domain:gurwinder.substack.com
Dean
Flairless
21hr ago
Hamas's actions were causal for Hezbollah's decision to open the northern front artillery campaign after Oct 7, which in turn led to foursignificant strategic setbacks for Iran that made their recent performance in the 12 day war possible.
First, it drove and culminated in the bushwhacking of Hezbollah's leadership via the pager and other campaigns, neutering Iran's premier proxy-ally-extension in the region. Hezbollah is a direct partner of Iran's IRGC, which is Iran's primary power-projection force, and this lost an ally whose reason for existing (from the Iranian backing perspective) is to help out in the kind of conflict that they just did not.
Second, because Hezbollah (and non-trivial amounts of its Syria-based infrastructure) were whacked by Israel, Iran lacked a proxy militia to stabilize Assad in Syria, allowing the momentum building that saw Iran's primary state-ally/client/main supply route into Lebanon cut while Iraqi-based militia groups were trying to drive over the desert. The loss of Syria was a loss of not just an ally, but a decade of significant investments in trying to establish and protect that interest.
Third, because Assad fell, the Syrian air corridor between Israel and Iran opened up. Israel was able to access previously denied airspace with vulnerable but capability-extending aircraft (like tankers and slower drones) that enabled the air war over Iran that led to Iran losing control of its own airspace. Israel would not have been able to generate as many air sorties over Iran as it did were Asad still in power.
Fourth, because the anti-Hezbollah campaign was being coordinated from an annex of the Iranian embassy in Syria, when Israel struck that in response, the Iranian response-response was the missile campaign between Israel and Iran. Not only did this deplete a considerable share of Iran's missile force, it also led to the Israel strikes on the Iranian air defense systems that also contributed to Iran's recent not-so-great showing.
As for Hamas's incompetence, that depends whose theory you want to subscribe to. Allegedly, Sinwar (the departed head of Hamas in Gaza who led the Oct 7 attack) was planning on reaching the West Bank and sparking a general uprising / Intifada. This not only did not happen, but the West Bank was so uninvolved that Hamas' only 'direct' allies in the conflict they wanted to make into a race war were... Hezbollah (who paid a high price) and the Houthis (who blockaded most of the Arab states from benefiting from of the primary Arab ethno-nationalist interests, the Suez Canal).
In so much that Sinwar's Plan B for the conflict was to have Gaza be pummeled in hopes the world would take the Palestinian's side, he certainly got Gaza pummeled, and the actual benefits for the Palestinians are sure to manifest any day week month year now.
The category "African-American" is neither limited to American Descendants of Slavery nor does it include Elon Musk. The Census definition is "A person having origins in any of the Black [sic] racial groups of Africa."
Not only is this silly in that it declares government to be the final arbiter and definer of race, it doesn't even work out well when governments themselves disagree on these types of definitions.
Check out the status of groups like the Brazilian or Portuguese Americans for instance.
For the Portuguese, whether or not they are officially Hispanic depends in part on the state they live in.
Some states, such as Florida, categorize Portuguese Americans as Hispanic, while others, such as California, do not. In a few places, including Massachusetts, laws and regulations treat them as a disadvantaged group for at least some purposes.
Is ethnicity really a concept that is state defined? Does a person's ethnicity really change if they move from California to Florida?
Brazilians are even more confusing, they aren't officially considered Hispanic or Latino either, and yet it seems more than two-thirds of them define their identity that way
This is more people than some traditional Hispanic groups!
In fact, enough Brazilians identified as Latino in 2020 that they would fall in the middle of rankings of U.S. Hispanic or Latino origin groups by size, if they were officially counted as one. In 2020, Brazil would have been the 14th-largest Latino origin group with 416,000 who identified as Latino, ahead of Nicaragua (395,000) and below Venezuela (619,000).
It even changes constantly in this list of racial prerequisite cases on who is determined white
Syrians, Asian Indians and Arabians are both white and not-white. Mexicans btw in the single case for them are white.
Chinese aren't white, but they do get a pass in Jim Crow Era Mississippi to attend the white only schools and join the White Citizens Council so it seems even that isn't fully clear!
Possibly so, but then I think the source of the matter does not begin (or end) with a proposition that it seems somewhat unique to government that rules are enforced by violence/kidnapping. I think something else has to be doing the work.
EDIT: I meant to also mention that it's not just child/parent relations. It's genuinely all rules ever. You're playing a board game, and you want to make a 'house rule'? Well, what if someone just refuses to play by it? Escalate? Eventually kick them out of your house? ...we start running into the 'exile' problem again, supposing they become maximally-oppositional. I don't think most people would start off saying, "You should consider whether or not it's worth using violence/kidnapping to enforce a house rule for a board game," even if that is a conceivable end state in the maximally-oppositional case.
magicalkittycat
21hr ago
The alternative is exceedingly simple. "African-American" is commonly understood to mean American Descendants of Slavery, not Elon Musk.
We can not expect every single person to have been exposed to everything and culturally absorbed this in their life, especially when it is so unintuitive. Like that XKCD comic that's pretty famous, there are a lot of people out there who don't have or never experienced "everyone knows" situations.
So if your category is unclear and inconsistent, and other more intuitive interpretations clash with the culturally accepted one, then you are inevitably going to land on a bunch of people who use it "wrong".
You're just "African", and that's how it will be until race/ethnicity-based affirmative action schemes are totally abolished.
So he's an African, and he's an American, but he's not an African American? Certainly you can understand how that at face value looks incredibly stupid right?
ControlsFreak
21hr ago
If only I had three further paragraphs.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
21hr ago
The cuts to science funding seem likely to do major damage to American R&D, cause a mass exodus of skilled workers to Europe, and give China the opportunity to get even farther ahead of us in key fields such as battery development.
The damage was done. The science funding was being used for woke first, climate alarmism second, and any useful science well after that. Politico did an article on the "scientific refugees" moving to France; those identified included only a climate historian, a climate scientist and his wife "who studies the intersection of judicial systems and democracies".
cjet79
21hr ago
I'll think about this. My sense is that the base relationship is what matters. The base social relationship is talking. The base family relationship is love/nurture. The base relationship with the state seems to be an imbalanced power dynamic in favor of the state.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
21hr ago
This is missing some steps. There are plenty of government rules, which, on their face, are not enforced through violence and kidnapping. In many of those cases, you have to posit a persistently-oppositional figure and a continued escalatory cycle to get to an eventual end state where the ultimate response to unending opposition is, indeed, violence/kidnapping.
It's the same picture. The government won't give up until it has won.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
21hr ago
The category "African-American" is neither limited to American Descendants of Slavery nor does it include Elon Musk. The Census definition is "A person having origins in any of the Black [sic] racial groups of Africa."
So it's pretty clear that neither Mamdani nor Musk is "African-American", but Obama (regardless of whether there's really a slave in the family on the white side) is.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
22hr ago
Yes, there are negative consequences of such limitations. Of course, if that Hezbollah cell does anything, the citizen can still go through the criminal process for it as a citizen. The alternative is that 40 years post-naturalization you've got people poring through old records looking for a lie big enough to denaturalize someone.
And note it is longer than 3 years -- it take 3 years to become a citizen from getting a green card, if you're married to a citizen, and 5 years otherwise.
Lizzardspawn
22hr ago
Never half ass a genocide. One of the most important lessons of history.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
22hr ago
If Iran has the bomb, they can provide it to a smaller, far more suicidal group of allies (the Palestinians) to lock the Israelis into their current borders unless they negotiate with Iran. Technology transfers, taxes, religious rites/rights, not purchasing American weapons, etc. is what that looks like.
Israel is obviously not going to agree to that. If Iran provides Hamas a bomb, Hamas will use it; Hamas does not have the self control to merely threaten for long, nor the ability to hide it for long (which means "use it or lose it" makes sense), regardless of what Israel does (aside from cease to exist). If Iran threatens to provide Hamas a bomb, that's the same as Iran threatening to nuke Israel; the presence of Hamas changes nothing.
They didn't like the paragliders the first time; imagine how much they're not going to like them when the settlers further encroaching on their territory prompts an air-borne SADMization of the Israeli countryside.
Little nukes like that don't change much unless they can get them into the Knesset. (And the settlers are irrelevant; every Israeli could fuck back off behind the Green Line and the Palestinians would still demand the river to the sea)
There's some technical parts to how LLMs specifically work that make it a lot harder to police hallucination than to improve produce a compelling argument, for the same reason that they're bad at multiplication and great at symbolic reference work. A lot of LLMs can already use WestLaw and do a pretty good job of summarizing it... at the cost of it trying to cite a state law I specifically didn't ask about.
It's possible that hallucination will be absolutely impossible to completely solve, but either way I expect these machines to become better at presenting compelling arguments faster than I expect them to be good researchers, with all the good and ill that implies. Do lawyers value honesty more than persuasion?
I mean, yes, but the hallucination problem of putting in wrong cases and statutes is utterly disqualifying in advanced legal writing.
One would think! And yet.
Corvos
22hr ago
Going by my English intuitive sense of ‘sovereignty’, it would mean:
- They own all the land in Australia (and can therefore charge you rent for it or turf you off it in perpetuity).
- They are the top level of government, and entitled to make any laws or override any bodies that they please, in the same way that the UK parliament is sovereign.
Now, I would be very very surprised if they ever got that, and there be lots of hammering out of details over which tribes and what bodies own things and have rights. But you can admit those rights in theory and move towards them by e.g. saying that aborigines have the right to charge rent of say £10m per year to the Australian government and treat it as basically UBI. Or by giving them certain veto powers over government.
Barfknuckle
22hr ago
Roman soldiers often became loyal to the generals that distributed them land and victories over the roman state itself. It's really hard to not see this dynamic replicated.
Ludicrous comparison. TDS.
thejdizzler
22hr ago
I think you should stop taking this guy so seriously. He has good advice in some areas of life (financial independence, internet use), but he is a hack in many other areas. For example, he claims that you don't need to learn a ton of vocabulary to be fluent in language and also that he is fluent in Spanish and French just from learning Latin. The first of these is not true, and he should know better as a someone who claims to be a linguist. The second seems to be really improbable: I'd have to hear him speak Spanish to believe it. I'm sure this is true with other areas of his "expertise" that I have less experience with.
cjet79
22hr ago
There are some flavors of libertarians that derive a lot of stuff from contracts.
I suppose I see contracts as more of a good operating system, but the way violence is wielded and property rights are protected is more like having CPU and motherboard for your computer.
cjet79
22hr ago
If you define property rights as a social project, sure I guess that follows.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
22hr ago
Right. No one's willing to make or defend the counter proposal of "You get nothing this time and furthermore we've decided we're taking away what you got last time", so it can only move in one direction.
I mean, yes, but the hallucination problem of putting in wrong cases and statutes is utterly disqualifying in advanced legal writing. Citing to a nonexistent case or statute compromises the entire brief or argument. A decent first year associate might misinterpret a statute or case, or miss that the case was overturned, but they wouldn't make up cases from whole cloth and build their arguments off those.
For a lot of tasks, you just need to go through and proofread or fix up the places where it filled in basic info that it obviously didn't have.
But citing a case that doesn't exist to build an argument is like asking it to design a bridge and it get the tensile strength of steel completely wrong, or perhaps it makes up a type of material that doesn't exist and hallucinates its properties as part of the specifications.
And maybe it does that, I don't know. But there's literally no reason for it to be doing that, either, when there is definitive information, easily available for reference. Its information it should never get wrong, in practice.
And it really shouldn't be hard to fix, the caselaw and statutes are already simple to look up. Just teach the thing to use WestLaw.
So I do expect them to solve that particular class of hallucinations pretty handily, even if it will still completely fudge its outputs when it doesn't have an easy way to check.
OliveTapenade
23hr ago
That's what they've been doing with 'sovereignty never ceded', they've been treating it like a slogan for people to say and feel good about.
My lasting frustration with 'sovereignty' dialogue in Australia has been the steadfast refusal of the indigenous lobby to ever define exactly what it is, or what they think it means. These examples are pretty representative - there's a lot of waffle about a spiritual connection to land but it is not remotely clear what that means in practical terms, or what it is that they think they need but do not have. If sovereignty is a spiritual sense of oneness with the land, in what sense do they currently lack it? What do they think other people need to do in order for them to practice it? Or is the idea, sometimes hinted at but rarely expressed, that Aboriginal people are a different nation to Australia? If so, would some sort of secession movement be the result? The establishment of a new and independent nation on the Australian continent, alongside the Commonwealth of Australia? It doesn't seem like anybody wants that, if only because any such nation would be desperately poor and would survive only insofar as the Commonwealth props it up with foreign aid.
It just doesn't seem to mean anything. It's a slogan - 'sovereignty' is a word that people say, but there's no shared understanding, and it feels to me like a set of goalposts designed to be moved.
I don't go so far as assuming there's an intentionally nefarious conspiracy here or anything, but the indigenous lobby definitely has a lot of ambiguity in what it preaches.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
23hr ago
In what way was Hamas' action incompetent or harmful for Iran?
2D3D
23hr ago
Why wait for Iran? Pakistan has nuclear devices available for sale to destroy the Zionists.The same problem for the Iranians would exist for the Pakistanis: how do you trust that Jihadi Jamal really is able to execute his plan to bomb Tel Aviv and is not compromised or incompetent. Russia could have sold any of its nuclear devices as well, but that runs into the additional problem of getting the cash into a usable form.
No nation outsources strategic capability to external actors, and Irans employment of such a strategy for the Axis of Resistance showed how hollow such a strategy ends up being. Lack of direct oversight saw Hamas pulling the trigger on bad assumptions and Hezbollah getting thoroughly compromised. Whether Iranian direct control would have been better is unknown, but if the benefit of strategic ambiguity is wasting money on incompetent stooges then the decision maker needs to be put on performance review ASAP.
YE_GUILTY
23hr ago
But it's a way of seeding the idea that the government isn't actually in control for further usage later on. If you say it and repeat it enough, it becomes true.
Yep, I've never trusted "land acknowledgements" for this reason. They're the camel's nose under the tent. Even the semi-skeptical retort of "ha ha, a land acknowledgment without any concessions is just boasting of conquest" is part of the plan: "so you admit the land is theirs, and yet you don't do anything about it? Well, we've got a few ideas..." Not extending all the way towards handing over full rulership to those with the appropriate ancestry (yet, at least - so long as that tension exists, there's still energy in the system) but plenty of creeping gains presently unthinkable.
IMO the census definition should be made more specific to include ADOS and ADOS alone, but "Obama, not Mamdani or Musk" is close enough.
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