domain:betonit.substack.com
Jiro
9m ago
My argument is simply that America's actions re: the ICC demonstrate once again that it has no interest in submitting itself to such a system
This implies that the ICC is such a system. This is, to put it mildly, in dispute.
Throwaway05
10m ago
Hey man, like what about justice man?
I do mean this seriously however. Don't underestimate how many people on both sides are incensed due to their understanding of the facts on the ground and feel like the situation is untenable. In the case of the pro-Israel side you'll find people from all over the word who interpret events as "I have no particular interest in or affection for jews, but I see Hamas as terrorists and terrorism can't be allowed to flourish, out of either a sense of justice, or out of fear for what may later happen to me and mine if people find this valid."
You're also gesturing at precisely the "social atomisation" thing I'm describing: a few generations ago, asking out a girl with whom you have no overlap in social circles simply wasn't an option. A hundred years ago, if you lived in a town of a few thousand people and tried to ditch a girl after getting her pregnant, her father would be hammering on your front door with a shotgun before the day was out. Nowadays if you do that, she has no recourse.
I think this is also a large part of the non-stickiness of online dating relationships. You meet somebody, have a fairly good click but the thread drops or there's some light friction for whatever reason and there's essentially nil chance of randomly bumping into them again in person at a mutual friend's social event or however else people tended to get over light cases of 'the ick' historically. I, a few years ago, went through a hell of a lot of app dates and have since come out the other side with a longterm partner and a child. I still had a lot of time to formulate crotchety opinions about the dynamics in a lot of these things.
Now if somebody gets even slightly peeved at the other party, you've got one or maybe two DMs to try and rekindle things then you're dead in the water. Without even getting into the 'there is an unlimited supply of shiny new toys being served up via app' element.
Jiro
14m ago
Even the most dedicated pro-Israelis concede that Palestinian casualties have always far exceeded Israeli ones, but Israel's war is the "extremely restrained" one?
Being good at defense does not mean you're not allowed to kill the enemy. Palestinian casualties have exceeded Israeli ones because Israel's defense is good, not because they're going light on trying to kill Israelis.
Also, Israel doesn't build military bases in hospitals in order to increase its own casualties. A lot of the Palestinian casualties that "exceeded Israeli ones" are a result of deliberate Palestinian action.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
15m ago
This is true to a point. It is also true that Israel was once far larger than it is today. The Israelis captured huge swathes of land through force of arms in defensive wars, and has mostly returned that land peaceably. The Israelis left the Gazans to their own devices in 2005. The common narrative that Israel is constantly expanding is ahistorical.
I don't accept "defensive" (would you label Russia's Ukraine war thus as well? After all, Ukraine was constantly attacking Russia's acquisitions in the Donbass), and if you keep seizing x units of land and then returning x/2 of them as a "gesture of goodwill" when settling with a thoroughly defeated adversary, this doesn't register as things being a wash regarding your expansionism.
I see this logic - not that I agree with it, but I see it. What I don't see is how your logic is not fully generalizable to the Israelis. They have also been wronged by Palestinian actions. How can it be in your paradigm that Palestinians have the right to invade Israel and kill every Jew they see, but then the Israelis do not have the right to bring indiscriminate death down upon the Palestinians in retaliation? (for the record, I do not believe either of them have the right to do this, nor do I believe that Israel's response has been indiscriminate.)
As I argued in a parallel response to @RobertLiguori, I perceive an asymmetry between initating unjustified violence and retaliating to it. If the Palestinian actions that wronged the Israelis were morally just, then any given act of retaliation for them is at least significantly less just than if the prior action were not. On top of all of this, even just looking at casualty figures, the Israeli retaliation for any Palestinian action is wildly out of proportion - generally, any conflict seems to look like "Palestinians killed n Israelis; thereupon Israel killed 100n Palestinians, with another 5n Israeli soldier casualties".
While I don't think the analogy is particularly fair, I will point out that there is only one moral paradigm in which the shooter in your story is unambiguously justified, and that is blood feud. That is inherently a might-makes-right morality. The shooter will soon find out the hard way that that the Mafia have no more scruples than he when it comes to killing children.
Why are blood feuds might-makes-right, except for the trivial sense that if you don't even have the might to take a potshot at the enemy team's weakest spot then you are really left with no recourse? Either way, blood feuds seem to have been the default mode of justice for functioning human societies for the overwhelming part of human history. I understand that they are questionable from the perspective of someone living in a functioning modern state and we have found approaches to justice that work better, but all of these presume that there actually is a functioning state that is willing and able to mete out non-blood-feud justice. The whole conundrum of the Palestinians is that there isn't - nobody could judge the Israelis for driving them out of their homes, levelling their cities or killing them in the tens and hundreds of thousands. Any candidate sovereign that could force the parties into court by force of arms is making a show of looking away and whistling. In this setting, blood feuds empirically seem like the best social technology that humanity has discovered.
Forgotpassword
16m ago
As a 29 year old with primarily Zoomerish co-workers in my niche I think even 'the bar' isn't really what it was.
Alcohol's increasingly expensive in most urban areas, I think social dynamics in bars is more about 'I go to the bar with my group of friends to be somewhat near other groups' instead of as much interlocking as you'd get historically and frankly my younger co-workers just don't really drink that much.
Jiro
17m ago
"Disproportionate" does not mean "the enemy gets to kill as many of us as we do of them, or else it's disproportionate".
miras_chinotto
certified low iq
18m ago
That doesn't make much sense to me. The dancing Israelis on 9/11 are one of the most widely known conspiracy theory-esque ideas in the United States. It seems like a direct counter example to your argument.
CryptoWitch
Live From New Vegas
20m ago
Thank you, that’s helpful!
CryptoWitch
Live From New Vegas
20m ago
Of course; anything that works (beyond VSIMR or solar sails, as another commenter helpfully pointed out) requires some law-of-physics updates. But I will point out that this is exactly what is claimed.
A veteran of such storied programs as NASA’s Space Shuttle, the International Space Station (ISS), The Hubble Telescope, and the current NASA Dust Program, Buhler and his colleagues believe their discovery of a fundamental new force represents a historic breakthrough that will impact space travel for the next millennium.
“This discovery of a New Force is fundamental in that electric fields alone can generate a sustainable force onto an object and allow center-of-mass translation of said object without expelling mass.”
“There are rules that include conservation of energy, but if done correctly, one can generate forces unlike anything humankind has done before,…”
“Essentially, what we’ve discovered is that systems that contain an asymmetry in either electrostatic pressure or some kind of electrostatic divergent field can give a system of a center of mass a non-zero force component,” Buhler explained. “So, what that basically means is that there’s some underlying physics that can essentially place force on an object should those two constraints be met.”
I’m not strongly arguing for this being The Real Deal; as another commenter pointed out, put it on a satellite and prove it. Rather, my interest in this is as a thought exercise: consistent force production from electricity allows us to do all kinds of wacky stuff, up to and including interstellar travel on reasonable timeframes, pursuant to your definition of reasonable. 1G acceleration, as is claimed in this particular instance, would get us to Alpha Centauri in a little over six years; 12 years if we are slowing down at the halfway point. This is well shy of “generation ship” type speculation, and would turn intersolar travel into something feasible in a lifetime.
Now, hefty grain of salt and all that. I’m skeptical myself, and recognize this is extremely speculative. Not only are there large engineering challenges in building such a spacecraft (or proving that one of these propellantless engines can produce thrust), there are also a whole slew of known unknowns (interstellar hydrogen or small molecule impacts at an appreciable percentage of C?) and unknown unknowns.
At the same time, it also solves some problems. Consistent acceleration, likely even under 1g, removes a lot of the problems of extended stays in microgravity, and if we’re hypothesizing advanced extrasolar civilizations anyways… Then it stands to reason that we would not be the only ones who would discover such things. It would “raise the ceiling” on intrastellar travel, so to speak.
I’m happy to be able to discuss it. While my own priors are low for any individual ‘game changing technology’ coming to fruition, we do know there are yet-unexplained physics; we live in exciting days, in both the positive and negative sense, to be able to more seriously start investigating these fringes.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
25m ago
Somehow, you look precisely like I would expect a George E. Hale to look.
Corvos
26m ago
If rule 1 is "I always win" is it still a rules-based order? Legally, yes! And yet something seems wrong.
"Rule of law" or "rules-based order" is usually taken to mean an impartial system that constrains great and small alike. My argument is simply that America's actions re: the ICC demonstrate once again that it has no interest in submitting itself to such a system and that the only system of rules that America is interested in is one where it gets to make the rules. I do not think that this is stable long term.
JulianRota
29m ago
This largely tracks with my understanding of the history of the region (plus a few new details), except:
Israel surprisingly wins the war and takes lands beyond even the 1947 proposed borders, many Arabs are expelled at this point and this is what is referred to as the Nakba.
My understanding was that the Arabs largely left voluntarily upon request by the surrounding Arab nations, who expected to wreak total destruction on those pesky so-called Israelis (in their opinion), and didn't want them to be in the crossfire. Possibly there was some small-scale local hostility and encouragement, but not anything that could be called a proper expulsion.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
33m ago
Then unless you fall into your own bullet one above, you've got your justification not just for Israel's extremely restrained and humane war, but for actual full-on retaliation.
This description of the war does not match with my perception of reality, either based on casualty figures or the pictures that I see. Even the most dedicated pro-Israelis concede that Palestinian casualties have always far exceeded Israeli ones, but Israel's war is the "extremely restrained" one?
Either way, I think there is a basic asymmetry between unjustified violence and retaliation. If person A chops off person B's arm and everyone else around looks away and says that A is in their right to do that, then B has been wronged. If B then chops A's arm off in retaliation, B was justified in doing so. If A chops B's other arm off in retaliation for that, this is not justified, because justified violence does not beget a similar right to retaliation.
There is no ethical principle other than "Whites bad" (or other general Who, Whom?) that condemns Israel while not condemning not just the Palestinians, but the vast majority of the Arab countries for their historic displacements and exterminations of Christians and Jews.
Please exercise the minimum of good faith to grant me that I am not approaching this from an ethnic perspective. I don't see where Christians come into this, but historical wrongs committed by Arabs against Jews seem like a better candidate for something that would justify the actions around Israel's establishment. This is an area where I have to admit relative ignorance, but my sense was that the scattering of the Jews of the Levant was largely at the hand of "Western" powers, starting with the Roman empire, and that actually Arab suzerains treated them better throughout history than the crusaders that would occasionally insinuate themselves into the region; and either way, any hostilities experienced by remnant resident Jewish population were out of proportion with the injustices visited upon the resident Arabs by the invading European Israelis. Because of the disconnect between the principal agents of Jews' displacement to Europe (the Romans) and the current "targets of retaliation" (the Arabs), who moved into the post-Roman vacuum much later, I find it hard to accept that the latter would have any moral culpability for what the Jews suffered in the European diaspora.
As a calibration question, I'm curious what you think of the Allies's campaign in WWII. Do you sympathize with the modern Neo-Nazi arguments that the firebombing of Dresden was an abomination, that the mass destruction of civilian life is never justified, and thus Nazi resistance to Allied occupation was justified then and justified now? Were the lives of the German civilians that died in Dresden precious enough that the war effort should have been forestalled?
No, not particularly, because as I said above there is an asymmetry between first-mover violence and retaliation. Since I don't accept the Nazi argument that starting WWII was proportionate retaliation for Versailles, they are the ones who moved first, with the civilian population as both an intended beneficiary and enthusiastic supporter of their actions. I would go even beyond the publicity-friendly rationalisation by military need and say that the Allies would morally not be so wrong to murder those civilians out of pure revenge. (Though actually still a bit less so than the Gazans, because they had more options to make Germany and Germans pay available to them at the time than the Gazans had wrt Israel!) To dispel any attempts to put a racial angle on this, I would say the same about the firebombing of Tokyo.
"Jews are literally all organized criminal gangsters, down to the children."
Ugh, I didn't anticipate that using that particular metaphor would invite this interpretation. The only reason I reached for it is that mafia/police collusion was the first trope I could think of where the protagonist is subjected to injustice and can't get succour. What matters for the metaphor is not even the collusion among the mafiosi, but the collusion between them and the police (the US + vassals). Would you be happier if I changed the stand-in for Israel to be a single guy who has a small frontier town's police and judges in his pocket, with a single pampered daughter who had a cushy upbringing thanks to what he racketeered from some townspeople?
zeke5123a
35m ago
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Palestinians are part of my enemies (more broadly religious Islam).
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I’m not really opposed to colonialism. I think most places that were colonized were better for all involved under the colonial power. Generally the colonized people (with certain political restrictions) ended up with more freedom.
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The argument against colonialism (self determination) are never generalizable (eg should my state be able to split off, should my city, should my house?). It just seems like special pleading to say “west bad” when in reality “west was good.”
OliveTapenade
40m ago
Oh, I have no doubt that it's true that wealthy individuals pressured Columbia in this way, and the fact that the individuals in question were disproportionately Jewish is unsurprising, since for very obvious reasons Jewish people are disproportionately likely to support Israel and to oppose the Palestine protests.
But I'm not blind. I can see the way that coffee_enjoyer specifically framed this around Jewish billionaires, and given that he is one of the small group of people on the Motte obsessed with Jews, the implication is not exactly subtle. In the top-level post he quite explicitly presents this as support for alt-right theories about secret Jewish power manipulating Western civilisation and so on.
I'd just like to maybe go a week without a bunch of people blaming everything on the Elders of Zion, you know?
quiet_NaN
42m ago
Yes they do. Wikipedia points out that the force is (1/c) times the power, and helpfully converts 1/c to 3.34 Newtons per Gigawatt. The article also helpfully does the calculation for the solar radiation near 1 AU (i.e. Earth) and comes to a value of ten Micronewtons per square meter.
If one wants to use this force, the best thing one can do is have a very large and very light mirror, which is better than first taking the momentum of the suns photons on your solar collectors and then sending a small fraction of that momentum out in the direction you actually want to accelerate in. This is not completely hopeless: metallized Mylar foil might weight some 50 micrograms per square meter, so a space craft where most of the mass is in the foil might accelerate at 40 centimeters per second squared (though there are some constraints on the direction, similarly to sailing). Of course, having a spacecraft with two hectares of foil per kilogram of payload might be difficult from an engineering point, and micrometeorites might become a problem. I would probably play a Kerbal mod which adds Kerbol radiation pressure and giant sails, though.
Or you could actively shine an Earth- or Moonbound laser on your spacecraft.
In general, there is a tradeoff between getting the most momentum out of your propellant mass, which benefits from higher exhaust velocities on the one side (with photons being the optimal choice, and ultrarelativistic ions only slightly worse) and getting the most momentum per energy invested, which favors throwing out a huge mass at minimal velocity. For propulsions where the energy source is decoupled from the reaction mass, such as ion drives, the sweet spot seems to be at a mere 20-50km/s -- which is far away from the 300,000km/s you would get with photons.
hydroacetylene
42m ago
Decree 770 did boost the fertility rate, but it didn’t do so by paying women for motherhood- it did so by banning contraception unless you already had 5 kids.
hydroacetylene
44m ago
My friends with many children(I have many friends with normal-for-tradcaths family sizes) say that they have to buy special slim fit car seats to use a sedan for three children. I don’t know where these car seats are sold, and also wonder why slim car seats aren’t simply the default due to their occupants being, definitionally, small.
Of course no one is actually going to question a mother about the age of her children if there’s any room for doubt at all; my friends who do that pretty much all have 3 under five or something like that.
zeke5123a
46m ago
Like most things, the solution is freedom in normal situations and government regulation in monopoly situations.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
52m ago
When looking at Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank, I'm reminded of the 20th century history of the Indian subcontinent, wherein a war drew borders between India and (a combined) Pakistan, which then had a second conflict dividing it into the two Muslim-majority states of Pakistan and Bangladesh. I haven't seen a "three state solution" seriously proposed by anyone in power, but it doesn't seem implausible to me.
hydroacetylene
52m ago
Argentina is not 97% white, it’s 97% white and mestizo combined. ‘Mestizo’ is Spanish for mixed and tends to be used mostly in reference to people with obvious white ancestry who can’t just pass as white. The actual breakdown is unknowable because in Latin America whiteness is high status, and so everyone downplays their non-white ancestry.
I don’t have a link right now, but IIRC the whitest parts of Latin America, based on hospital phenotypic data, consistently have parts of Mexico in the top ten. Clearly HBD does not dominate Latin American crime rates.
I love how social and mainstream media pearlclutching over Butker has pretty much catapulted him to being the third most famous Chief via the Streisand effect. I’d never heard of him before this.
I still have no interest in listening to his speech, looking into his opinions (they’re probably kind of stupid), or watching him or the NFL in general, but he’s making the usual insufferables seethe so I like him. I’ll just donate my ki from afar like he’s Goku charging up a Spirit Bomb.
It helps that most of his fellow NFL players have greater idpol protections and hold views that are even more politically incorrect about women and 2SLGBTQIA+ (views that are sometimes physically expressed to the former in a fiery, but mostly peaceful manner). However, they just don’t have the desire or ability to introspect on a worldview and go around giving speeches. So Butker likely enjoys some low-key solidarity.
The Chiefs as Superbowl champions in an OT victory and the biggest hotbed of off-field drama, gossip, and lolcowery? Maybe the NFL is indeed fixed like boxing, instead of real like pro-wrestling.
JulianRota
52m ago
For 1, I'm skeptical about that. I think it's very common in the US at least due to the scientific and social influence of the I think 70s-era belief in the "food pyramid", that lots of carbs and some meat were the height of healthiness and all fats were bad. The perception and trend wears on even as we've discovered that that isn't really true and nutrition is far more complex. I think any feeling of fulfillment is more due to some combination of it being what people are used to and perception of social approval.
For 2, I think it's about the overall state of society, which means that perceptions of what is attractive are more malleable than most people think. If getting any food at all is expensive and hard work, then being fat signals that you are a high-status person who has access to plenty of food, therefore you are attractive, for both men and women. In our current society where food is incredibly plentiful and much of it is not great for your health, being fat is nothing special as far as status in society, and instead being thin is a better signal that you have plenty of resources and status, in the form of time and energy to find and purchase higher-quality food and eat it in measured quantities. It also tends to signal that you have the free time and energy to exercise for fun.
My understanding is that the present ruling population, that is, Eastern European Jews (as seemingly everyone on Wikipedia's list of Israel's leaders in the 1948 war was), derive from a population that was expelled from the Levant by the Roman Empire. The Romans don't strike me as particularly ancestral to the Palestinians; even if you find some genetic signature, sociologically and culturally they were if anything also in the enemies-of-Rome camp.
As far as I know, genetically the Palestinians can be traced back to pre-Roman-era populations of the area (the namesake Philistines? Canaanites?), so the comparison with Normans in England does not work. If you want to create a British metaphor, the closest I could think of is if after a St Patrick's Day celebration in Boston gone particularly awry, Irish-Americans decided to invade Scotland and push the resident Scots into reservations, arguing that the Celtic part of the British Isles is their ancestral homeland, there were already some Irish people in Scotland (true) and the Scots got thoroughly culturally assimilated by the foreign Norman invaders anyway.
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