domain:rifters.com
Lizzardspawn
20m ago
Probably no. Which is why I think that the ceasefire got accepted.
This is what I have always said - don't kill the schmucks. Kill the elites. Easiest way to bring someone on the table to negotiate is to put their skin on the line
FtttG
23m ago
If you're suggesting that the war in Gaza is a genocide because half of all deaths in Gaza were civilians rather than combatants, that would imply that virtually every modern war was a genocide, as many wars had a vastly higher ratio of civilian to combatant deaths (as high as 9:1 in some cases). If you're happy to call the Korean war, the Gulf war and the 2003 invasion of Iraq genocides, all well and good, just as long as we're consistent.
FtttG
28m ago
Ukraine's leadership has a vested interest in protecting its citizenry, while Hamas has an official policy of intentionally putting Palestinian citizens in harm's way. Hamas and the Arab world have continually refused to allow Palestinian refugees safe passage into neighbouring countries.
I'm not saying the manner in which Israel is prosecuting this war has nothing to do with the rate at which Palestinian civilians are being killed, but suggesting that they are solely responsible for the level of civilian collateral damage is literally falling for Hamas propaganda hook, line and sinker.
sohois
42m ago
Don't focus too much on the cities. The cultural revolution destroyed a ton of history all across the nation, and the development boom finished the job on a lot more. They all have a lot less to see than equivalent cities of their size and history in other nations. You can go to one big city - Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, etc. - and you'll have seen them all.
Since you're going in December, how much does weather matter to you? You might be able to catch Harbin Ice Festival if you're willing to bear -20 or lower temperatures.
erwgv3g34
46m ago
"A government of laws, not of men", as John Adams put it, is an incoherent fantasy. Laws are nothing more than ink on paper; only men can rule.
erwgv3g34
49m ago
If you like that, then you will love Wickard v. Filburn, where the supreme court ruled that the federal government had a right to prevent a farmer from growing wheat in his own land for his own use because, if a bunch of farmers did that, it would substantially lower the price of wheat in the national market, thus affecting interstate commerce.
And of course, we have all heard about Roe v. Wade and Obergefell v. Hodges, so it's not a problem specific to the commerce clause; a court that can find the right to abortion and gay "marriage" in the fourteenth amendment is a court that can find anything in anything.
I think the ceasefire is fake, like the Russia-Ukraine ceasefires. Both sides are just manoeuvring to look like they want peace when they really want victory. They'll say 'oh they broke the ceasefire' and continue on. Israel has broken no small number of ceasefires throughout the years and the Iranians do similar things with their proxies.
Trump's powers are not that great. He can produce drama and break things but he cannot mend or create to any significant extent. He can rugpull Ukraine for instance but he cannot actually achieve peace with honour like he promised. He can rugpull the NASDAQ with tariffs but he cannot actually reorder the world economic system to spur sustained manufacturing growth in America per his goals, let alone abolish the income tax per his musings. Note that both of these are very difficult tasks!
The prospects of him using diplomacy effectively on Iran of all countries is very slim. Firstly, Trump does not know how to do diplomacy in general. Secondly, his entire Iran policy consists of being as untrustworthy as possible, reneging on treaties, issuing ultimatums and bombing the country.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
57m ago
Full-size vans dominate minivans on UK worksites too.
ControlsFreak
1hr ago
Sure. Obviously, that's a challenge. But it's sort of irrelevant to the original discussion? Unless you view this as a fully-general argument against any sort of minority view? Like, sure, any minority view on any topic has a hurdle of convincing enough of the public to join you in lobbying for it. That's not particularly novel or useful to discuss. Communists and libertarians and trans activists and neoluddites and... and... are all aware that they have minority views that they would like to promote more widely.
and
Duly noted and agreed that the predominant swing for several decades has been pro-premarital sex (and a variety of related issues). That was actually my point.
I think the biggest thing you've added is that, indeed, you do think that it's just a fully-general argument, including that you would have used it against slavery abolitionists in 1000 BC, 1000 AD, and in 1864. But yeah, I do listen to/read some libertarians, and I imagine if someone just kept popping up to say, "You're a minority opinion; you haven't convinced everyone yet; it's hard to convince people of things," they'd probably respond with, "No shit, Sherlock." But if you kept popping up to interrupt them to say that, I'd probably get tired of the annoyance pretty quickly.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1hr ago
Sucks so much when people you have normal relationships come up with the most basic, one-sided, emotionally driven opinions about politics.
I had a friend, a serious thinker, works close with govt and has seen/worked in the sausage factory with politicians and really ought to be credulous, come up to me and talk about how she read about how Kamala was just really smart and incisive and kept everyone on their toes with her reading of documents and questions to staffers... You can (and my friend certainly does) hate Donald Trump with a burning passion but this is a bridge too far.
Neither of us are American! Where is this stuff even coming from? So many are living in a totally closed media environment.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
1hr ago
How so and will they continue with the ceasefire in effect?
Lizzardspawn
1hr ago
Also yesterday Israel started getting serious in eradicating IRGC
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1hr ago
It didn’t help them in previous wars. No matter what Israel did to avoid casualties, it either wasn’t enough, or it was considered evil. I think this is why they’ve been so gloves off this time. The gloves are pointless, as any sort of fighting back is demonized as apartheid or genocide. So, rather than risk their soldiers to prevent such war crimes, just go for it.
OliveTapenade
1hr ago
That's fair. I should have clarified that I meant ethnic or racial groups.
If a pickup does, in fact, tow significantly better than a full-size SUV that would be a large part of the answer (even if just by perceived option value). Does it?
It would also explain some of the national difference - heavy-duty towing (>750kg trailer and >3500kg combination) requires a license endorsement in the EU (and thus in the pre-Brexit UK) so a lot fewer people imagine themselves doing it.
Of course it's real. What else could Iran have done? They can't project power, their long-range weapons are running low, their terrorist groups abroad have already reached the limits of what they can do. They won't exactly just cancel the Islamic Republic and call the game lost. Anything drastic they might do - buy nukes from Pakistan or the Norks, mobilize their army and march on Israel through whatever is in the way, or rebuild Fordo two miles below the mountain - will take time, and time is exactly what a ceasefire buys them. Does the same for Israel, too, but I suppose that's a gamble worth making when all your alternatives range from wishful to fantastical.
Owlify
2hr ago
Control over these relatively few entry points means you can control what ideas will be spread.
I don't know why you believe that there are very few entry points for ideas. Every person is a potential originator of an idea. Spreading ideas has never been as easy as it is now.
Ok, this is exactly what we have now.
I don't know why you believe this. Censorship has never been lesser than it is today as far as I can see. People may fall into peer pressure to not say what is considered politically incorrect, but that has always been true because humans are conforming and tribalist by nature. I gave the example of a terrorist camp specifically to illustrate the level of extremity and control required for an environment in restricting ideas to qualify as brainwashing. It's not difficult to be agentic about spreading ideas opposing the current perceived consensus if someone really wants to do it.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
2hr ago
And for the record, this would be the case regardless of the group in question.
Depends on your definition of "group". There's at least one category of people that's basically just staggeringly negative-sum and appears to exist pretty much solely due to group selection not being strong enough to fully root it out. I'm speaking, of course, of psychopaths. I think "kill all the psychopaths" is a very defensible position; the big problem with doing it is not that we need psychopaths or that they don't deserve it, but that of setting a precedent of gas chambers (because once that taboo's broken people will start arguing for gassing the borderlines and the autistics and the morons, and that's a far-worse idea).
SkoomaDentist
2hr ago
People in Europe have no problem towing their boats and trailers with regular cars.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
3hr ago
I'm pretty sure @Amadan would stop asking SS whether he wants to kill all the Jews if SS ever gave a straight "yes" or "no".
I'm also very sure that if SS gave a straight "yes", he would not be banned from theMotte for that. While a number of Mottizens who want their outgroups dead have been banned, it was never for that per se (usually it's been for refusing to stop insulting other Mottizens who are members of those outgroups and/or for insulting mods who mod others insulting the same outgroups; I presume any attempt to use theMotte to organise murders would also get a ban under "Recruiting For a Cause" although I'm not 100% sure whether there's been an explicit example). Given this, I don't think it's correct to describe us as demanding he denounce exterminationism.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3hr ago
A lack of revolution is understandable, it's not a trivial matter, and the regime is otherwise not that terrible. What I have very little patience for is our local lawcells acting, and expecting that others act, like law texts are meaningful, and that matters of law be debated within their framework.
functor
3hr ago
So these Hamas rockets that have barely been able to kill anyone leveled an entire hospital during Israeli bombing. Seems like something AIPAC cooked up.
As for October 7 Israel was engaging in military operations against Gaza, they had murdered hundreds of civilians and taken thousands of hostages.
There war a roughly 50% civilian death rate on the Israeli side. Is 1 civilian death for every military death acceptable or not? Why isn't it terror when Israel kills more than one civilian for each military casualty?
Tenaz
3hr ago
Apparently some Amish people about 15 years ago were charged with hate crimes for cutting other Amish men's beards.
They tried to argue that the federal government had no constitutional authority to prosecute them, but the judge ruled that since the scissors used to cut the hair, and the vans used to drive to the men, had at some point crossed state lines, this was a valid prosecution under the interstate commerce clause.
I don't really have the time right now to make this into an effortpost for the main thread. But this is crazy. I'm living in crazytown. How we reached the point where such rulings aren't immediate grounds for revolution, I'll never know.
OliveTapenade
4hr ago
I've always been very ambivalent on the 'missing mood' argument.
On the one hand, if someone's explicitly-stated argument seems like it implies a particular emotion, and the person making the argument lacks that emotion, that does seem like a good sign that the argument is not motivating for them. The argument is excuse or justification, rather than the real motivation for the position.
On the other hand, taken too seriously, the missing mood argument also sounds a lot like, "You don't feel the way that I imagine you ought to feel - therefore you are not serious." But human psychology is extremely diverse and unpredictable, the way people express their deep emotions varies very widely as well, and you should not typical-mind. Caplan summarises it as, "You can learn a lot by comparing the mood reasonable proponents would hold to the mood actual proponents do hold", but the phrase "the mood reasonable proponents would hold" is doing a lot of the work there. What is the mood reasonable proponents would hold? Are you sure? Is there only one such possible mood? How confident are you of what's going on inside another person's head?
I suppose I think missing moods can be a weak piece of evidence, which may suggest that we ought to look more deeply into a person's agenda, but nothing more than that. Unfortunately the actual examples Caplan gives in his piece are unconvincing and suggest a lack of moral imagination on Caplan's own part. Other people don't appear to feel what Caplan thinks they should feel, so he concludes they're insincere. But maybe Caplan is just wrong about they ought to feel. Maybe he's assuming that they accept facts and moral principles that Caplan himself accepts, and if he looked closer he would realise that they don't.
Agreed. In an exchange of missiles and bombs, Iran would be losing decidedly, so it makes sense for them to not engage in it.
From my understanding, this ceasefire is mostly that both sides will cease lobbing missiles at each other for now, not anything about Iran stopping their nuclear program.
If either side feels they have anything to gain by breaking the ceasefire (e.g. Israel seeing another opportunity to delay the Iranian nuclear program by bombing them), then they will break it.
While it is a defeat for the Iranian regime, it is a defeat that they likely can survive -- they ideology is not based on how they are technologically superior to the West, after all. I imagine that support for their nuclear program has actually increased, because it seems like the only pathway to prevent the IDF from bombing Iranian generals whenever they feel like it.
Of course Trump announces the ceasefire like he had just negotiated the fucking Good Friday Agreement, when all he did was bomb Iran without getting into an indefinite missile war with them, which few if any people claimed was the main downside of bombing them.
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