domain:drmanhattan16.substack.com
In general, I think that power discrepancy is why we have age of consent laws. Using the age is obviously a crude approximation, I can think of situations where a 15yo having sex with an 18yo would not be problematic from a power discrepancy point of view, and also of situations where two 18yo having sex would be problematic from a power discrepancy view without being criminal. But still, one has to draw the line somewhere, and age is at least something which can reasonably be verified, while "would a judge like the power dynamics in that relationship?" is much more diffuse.
Okay, second thread of thought, separate from the Trump issue below:
I'm never a fan of the 'power discrepancy' argument since 'power' is usually very hard to define in tangible terms. We know it when we see it, sure, but it comes in different forms. The person who holds financial power might not be the 'more powerful' person in a confrontation where the other party holds... a gun.
"Coercion" is a more tightly defined, and the law has pretty decent standards for recognizing where coercion has occurred. Power can be used to coerce, but it can also be used to 'persuade' in the literal "convince someone that it is good/right for them do to the thing" definition.
Should we differentiate between a rich/powerful guy saying "If you don't sleep with me I will make your life a living hell" vs. saying "If you sleep with me I'll give you a ride in my private jet"? Probably. Either one is the result of a 'power' imbalance.
And, finally, the existence of statutory rape laws can, arguably, invert that power dynamic, rather than eliminate it! A particularly sociopathic 15-17 year old can tell someone slightly older than themselves "Sleep with me/give me money or I will tell the cops you raped me."
I don't think that's a common situation, but you see the point, if we're worried about power imbalances it doesn't do to just hand more power to the alleged less powerful person in this situation.
What's my solution? Bring back literal rites of passage rather than tying things to a strict age-based formula.
Philosophically and psychologically, 'consent' is based on state of mind and understanding of the acts in question, age is only very loosely correlated with those factors. And we have the ability to measure those factors more directly. So why use the less reliable metric that is constantly being gamed anyway.
So I see the "what should age of consent be?" debates as a massive red herring. Understandable one since its the standard in place now. Yet everyone has secondary motives for what they'd prefer the age be. And there legitimately is NOT some 'one size fits all' answer!!
Just cut through that stupid knot and tie legal adulthood to some test or other obstacle that a young person must clear before they're recognized as full adults. Some will pass the test at age 15, some at 18, some at 25, and some never at all.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
1d ago
All the Japanese had to trust is that if they kept on we'd keep killing them until they surrendered, were all dead, or at least mere remnants scattered through the countryside with all the cities and industry destroyed. And that the alternative of surrender was better than that. And they were right -- the US didn't have any more nukes at the time so it would have taken more time and US lives than they may have thought, but they had no winning scenario at that point.
Gazans either think they can win because of some outside force making Israel back down to the point of ceasing to exist, or they don't care -- they prefer fighting uselessly against Israel to the alternatives. And given that the demonstrated alternative was living in Gaza, being fed by the UN and still being able to shoot rockets over the wall from time to time, that's pretty damned dumb. If they'd been willing to actually stop shooting rockets and stirring up trouble in Egypt, they'd have done better than that. But they aren't.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1d ago
So aggregate action is always harder than individual action. If the IDF offered food and a trip out of Gaza for the family of anyone who accurately reported Hamas hiding spots I bet they would win fast. Also the people are some degree of starving, so it makes fighting harder, and they may not have the weapons or chance to fight effectively at all. (Could some hungry Gazans really do better than the IDF at killing Hamas?) If Hamas is bunkered down in literal bunkers and tunnels, you can’t do shit even if you have a mob. Still the point remains that they are ultimately civilians and should this be treated like bystanders and in an ideal world as equal value as humans, like any other human.
Despite in some sense being victim blaming (it’s a toxic relationship, everyone is at least a little toxic, Hamas can be monsters and Gazans can be victims both) if we look at surveys support is dropping albeit slowly. But over focusing on the Israeli hostages is probably a poor framing since most seem to believe giving up the hostages would do nothing to stop the war. In fact a large number oppose disarmament because they think it wouldn’t stop the war either (distrust, basically). Thus fatalism is on the rise in Gaza (martyrdom is shrinking interestingly and isn’t the majority view). To be fair when asked if they would evict Hamas to stop the war, this was interesting to me, it’s still like 2/3 no and 1/3 yes. So I think it’s fair to blame Gazans to some extent absolutely yes.
anti_dan
1d ago
The reason it looks aimless is because we are preventing them from taking effective measures though. You're presenting a catch-22
UncondemningMonk
1d ago
I am a person who tends to resist conspiracy theories - could be described as other in this thread have said as a "nothing-ever-happens" guy. So I'll just go through some of your points and talk about why they don't seem dispositive of much to me.
The cameras for in front of his cell are down, guards apparently failed to check in on him (apparently both of them fell asleep despite this being their job)
With respect to the guards, very easy for me to chalk this up to an American prison system that doesn't really care about the well-being of its inmates and is content to hire low-paid grunts to perform thankless security work.
As for the cameras being down, I'm not aware of how extensive that problem was. Were only the cameras in front of his cell down? Was there a more systematic issue throughout the prison? Had this been happening for months, or were the cameras fine until the night of his death? I'm not sure I've seen people come with data about these questions. So I don't have much to do with the cameras being down absent that further context.
(paraphrase) Video released by DOJ with missing minute
It's suspicious for sure. But I guess I find some kind of nightly reset that happens at 11:59 every night plausible. Of course if that is well known, it's also the perfect time to do something nefarious - but the video also isn't even an angle that is very relevant to Epstein's cell and I believe I've read that there were hallways into Epstein's cell that wouldn't require going through this camera angle, so why would it matter anyway.
That same day Epstein was also allowed to make an unmonitored call on a line intended for attorneys only to a non-attorney, with the regional director saying "We don't know what happened on that phone. It could have potentially lead to the incident, but we don't - we will never know" which is another oddity. He claimed he was calling his mother ... his mother has been dead almost two decades before then.
Epstein claiming he's calling his dead mother sounds like the behavior of somebody going through severe mental anguish that might ultimately lead them to suicide. What would be the reason he claimed he called his mother in the scenario where he had no plans to kill himself? It's some kind of coded signal that means "I'm perfectly well and have no plans hang myself?" Why not just say that directly?
Then afterwards, Epstein's own lawyers contested the official finding and hired their own pathologist who said the injuries were more indicative of homicide by strangulation than normal self hanging.
Lawyers gonna lawyer. They can always find an expert witness to defend their side of the case. I don't know how the legal payments work, but could they just be extracting more money from the Epstein estate for as long as they are able to? With respect to the actual facts, I have no idea whether they are more likely to indicate homicide or strangulation.
Then of course we have things like Epstein's sweetheart deal maker Alex Acosta being a literal high level member of the government
A little sus, but the essence of what happened here is that a Republican US District Attorney for South Florida was elevated to a cabinet level position by a Republican politician from South Florida.
stepping down only a month before the suicide. Was he distancing himself? Cause that's a mighty odd coincidence too to leave right around that time.
This doesn't make any sense to me. If he was going to distance himself, why not leave the administration well before Epstein was even arrested again. And it's not a coincidence he left around that time - he left directly because of Epstein's arrest and the public's subsequent heightened awareness of the 2008 sweetheart deal he made.
And we get told all sorts of things about having files ready for release, only for them to apparently not actually exist like all the files sitting on Pam Bondi's desk.
Very easy for me to chalk this up to Bondi being a populist buffoon who had been either convinced that there definitely was a there there and was confident she would find something, or she might have just wanted to sound really confident and cool on her Fox News hit. I watched that live while at the gym and that's what I thought at the time; it did not give me any impression that files with any new substance would actually be released. She just fucked up because she wanted to deliver something to the part of Trump's base that really cares about this.
(paraphrase to shorten) Intelligence connections, Mossad, etc.
The connections to Mossad through Maxwell are somewhat odd. But he seemed to very publicly have these connections, right? His friendship with Maxwell seems to have been no secret, nor are Maxwell's father's connections to Mossad. I'm not claiming anybody that interacted with them knew of these connections (though they probably could have if they were powerful people and did any bit of research on the people they were going to engage in sketchy behavior with), only claiming that Epstein would not exactly be the most subtle Mossad agent of all time. The connections were there in plain sight for anybody with interest to do so to discover.
Outside of 100% proof, how much more would be needed before it stops being "just a conspiracy theory"?
I don't know how to answer this question. Definitely video footage of people strangling Epstein would convince me. Anybody (prison guards, Alex Acosta) going on record claiming knowledge or evidence of the conspiracy. But it is tough to know exactly would tip the scales short of those things.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
1d ago
Yes exactly
Hence my opinion that the Israeli strategy is bad because it's inherently unsustainable and also profoundly not going to resolve anything.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
1d ago
Both sides of the conflict clearly understand this. It's only third parties who do not.
Browser
1d ago
Does it even have to look like an accident? Surely there's enough dodgy people on in Epstein's circles where if he was gunned down it's ugly but nobody's overly questioning it.
I can cut through most of the murk wrt Trump's actual involvement with Epstein with a few observations:
-
Any negative fact about Trump that could be leaked has leaked over the last 10 years.
-
Any criminal charge that had the barest chance of sticking was thrown at him in the last 5 years.
-
Biden and Co. were in possession of the Epstein files from 2021-2024.
-
Nothing in the Epstein files that directly implicated Trump in criminal activity was leaked.
-
No criminal prosecutions for such behavior were attempted during the last five years (caveat: those prosecutions would probably take place in Florida, which is friendly ground for Trump).
MY Bayesian priors on Biden and Co. deciding to leak nasty Trump stuff are extraordinarily high. So the lack of such leaks indicate that salacious Trump stuff just wasn't there... or the ongoing possibility that there's a MAD situation where tons of people would get burned if Epstein stuff goes public. However if that were the case, why'd the attack Trump from every other angle?
Does this prove Trump didn't commit statutory rape, or that he's objectively not a pedo or hebephile or whatever? Nah. But looking at the longer Trump record, it doesn't fit any other observed fact, unless he's just a general, indiscriminate horndog.
Lemme put it this way, if you believe that Trump did indeed bang Stormy Daniels (lol remember that name?) in 2006, when she was in her mid-20's and an active porn star... I REALLY think you have to downgrade your belief that Trump actively prefers young teens. Keep in mind this was around when the Epstein stuff was coming to light! There's just no way a guy would look at THIS (SFW) as a workable substitute for a teenager. And for the record I do think it is more likely than not that he did bang her or at least have a sexual encounter.
Anyhow, I remain glad that people are refusing to let the Epstein issue die. I grew up in Palm Beach County during the time his activities were getting investigated and prosecuted, I've been aware of the basic facts of the situation since I myself was in my teens. I hope enough pressure builds to force some actual revelations and possibly prosecutions... but it'd be nice if people were a bit more realistic about what they'll probably find.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
1d ago
You know, right now I'm listening to the news on the radio and it's another interview with someone about what is happening in Gaza.
I have two options:
(1) Everyone in the world is a lying liar who loves Hamas and wants to obliterate Israel.
No, everyone who is in your curated source of news is a lying liar who loves Hamas and wants to obliterate Israel. Or is dumb as dirt and don't realize they're patsies for same.
But when people are dying, I don't give a flying fuck about their politics.
That's not how war works, or ever has.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
1d ago
I’m not aware of many even on the far left who advocate to kick people out of America if they don’t share the principles?
A bit slippery and perhaps deliberate on Vance's part, I'd read at they want to deny right of representation to people that don't share their principles. They won't send Vance (for example) or people like him to a prison in El Salvador, but they would do everything in their power to deny that he's a "true American" and prevent him from ever having a position of influence.
And does a disdain for America, where it exists, also directly translate to weaker social bonds, his original concern? No, there’s no real link
I want to say citation needed but I don't know what evidence I'd accept here. I do think that's a pretty fair correlation but other things occurred over the last few decades that also affected social bonds.
He’s underestimating, ironically, America’s own extremely strong assimilation forces.
Historically speaking, with a 70 year pause and a few wars between big waves.
He’s not considering immigration as a potential strength.
His wife is an immigrant and he explicitly says the country is better with her in it.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
1d ago
This whole thing is just another hack: "we'll launch rockets from the territory to force you to react, then when you control the ground we'll insist that now it's your sovereign territory and you are obligated to govern it".
And not only govern it, but govern it democratically, so the Palestinians can take over the government and kill all the Jews. And if the Jews can't prevent that it's because they failed in "reconciling with the Palestinian civilian population" so they deserve to die. Israeli Jews, however, are not stupid enough to buy this line of reasoning.
07mk
1d ago
When they make mistakes, their mistakes are factual---that their extreme remedy is going to make the situation better than the status quo. These mistakes are not that hard to correct
I think the past decade or so of history has proven beyond any reasonable doubt that these mistakes are, in fact, insanely hard to correct.
My hypothesis is that this is due in large part to the fact that people don't just make unbiased, truth-oriented judgments on what is true and false, but rather use judgments based on what one is motivated to be true. Ironically, the "wokes" should be more aware of this phenomenon than the average person, because so much of the "woke" worldview is based around invisible/unavoidable biases that people have due to the conditioning they received from society. It's somewhat confusing why they don't use this insight to introspect - figure out what oppressive societal forces pushed themselves into their own ideology that posits a narrative about "patriarchy" and "white supremacy" as hegemonic forces shaping our society. Figure out what personal psychological blind spots and failings are causing them to find this narrative of oppression so attractive and convincing. At the same time, it's not at all confusing why they don't do this. People chase their bliss.
When the so-called factual mistakes are driven by ideology, then correcting them seems at least as hard as correcting simple disagreements in ideology. In part because the people making these factual mistakes mistakenly think that their mistakes are factual in nature, rather than ideological, and so they lack the knowledge to actually correct their mistake, dooming them to keep making the same mistake. Well, dooming others to being subject to them making the same mistake, perhaps.
This is unremarkable and no reasonable person seeks revenge for war.
This is not true. And Gazans (and people in honor based and tribal societies in general) tend not to be reasonable people anyway.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
1d ago
I wouldn't worry so much about the Kim case. Didn't we JUST have a case where some Trump admin atrocity turned out to not be what it seemed? Or rather, not to have happened at all?
It turns out people will just make stuff up.
It is possible, as the stories have been speculating, that Kim was refused entry to the US and detained because of his past drug offense. If so, this is not new with the Trump Administration. Here's a 2015 document from the Immigration Legal Resource Center noting that such an offense makes a person inadmissable but not deportable. If he actually completed pre-adjudication probation (resulting in no conviction), he should be admissible, but it's not clear that happened..
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1d ago
Depends how you define success. Kabul was doing kinda okay for a while. And important for our context here, we didn’t genocide or ethnic cleanse Afghans, nor do anything proximate. I feel okayish overall about it. They ended up deciding they preferred Taliban rule by revealed preference basically, and we did, eventually, greatly reduce (some would even say completely eliminate) international terrorism from that region, which was the original goal. There isn’t a high enough degree of depraved bad actions that we would want to intervene.
Israel still looks terrible in comparison. Not that it’s a perfect comparison, but it’s pretty great compared to the tortured examples otherwise found in this subthread. Again, Afghanistan is right there as an example, why reach?
faceh
1d ago
Yeah, this might be the most egregious motte-and-bailey that is currently widely accepted.
Call someone a 'pedophile' because they express attraction towards someone just barely under the age of majority, and uninformed onlookers might very well imagine that they're a predator who stalks 10 year olds with designs on kidnapping and molesting them.
And since Pedophiles (the actual child-attracted kind) are virtually the LAST remaining 'identity group' which it is universally accepted are okay to hate, abuse, and maybe even murder, there's huge incentive to get an outgroup member classified as such.
And deeper than just your point:
A person who is eager to draw a distinction between "paedophilia" and "ephebophilia" will be accused of pedantic hair-splitting at best and nefarious motives at worst
Defending pedophiles AT BEST gets you marked as 'low status' and 'weird.' I don't think any person, in the history of EVER, has managed to increase their social standing by being the guy advocating for a nuanced view on child-diddling.
So anyone sensitive to social status just WON'T defend them, even if they do have nuanced beliefs on it.
Shrike
1d ago
Also, a situation where guards are bribed for a few bucks to have access to a prisoner is actually a pretty good way to carry out a hit on someone, since the guards are incentivized the cover it up rather than cop to "yeah I totally let my prisoner get murdered but in my defense I thought they were just going to have a conversation! I would have asked for a lot more than $500 if I had known it was a MURDER!" (I haven't viewed the film, so maybe this scenario is implausible for various reasons.)
I think there's a common misunderstanding of conspiracies that supposes that everyone involved in the conspiracy knows everything. Which I think is dumb. One of the big problems with petty corruption is precisely that it opens the door to things like murder and espionage, even if the corrupt officials would never intentionally get wrapped up in murder and espionage and merely thought they were turning a blind eye to smuggling or petty tax evasion.
Anyway, the very funniest possibility is that Epstein was murdered Hollywood style by a guy with a "certain set of skills" turned vigilante seeking justice under the belief that Epstein was going to be let off with a slap on the wrist again and now the "Deep State" is left holding the bag.
Grant_us_eyes
1d ago
I find it more interesting that this is a statement I've seen voiced by others in the past few years, that's only come up recently. That we have the Vice President of the United States voicing this aloud indicates... well, it certainly indicates something.
Part of the issue, I feel, with modern immigration is that people have bought into the myth and propaganda, and if you question this, you're, well, a bad person. 'Give us your tired, your huddled masses, your poor' is basically good advertisement, but it doesn't reflect the reality on the ground. 'Melting pot', too, was a statement by a visitor from Europe to describe New York City, and I can't help but feel trying to make all of America look like New York City makes my skin crawl.
As far as mythology goes, again, I feel that people have this mistaken assumption that people just came into the US during the heyday of 20th century immigration and merely stayed and settled. Not true. In truth, it was a two-way free-flow of people that came to the US to make their fortune and then left if they couldn't do so.
Many European migrants who moved to the United States in the early twentieth century eventually returned to their home country. The US government collected official statistics on both in- and out-migration from 1908 to 1923. In those years, the United States received 10 million immigrant arrivals and lost 3.5 million emigrants, a return migration rate of 35% (Gould 1980; Wyman 1993: 10–12; Hatton and Williamson 1998: 9). Return migration rates may have been even higher than the aggregate statistics suggest. Bandiera et al. (2013) found that in order to reconcile micro data on migrant inflows to the stock of migrants remaining in the United States during census years, the return migration rate may have been as high as 70%
More, was serious concern over said glut of immigration, to the point where moratoriums came down to stifle said flow of people because of concerns regarding the people that actually lived there.
More, as someone whom considers himself... well, I can't say 'amateur', I won't grace myself with such a title, so let's call me a 'dabbling fumbler of a historian' - someone who's looked into the past on this topic, the one thing I never see brought up in regards to early 20th century immigration is the one of distance and time. I go to local places that were settled as ethnic enclaves and I put myself back in the days of yore, both in terms of distance and logistics, and I come to a stark realization - people talk of this 'founding myth' of immigration for America as if it perfectly applies to the modern age, and, no, it doesn't - because these were groups of people who basically came to America, staked out a section of land days travel from others in the middle of nowhere, and lived their lives, alone and away from others and not causing any trouble.
We don't have that today. Travel from port city to said settlements take days back then of hard travel now take a few hours at worst. We have a free flow of people undreamt of in the past, over vast distances and in a fairly trivial fashion. What would take places in another section of your own county could be ignored with a fair amount of ease if you so wished - now we need to pay attention to what occurs in other states because the people over there could very easily come over here with all their issues and there isn't a damn thing you can do about it.
Talk of meritocracy and individualism applied to Immigration is a bad argument from the get go, I feel, because it's based on a host of assumptions that are not historical truth. America was never a melting pot, it was a crucible - one that people could leave and did so. And even if they stayed without being a success, they were not necessarily a failure, as they could simply live their lives without bothering anyone and not being bothered in turn.
That age of history is done and gone. We no longer have that luxury. The myths of yesteryear may speak of something that people want to be true, an ideal to aspire to, but the set of circumstances that allowed for that myth to flourish no longer exist, and it's time people acknowledge that. We can't look to the past for solutions, because the past people expect to find never existed, and the solutions that did exist people don't want to use.
TLDR: While I'm sure there are applicable arguments about Meritocracy and Individualism, I feel this is a bad one built upon bad assumptions and so I'm dismissing it entirely in favor of focusing on other aspects.
Unfortunately, I think this ship sailed decades ago. In the public imagination, "paedophile" scans as synonymous with "person who has sexually assaulted a person below the age of majority, without penetration" or "person who has committed statutory rape" or "person who has been accused of committing statutory rape" or "person who seems interested in committing statutory rape" or even in some cases "person who is significantly older than his or her romantic or sexual partner (even if said partner is of the age of majority)". (Hell, in at least one case it was seen as synonymous with "paediatrician" - this article is twenty-five years old.)
A person who is eager to draw a distinction between "paedophilia" and "ephebophilia" will be accused of pedantic hair-splitting at best and nefarious motives at worst (honestly, I don't even think the latter is unreasonable, unless the person drawing the distinction is a literal clinical psychologist or similar); likewise a person who is eager to draw a distinction between "paedophilia" (a disorder of sexual attraction which does not imply a particular pattern of behaviour) and "child molestation" (an actual behaviour).
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
1d ago
Now you're ripping off Jack Lewis Todd Thromberry.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1d ago
· Edited 14hr ago
Taking a step back, I think you are begging the question by smuggling in the premise that the principal test of someone's stances on individualism and meritocracy should be whether they are in favour of granting or withholding American citizenship on individualistic and meritocratic criteria. I think that most right-wingers, and many people more accurately described as "left-wing heretics", disagree with the idea that citizenship is or should be anything like an award, reward, occupation, office or responsibility, which are the things whose distribution based on merit are what is usually taken to define a meritocracy.
Imagine a strange world in which there is a real broad-based political movement holding that family membership should be treated like a public-sector job. Your sister, who is an adherent of this movement, says she got a strong application from India for the position of your father - the candidate is stronger and healthier than your current dad, has better educational credentials (a degree from an IIT in parenting, even!), and in fact a narrow majority of your present family members were polled and found to have much better alignment with his values. In that world, if you were deeply opposed to the idea of replacing your dad with the Indian candidate (or even just admitting him as a second dad), do you think you would have to hand in your individualist meritocrat card?
If yes, sure, you are at least consistent - get in touch so we can work on putting out some ads for any family positions our present system might let us legally fill with better-qualified individuals. There are however strong arguments for the "no" answer here: the uses and expectations of family membership are so far removed from any standard transactional notions of merit that it is nonsensical to award it based on them - you are expected to spend all your time around family members, sacrifice for them even to your own straight detriment if they need it (and expect that they would to do so for you, even if this hypothetical is one that will never come to pass in reality; your washing and clothing a paraplegic relative is not in expectation that they might actually repay it), and share illegible life experience that is only cross-applicable because you are actually genetically similar.
Many will hold that citizenship is the same! After all, you do have to spend time around your countrymen, benefit from illegible cross-applicability of life experiences (progressives would be the first to tell me that something as random as skin cream formulations might unexpectedly not work as well for people who are genetically far from those that they were optimised for!), and sometimes sacrifice for them in the purely hypothetical expectation that they would do the same for you (whether it is a small sacrifice for someone else's big benefit, like paying taxes that go into medical benefits, or a big sacrifice for everyone else's small benefit, like going to war and dying).
Of course, there is also a sort of third answer, that the family example was contrived because the notion of merit was not right. All these things - genetic similarity, giving other family members the lizard-brain reassurance that comes from looking and smelling like them, willingness to sacrifice for them - are what is asked of family members, so your slightly deadbeat dad is in fact the most meritorious candidate. Only, if you lift this answer back to citizenship, you get an answer that you may not be happy with either, which is that JD Vance was also being perfectly meritocratic there! It's just that the main qualifications for American citizens are "convince yourself and others that your ancestors fought in the Revolutionary War", "be genetically close to white Anglos" and "be someone the current residents of America would like as their neighbour".
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
1d ago
What did we do? Bombed the shit out of them yes, invaded yes… but what else? Did we engage in a war of annihilation to destroy all Afghans? No. No! We gave them a shitton of money to rebuild stuff, tried mostly to avoid civilian deaths, helped them set up a new government for themselves, tried all sorts of education and policy interventions, lots of stuff! Okay later we tortured some people but look at how we treated the general population.
Would you say that this strategy was successful?
LCEnzo
1d ago
Yeah. It does not have the fidelity and sheer foundational quality of assets that a game like Cyberpunk has, nor is the Ray tracing good, nor is it well optimized (hitching, frame caps, etc).
That does not detract much from the amazing art direction, and great design. The vibes are great.
There are no settlers in Gaza.
The Gaza Palestinians are not Israelis. Israel has never incorporated the territory they now occupy, though it has (and does) hold it under occupation. They tried, in 2005, leaving the territory entirely to the Palestinans. The result is that the Palestinians made war on them. Your stubborn refusal to acknowledge this does not make it not-so. If you care to make an analogy to Germany and its Jews, the analogs to the Jews are Israeli Arabs. Who, you may note, are not being expelled.
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