domain:freddiedeboer.substack.com
My go to strategy as a kid was to walk through the library looking for Unicorn stickers (which signaled fantasy) in the children and/or young adult section (and later the adult section when I became a teenager). And then look at the cover, read the synopsis, and pick out books that sound interesting. (I eventually picked up intuition based on the cover art too, since that's correlated with... something something target demographic and sub sub genre, but I can't really articulate any of that in words other than to avoid books which look too much like other books you've read and disliked, and try to read books that look like other books you really liked).
However this was like 20 years ago and I have no idea to what extent the woke has penetrated fantasy. And also don't know what your niece's preferred genres are. So my actual advice is 1: have her just browse through the library and pick things out, and 2: don't be afraid to go slightly over age range. A Precocious 9 year old can handle books intended for 14 year olds, they're unlikely to have anything truly inappropriate, it's mostly an issue of word complexity and character age.
One of the milestones I set for myself is to have a replacement for my Nitter instance, which has been acting up lately. The road was quite bumpy, between the retarded SQL performance, and my brilliant idea to first import the Twitter data over the API, and then present it in chronological order. I thought I was saving myself duplicated code by fetching and rendering data the same way, whether I'm browsing the Twitter API, or the more generic entries of my application, but I recently realized this was doomed to failure, as Twitter does not return data chronologically. So I opted for rendering the API data directly, while importing it in the background. It went faster than expected, and things have never ran smoother. A few more tweaks and I might reach my milestone.
How have you been doing @Southkraut?
“Israel wants to starve innocent people in order to ethnically cleanse the land for Israelis” is the reasonable takeaway to me, because there is no evidence of Hamas ever taking aid (1, 2), Israel’s actions are entirely inexplicable unless they deeply desire to starve innocent people, nearly every independent international body paying attention to Gaza has called attention to the risk (and now reality) of starvation, important Israeli leaders like Ben-Gvir and Amichai Eliyahu have specifically advocated for destroying food supplies as a tool to get what they want, and an American retired green beret Anthony Aguilar who worked with the designated aid distributor has said that Israelis open fire indiscriminately on civilians seeking aid.
What I witnessed in Gaza at all four distribution sites — I didn’t just go to one for a photo-op. I didn’t go to one to watch a distribution and then say, “Yes, this looks great.” I spent days on end in Gaza at all four distribution sites, at Kerem Shalom, where the aid is loaded for distribution, and at both operation centers that control the daily convoys, logistics operations and distribution for the four sites. What I saw on the sites, around the sites, to and from the sites, can be described as nothing but war crimes, crimes against humanity, violations of international law. This is not hyperbole. This is not platitudes or drama. This is the truth.
The sites have not only become death traps, they were designed as death traps. All four distribution locations were intentionally, deliberately constructed, planned and built in the middle of an active combat zone. Some may argue, “Well, all of Gaza is a war zone.” That may be true, but there are parts of Gaza that are direct — or, determined to be active, operational combat zones where Israeli Defense Forces are operating. Those sites were built in the middle of those areas intentionally. It’s not by accident. That, in and of itself, to designate humanitarian distribution sites to service an unarmed, starving population, to build them deliberately in an active combat zone, is a violation of the Geneva Convention protocols. It’s a violation of humanitarian law. And in my opinion, it’s a violation of humanity in general.
The things that I just described are not just opinions, they’re facts. The sites were designed to lure, bait, aid and kill. The food that we distribute, nowhere near enough. To Mr. Johnnie Moore, shame on you for celebrating 92 million meals delivered into Gaza. Shame on you. It’s a very simple equation: 92 divided by 2.2 million people, divided by 3 million — or, three meals a day. That’s what GHF proclaims. We’ve been distributing aid since the 26th of May, 26th May to now the 29th of June, 64 days of continuous distribution, and we’ve only managed to distribute 92 million meals. When you break that down, again, it’s a simple equation. That’s 14 days of meals. So, out of 64 days, we’ve provided 14 days of meals to the entire population in the enclave of Gaza. That’s inhumane.
Aguilar was previously the Commander of Special Operations of the Central Asian Command. This is not some no name guy. His testimony is confirmed by Dr Nick Maynard of Oxford University, who treated malnourished children. Maynard also suspects that the IDF is deliberately shooting children for sport, which other doctors have said in the past (I wrote a post on this a year ago or so).
But why does Israel want to starve innocent people?
IMO there’s simple answer to this, and it’s the same reason that anyone commits a crime against another for personal benefit which they believe they can get away with. There’s an insufficient “love for one’s neighbor”, an inability to feel empathy or otherwise recognize the shared humanity in another person from a different tribe. This can also be called being evil, as in, Israel has fallen so far from the standards of reasonable goodness that they are closest to its opposite, which is evil. So Israel is doing this because they are evil, very far from good. It is advantageous for them to take the land from Palestinians. It is advantageous even to starve them if you can’t take the land, because this damages longterm health, fertility rates, and intergenerational health. There is no real cultural or religious pressure that promotes love for non-Jews in Israel. So, IMO, the leaders of Israel are evil, and that’s why they are currently starving children for their own benefit.
I think Hamas is suitably different enough that you can't really compare starving their people to the blockades of Germany or Japan. Hamas and other terrorist groups consider human suffering and death to be a good thing because of their religion. There may be no upper limit to how much death they will tolerate.
In light of this, I don't really know how you solve the Hamas problem. Maybe stop letting aid in and then also give everyone guns to turn the whole thing into a Syria-esque clusterfuck and hope the people solve the Hamas problem themselves? Is that why clusterfucks like Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, or Yemen happen?
I doubt it; IIRC the beepers were used to "call up" Hezbollah members for service. If Hezbollah was already engaged in an all-out invasion of northern Israel as envisaged/desired by Hamas, there likely would have been no need to use/carry the beepers after the fighters had assembled and gone into combat.
I found the Golden Vow ash of war. Considering putting it on my sword or my flail.
It changes the str and dex scaling from d to e and introduces faith scaling: d. My Vagabond has 9 faith. And it reduces regular damage but introduces holy damage...? And has a hefty FP cost for its skill (40). Hmm. If I use that skill I wouldn't have FP left over for powerful spirits. Not sure what to make of this.
Sorry, newborn baby, you are an immediate threat to this poor defenceless country and have to be crushed before you can attack it
Correct, this is what a democratic theory of sovereignty means and has always meant since the French revolution at least. If the people are responsible for empowering their government, then if a country aggresses, the people are responsible for that too.
If you don't want your people to suffer the consequences of war, don't start one. It's really not complicated.
Neither will Israel starve Gaza into releasing the hostages nor will Hamas rape Israel into recognizing a free Palestine. Nor were either Nazi Germany or the UK ever going to bomb each other into submission.
And yet Germany was starved into submission in WWI, Japan bombed into submission in WWII, Tigray starved/bombed into submission in Ethiopia, etc.
Both phrasings imply that there is some level of suffering at which point the other side will give in, that the cruelty is instrumental to achieve another terminal goal.
Yes, it is a truism that war is politics by other means.
While this might even be technically true (i.e. once the last Gazan starves, nobody will stop the IDF from retrieving the bones of the hostages) I think that the implication "and we already have made progress into making the other side give in" is simply false.
Your strawmanning aside, that's a nice hunch you have there - a shame if someone were to...test it.
In reality there is no clever terminal goal for which starving Gazans or murdering Jewish civilians is an instrumental stepping stone, so we can conclude that the cruelty is itself a terminal goal.
Blind assertion without evidence. It's quite clear that murdering Jewish civilians is envisaged as an instrumental stepping stone to "liberating" Israeli territory for Palestinians - Hamas and other Palestinian organizations openly say so. And it's not as if there is any shortage of Israeli press squabbling about the blockade, food aid issues, and what the ultimate political program that Israel should be pursuing w/r/t Gaza is (downstream of "10/7 can never happen again" of course), none of which you discuss or cite.
How would you accomplish this, per legality?
You could come up with a system similar to PDO that protects how the product is actually made.
Otherwise how do you tell the difference between a knock-off factory and a simple expansion of the business?
Check if the new product is substantially similar to the old one, versus something completely different. Companies shouldn't be able to sell something completely different under the exact same name and mark.
Asahi made the assumption that American audiences would be satisfied with Peroni and ... were right on the mark.
We don't have a counterfactual for this, so we can't really saw how satisfied the consumers are. The market share in the US is absolutely miniscule though, but I find it hard to check the exact numbers. On walmart.com Corona beer has 3550 reviews, while "Asahi" has a grand total of ... 3.
Anyways for companies that abuse brand value at the expense of consumers, it takes time for consumers to learn that the brand is fake, and stop buying it. During that time they can cash out.
Asahi Select (or whatever name)
Asahi Select isn't even real. It's just something that a domestic brewery that licensed the Asahi mark (in the old days) dreamt up to slap on some other domestic macrobrew. There was never a day in history that an Asahi owned brewery brewed a drop of product ever sold under the name "Asahi Select." Literally "Brew some coors, call it Asahi Select."
find its way from a Pacific tanker onto your grocery store at a significant mark-up from the regular.
Unfortunately when the execs decide on a strategy of plunder, this isn't going to happen. The more they devalue their mark selling completely different stuff, the less likely they are to bring in the genuine article in the future.
Gaza pre war had an obesity problem. I don't think anyone was accusing them of being underfed.
I don't think they recognize any state's claim to the territory, do they? I guess that's not completely unprecedented, but I think in practice it is for populated territory.
Even if it can't sway Israel (let alone Hamas), it can influences the choices of people on the sidelines ie the rest of the world. Whether we're talking about the big picture of "should America support Israel's war effort even though it results in starving children", or the small picture of "should I, personally, donate to that online fundraiser to send help to starving little Abdul".
It can, and has influenced people, but to whose benefit outside of Hamas'? This influence appears to actually be leading to more death and suffering. So, to the extent that your moral correctness on this issue intersects with realpolitik, I see it as a mechanism that prolongs the conflict and props up the worst actors. The dilemma as I see it is if the practical outcome of your moral correctness is just more suffering then do you accept that suffering so that you can stay ideologically consistent, or do you abandon it for what you would consider a more favorable practical outcome?
I dont think Ive particularly seen that messaging, and Im genuinely asking. Obviously Ukraine isnt like that, but Israel generally seems more diplomatically than materially limited. Looking things up now, Israels military spending was about 5% of GDP in previous years, up to 9% last year. US aid was approximately(second chart) at 1%, increased to 3% last year (and presumably continuing for the current conflict). Probably those numbers dont include everything, but thats far from "obviously impossible" territory. North Korea is quite a bit higher than that, and you can see in the first link that Israel was there previously. For another comparsion, support for the former east german states seems to have been around 5% of west german GDP in the initial years.
That seems to depend on who is making the judgment, and whether the 'potshot' is an unguided missile launched at civilian population centers (which happen to include grocery stores, and maybe a few valid military targets) or IDF forces firing at what I assume they deem (validly or not) 'suspicious' actors seeking to steal or disrupt humanitarian aid distribution.
Neither really brings joy, though.
The Viet Cong didn't win, the Americans got tired of fighting and gave up. The Viet Cong never landed a single boot on American soil. There was never any question of the Viet Cong conquering America. In the sense that the Palestinians are too weak to conquer Israel, the Viet Cong were too weak to conquer America.
The difference between Hamas and the Viet Cong is that Hamas has invaded Israeli soil and killed Israeli civilians. The Israelis can't get tired of fighting and give up like the Americans did in Vietnam. If they could, they would have done it already. Hamas and its various sister organizations like Hezbollah will continue to attack Israel until one or the other is annihilated. Ergo, the Israelis have no choice but to continue fighting.
Today I learned this distinction. Thanks!
I am not aware of any requirement that would need an exception to be made. Allowing neutral actors to provide humanitarian aid to civilians is one thing. Allowing hostile actors to aid and abet active combatants is something else entirely. As a credible case has been made that this falls under the latter rather than the former, I don't think there is any international law that actually requires the Israelis to do anything.
As a rule of thumb, international agreements never require states to do anything that would be to their strategic disadvantage. If they did then no state would ever agree to them in the first place. That's why they only ban weapons that are too impractical to actually use, like mustard gas and bioweapons. Nobody would ever seriously suggest banning stealth bombers or cruise missiles, because none of the states that have those things would ever agree to stop using them.
If Isreal decided "fuck it, Gaza's borders are open. We're just gonna sit behind the border wall and do our thing, the people of Gaza are free to do whatever" then yeah, I would assign them zero responsibility.
They did do this in 2005 when they removed (sometimes at gunpoint) all the Jewish settlers in Gaza. The naval blockade and walls went up years later in response to the rockets and other attacks. I think this is part of why the Israelis question whether peace is possible at this point: Gaza's government, and arguably it's populace that hasn't overthrown it, supports attacks on Israel, even questionably effective ones, at almost any cost to themselves.
Yeah, but if Saudi Arabia decided to reintroduce its original population of lions due to enormous wealth, they’d still have gone extinct in the middle.
Are there first world countries that developed to first world standards without pushing their native large predators out? I mean, Canada and Uruguay are contenders- with the obvious similarity of large tracts of essentially uninhabited land because everyone lives in one or a few major cities. The U.S. is similar- wolves, bears, and cougars were largely extirpated from the areas people actually live, the recent range expansions are driven by population concentration and deliberate reintroductions. Maybe bears in Japan?
Most 'root causes' that get highlighted by activists are just correlates of criminality (e.g. poverty) not causes.
You'll see someone raise a point that's evidence for "just like that" position and draw completely different conclusions. The funny one usually goes something like "Jamie spent 30 years in and out of juvie and prison for various violent offenses. His dad also went to jail for murder and he was raised by his single mother. Just another example of how interactions with the justice system create an intergenerational spiral".
It never seems to occur to the people most likely to use this stuff.
Doesn't Israel claim sovereignity over the area?
No, they do not.
Bison are grazers, not browsers.
So are afghans and Iraqis.
The comment was making an analogy that if what happened to Israel on October 7 had happened to America (eg across the Mexican border), the US would react a certain way. I’m not sure how this relates to American hostages in Gaza.
I believe Israel recognizes the Palestinian Authority's claim, but they don't recognize the PA as a state.
More options
Context Copy link