domain:mattlakeman.org
pairingheap
5m ago
(Wait, 2rafa is a woman?)
Folamh3
1hr ago
Going just by raw numbers, in the back-and-forth of action and reaction, it really looks a lot like the Israelis are constantly escalating and the Palestinians are constantly deescalating - there is not a single instance of Palestinians killing Israelis that was not followed by Israelis killing more Palestinians, and no single instance of Israelis killing Palestinians that was not followed by Palestinians killing fewer Israelis.
This just seems like a fundamentally dishonest framing. Hamas fires dozens if not hundreds of rockets at Israel every year. These rockets are slapdash affairs with no guidance system to speak of, and the Iron Dome renders most (but not all) of them ineffective. Without the Iron Dome, it's obvious that Israel's casualties would be an order of magnitude higher at least.
Describing Hamas firing hundreds of rockets at Israel (most of which miss or are shot down before they can hurt anyone) as Palestine "de-escalating" the conflict - I mean, really? If you repeatedly shoot at someone, the fact that you're a lousy shot and/or they were wearing full body armour does nothing to exculpate you.
hydroacetylene
53m ago
Israel keeps one of America’s #1 enemies, Iran, in check. Israel provides an overwatch that prevents Hezbollah, a very anti-American power, from dominating Lebanon. The Israeli military has in the past carried out strikes on anti-American regional powers that America was no doubt very pleased with, eg against Syria.
Does this necessarily mean that Israel is worth the price tag? No, but there’s genuine geopolitics reasons to play nice with them.
PierreMenard
28m ago
The mods were just following orders. Is it really anybody's fault that no one but Nazis can seem to follow pretty simple rules?
OliveTapenade
57m ago
There are, to be fair, plenty of contexts today where you would be afraid to publicly admit to being a Zionist, even by just a minimal definition of it (i.e. thinking it's good that Israel exists and wanting it to continue existing free of attack).
PierreMenard
7m ago
There are absolutely places where being a Zionist will get you punched.
When was the last time these billionaire Zionists got punched? Anybody doxxing them like Supreme Court justices?
No, it's not as radioactive as white nationalism, but so what?
Well, then that's why you see more white nationalism-adjacent discourse on the Motte than zionist content.
People who want to defend Israel's right to ethnic cleansing can just do so on TV panels, government offices, billionaire whatsapp groups, Fox News ads, SuperBowl ads, etc...
Meanwhile Tom Cotton has the audacity to suggest that perhaps the violence in American cities should be contained and everybody freaks out.
A few days later, The New York Times published an opinion piece by Cotton titled "Send in the Troops", arguing for the deployment of federal troops to counter looting and rioting in major American cities. Dozens of Times staff members sharply criticized the decision to publish Cotton's article, calling its rhetoric dangerous.[89][90] Following the negative response from staffers, the Times responded by saying the piece went through a "rushed editorial process" that would be reexamined.[91] Editorial page editor James Bennet resigned days later.
OliveTapenade
8m ago
What surprised me most in the reaction was this amusing line:
Butker’s statement explicitly argues that there’s a correct way to be Catholic, even though in reality, most Catholics are supportive of abortion and LGBTQ rights.
Well... yes.
Yes, there's a correct way to be Catholic. It involves believing and acting in accordance with Catholic teaching, which is very clear on some of those subjects.
How is that controversial?
OliveTapenade
15m ago
There are absolutely places where being a Zionist will get you punched.
No, it's not as radioactive as white nationalism, but so what? There's plenty of room for Zionism to be unpopular and provocative and something that might make Jews afraid without it being exactly as bad as the worst thing in modern politics.
The fact that Zionism is not yet as universally loathed as Nazism (though, again, there are certainly crowds people who think it ought to be) doesn't seem to prove anything, to me. Unless you're asserting that it should be?
You're also equivocating a bit between 'Jews' and 'Zionists', so I suppose I'll ask directly. Do you think that Jews should get punched just for being Jews? Or Zionists just for being Zionists?
(And to pre-empt any attempt to turn it around, no, white nationalists or neo-Nazis should not be punched either.)
It seems to me that by any reasonable standard Zionism is quite widely and publicly hated. I mean, anecdotally I know Jews who have been taking self-defence classes and buying more home security and avoiding wearing any outward signs of Jewishness in public because they're afraid of being harassed or possibly attacked. Some of those fears are exaggerated, in my view, but they're not totally unjustified.
ChestertonsMeme
5hr ago
This could be really interesting.
- Adding political party registration as a protected class could end up changing the character of many institutions and organizations. For example, forcing universities to hire Republicans would have major long-term effects on the values of future college graduates.
- This law conflicts with the principles of freedom of association and equal protection. It'll force the issue up through the courts (no way it doesn't get an instant challenge up to the Supreme Court) and with this Court the result could be something wild like reversing Griggs v Duke entirely.
- Even if it stands, it will bring quotas to the fore as a political issue and make the public conversations more clearly about group spoils vs. overall efficiency. It adds such onerous requirements for businesses to make any useful predictions about people that there will be tons of examples of waste and inefficiency due to the law. In an accelerationist way this could be good for getting back to a more reasonable set of laws.
COVERED ALGORITHM.—The term “covered algorithm” means a computational process, including one derived from machine learning, statistics, or other data processing or artificial intelligence techniques, that makes a decision or facilitates human decision- making by using covered data, which includes determining the provision of products or services or ranking, ordering, promoting, recommending, amplifying, or similarly determining the delivery or display of information to an individual.
I wonder how that would apply to dating apps; would they now be required to design algorithms such that an Asian man, black woman, or trans woman all get equivalent number of matches to their privileged counterparts? Or is that not discrimination?
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
42m ago
Sloot
51m ago
Yeah… although I’m sure there’s a non-zero amount of men into the BBW or feeder fetish, most of men claiming they’re into “thicc” girls is just euphemistic cope for them being unable to pull slim chicks.
No_one
7hr 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).
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
4hr ago
Yes, but the lower courts could just ignore that. Maybe in another 10 years the Supreme Court will finally take a case and issue a wishy-washy decision that the lower courts could then ignore again.
2rafa
5hr ago
I mean, technically ‘white people’ are already a ‘protected class’ under the law as a racial group, and states like California make political ideology a protected status too (which is seemingly why Damore was able to negotiate a nice settlement with Google). What is more relevant is practice; since almost all major white collar economic activity occurs in deep blue states and cities, activist progressive judges and district attorneys can always selectively apply these laws to favored groups. It’s very rare for criminals who attack whites to be charged with racially aggravated offenses.
zoink
8hr ago
Butker seems to be almost perfect. I assume the media is desperately searching, so he's likely been faithful to his wife and probably hasn't said "nigger" within recording distance. As Nybbler points out, he's got literally a gigachad look. It might be cooler if he were a tight end, but he's arguably one of the best kickers in the game with three Super Bowls. He's not perfectly articulate, but articulate enough, and his speech avoided some of the pitfalls conservatives love to jump into. It was very digestible if anyone wanted to watch the whole thing and more coherent than Margery Taylor Greene or Trump can be. It also helps that he kept things straight Catholic; going all in against Catholicism is attacking a lot of Latinos.
Conservatives should spend a lot of time figuring out the things he got right.
PierreMenard
1hr ago
Mainly at the level where I think, boy, it'd be really nice to read the Motte without the same two or three people every time yelling about the Jews.
I agree with you! I can't wait for anti-sionism to be so mainstream that Jews are afraid to publish their pro-Israel opinions and have to get together on obscure pseudonymous message boards to dare express that 'perhaps Jews have a right to self-determination'.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
1hr ago
I believe the scotus size was set by statute, meaning that the house is required to consent to an expansion of the court size. If only the senate and president had to conspire to add additional justices, I figure it would have happened already.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
10hr ago
I've been reading a lot about this conflict, and the history of Israel and Palestine. I've read books by Israeli historians and by Palestinian historians and by American historians and journalists. I've followed pro-Israeli channels and pro-Palestinian channels. I've also spoken to no small number of Arabs (since I am studying Arabic).
It's messy and complicated all around. What strikes me in every narrative is that most of them tell a more-or-less accurate version of known historical events, but always leaving out a few bits that make their side look less noble and less like the victim. The Israelis talk endlessly about how five Arab nations declared war on them the day after they declared independence, and they offered full citizenship rights to those Palestinians who stayed instead of fleeing (in the expectation that the Jews would soon be exterminated and they could return home). They don't talk about how there were explicit plans to remove even peaceful Palestinians and some of those expulsions were performed under presumed military necessity and with the full foreknowledge that they were uprooting locals from their land. They don't talk about some of the outright terrorist actions of their predecessors, and some of the atrocities that Israelis committed. (It was war, the Israeli army mostly conducted itself in a modern, disciplined fashion, but there were some civilian massacres, and other war crimes. The Israelis will retort that the Arabs did far more and far worse, which is probably true but doesn't make what they did not happen.)
The Palestinians talk endlessly about the Nakba and how 750,000 Palestinians were forced off their land. They don't talk about the fact that yes, many of them did explicitly leave so the Arab armies could exterminate the Jews, and thus they obtained the fate of a people who lost a war they started.
Dig into that event, and then you have to dig deeper - why did the Jews arrive in the first place, who was behind it, did they acquire land legally or did they forcefully occupy it? (They mostly acquired the land legally by purchase, prior to 1948, but Palestinians will then retort, accurately, that the Jews often bought the land from wealthy absentee Turkish (former Ottoman) landlords and then expelled the villagers who'd been living on that land for generations.) Was the Zionist movement an organic Jewish nationalist movement or was it a "Colonialist-Settler project" by Europeans whose motivation was essentially to get Jews out of Europe? (Answer: a little of all this and more.)
"It's complicated." People who want a clear right-and-wrong narrative hate that phrase, but it is. Move forward into all the many failed peace processes; Israelis claim Palestinians have been handed opportunities for peace over and over and rejected them. Palestinians claim all those peace offers were either made in bad faith or were very bad deals for the Palestinians. Who's right? A little of both. Palestinians have turned down deals that would have been objectively far better for them than what they have now, or have ever had. These agreements have also always been, at best, offers of divided rump territories with very little chance to ever develop into real countries. Many Palestinians feel that the offers themselves are fundamentally illegitimate because Palestine was stolen from them and only full restoration can make things right again. Regardless of whether you think this is a morally correct argument, it unfortunately carries the logical conclusion that there is literally no peace agreement they will accept that allows Israel to continue to exist. No matter how convincingly you argue that your people and your ancestors were screwed over and robbed and are entitled to reparations, if it ends with "... and therefore Israel must cease to exist," it's just a non-starter. But Palestinians (and many of their supporters), either out of stubbornness, or a belief that somehow either Hamas and Iran will actually succeed in destroying Israel, or else Israelis will somehow all be persuaded that they must dissolve the nation-state of Israel, persist.
You basically have three options: one state, two state, no state. The latter ("no state") is basically one side exterminates the other. Israelis are being accused of trying to do this now. I don't really think that's true, but certainly some elements of Israeli society and the government would not mind literally wiping out the Palestinians if they thought they could get away with it. Hamas is pretty explicit about wanting to eradicate Israel. Some of their more savvy apologists will say no, they just don't want Israel to exist "in its current form." Usually, if you pin them down, what they propose is something like the "one state" solution, where "From the river to the sea," the entire country becomes a multi-ethnic non-Jewish state with Jews and Arabs having full equal citizenship rights. Essentially, merge Israel and Palestine into one country. In theory, doesn't sound like a terrible idea (as long as you're not a Jew who is invested in a Jewish nation state), but it just sort of assumes that at that point, all the Palestinian Arabs (who outnumber the Jews considerably), who for generations have been openly calling for the literal extermination of all Israelis and claiming that every last Israeli is living on stolen land that must be given back, will say "Okay, we're cool now, you can live here with us. Let's all build a progressive multicultural society together." Let's just say I cannot blame the Israelis for considering that a non-starter.
That leaves the two state solution, which was fraught and unlikely before October 7 and pretty much impossible now, at least for a generation or two. The various schemes to apportion land to a new Palestinian nation have always struggled with Palestine being divided between Gaza and the West Bank - obviously not much of a country if you're divided between two regions with a historically hostile neighbor controlling all the land and travel between them. Also there's the problem of whether the Palestinian nation gets to have its own military, and build whatever they want in the way of weapons. Israelis have pretty good reasons to say hell no to that, at least until maybe we have a generation or two of peace convincing them that any new Palestinian army will not promptly start lobbing rockets and artillery shells at them. So the Palestinians argue (with some justification) that every offer they've been given has been for a fragment of a country that will still for all practical purposes be a protectorate under the military control of Israel, and the Israelis argue (with some justification) that the Palestinians have to prove they aren't going to keep trying to kill Israelis before they can have more.
Bringing us to today. Most people in the West are more sympathetic to the overall perspective of the Israelis, because we can see that yes, historically the Arabs really have been trying to kill them for decades now, and the Israelis have made at least some attempts to ease up on the Palestinians and let them try to build a society, and every such easing up has resulted in more suicide bombings or October 7. Leftists say, well, the Palestinians are an oppressed people, they are entitled to armed resistance. I always try to get them to say the unspoken part, to reveal their power level (just like I do with our friend @SecureSignals): okay, what is the end goal? Tell me what you really, really want to happen if you "win"? Most leftists won't come out and say "I want Israel to be destroyed." Some of them will give some sort of pie-in-the-sky one state answer, like above. But the reality is that the literal destruction of Israel is the only real "win condition" for them.
For those people like you (@4bpp) who I assume does not actually want the destruction of Israel, what do you see as a solution? Besides just "Stop the bombing now," which I can sympathize with, but let's say Israel stops the war in Gaza today and withdraws, and promptly allows unlimited international support in to rebuild. What happens next? What I think happens next is that Hamas grabs as much of that as they can and plans the next October 7, which will happen sooner rather than later. As much as I would like to see Gazan civilians not being bombed (and I do not care if "80% of them support Hamas," which is a frequent justification for why, essentially, we should not feel bad about them being slaughtered), I can understand why Israelis are not willing to accept a stopping point that just returns to the status quo and another October 7.
The more peaceful leftists will then say "They should cease fire now and then negotiate a real peace that gives Palestinians a real state so there is no need for Hamas etc etc etc." Okay, great idea. Everyone's been trying to do that for decades. See above.
So, simply saying "The Palestinians have a clear moral case," even if you're right, does not solve the current problem. Unless you are willing to bite the bullet and say "Yes, actually, I think Israel needs to cease to exist." Followed by either how you think peaceful coexistence between former Israelis and Palestinians will be accomplished, or your plan for forcibly resettling all the Israelis to another continent. Some would at this point show their power level and say "Yeah, actually, just let them slaughter all the Jews, they have it coming." But that would make the Palestinians' clear moral case a little less clear.
PierreMenard
30m ago
A strange backwards situation in which the feeble try to tell the mighty what is allowed.
Interestingly, when one considers the relationship between the US and Israel, a straightforward interpretation is that the mighty would be the US.
Yet who is telling who what is allowed? Whose billionaires are broadcasting Superbowl ads and emptying their government's coffers to fight whose wars?
Was mid-century Germany justified in telling the feebler Eastern-European countries how to treat their civilians?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
57m ago
Palestinian casualties have always far exceeded Israeli ones
It’s not for lack of trying, though.
Hamas appears to be limited more by Israeli tech and funding advantages than by its own morality. Israel…it’s less clear. I would argue they are operating further from their maximum capability than Hamas. Whether that’s due to conscience or to realpolitik, I’d still call it “restraint.”
Or to put it another way: if Hamas wanted to cause more casualties among Israeli civilians, what would it do differently? Because I get the impression it’s taking all the opportunities it can. The scarcity of such opportunities, and the horrific penalties it pays in return, doesn’t excuse much.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
The CMRI are fringe nut jobs who bought holy orders from the mafia and consider other tradCaths apostates.
quiet_NaN
4hr ago
If you are continuously denied justice in an existential matter, though, I don't think it's at all an alien viewpoint that you are morally entitled to do whatever you find appropriate to seize justice for yourself, including ineffectual and vile acts of revenge such as murdering the women and children of those who wronged you. To claim otherwise, to me, seems to amount to claiming that you can be absolved for arbitrary wrongs if you just amass enough power to make effective resistance impossible, and I don't like that even before we start taking into the account that the targets of Hamas terror were intended and more often than not happy beneficiaries of the original wrongs committed.
Our moral intuitions differ on this a lot. I am not per se against actions whose only purpose is to depress the enemies utility function. If the only move you have is to break into Hitler's villa and destroy all his paintings just to piss him off, I will not hold it against you if you do that.
But when you target third parties such as civilians, reality is typically more complex than that, because they are not only terms in the utility function of the enemy, but also of other's utility functions, such as their own or mine.
In my mind, there is a ton of difference between accepting some collateral damage and intentionally targeting civilians. If Hamas targeted IDF bases with their rockets but accepted the possibility that they might miss and blow up a school instead, or if the IDF decides to blow up 50 people to get one Hamas commander, that can still be viewed as evil because it assigns so little utility to the civilians, but it is very different from expressing a preference for killing civilians, as Hamas did on Oct 7.
If Hamas had targeted shot IDF personnel without offering surrender, I would not have liked this either, but I would also have recognized that there was some military utility to their action.
Instead, they elected to go after civilians. Intentionally. As I have written elsewhere:
Hamas leadership know that they their organization will never defeat Israel militarily. Their best chance to achieving their dream of wiping Israel from the map is a broad alliance of Arab countries who defeat Israel together. The way they get there is public Muslim outrage at Israel. And the best way to generate such outrage is dead Palestinian kids. In my opinion, their attacks were militarily completely pointless, but served the important strategic goal of getting Israel to bomb Gaza down. This will likely throw a wrench into Israel's diplomatic efforts to normalize relations with its Arab neighbors.
In short, the Gazan war is not an acceptable price for Hamas to pay for their day of impotent vengeance on Oct 7, but the motivation for Oct 7 was to get Bibi to blow up a lot of Gazan kids.
I firmly believe that an organization acting like this should be wiped from the face of the earth.
On a broader scale, the problem with the Palestinians is that they don't know how to lose.
Wikipedia has this helpful list. The overall effect is reminiscent of that black knight scene in Monty python: "You have destroyed our ability to fight you in the open? No matter, we can still do suicide bombings. You have walled in Gaza? No matter, we can still fire rockets".
Israel is evidently not incompatible with continued Palestinian existence, so absent a road to victory, resisting them seems counter-productive.
Sometimes it is better to accept accept a peace which feels unjust than fight on forever. When the Alsace became French in 1945 again, a lot of the German-speaking people living there were probably not happy about it. But somehow, the proud tradition of fighting a war every few decades about that region was never revived. It surely helped that nationalist fervor was depleted a bit on the German side after the Nazis, but I still consider this an outcome vastly better for everyone than the alternatives.
"They're both justified to continue murdering each other"
From where I stand, this seems a totally bizarre statement. If two sides fight about a thing, then whatever metric you use to decide who is right and what you would consider a fair distribution of the land or whatever, the rightfulness of all sides summed up has to be less than unity. Only if you optimized for conflict instead of post-conflict outcomes could you prefer both sides to fight each other.
In summary, I am not pro-Bibi, but I am really anti-Hamas. After Oct 7, Hamas needs to be crushed, and as Biden has not volunteered, it falls to the IDF to do the job. I don't think that the way the IDF wages this war is actually all that great, and I am very concerned that nobody has a plan to offer the Gazans a credible alternative. I also think that Israel should destroy the Israeli settlements on the West Bank and arrest the settlers who destroyed that Gazan aid convoy on charges of attempted murder.
Yes, prior to Vatican II and especially prior to 1900 or so, the traditional Catholic position was basically that the state should formally endorse the Catholic Church, obey directives from the Vatican, and tolerate other religious positions either provisionally or not at all. Integralism is, broadly speaking, the traditional Roman position. If you ever get interested in the last two centuries of Spanish, French, or Italian history you will notice this causing a great deal of trouble. It's also responsible for a lot of traditional American (and Anglo in generally) anti-Catholicism. Taken seriously, it is the position that leads to drama like this.
However, Catholics, partly because of how extreme this position seems today, have largely been running away from it in the West, or have been looking for ways to reconcile Catholicism with American liberal values. Some have been more or less successful with this.
But anyway, if you dig into the European history a bit, 'discriminated against' is underselling it. This is/was a position that causes civil wars.
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