domain:web.law.duke.edu
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
1d ago
Oh I see, in that case yeah
This conflict is so funny in that it seems to turn people's brains off way harder than other ones (on both sides).
It's so nakedly partisan if someone isn't blaming every side for the 100+ years of tit for tat revenge.
I used to think there was a solution and I don't anymore. The Isreali's and the Palestinian's deserve each other.
I do assign Isreal a larger share of the responsibility to end it these days though, given they have so much more power. There's also something so amazing about saving them from the Holocaust only for them to immediately go start kicking someone smaller than them, you'd think of all the people they'd be marginally more sympathetic lol.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
1d ago
I have done and been the same in various places on earth, and also Japan. The only difference is that, in Japan at least, I remained, and have to some degree matured, and, to some degree, have become able to reflect and revise my behavior.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
1d ago
Sorry, I meant they can coexist with America / the western world
Ahhhhh, in that case, yeah
Their greatest moral failure has been half-assing it.
Seriously, it's very similar to the state of native Americans (and Australians). That at least has an end. Assimilation will win eventually I think.
Tollund_Man4
1d ago
so I'd like to remove e.g. scratch-off cards at convenience stores
When I worked in a convenience store the people who would hang around the till buying and scratching cards until they were out of money were a big annoyance, the more inconsiderate ones would let a queue build up behind them while they did it.
kky
1d ago
“The damn commies mind controlled our women!” is a pretty lame excuse, given that women are well-known to be more little-c conservative than men (which is why so many of them are big-L Lefty these days).
The actual problem was exactly what I said: the suburbs were deeply deracinated and undermined two of women’s deepest sources of stability and happiness: connection to their (non-atomic) families and to a strong network of peer women, especially including older ones. Those connections provide material support for the primary duty of childcare and serve as a stabilizing factor for emotional distress, as well as being simple entertainment and fulfillment. Being locked down more to her husband made a woman more fragile and increased the aspects of her life which she required from him in particular, proportionally lowering her own self-reliance and alienating him (as the demands put upon him grew ever more conflicting and severe). In the edge cases the relationship fractured in some dimension or another, and this fracture in turn alienated daughters from their mothers’ way of life. The most determined and hot-tempered became feminists and started changing the tradition from the top down.
Properly big-c Conservative cultures give women the strong same-sex support groups they need, typically through something as simple as a village gathering or an extended family.
zeke5123a
1d ago
I think modern weapons are different from ‘Nam area. My understanding with some of the weapons is we basically did everything but bit the fire button.
zeke5123a
1d ago
I think it’s a bit more than “we think they are here.” From my understanding, we did everything but pull the trigger and without us Ukraine couldn’t have fired some of the weapons.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1d ago
(It's also only a reliable signal of malfunction in men, since there are no male gendered clothes except maybe boxers.)
Not true above a certain level of formality - women's trouser suits look very different to men's suits, starting with the acceptable colour palette. And as the level of formality increases the expectation that women wear dresses gets stronger. This is why tomboys hate formal events - they are used to being able to be performatively androgynous without looking like they are cross-dressing.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
1d ago
This is prompted by [this Matt Yglesias post] talking about abundance politics
You forgot to add the link.
Can anyone explain America's love affair with the pickup truck? This is prompted by this Matt Yglesias post talking about abundance politics, and acknowledging that for working-class Hispanics (among others) owning a pickup is a key measuring stick for material prosperity and that it would be politically stupid for abundance-orientated Democrats to argue this point.
This isn't a question about why Americans drive much bigger personal vehicles than people in other countries - that is obvious. (Generally richer country, cheaper fuel, wider roads, more idiot drivers such that "mass wins" is seen as an important part of being safe on the roads). I think I understand why so many of these are built on a truck chassis (mostly CAFE arbitrage). But the thing I don't get is why the pickup as the big-ass form factor of choice. If you look at the big-ass personal vehicles in the London suburbs, you will see at least 5 full-size SUVs (as in the US, the most common form factor in affluent suburbia is the crossover, which no longer counts as big-ass) for every clean pickup. And if you look at work vehicles, you will see at least 10 vans for every pickup. Most of the work pickups I see in the London suburbs are owned by landscapers who regularly haul large quantities of fertilizer, so "ease of cleaning the bed" is the obvious reason for them. The pattern seems to be the same in other European cities, and googling "Tokyo traffic jam" brings up pictures with more pickups than Europe, but still many fewer pickups than vans or big-ass SUVs.
So my small-scale questions are:
- Is it true that there are more clean pickups than full-size SUV's in the US? Everywhere or just in Red/Hispanic areas?
- Is it true that there are more work pickups than work vans in the US?
- Does anyone have a sense of why Americans choose pickups over other big-ass form factors?
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1d ago
The argument wasn't whether the West has "any role". Of course there are risks involved, though there would have been (and are) considerably greater risks related to letting Ukraine fall. The argument was whether what the West is doing in Ukraine is the same as if US had decided to send American B2s with American pilots under American flag to drop bombs on Russian targets. It isn't, even in the ballpark.
FistfullOfCrows
1d ago
All of this myopic talk of nukes, in a world where thermobaric/ air burst fuel mixture bombs exist. They are comparatively just as destructive and as a bonus don't leave a fallout. A few MOAB equivalents together can absolutely annihilate a town
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1d ago
Disagree. Historical evidence is strong that being a housewife in deracinated, suburban 1950s America was pretty damn miserable.
What's the evidence? Progressives used to like bringing up Valium and the like, but drug consumption among women has, if anything, only gone up since.
Consider that it was their daughters in particular who became second-wave feminists - in open repudiation of their mothers’ lives. Why would they do that if it were something to look forward to?
Because society requires active maintenance and not just mere inertia, and propaganda based around sowing resentment towards specific subgroups is quite effective.
Maybe the most moralistic version. But even the most detached and amoral babysitter has reason to keep their most deranged wards away from the knives.
kky
1d ago
Disagree. Historical evidence is strong that being a housewife in deracinated, suburban 1950s America was pretty damn miserable. Consider that it was their daughters in particular who became second-wave feminists - in open repudiation of their mothers’ lives. Why would they do that if it were something to look forward to?
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Warheads on missiles are removable. All they'd need to do to launch a nuke is replace the warhead in one of their missiles with a nuclear one.
For a ballpark number of an early nuclear bomb, we might look at Little Boy, which weighted 4.4 tons. Sure, a warhead would have different design constraints than a bomb which has to fit in a B-29, but it is reasonably to assume that any early warhead would weight a multiple of its fissile mass, perhaps half a ton, not something you can easily move around.
More importantly, to play MAD, you have to have launch-ready nuclear weapons. You want to be sure that your enemy can not take out your ability to retaliate with a first strike. Iran does not have missile submarines and also does not have any aircraft which can be reliably make it to Israel, so the only arm of their nuclear triad would be ground-based missiles fired either from stationary silos or vehicles. Either of these only work if you get the missile in the air before your launcher is hit.
If you opt to keep your retaliatory warheads in a deep bunker safe from harm, you will find that you do not have enough time between the first warning of an impeding attack and your bunker being hit to take your warheads out of the bunker and mount it on a missile. Even if the warhead itself is kept safe, after being hit you will not be in any position to launch it -- your access tunnels to your bunker will be full of rubble, your nuclear-capable missiles and launch pads near the surface will be destroyed, and the only retaliation your nuke offers is blowing up your own bunker. All your enemy has to do is to make sure that you have other priorities than digging through rubble in a nuclear crater in the middle of a war which you are fighting with severely degraded capabilities, which seems plausible enough.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1d ago
I get being against what is happening in Gaza, but so many people seem to be completely ignorant of the history of conflict, perhaps willfully so.
What is an example of a piece of history of the conflict that you think would change people's minds if they were aware of it?
I seem to be coming from a broadly similar background as you (I was a grad student around when you say you lived in Israel, and visited the country around the same time, and am an "alt-left" outlier on this forum), and I see much of the same facts on the ground as you do (Israel is quite livable, Arab-run countries are shitholes, etc.) (though your benchmarking against the West Bank, which is kind of an Israeli-run open air concentration camp, is a bit disingenuous), and yet I'm increasingly falling in the delenda est camp just because the Israelis have proven time and time again that they are unwilling to compromise on their monomanic obsession to capture and subjugate. For me, this does not even come from a particular reflex to support "the oppressed", as I for example am leaning towards kicking all the Islamic refugees out of Europe to the extent achievable under the law. It's just that I do believe in some baseline of human rights including some degree of freedom, bodily safety and self-determination, and the very existence of Israel from the point of its founding seems to just amount to a wanton cruel ploy to deny these to the previous residents of the clay they took.
I think the Palestinians should be allowed to govern themselves in a miserable theocratic shithole, if they are so inclined; if the Israelis want to build a purposeful country with nice infrastructure and great food production, more power to them, but they should have done so on land they obtained fair and square. I'm sure I could run a very spiffy software development startup in tidy quarters where I also cook two delicious meals a day, but would it be acceptable for me to do that by commandeering a random crack addict's shack and keeping the previous owner locked up naked in the basement, subject to regular beatings (frequency and intensity increased if he lashes out against me) if I also sometimes share some of my food with him (surely better than the slop his buddy who got to keep his shack next door eats)?
kky
1d ago
I only went there as you describe once, some ten years back. I was very young and dumb and spoke none of the language so most of it was wasted on me. Most of my experience is of the hellhole sort… oh well. At least I met some very nice people each time I went!
functor
1d ago
A private system could work as well. Holland, Switzerland and Japan also have private systems. The difference is that their prices aren't abhorrent. Regardless of who pays the US medical system has a cost problem. This problem will not get solved because the vested interests want delivering a baby to cost 40000 dollars.
I don't think anyone really disputes that the Palestinians, collectively, are oppressed. Where we differ is who we blame for oppressing them (the modal leftist pins the blame solely on Israel, whereas I would say that the Hamas leaders, the broader Arab world and Iran bear some of the blame); what the fact of their oppression implies for the moral rightness of their behaviour (the modal leftist believes that, because Palestinians are oppressed, they cannot be held accountable for their actions in the same way an oppressor could; I disagree); and what the fact of their oppression implies for the pragmatic pursuit of their goals (the modal leftist believes that, because Hamas was morally justified in committing the attacks on October 7th or firing rockets at Israel more or less indiscriminately, that therefore implies that doing so was a sensible goal; I disagree, as I am unable to fathom a hypothetical turn of events by which gunning down revellers at a music festival brings Palestinian statehood an iota closer).
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
1d ago
At the point where the father prevents the boy from picking up a sword. That's where you should have stepped in, enthusiasticaly pressed the foam weapon into his little hands, and distracted or even confronted the "father".
Of course I'm heavily biased here. I'm doing what I can to teach fencing and grappling to my 3-year-old daughter, who at least humors me even if she has no drive to fight. Kid wants to pick up weapons? Great! What parent wouldn't want their child to develop a healthy enthusiasm for self-defence, or maybe even the capacity to defend others? Boys may be boys and girls not as given to physical fighting, but even then, kids of either gender benefit from learning how to handle themselves.
I have a habit of alienating my wife's friends and family members by telling them straight-up what I think on controversial issues. My own family members know better than to start, by now, and my own friends either have no opinion on childrearing or are conservative enough themselves. So I don't think I'm playing internet tough guy when I say that I would have no problem telling the parents in your tale that what they're doing is straight-up horrifying and that I hope the child grows up to escape their influence ASAP. If they want to virtue signal to provoke the squares, fine, consider this square provoked, but they won't get off uncontested.
Now, as for the state...eh. In an ideal world, the all-powerful, all-knowing, all-competent yet all-benevolent state will have prevented that scenario from occuring in the first place. In our current world, with our current states, I think it's better for the state to stay out of it.
FtttG
1d ago
Which is to say, Israel postures like it is responding to an existential threat, but it isn't.
Hamas alone does not present an existential threat to Israel, agreed. But for most of Israel's history, they weren't just facing a threat from Palestinians, but from the entire Arab world; and even today, as little as two years ago they were facing a combined threat from Hamas, Hezbollah, Qatar and Iran. I think it's fair to say these four belligerents combined constitute an existential threat to Israel.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Regime change isn’t possible without a ground invasion
Yes
a ground invasion which isn’t possible
Debatable. Arguably, the US would pay a lower price in lives lost to occupy Iran than they did in, say, Operation Overlord.
Sure, currently the political climate is not very favorable to an invasion. The two failures of GWB are still fresh in the minds of Americans, and Trump did not campaign on military adventurism.
It would likely take a very stupid action on Iran's part to shore up US support for an invasion. Perhaps a 9/11 level terrorist attack, or a couple of 100 captured US servicemen being beheaded on video.
Work vans are far more common than work pickups in the USA. ‘White van man’ is not a usual American phrase, but everyone here understands what it means. The reason is obvious- it’s harder to break into the back of a van than a pickup bed.
Pickup trucks are the single most common vehicle in red/hispanic areas. It comes off as masculine and respectable(some form factor of success, maturity, decent behavior) for cultural reasons. Remember the American concept of masculinity, even upper class masculinity, is much bigger on ‘can personally go and do work’ than in the old country and utilitarian-but-not-really pickups make sense in that mold.
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