.
HBD is a fact, what policy implications you draw from it are a function of the rest of your values.
And heretofore, HBD proponents have vociferously denied that they consider those of lower genetic IQ to be morally inferior. And yet, here we are.
Me? I think we should gene therapy the living shit out of the human population until everyone is at least a 180 IQ Ubermensch, potentially to the limits of human biology and other relevant tradeoffs.
You also think that less-sophisticated people should be massacred by "more sophisticated" people, if they turn out to be troublesome. The fact that genetic engineering is considerably more hypothetical than massacre engineering raises immediate concerns.
And heretofore, HBD proponents have vociferously denied that they consider those of lower genetic IQ to be morally inferior. And yet, here we are.
Well, I can't speak for all of them. I just happen to prefer assigning some moral worth on the basis of IQ, and today, race serves as a strong proxy. They could be pink and blue with elephant ears for all I really care. Or a mind upload.
You also think that less-sophisticated people should be massacred by "more sophisticated" people
"Should" seems a bit strong if I stop to assess everything I've uttered on the matter today. If there was a peaceful solution, I'd take it, but if there isn't, then I won't complain at all if the Israelis stamp out their opposition instead of letting it fester. Largely because I think the total amount of violence necessary over a longer period will be lower if it's frontloaded.
The fact that genetic engineering is considerably more hypothetical than massacre engineering raises immediate concerns.
HBD proponents are a heterogeneous group. And if we're talking about 2rafa who seems to have brought it up in this subthread, I'm fairly sure she considers a whole lot of people (including most of us) to be her inferiors in all ways.
Whether there's an "evil gene" (or genes) is in an interesting question, but my guess is that if there is, it's at fixation in the human population. And is a separate thing from IQ. Being stupid doesn't make you evil, though it may make you become more easily convinced that evil things which are not in your self interest actually are.
And of course, when the nuke goes off in Tel Aviv some day, or the tech shifts the wrong way and its Israelis getting slaughtered down to the old men and the infants, that will not be "a stronger race, a higher grade race, or, at any rate, a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place", will it? Because chip fabs and language models, right?
There's a reason I'm not an Israeli, namely that I think the chances of Israel losing (everything) are much higher than most people, and especially most Jews, recognize. My existence in the diaspora is comfortable enough, and as such (a sign of loyalty, perhaps) I also don't favor additional (or any) American/Western aid for Israel. Nevertheless, both as a Jew and a supporter of civilization in the endless struggle against savagery, barbarism, and low IQ nonsense, I won't shed any tears if the Israelis decide (and successfully ensure) that enough is enough. The Holocaust was a tragedy of history and, though I don't particularly consider German civilization superior to Jewish civilization, we got fucked and many of us paid the price. That is life, and though I have thoughts on the general principles of the matter, I personally harbor no illusions that I am morally superior to a German or Palestinian, nor do I care to be.
I think Jews are mostly quite aware of, and discuss incessantly, Israel lacking strategic depth and being in a precarious situation and having no choice but to preemptively strike etc etc; if anything, they overestimate the threat from its utterly inept or degraded, and frankly well-taught in previous wars, neighbors.
What they do get wrong is the relative danger of being in the Diaspora, because they take deluded Whites lending vocal support to Hamas and other savages too seriously, and extrapolate this incoherent virtue-signaling gibberish to willingness for participating in or enabling Antisemitic violence locally. I appreciate that progressive Jews at, say, Harvard may experience very… interesting emotions right now; but realistically, they're unlikely to ever get hit with more than a variant of anti-white anti-colonial invective from their peers. Hence «there is only one country where it's safe to live while being a Jew» refrain. (Though judging by Twitter and in light of recent events, India might quality).
Then again, I may be overestimating human rationality and pacification again.
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Notes -
How would Zionists behave if they were in the Palestinian position?
This is a key question for determining the moral severity of the terrorist attacks we saw this weekend. A common criticism of Hamas is that they engage in terrorism against civilians whereas their morally enlightened (ostensibly) Israeli cousins only attack military targets. But I think this ignores the fact that Israel has the luxury of successfully hitting military targets. Israel can kill just as many civilians as Hamas by targeting military sites, while also killing relevant military leaders and defending against unwanted criticism. Yet at the end of the day, the same if not more civilians are killed, and the same terror is instilled in the enemy’s civilian population. Regarding an Israeli missile attack in May which killed ten civilians, Amnesty writes:
The idea that it is morally acceptable to kill civilians when you also kill military targets at the same time is often brought up when American bombings in Japan during WWII are discussed. However, I’m not convinced that there is a clear moral difference between Hamas actions and, say, the firebombing of Tokyo, where as many as 100k were killed, the vast majority being civilians.
Back to the question at hand, we know that Zionists had no issue bombing embassies and killing non-combatants in order to colonize the land of what is now called Israel. In the 40s, they notably bombed a British embassy, and in the 50s the Israeli government pressured Britain and Italy not to investigate the bombing. Recently, an Israeli historian has claimed that Zionists were responsible for the bombings targeting the Jews of Baghdad in order to pressure Jews to migrate and settle Israel. So, back when Israel’s position was more similar to Palestine, they did in fact engage in terrorist activity. If Israeli militants would behave as Hamas militants were they in that position, then the immorality of Hamas conduct is greatly diminished in severity.
Not all people, not all civilizations, not all tribes, are equal. This is a core conservative conceit, it’s also inherent to ideas like HBD that you yourself agree with. Human progress has always involved the conquest of some peoples by others.
‘Punching down’, in other words, may be more moral than ‘punching up’. The many settlers of the Americas did what they did and so, perhaps, will the Israelis.
No, it certainly is not, in the sense of moral worth that you are explicitly appealing to.
I thought HBD was just about population averages in performance, not moral worth? Have I not been told that over and over again for years now? ...In any case, I do thank you for the citation.
We learn nothing. The foolishness of Enlightenment Progressivism is without bound. You and everyone else making similar arguments here know for a fact that you have no rigorous, objective, scientific materialist standard for "better" or "higher-grade" or "worldly-wise" other than raw strength. Your appeal is pure Might Makes Right, and you make it because you have lost the ability to even imagine that the roles could be reversed.
No, that is not possible, nor has it ever been possible. When you design a better microprocessor, that does not give you or your culture additional moral value. Technological advancement does not, cannot, and never will imply moral value. It doesn't matter if I'm knapping flints and you're building star destroyers: our moral responsibilities to each other remain entirely unaltered. To think otherwise is to fatally misunderstand both morality and technology on an extremely basic level.
Describe for me the moral gradations between murder with a stone versus a flint knife, a bronze sword, an arrow, a bullet, or a laser-guided fragmentation submunition. Show me the moral difference between strangling a person with my bare hands and disassembling them with sci-fi nanotechnology. Show me the objective moral difference between oral storytelling around a campfire and Avengers: Endgame, or between a horse and an airplane. What is the moral value of refined aluminum, and what is the exchange rate in charred corpses of your friends and family? What is the atomic mass of love or mercy, or the molecular weight of justice?
Of course, you and most other rational materialists don't actually believe in moral value or morality in any meaningful sense, as these threads have amply demonstrated. They are just words to you, made-up labels to be applied where convinient, because ultimately there is no meaning or value to anything at all, no final accounting, no judge and therefore no justice, beyond that enforced by your own strong arm. And of course, when the nuke goes off in Tel Aviv some day, or the tech shifts the wrong way and its Israelis getting slaughtered down to the old men and the infants, that will not be "a stronger race, a higher grade race, or, at any rate, a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place", will it? Because chip fabs and language models, right?
That's obviously true. But I don't think 2rafa believes a pious 90 IQ Mizrahim settler is morally less worthy than a 150 IQ Persian academic (despite likely preferring the company of the latter); and the 160 IQ Netanyahu certainly would rather have the latter assassinated to ensure the safety of the former.
It's all friend vs enemy; or worse yet, hot take vs hot take. Descriptive frameworks are used to justify normative beliefs that themselves are little more than habitual verbal behavior. It gets pretty tiresome.
«Он знает, что ничто не застанет его врасплох и ничто не заставит сделать какое-нибудь отступление от той сети пустых и насквозь прогнивших афоризмов, в которую он закутался с головы до ног. Для него не существует ни горя, ни радости, ни ненависти, ни любви. Весь мир, в его глазах, есть гроб, могущий служить лишь поводом для бесконечного пустословия.»
Are many settlers Mizrachim? In any case I find the settlements project inanely justified by a religious ideology I don’t believe in and unnecessarily provocative at best. The ‘67 borders are amenable to me, although I’d have the Saudis run the Palestinian state. As for who should be in power, well you know my opinion of democracy.
Many of my friends were (gentile) Persians growing up, and many of them still are. It is entirely feasible that a smart Persian academic, even one committed to Israel’s destruction, might have higher moral worth than a 90 IQ Religious Zionist. Iranian hostility to Israel is the result of a PR exercise by the mullahs, it can evaporate within months of regime change. Palestinian hostility, due to the fundamental nature of dispossession, is much more intractable.
‘My people’ are smart, secular, Ashkenazim, although we have thrown our lot in with some I find much more unsavory. Nevertheless, when it comes to broad principles, Iran isn’t discriminating between the settlement fanatic (few or none of whom seem to have been killed on Saturday) and a version of me in Israel, so there is little choice in whom to support for now.
And you cannot disconnect IQ from moral worth entirely. It is immoral when something beautiful is destroyed by something uglier and more vulgar. This is in part why we find rape so abhorrent, it is why the Mongol horde razing civilization to the ground is such a deeply ingrained (often subconscious) cultural motif. So yes, Bronze Age savagery by a people who have not contributed to the wider human race in a millennium and who would rather live in poverty and squalor than kneel is morally less noble than, say, the settlement of the Americas by Europeans, regardless of the individual moral worth of members of that culture.
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HBD is a fact, what policy implications you draw from it are a function of the rest of your values.
Me? I think we should gene therapy the living shit out of the human population until everyone is at least a 180 IQ Ubermensch, potentially to the limits of human biology and other relevant tradeoffs. Skin color should no more determine your more relevant qualities than the shade of lipstick you choose to wear.
Should. Not does, at present. We look for trillion dollar bills on the pavement, not realizing that it is the pavement. Or at least I hope a bill for a sum so large should reflect it.
I also happen to be less than sympathetic to the accusations of racism of the gaps that provoked the Great Awokening, since any discrepancies are best explained by HBD instead.
Yeah, that's never going to happen. We don't have full control of our genes and I'm going to bet even slight tweaks to skin color will have a measurable effect on intelligence. (In either way. Who knows, maybe 300% melanin will actually make us hyper intelligent or whatever).
Whatever genes you alter to change faces, hair, body size. Literally any structural or outward appearance of a human will also alter their brains. It's all interconnected.
I find this a very dubious assertion, within my limit of understanding of genetics. Which I would hope is better than average, even if I don't claim domain expertise like say, our Chris Pratt Dino Wrangler friend can say.
Yes, DNA is unadulterated spaghetti code, but it's not so intractable that something like melanin production can't be targeted without, a priori, not expecting it to blow up the kidneys of something. If I was designing something, I would look for a way to down regulate melanocyte stimulating hormone, to the degree feasible without say, causing visual problems as seen in albinos.
While skin tone isn't a Mendelian trait, I see no reason to think it can't be managed.
As for other phenotypical traits, it depends, but once again I have reason for optimism, or at least faith in plastic surgery. It doesn't have to be a germline modification, you can probably pull it off in-utero or later, the bones have to grow, unless you have a really bad case of baby face.
And since my end goal is liberation from biology in the form of an existence as a mind upload, then I'd say I don't particularly care either way.
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And heretofore, HBD proponents have vociferously denied that they consider those of lower genetic IQ to be morally inferior. And yet, here we are.
You also think that less-sophisticated people should be massacred by "more sophisticated" people, if they turn out to be troublesome. The fact that genetic engineering is considerably more hypothetical than massacre engineering raises immediate concerns.
Well, I can't speak for all of them. I just happen to prefer assigning some moral worth on the basis of IQ, and today, race serves as a strong proxy. They could be pink and blue with elephant ears for all I really care. Or a mind upload.
"Should" seems a bit strong if I stop to assess everything I've uttered on the matter today. If there was a peaceful solution, I'd take it, but if there isn't, then I won't complain at all if the Israelis stamp out their opposition instead of letting it fester. Largely because I think the total amount of violence necessary over a longer period will be lower if it's frontloaded.
I certainly wish it were otherwise.
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HBD proponents are a heterogeneous group. And if we're talking about 2rafa who seems to have brought it up in this subthread, I'm fairly sure she considers a whole lot of people (including most of us) to be her inferiors in all ways.
Whether there's an "evil gene" (or genes) is in an interesting question, but my guess is that if there is, it's at fixation in the human population. And is a separate thing from IQ. Being stupid doesn't make you evil, though it may make you become more easily convinced that evil things which are not in your self interest actually are.
I certainly don’t consider you my inferior, Nybbler!
At least until the Gobbler model comes out
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I regret that I have but one upvote to give.
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There's a reason I'm not an Israeli, namely that I think the chances of Israel losing (everything) are much higher than most people, and especially most Jews, recognize. My existence in the diaspora is comfortable enough, and as such (a sign of loyalty, perhaps) I also don't favor additional (or any) American/Western aid for Israel. Nevertheless, both as a Jew and a supporter of civilization in the endless struggle against savagery, barbarism, and low IQ nonsense, I won't shed any tears if the Israelis decide (and successfully ensure) that enough is enough. The Holocaust was a tragedy of history and, though I don't particularly consider German civilization superior to Jewish civilization, we got fucked and many of us paid the price. That is life, and though I have thoughts on the general principles of the matter, I personally harbor no illusions that I am morally superior to a German or Palestinian, nor do I care to be.
I think Jews are mostly quite aware of, and discuss incessantly, Israel lacking strategic depth and being in a precarious situation and having no choice but to preemptively strike etc etc; if anything, they overestimate the threat from its utterly inept or degraded, and frankly well-taught in previous wars, neighbors.
What they do get wrong is the relative danger of being in the Diaspora, because they take deluded Whites lending vocal support to Hamas and other savages too seriously, and extrapolate this incoherent virtue-signaling gibberish to willingness for participating in or enabling Antisemitic violence locally. I appreciate that progressive Jews at, say, Harvard may experience very… interesting emotions right now; but realistically, they're unlikely to ever get hit with more than a variant of anti-white anti-colonial invective from their peers. Hence «there is only one country where it's safe to live while being a Jew» refrain. (Though judging by Twitter and in light of recent events, India might quality).
Then again, I may be overestimating human rationality and pacification again.
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Fair enough, then, and I apologize for interpreting your comments otherwise.
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