domain:aerosociety.com
sliders1234
2m ago
Since when is allowing Israel to crush the Palestinians against the principles of the west? Last time I checked the west has long been a colonizing power. I am not going to accept that because some academist and leftist are against it that the west is anti-colonialism. I’m very pro-colonialism and believe that fits with the deep roots of the west.
I think western values are perfectly in-line with full eviction of Palestinians from the region which is my preferred path at this point. There is no reason we should keep fighting this war and we should end it for all time.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
4m ago
How did America get to a point of total Catholic domination?
To me it seems very simple.
Conservatism in America is deeply connected to religious conservatives, especially Christians. Of those, excepting very small groups like Orthodox Jews, Orthodox Christians, and Anabaptists, you have essentially three subgroups: confessional Protestants, evangelical Protestants, and Roman Catholics.
Confessional Protestants are often very engaged in ideas (they love their long confessions full of them, of course), but they're, relatively speaking, a rather small group, even compared to the shrinking mainline Protestants with whom they have a shared history. Think the Presbyterian Church in America (not Presbyterian Church U.S.A.), the Lutheran Missouri and Wisconsin synods (not the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America), and perhaps even the Anglican Church in North America (not the Episcopal Church). I'm not from the region of the country where this form of Christianity is very large, so I can't speak to their absolute numbers, but they're relatively small as far as I understand.
I have ancestors who were members of these churches, but in my family, which is pretty standard for the religious right, evangelical Protestantism predominates. Baptists, Pentecostals, and non-denominational Christians (who I consider, from personal experience, Baptists-in-denial) make up a majority of conservative Protestants in the United States.
So what is there to say about evangelical Protestants? Well, I'm very fond of them. They're a large part of my family. But they also -- and I say this just to be brutally honest -- have a very poor track record when it comes to fostering a culture that values higher education or elite status-seeking. They have much in common, I think, with the pietist movements of magisterial Protestantism, which stress direct experience of God and simplicity in faith, rather than scholasticism, education, and learning. Put more bluntly, their cultural and biological ancestors are mostly the Borderers (Scots-Irish), who never valued education and were associated with anything but book learning.
Today, you look at Pew Research's table of educational attainment by religious affiliation, and you find evangelical groups like Baptists and Pentecostals filling up the bottom. This is simply not a group that produces Supreme Court justices, who are universally elite and educated persons.
This leaves, of course, Roman Catholics. Catholicism has a long and storied history of higher learning, being associated with many of the major historical universities of Western Europe. It also has a strong focus, at least among conservative and traditionalist Catholics, on deep knowledge of faith and resistance to common patterns of behavior. It has institutes of higher education in the United States, like Notre Dame (which another poster discussed), which are considered elite enough to possibly matriculate a future federal judge. And, as others have pointed out, Catholicism has a long history of legal scholarship and a rigorous tradition of religious law that makes legal interpretation a rather natural choice for a smart Catholic to study.
While as a whole, Catholics are middling in their education attainment, this is largely determined by the large numbers of Latino immigrants. Native-born, white Catholics (if I understand correctly), have rather high educational attainment, even if most are liberal or lapsed Catholics. But those who remain in a conservative understanding of their faith -- like Harrison Butker noted above, often have a well-developed and intellectual understanding of their religion and a desire to put it into practice in broader society. This is the right combination to produce elite jurists.
You could of course ask, what about non-religious conservatives? And I would simply respond: "who?" While I have a great deal of affinity for right-wing atheists and know some, this is not a large group by any stretch of imagination. I am inclined to believe there are more Jews keeping the strictest interpretation of Torah in the United States than there are atheists who would even consider voting for a Republican.
So, if Republicans are going to appoint justices to the Supreme Court, and they've gotten to do that quite a lot lately, they've got to be Catholics. It's the only group in the United States that produces large enough numbers of educated, elite, status-seeking, but traditional and conservative, people.
It also helps, of course, that a large ethnic minority in the United States are Latinos who are often Catholic, which means that Democrats also have a reason to appoint certain kinds of Catholics to the Court, as they did with Sotomayor. It's notable also that the one clear, life-long Protestant on the Court is Ketanji Brown Jackson, who identifies as a non-denominational Protestant but doesn't seem to have a strong connection to her faith. There are, as far as I'm concerned, no committed evangelical Protestants on the Court, and plausibly there have never been.
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
6m ago
Krystal Ball
Her name always makes my mouth curl into a slight smile whenever I see it. I mean, the memetic potential of it is next level and were I her I'd be leaning into it a lot more e.g.:
The Virgin Cassandra vs the Chad KRYSTAL BALL...
jkf
7m ago
Absolutely! Ban everyone (other than the Nazi-hobbyists with the time on their hands to couch their points in interminable gish-gallops) and you will not have anymore inflammatory comments to deal with! (tappinghead.gif)
Keep up the good work guys.
2D3D
10m ago
Sure. I still don't exactly see the French agitating for the return of Algiers or the Poles demanding Lviv (despite Moscows rhetoric). Irredentism is temporary to living memory, and the more who die the less who remember.
TIRM
11m ago
There's this thing where a few European countries sign a treaty, let's say agreeing not to use cluster bombs (not that they have any or were going to start using them), and then declare that the US and Israel are violating international law. High minded talk about rules based international order, etc, which seems to me to be a few countries making up rules America never agreed to and then trying to impose them onto us. A strange backwards situation in which the feeble try to tell the mighty what is allowed. At this point I roll my eyes when I see claims that America or Israel is violating international law.
So yes: I don't much believe in a rules based international order and I especially don't believe in one imposed onto us by some European countries.
I know I'm coming in hot on this one, but it is such bullshit. The Hague Invasion Act is the correct expression of our contempt.
2D3D
11m ago
The egyptians and jordanians established relations to let things thaw out. The PLO kind of did in 1993, but the second intifada in 2000 killed the momentum for peace and the Fatah-Hamas war buried it concretely. @Dean mentioned that a unilateral withdrawal by Israel from Gaza resulted in renewed hostilities from an unrestrainrd Hamas, and it is on the Palestinians to show that they aren't interested in stabbing the outstretched hand before the Israelis remove their gauntlet.
TracingWoodgrains
18m ago
Nah. So far as I’m aware it would have been prohibitively difficult to doxx me given the paucity of info about me online. I didn’t work too hard to hide my identity, all things considered, but no potential doxx was anywhere near my radar.
TracingWoodgrains
19m ago
I appreciate the kind words. Looking forward to much more similar work moving forward.
2D3D
22m ago
Ideologically motivated historians have unearthed Azzam Pashas genocidal statements, Khaled Azm (president of Syria in 1949) said that the Arabs themselves exhorted the Palestinians to leave first, the Jordanian papers blamed Arab generals for making such declarations... all this evidence is dismissed by postmodernists because it is 'manipulated', with only Plan D (why D instead of earlier plans) being proof of the evil of Israel. I think it is far more likely that people panicked and left of their own volition in the face of an advancing enemy, like what is happening to Ukrainians and Masalit, than it is a deliberate strategy crafted by the adversary. A coincidental benefit, but hardly any more deliberate in intent compared to the more pressing objective of killing armed combatants.
Crowstep
26m ago
The only two anorexics I ever knew in real life were my grandmother in her final years and a boy I went to school with. The meme when I was growing up was that teenage girls caught anorexia from reading fashion magazines. It jarred so much with my own experience that I always figured there must be more to to disease than 'I wanna be skinny so boys will like me'.
SSCReader
37m ago
Sure, declasse perhaps. But that is because we give special dispensations to kids and historically to women, though these have been eroding. But legally, if you were struck first by a woman then she assaulted you.
But none of these apply to nations anyway. The UK didn't have to allow Argentina to invade just because their GDP was less. We don't really have the concept of child countries where they are not accountable.
2D3D
38m ago
Of all the arguments against Israel, the most 'sympathetic' one is 'let these fools fight why are my tax dollars going there'. I will ignore the fact that those tax dollars unspent on LockMart USA will not result in tax breaks following and simply focus on the presumed moral culpability of supplying Israel with weapons, as if the 1040 declares that '5 bucks here killed little Aisha, this is your fault'.
The specific reason this argument falls slightly short is that Israel has this thing called an economy, and plenty of means to build its own weapons and buy from others. The first suppliers of Israeli arms were communist Czechs, and literally anyone who sold weapons found Israel a willing buyer. American involvement in Israeli arms exports is more a function of balancing Saudi and even modern Iraqi interests: a fully unrestrained Israel is far more dangerous to the region than one which is constrained by a paltry few billion in aid. General Dynamic is the preferred supplier for Israeli munitions now, but Hanhwa and even Roketsan is in the background ready to backstop inventories at a moments notice, much less entities farther afield like Avibras and even Norinco. US aid to Israel is ultimately a state department containment operation, not an AIPAC invention.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
44m ago
I'm not sure that anyone is denying that such Telegram groups exist here. However, the history is full of examples of states in struggle against each other fomenting literally genocidal levels of fury aimed at each other turn, only for all of that to be turned to a much cooler variant of mutual distaste or even eventual careful friendship once a peace has been achieved and been in force for some years. Israel supporters tend to treat it as obvious that that couldn't happen with Palestine, that even a mere suggestion that it could happen is some sort of a gross form of la-la-land naivete, even though Israel and Jordan - the "state of Palestine that already exists", according to Zionists - are close enough currently for Jordanians to shoot down drones aimed at Israel.
yunyun333
45m ago
morris's view is basically the same as yours - Both sides did awful things, which is what happens in wars. The Arabs were the losing side and my view is that if people commit major mistakes in history they pay for them and perhaps that’s how it should work out. The Palestinians should have agreed to a two-state solution.
jkf
46m ago
If a weaker person punches you as hard as they can and you deck them as hard as you can in return and break their jaw, then you didn't escalate, you just retaliated proportionally.
If you are a bodybuilder, and a woman/child punches you as hard as they can, breaking her jaw would be declasse, to say the least.
yunyun333
47m ago
i don't know what postmodernism has to do with this. it seems entirely possible to determine what in fact happened in 1948, whether arabs left because arab leadership told them to leave, or because they were afraid of being massacred, or because they were forcefully expelled by jewish soldiers, or for any other reason. motivations are more nebulous but you can look into official idf documents (plan D) and what leaders such as ben gurion wrote.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
49m ago
Eh, the Arab expulsion of jews from the greater middle east and the Algerian civil war don't elide much irredentism.
Why would it? It was basically a jackpot for the Zionist movement, insofar as getting the settlement of Israel properly going went.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
49m ago
The Persians did, in fact, ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ in the Battle of Thermopylae.
No_one
49m ago
https://reason.com/volokh/2024/05/15/congress-is-preparing-to-restore-quotas-in-college-admissions/
Apparently, there's a new privacy bill in congress, with a maximally bad attachment to it, and quite likely to pass. (what kind of monster would be against privacy? )
Almost all kinds of decision making (anything that involves computers seems like) are classed as an algorithm.
If your 'algorithm' causes disparate impact, it's bad and you must change it or you're open to lawsuits. Yearly review of the 'algorithm' is mandatory, first review in 2 years after bill is passed..
Covers: every bigger business (iirc 750 employees+), all social networks and...??all nonprofits using computers to process 'personal data' to submit yearly evaluations if they're not causing 'disparate impact'. Excepted: the entire finance industry, government contractors.
It also explicitly allows discrimination on the basis of a protected characteristics (race, sex etc) for the purpose of
27 (ii) diversifying an applicant, participant, or customer pool;
Here's a bigger excerpt:
Here's how it works. APRA's quota provision, section 13 of APRA, says that any entity that "knowingly develops" an algorithm for its business must evaluate that algorithm "to reduce the risk of" harm. And it defines algorithmic "harm" to include causing a "disparate impact" on the basis of "race, color, religion, national origin, sex, or disability" (plus, weirdly, "political party registration status"). APRA Sec. 13(c)(1)(B)(vi)(IV)&(V).
At bottom, it's as simple as that. If you use an algorithm for any important decision about people—to hire, promote, advertise, or otherwise allocate goods and services—you must ensure that you've reduced the risk of disparate impact.
The closer one looks, however, the worse it gets. At every turn, APRA expands the sweep of quotas. For example, APRA does not confine itself to hiring and promotion. It provides that, within two years of the bill's enactment, institutions must reduce any disparate impact the algorithm causes in access to housing, education, employment, healthcare, insurance, or credit.
No one escapes. The quota mandate covers practically every business and nonprofit in the country, other than financial institutions. APRA sec. 2(10). And its regulatory sweep is not limited, as you might think, to sophisticated and mysterious artificial intelligence algorithms. A "covered algorithm" is broadly defined as any computational process that helps humans make a decision about providing goods or services or information. APRA, Section 2 (8). It covers everything from a ground-breaking AI model to an aging Chromebook running a spreadsheet. In order to call this a privacy provision, APRA says that a covered algorithm must process personal data, but that means pretty much every form of personal data that isn't deidentified, with the exception of employee data. APRA, Section 2 (9).
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
50m ago
No one says this immediately today. The question is what is the statute of limitations on historical land grievances? We discourage conquest and colonization today, but we cannot roll back or atone for every conquest that ever happened.
(This is why I find the Israelis' argument that Israel was "theirs" 2000 years ago to be completely irrelevant.)
Sloot
50m ago
It cracks me up how chicks nowadays just instinctively turn to tilt their ass at the camera when one comes out.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
53m ago
How do you say "ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ" in modern Hebrew? The Arabs have tried that before; it did not go well for them.
2D3D
54m ago
Eh, the Arab expulsion of jews from the greater middle east and the Algerian civil war don't elide much irredentism. If the Arabs got good enough to unify and crush every jew, pearls may be clutched for a day, then it'll be forgotten. No one cared about the Armenians, no one cares about the Rohingya and Masalit, and no one will care about the Hazara Kurds or Uighur. If the Arabs git gud enough to kill every jew, we won't care either after the requisite pearl clutching.
Legally, sure (well, maybe -- I think that guy who stabbed the kids attacking him in the river went down for murder) -- but everyone will think you are an asshole and be on the lookout for anything else they can pin on you. Which is kind of what's going on with the (less-extreme) anti-Israel sentiment ATM.
Again, legally correct -- international law (as Dean points out over and over again) is not really a thing.
But countries that behave in such a way as to turn international sentiment in the direction of "they are kind of assholes all the time, hey" will (may) eventually suffer consequences from that.
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