domain:cafeamericainmag.com
Dean
Flairless
4hr ago
The US has given similar amount in aid to Egypt. Both use the money to immediately buy American weapons. At least Israel operates in tight lockstep with the American military. What does the US get by sending money to Egypt ?
An end to semi-regular wars along the Suez Canal and degrading the arms-supplier influence nexus to Egypt from major American geopolitical rivals?
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
4hr ago
I mean, I’m picturing something like an extra 20 years of useful life, 10 years of not so functional life, and maybe an IQ gain of 5-10. I am not an expert but would doubt you could realistically get much more than this. Laying aside the race stuff and caustic negativism, I don’t imagine that would be too societally chaotic. I’d imagine lifespan differences wouldn’t become obvious until the 50s. So I could imagine some strife within families when your child is 50 and you are maybe 80 and it’s becoming obvious that your child will live longer and already has a higher QoL than you did at that age. Families already get a bit dysfunctional around wills and such at that age so that to me is the bigger concern or plausible source of tension. Like Boomer resentment multiplied, flipped, and personalized. Disease resistance as well (if it even works) is largely invisible on a personal level so I don’t think that figures too much.
More to my original point it could very well be that tons of the recipients get Alzheimer’s or some other hitherto unknown condition way earlier and stronger. Causing chaos, and something animal studies didn’t pick up. Our science is not optimized to detect that kind of stuff. And would we really be patient enough to wait for the original test tube generation to fully age before we implement it for others?
SSCReader
4hr ago
Absolutely. And that is a reasonable critique of the position. Especially if you pointed out significant parts of the poor health is behavioural! I'm not saying they are correct, I am saying its a reasonable non evil position to hold. With scarce resources some people are not going to be treated. But note that is also the basic decision we came to with age. Younger people had to wait to get vaccinated. So were we punishing young people for being too healthy? Or is it simply the pragmatic choice to try and equalize death rates between different age groups? We did deprive young people of care they would have got in an age blind society then presumably. Is that ok but race skewing isn't? Or are neither ok?
Like I said in the other thread its not just about race, its also age, and class and job role. Should you vaccinate a farmer or a barista? The farmer is likely to be more important to food security, but a barista is likely to be exposed to and expose many more people. Depending on your goals/priorities you can make a reasonable case for either.
Dean
Flairless
4hr ago
You have re-cited one of three distinct conditionals that would enable the Trump administration to lawfully act against its political opponents breaking the law, as a response to a post arguing that any of the three conditionals would meet the probable intent of seeking to lawfully act against political opponents breaking the law.
RobertLiguori
4hr ago
If they aren't, and it is ever possible that someone other than the Author-Empowered God Stand-In ever claims (or even challenges) that power, then there is not just no story, but no possibility of a story, because the superintelligence would just turn off the laws of physics that permit its enemies to have ever existed. A superintelligence would need to derive a benefit from the existence of a non-sterile galaxy commensurate with the risk of another superintelligence popping up in it and saying "Fuck you and the light-cone you rode in on."; even if it doesn't go full paperclip-maximizer, shouldn't a superintelligence be like "Hey, the fact that failure is a dramatic possibility means that we should pre-empt this?"
It's just unsatisfying to me, and more so to pretend that being able to change the INT_MAX global variable is anything other than either evidence of pure simulationism or about as sci-fi as the Force. It's a conceit I was able to go along with when I read one of the books, but what was trying to come across as mysterious just felt half-baked to me. Like, what if I invent blargle-snarfing, which is applying reason and inference to data available to me but not actually thought? How is 'thought' defined and gatekept?
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
4hr ago
I mean, sure, if you have no imagination. But choo choo, here we go to the Neighborhood of Make-Believe.
Scenario 1: As a cost cutting measure, the Obamacare gene editing doesn't target specific genes, and fixes the narrow pairings that are causing the problem. They just bulk replace, say, 5-10% of everyone's DNA. That's the only way it scales cost effectively. The government contract to make it so goes to a "Minority Owned Business" as many do, and wouldn't you know it, some H1B colony just uses Indian DNA samples to make their gene editing templates. Next thing you know, everyone's kids are coming out just a little bit Indian.
Also it doesn't actually solve any of the diseases it was supposed to.
Scenario 2: The average African American IQ in America is something like 85? But that's the average. Imagine you uplift the IQ of the child of some congenital felon with an IQ of 75. Can you first imagine the very special hell that child now grows up in? I've seen a few his/hers/ours scenarios where a child of a previous spouse is leaps and bounds smarter than the new wife (and the "ours" kids), and the abuse heaped onto them by the less intelligent new spouse is wild. Below average IQ parents can be fucking savage to the high IQ children that end up in their care. Now imagine that at scale.
Scenario 3: Congenital felons again. There is a strong correlation between high IQ and low criminality, but it's not perfect. Imagine we uplift their IQ, but not their criminal dispositions? If you thought "We Wuz Kangs" is bad, wait till you've seen "We Wuz KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN"
why are our politicians handing synagogues hundreds of millions
I'm ignorant here. Can you shed light on this ? What were the numbers like pre-Trump ?
Why did Trump specifically go after students who criticized Israel on social media, rather than students who criticize America or the West broadly?
That was the meat of my earlier post. Because Trump can frame criticism of Israel as hate speech in courts. Criticism of America & the West is free game.
Why do we, in effect, subsidize the entirety of Israeli society, from their subsidized colleges and subsidized healthcare to their subsidized religious institutions?
The US has given similar amount in aid to Egypt. Both use the money to immediately buy American weapons. At least Israel operates in tight lockstep with the American military. What does the US get by sending money to Egypt ?
Military funding is very difficult to decode. There's a reason the Pentagon fails every audit. I won't be attempting to itemize it, and neither should you.
no other than Ghislaine Maxwell’s father Robert Maxwell
Woah. I didn't know that the Maxwells has such deep ties to the CIA. Strong signal that Epstein was on CIA's payroll.
The average IQ with Down’s is closer to 50. If IQ was perfectly genetic, nothing about nurture or epigenetics involved, the average Haitian would be almost twice as far from that as from the population average. The difference is more stark if the foster parents have more effect.
I would also say it’s fundamentally different to try for a child (who ends up with Down’s) than it is to knowingly adopt a child from a disadvantaged background.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
4hr ago
(a) Let it go and disengage. (b) Provide links to specific citations and proactively provide an explanation of their relevance. (c) Consider the possibility that they are not "ignoring facts" but that you are both interpreting the same evidence in a way that caters to your own biases and that you need to actually make an argument.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
4hr ago
I think part of the appeal of Star Wars is that since the vibes are compelling, and there are seeds of interesting ideas, it’s a fertile bed for fan fiction and headcanon. Have you noticed that Harry Potter also had great vibes, interesting mini-ideas, and also has some of the most prolific fan fiction? No accident, I say. Rigor and internal consistency don’t allow projection as easily.
Avatar’s vibes to me are more visual and spectacle (maybe a bit of the anarcho-primitivism) and the plot is incoherent to the point where I think there are only like, two interesting ideas and they have been done better elsewhere. Plenty of fiction already about VR/projected consciousness (the Matrix, Altered Carbon, endless VRMMO fictions), encounters with aliens (up to half of all sci-fi), a sort of living world (Speaker for the Dead, Gaia theories), even treating them like past human undesirables (District 9), or exploiting them (Mass Effect?).
We also simply don’t see enough of the actual world to get a sense of what humanity is like nor the Na’vi more broadly. The second movie only partly fixes this problem but mostly not. Star Ward to continue the analogy not only gives us visual spectacle but we also see humans and aliens in a variety of worlds and socioeconomic settings from which you can make interesting extrapolations.
yunyun333
4hr ago
Israel fought the Suez Crisis on US & UK's behalf.
UK and France. The US told them quite firmly to stop, which they did. The US was not particularly pro Israel until Lyndon Johnson, who let himself get bossed around by his very pro-Israel foreign policy guys.
Israel didn't directly instigate Iraq 2 of course, but many of the higher ups in the executive branch who were pushing for an invasion of Iraq were ardent Zionists (see the Office of Special Plans, which also involved an espionage scandal involving an analyst passing information to Israel through AIPAC).
erwgv3g34
4hr ago
Except that (generic) you are not keeping your hens in a henhouse; you are sending them out into the forest without a care in the world, then getting upset because most of them end up eaten by foxes. You are trying to make the forest safe for the hens by executing the foxes one at a time, and that is simply not going to work.
First, you have to keep your hens in a henhouse. And in order to do that, you need a priest who tells you that it is good and proper for a man to lock up his hens, a sheriff who recognizes your legal right to do so as the rightful owner of the hens, and friends and family who will look at you like you are an absolute idiot if send your hens out into the forest. Only then will there be any point to killing the occasional fox that happens to get in.
Needless to say, our priests, our cops, and our communities do the exact opposite.
Agreed on college. Academia delenda est. Man will not be free until the last professor is strangled with the entrails of the last journalist.
rmtodd
4hr ago
Not that prescient, as the net in AFUTD was heavily inspired by the early 1990s Usenet computer network, and the phenomenon you describe existed just as much on Usenet back then as on Internet fora today.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
4hr ago
One is enough, but two is better to show the first one wasn't a fluke. And some of the later Dune books aren't anything special.
Discrimination against whites is a hard sell when the executives & the board are white[*]. Moreover, 'Trump voting white' isn't a protected category.
The China analogy doesn't work because China is naturally positioned as a competing power while Israel is strategically, culturally and spiritually positioned to be collaborative power.
Broadly, Jews are found in 2 places: US and Israel. When America flourishes, Jews flourish. That's to Israel's benefit. Strategically, Israel's enemies are Islamist. So, they want to ally with an anti-Islamist power : USA. Israel is a liberal & open democracy. It wants to ally with a liberal and open democracy : USA.
Israel wrecks the relationship with middle eastern countries
America wrecked its relationship with the middle east all by itself. Israel fought the Suez Crisis on US & UK's behalf. Saddam Hussein's overthrow was classic American overreach. Intervention in Afghanistan was first a cold war exercise, and later a response to 9/11. Syrian efforts were a proxy war against Russia. Iran-US relationships soured because the Shah was overthrown and Americans were taken hostage. Jordan and Israel actually have pretty decent relations. The Saudi, UAE and Israel relations have been on a consistent up and up. Qatar always plays all sides, Israel or no Israel.
So, can you name a country who's US-country relationships got wrecked by Israel ?
they were all about owning the libs by taking out DEI efforts specifically hurting Chinese people.
The analogy doesn't work because American Jews are 'the libs'. The majority of American Jews live in NY and California. American Jews (pre Oct 23) overwhelmingly voted for deep-blue candidates in deep-blue cities. They subscribed to generally 'blue' opinions such as : 'Netanyahu bad', '2 state solution good' and 'Trump bad'.
There is healthy skepticism towards Israel from within the Jewish community itself. America's temporary sycophancy towards Israel has more to do with recently empowered fundamentalist Christians signalling to their voter-base during Trump2, than a deeply rooted allegiance to Israel.
[*] The discussion of how specific whites are being discriminated against is longer conversation about the sub-racial dynamics among whites people. I think white groups (rich and poor) both benefit from not opening this pandoras box.
That's one way of putting it, but another way of putting it is that such a distribution is effectively punishing white people for being too healthy.
Essentially, "you're not dying enough, so you can't have a vaccine". The underlying problem that the machete version of the cartoon is trying to point out is that attempting to compensate for different base health by race is in practice going to mean depriving people from healthier groups of care that they would receive in a colour-blind society, until and unless they start dying at an equitable rate.
this man exploits the woman's unawareness of her potential value on the sexual marketplace
But the opposite, right? She is aware of her sexual value. So she doesn't squander it on a 19 year old. He has no money.
Our hypothetical woman is with a financially secure older man with disposable income. Not a penniless 40 year old and not a penniless 19 year old. Call her a gold digger if she seeks marriage. Or chuckle at those charts of Leonardo DiCaprio's age vs his girlfriends' age. But this hypothetical woman has determined her sexual value and found a buyer.
If we are going analogize finding romantic partners to buying and selling, then these women are like me when I sold my last house. I didn't sell it to a penniless college student. I sold it to an older man after he showed me his bank account. He had a million dollars in a checking account. I didn't fail to realize my house's value. I found a buyer and we agreed on a mutually beneficial arrangement.
Not that I endorse comparing dating and marriage to selling yourself, but if we're making the analogy then let's follow it through.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4hr ago
It’s adapting a quote from Goebbels. Using a nominally-accurate term as an insult is the point.
In Turok’s model, mottizens neoreactionaries are strivers in denial. They want to be comfortable, educated, well-connected arbiters of taste, but admitting such would give the outgroup too much credit. So they try to construct a rival hierarchy which puts their class markers at the top.
If this is true, then the most vicious thing Turok can do is point it out, revealing the neoreactionary’s class interest. That’s why Turok assumes that he’ll get banned. “They hated Him because He told the truth.”
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
4hr ago
If our relationship with Israel is characterized by Israel doing America’s dirty work, then: (1) why are our politicians handing synagogues hundreds of millions in free funds, yearly, as SS notes? What does this have to do with our geopolitical interest? This is more readily explained by a group of people having sophisticated lobbying capabilities. (2) Why did Trump specifically go after students who criticized Israel on social media, rather than students who criticize America or the West broadly? (3) Why do we, in effect, subsidize the entirety of Israeli society, from their subsidized colleges and subsidized healthcare to their subsidized religious institutions? We are Israel’s security in the region for free; they gave nothing, not money or troops, for our wars in the region, and they will not be repaying the $1,000,000,000 we spent on their defense vs Iran. If Israel were the client state of our Empire, you would expect them to pay Caesar’s tax, right? Instead, we hand them our resources for no obvious gain. It should be the other way around. As Mearsheimer spoke to Tucker Carlson the other day,
And the lobby is so effective, it is so powerful, that we basically end up supporting Israel unconditionally. What that means, Tucker, is in those cases where Israel’s interests are not the same as America’s interests, we support Israel. We support Israel’s interests, not America’s interests.
[…] anytime the Egyptians or the Jordanians get uppity about Israel, the United States reminds them, “You better behave yourself because we have huge economic leverage over you. You have to be friendly to Israel.” So Jordan and Egypt never cause the Israelis any problem […] as I said to you before, we have a special relationship with Israel that has no parallel in recorded history. Just very important to understand it. There is no single case in recorded history that comes even close to looking like the relationship that we have with Israel. Because again, as I said, states sometimes have similar interests, and this includes the United States and Israel, but they also have conflicting interests. And when a great power like the United States has conflicting interests with another country, it almost always, except in the case of Israel, acts in terms of its own interests, America first. But when it comes to Israel, it’s Israel first. And if you go to the Middle East and look at our policy there, there’s just abundant evidence to support that.
I believe there’s one simple answer [as to why this is the case]. The Israel lobby. I think the lobby is an incredibly powerful interest group, and I’m choosing my words carefully. It has awesome power, and it basically is in a position where it can profoundly influence US foreign policy in the Middle East. And indeed, it affects foreign policy outside of the Middle East. But when it comes to the Middle East, and again, the Palestinian issue in particular, it has awesome power. And there’s no president who is willing to buck the lobby.
If Israel were our forward operating base, then it would be easy to support them: Israelis would be working day and night to secure a better future for Americans. Their tax dollars would go to our institutions and their blood would be spilled in Syria / Iraq / Afghanistan for us. Alas, this does not appear to be the case.
A couple asides on Pegasus: its ancestor PROMIS was indeed developed by the CIA and sold to Israel, and then from Israel it was disseminated to other countries. The person doing this dissemination was no other than Ghislaine Maxwell’s father Robert Maxwell. But Israel, rather than acting purely as a FOB to America, has its own interests in mind:
"L'Oeil De Washington" contends that a bugged version of PROMIS was sold in the mid-1980s for Soviet government use, with the media mogul Robert Maxwell as a conduit. According to the book, Israel's knowledge of this operation became a bargaining chip in trying to curb U.S. arms shipments to Iraq before the Gulf War; the Israelis threatened to tell the Russians their computers were open to American surveillance. Apparently, the U.S. called Israel's bluff and lost. One of the book's major sources, the Israeli arms merchant Ari Ben-Menashe, told the authors that in 1989 the Soviet spy agency, the GRU, shut down all of its computers for a week after learning that they were bugged by PROMIS.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
4hr ago
Not a mod but I consider his posts to be pretty forthrightly criticisms of people/caricatures of movements rather than descriptions of movements and subsequent criticism. That is, he completely ignores the “discuss the CW don’t wage it” rule which admittedly is a tough one to police and maybe even flawed as a concept but Turok (to me) didn’t seem to even bother to attempt to follow it.
magicalkittycat
4hr ago
Saying this is about Israel is as misleading as saying it is about DEI, or immigration in isolation. It about no one of these things- it's about the collection of progressive/democratic coalition shibboleths, any of which is sufficient for the goal.
The text literally said
Discriminatory prohibited boycott means refusing to deal, cutting commercial relations, or otherwise limiting commercial relations specifically with Israeli companies or with companies doing business in or with Israel or authorized by, licensed by, or organized under the laws of Israel to do business.
They defined "discriminatory prohibited boycott" solely with Israel and nothing else. They've since removed it, however their tweet still specifically says they're gonna deny federal funds to BDS (i.e boycotting Israel) so it's not even different.
magicalkittycat
4hr ago
Well they're denying it's specifically Israel now. https://x.com/DHSgov/status/1952482455954341930
Nevermind that people could see the original document where it literally said Israel, and that this tweet even reinforces that they plan to deny federal emergency aid over boycotting them ("including as it relates to the BDS movement"
I wonder how they feel about putting tariffs on Israeli goods then? It's the government making the Israeli products more expensive through taxes for the express purpose of reducing sales, seems like that isn't far from antisemitism if boycotting is.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
4hr ago
I mean if we’re talking gene editing in America, there is theoretically a delivery mechanism that could deliver uplift to about 80% or more of the public. You’d just have to pass an Obamacare style law to require health care insurers to cover some degree of the process.
Now at the same time there’s probably a good argument to be made that America (assuming it were invented here! It might be China) might functionally withhold the tech from other countries under IP law stuff. But if China invented it and perfected it then the US might find itself in the weird position of pulling a China and blatantly ignoring IP, stealing it themselves and refusing to impose punishment. And I’d assume other countries stealing it too would also occur.
I view the problem of trust about gene editing to be noticeably distinct from other public health trust issues, if for no other reason than you’d potentially have to wait 100 years to get a good sense for the true consequences of the tech (in the more extreme versions of the tech) since you can’t accelerate human development very much. Literally none of our systems or science are set up to track and process that kind of data. Ironically for you perhaps global climate change is the only similar example.
crushedoranges
Can Marx explain the used panties market?
4hr ago
No, he wasn't. The only intelligence that I'd give him credit for was skirting the lines of a permaban for so long, and even that was finally quelled. Like many lolcows, he just couldn't resist having the last word and doubling down on absolute nonsense.
At this point, I'd respect more a 4chan shitposter giving me a scrolling page of n-words: at least, in this example, he isn't wasting my time.
Never thought before about how culturally informative it might be to ask what kind of beans go with rice or that you have for dinner.
Mmm, a little margarine on the crackers when you can? Delicious.
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