domain:asteriskmag.com
sun_the_second
could survive a COD lobby and a gay furry discord server
12hr ago
If no one wanted that land in Africa and Latin America why should the Jews?
Your schtick of acting like Israel is the only country in history to ever do naked conquest as opposed to simply being the most recent one is getting stale. At least when the bleeding heart progs do it, their historical and ethical myopia is consistent. When you combine trying to paint Israel as evil for the actions of Israel and trying to paint Israel as evil because Jews have been uniquely evil for 2000 years it's just incoherent.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
12hr ago
Trump being a frequent litigant, even by the standards of real estate guys, long predates his move into politics. He was, and is, in court as plaintiff a lot because he likes to file frivolous lawsuits to intimidate his critics. He was, and is, in court as defendant a lot because he likes to push the limits of the law. He was already notorious for both of these things back when he was a Democrat.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
12hr ago
The key point in that example is not all the myriad nitpicks one can make about a 2-line example designed to make a general point.
The key point is that when you give people huge amounts of money, when you enable them to do things, you bear a level of responsibility for what they do with the resources you've provided. More importantly, your patronage is taken as implicit support of their stance corresponding with its magnitude. When the patronage is roughly half the government's revenue then it is a significant level of investment and responsibility.
functor
12hr ago
Israel has engaged in military action against Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Yemen and Iraq. Who else comes close to that much war?
functor
12hr ago
The fact that they achieved peace and created a functioning society in which many protestants live. Subjegating Palestinians is never going to work as the conflict isn't going to end if there is no deal for the Palestinians to accept. You can't have a large portion of the country that fundamentally doesn't accept the current order and have no reason to do so.
FtttG
12hr ago
Israel is a... state that is going to be in constant conflict with everyone and everything around them.
I note that this is a description which applies equally well to literally every country in the Middle East, and yet for some reason you're only calling for the Israelis to find a new home.
functor
12hr ago
They could find some plot of land in Africa or Latin America with a far lower population to resettle to. Their claim to Israel is that they bought the land in exchange for half the skin on their babies pensises which is a rediculus premise for a country.
FtttG
12hr ago
The British counter insurgency in Northern Ireland was far more effective.
By what metrics are you basing this assertion on? I believe this is not the first time you've made this comparison. The counter-insurgency concluded with a power-sharing agreement between Protestants and Catholics, the unconditional release of all imprisoned IRA members, a recognition of the right of Northern Ireland to secede from the UK if a plurality of its residents approved, and the dissolution of the Northern Irish police force in favour of a new police force which was required to employ Protestants and Catholics in equal numbers. Is that what an effective counter-insurgency looks like to you?
georgioz
12hr ago
So in other words Israel's only strategy would be creating a giant refugee crisis 300 km from Europe.
Other countries do that. Syrians do that, Sudanese do that, Pakistanis do that. In a sense Palestinians from Gaza are peanuts when it comes to potential issues and resulting refugee crisis right know in the whole Sahel region.
Nobody wants that. Israel is a small state that is going to be in constant conflict with everyone and everything around them.
Not really. Many of Israel's neighbors - like Egypt or Saudi Arabia - don't give a single shit about Palestinians except for some platitudes. In fact it is Western countries who are more active in this sense. Plus I think that this is already old news, Israel will be considered a bad guy no matter what - there are people who still throw 1948 expulsion at them
sun_the_second
could survive a COD lobby and a gay furry discord server
12hr ago
They will not "go find a new home" because getting in on the business of colonizing/genociding/enlightening the savages that the western civilization has been enjoying for the past 2000 years is strictly better for them than staying at the complete mercy of said western civilization.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
12hr ago
Well, that's a spirited defense of the series. I feel that I owe you enough to power through the rest of it. I'll also report it as an AAQC, because it deserves it.
I'm more than happy to admit that I might be the wrong target audience for the show, I did say that I went into it with very little on the way of pre-existing knowledge, just that it involved big ass robots and ludicrous power-scaling, which are aspects I was perfectly happy to indulge.
(A yet to be disclosed aspect is that I was seeking to perform a bit of field research. In my own novel, there's a weeb superhero who is really into mechs, and in-universe, loves TTGL. I felt I owed it to the character to watch it for myself, at the very least, it lets me write better satire and throw in more puns.)
even if your own travails involve precisely zero giant robots
Let's not rule that out! I don't know about my travails, but I do know I intend to travel in a big-ass robot this weekend. It's called a plane haha.
Holy shit! We’re living in the future and the future is so cool! I can’t wait to see what humans—and soon, robots—are gonna invent next!” The other guy thinks “Holy shit we’re all going to either be replaced or killed, it’s so over.”
Funnily enough, I entertain both positions. I don't know if I'm a bog-standard techno-optimist, but I do think that progress in AI can lead to amazing things, I just have grave concern that it could directly or indirectly kill us or screw things over.
functor
12hr ago
So in other words Israel's only strategy would be creating a giant refugee crisis 300 km from Europe. Nobody wants that. Israel is a small state that is going to be in constant conflict with everyone and everything around them.
Rhodesia and French Algeria existed longer than Israel and had people who had lived there for generations. Jews are rootless cosmopolitans and should find a new home.
sun_the_second
could survive a COD lobby and a gay furry discord server
12hr ago
Are we Russel's Teapotting whoring now?
I'd say that the definition of woke is much better grounded than what leftist define as fascism or neoliberalism or even capitalism. It was beaten again and again including parallels with Marxism. Woke uses the same oppressor/oppressed dichotomy, marxist dialectic and interplay of Theory(Critical Theory) and Praxis (Activism) as old Marxist. They also use similar concept of consciousness as Marxists do with their class consciousness. The easiest way to make the parallel is that wokeness expanded on the concept of property/capital, which now includes other types of property that oppressing class possess. In the same way bourgeoisie possess the property of capital, white people possess the property of white privilege, men possess the property of male privilege and cishetero people possess the property of [cishetero]normativity.
But again, all these are high-level academic definitions and one can argue them. But this is far from the extent to which we are talking about. Wokeness is an ideology, even secular religion in similar way to let's say scientology. Woke people have their own ontology of what is man and a woman, what is justice, with their own prescriptions of how society should work with their own sins such as racism, sexism, transphobia, xenophobia or homophobia. On ground level woke people do not need to know the nitty-gritty details of how the ideology is developed. But it is the same with other religions - not all christians know bible passages by heart or know the main church doctrines. This does not prevent people to call them Christians as a useful descriptor.
JTarrou
12hr ago
"Been involved in" is a nice way of saying has been the single most common target of lawfare since the founding of the country.
Whatever lawfare he's doing in response is certainly downstream of the legal shitflinging that has been the response of the educated classes.
Personal injury is a very different game because, as you say, there are very few lawsuits where there is a real dispute about liability, as opposed to haggling over the amount of damages.
The main problem with US personal injury law is that the conventional 1/3-of-damages contingency fee means that there are a lot of cases where the standard fee vastly exceeds the cost of litigating, and in line with econ 101 most of that surplus gets spent by lawyers competing to sign up the good plaintiffs. And that competition is mostly a negative sum game for non-lawyers, because chasing ambulances is anti-social.
The problem with personal injury law in England (which is loser-pays) is that plaintiffs' lawyers are more motivated to find ways of running up the fees they can recover from losing defendants than judges are to stop them. And each open loophole is a type of case where the collectable fee significantly exceeds the cost of litigating, and so an incentive to chase ambulances.
In both cases, the resources used to chase the ambulances ultimately come from overcharging businesses that injure people relative to the actual harm done. This causes additional harm by creating an incentive for excessive safetyism, and the financial cost is ultimately reallocated to society as a whole via liability insurance premiums.
I'm any event, truly frivolous lawsuits are pretty rare.
And this matters for the debate about whether loser-pays curbs strategic lawfare. The big gain is that loser-pays makes a lawsuit with a negligible chance of winning at trial ineffective as a strategic weapon. The cost of a successful defence is a lot less (because you get reimbursed for most of it) and the cost of suing is a lot greater. The question is what it does to the strategic value of a lawsuit with a 10-20% chance of winning at trial. The consensus among likely SLAPP-victims in the UK (the media, campaigning orgs etc) is that if a deep pocket is using lawfare to punish critics, loser pays makes the problem worse by raising the stakes. Peter Carter-Ruck was notorious for finding ways of making defamation cases expensive to litigate, because when a billionaire is suing a newspaper it doesn't matter that the billionaire is going to end up paying two thirds of the time - the point it to drive the potential cost to the newspaper to the point where they cry uncle.
But in America in 2025, the ability to bring SLAPPS in forum-shopped jurisdictions (e.g. Musk vs Media Matters) probably dominates all the other issues.
The current genocidaires of China (by internment), Iran (by ethnic displacement) and North Korea (by starvation) are currently suffering zero consequences for their actions. Suppose that yes, Israel is stuck with such a charge. So what? That's not a strategy, that's a tactic, one that is failing. If your logic is then 'the Jews will be ashamed, and everyone will embargo them into dissolution' then it is incomplete. Who, if anyone, would try and enforce any consequence?
The Arabs aren't lining up to invade Israel. Certainly, the Europeans lack the capacity. Indeed, the expected behavior of the international community to an active genocide is to do nothing and fiercely regret its aftermath.
But that's ceding the point, and accepting the charge on face value. If they are at war, then they are not responsible for feeding the enemy's civilians. The Allies didn't worry themselves about their enemy's starving civilians. Neither did the Axis. If they are not at war, and they are policing occupied territory, then they can distribute aid as they wish. They don't need to feed those who are waging a guerilla war against them, or incorporate them into their aid mechanism. The Americans didn't worry themselves about feeding the Taliban.
So which one is it?
Israel is a small country, but Gaza is even smaller. It is perfectly possible for them to enforce a complete blockade on their terms. This is not something any other colonial occupying power has had the power to accomplish. Israel wants a total and complete surrender, unconditional and without third party mediation. The longer it takes, the worse the Palestinian people will suffer. They want a political solution that solves the Gaza problem forever, no matter how much the international community calls them war criminals. What do they care? They're already a pariah state to half the world.
They're never going to return back to the status quo. UNWRA and the NGOs will never be allowed back. Using food as a tool for regime change isn't moral in the least, but then again, kidnapping civilians for use as hostages at the bargaining table isn't moral, either.
Being brutal against the locals is not an effective way to win.
You just cherrypicked several unsuccessful attempts even in relatively late times. Croats literally performed ethnic cleansing of Serbs under NATO umbrella and were successful. Czechoslovakia and Poland were absolutely brutal toward native Germans living in the area for 500+ years and were successful in solving the "German problem" creating ethnically homogenous states. Plus don't forget about ongoing war in Ukraine with "war crimes" aplenty.
What you described is all poxy/colonial wars with little to no investment of local population. The comparison of Israel as a colonial power similar to France in Algeria is absolutely misguided, millions of Israelis cannot just pack and leave such as French from Algeria or Americans from Vietnam or Soviets from Afghanistan. Again, just look at Ukraine war where Russians are willing to shoulder losses two orders of magnitude higher compared to their previous colonial military engagements. It is a completely different game.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
13hr ago
Yeah, I will say they might literally be the ONLY exchange I know of that was fully expecting, well in advance, the need to navigate regulatory environments and fight off attempts by regulators to bully them, and the plan was more than "ignore it until they're kicking the door in to serve a warrant."
...which is sometimes a rational choice, because the penalty for getting caught is frequently less than the gains from crime. Changpeng Zhao seems to be doing alright for himself.
Seriously, more countries need to have the penalty of "all your money are belong to us" on the table for financial criminals and/or actually use it.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
13hr ago
The current beauty standard is a historic anomaly that should be discarded.
Isn't pro-ana a thing of the 10's or even 00's? There are more overweight and obese girls in the first-world countries than there are dangerously underweight ones. 120 pounds is a perfect weight to be at.
I agree that a gym membership is a good idea. Especially if @CriticalDuty can gawk at the girls there in a way that looks like he's trying to hide it from his GF, but is still obvious to her. Show her what the most attractive body type looks like.
raakaa
13hr ago
I feel compelled to defend TTGL: it was one of the first anime series that I ever watched, so there’s no doubt that that colors my perception of it, particularly since it’s been years since I last rewatched it. But the show that I remember has quite a bit more going on than you’ve seen in the first few episodes.
I think that a big part of the problem is the attitude that one has when going in and watching the series; I’ve met big anime fans in real life who bounced off of it for this reason too, expecting well-choreographed tactical fights with a deeply-thought-out power system like many modern battle shounen series instead of GIGA DRILL BREAKER ad infinitum. But to me, that’s like watching a performance of Romeo and Juliet and asking “Why didn’t Shakespeare go into more detail about the political chaos of Renaissance Italy instead of this stupid love story?” TTGL operates on vibes rather than carefully engineered magic systems, and that’s the level that the show is best appreciated at.
More specifically, the way I think of TTGL is this. If you (I) watch it when you’re young, you love it because of the epic fights and the horniness and the increasing power levels and “humans fighting to evolve against those who want to keep them down”. If you watch it a few years later, further into your teenage years, and that awkward time isn’t treating you particularly well, then watching a show about “believing in the you who believes in yourself” and “doing the impossible” might be exactly what you need, even if your own travails involve precisely zero giant robots. But then if you watch it yet again as an adult, you realize: hey, maybe kid me was on to something, and the “humans fighting to evolve against those who want to keep them down” plotline has a lot more real-world relevance than teenager me, who figured that it was just a metaphor for depression or something, thought.
This fundamental thematic conflict in the series, which becomes particularly apparent in the second half (and particularly towards the end at that), could be boiled down to “growth vs. degrowth”: at what point does technological and economic progress need to be stopped entirely, lest humanity collectively shoot ourselves in the face? How much of our own humanity and dignity should we sacrifice in order to prevent this? [1] I’d say that these are questions that’ve gained particular relevance (in public discourse) in recent years, both with climate change and now (more recently) with AI. Without getting into spoiler territory here, one thing that I found TTGL to do extremely well was to “aestheticize” these questions and translate them from an abstract debate about policy into something that “feels” important on a direct, gut level. The show take a rather refreshingly techno-optimist stance on these questions (which made me reconsider some of my own personal aesthetic attitudes towards them—more on that later), but still provides an appropriately healthy level of nuance (which is most strongly made clear in the series’s controversial ending that large numbers of its Internet fanbase refuse to understand).
Now, as I write this, I realize that “being made to feel certain questions strongly” does not make an anime series high art. What I wrote here unfortunately reminds me of some image collage I’d seen created by a One Piece fan, which insisted something like “One Piece is not a childish anime! It deals with themes like poverty and racism!” It’s clear that whoever made that image had a horrifically stunted aesthetic sense, one that hadn’t developed past the 7th-grade English class stage of “good art = deals with ‘themes’ that can be summed up in one word”. And yet here I am, going and saying “TTGL is a good series because it deals with ‘themes’ like ‘growth vs. degrowth’”—alright, that’s great, but why should I care if a show “deals with themes”? And if I tried to rebut by saying “well, maybe it changed my opinion towards those themes”, then that would only reflect badly on me: I don’t particularly consider myself a Rationalist, but I know well enough Not to Generalize From Fictional Evidence.
But if there is a nugget of value to be salvaged from the assertion that “TTGL is a good series because it addresses the question of ‘growth vs. degrowth’”, it would be this: TTGL presents an aesthetic of (responsible) techno-optimism which is compelling, in the sense that it helps me to understand why it would feel good to live in a techno-optimist world. Even though techno-optimism can be considered, like many isms, as a set of policy prescriptions or economic attitudes, man cannot live by policy prescriptions alone; there has to be some sort of narrative that structures how he will relate to the society formed by that set of policy prescriptions.
For example, you could take two different people living in the same society in the same (or similar) material circumstances, who nevertheless have polar opposite instinctual emotional attitudes towards that society. One guy sees that OpenAI and DeepMind have created AIs that placed 1st on the International Math Olympiad and thinks “Holy shit! We’re living in the future and the future is so cool! I can’t wait to see what humans—and soon, robots—are gonna invent next!” The other guy thinks “Holy shit we’re all going to either be replaced or killed, it’s so over.” Now, if you’re in a position where you can affect policy (be it at the political level or at the market level), there is an asymmetry between these positions: executing the policies associated with the wrong one (whichever it may be) could spell mass disaster. But if you’re just some guy—then these are just different ways of relating to the world, on an emotional level that most directly shapes your own life.
So if a piece of art (or a TV anime series) gets you to relate to the world in a different way at the personal level, even if only provisionally, then I’d say that that’s a point in its favor: it was able to enrich your collection of mental attitudes towards the world [2]. And since TTGL did that for me, to some extent, I have to say that I found it to be a good series.
Now here’s the part where I apologize for this massive rambling text dump. Forgive me; I ended up getting way too carried away. Anyway, I’ve never watched Gundam or Macross, but from what I understand, there’s quite the convoluted viewing order for those franchises, so be aware of that before you jump in.
[1] Only writing this now do I realize that this too is an expression of the lingering trauma from the atomic bombs in the Japanese psyche. It’s not quite as obvious as in e.g. “Giant Robo”, but in retrospect, it makes a lot of sense.
[2] Of course, there are some “attitudes towards the world” that are just harmful and not suitable for most humans who want to live a good life. E.g. regularly watching cartel snuff videos probably doesn’t foster attitudes conducive to eudaemonia. But I don’t think that TTGL belongs in that category.
TowardsPanna
13hr ago
What connection are you drawing and what do you think the mechanism might be?
functor
13hr ago
Creating a jewish state by genociding all the people living there including a large portion of Christians is abhorrent. Palestine's best asset is jews posting content in English and showing the world what Talmudic logic is like.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
13hr ago
and using slop to eventually criticize the concept is still using slop.
This reminds me of early Sorokin. His first works all used the same template: they started out as workmanlike and uninspiring Socialist realist prose, but then, when you least expected it, there would be a whiplash-causing genre twist and the story would devolve into a scatological surrealist nightmare.
Literary critics raved about him, but I always felt kinda cheated: at the end of the day you got me to read some crappy Soc-real fiction and the gross-out punchline was amusing just the first couple of times. At least /u/shittymorph writes just a couple of paragraphs before the punchline.
Later Sorokin got better, writing actual framing stories. When the caterpillar scene happens in the middle of alt-history political satire it's much easier to accept it as a well-timed mood breaker.
Thanks for calling OP out on his flagrant errors. It's one thing to make a technical mistake on a non-technical forum; it's another thing entirely to flex, claim industry expertise, and then face-plant by confusing word embedding models with LLMs. I hope people aren't being misled by his, well, "hallucinations". (Honestly, that's an appropriate word for it! Incorrect facts being stated with complete confidence, just like an LLM.)
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