domain:eigenrobot.substack.com
2D3D
1d ago
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.
Reductive racism back on the menu!
How about this: the entire Arab claim to the region is from a pedophiliac warlord preaching tolerance when he was weak and sheltered by the Banu Qurayza, then he betrayed them and enslaved their women and children through promising religiously ordained rape and slavery of unbelievers to mobilize desert nomads into a bandit horde. The chronological Quran is the inverse of the Bible: peace tolerance and manumission before victory, absolutist Arab supremacism justifying subjugation and humiliation of unbelievers once a power base was established.
THAT is the root of Arab claim to the region, forced conversions and displacements of Copts and Maronites and total annihilation of Chaldeans and Assyrians and Zoroastrians. Baby foreskins are currency to purchase land? What a wonderful concept. Arabs certainly found it easy to pay for their lucre with thriving Zanzibar slave eunuchs too, though simply slaughtering locals and forcibly converting remnants was also a great currency.
All this framing is obviously intensely hostile and deliberately so, because reductive polemicism opens up similar avenues of attack to other actors, avenues by which the directionality of hostility make clear why such polemicism is avoided by modern anti-israelis. Objecting to the jewish state on such grounds means objecting to the Ottoman Mamluk and Sassanid/Roman predecessors as well. Return to glorious Eber-Nari as the last relatively clean incarnation of that damnable region.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1d ago
There's an important distinction between a person speaking to masses on behalf of or as a representative of their employer, and someone who merely happens to be an employee speaking their own opinions as a private individual in a context unrelated to their job, and having activists dig up their messages and threaten the company over them.
It is an imposition of government power to prevent an employer from firing an employee for their private speech, but not an authoritarian one. It is also an imposition of government power to prevent an employer from firing an employee for being the wrong race, and yet most of us would agree that is appropriate. It is worth it for the government to intervene and restrict freedoms if those restrictions create more freedoms as a result. In this case protecting the ability of people to speak and not be mindslaves to the megacorps (and the activists who cherry pick people to bring to their attention).
And in a game theoretic way the corporations will actually be better off this way! If corporations were legally prohibited from firing employees for first amendment protected speech when that speech was made outside of the workplace, then no activists would have any incentive to boycott or threaten the company for refusing to fire such individuals. They wouldn't be able to get anything out of it, and if they try to accuse the company of tolerating bad speech, because the company could simply point to the law and use that as an excuse and so their reputation wouldn't suffer and they wouldn't be forced to fire their otherwise competent and well behaved employee. Win-win for everyone except the mob.
2rafa
1d ago
They are still considered Jewish according to Halacha in that they can revert to Judaism without having to undergo the conversion that a gentile would undergo.
The practicing another religion thing is more specifically about Aliyah / migration to Israel. That is governed by different rules and so some groups that are not halachicly Jewish (patrilineal descendants of the first and second generation) are allowed and groups that are (converts to other religions born of Jewish mothers) are disallowed.
In practice the rules are very rarely enforced. A substantial minority of Soviet / Russian immigrants were (and are) low key practicing Christians, true even if the recent post-2022 Ukrainian wave. Unless someone is an open missionary on social media they are rarely rejected.
2D3D
1d ago
That horse has bolted. Hard to go 'ok bros we didnt lose but lets try peace anyways' and survive if peace succeeded. The immediate response would be "we could have been ok but we followed you for NOTHING".
To rebuild, the existing foundation must be destroyed root and branch. Total Hamas defeat is in fact a clean starting point for a new Palestinian political conceptualization to emerge. Jordan would be best, but given what happened to the West Bank where the Palestinians chose irredentist claims such an outcome is distressingly remote.
2rafa
1d ago
Being anti-democracy and being socially conservative are two largely separate things. You could have a global authlib dictatorship ruled by an absolute monarch, obviously there were various socialist autocracies. It is true that the most trad conservatives (French ultra-Catholics) in the west tend to oppose democracy, but that’s often more about local political factors (like their hatred for the French Revolution) than anything else.
A left-wing commune dweller saying that after the revolution they'll lead discussion groups and make clothes out of scraps. A right-wing authoritarian saying they'd be a warlord an authoritarian society. I think you're making a conversion error when you say these are equivalent.
The would-be commune dweller is funny because leading discussion groups and making clothes out of scraps is no more plausible as a career after the revolution than it is before. If it's not profitable to do under a capitalist system them it's not practical to do under a communist system. If we had the money and desire for that kind of frivolous luxury then someone would already be paying you to do it.
Being a warlord is a real job, it's just that you chose for some reason to compare a regular person making clothes out of scraps with a highly-exclusive job reserved for social elites. A more reasonable comparison would be to a warlord's street-level enforcers, who actually tend to do quite well for themselves under an authoritarian system. "Under an authoritarian system I would be one of the dictator's goons enforcing his will on the people and exploiting his power to enrich myself," may not be a very moral stance, but no one can say that it's not a tried-and-true strategy for getting ahead.
If you work hard and kiss all the right asses you can climb the ladder of authoritarian goons until you become the warlord, like how Putin climbed through the KGB. That doesn't mean that everyone who doesn't make it all the way to the top is just wasting their time. Being a regular goon can still be a good job.
It's a common criticism levied at reactionaries that they imagine themselves as aristocrats instead of the masses, but I don't think it connects because it's just not accurate. And in fact I think it's mostly projection, or the sort of attempt at symmetry that you're doing here, a common feature (and demand) of liberal ideology.
What more commonly animates reactionary thought is a desire for normalcy and a return to an understandable order of things. In fact it is more commonly a desire to escape politics and not have to deal with one's social order being constantly upended. The story is all too common: "I just wanted to play video games".
If you actually look at the ideas, the reactionary thesis is that most people do not desire to participate in politics and that the job of a respectable aristocracy is to fulfill this demand. Mass politics is a leftist import that only really features in syncretic forms of reaction like fascism.
On this question, consider Wyndham Lewis' The Art of Being Ruled.
As for the more general consideration that the people who wish for more constraining social norms may chafe at too constricting ones, it seems as fallacious to me as pointing out that the people who demand slightly more liberal social norms may fall prey to anomie if all norms are destroyed.
A decent and stable equilibrium is what the object of desire here. The question of the dynamics and as to which direction for nomos is the slippery one has to be seriously examined for this to have any teeth. But I believe one will easily find that it is easy to destroy things and hard to create them, even social norms.
Now to compare this back to the yearning of communists for communism, it seems categorically different. Communists have a very specific and deliberate eschatology that most non revolutionaries do not have an equivalent to. And it is that yearning and that eschaton that are laughable, not the general desire for social improvement. Nobody ever laughed at lefties for desiring decent healthcare at an affordable price.
As far as I'm aware, most of these are (1) self-imposed by HR departments and not actual regulation and (2) falling out of favor.
DEI measures have indeed made their way into government policy, they're not just being self-imposed by HR departments.
For example, in my country (Australia):
"Noting that the gender pay gap remained significant, the government announced a $1.9 billion package to improve women’s economic security. The sum takes in $1.7 billion over five years for increased childcare subsidies, as well as $25.7 million to help more women pursue careers in science, engineering and maths."
"The package also includes $38.3 million to fund projects that assist women into leadership roles."
Some quotes from the relevant budget statement:
"The Government’s Boosting Female Founders Initiative provides co-funded grants to majority women-owned and led start-ups, and facilitates access to expert mentoring and advice. The Initiative, announced in the 2018 and further expanded in the 2020 Women’s Economic Security Statements, provides $52.2 million in competitive grant funding plus $1.8 million in mentoring support. The program commenced in 2020, with round one of the Initiative providing approximately $11.9 million in grant funding to 51 successful applicants. Round two closed on 22 April 2021."
And:
"To further grow the pool of women in STEM, the Government is investing $42.4 million over seven years to support more than 230 women to pursue Higher Level STEM Qualifications. These scholarships will be provided in partnership with industry, to build job-ready experience, networks and the cross-cutting capabilities to succeed in modern STEM careers. This program will complement the Women in STEM Cadetship and Advanced Apprenticeships Program announced in the 2020-21 Budget, which targets women to enter industry-relevant, pre-bachelor study."
And:
"The Australian Government is committed to supporting more women into leadership positions and to further closing the gender pay gap. The Government is providing $38.3 million over five years to expand the successful Women’s Leadership and Development Program. This builds on the $47.9 million expansion to the Program announced as part of the 2020 Women’s Economic Security Statement. This program funds projects such as Women Building Australia run by Master Builders Australia to support more women into building and construction. These initiatives form part of the Government’s response to increasing gender equality, extending leadership and economic participation opportunities for Australian women, and building a safer, more respectful culture."
https://archive.budget.gov.au/2021-22/womens-statement/download/womens_budget_statement_2021-22.pdf
That's from the 2021-22 budget statement, and the 2022-23 budget was no different:
"Further measures in the Budget are focused on helping women into higher-paying and traditionally male-dominated industries. To boost the number of women in trades, the Government is investing $38.6 million over 4 years from 2022‑23. Women who commence in higher paying trade occupations on the Australian Apprenticeship Priority List will be provided additional supports, such as mentoring and wraparound services."
And:
"The Morrison Government is making a further investment, building on the success of existing initiatives to improve leadership outcomes for women, by providing an additional $18.2 million for the Women’s Leadership and Development Program."
"This includes $9 million from 2023-24 to 2025-26 to expand the successful Future Female Entrepreneurs program to develop and grow women’s core entrepreneurial skills. Funding will continue the successful Academy for Enterprising Girls (10-18 year olds) and the Accelerator for Enterprising Women, expanding it to include all women aged 18+, as well as adding a new Senior Enterprising Women program."
"To support women facing unique barriers to leadership and employment, the Government is also investing $9.4 million to expand the Future Women’s Jobs Academy and to support gender balanced boards."
You can undoubtedly find more of this in the recent budget statements. Governments love boasting about how much public money they have funnelled into gender and racial equity initiatives, and many of them cannot so easily be circumvented by those disfavoured by the policy since things like "the desire to become a tradesperson" is not transferable to your wife. In addition, I don't think this is a good argument:
The regulation that I'm most aware of actually pisses everyone off, which is "Woman-owned businesses", where everyone just registers their wife as the proprietor of their business and simply acts as a hurdle for building more housing.
The notion that blocking single men from accessing that benefit would have no distorting effect is a bit peculiar, especially in a society with a significantly delayed age of marriage and where many people spend significant portions of their lives outside of a romantic dyad. In this context, if men have to meet the criteria of having procured a wife to secure a benefit for themselves, it's certainly not irrelevant.
2D3D
1d ago
Not to be pedantic, but here
https://theconversation.com/what-cattle-conflicts-say-about-identity-in-south-sudan-181637
Its not even permanent land its basically nomadic pastoralists raiding as has been their tradition for centuries.
Perhaps that still counts as economic necessity, but it is a choice to engage in primitive cattle herding instead of pivoting societally to productive economies. Raiding and conflict is a manifestation of intractable differences between cultures, not the cause. Bedouins are seizing on the opportunity to assault Druze with a cassus belli, not that they were content to live in peace absent external influence. Uncorking Libya resulted in Tobruk and Tripoli creating competing clan based governments immediately. Right NOW the Cambodians are assaulting the Thais over a dead temple region and the Thais are eager for a scrap due to insane local politics (tldr Thaksin clan and the royal/military both benefit from conflict specifically against the Cambodians).
There are plenty of people who WANT to exterminate their culturally distant geographic proximates. The issue is whether a unifying culture can supersede underlying cultural distances. The unifying project of "never again" has provided a stable shell for Franco-German-Anglo relations to stabilize, but this is an aberration facilitated only by tangible outcomes. If the overculture fails to deliver, guillotines follow. And we live in an era where the major cultural touchstones are torn down with no functional replacement ethos. Neoliberalism and neoconservatism were destroyed by MAGA and progressivism, but annihilating the Protestant-Calvinist northeastern spine along with the neolib/con framings leaves the USA with a much more fractured cultural landscape.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
1d ago
This is a ahistorical view. Fascism grew out of syndicalism, the specifically biological animus is a German adjunct which plainly grew out of the culturally German importance of blood. Mussolini was famously anti-racist before his alliance with Germany, and many examples of actual fascism (as opposed to run of the mill authoritarian nationalism) had little to do with race.
What you're trying to point at is a central concern for the spirited part of the soul that guides fascist (and more generaly ultranationalist) politics in reaction to its neglect by liberal democracy. What the Greeks and Fukuyama call Thymos. The desire for recognition, dignity, and self-worth. The drive to be acknowledged as having value and status.
This is at the center of revanchism, the obscession with aesthetics and much of Fascist politics. But the form it takes is a function of the society it appears in. Romanian fascism focused on religion, German fascism focused on race, etc.
Like Kath Two from Seveneves.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
1d ago
Interesting take. I don't presume anyone wants a full breakdown of my personal lack of interest in most anime, and my comment was meant to be humorous. If it struck you as dumb instead, erase one off the board for my wit.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
1d ago
Is free speech more or less important than freedom of association?
2D3D
1d ago
Literally there were rallies celebrating the Oct 7 attack hours after. Complete with nazi slogans and cheers for the slaughter of "hipsters".
And many, many more.
Don't pretend for a single second that sympathy was extended towards Israel in any meaningful amount. The telegram channels were full of celebration and promises of painting Al Aqsa with Jewish blood and when it was clear that victory was not exhaustive then it immediately flipped to "we will suffer a genocide!".
The western left position is purely oikophobic. It is subversive and vanguardist in equal measure, casting down the holders of power while preserving institutions so that the left can occupy the vacant seats. The contempt the western left displays for its cultural proximates is a side effect of its primary desire to place themselves on top of the power structure by exploiting any underclass vector.
A common flavor of mockery is to find leftist posts about "what I'll do after the socialist revolution" and ridicule them. We were discussing the genre and the general amusement at folks that think they will have a quasi-aristocratic life: oh I'll work on the commune garden and teach embroidery and prepare meals for everyone. Weirdly, many of the posts by women ended up being weirdly trad too -- but that's a bit of a sidetrack.
My friend had an important insight: there is probably a rightist/reactionary equivalent to this. That's a good observation. We came up with a few of these
- He believes society has prevented him from being a warlord, it more likely prevented him from being a slave
- He believes society could police sexual & religious morality, it would more likely have had him flogged for drinking or disrespect or dirty jokes
- He believes he'd be the head of a respected family, more likely he'd chafe under his grandfather/uncle's authority
2D3D
1d ago
"of their own creation" is doing too much heavy lifting. In 1948 the Arabs invaded immediately, with Egypt and Jordan making little effort to integrate the Gaza and West Bank polities that were their nominal responsibility. When Jordan tried, they were rewarded with Black September. Lebanon collapsed when Palestinians allied with Hezbollah to use a functional state as a shield to launch rockets from. Gazan fields are a nice thing to show, because it immediately invalidates the "open air prison" narrative that makes Gaza seem like Kowloon Walled City under constant bombardment. Turns out there ARE open fields where Hamas could have operated from instead of under hospitals!
Ultimately holding Israel responsible ignores that the agency that Palestinians display repeatedly. Given the choice between a hardline maximalist versus a theoretical cooperative entity they have ALWAYS chosen hardline maximalism. There is no actor in Palestine territories calling for peace and recognition of Israel, and their cause is supported not just by geographicallyproximate Arabs who on a good day find it incredibly funny to irritate Israel eternally and on a bad day (most days) wish to drown the sands in Jewish blood in accordance with the Quran, but by rich westerners who at best are ideologically blinded by manichean moral framings and at worst are just barely (and cowardly) hiding their antisemitism. Hate jews if one wishes, as many do, but at least be honest. Sophistry works in echo chambers not in reality.
The arab population within Israel is 20%. They are the Palestinian arabs that stayed in place and did not flee, and for that they were granted citizenship and participation in a project that makes this population the richest and most prosperous of their monoethnic neighbours. This domestic population has assholes just like the Haredi and settlers are largely assholes, but it is not nearly as bad as the Palestinians who are given maximal succour for their eternal dickishness.
There is a two state solution REPEATEDLY offered. It is Hamas that and PA that reject a 2 state solution that does not involve ISRAELI disarmanent and permanent withdrawal from Gaza. Hamas wants eternal ceasefire (Israel ceases Hamas fires) and no disarmanent. I see zero demands for accountability for Hamas and the Gazans who express repeatedly their desire for Hamas to press maximalist claims, and I directly attribute such fervent optimism to foreign pressure on Israel to accept the unworkable. Hamas repeatedly breaks ceasefires to cheers from Palestinians and their win condition is satisfied either way.
Israel is not being ALLOWED to take responsibility because international pressure is inconsistent and shapes domestic politics into temporally transient positions. There is little chance Israel can effect either a maximalist cleansing operation or a reconstruction effort with both eternal foreign pressure and Gazan intransigence. Again, the hypocrisy is on full display. No one gives a single shit about Arktash, Palestine is incomplete until it is made whole from river to the sea with jews expelled to the void.
Maybe they should do that. Arab populations exploded with foreign food and healthcare access. On their own recognizance they would not be able to feed or medicate themselves and their populations would revert to the limit of their organic capability. Again, Israelis should just Migrant Fleet on a 4 year Carnival Cruise buyout. It'll also improve the reputation of that cursed company.
erwgv3g34
1d ago
This is like replying to a negative review of Harry Potter with "this is why I have no interest in literature".
anon_
1d ago
Indeed, I think it does depend on the siege. But also (with notable exceptions) it rarely happened when the besieged surrendered in good order.
Realistically anyway, the only hope anyway is that the attacker's forces are drawn away, starves or that a friendly army comes to relieve them. No defenders ever actively won a seiege, although many skills played for time and got one of the above 3 relief.
anon_
1d ago
The question is how much Israel can torture the civilians before there is sufficient moral pressure to make them stop.
Hence the framing. If one believes that the torture is being inflicted by Hamas' refusal to surrender then there ought to be moral pressure on them to do so.
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
1d ago
Congrats, I will do Math for ML after I finish Discrete Math, I am on Methods of Proof for now. The main bottleneck for being a good deep learning practitioner is programming, according to Howard. I am down to 45 XP daily, will do some more math via other sources in that time.
How did you start MathAcademy? Where did you learn about them?
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1d ago
I can respect most of that. However I'd politely note that I never used the word famine. I was trying to figure out a little more detail about your position. I do want to also note that when the invasion happened, Israeli tanks basically flattened half the farmland that was left, and I can dig up an article or two with the satellite receipts if you really want, but I think the point is a bit of a distraction/moot because even the extant greenhouses and fields were never going to be enough in the first place. Hunger is still pretty awful subjectively, even if it doesn't result in death, of course. (On a personal note, yes I agree it deserves to be taken seriously. I have a good number of pioneer/homesteader type ancestors, and some of what they had to do to survive on occasion is pretty gruesome.)
In the end I don't think we can fully escape the original shadow: Is it realistic for Israel to "step away" from a problem of their own creation? Or should we care about "who started it"? Personally I'm of the admittedly minority opinion that Israel should only be bound by guilt up to, say, 1978, and then only slightly, '82 or '85 also seem reasonable. Yet we still have to be realistic. Everyone has their own houses to clean: the PA needs to get their act together, Hamas needs to stop existing (or more accurately Gazans need to entirely reject them), Israel needs to come up with a reconstruction plan for Gaza which its own bombs ultimately busted up, and the neighbors of Israel have no real responsibility to help but it would be nice if they pitched in a little bit. I also think Israel ultimately can't have it both ways: either they retain control, as a Jewish bloc, over their democracy, or they don't, but they have to be honest about why in both cases (timelines and details are negotiable); parallel to this, either they figure out a more durable two-state-ish solution, or resign themselves to being permanently interventionist forever, and they are literally the only ones capable of taking the lead there, because of their large negotiating position and functioning government. Is it somewhat unfair that Israel needs to man up and take responsibility, because no one else will? Yes. But as my dad likes to say, life aint fair.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1d ago
Yes, basically this. If anything, the level of care given to variously 'friendly', 'neutral', or 'hostile' civilians is one of the most direct indicators of how morally the society is treating war. No war is perfect, civilian casualties are inevitable, even in significant numbers. But surely some conclusions can be drawn from the decisions made, both at a tactical level (e.g. what rules of engagement are you following, and what risk tolerance do you have, how high a confidence level do you require) and a general level (e.g. how often does Israel use bombs larger than necessary, how much exposure do you accept in terms of boots on the ground, and so forth). None of this should be construed to mean that I don't understand those real trade-offs.
Pre-war, what I'm trying to say is they had struck some kind of balance. While you could try and judge that on its own, we could be a little lazy and just call it a local, contextual "baseline" level of care. And it was already pretty lopsided. I realize 10 to 1 is an oversimplification, but that's how it is. Just picking out a google result from 2014, not fully randomly but partially (googled IDF riot deaths in a 2014-2016 date span, first relevant result with figures), an article has this to say:
...fighting that has killed 32 Israeli soldiers and two civilians, a Thai guest worker and more than 700 Palestinians, most of them civilians. Militants have launched more than 2,000 rockets toward Israel in the renewed fighting, which was stoked by the kidnap-murder of three Israeli teenagers and the apparent revenge killing of a Palestinian teen.
Note that despite the large number of rockets, few people are typically killed as a result because of Iron Dome (whether you think the rockets are normally launched because of this, or in spite of this, is a separate question). But look at those overall numbers for a second. A series of highly emotional murders (cycle of violence) sparks riots which sparks a mini-war. And at our snapshot in time, we have 32-25 dead Israelis/non-Palestinians, and over 700 Palestinians dead. That's a 20x ratio in this case! Not uncommon for the region.
Now let it sink in for a second that the current ratio, as the result of the now almost 2 year war, is up to 35x. I know numbers can lie, but... I really think that the figure should at the very least offer a strong hint as to what's going on, yeah? This seems to align with the anecdotes we get about IDF decisions about use of force on almost all levels. They are decisions, at the end of the day, not inevitabilities, at least within a certain range. Yes, I know the numbers are fuzzy, and you can slice it different ways. There's wiggle room. But historically for modern conflicts, these are pretty high numbers (Gazan density makes exact comparisons tricky) as a quick glance at military vs civilian casualties in recent wars such as Ukraine, Azerbaijan, even Syria over the course of the whole war, can according to some estimates get under 1x, though if you consider 20k Hamas fighters killed as is the Israeli claim, the ratio dips to a "mere" 2-3x or so military to civilian. Again I don't want to oversell these numbers, but the general trends combined with what I've read (from both sides) about current Israeli tactics and strategy seems to point pretty strongly on the side of callousness. The sad truth is a situation of "so what if they are using five human shields, kill them all," like the infamous trolley problem, varies in response to how sympathetically you view the human shields - dare I say you can actually use it as a rough barometer?
This is it. After the (imaginary) authoritarian socialcon revolution, I'll let my kids roam free in our safe, crime free neighborhood, I'll let them attend public schools without fear of them absorbing enemy propaganda. I'll work a normal middle class drone job (like I do now). I just want to be free to live my small traditional peasant life and raise my family among the same. I don't want to be a warlord or a artist. I just want to grill.
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