domain:ashallowalcove.substack.com
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
You need to develop reading comprehension. I cannot stress this enough. There are many things the Israelis can do. I maintain that more diplomacy and less bombing would advance their position in terms of peace and stability. Obviously it wouldn't advance the goal of territorial expansion since diplomacy requires negotiation, give and take. But Israel is a small country, territorial expansion is not sustainable with their resources. Israel only pursuing the 'bomb first, annex later' strategy because the US provides cover from the negative consequences of their strategy, US power is upholding an unnatural, unstable equilibrium.
Your 'solution' is the fastest and surest route to disaster for Israel by torpedoing the source of Israeli strength, American support. Their prior strategy of 'pretending to negotiate, sabotaging negotiations, dividing opponents and then blaming others when the Palestinians don't accept bad terms' worked pretty well, far better than your 'blow everything up and get sanctioned into the ground' approach might.
anti_dan
3d ago
Requiring outside subsidies is an issue because your program turns into a self licking ice cream cone. This seems true for PEPFAR. The purpose of PEPFAR is to keep the people on PEPFAR alive which then demands more money to keep the same people alive in the future. There is no expectation that PEPFAR recipients will erect an anti-retroviral factory anytime soon so they can provide themselves the drugs, nor any other factory that will allow them to be productive enough to actually buy them at market price. The expectation, rather, is this program will be a moneysink for the remainder of my lifetime. This is, of course, a problem with most large charities. Effective charities are almost always more targeted and more discriminatory. An adoption program that places kids with well vetted parents, a financial support network for widows of fallen soldiers and police officers, etc. Such programs are effective in that they are targeted towards an end: creating functional adults who can be independent, positive contributors to society. Public schools are an example of a failed attempt at effective altruism. In theory educating the public could have positive externalities. In practice, they have proven to be moneysinks because the reality of schooling is it is related to, but is not actually education, and human teaching ends up approximating a garbage-in-garbage out model. You can predict the outcomes of an incoming kinder-garden class with fairly good accuracy with just the demographics of the children, while ignoring the teachers almost entirely.
iprayiam3
3d ago
This isn’t about counter factual people. You’re starting with the premise that’s under dispute.
In sumo, can steroids give you an edge? Does anyone do steroids? Any scandals?
iprayiam3
3d ago
This analogy doesn’t make sense. We’re not talking about genetic manipulation, we’re talking about picking which embryo is selected.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
3d ago
Conversely, would a gene pool guided by culture (which is a lot more volatile) not be much more vulnerable to genetic catastrophe?
It's that one Asimov story again, we'd be saving ourselves from one form of entropy only to discover a new one.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
3d ago
Arguably the most luddite guy here busts out a PR to fix a minor site annoyance in a matter of hours. Incredible.
hydroacetylene
3d ago
Your ideal society is western Saudi Arabia?
Lizzardspawn
3d ago
That is a citation needed moment. Source - I am from Europe. AC is quite popular and widespread. And treated as necessity during summer. We just don't try to achieve polar temperatures and usually put it to 20-22 C (don't ask me why AC units became such pussies lately)
‘Not enough power for the Catholic church’ is a baffling criticism of Franco.
Which is why my criticism isn't "not enough power for the Catholic church" so much as "didn't turn the clock back far enough, and in too few areas." As you note, fascism does not have enough staying power; I'd say that's because it's way too modern.
Show me a leader who will give his best efforts to roll back every part of society he can — except science and technology — to before 1500 AD, and that would be a proper reactionary.
Edit: as I've said to people before, most Americans' vision of the "sci-fi far future" looks like Star Trek — ranging from TOS for the Republicans to Kurtzman's abominations for the Woke (or, for some of the well-read "Grey Tribe" techno-optimists in places like this, it looks something like "The Culture" (shudders)).
Me? It looks more like Battletech, Dune, or Warhammer 40,000.
If we're just going to make up fictitious weapons, I don't see why we can't make up fictitious countermeasures as well.
Warfare however does give a fuck about internal cohesion. Anybody that's ever done it will tell you that. And that holds even when it's making-FOXDIE tier biomedical spycraft.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
3d ago
EA exists within the liberal democratic view of human rights
What's a "human right"? I'm not asking what you think, you clearly believe in some utilitarian formulation of natural law, likely in the style of J.S. Mill. That has boundaries I'm well familiar with.
I'm asking what most EA people believe.
Because in my experience it's a lot less solid than what you have in mind, generally more aligned to Rawls than Mill and almost entirely without bounds.
I do not believe that Effective Altruists would oppose vaccine mandates categorically under grounds of bodily autonomy, for instance.
I do not think it is fair to directly fault EA at large for Ziz and SBF. [...] they literally disavowed the individual and their ideas. [...] SBF also fooled a great many worldly financial types outside of EA
I understand those as fair arguments, but they are the same fair arguments Khrushchev made for Stalin and that Marx made for Guesde. We are responsible for what we bring into the world, the purpose of a system is what it does, etc.
this is an extremely broad criticism that applies to many religions and ideologies.
Of course. And I denounce them all as capable of the same horrors.
Lizzardspawn
3d ago
Genetically engineered viruses don't give a fuck about internal cohesion of a part of the social strata.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
3d ago
If no genes are good or bad then they ought to have no objection to an embryo being edited to have the "bad" genes that produce congenital disorders of one type or another.
The objection is that the procedure to edit such an embryo is neither risk-free nor costless. So why, then, would you pursue a costly, risky procedure, unless you think there's something to be gained from it? Putting an embryo at risk of complications for absolutely no reason whatsoever is something that probably should be forbidden, no?
If you truly believe that all genes are equal, then you'd believe that there's absolutely no reason whatsoever to ever even bother replacing one human gene with another, and thus, no reason whatsoever to spend even the slightest time and effort developing the technology to do so.
This was a key thrust of Prior's whole mass of arguments, and why he chimed in with them any time CRISPR or gene editing came up: anyone who supports (or, for that matter, allows to pass unopposed) any form of research whatsoever into human genetic modification is definitionally a Nazi, and must be dealt with accordingly.
The aversion to judging negatively fails when it results in the reluctance to provide any judgements at all. It's an overcorrection. Failure to exercise judgement can be equally as bad as eagerness (thisisfine.jpg).
I agree. But then, to folks like Prior, that just makes us two more people who clearly and obviously want another six million murdered.
the_Culture_is_great
3d ago
Why is "requiring outside subsidies" an issue?
What charities are more effective per dollar than PEPFAR?
gattsuru
3d ago
In home or small business settings, or modern construction, that's the typical failure mode, and it's possible that the reporting is just conflating things. That said, in older construction of large buildings, it is very common to have choke points well in grey or blackwater pipes well after the restroom itself, either because of pipe narrowing around fittings, because of bad slope, or because of partial obstruction (roots, partially collapsed piping). When clogged at those points, you'll get wastewater from all of the points above it backfeeding over time.
This still isn't technically sewage, since it hasn't made it to the sewer, but it's still going to end up being quite a large number of toilets backing up at once.
hanikrummihundursvin
3d ago
From a progressive standpoint, you're not looking at successful systems in hopes of further maximizing efficiency. You are looking for solutions to problems. Expensive projects with dubious results might look economically silly, but the need for them arises from a want. For example, after hearing that a local homeless person froze to death or something. 'We need to do something' always sounds better than 'welp'.
OliveTapenade
3d ago
This is an act of desperation, it's going to increase antisemitism because wildly disproportionate responses like this reveal the underlying criticisms made by "anti-semites" to be true.
What criticisms have you made that this shows to be true?
Magusoflight
3d ago
Iirc danish sperm is the worlds most coveted.
We will all be Nikolaj Coster-Waldau and Scarlet johansen
Magusoflight
3d ago
I don’t really see why this is bad. You have to to put in perspective, which is that we are in a full blown race against genetic meltdown in the gene pool. Genetic mutational load is cumulative! That means deleterious mutations continue down the germ line! In layman’s terms: We are breeding people to be dumber and weaker and sicker at an alarmingly fast rate. Why shouldn’t we equip people to fight this trend? It’s like, our only effective tool at this point
Weaponomics
3d ago
Woke identifying beauty + science as an-existential-enemy-to-Woke might be “right”, but that does not make the Woke “more correct”.
However, if your claim includes the assertion that. abc/msnbc/salon/post/times/NPR are all Woke, I still mostly agree.
OliveTapenade
3d ago
The difference is that we Jews don't demand that everyone else should subscribe to our metaphysics. Now, Christians do, and while they don't think that someone who doesn't believe in the trinity is anti-Christian, they do believe he is the next best thing.
1 John aside, I would suggest that the standard Christian approach is to distinguish non-Christian from anti-Christian, such that 'non-Christian' means not being within Christianity or disagreeing with Christianity to some extent, and 'anti-Christian' means possessed of specific, active malice towards Christianity.
(If you read all of 1 John, that letter appears to be talking about schisms within a particular community. 1 John 2:18-19 would seem to indicate that the 'many antichrists' are those who 'went out from us'. The 'liars' in 2:22 are presumably then those who were part of the Johannine community but who have since gone around denying the constitutive dogmas of that community.)
This approach seems consistent with how we talk about other religious groups as well. As I am a Christian, I naturally disagree with parts of Judaism and parts of Islam. I sincerely believe that religious Jews and Muslims are, ipso facto, in error about certain facts. This does not make me anti-semitic or anti-Islam/Islamophobic, just as I do not consider those Jews or Muslims to be anti-Christian. We distinguish between disagreement and malice.
The whole criticism of trans activism here is that they are treating disagreement as malice. There's no 'neutral' position. You either affirm the whole platform or you are a transphobe.
OliveTapenade
3d ago
I don't see how that relates? In fact, it seems like an instance of the same mistake?
Both genetic screening and treating someone differently after DNA modification seem like genetics-based discrimination. In both cases the correct approach is the same, which is to say that people or their worth cannot be reduced to genetics. Genetics do not encode personhood.
OliveTapenade
3d ago
Editing and screening are two different things, though I'm not particularly supportive of either.
In principle I have no objection to genetic medicine. If we could alter somebody's genes so as to end or remove illnesses, that would be a good thing. However, the line between medicine and enhancement is, in practice, pretty murky. If we could use gene editing to genuinely cure Down syndrome, that would be good, but in practice I suspect that if we had that technology it would inevitably be used for enhancement - that is, in an attempt not to improve the lives of actually existing people, but to manufacture better people. I think the risks of instrumentalising human life that way are considerable.
Screening is a step beyond that, isn't it? Screening is the equivalent of aborting an infant with Down syndrome prior to birth, only quicker and more efficient. So all moral objections there would apply.
Not just myself, but many have made the criticism that the US federal government is unduly influenced towards defending the political and cultural interests of Jews above and beyond other groups of people, including most notably White Americans.
I myself have pointed to other prominent instances of this, like Jewish groups getting hundreds of millions in handouts from DHS. There's actually been an update to that story recently- the Israel supplemental bill included a $390M increase to the Nonprofit Security Grant Program with $230M available through Sept 30, 2026. Schumer is pushing for an additional $500M bringing potential 2026 funding to $730M. A massive expansion of the program.
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