domain:science.org
quiet_NaN
6hr ago
I think it is entirely reasonable to hold Israel to a higher standard than Hamas. If I held the Israel government only to the standard of Hamas (whom I consider murderous thugs who need to be wiped from the face of the earth), then I would have to concede that it would be a good thing if NATO invaded Israel and occupied them for a few decades until they learned better.
Per WP, there have been about 70k Gazans and 1k IDF killed since Israel responded to the Oct-7 attacks. Let's assume that 40k of the Gazans were civilians as a ballpark number.
The ratio at which your own soldiers die relative to enemy civilians is reflective of the value system of the society waging the war, what the factor before the count in the utility function is for enemy civilians and your soldiers.
Approximately, the relation of death tolls should reflect the quotient of these values. (The distribution of tactical options is also relevant, of course, if you only ever have to decide between two of your soldiers and one civilian, you might end up killing a zillion civilians and none of your soldiers despite valuing them equally, but I think it is unlikely that this distorts the effects too much in reality.)
A toy example would be that you are harassed by an enemy sniper in a building (back when Gaza had buildings), which is also expected to be inhabited by civilians. You can either call an airstrike, thereby killing an estimated X civilians, or storm the building with infantry, losing an estimated Y soldiers in the process.
I am not saying that you need to value enemy civilians as much as your troops. Few armies would gamble a soldier to rescue an enemy civilian (probably non-allied civilian would be a more appropriate phrasing) in a double or nothing scenario.
But if you have 40 civilans dead for every one of your soldiers, then it becomes reasonable to suppose that you have a callous disregard for the lives of the civilian population, and that is the point where the IDF is right now.
oats_son
6hr ago
The movie was already boring! There were like, two fight/chase scenes that didn't have any tension plus some politican getting vaporized at the start of the movie and then a bunch of weird not-very-interesting philosophizing on what a person is or random political intrigue, in both cases several minutes of people just talking. Screw that noise! GitS sucks!
Because they’re all dirty liars that have constantly lied about every single thing over at least the last 12 years I’ve been paying attention?
I clicked on link 3 at random, read the article, and am unsure how or what you’re supposed to be trusting.
I’m being honest here - what is it even saying?
‘ Israel shouldn't be be in charge of food distribution to Gaza - people in Gaza are hungry - Palestinians have been killed trying to get food ‘
It’s a fucking war.
What is it that you’re supposed to come away with? Why did you link it? What is it supposed to mean to me?
Corvos
6hr ago
This happened to a friend of mine. He had a very good case, and the lawyer said, "Look, you've got a 95% chance of winning this. But the other side is going to hire the very best, most expensive guys in town. There's a 5% chance you'll pay millions in damages - can you handle that?" And of course they didn't have that kind of money.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
6hr ago
insanely twisted way of framing that forum
Bruh, this
”The stories and information posted here are artistic works of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact.”
has been the header on /b/ since the 00s. They embrace it.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
6hr ago
If every Gazan and inhabitant of the West Bank became a full citizen of Israel, there would no longer be a guarantee of a Jewish Israeli PM or President or majority in the Knesset.
There are currently 7 million Jews and 2.5 million others with Israeli citizenship. There are about 2 million Gazans and 2.7 million West Bank-ians. Add them in and give them voting power and suddenly there is a substantial non-Jewish voting block. (And then the wolves eat the lambs.)
It's one of those things everyone knows but not a lot of people make the point to explain. The Jewish Ethnostate depends on not integrating these people, or at the very least, integrating slowly.
07mk
7hr ago
Also consider that this is part of a movement accusing large amounts of celebrity women to be secretly trans. It seems like the standards of evidence they use might be pretty weak, or maybe Taylor Swift/Jennifer Lopez/Lady Gaga/the Kardashians/etc are really trans after all.
Horseshoe theory strikes again, given that accusation requires an implicit belief that it's possible for a transwoman with as much and long history of public exposure as these celebrities do to pass as ciswoman.
Hieronymus
7hr ago
I wish there were such an outcry, but I am skeptical; I can't recall one in my lifetime. Institutional U.S. policymakers don't want to be called crusaders or lose any more support in the Muslim world, and I don't think I have ever seen that policy come back to bite them domestically. Ted Cruz told a gathering of mideast Christians that he would never support them unless they supported Israel, and he only got a little pushback from the very online set.
I'm not sure why this is. The explanations I've seen floated are mostly bogus stereotypes of American Christians.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
7hr ago
· Edited 5hr ago
Thank you for the thorough reply. I love getting to talk about this stuff.
I might read this + Derrida's Truth in Painting and get back to you at some (undefined) point in the future.
Derrida's a heck of a place to start if you're not already steeped in the continental tradition. He'll rapid fire off references to 10 other books and expect you to be familiar with all of them. Not that I'm at all trying to discourage you or anything, just saying that it's normal if you find him frustrating. I only understand what he's saying about half the time.
The Marcuse book on the other hand is rather short and approachable.
Anything political the Frankfurt School or its descendant schools of thought wrote induces anything from disaffected ennui to downright hatred.
I think appreciating the historical/personal context they were writing in helps contextualize their pessimism a little better. They were all communist Jews who legitimately believed that the world workers' revolution was on the horizon, and then they watched Stalinism turn their Marxist ideals into a hellscape, and they lived through Nazism and WW2, and basically they watched their entire world and all their hopes for the future collapse around them in a spectacularly dramatic fashion. That's the sort of thing that would put anyone in a sour mood.
In general, I find that many philosophers from the analytic tradition had a habit of defending claims and properly defining terms so as to minimise uncertainty. There's often a more rigorous bent to their writings.
You're right, I don't disagree at all. That's by design of course. In the early 20th century, Russell and Moore and their co-conspirators thought that Hegelianism had gone off the rails, and philosophy needed a new beginning that was self-consciously modeled after mathematical logic. That was the start of the analytic school.
Analytic philosophy was my first introduction to philosophy and I think that permanently shaped how my mind works. Or maybe my mind just already worked like that and analytic philosophy was a natural fit for it, idk. But I do feel that on some fundamental level my outlook will always be analytic in some sense. I'm perpetually annoyed at how, at times, continental philosophers seem to care nothing for running basic sanity checks on their sentences (are terms well-defined, am I making any category errors, etc) (although I'm always equally as sensitive to the possibility that this is just a misunderstanding on my part, or that my whole conception of how one should "evaluate" sentences is wrong in the first place).
But nonetheless here on TheMotte I end up talking more about continental philosophy, partially because that's just what I read more of these days, and partially because continental philosophers speak more directly to the types of culture war issues that we discuss here.
It's often extremely fluffy, terms will be so poorly defined that interpretations of their texts bifurcate depending on one's reading of them, and even once you've broken through the morass and divined several possible interpretations of their words, every single interpretation turns out to be endless navel-gazing that has become unmoored entirely from reality.
I get why you say this, definitely. But at the same time, continental philosophy is so wildly heterogeneous that it's almost impossible to make generalizations about it as a whole. It varies heavily from author to author, text to text. You really have to treat each text individually and take it on its own merits.
I was just talking about how difficult Derrida is, but ironically, I think he's actually the closest to analytic philosophy out of all the "big" continental writers. His concerns and methods are ones that analytic philosophers can appreciate, once you cut through all the verbiage. Like his Voice and Phenomenon for example, it's a nice short little book that addresses the question, "do we have privileged epistemological access to the contents of our own mental states?" That's a perfectly comprehensible and "classical" philosophical question, no issues there. And he does have arguments; they're perhaps a bit difficult to extract, and they're not the most carefully rigorous, but they're there.
Nietzsche won't bullshit you. (I think we can safely call him continental. He lived before the split of course, but like Hegel he's very strongly continental coded.) Reading Nietzsche is just such an amazing and wonderful experience. He doesn't provide too many arguments per se (and it would kinda go against his whole project if he did, because he's kinda doing a postmodern performance art deconstruction of the concept of philosophical argumentation itself, which is really not nearly as dumb and pretentious as it sounds, like seriously just read him trust me), but he doesn't need to give arguments because he just like, says stuff, in plain ol' honest terms, and you're just like "damn, that is so true... how did I never think of that before..."
But then of course you do just have the really hyper-weird shit. I wrote a post yesterday where I quoted some passages from Lacan's Seminar XX and, yeah I'll admit, it's fuckin' wild. You're justified in asking, how am I to take this as anything except the ramblings of a very unwell man who is on the verge of a psychotic episode? And I'll admit, I'm not sure how much of it can be defended "rationally". I can give basic definitions of the jargon terms like "jouissance" and "Other", but in terms of justifying why these specific words were put in this specific order and what it means as a whole, such that a sane person would be justified in believing it... yeah, that's tough. But that doesn't mean I can just throw it out, y'know? Something about Lacan's ideas and terminology resonates with me. I don't know what he's onto, but he's onto something. I can't argue anyone into walking that particular path, but I know that there are other people who are interested in walking the same path.
I wish there was more rigorous work done, both philosophical and historical, about how the analytic/continental split came to be and what it means. My current pet theory is that there really is just a certain strain of mysticism in continental thought, and as such it tends to attract people who are more open to mystical thought/experience, and this shows through in the texts, although most of them would strenuously deny this. It's not clear exactly why or how this particular mode of thinking caught on when it did in European philosophy, but multiple of the big "founding fathers" of continental philosophy did flirt with mysticism, to varying degrees of overtness, and this likely set the tone for what "personality type" would be attracted to continental philosophy going forward.
Kierkegaard had his own idiosyncratic brand of existential Christianity, that one is obvious. Magee's Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition goes into detail explaining how Hegel's thought was influenced by Hermeticism. And when Heidegger in What are Poets For? is saying things like:
Poets are the mortals who, singing earnestly of the wine-god, sense the trace of the fugitive gods, stay on the gods' tracks, and so trace for their kindred mortals the way toward the turning. The ether, however, in which alone the gods are gods, is their godhead. The element of this ether, that within which even the godhead itself is still present, is the holy. The element of the ether for the coming of the fugitive gods, the holy, is the track of the fugitive gods. But who has the power to sense, to trace such a track? Traces are often inconspicuous, and are always the legacy of a directive that is barely divined. To be a poet in a destitute time means: to attend, singing, to the trace of the fugitive gods. That is why the poet in the time of the world's night utters the holy.
it's kinda like, what are we even doing here? We're not even pretending that this is "philosophy" anymore. (Actually Heidegger rejected the notion that he was doing "philosophy", he said that what he was doing was "thinking", what exactly that means is up to interpretation.)
And Hubert Dreyfus had the chutzpah to say "oh Heidegger was just doing a philosophical anthropology, the 'unveiling of a world' just means how our social practices influence how we categorize objects, nothing unusual going on here". Come on man.
The result of collecting all these spacey wordcels in one intellectual space, and giving them the freedom to be as spacey as they want without much in the way of outside checks and balances, is a very strange and unique literature that freely transitions between philosophy, history, sociology, psychology, poetry, and religious experience, sometimes all within the same paragraph. They won't announce when they're "changing modalities", that's on you to figure out. You might find it frustrating, but you can't say it's not fascinating.
But anyway. In spite of all that. All continental texts are really different from each other and you have to take them on a case by case basis. There's been increasing analytic interest over the past couple of decades in doing analytic interpretations/reconstructions of Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Marx, Derrida, all the big names, figuring out what ideas are in there that can be extracted and pressed into a more easy-to-digest form. I wouldn't say there's anything like a "bridging of the gap" between the two traditions but the interest is there. It's not all bullshit.
Seems like an easy Occam's razor to me. Either Candace Owens is just bullshitting with the obvious incentive that she is rewarded with views and attention and money, or she of all people stumbled on hard proof that the first lady of France is transgender, hard proof that is strong enough to overcome the questions of "Why would no one else know about this till now?" and "she somehow faked three pregnancies?" but also isn't able to be shared to convince others to overcome their prior.
Also consider that this is part of a movement accusing large amounts of celebrity women to be secretly trans. It seems like the standards of evidence they use might be pretty weak, or maybe Taylor Swift/Jennifer Lopez/Lady Gaga/the Kardashians/etc are really trans after all.
magicalkittycat
7hr ago
And allowing "our children" to see things put out by the Chinese is a national security threat exactly how?
Consider that despite a literal ban being passed, two presidents have ignored it in a row. That seems pretty concerning, they must have a lot of influence in the country if we aren't even enforcing our laws.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
7hr ago
Didn't get a chance to do a lot this week. Any better luck @Southkraut?
magicalkittycat
7hr ago
I mean didn't he literally just get purged for expressing a political opinion?
He doesn't have to read about authoritarian states, he's already living in one!
If my employee is on TV and says rude things about a major client of mine, should the government ban me from firing them? From my perspective as a business owner in this hypothetical, it seems more the authoritarian government is the one that forces me to keep shitty and unliked employees around even if they're costing my business reputation.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
7hr ago
Israel is dissolved and thus the state reverts back to being the Arab state of Palestine.
As with Taiwan, this cannot happen, because this would not be a reversion. There never was an Arab state of Palestine. There was an Ottoman province there, and then the British mandate, but no Arab state.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
7hr ago
Trump was involved in an unusual amount of litigation for an ex-President, and is now involved in an unusual amount of high-profile litigation as President. You are saying that this is the result of his political opponents waging an unprecedented campaign of lawfare against him. I am saying that it is a result of his behaviour.
The point is that Trump's pre-politics litigation history is evidence that my view is correct and yours is not.
quiet_NaN
7hr ago
I think that both sides can reasonably claim a fear of a slippery slope.
Have you heard of this obscure group called Hamas? They were kinda big some time ago, and seem really hell-bent to fast forward to the end of the slope where the Jews are drowned in the sea. Do you think that if Palestine was recognized as a state in the borders of 1968, they would think their jihad over and decide to become good neighbors?
And on the Israeli side of things, there are groups who want Jews to settle in the West Banks to establish a permanent Israeli claim to this land. Last time I checked, they were running the Israeli government. If I was a Palestinian, I might reasonably get the impression that they will take the next slice of land rather sooner than later.
Of course there are moderates on both sides, but fear of the extremists seems to be very appropriate.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
7hr ago
Having a model of space and time is, quite literally, a model of the world. What more do you expect me to produce to shore up that point?
Human brains have arrangements of neurons that correspond to a 3D environment. This isn't a joke, when your brain thinks in 3d, there's a whole bunch of neurons that approximate the space with the same spatial arrangement. Almost like a hex-grid in a video game, because the units are hexagonal. If your standard of a world model excludes the former, does this get thrown out too?
A little 3D model of the world is, as far as I'm concerned, a world model.
Dismissing the whole Mozart analogy as being due to just negligible "statistical word co-occurence" is an incredibly myopic take. But how does the model learn that non-co-occurrence so robustly? It's not just that the words "Mozart" and "hip-hop" don't appear in the same sentence. It's that the entire semantic cloud around "Mozart" - 18th century, classical, Vienna, harpsichord - is astronomically distant from the cloud around "hip-hop" - 20th century, Bronx, turntables, MCing. For the model to reliably predict text, it must learn not just isolated facts, but this vast web of interlocking relationships. To call that "just statistical association" is like calling a brain "just a bunch of firing neurons." It's technically true but misses the emergent property entirely. That emergent, structured representation of concepts and their relations is the nascent world model. In that case, you're overloading "just" or woefully underestimating how powerful statistics or neuronal firing can be.
You can also ask an LLM for its opinion on whether Mozart might have liked hip-hop, and it will happily speculate on what's known about his taste in music and extrapolate from there. What query, if asked of a human, would demonstrate that we're doing a qualitatively different thing?
Regarding Claude plays Pokémon. I've already linked to an explainer of why it struggles above, the same link regarding the arithmetic woes. LLM vision sucks. They weren't designed for that task, and performance on a lot of previously difficult problems, like ARC-AGI, improves dramatically when the information is restructured to better suit their needs. The fact that they can do it at all is remarkable in it self, and they're only getting better.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
7hr ago
Given that every negotiation has failed by one side or the other, and the two sides expect defecting by the other side (and thus have every incentive to defect first and seize initiative) there’s no viable way to have a two-state solution of any type. There are two end states on offer
1). Israel controls all the territory and has enough weaponry to protect its borders and citizens.
2). Israel is dissolved and thus the state reverts back to being the Arab state of Palestine.
3). We keep up intermittent wars until one of those two states is reached.
Given this, the best solution is backing one side to break the stalemate and take over, the quicker tge better. Then once one side or the other loses completely enough to accept they won’t be in the Levant anymore, the conflict ends.
I frequently hear women express sentiments that actually, promiscuity is good, being a camgirl is a completely normal job, and having a dozen boyfriends in one year and collecting gifts and favors from all of them on the way is par for the course and bystanders should politely not notice it. I very rarely (in fact, not in almost a decade by now) hear the opposite IRL.
I don't know that I've heard that IRL, though I do recall even in school there were lots of girls who expressed interest in marrying a man for the money, or in using sexual appeal to get things from men, while never expressing interest in the idea of actually loving a man.
I guess these motivations have been around forever, along with the more intrinsic motivations like intimacy, companionship, physical affection, etc. But it's surprising to me how the shoe has moved to the other foot and it's much more rare for me to hear discussions of intimacy, companionship, and physical affection as the core reasons people are looking for a relationship. "I would like to have children" has a strong constituency, but I'd argue that's still an instrumental reason to have a relationship. (But an important one!)
Does Israel actually want to be the ones distributing aid?
I don't know. The March-April blockade ends with Israel propping up, scaling, and now supporting its own sanctioned distribution network. The GHF posts daily press releases. Today's message is the same as yesterday's:
“As we exceed 91 million meals delivered to the people of Gaza to date, we are taking a moment to reflect on the adversity we’ve overcome for this herculean humanitarian mission. Our aid staff and local partners have demonstrated tremendous courage and commitment to those in need.
“Looking ahead, we will not stop until our mission to feed as many Palestinians in Gaza is accomplished. We are also offering to distribute UN and other international organization aid for free — we have the scale and operational efficiency to feed more Gazans, and we encourage all humanitarian groups on the ground to partner with us. The people of Gaza are depending on us and we cannot let them down.”
Israel wants to at least threaten a commitment to solely manage aid distribution. If you think "ceasefire talks" are serious, and Israel is going to sign a deal for some hostages, pack up, and go home, then this is simple leverage to speed that process along. If you think ceasefire talks are not very serious, and to me this appears very possible, then this may be the start of the long haul. It looks like one stage of a plan than it does negotiating leverage, but I'm open to other interpretations. If the UN does hand over its trucks to the GHF I'll be more certain.
quiet_NaN
8hr ago
The person who is now Mrs Macron was born in 1953. Given the prevalence of people transitioning at that time, I think it is very unlikely that she went m2f before she was 30 or at whatever age she met her future husband.
If she was known as a "that weird cross-dressing teacher" back then, I think the media would have reported on it, the story of their marriage is obviously too juicy for the tabloid vultures to not have been picked to the bone years ago.
I thought there was some scholarly hypothesis that the Philistines were Mycenean Greeks, which helps explain certain things like Samson being a more Herakles-type hero, instead of the more typical "Mouthpiece of God" prophet in the Old Testament.
I suppose that it is possible that the Philistines or their descendants Arabized, but I'd want to see the account of that survival since the connection seems a little dubious to me.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
8hr ago
Then it’s not much of a “default career,” is it?
I think you’re defending the motte to Southkraut’s bailey.
TequilaMockingbird
Brown-skinned Fascist MAGA boot-licker
8hr ago
Agriculture generates hundreds of billions in revenue, and is far mor essential to continuing civilisation than Orangutan or LLMs are. Does that make grain, or the tools used to sow and harvest it "intelligent" in your eyes? If not please explain.
As for comparing like to like, GPT loses games of Chess to an Atari 2700. Does that mean that rather than progressing AI has actually devolved over the last 40 years?
Different boards have completely different cultures. /b/ is not /pol/ is not /k/ is not /r9k/.
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