domain:npr.org
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
6m ago
it would be like if Edison had created the light bulb and physicists had only discovered electricity afterwards to figure out how it works
To be fair it's not like that kind of stuff never happens. A lot of the history of semi-conductors is engineers trying various random things intuitively to get a particular defined effect and only explaining why that worked after the fact.
Astranagant
18m ago
What I'm confused about: why is this a story at all? Presumably, the main effects of this are to make him unemployable and perhaps cause some interpersonal issues.
It's a story pour encourager les autres, of course.
I think what gets me is that there's simultaneously an appropriation of victimhood (evil bad guy publishes anonymous essay causing evilness!) combined with an inquisitorial zeal to punish, and apparently the power to do exactly that.
This has always been the case, and is nothing new. The establishment has now styled itself as a revolution against its victims. People who call themselves "punks" enthusiastically sign up to the same stifling speech rules as every HR department in every multinational megacorporation in the western world and excoriate others who deviate.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
22m ago
why is this a story at all?
Why was Scott's identity a story at all? Why was Beff Jezos'?
Dissident not only exists but has the impudence of publishing dissident litterature gets published because he is now a known quantity to networks of activists that will attempt to make his life and that of his friends hell if tries to get a hold of any power. It's a signal to friends that enemies exist in this particular place and must be destroyed, nothing more.
At best it sounds a little bit absurd because the power of those activists has recently diminished and they're no longer able to cancel people at will, so this type of "Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?" publications are thankfully impotent complaints.
There is no larger story, no bigger picture, just journalists throwing mud at people they find contemptuous, as is, disgustingly, their job.
SteveKirk
26m ago
Are you doing this to get in front of a hostile doxxing from a certain notoriously vindictive group you've upset?
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
3m ago
Don't most of these still require exotic matter? Trading breaking conservation of momentum for negative mass never really sounded to me like a gain in credibility.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
17m ago
It is a bit funny how the US is now on the same side of this issue as Russia.
What was the diplomatic position of the United States about the ICC charging Vladimir Putin?
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
11m ago
Based on the steady torrent of Israel-Palestine threads, the general impression I get is that a majority of people here is quite solidly pro-Israel in this conflict. I would like to understand the pro-Israel position better; in particular, I wonder if there are arguments for the Israeli position in the current war that don't mostly rest on one of the following:
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An arbitrary cutoff of historical reckoning either shortly before the most recent Hamas attack, or else somewhere in the early '90s following the general Western mode of thinking about other geopolitical conflicts. Unilaterally declaring all scores settled is not a persuasive or universalizable moral principle.
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Invocation of inherent superior qualities of Israeli Jews relative to Palestinians, be it intelligence, education or general "civilizedness". You would almost certainly either need to cut out a very contrived set of conditions to make the principle only apply to this case, or accept some hypothetical corollary you probably don't want that involves similar abuse being heaped on morally/intellectually/civilizationally inferior people that you care about or feel kinship to.
The way I see it, the moral case for Palestine is pretty clear, and unlike some seem to assume does not require you to subscribe to a lot of oppressed-are-always-right slave morality (though you do need to stop short of maximally might-makes-right master morality). The present ruling population of Israel mostly moved to that territory in the late '40s, and from the start has continued violently expelling the ancestors of present Palestinians from their homes to acquire their land for themselves. I do not think that Palestinians' stupidity or backwardness or whatever are so great that they can't be afforded what we otherwise consider basic human rights to property and safety, even if the people who want to take those from them for themselves were all literal Von Neumanns.
I don't think that this original wrong has been made right to the Palestinians, and the argument that some Palestinians submitted and got to live better lives under the Israelis than they would have had in an independent Palestine does not morally convince me either. If Bill Gates steals the plots some rednecks built their houses on, builds a mansion in its place and then offers them lavish jobs as domestic servants, do the ones who don't accept forfeit their right to complain about the theft? Another counterargument seems to rest on something like statute of limitations (like, the Palestinians and Israelis alive nowadays are not the ones who got robbed and their robbers), which would be more persuasive if Israeli settlements were not still expanding, and there weren't still Palestinians who are quite directly being made to suffer at the hands of the Israeli men with guns for no other reason than that they do not accept the "become Bill Gates's domestic servant" deal. It seems pretty clear to me that there is no recourse left to the Palestinians who do not want to to take this deal that preserves their human dignity - their conquerors certainly won't hear them out themselves, and they are backed by the US machine which not only could produce a personal cruise missile for every Palestinian if it put its mind to it but also has enough intellectual and propaganda firepower that they could make even the Palestinians doubt that they are themselves humans with rights.
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. (If you have been driven out of your house and into a corner at gunpoint by the mafia, the mafia boss's kid stands by watching the show and mocking you, and, seeing an opening, you shoot the kid, I will find it hard to fault you for the murder even though the kid is technically innocent of the misfortunes that befell you and this did absolutely nothing to help your situation. As a bonus, the corrupt police (my country) is then called in to arrest you, after sharing a smoke with the mafiosi.)
Though I said that the moral case for Palestine is clear, this is emphatically not to say that I rule out the possibility of a clear moral case for Israel existing at the same time. "They're both justified to continue murdering each other" is a sad reality of a lot of tribal conflict. However, in this particular case, I actually do not even see that case, or at least what I have seen seems much weaker to me, given that Israelis still have the option to leave Israel at any time as a large part of the world would welcome them with open arms (while the anti-Palestinians like reiterating that not even other Muslim countries want to take in the Palestinians, as if that helps their case), and even though in some sense they would also then be "driven from their homes" it's not like they are usually unaware of those homes' provenance.
I hinted at this with "liberal total state", but I think that this is a new environment of omnipresent state control + supposed "liberal norms" about the use of state power.
Once upon a time a feuding clan could come and kill you and the king couldn't do much about it. Sometime later the king could send his men to kill you and nobody could do much about it.
Now we're at a point where the state has almost total power to restrain or permit violence, but in theory isn't supposed to have you murdered for opposing the state. So state violence against its victims is carried out extrajudicially by a criminal underclass that is allowed to e.g. carry guns in Chicago to do drivebys without being prosecuted. Or antifa thugs in Portland and Seattle that carry around illegal rifles in public to burn police stations. Or leftist hackers allowed to DDOS opposition websites, spam them with child porn uploads, and call in threats to the host/registrar/tier1 networks.
Or, even more hilariously, gangs of IDF-backed Jewish frat boys lol.
The state uses the criminal class as a hands-off weapon of anarcho-tyranny. It's not a subtle tool, and sometimes to their shock it bites the hand that feeds it; as Marion Barry said after being beaten by home invaders who stole his drugs, "I thought they knew I'm on their side"
This is all pretty new and unexpected as far as I can tell. Everyone predicted totalitarian control through a surveillance state and the secret police, not party NGOs raising money for violent street thugs, hacking rings, and doxxing groups.
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