domain:rifters.com
hydroacetylene
10hr ago
Roe wasn’t a 14th amendment ruling, it was a right to privacy under the ‘penumbra’ of the constitution. Famously Ruth Bader Ginsburg thought it was badly written and not grounded in anything.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
10hr ago
Looks like Iran fired two missiles, Israel dropped two bombs in response. Given that the missiles were intercepted I would think Israel could afford to ignore the violation, but probably they figured that would make them look weak.
aardvark2
10hr ago
You should mod him, not me, the quoted line is inflammating claim without evidence, which is against the rules.
Trump, on Truth Social, after reports of Israel continuing to bomb Tehran:
ISRAEL. DO NOT DROP THOSE BOMBS. IF YOU DO IT IS A MAJOR VIOLATION. BRING YOUR PILOTS HOME, NOW! DONALD J. TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES
This tone towards Israel is, to me at least, unexpected given the terms of the ceasefire. I expected Israel to have carte blanche to 'finish the job'.
Maybe a reductive take but I genuinely believe the next move depends on what Trump is currently watching on television. If Fox News presenters start covering for Israeli actions, or harping on about Iran 'breaking the ceasefire first', Trump may be convinced. It really is a shame that Tucker isn't on a major network anymore - if it's not on TV, Trump doesn't care.
HereAndGone
11hr ago
Because while it doesn't excuse everything, it does explain behaviour. I was angry about it because I thought he was just being an asshole, just pushing to get away with things because he thought he was that special and entitled. Finding out that his brain was busted helped explain "okay, sometimes he genuinely couldn't help it/didn't realise what he was doing".
Genuine mental illness, like physical illness, does have an effect on you that no amount of willpower or grit or 'just decide to do better' will shift. Of course some people will use that as an excuse. But if you have a problem, and don't realise it's a problem, and don't get treatment for it because you're not aware of treatment, then it gets as much latitude as "I never knew I was diabetic and that's why I was always fainting and lacking energy because I wasn't eating correctly" would get someone.
If it's okay to take insulin to treat the problem, it's okay to take antidepressants. It's not about 'the real you', it's about 'this is you when you are healthy and this is you when you are not'.
OliveTapenade
11hr ago
(To boil down my disagreements with those premises, I think Jews are pretty assimilable if you make an effort, I think any form of HBD on Jews is much, much more suspect than HBD on Africans/Austronesians/Everyone Else due to shorter timescales, and given that of the Jews and part-Jews I've notably interacted with (and I am part-Jew myself, though it's a small part) most of them seemed fine (and the one major exception was probably just a case of misplaced righteousness meeting overconfidence in a risky plan) I'm not really feeling the whole "Jews are evil" thing.)
The latter matches my experiences as well. I don't think I knew any Jews growing up, but I ran into a couple at university, and eventually got to know more as an adult, including spending some time at a synagogue and engaging in adult Torah study with them, and the main thing I took away from that experience was, to put it bluntly, how boring and unremarkable they are. Synagogue really is very similar to church, and a very similar culture prevailed - though there were some different holy symbols, a bit more Hebrew instead of the occasional Greek or Latin, obviously no New Testament or Church Fathers or the like but the Talmud and rabbinic writings instead, but the animating spirit felt basically the same.
The mundanity of both Jewish religious ritual and just Jews in general was probably a very powerful inoculation for me against conspiracism. Part of that meant, in contrast to the way certain groups get very bothered about Jewish IQ, noticing that in practice, in everyday life, Jews certainly did not appear noticeably more intelligent than Gentiles. Torah study was interesting but not more insightful than Bible study. There were plenty of Jewish idiots and Jewish midwits, as well as their share of bright people, and I wouldn't say they compared particularly favourably or unfavourably to people in comparable groups in churches, mosques, or temples.
Jews are just - and no offense intended to any Jewish mottizens - not very interesting. Probably the best thing that came out of that engagement was that I made friends with a couple of Jews who are really into theology and we sometimes meet up for chats, but, again, they're not noticeably smarter or for that matter more sinister than the Catholics or Muslims or Buddhists with whom I do the same thing. It's all just quite normal. I understand why I do this, because I'm fascinated by religions of all types, but for people who aren't like me? These people just aren't that special.
Thanks! Xi'an features in two or three of my itineraries - I've heard good things about it from most everyone, so I'll try to prioritise the plans which pass through the city.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
11hr ago
On the morning of November 11, 1918, World War I was effectively over. The armistice had been signed hours earlier, and at exactly 11:00 a.m., the guns were set to fall silent. The battlefield was already filled with soldiers – on both sides – who were simply waiting out the last few moments of a war that had consumed the world.
And yet, just one minute before peace, a single shot rang out. Henry Gunther, an American soldier, was dead. He became the last official casualty of the war, but his death wasn’t an act of heroism – it was something much more tragic.
A nitpick, but after having done some really deep digging I would actually say China has the richest historical sites of all of Asia, even if much of it is terribly marketed to international tourists (the Cultural Revolution was bad, but there's so much history in China that it's impossible to Thanos-snap most of it away in a relatively short period, and other countries in Asia have also had somewhat analogous periods of cultural destruction like the Meiji Restoration).
I'll definitely agree that most of the really big Tier-1s like Shanghai, Shenzhen and Guangzhou are historical deserts, but that's in part because these cities got big relatively recently; they're nowhere near the core of historical Chinese civilisation. Shanghai was a small agricultural community for most of Chinese history and only really came into its own in the 1930s, and Shenzhen barely even existed until 1979. Most megacities in China are relatively history-poor, but that's in part because there wasn't that much history there to protect in the first place - the cities that are global hubs in China today are, for the most part, not the cities that were historically important. OTOH many of the older cities like Beijing, Chengde, Xi'an, Suzhou, Luoyang etc seem to have way more historical sites than your modal Asian city, not less. And Pingyao looks insane. I do plan to incorporate a lot of areas outside of the cities into my itinerary though.
Weather doesn't really matter that much to me, though -20 is pushing it a little bit and I'm mostly going to China to see history and culture (Shanxi and Shaanxi provinces are very attractive in that regard). I've heard of the Harbin Ice Festival before; have you gone yourself and would you recommend it?
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
11hr ago
If Trump thinks we are playing poker, we are doomed. Poker is a zero-sum game where you want your opponent to go all-in and lose. War is a negative-sum game where an all-in confrontation and showdown means everyone loses.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
11hr ago
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
11hr ago
If this is not real,
It isn't real. Both sides are still shooting at each other. Israel is claiming that Iran should be blamed because they fired the first shots after Trump's deadline, and they are just retaliating. What is definitely the case is that both sides tried to do maximum damage in the hours between the ceasefire being announced and entering into force, which is not what people who actually want a ceasefire do.
Dean
Flairless
12hr ago
There is also a point of comparing Gaza to other cases of dense urban warfighting where the millions-scale civilian population is stuck in the dense urban area. There aren't many other examples, but in the closest analogs (such as the fall of the ISIS caliphate), the casualties are pretty analogous when controlled for time.
Turns out, urban fighting is dangerous for attacker, defender, and bystander alike. Who would have guessed?
I don't know why you believe that there are very few entry points for ideas. Every person is a potential originator of an idea.
Because effectively, they're not, and there's only a handful of entrypoints which allow you to flood all of society with an idea, while all the other ones give you an extremely limited reach. Why do you think all the creators whine so much about The Algorithm?
Spreading ideas has never been as easy as it is now.
Yes, if people controlling the entry points want to let you spread it.
I don't know why you believe this.
Because we've seen open and deliberate measures to throttle and restrict what was deemed "harmful misinformation".
Censorship has never been lesser than it is today as far as I can see.
I'm not particularly interested in litigating whether the control over thought was greater in the past than it is now, my thesis is: mind control works. The past might have had it's own forms of mind control, but today it works, to a large extent, by deciding what ideas get to spread over mass media (+a handful of institutions like the education system). This is undeniable, not only did we see it happen in real-time, we were explicitly being told that this was the goal of people in charge of said media.
Dean
Flairless
12hr ago
Yes, but if the processing system uses dollars and US banks (or banks that eventually connect to US banks) then US can control it. Dealing with a ton of different currency without having an intermediary one where you can align everything to the single common measure could be challenging...
The other point is that if the actors using the system also want to use dollars and US banks separately, the US can still influence it. This is why the attempted Iran-EU exchange program died after the JCPOA fell apart. The Europeans mooted building what would basically have been shell companies to serve as intermediaries who would never touch dollars for Iran-EU trade, and the US simply moved the threat of secondary sanctions to any European companies that did work with the shell companies doing work with Iran.
This is part of the classic misunderstanding of the influence of the dollar in the international system. It doesn't actually matter if you use dollars in the transaction. Dollars are just a lower transaction cost medium of exchange, but everyone already had the ability to pay a higher transaction cost if they wanted to do currency swaps and such. What matters if you also, elsewhere, want to do business with the dollar system.
Dean
Flairless
12hr ago
Building on this, the 'more important' ceasefire for most of the world isn't even Israel-Iran, but US-Iran.
The US entry was limited to the bunker buster attack (which Israel could not get on its own). Iran responded with the telegraphed attack on the US base in Qatar. This was a basic tit-for-tat, and the 'cease fire' had neatly concluded that.
A lot of Iran's more major potential escalatory steps- shutting down the Straight of Hormuz, needing a nuke for regime survival- are assets more against the US than Israel. But they are also assets with higher global fallout for global energy markets / global proliferation than just the Israel-Iran conflict as is/was.
It's not that the Israel-Iran part isn't important, but even if it breaks down (and there were reportedly some late-fires already) it won't have the same implications of the US being directly involved.
I imagine that support for their nuclear program has actually increased, because it seems like the only pathway to prevent the IDF from bombing Iranian generals whenever they feel like it.
This part I'll disagree with, however. Nuclear deterrence does not work as a 'I can hit you, no hit backs' shield, which already has a good deal of precedent not only in Russia-Ukraine but also in, well, the Iran doing retaliatory missile strikes against US bases in the middle east. The precedent for this line of thought failing have already been established, notably by Iran.
As long as Iran remains wedded to its proxy war strategy against Israel (and the US), it will be subject to retaliation strikes. That Iran has reached a point where its proxy strikes lead to direct retaliations is more of a measure of strategic misplay of proxy warfare* than an issue that can be resolved by gaining nukes.
*The first rule of proxy warfare is that plausible deniability requires the opponent to variously not know, or have enough doubt, such that they prefer to avoid the consequences of direct conflict and prefer to focus on the proxy regardless. If the proxy lacks plausible deniability, then there is no meaningful difference to the receiving state, and the proxy-using state has no higher authority to appeal to if the receiving state wishes to retaliate directly.
quiet_NaN
12hr ago
Agreed. In an exchange of missiles and bombs, Iran would be losing decidedly, so it makes sense for them to not engage in it.
From my understanding, this ceasefire is mostly that both sides will cease lobbing missiles at each other for now, not anything about Iran stopping their nuclear program.
If either side feels they have anything to gain by breaking the ceasefire (e.g. Israel seeing another opportunity to delay the Iranian nuclear program by bombing them), then they will break it.
While it is a defeat for the Iranian regime, it is a defeat that they likely can survive -- they ideology is not based on how they are technologically superior to the West, after all. I imagine that support for their nuclear program has actually increased, because it seems like the only pathway to prevent the IDF from bombing Iranian generals whenever they feel like it.
Of course Trump announces the ceasefire like he had just negotiated the fucking Good Friday Agreement, when all he did was bomb Iran without getting into an indefinite missile war with them, which few if any people claimed was the main downside of bombing them.
Lizzardspawn
12hr ago
Probably no. Which is why I think that the ceasefire got accepted.
This is what I have always said - don't kill the schmucks. Kill the elites. Easiest way to bring someone on the table to negotiate is to put their skin on the line
FtttG
12hr ago
If you're suggesting that the war in Gaza is a genocide because half of all deaths in Gaza were civilians rather than combatants, that would imply that virtually every modern war was a genocide, as many wars had a vastly higher ratio of civilian to combatant deaths (as high as 9:1 in some cases). If you're happy to call the Korean war, the Gulf war and the 2003 invasion of Iraq genocides, all well and good, just as long as we're consistent.
FtttG
12hr ago
Ukraine's leadership has a vested interest in protecting its citizenry, while Hamas has an official policy of intentionally putting Palestinian citizens in harm's way. Hamas and the Arab world have continually refused to allow Palestinian refugees safe passage into neighbouring countries.
I'm not saying the manner in which Israel is prosecuting this war has nothing to do with the rate at which Palestinian civilians are being killed, but suggesting that they are solely responsible for the level of civilian collateral damage is literally falling for Hamas propaganda hook, line and sinker.
sohois
13hr ago
Don't focus too much on the cities. The cultural revolution destroyed a ton of history all across the nation, and the development boom finished the job on a lot more. They all have a lot less to see than equivalent cities of their size and history in other nations. You can go to one big city - Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, etc. - and you'll have seen them all.
Since you're going in December, how much does weather matter to you? You might be able to catch Harbin Ice Festival if you're willing to bear -20 or lower temperatures.
erwgv3g34
13hr ago
"A government of laws, not of men", as John Adams put it, is an incoherent fantasy. Laws are nothing more than ink on paper; only men can rule.
erwgv3g34
13hr ago
If you like that, then you will love Wickard v. Filburn, where the supreme court ruled that the federal government had a right to prevent a farmer from growing wheat in his own land for his own use because, if a bunch of farmers did that, it would substantially lower the price of wheat in the national market, thus affecting interstate commerce.
And of course, we have all heard about Roe v. Wade and Obergefell v. Hodges, so it's not a problem specific to the commerce clause; a court that can find the right to abortion and gay "marriage" in the fourteenth amendment is a court that can find anything in anything.
In the US towing ~4000 lbs is pretty normal and one of the things a pickup might get used for, I wouldn’t say a pickup is necessarily better for it but everyone just assumes it is.
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