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ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
2d ago
Relevant passage from The Great Divorce, spoken by Lewis's spiritual guide:
“There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, "Thy will be done," and those to whom God says, in the end, "Thy will be done." All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. Those who knock it is opened.”
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
2d ago
I think it's a great source to quickly get up to speed on any given hobby or subculture's memes.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
2d ago
There are two types of people you will never convince:
- Those who believe they have a vested interest in this not being seen as a conspiracy
- Hardcore "nothing ever happens" people
I really think that, if Epstein were not apparently connected to intelligence, powerful people in government, and were not Jewish, nearly zero people would argue that he killed himself. There are simply too many "coincidences." But there are people who like the political status quo (or at least despise the upstarts trying to disrupt the status quo), and there are other people who perceive the emphasis on Epstein's Jewishness/Mossad connections as dangerous to themselves (I have sympathy for this second group).
I don't know what to make of the "nothing ever happens" people. I have a friend like this, and I gave up talking to them about anything a long time ago. Any time I bring up some current event, I get some variation of
- "Eh, it'll blow over and everyone will forget in a month."
- "Actually it's always been like that."
- "I don't think that will actually change much."
- "I dunno, that sounds too far-fetched to be true."
- "I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing. I can see both sides."
It's closely related to the "enlightened centrism" meme. These sorts of folks are not "arguing to understand."
Now the one camera that was working has footage released from it only for it to be likely edited video that doesn't even provide a meaningful perspective even if it wasn't edited (so why is it changed and had parts removed? Was something incidentally caught on one of the cameras they didn't shut down?) and a full minute missing along with the other smaller possible cuts, a cut that was completely unmentioned in the inspector general's report but suddenly shows up now. With an excuse that the "missing minute" is a standard reset and the recordings aren't operating at that time yet it now appears to exist according to government leakers.
I don't have a dog in this fight but this doesn't unsettle me at all.
So. I had a job once that required keeping clocks in sync between all of the computers in a company. For servers we decided clocks could drift only one millisecond, but for desktops we allowed up to 100ms. This required modifications to Windows because Microsoft only imposed one minute clock discipline at the time (only improving on this policy after 2016, which is probably not early enough for whatever piece of shit the jail installed). That means Microsoft allowed Windows computers to be up to one minute off of the real time, which in practice meant any two computers could be almost two minutes apart in their timestamping (e,g, one was a minute slow and one was a minute fast).
You may think computers should be able to keep time without trouble, but nothing can be further from the truth. They suck at it, due to interesting physical properties[1]. They can be slow or fast, and it can vary over the course of the day. Sometimes the drift adds up to tens of minutes a day. Without any correction they drift and drift and could be days or weeks off from the actual current time. It's ugly. The way they correct for this is by coming up with a clever protocol that pings well known atomic clocks over the internet. Though modern solutions can also recruit GPS.[2]
Anyway, watching the time jump forward by a minute on a recording system doesn't strike me as that odd. Especially when it's around midnight, which is when people schedule automated tasks, like "stop writing to 2019-08-09.mov and start writing 2019-08-10.mov", to me this is not at all suspicious.
I don't know for a fact that this is what happened, of course. And I certainly don't know how jailhouse surveillance systems work. But I have had to explain in legal matters why recordings in networked computer systems can have such variation in timestamps. People crinkle their eyebrows when one networked system says this thing precedes this other thing, even though the event with the later timestamp caused the event with the earlier timestamp, use but it's generally the sad truth.
Anyway, I'm open to believing he was murdered. But you're going to have to wake me up when the missing minute is revealed and it shows masked people holding stun guns hopping over the railing. A one-ish minute forward jump in a recording at midnight just doesn't phase this systems engineer at all.
(I'm not going to evaluate the claim that the missing minute exists because anonymous sources may as well be epistemic status: complete fabrication at this point. But also I'd rather not try to imagine how incredibly stupid a jailhouse surveillance system could be)
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Basically, computers are made of metal and metal expands and contracts as it heats and cools. Since temperatures around computers and inside of them vary all of the time (especially based on workload) this causes its own internal timekeeping to drift from real time as the distance electricity has to travel varies based on temperature. This varies the number of cycles that happen per second.
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It's also not as easy as just check the atomic clock time and set your computer's time to that one. If you find your computer's time is too fast (minutes ahead of real time), you can't fix it by just slamming the clock backwards in time. That fucks a lot of applications up. So they come up with this thing called "slewing", which basically is an adjustment to the computer to count perceived ticks of a clock as less than whole ticks so it catches up. Some time keeping policies will also slew speedup adjustments if the clock is behind, but it's less destructive to application logic to make the clock jump forward, so you see that from time to time in logs as well. E.g. a one minute jump forward is safe, though it makes people crinkle eyebrows if it's in a timestamped video.
anti_dan
2d ago
What does this look like? I don't know. But directionally, perhaps it's something like the British Raj. A civilizing mission is basically the only way to turn things around.
Who would do such a thing? Would it even be effective? India, after all, is still a neigh-ungovernable amalgamation of warring peoples. The US just got done trying something like that in Afghanistan and Iraq, to miserable failure. In my opinion your hypothetical Raj would have to be significantly MORE brutal on the population than the current military operations conducted by Israel are to have any hope at success.
the_Culture_is_great
2d ago
My intuition is that the optimal incarnation rate is probably somewhere between Canada and the US. That seems likely even if you know nothing about the specifics given that Canada is on the low side and the US is on the high side.
It can be true that Canada should increase its rate, and the US should decrease.
anti_dan
2d ago
Starving babies is incidental to the overall strategy. There is no way to starve Hamas without starving babies (that we have found) because Hamas rules the territory, thus Hamas always eats first, and second, and third, then maybe a few babies get some morsels.
With something this complicated it is incumbent on critics to offer at least the skeleton of an alternative proposal so that it can be critiqued. Just saying something is bad is woefully inadequate. Do you think Israel hasn't had a meeting where someone brought up the point that starving children is not good optics (at the very least, if not also brought up the morality of it)? Of course not. They've had hundreds of such meetings. Notably the people who were giving aid to Gaza before didn't really even try to ask the question of "how do we get food to civilians without paying and feeding Hamas?" They just were like "here Hamas here is a buffet and some rocket assembly materials."
You’re interpreting his statements somewhat uncharitably. Remember that he’s explaining these things in a long video, verbally and narratively, so the words have to be understood in the context.
Elsewhere he specifies in what sense he means indiscriminate killing:
“On May 28, at secure distribution site #2, this young boy, Amir, walks over to me, reaches out & kisses my hand…”
“This boy is not wearing shoes. His clothes are falling off of him because he is so skinny… He doesn’t have a box — he has half a bag of rice, lentils, and he was thanking us.”
“He walked 12 kilometers to get there … and when he got there, he thanked us for the crumbs he got … and he set them on the ground with his frail, skeletal, emaciated hands, and he kissed me and said ‘thank you.’”
“And then he collected his items, walked back to the group, and then he was shot at — with pepper spray, and tear gas, and stun grenades, and bullets…”
“They are shooting into this crowd. Palestinians, civilians, human beings — are dropping to the ground. And Amir was one of them.”
“Amir walked 12 kilometers to get food, got nothing but scraps, thanked us for it… and died.”
We can surmise that this is what he means by war crimes, that using a rifle with live bullets to deal with civilian crowd control is a war crime. This is a war crime under The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, Article 8 (Article 8(2)(b)(i) and 8(2)(e)(i)). In the DemocracyNow video he previously said that razor wire is a war crime —
Geneva Conventions specifically prohibit the use of razor wire to restrict areas that civilians are servicing — hospitals, water points, food distribution points. And we’re using it. Not only did the IDF provide it for us to use it on the sites, we, UG Solutions, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, asked for it specifically. Razor wire is designed to maim and kill, and we’re using that to channelize and herd, if you will, thousands of unarmed, starving civilians. That’s a war crime.
———
He explicitly says the rifles are OK
He says that the “fully automatic weapons” were not in itself a war crime. Probably because it can be used with some less-than-lethal munition. Then, when he mentions the ammunition which “in and of itself” is a war crime, he clarifies —
Why would anyone need that, even if to defend themselves for their — defend their lives against an unarmed population? It’s inappropriate. That, in and of itself, that action there, is a war crime.
It’s reasonable to assume that the “action” he’s talking about is starving children getting a little too close or not disseminating as quickly as the group wants, and then being shot with live ammo.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
2d ago
Every system has losers, and the winners have to be able to do something about them. Meritocracy has an advantage in this in that the losers, by definition, suck.
ThisIsSin
Liberty has an anti-privilege bias
2d ago
From the looks of Wilson Combat's products (in particular) it looks like they're banking on people buying their product to change something about the grip angle of the gun (there are a couple of them that mimic the 1911/DWX) or to have a convenient way to make it heavier.
(Why you'd want to make a plastic gun heavier like that instead of just buying something like a Q5SF Match is another question entirely, but it's not like it costs WC anything to market it as "you could do it".)
The problem with meritocracy is that it has Implications.
The best fit for the best able, sure. But what if you aren't? There's also no clue about what's best. If you apply evolutionary logic to society, then who knows what will end up surviving and what won't? As someone else noted, it's easy to talk about meritocracy when you win, and it's very attractive. But what if you lose?
I would think that most meritocratic societies need to have some method of dealing with the people who lose. "You're a loser in a meritocratic system and you lost because other people are better than you in this system" is not a popular message. q.e.d. the woke: why not burn the system down instead?
birb_cromble
2d ago
The plastic grips and triggers[2] for the P250 may be dirt-cheap to make on a per-unit basis, but the moulds for that plastic are incredibly expensive
How do smaller companies like Wilson combat make aftermarket grips at a profit? Are they using a different manufacturing technology, charging more, or riding on the original SIG R&D?
ThisIsSin
Liberty has an anti-privilege bias
2d ago
or holding a gun to the stomachs of your own pregnant women to threaten your enemy into compliance
Ironically, the set of people that's less likely to work on are also the set more likely to believe pulling the trigger in that case would be ending two lives.
the_Culture_is_great
2d ago
I don't think you need to be a negative utilitarian, a lot depends on exactly how bad the person is vs how bad you think prison is. And as I mentioned elsewhere, prison is very very bad.
Wireheading city could be better than prison, but fraught with potential issues. Pure pointless hedonic pleasure isn't the same as utility. But honestly, less extreme versions of this are not particularly objectionable, and could even be compared to progressive harm reduction approaches (way way different in degree though).
the_Culture_is_great
2d ago
modest increase in the prison population could fix these problems
It didn't work before, but it might work now!
Repeating that logic is how the US got into this situation.
I'm not saying don't lock the serial offenders up! But there needs to be better planning on how to target and convict them specifically. There's a high risk of collateral damage to people who are essentially harmless.
the_Culture_is_great
2d ago
The US is both over and under-policed, depending on the exact time and location you look
Exactly what I mean when I say it's more complicated.
I do think that long rail of terrible offenders should be locked up, but identifying and punishing them is a more complicated problem than just "be meaner".
The State Department is just Trump appointees, who are ardent defenders of Israel. So, while someone downstream from a Trump appointee disputed the findings based on a “video”, they
provided no such videos. The spokesperson also accused traditional humanitarian groups of covering up "aid corruption." A White House spokesperson, Anna Kelly, questioned the existence of the analysis, saying no State Department official had seen it and that it "was likely produced by a deep state operative" seeking to discredit President Donald Trump's "humanitarian agenda."
as the article continued. So it doesn’t appear that there is really a video of Hamas looting. I think this can be ignored. Do we expect Trump appointees to tell the truth here? Where is the video showing Hamas looting? One is a study, the other is Rubio. But if the State Dep comes out with evidence then it should be considered.
Your link about Hamas taking aid actually proves the opposite, at least in 2024. Because —
the shortages had also prompted questions of Hamas for its seeming inability to stop the gangs
which means that Hamas did not take or monopolize aid at the time of the article’s writing; armed gangs (probably funded by Israel as I cite in another comment ITT) took the aid. If Hamas had control of aid, a rival gang could not be in control of the aid.
The new anti-looting force, formed of well-equipped fighters from Hamas and allied groups, has been named "The Popular and Revolutionary Committees" and is ready to open fire on hijackers who do not surrender, one of the sources, a Hamas government official, said.
This would only be required if Hamas was not in the business of appropriating or overseeing aid retrieval within the period preceding the article being written. If Hamas was getting the aid, how could a rival group ever hijack so much aid that the citizens of Gaza question Hamas’ ability to fight crime?
birb_cromble
2d ago
I address that in the original post. He shoves a screw into the trigger assembly. I don't consider that no reason, but I could entertain the notion that it is indicative of a deficient design.
I read someone here talk about deepening capital the other week and it created this mantra in my head: regard females, deepen capital.
The regard females part isn't very actionable since I think I've maxed that out, but the deepen capital part is.
So I've been on this rampage of cleaning my property and fixing stuff and thinking of renovations to do. Maybe even considering getting a mortgage to buy another house and seeing if I can exploit some tax advantages and maybe landlord maxx my current place.
It's borderline obsessing. Just gonna try scaling back to cleaning and doing maintenance until this little bout of entrepreneurial(?) zeal passes.
I'm rather astonished how many incentives the government gives you. Subsidized mortgages, deductible interest, depreciation of rental properties even if they're actually appreciating in the market, no capital gains taxes on flipping your primary. What in the world. Kind of silly not to be in this game with at least one property.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
2d ago
P-Necromancer
2d ago
Ah, I don't necessarily disagree on any of this. To tell the truth I haven't followed these events closely at all -- my point was very narrow: 'I'm confident these claims are false, which makes it a lot harder to believe your other claims.' Not even saying the pro-Israel side doesn't do the same thing (though I can't immediately recall anything quite so blatant).
Probably best I not make a fool of myself commenting on Israel's internal politics, but sure, I'm not clear on what Israel expects their current actions to accomplish. I certainly don't like some possible answers. Your theory doesn't sound implausible to me.
If that is what's happening, it's a curious mirror of what's going on on the other side: Hamas depends on Israel's misbehavior to gain recruits and garner international sympathy while Netanyahu depends on Hamas's ability to recruit and garner international sympathy to push his voting public right. Not sure if that's actually an insight or just pedestrian inter/intra-group dynamics. (Pretty sure that was one of the reasons for eternal warfare in 1984, so it probably counts as a hackneyed truism by now.)
Yet, the loudest detractors steer the conversation towards the existence of the state of Israel instead of Netanyahu as the leader who oversaw this response. To me, that's the difference between credible detractors (Tech elite, European centrists, American Jews) and antisemites. (Progressive left, Muslim leaders). Antisemites are tempted by maximalist claims and their hate makes up for the lack of due diligence. "All Israelis are evil, always have been. All Gazans are being killed. All kids are being shot in the dick. No one is getting food." No nuance. Only hate.
Yeah, this makes sense. I object to a certain strain of common, virulent opposition with a loose relationship with truth -- certainly doesn't mean Israel's actions are unobjectionable.
I understand that no military ever actually wants transparency into any of their operations, but it doesn't seem like it can do all that much harm to the IDF at this stage; the more national and international pressure mounts to provide that transparency, the more suspicious the failure to do so will be.
oats_son
2d ago
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
The world made a rule that ethnic cleansing was never justified under any circumstances.
A much more basic way to frame this moral precept would be:
All people who live within your borders are, and of right ought to be, citizens of your state, and the government of your state has equal responsibilities to them as to any other citizen. You can exclude people from entering your country, you can expel parts of your country (Malaysia/Singapore, India/Pakistan), but you can't treat certain people living in your country as non-citizens.
Israel has tried to find its way around this by creating two Palestinian bantustans and keeping them split, the non-viable non-contiguous territories providing a shred of cover that those living there will never have to be integrated into Israel's population, despite Israel's permanent control of the external policy of each enclave.
My point being that Israel has another path: re-educating and reconciling with the Palestinian civilian population such that they no longer support Hamas (or whoever).
Hamas doesn't get to do its permanent-war bit on its own. It requires mass support among Arabs, undermine that and there's no more Hamas.
But why would they do that? If I were a Palestinian, I'd want revenge--terrible, horrible, unconscionable revenge forever, and I'd still go to heaven.
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