domain:betonit.substack.com
The Destruction of the Rafah Ghetto
There has been intense debate between US and Israel on an impending ground operation into Rafah. It appears the operation is starting to take form, and it's going to look a lot like the evacuations from the Warsaw Ghetto on a much larger scale.
This is not going to look like the assault on the Northern Gaza, since the Israelis have already concentrated the Gazans within Rafah. One of the primary points of disagreement between US and Israel seems to be on the timeline of the evacuations, with the US insisting that it's going to take months to evacuate and sift through the civilian population while Israel has proposed a much more aggressive timeline. Here's how it is going to unfold:
- Israel will establish secure checkpoints and transit facilities around Rafah: registering, delousing, providing medical treatment and food to deportees.
- There will be some weekly target for the number of civilians to process at these transit camps.
- Deportees will then be transported to one of the many
concentration camps"humanitarian islands", they are calling them, with military-aged males likely being segregated from the rest of the population, or at least highly likely to be detained based on other criteria. - Israel will assault Rafah and the city will face a level of demolition similar to but probably not as intense as Northern Gaza.
Historical comparisons are always messy, and you aren't going to see journalists in good-standing noting this, but I can't think of another historical operation that is closer to the impending evacuation of Rafah than the evacuation of the Warsaw Ghetto. The second battle of Fallujah and the evacuation of Phnom Penh provide other examples of civilians evacuating cities by force or military action, but neither of those approximates the circumstances or tactics which will be used in Rafah.
The Brutal Reality of Resettlement and Partisan Wars
There seems to be two camps: on the one hand, Israel is waging a Genocide, a secret desire to kill all the Palestinians. On the other hand, Israel is engaging in a fight for its very existence and doing everything it reasonably can to limit civilian casualties. But the truth lies in the middle, and can be summarized with two points:
- Israel is fighting a partisan war, which cannot be won without high civilian causalities, in the first place because the militants live among the community but, more importantly, because reprisals against the civilian population are a requirement for winning a partisan war (Israel knows this, the US could never accept that). "Reprisal" provides a better interpretation of the high rate of civilian casualties than either a secret plan to genocide all Palestinians or the absurd notion that Israel is doing everything it can to minimize civilian casualties.
- Israel wants to resettle the Palestinians outside of its aspirational territory, to enemy territory like Egypt.
The actions of Israel, including the impending evacuation of the Rafah ghetto, can be understood by accepting the above two points. It so happens that the above two points are identical to the position of Holocaust Revisionists, or Holocaust Deniers, regarding the Nazi policies with respect to the Jews. Those policies also resulted in the concentration and mass resettlement of the Jews, culminating most famously in the evacuations of the Warsaw Ghetto, those infamous deportation trains, which took place over many months.
In contrast with the Official Narrative- that the secret policy of the Germans was to kill all the Jews, Revisionists maintain the policy was to resettle the Jews to a territory in Russia, with a Jewish state likely being created after the war in Madagascar or Palestine. The Revisionist position is supported by documents, which all refer to "resettlement" as the policy objective of the deportations. But historians maintain that, in all these documents throughout the sprawling German bureaucracy, everyone was "in" on the conspiracy to use "resettlement" as a codeword for "extermination". Even in internal, top-secret communication which was intercepted or captured after the war. That's why, they say, there are no documents outlining the German policy with respect to the Jews as claimed by historians, but there are very many documents outlining the Resettlement policies as claimed by Revisionists.
Israel's insistence it cannot win the war without evacuating Rafah speaks to a similar motive claimed by Revisionists for the evacuations of the Jewish ghettos. We lionize partisan efforts against the Nazis, including the Underground Resistance operating out of Warsaw, but Israel's calculus provides some evidence for the Revisionist claim that, also, the evacuation of the Jewish ghettos was not motivated by a secret policy to exterminate them all within shower rooms in secret death factories.
A Year in Rafah
Despite the similarities described above, there is obviously one major claim in Mainstream Historiography regarding the evacuation of the Jewish ghettos that is an outlier in all respects, from anything else that has happened in human history. Whereas documents all describe these evacuations being motivated by economic and security concerns, and deportees were told that they were being evacuated to Humanitarian Islands where they would have work, this is what actually happened according to orthodox historians:
The Nazis set a quota for the evacuations of the Warsaw ghetto. Deportees were given food and told they would be resettled to camps where they would have work. The deportation trains brought the deportees to a small, secret camp called Treblinka that was set up as a fake train station, complete with a fake train platform and clock, fake ticket booth and posted train schedules. They were told that they were going to take a shower before being transited onwards. They were given soap and a towel and tricked into entering what they thought was a shower room. Then, the doors were locked and they were poisoned by carbon monoxide exhausted by a captured Soviet tank engine.
More than 5,000 people were said to be killed daily in this secret camp staffed by no more than several dozen German personnel, a larger Ukrainian auxiliary, and Jewish workforce. After being killed, all of the victims were buried onsite in huge mass graves. According to the Standard Work on the Treblinka extermination camp by former director of Yad Vashem, Yitzhak Arad, Himmler visited Treblinka in February or March 1943 and:
Himmler learned from his visit to Treblinka that, in spite of his orders, the corpses of the Jews who had been exterminated in this camp had not been cremated, but buried. Immediately after this visit, the big cremating operation began in the camp. This was the main task imposed on Treblinka during the last months of the camp’s existence...
After Himmler’s visit, the date for closing and liquidating the camps of Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka became dependent on the completion of the cremation of the victims’ corpses and the erasure of all traces of the crimes that had been carried out in these camps. The timetable for carrying out this decision lay mainly in the hands of the camp commanders and in their ability and desire to accomplish the erasure of the crimes as quickly as possible...
In Treblinka, the camp command faced the most difficult task—unearthing over 700,000 corpses and cremating them while at the same time continuing to receive new transports with Jews for extermination. In this camp the entire cremation operation lasted about four months, from April to the end of July 1943. To accomplish the task, the cremating took place simultaneously in a number of sites and the largest number of Jewish prisoner-workers were put to work in the various required stages.
So the 700,000 victims of the evacuation of the Warsaw Ghetto and other deportees were unburied and then cremated over the course of 4 months along with newly-arrived victims. In total, Arad estimated 850,000 victims at Treblinka, meaning that about 6,000 - 7,000 corpses were cremated every single day in this camp during cremation operations. Treblinka was not constructed with any cremation facilities, and so these corpses were cremated on huge outdoor pyres using locally-gathered brushwood although there are no documents or contemporary reports at all describing this process. The cremations were said to take place immediately adjacent to a major civilian rail-line, and adjacent to several Polish villages, and in spite of this there are no wartime contemporaneous accounts of this enormous cremation operation.
Yitzhak Arad heavily relies on an alleged eyewitness called Yankel Wiernik, whose account is by far the most important in the historiography of the camp. Given the complete absence of documentary or physical evidence for any of this- a Soviet excavation of Treblinka in 1945 found no mass graves on the site, and no investigation since then has ever found a single mass grave at Treblinka, Wiernik's eyewitness account is the keystone to the entire Treblinka historical narrative:
He remembered the horrors of the enormous pyres, where "10,000 to 12,000 corpses were cremated at one time." He wrote: "The bodies of women were used for kindling" while Germans "toasted the scene with brandy and with the choicest liqueurs, ate, caroused and had a great time warming themselves by the fire."[6] Wiernik described small children waiting so long in the cold for their turn in the gas chambers that "their feet froze and stuck to the icy ground" and noted one guard who would "frequently snatch a child from the woman's arms and either tear the child in half or grab it by the legs, smash its head against a wall and throw the body away."[7] At other times "children were snatched from their mothers' arms and tossed into the flames alive."
He was also encouraged by occasional scenes of brave resistance.[8] In chapter 8, he describes seeing a naked woman escape the clutches of the guards and leap over a three-metre high barbed wire fence unscathed. When accosted by a Ukrainian guard (Trawniki) on the other side, she wrestled his machine gun out of his grasp, killed the guard, and shot another guard before being killed herself.
You can read the witness account for yourself if you are inclined. In spite of the enormous historiographical importance of Wiernik's work, you cannot purchase it on Amazon in either print or digital form. I only learned about this work from Revisionists, it seems to be something of an embarrassment despite its extremely important position in the historiography of the camp. Excerpts from Wiernik were submitted as evidence by a Soviet Prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trial, along with a ~15 minute examination of another Jewish witness, who claimed to have been deported to the camp from Warsaw. That's all the evidence that was presented at Nuremberg, for the murder of 900,000 people- a Soviet excavation of the site uncovered no mass graves and no physical evidence was submitted.
I interpret it as a tacit admission to the weakness of the source, that this work is not required reading in every school across America in contrast with, say, Elie Wiesel's Night or Anne Frank's Diary, both of which have important literary significance to the Holocaust narrative but no historiographical significance. Wiesel, for example, makes no mention of gas chambers in his account, instead opting for extermination by burning people alive, which is not claimed by mainstream historians today. Anne Frank's tragic story likewise provides no historiographical relevance to the "extermination camp" narrative and actually contradicts it. She was deported to an alleged extermination camp, Auschwitz, and then transferred to another camp where she died in a hospital of Typhus.
Needless to say, Revisionists regard A Year in Treblinka as literary fiction. This is supposedly a direct eyewitness to the murder of 850,000 people who organized a prisoner revolt in Treblinka (which also has no documentation whatsoever) and heroically killed a Ukrainian guard with an axe.
Suddenly we heard the signal - a shot fired into the air.
We leaped to our feet. Everyone fell to his prearranged task and performed it with meticulous care. Among the most difficult tasks was to lure the Ukrainians from the watchtowers. Once they began shooting at us from above, we would have no chance of escaping alive. We knew that gold held an immense attraction for them, and they had been doing business with the Jews all the time. So, when the shot rang out, one of the Jews sneaked up to the tower and showed the Ukrainian guard a gold coin. The Ukrainian completely forgot that he was on guard duty. He dropped his machine gun and hastily clambered down to pry the piece of gold from the Jew. They grabbed him, finished him off and took his revolver. The guards in the other towers were also dispatched quickly...
Just as I thought I was safe, running straight ahead as fast as I could, I suddenly heard the command "Halt!" right behind me. By then I was exhausted but I ran faster just the same. The woods were just ahead of me, only a few leaps away. I strained all my will power to keep going. The pursuer was gaining and I could hear him running close behind me.
Then I heard a shot; in the same instant I felt a sharp pain in my left shoulder. I turned around and saw a guard from the Treblinka Penal Camp. He again aimed his pistol at me. I knew something about firearms and I noticed that the weapon had jammed. I took advantage of this and deliberately slowed down. I pulled the ax from my belt. My pursuer - a Ukrainian guard - ran up to me yelling in Ukrainian: "Stop or I'll shoot!" I came up close to him and struck him with my axe across the left side of his chest. He collapsed at my feet with a vile path.
I was free and ran into the woods. After penetrating a little deeper into the thicket, I sat down among the bushes. From the distance I heard a lot of shooting. Believe it or not, the bullet had not really hurt me. It had gone through all of my clothing and stopped at my shoulder, leaving a mark. I was alone. At last, I was able to rest.
Wow! How have you never heard of this guy? If his account is true, this work must be so remarkable as to have nearly biblical significance. But you cannot purchase it on Amazon, and Holocaust Deniers are the only ones who actually talk about this guy, rather than historians who quietly use his account as the most important primary source in the historiography of the camp, but who otherwise do not attempt to attach any cultural significance to the man himself who witnessed these things. It is very suspicious, and it's likely because if you read his account yourself you would not find it believable.
Parallel Interpretations
In case the point of my post isn't clear:
Israel's motive and tactics for dealing with the Gazans generally, but especially the impending Rafah Aktion, mirror the Revisionist interpretation of the resettlement of Jews in Eastern Europe. The part of that history which has no parallel- the allegation that the Germans tricked millions of people into entering a shower room, gassed them with exhaust from a captured Soviet tank engine, buried them, then unburied them, cremated them on open-air pyres and reburied the remains, is the part which has no parallel and is also the part of the story which is contested by so-called Holocaust deniers.
In the several years in which I have studied Revisionism, I have only ever noticed Revisionists really talk about Revisionism. But this seems to be changing, on Twitter from a pretty broad array of Twitter accounts I am noticing people talk about Holocaust Revisionism who are not known for that. It might be going viral and become the next forbidden knowledge now that HBD is being digested by the Twitter intelligentsia. The fact that Israeli conflict with the Palestinians is presenting so many direct parallels: the brutal reality of partisan warfare, the mass resettlement of undesirable populations, the ease with which false propaganda becomes "news", are all contributing to what appears to be a growing skepticism among right-wing Twitter that I have never seen before outside of Revisionist circles.
The growth of Holocaust Denial will likely be another consequence of this war.
Edit: Forgot to mention, One Third of the Holocaust is the most well-known Revisionist video discussing these alleged secret extermination camps, although there are many technical studies done for each of the individual camps by Revisionist scholars.
J. K. Rowling challenges new Scottish hate speech legislation, openly challenging them to arrest her for calling trans criminals men who pretend to be women:
https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/1774747068944265615
In passing the Scottish Hate Crime Act, Scottish lawmakers seem to have placed higher value on the feelings of men performing their idea of femaleness, however misogynistically or opportunistically, than on the rights and freedoms of actual women and girls. The new legislation is wide open to abuse by activists who wish to silence those of us speaking out about the dangers of eliminating women's and girls’ single-sex spaces, the nonsense made of crime data if violent and sexual assaults committed by men are recorded as female crimes, the grotesque unfairness of allowing males to compete in female sports, the injustice of women’s jobs, honours and opportunities being taken by trans-identified men, and the reality and immutability of biological sex.
#ArrestMe is, dare I say it, brave and powerful. At least she's putting skin in the game. It's also pretty well calculated in my opinion.
They can't really attack her for being a right wing extremist when her world famous books are a pretty clear allegory of Racism Bad. She even makes sure to target India Willoughby, who is apparently anti-black. Rowling has an enormous pot of money for expensive litigation and automatic worldwide attention on her. It's hard to righteously defend people such as
"Fragile flower Katie Dolatowski, 6'5", was rightly sent to a women's prison in Scotland after conviction. This ensured she was protected from violent, predatory men (unlike the 10-year-old girl Katie sexually assaulted in a women's public bathroom.)"
It's very practical politics to fish out the worst of the enemy milieu to preface one's normative statements. I think Rowling has a good shot at tactical victory - either the govt won't charge her or she'll win in court. On the other hand, only systemic change is going to change the progressive-leaning status quo. You need an Orban or some similar force to drag out the weed by the roots, rather than just pruning away when it grows particularly egregious. Rowling is no Orban, that's probably far too extreme for her.
The legislation is here: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/asp/2021/14/contents
Crimes include 'stirring up hate' by 'behaving in a manner that a reasonable person would consider to be threatening, abusive or insulting' to select groups. Looks like it allows nigh-limitless opportunities for selective enforcement. And a huge drain on police resources, given they can't even investigate all crimes:
Just last month the national force said it was no longer able to investigate every "low level" crime, including some cases of theft and criminal damage.
It has, however, pledged to investigate every hate crime complaint it receives.
BBC News understands that these will be assessed by a "dedicated team" within Police Scotland including "a number of hate crime advisers" to assist officers in determining what, if any, action to take.
Blueberry
29d ago
Italy’s birth rate is decreasing further to 1,2:
Financial Times: Italy’s births drop to historic low
Just 379,000 babies were born in 2023, despite PM Giorgia Meloni’s efforts to reverse demographic decline
Meloni has continued a child allowance scheme introduced by the previous government in 2021 and slightly increased the monthly sums families receive for small children, but her rightwing government has also experimented with other incentives.
After coming to power in late 2022, the coalition government halved VAT on infant products such as baby formula and nappies, but it has since scrapped those tax cuts. This year, Italy has allocated €1bn in other measures aimed at supporting mothers, including temporarily making pension contributions on behalf of working women who have at least two young children.
But Maria Rita Testa, a demographer at Rome’s Luiss university, said policymakers needed to address other factors, including parents’ economic stability and access to affordable childcare, now in acutely short supply. “They should try to tackle the problem of reconciliation of family and work tasks,” Testa said.
Italy had planned to use some of the €200bn in EU recovery funds it receives to build new childcare facilities for 260,000 infants and pre-school aged children, but Rome has now cut that target to 160,000.
The article notes that Meloni is herself a single child, but fails to mention that she also only has a single daughter. Still the low birth rate is a core issue for her and her right-wing coalition, but as in leftwing governments elsewhere they can’t find policies to reverse course.
stav
3d ago
I've noticed the alt-right (specifically the Richard Spencer wing) is blaming Christianity for cucking Whites and making them accept non-whites in their country. To me this isn't even close to being true and can be dismissed outright as nonsense.
We know from genetics that modern Europeans separated from sub saharan African 30 to 40 thousand years ago. We also know that Western Europeans didn't have any meaningful contact with Blacks until the 15th century when Portugal "discovered" West Africa during the Age of Exploration. By accepting this, we can see that Western Europe has had over 500 years of contact with Blacks.
I've specifically been looking into England, but the same is true for other nations. The highest count of non-whites I can find on Google Scholar recently is 2.6% in 1951. Interestingly, 2.2% of those 2.6% were first generation immigrants. This is by far the highest I've seen with other estimates putting it close to 99%.
So at this point, we have pretty clear data that when Europe was Christian (and America), there was almost 0 non-white immigration to Europe. We also know places like France put in racist laws like Code Noir that explicitly put Whites at the top of the social hierarchy.
When we look at when this changed, it was really the 1960's. But at this point, Christianity was starting to decline due to science and especially Darwin (and in my opinion became obviously not true). The increased immigration and anti-racist views correlates with Christianity's decline, so the idea that Christianity having everyone's soul being equal can be equally dismissed. In fact, I would argue the pro non-white immigration came from the secular left or if you want to argue it's the right neoliberalism. I see zero evidence of this that Richard Spencer and his allies argue to be true. In fact, the evidence shows the complete opposite.
Dispatches from the War on Horny/Payment Processors: the other shoe has dropped for Pixiv.
A year and a half ago, Pixiv made signs that they'd be clamping down on content on some of their services to appease Visa and MasterCard. Today, Pixiv announces that US and UK users will face restrictions on content they can upload. (Specific details here.)
Currently remains to be seen how much this affects the Western artists who are on Pixiv, but it doesn't bode well. Some think this portends a coming era of digital pillarization, and while I won't rule out the possibility that things will get so walled off that VPNs become a necessity, it's hard to say how likely that actually is.
Students from various campuses have occupied the Columbia University campus in New York City in protest of Israel. There reports and videos circulating of protestors harassing Jewish students on or near campus grounds. The NYPD has deployed officers to surround the campus and has established filtration checkpoints to prevent outside agitators from entering campus. Various Columbia alumni have expressed concern with Columbia’s handling of the situation. All classes are now online at least for today. Similar protests are happening at Yale and various other campuses across the country.
Edit: Congressman Josh Hawley has called on President Joe Biden to deploy the National Guard to Columbia and other universities to protect Jewish students on campus.
Edit: NYU has ordered their encampment to disperse and the NYPD is moving in to clear the demonstrators.
Edit: I’m seeing footage of NYU professors being marched out of the campus in zip ties. Cal Poly Humbolt students have barricaded themselves inside a campus building with furniture.
Edit: University of Texas, Austin student protestors are being dispersed by police. And possibly vanned. Protests now seem to be nationwide.
Edit: Mass arrests beginning at USC protests.
Edit: Tasers and rubber bullets being deployed against protestors at Emory University in Georgia.
Edit: There appear to be police snipers monitoring protests at Ohio State University.
PresterJohnsHerald
CRT Steelmanner/Ex-“Wokist”
24d ago
As a black person...I really really really don't want HBD to be true
This doesn't mean I think it's wrong. It's just that I think that the conclusions you'd have to draw from it being correct are just so awful for me.
I view it as nothing short of tragic that a people who suffered so much due to being viewed as inferior, who struggled for so long to be viewed as equals and treated with dignity, who endured all kinds of injustices in the hope that we would overcome...only for science to prove that it was fruitless all along. It's so dispiriting the possibility that all the problems in our community: crime, poverty, ignorance, are intransient. How are you supposed to deal with that without becoming utterly nihilistic?
I'll probably have a longer more essay-type post for next week's thread but I just want to get my raw emotions about it out here before then.
It's just so unfair. It fills me with anger and sadness and rage and I can't stop thinking about it. I don't want it to be true...I don't want it to be true. It's so unfair
LazyLongposter
13d ago
This is based off a comment I made to a group of friends, and it was suggested I post it here; I've edited it to be more approachable but please forgive any poorly explained references.
I am continuously boggled by how bad the drop off in video game writing has been. Inversely, it’s shocking how passable and even good it is coming from (mostly text based) games in the 90s and early 2000s. The people making those stories were often programmers with no creative history, so it’s surprising to me that they were able to put out such quality writing with any level of consistency.
Take the Mac game Marathon. There are definitely duds in the writing, mostly Durandal (a recently gone-insane AI) being wacky, but the majority of the writing is pretty good. Even the “computer being crazy” was a somewhat fresher concept, so I’ll excuse the missteps. More than that, the writers Jason Jones and Greg Kirkpatrick were still in/barely out of college when they made Marathon. That’s just astounding to me given the quality of some of the terminals.
The other example is Ares, another 90s Mac game (guess when and how I grew up). It's a much smaller game, with a less sprawling story, but what is there is pretty good quality. It’s not Marathon level writing, but its development was even smaller scale - basically a one man show. One guy was able to code an entire game, write the music, and write the story, and it’s all passable at absolute worst. Even more than the overall story, the quality of the writing on a basal level is quite good.
My question is how did this happen? Thinking on it has given me three main possibilities:
The first is just that the people making games - and particularly their stories - have changed. As the coding and graphics and scale get more complex, you can’t juggle everything as the project lead and reasonably be able to produce anything above indie level. I definitely think this is the majority of it. But I also think culture has an effect on this, and my second and third theories touch on that.
Second is that I think it’s an indicator of the quality of education, and especially higher education, falling significantly. I have no evidence for this, but the amount of knowledge the creators of old had in their back pockets to make their stories feel genuinely vast and deep, not entirely myopic.
That leads me into my third theory, which is nerd culture at large falling apart completely. This isn’t a new idea, but it used to be that being a nerd required you to be immersed in whatever passion you had, often alone. Greg Kirkpatrick admitted he read a ton of sci-fi and played a ton of DnD, and he drew on both of those for Marathon. As a personal anecdote, my recently deceased grandfather is universally considered to have had Asperger’s. The breadth of how he lived is astounding, though. He built a house, engineered rockets, became computer literate on his own (well past when he'd have been expected to do so), raced bikes, and played music. Absolutely a renaissance man in every way. In all I don’t see nerds and the autistic (they’re correlated) having near as comprehensive an upbringing. Maybe it’s the death of reading, maybe it’s being terminally online. It's all just sadly lacking. I don't think I have to illustrate that the barrier of entry to "being a nerd" is basically just saying you are. On that note, there's a trend of “nerds” that are just English majors who played games, which might explain how a lot of dedicated professional AAA video game writers are so bad.
As a counterpoint, Prey 2017 had its story written by its lead developer, as well as some of the music. I think the fact that it’s so good is a testament to the need for a game to have its own solid vision, even as the scale increases. Maybe that’s the root cause more than anything else.
Some additional considerations (and my responses to them):
- Video games have exploded in popularity. The amount of quality writing (and writers themselves) may have actually increased, but the signal-to-noise ratio has increased exponentially. I often find myself completely blindsided by games that I find quality, in that I've never heard of them before either being told via word-of-mouth or essentially stumbling upon them. I find this very much to be like music. If you look at the most popular music, I'd argue that it's in an awful spot, being borderline unlistenable while also being more popular than ever before. However, if you take the time to look for a niche, you can find some amazing stuff, even today, and it's all at your fingertips on YouTube. This of course torpedoes a bit of my thesis that quality has gone down, but I'll similarly pivot it as I do with music: Why is it impossible for games at the highest level of production and scale to have quality stories?
- I've noticed that sci-fi games are far more likely to qualify as "quality writing" for me. Even my contemporary examples (such as Prey) are sci-fi as well. That's not to say I can't enjoy other types, but I'm wondering if I either have a bias; if sci-fi lends itself to deeper writing, or attracts writers who can do so; or both. Note that I can give some very bad sci-fi examples of games (I am outspoken in how much I find Mass Effect completely awful in almost every way).
- I mentioned that my best examples are games with text-based dialogue and story. Perhaps those are easier to write, given that the player can mentally fill in lines in a way that makes sense to him. If you've ever looked up videos about Marathon, you have most definitely run into people reading the lines from the story out loud. I've yet to find a reading that hasn't made me cringe. I'm wondering if voice acted dialogue is just harder to write (and harder to fill with competent performances). But even then, a game I really love called Alpha Centauri has both written and voiced dialogue, and the voice lines are so good that they are literally chilling at times. That's a game from a group of about eight people, so that's an indicator that they just had to have the direction, wherewithal, and talent to see through their stories properly.
When discussing pharmaceutical and surgical interventions in the treatment of gender dysphoria, the gender-critical among us often draw parallels with bodily integrity identity disorder. This is a rare psychiatric disorder in which a person experiences profound distress because of the presence of one or more of their limbs, and requests to have these limbs amputated to alleviate said distress (or tries to amputate them themselves). Colloquially, one might say that people with this condition are able-bodied but identify as disabled.
Given that no one thinks that surgical amputation is the correct treatment for this psychiatric disorder, we gender-criticals argued, it follows that surgical intervention is the wrong approach for people with gender dysphoria. If it's wrong to amputate a mentally ill's person's arm just because they say it's causing them distress, how can it be right to do the same for a penis or breast?
Sadly, one man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens, the medical establishment has noted the parallels, and it is coming to a rather different conclusion:
Sensational news from late last week, that doctors amputated two fingers for a 20-year-old patient to alleviate the young man’s mental distress over being able-bodied, contained a buried clue: “He related his condition to gender dysphoria.”
... A 2018 ethics analysis in a Cambridge University Press publication concludes that there is “no logical difference between the conceptual status of BIID and transsexualism”. It goes on to say that, “given that individuals with transsexualism are offered gender reassignment surgery it seems to us that individuals with BIID ought at least to be considered for treatment, including elective amputation in some cases.”
... But what would it mean to accept the amputee identity at scale, the way we have accepted trans rights as a universal humanitarian movement? Drawing exact parallels, we would likely see a total saturation of amputee culture, from amputee story hour to centring amputee voices in DEI training, and doctors warning parents of the very real suicide risks for amputee-identifying children whose parents refuse to accept them as surgically modified cripples or invalids. Advocates would talk of being “assigned able-bodied at birth” to persuade activist teachers and medical associations to adopt the absolutist position that any attempt to talk kids out of amputee surgery amounts to “conversion therapy”.
The journalist Mia Hughes recently asked readers to imagine a society in which amputee advocates enjoyed the same cultural and political victories as trans advocates.
“Imagine there were a sudden 4000% increase in teens identifying as amputees, but we were all forbidden from being concerned. Instead we were supposed to celebrate it,” she posted on X. “Imagine schools teaching children as young as kindergarten that some people have amputee identities, that they get to choose how many limbs they have. Posters promoting body mutilation adorned the walls of many classrooms.”
Nothing specific to add to this* beyond despair. The Anglophone medical establishment appears to be fully ideologically captured. It doesn't matter if the Tavistock is shuttered and there's a rash of lawsuits directed at youth gender clinics in the US: if you're a medic who's internalised (or been made to internalise) the gender ideology worldview, the implications of that worldview and the role of the medical establishment it affirms have far-reaching implications in medical domains unrelated to gender medicine itself. At this point I honestly can't rule out psychiatrists prescribing anorexics appetite suppressants to aid them in achieving their "bodily attainment goals".
*Other than why the fuck are Canadian doctors so keen to help their fellow citizens maim or destroy their bodies??!!
Iran-Israel War(?)
Well it's happening gents. Iran has launched a massive attack at Israel, consisting of at least 100 drones followed up by cruise missiles, and with ballistic missiles assumed (possibly confirmed) to follow. Presumably this is intended to saturate and overwhelm Israeli Air Defenses. Iran has stated this is a response to what is claimed to be an Israeli strike on the Iranian Consulate in Damascus, which killed seven members of the Revolutionary Guard including two top commanders. Israel has not claimed responsibility for this attack, but it is largely agreed by those in the know that Israel did it. Without attempting to consensus build, I will assume arguendo that Israel did in fact bomb the Iranian Consulate unless I see evidence to the contrary. Netanyahu has convened his war cabinet, the British PM has condemned the attack, and President Biden while apparently initially going to address the nation has instead called a "lid" meaning no more announcements today.
Civilians in Tehran and across Iran are preparing for what is believed to be an inevitable Israeli counterstrike.
As of writing Israeli, British, American, and allegedly Jordanian jets are in the process of intercepting drones and missiles en route to Israel. The attack appears to be against exclusively military targets, a pleasant change of pace from the general behavior of Middle Eastern combatants.
Update: Well it appears this was much ado about what has become something of a nothingburger. While I hesitate to call a mass drone/missile strike by Iran against Israel nothing, well. Iran has stated that the matter is concluded, and Israel has claimed interception of 99% of the incoming drones and missiles. Israeli medical authorities have reported no casualties as of a few minutes ago, aside from a Bedouin 10-year-old girl in serious condition. This number may rise, but it is my opinion that it is unlikely to break mid double digits.
Update 2: After a phone call between Biden and Netanyahu, it appears that Israel no longer intends to retaliate. The tit has been tatted, and since no Israel citizens have died, and only the one poor girl was injured, the Netanyahu administration seems willing to just let this one go instead of escalating.
jeroboam
13d ago
The coming Ukraine/Russia baby boom?
There's a theory that one part of falling fertility is female hypergamy. Since my spellchecker is underlining that word, I'll define it like this:
Female hypergamy is when women seek to marry "up", either into a higher social class or to a mate who is superior to them.
It's harder than ever for women to marry up. Modern femininist societies devalue male traits such as stoicism and aggression but highly value female traits such as conformity and self-control. As a result, women's status relative to men has risen greatly. This has the side effect of making most men undesirable to most women.
You know what raises the status of men? Fighting in wars. It's no secret that women love men in uniform. And many will confess to being aroused by male violence. For better or worse, violence raises male status.
Nearly all nations had a baby boom after WWII. And this wasn't merely making up for lost time. In the United States, the fertility rate peaked at 3.74 children/woman in 1957. Even Russia had a fertility rate near 3 despite a ridiculously lopsided gender ratio where more than 80% of men born in 1922 didn't survive until 1946.
So anyway... I predict that Russia and Ukraine will experience a similar (but smaller boom) in the decade following the end of the war.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
4d ago
Ukraine suspends consular services for military-age men in draft push
Ukraine on Tuesday suspended consular services for military-age male citizens until May 18, criticising Ukrainians abroad who it said expected to receive help from the state without helping it battle for survival in the war against Russia.
Hundreds of thousands of military-age Ukrainian men are living abroad and the country faces an acute shortage of troops against a larger, better-equipped enemy nearly 26 months since Russia's full-scale invasion.
[...]In practice, the suspension means military age men now living abroad will be unable to renew expiring passports or obtain new ones or receive official documents such as marriage certificates.
It's been interesting to watch the reaction from Western pro-Ukrainians to Ukraine's sweeping new mobilization orders. The prevailing sentiment seems to be "that's a tragedy, and obviously the draft shouldn't exist to begin with, but what can be done?" Suggesting that it would be better to negotiate a peaceful end to the conflict is outside the Overton window. It's a foregone conclusion that Ukraine must fight to the last man.
There is something hellishly dystopian about fleeing to another country, possibly even across the ocean, and your country of birth is still trying to pull you back. Particularly because women are given a free pass. It's natural to feel like there should be some cost associated with the privilege of not having to be forcibly conscripted to fight against an invading army.
This raises questions about Ukraine's ability to keep their fighting force well-staffed going forward, and also questions about the morale of Ukrainian soldiers. Every conflict has some number of draft dodgers, but I wonder if there are any hard stats about whether dodgers are particularly overrepresented in this conflict? That could help adjudicate the question of whether the Ukrainian resistance is an authentic homegrown phenomenon, or if it's largely being sustained by Western pressure.
Botond173
27d ago
Whenever the subject of feminist narratives comes up on this forum, one of the recurring arguments is that feminist messaging is ineffective, self-defeating even, the usual reason being given that it doesn’t reach the men it’s supposed to reach, and only reaches men who don’t need feminist messages in the first place because they’re pretty much acculturated in a feminist milieu anyway. (I know all this doesn’t necessarily sound fair or unbiased, but let’s ignore that for a moment.)
The most fitting example of this that is usually mentioned is the message that “we need to teach men not to rape”, which is supposedly a favorite of feminist activists on college campuses, corporate HR boards and elsewhere. Apparently they promote essentially the same idea as a great tool to combat sexual assault and harassment.
I don’t think I need to explain in detail why this argument sounds so dumb to the average man. Even when I come up with the most benevolent interpretation of this tactic that I can think of, it still seems misguided and, well, dumb. But then it occurred to me: the message makes 100% sense if we start from the assumption that modern feminists, eager to right cultural wrongs of the past that they perceive, really want to make sure their messaging never ever entails even a hint of the notion that women need to exercise any level of agency in order to avoid rape, assault or harassment of any type i.e. avoid bad men, because in all cases that would be “victim blaming” and horrific etc.
From that perspective, it all makes sense, sort of. Am I correct, or is there something else going on as well?
Against the extermination of hard games
In this post, I argue against the extermination of hard video games, that is games that are hard to beat, even on the easiest difficulty setting. Those who wish to exterminate these games usually do so by broadly advocating for the implementation of easy modes. I deal with two main arguments, the "narrow liberal" argument and the argument from accessibility. The narrow liberal argument simply asserts that the inclusion of an easy mode does not harm those who wish to play on a harder setting. I refute this by showcasing advantages of unique difficulty settings. The argument from accessibility states that accessibility concerns should trump concerns regarding the enjoyability of the game. I show why this doesn't make sense. Lastly, I take a broader perspective and end up with the metapolitical implications of applying a "narrow" or "broad" liberal worldview.
Whenever FromSoftware releases a new game, a deluge of articles pour down demanding for an easy mode to be implemented. While, ostensibly, these articles are about FromSoft games, most of their arguments apply to any game. Furthermore, in none of these articles is it argued to implement easy modes only in certain types of games. Therefore, in this article, I will argue against the notion that every game should have an easy mode. Of course, I am not the first to do so. Youtuber Ratatoskr has, in my opinion, the best arguments against implementing easy modes in every game and I will draw in part from his work. However, I believe that his videos still don’t sufficiently express just how utterly wrong, egoistic, and exclusionary those are, who aim to exterminate hard games by arguing in favor of easy modes in all games. With “hard games” I mean games that are difficult to finish even for a seasoned player on the easiest available difficulty. In particular, I focus on the subset of games that have a unique and hard level of difficulty.
All articles arguing in favor of easy modes base their thesis on one central argument, which I dub the “narrow liberal argument”.
The narrow liberal argument
Implementing an easy mode does not hurt those who still wish to play at a harder difficulty level because the harder difficulty levels are still available. Nobody is taking anything away from you when implementing an easy mode and there are absolutely no downsides to it.
If this argument was true, the discussion would be essentially over. Unfortunately, it is completely wrong and disrespectful.
Why is it wrong? Even a single, small benefit of a unique difficulty setting is enough to prove the narrow liberal argument wrong. Here are some benefits that a unique difficulty setting provides, and that an easy mode would undermine:
It provides a sense of meaning to your struggles. When beating a challenge in a game like Sekiro, the reward is that you are able to progress through the game. Overcoming the difficulty has meaning because if you didn’t overcome the challenge, you could not have moved on. Conversely, if there was an easy mode, beating the challenge on “normal” only means that you did not have to lower the difficulty in order to overcome the challenge. It, thus, lowers the meaningfulness of your victory.
It provides a sense of unity and comradery. In Dark Souls you can literally see other peoples’ struggles against the exact same challenges that you face. This engenders a feeling of comradery against a common foe, which would be weakened if you couldn’t be sure that they aren’t facing a lesser challenge.
It provides a sense of identity for the game. It is no coincidence that discussions about difficulty always pop up around the release of FromSoft games. The unique difficulty setting has helped to create the identity of FromSoft games as “hard games”. Think of other “hard games”. How many of them have an easy mode? Having a strong identity, in turn, makes it easier for people to understand whether a game caters to their tastes. Everyone knows what to expect from the next FromSoft game. In some cases, the difficulty is the entire point of the game. For example, I wanna be the guy, QWOP, and getting over it are specifically designed to frustrate the player.
It provides a sense of pride when beating the game. The fact that some people cannot beat the game but you can, is a potential source of pride. If you enable everyone to beat the game, it is gone.
It saves on development time spent on balancing the game, which can be used on other areas. If the developers care about properly balancing all difficulty levels, this time save can be significant. If they don’t, which seems to be the usual case, the idea of implementing multiple difficulties is flawed in the first place. In the usual case of “easy/normal/hard”, normal is easy but hard means bullet sponge enemies and difficulty spikes. In some cases, it even ruins the game economy. I started out playing “ELEX” on ultra difficulty as an archer but had to quickly realize that killing enemies wasn’t worth it because I simply couldn’t afford the arrows to kill their bloated health totals. Thus, the difficulty setting didn’t provide a challenge for skilled players, it turned the game into a broken, unbalanced mess. There is no way this would have happened, had the developers balanced the difficulty around skilled players from the start.
It allows developers to generate their intended atmosphere more accurately. Some parts of games are meant to be hard to create an oppressive atmosphere. Others are meant to be easy to create a cathartic feeling in players. If there are multiple difficulty levels, a player may increase the level when the game is “too easy” and decrease it when it is “too hard”, thus undermining the developers intended atmosphere.
It provides commitment to a challenge. Hard games are oftentimes not that enjoyable to play in the moment but they provide more satisfaction when you finally beat them:
However, humans are impatient creatures who are prone to depriving themselves of long-term satisfaction for short-term enjoyment, e.g. by lowering the difficulty below what it needs to be. If you only have one difficulty setting available in the first place, this is impossible.
It provides peace of mind. In the beginning of a game with difficulty settings, you need to choose a setting without really knowing which one will be best for you. Maybe “hard” is good, maybe enemies are just bullet sponges. Don’t ask me what to pick, I’m here to play the game, not to design it! During the game, you are always faced with the choice of lowering or increasing the difficulty. With a unique difficulty setting, you don’t have to think in the back of your head that you could always lower the difficulty when struggling against a difficult boss. You simply have to…
…git gud. git gud means that there are some challenges that don’t scale to your level and that can’t be side-stepped. It represents the struggle of man to overcome his own limitations against all odds. Failing to git gud means to fail the archetypical struggle of humanity. It doesn’t matter that it’s unfair, it doesn’t matter that others are more privileged than you are. This is your challenge and you need to conquer it. However, if there is an easy mode, you no longer have to git gud. No longer gitting gud means that we lose a part of humanity itself. If you do not instinctively get what I am alluding to, you lack an essential aspect of humanity, sorry. Games are one of the last areas where git gud still applies in the West (another is love) and it does so with relatively low stakes. In the words of one our time’s foremost philosophers Fetusberry ‘Ass Bastard’ Crunch...
guesswho
26d ago
'Rich person flaunts the law, confident they will never face consequences' is not a very unique or interesting story. It's certainly not 'brave' or anything... if no one rich or powerful is going to face any legal consequences of any kind over Epstein connections, you can be damn sure she's not going to pay for anything relating to this, either.
But I don't see why conservatives would think this is supporting any of their claims? The conservative claim has always been that they are oppressed for their views, living in constant danger of being cancelled or arrested by the woke mobs and captured government institutions.
Someone blatantly pointing out in the most public way possible that this has always been a fiction, that governments may make figleaf declarations about opposing these types of slander but will never actually enforce them because they actually are inherently conservative entities that are on the side of the privileged and the default, that anyone can make the most vile comments they want and always could without fearing legal reprisals, that the whole Petersonian rhetoric about free speech crackdowns was and always has been a charade... why is that good for her side, exactly?
I mean, I guess the truth is that I'm being too simplistic in considering it one 'side'.
The Peterson/'free speech absolutist' wing points at 'cancel culture' and the specter of government censorship as a general bludgeon against the left, but they're actually committed to a much more broad model of conservatism and just using that to stir up their base.
Whereas people like Rowling aren't fully committed to that broader conservative project, they just want to slander and eradicate trans people, and they're annoyed that people like Peterson have scared some of their supporters into thinking they might ever face consequences for spewing vile slander 24/7, thereby mildly restricting the spigot.
So while the two have been default bedfellows up till now, it seems like JK has recognized the conflict of interest there and is ready to abandon the pretense of being oppressed in favor of proving that it's safe for everyone to start spewing as publicly and loudly as possible.
KulakRevolt
29d ago
What's going to be the big apocalyptic struggle this election?
I wrote a piece over at my blog about how at this time in 2020 we were already in "2 Weeks to slow the spread", were about 1 month out from the first anti-lockdown protests, and 2 months out from the Summer of Floyd.
It seems obvious to me that all the chaos in the wider American empire concentrates around election years and seems to have the oxygen sucked out of it on off years.. 2020 is obvious, 2016 was only slightly less history changing, and even the 2008 financial crisis was an election year event.
There's a lot of really obvious candidates: Ukraine could go south really catastrophically really quick; the middle-east is speculated to kick-off with a potential Israeli invasion of Lebanon; and going shearly off the numbers the US southern border is one of the largest population transfers in human history with few precedents since WW2 or the even the 4th and 5th century.
But I don't know, maybe it's my mind trying to fit things too neatly to the 2020 framework... it feels like the election hasn't started yet, it feels like there's some shoe to drop or issue I'm missing, something as far from public consciousness as Immunology in Jan 2020, or racial politics in March 2020...
I can feel this massive issue just behind my peripheral vision that's about to draw all my attention and require its own Motte containment thread, and that will devour the media and twitter, for months on end.
I feel like there's this huge world shattering issue that's about to explode and within the next few months I'll be lamenting that I only have 24 hours in the day to read enough about it, convinced that it DEMANDS every second of my attention.... And I have no idea what it is?
-Is Trump going to die?
-Will a Nuke Launch?
-Is China about to take Taiwan?
-Are all those Chinese and foreign nationals on the southern border about to start targeting power infrastructure?
-Is there about to be a financial crisis?
-An "Internet Lockdown"?
-Hot ethnic cleansing in Europe?
-Global food chain collapse?
.
Give me your best guess.
What will be the major containment thread at the Motte between now and election day?
STATUS GAMES
When people talk about "status games" 'round these parts, they're normally referring to our obsession with relative social status and the games that we play in order to increase it. However, this morning, I listened to oral arguments in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, a case about a municipal ordinance, from a town in Oregon, prohibiting people from sleeping in public, at least with some 'aggravating' factor, like having a blanket. Of course, as is probably traditional for me at this point, I hardly even want to talk about the specifics of this case, at least not concerning homelessness. Instead, I'd like to jump off into questions of categories (which, uh, I guess are made for man?), agency, and the games we play with categories like 'status'.
The background is a 1962 case, Robinson v. California, referred to in all blockquotes from the Court as just "Robinson", which considered
A California statute makes it a misdemeanor punishable by imprisonment for any person to "be addicted to the use of narcotics," and, in sustaining petitioner's conviction thereunder, the California courts construed the statute as making the "status" of narcotic addiction a criminal offense for which the offender may be prosecuted "at any time before he reforms," even though he has never used or possessed any narcotics within the State and has not been guilty of any antisocial behavior there.
SCOTUS held:
As so construed and applied, the statute inflicts a cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments.
Details aren't the most important, but a vague sense of that backdrop is. If someone is "addicted to narcotics", that's considered just a "status", not actual behavior or conduct that can be regulated by the state.
This status/conduct categorical divide has a long history of being quite confusing, and this confusion was on full display at the Court. A Ctrl+F of the transcript shows 121 mentions of the word "status", and many of them are trying to figure out what counts. I collected more blockquotes than I could possibly clean up or feel comfortable bombarding TheMotte with, so I'll try to be sparing. First off, Justice Kagan asking questions of Ms. Evangelis, who is arguing on behalf of the city:
JUSTICE KAGAN: So can I talk about that, Ms. Kapur? So taking Robinson as a given, could you criminalize the status of homelessness?
MS. EVANGELIS: Well, I have a couple points to that.
JUSTICE KAGAN: It's just a simple question.
MS. EVANGELIS: So Robinson doesn't address that and I think it's completely distinguishable. So Robinson was a --
JUSTICE KAGAN: Could you criminalize the status of homelessness?
MS. EVANGELIS: Well, I don't think that homelessness is a status like drug addiction, and Robinson only stands for that.
JUSTICE KAGAN: Well, homelessness is a status. It's the status of not having a home.
MS. EVANGELIS: I actually -- I disagree with that, Justice Kagan, because it is so fluid, it's so different. People experiencing homelessness might be one day without shelter, the next day with. The federal definition contemplates various forms.
JUSTICE KAGAN: At the period with which -- in the period where -- where you don't have a home and you are homeless, is that a status?
MS. EVANGELIS: No.
There is a bit of meandering that I'll omit, but it comes back to:
MS. EVANGELIS: The statute does not say anything about homelessness. It's a generally applicable law. One more -- it -- it's very important that it applies to everyone, even --
JUSTICE KAGAN: Yeah, I -- I got that.
MS. EVANGELIS: -- people who are camping.
JUSTICE KAGAN: But it's a single person with a blanket.
MS. EVANGELIS: And --
JUSTICE KAGAN: You don't have to have a tent. You don't have to have a camp. It's a single person with a blanket.
MS. EVANGELIS: And sleeping in conduct is considered -- excuse me, sleeping in public is considered conduct. And this Court -- this Court in Clark discussed that, that that is conduct. Also, the federal regulations --
JUSTICE KAGAN: Well, sleeping is --
MS. EVANGELIS: -- are very --
JUSTICE KAGAN: -- a biological necessity. It's sort of like breathing. I mean, you could say breathing is conduct too, but, presumably, you would not think that it's okay to criminalize breathing in public.
MS. EVANGELIS: I would like to point to the federal regulations which I brought up.
JUSTICE KAGAN: And for a homeless person who has no place to go, sleeping in public is kind of like breathing in public.
and finally:
JUSTICE KAGAN: -- I'll tell you the truth, Ms. Kapur. I think that this is -- this is a super-hard policy problem for all municipalities. And if you were to come in here and you were to say, you know, we need certain protections to keep our streets safe and we can't have, you know, people sleeping anyplace that they want and we can't have, you know, tent cities cropping up, I mean, that would create one set of issues. But your ordinance goes way beyond that. Your ordinance says as to a person -- and I understand that you think it's generally applicable, but we only come up with this problem for a person who is homeless, who has the status of homelessness, who has no other place to sleep, and your statute says that person cannot take himself and himself only and, you know, can't take a blanket and sleep someplace without it being a crime. And -- and -- and that's, you know -- well, it just seems like Robinson. It seems like you're criminalizing a status.
Kagan may be the smartest of the liberal Justices, so it's probably no surprise that I think she got the closest to a conceptualization of status that is friendly to the left in this case. Unsurprisingly, though, "Republicans Pounce". Justice Gorsuch said that, "[T]he distinction between status and conduct is a slippery one and that they're often closely related," and had what was perhaps the most comprehensive exchange on the topic with Mr. Kneedler, who is the Deputy Solicitor General, weighing in on the case on behalf of the federal government, who was technically supporting neither party, but is obviously in practice representing the equities of the Biden administration portion of the left.
JUSTICE GORSUCH: Mr. Kneedler, I want to probe this a little bit further because it -- it does seem to me the status/conduct distinction is very tricky. And I had thought that Robinson, after Powell, really was just limited to status. And now you're saying, well, there's some conduct that's effectively equated to status and -- but you're saying involuntary drug use, you can regulate that conduct. That doesn't qualify as status. You're saying compulsive alcohol use, you can regulate that conduct in public. Public drunkenness, even if it's involuntary, that doesn't qualify as status, right?
MR. KNEEDLER: Right.
JUSTICE GORSUCH: You're saying you can regulate somebody who is hungry and has no other choice but to steal. You can regulate that conduct even though it's a basic human necessity, and that doesn't come under the -- under the status side of the line, right?
MR. KNEEDLER: Yes.
JUSTICE GORSUCH: Okay. But, when it comes to homelessness, which is a terribly difficult problem, you're saying that's different and -- because there are no beds available for them to go to in Grants Pass. What -- what about someone who has a mental health problem that prohibits them -- they cannot sleep in -- in a shelter. Are they allowed to sleep outside or not? Is that status or conduct that's regulable?
MR. KNEEDLER: I -- I think the -- the question would be whether that shelter is available.
JUSTICE GORSUCH: It's available.
MR. KNEEDLER: Well, no, available to the individual.
JUSTICE GORSUCH: It's available to the individual.
MR. KNEEDLER: But --
JUSTICE GORSUCH: It's just because of their mental health problem, they cannot do it.
MR. KNEEDLER: I -- I think there might be -- I mean, that's -- the mental health problem --
JUSTICE GORSUCH: Status or conduct?
MR. KNEEDLER: The mental health situation is itself a status.
JUSTICE GORSUCH: Right, I know that.
MR. KNEEDLER: Yes. But -- but if the
JUSTICE GORSUCH: It has this further knock-on effect on conduct. Is that regulable
MR. KNEEDLER: I -- I --
JUSTICE GORSUCH: -- by the state or not?
MR. KNEEDLER: -- I -- I think that -- I think if the --
JUSTICE GORSUCH: All the -- you know, alcohol, drug use --
MR. KNEEDLER: Right, right.
JUSTICE GORSUCH: -- they have problems too and that that -- and -- and -- but you're saying that conduct is regulable. How about with respect to this pervasive problem of -- of persons with mental health problems?
MR. KNEEDLER: I -- I think, in a particular situation, if the -- if the -- if the person would engage in violent conduct as --
JUSTICE GORSUCH: No, no, no, don't mess with my hypothetical, counsel.
(Laughter.)
JUSTICE GORSUCH: I like my hypothetical. I know you don't. It's a hard one, and that's why I'm asking it. I'm just trying to understand --
MR. KNEEDLER: I -- I --
JUSTICE GORSUCH: -- the limits of your line.
MR. KNEEDLER: I think it would depend on how serious the offense was on the -- on the individual.
JUSTICE GORSUCH: It's -- it's -- it's a very serious effect. The mental health problem is serious, but there are beds available.
MR. KNEEDLER: Well, what I was trying to say, it would depend on how serious being required in -- to -- to go into that facility was on the person's mental -- if it would make his mental health situation a lot worse, then that may not be something that's --
JUSTICE GORSUCH: So that's status -- that falls on the status side?
MR. KNEEDLER: Well, I -- I -- I -- I guess you could put it that way, but I -- I guess what I'm saying is that --
JUSTICE GORSUCH: I -- that's what I'm wondering. I don't -- I'm asking you.
MR. KNEEDLER: Well -- JUSTICE GORSUCH: I really am just trying to figure out --
MR. KNEEDLER: No. You could view that as status or --
JUSTICE GORSUCH: You're asking us to extend Robinson, and I'm asking how far?
MR. KNEEDLER: Well, what I was going to say, you could -- you could think of it as status, but I think another way to think about it, and this is our point about an individualized determination, is that place realistically available to that person because --
JUSTICE GORSUCH: It is in the sense that the bed is available --
MR. KNEEDLER: I know that it's --
JUSTICE GORSUCH: -- but not because of their personal circumstances.
MR. KNEEDLER: Right. Right. And that's -- and that's my point. It -- it's available in a physical sense. It may be available to somebody else, but requiring an individualized determination might include whether that person could cope in that setting. That's the only --
JUSTICE GORSUCH: So that -- so that might be an Eighth Amendment violation?
MR. KNEEDLER: Because it may not -- yes, because it's not available.
JUSTICE GORSUCH: So that's an -- it's an Eighth Amendment violation to require people to access available beds in the jurisdiction in which they live because of their mental health problems?
MR. KNEEDLER: If -- if going there would -- would --
JUSTICE GORSUCH: How about if they have a substance abuse problem and they can't use those substances in the shelter? Is that an Eighth Amendment --
MR. KNEEDLER: That is -- that is not a -- that is not a sufficient --
JUSTICE GORSUCH: Why? Why? They're addicted to drugs, they cannot use them in the shelter. That's one of the rules.
MR. KNEEDLER: Well, if they -- if they -- if it's the shelter's rule, then they have no -- they -- they -- they can't go there if they're -- if they're addicted. That's not -- that's not --
JUSTICE GORSUCH: So that's an Eighth -- that's an Eighth Amendment violation?
MR. KNEEDLER: Well, no, the -- the -- the Eighth Amendment violation is prohibiting sleeping outside because the only shelter that is available --
JUSTICE GORSUCH: Is not really available to that person?
MR. KNEEDLER: -- won't take them -- won't take them, yes. And that's an individualized determination.
JUSTICE GORSUCH: Same thing with the alcoholic?
MR. KNEEDLER: Yes.
JUSTICE GORSUCH: Okay. So the alcoholic has an Eighth Amendment right to sleep outside even though there's a bed available?
MR. KNEEDLER: If -- if the only shelter in town won't take him, then I think he's in exactly -- he's in the same -- he's in the same condition. And there can be all sorts of reasons, and the City doesn't normally --
...
JUSTICE GORSUCH: How about if there are no public bathroom facilities? Can -- do people have an Eighth Amendment right to defecate and urinate outdoors?
MR. KNEEDLER: No, we -- we --
JUSTICE GORSUCH: Is that conduct or is that status?
MR. KNEEDLER: I -- it's, obviously, there -- there is conduct there and we are not suggesting that cities can't enforce their --
JUSTICE GORSUCH: Why not, if there are no public facilities available to homeless persons?
MR. KNEEDLER: The -- the -- that situation, you know, candidly, has never arisen. And whether or not there -- I mean, in the litigation as I've seen. But no one is suggesting and we're not suggesting that public urination and defecation laws cannot be enforced because there are very substantial public health reasons for that.
JUSTICE GORSUCH: Well, there are substantial public health reasons with drug use, with alcohol, and with all these other things too.
MR. KNEEDLER: And they can all be --
JUSTICE GORSUCH: And you're saying the Eighth Amendment overrides those. Why not in this circumstance right now?
MR. KNEEDLER: No, I'm not -- I'm not saying the Eighth Amendment overrides the laws against drug use.
JUSTICE GORSUCH: Oh, I know that.
MR. KNEEDLER: Oh, I'm sorry.
JUSTICE GORSUCH: I know that.
MR. KNEEDLER: No, I misunderstood what you --
JUSTICE GORSUCH: That one -- that one the government wants to keep. I got that.
MR. KNEEDLER: No, I misunderstood your question. Sorry.
JUSTICE GORSUCH: Yeah. Last one. How about -- how about fires outdoors? I know you say time, place, and manner, but is there an Eighth Amendment right to cook outdoors?
MR. KNEEDLER: No. I -- I -- I -- I think what -- what --
JUSTICE GORSUCH: That's -- that's an incident -- a human necessity every person has to do.
MR. KNEEDLER: But this -- but this is one -- this is one of those things that, you know, is taken care of on the ground as a practical matter. There are restaurants where someone can go. There are --
JUSTICE GORSUCH: Well, no, no, we're talking about homeless people.
MR. KNEEDLER: No.
JUSTICE GORSUCH: They're not going to go spend money at a restaurant necessarily. Let's --
MR. KNEEDLER: Well, there -- there may be inexpensive places. Some people get --
JUSTICE GORSUCH: Let's say there isn't, okay?
MR. KNEEDLER: And --
JUSTICE GORSUCH: Let's say that there is no reasonable --
MR. KNEEDLER: And -- and the local community --
JUSTICE GORSUCH: Do they have a right to cook? They have a right to eat, don't they?
MR. KNEEDLER: They have -- they have a right to eat, a right to cook if it entails having a fire, which I think it -- it -- it probably -- it probably would, but -- but, as I said, the -- the -- the eating, the feeding is taken care of in most communities by nonprofits and churches stepping forward --
JUSTICE GORSUCH: But if there isn't
MR. KNEEDLER: -- as they have for 200 years.
JUSTICE GORSUCH: -- but, if there isn't, there's an Eighth Amendment right to have a fire?
MR. KNEEDLER: No, no, we are not saying there's an Eighth Amendment --
JUSTICE GORSUCH: Well, I thought you just said there was.
MR. KNEEDLER: Well, there -- there's food that you can eat without cooking it. I mean, they -- and they could could get a handout from the -- from a -- from an individual that, you know, people can beg for money. I mean, there are -- there are ways that this works out in practice.
Oof, that was long and covered a lot. Gorsuch would go on to suggest that the Court should just push the case back the State for a "necessity" analysis and not "get into the status/conduct stuff that -- that Robinson seems to invite." Roberts, meanwhile, went after immutability in a colloquy with Ms. Corkran, representing the class of homeless people challenging the law.
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: A number of us, I think, are having difficulty with the distinction between status and conduct. You'll acknowledge, won't you, that in those terms, there's a difference between being addicted to drugs and being homeless? In other words, someone who's homeless can immediately become not homeless, right, if they find shelter.
Someone who is addicted to drugs, it's not so -- so easy. It seems to me that in Robinson, it's much easier to understand the drug addiction as an ongoing status, while, here, I think it is different because you can move into and out of and into and out of the status, as you would put it, as being homeless.
MS. CORKRAN: Yeah. So it's interesting, we today understand addiction as an immutable status. In Robinson, the Court suggested that someone might be recovered and no longer have the status of addiction. So the Robinson Court wasn't thinking about addiction as something that couldn't change over time.
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Well, that may limit the applicability of Robinson to a different situation, but what is the -- I mean, what is the analytic approach to deciding whether something's a status or a situation of conduct?
MS. CORKRAN: So the question is a status is something that a person is when they're not doing anything. So being addicted, having cancer, being poor, are all statuses that you have apart from any conduct.
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Having cancer is not the same as being homeless, right? I mean, maybe I'm just repeating myself because homelessness can -- you -- you can remove the homeless status in an instant if you move to a shelter or situations otherwise change. And, of course, it can be moved the other way as well if you're kicked out of the shelter or whatever. So that is a distinction from all these other things that have been labeled status, isn't it?
MS. CORKRAN: I -- I don't think so because, you know, a cancer patient can go into remission, they no longer have that status. I don't think -- I mean, I don't think there's any question that being poor is a status. It's something you are apart from anything you do. It's a status that can change over time, and at that point, you wouldn't be a part of the class, but I don't think it changes the fact that it is a status. And what Robinson found so offensive about status-based conduct --
But it would take Justice Jackson to blow up our first real bombshell of the argument, following up on the Roberts' discussion of immutability:
JUSTICE JACKSON: Can a person go from being addicted to drugs to not being addicted to drugs?
MS. CORKRAN: So I think under common -- as we think about it in terms of modern medicine, the answer is no. But the Robinson Court certainly thought that was the case, right? Sixty years ago, we didn't have the same understanding of addiction as we do now.
JUSTICE JACKSON: So your view of Robinson is that it doesn't really matter, the permanency of the condition; it's still a status?
MS. CORKRAN: Right. The Robinson Court did not think that the permanency mattered because it thought that addiction was a status that could change.
In summary, the Robinson Court was actually wrong on the facts. They thought that people could go from being addicted to drugs to not being addicted to drugs. So, they clearly didn't care all that much about permanency. But BOOM goes the claim that, apparently the New Correct Lefty Science has determined that people don't ever transition from being addicted to drugs to not being addicted to drugs. I guess I heard it here first. My years of shouting at clouds that Scott pointed out that basically all honest alcoholism rehabilitation studies fail to outperform a placebo and that narcotics rehabilitation studies don't even use measures like "stops taking narcotics" in favor of measures like "causes trouble for other people while using narcotics somewhat less often" is finally being adopted! (Frankly, in far stronger form that I would have even stated. I wouldn't say that people can't stop being addicted to drugs; just that we can't magically impose a "treatment" regime that is going to result in them stopping.) Wow! Was the failure of Oregon's decriminalization experiment so spectacular that we're no longer going to have endless claims that we can make everything completely legal, so long as we pray to the god of providing "treatment" (without any serious consideration of how this is going to happen or whether it will actually do anything)? I can hardly believe it.
As amazing as this concession to Justice Jackson was, Alito somehow at least comes close:
JUSTICE ALITO: Well, see, the problem is that once you move away from the definition that makes the inquiry basically tautological, then you get into the question of assessing the closeness of the connection between the status and the conduct. And you do run into problems with the person who's a kleptomania -- a kleptomaniac or a person who suffers from pedophilia. So how do you distinguish that? How does the Court assess how close the connection has to be?
MS. CORKRAN: So -- so, for both of those categories, the -- the -- the status is defined -- I don't know if status is the right word there -- being a pedophilia or having pedophilia is defined by the urge that you have, not by your conduct, and acting on that urge. So, if someone were to act on that urge, that tight causal nexus on why they didn't have access to shelter, then they would be outside of our claim.
What's this?!?! A distinction between "having an urge" and conduct?!? In the realm of sexuality? Say it isn't so! How many times can The Lefties That Be just boldly admit that the entire slew of homosexual behavior to gay marriage cases were based on a fundamental lie?!
The more cynical among us might observe that status/conduct games seem to be yet another way that folks run away from agency, shielding anything that they like in terms of it "being who you are" or things that just "happen to you". There is no real theory here, and most attempts to justify it are pretty philosophically incoherent. It doesn't seem like the Court is going to buy this particular extension of The Game, but why wouldn't they try? They've had all these other victories, including effectively banning Christian groups from campuses, by substituting "status" in for "conduct/belief". Why are the Status Games so powerful?
Botond173
9d ago
I decided to share my theory (if we can call it that) about the origin of the ‘incel’ slur. I’m not claiming it’s terribly original or anything but I welcome your feedback about it because it’s a pure culture war phenomenon in my view and I wonder if my theory is sound.
To start with the obvious, pretty much every human community that ever existed have had concepts of the feminine and masculine as collections of desirable traits. This entails that men and women who refuse to live up to these ideals are disadvantaged in various ways. One way is social shaming. Again, let’s leave it that here; I’m aware that I could go off on dozens of tangents here and add dozens of qualifiers and interpretations to make my argument nuanced and elaborate, but I want to keep this concise.
One way to shame unmasculine men is to use the slur ‘nerd’ on them. This was the norm for a long time in Anglo-Saxon societies, and it sort of made sense. After all, nerds are interested in things and machines, not humans, who are anything but machines. The traits that make you a nerd, especially a hard-working and employable one, are exactly the traits that are useless, detrimental even, if you want to be a socially savvy, sexually successful cool guy. If you’re too boneheaded to correctly read the carefully calculated, covert signals women send out to you to indicate sexual interest without coming off to their social circle as dirty sluts, you’re not a real man. Especially if you’re also not interested in playing team sports etc.
At some point though, the Third(?) Industrial Revolution happens, and the computerization of science and the economy is in full swing. The men most disposed to become computer scientists and programmers happen to be nerds. Before that, programming used to be seen a lowly, dull desk job, basically not different from being a secretary, and a significant chunk of programmers were single women as a result. But now, society starts believing that learning to code is a secure path to having a high-paying career and the American Dream. It seems that only the sky is the limit in the digital revolution and the booming online sector. Young women come to realize that calling undesirable men ‘nerds’ just comes across as dumb and baseless to most people.
However, none of this means, of course, that unattractive male traits just disappeared, or that society is open to abandoning social shaming as a tool of controlling men. In fact, due to an unfortunate combination of the unintended(?) long-term consequences of feminist messaging and socially harmful, pathological trends like online porn addiction, endocrine disruptors, sedentary lifestyles, social atomization, the disappearance of male rites of passage and male bonding rituals etc., it seems that a growing segment of men are socially illiterate, repulsive and dull skinnyfat manchildren. Women no longer want to dismiss them as nerds, but they definitely want to dismiss them as…something.
At this point, due to online trends, society discovers the ‘incel’ term, and just starts using it as a replacement of ‘nerd’, basically. Later, online journos discover that the term was actually invented by some Canadian female college student 20 years earlier who was a romantic failure and started a long-defunct online message board for other college women in the same situation, who applied the term to themselves, not as a slur, and definitely not as something that conveys anti-feminist views etc., but all this is long forgotten and nobody cares anymore, so it doesn’t matter. Fast forward a few years, and it becomes normal for leftist women and their male ‘allies’ to dismiss anyone and everyone as ‘incel’, even married men with children as long as they come across as sufficiently deplorable to the average feminist.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
22d ago
What is the future of Islam in the West and the future of the West with Islam?
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Popular youth figures Andrew Tate and Sneako became Muslims and made it a part of their media personality, which frequently gets millions of unique views with the audience mostly impressionable young boys.
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Muslim memes are becoming popular online. Muslim terminology is becoming popular online — I have seen cases of Muslim expressions like inshallah and mashallah entering terminally online lexicon (which is the first step to normie lexicon).
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Unlike Christianity, there is a confluence of significant factors that lead to Islam retaining strict behavioral and cultural rules. Mosques and scholars are funded by wealthy Arabs who have a monetary, political, and genetic influence in the spread of the religion; imams have children, the more strict the imam the more children, and dynastic imam families are not uncommon; the center of the religion is the Middle East where there is a constant threat of violence if leaders stray far enough from orthodoxy; the practice of excluding women from decision-making means that feminine-coded tolerance is sidelined; the religion itself highly emphasizes the following of strict tradition and punishments for “innovation”.
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We are seeing the influence of Muslims in the criticisms against Israel, in a London street draped with Ramadan signs on Easter, and so on.
It’s interesting that “Islam is a threat” discourse has died down relative to a decade ago, despite the influence of the religion increasing. Is it because so many people have lost faith in both liberalism and liberal Christianity that they no longer care? I think that could play a part. Is it just laziness? Has there been a fundamental shift in assessment of Muslims?
His Excellency Joe Biden has declared March 31st a certain ‘Transgender Day of Visibility’, which has generated derision due to its simultaneity with the Western date of Easter Sunday. If this happened outside of Holy Week, it likely would have prompted the regimented groans from the right side of the isle, and that would be that; coincidentally, however, this ‘holiday’ (which has been declared such since 2009) happened to fall on the holiest day of the year for Christians, the group which is perhaps the biggest collection of resisters against transgenderism. Naturally, this has created a lot of controversy. Trump and his team even issued a statement calling for Biden to apologize for his ‘blasphemy’, which is probably a unique event all things considered (when’s the last time you’ve heard of a politician smear another one for blasphemy? In 2000+24, no less?) Such personalities as Caitlyn Jenner and Musk have responded with similar negative attitudes.
Now, I would bet dollars to doughnuts that Biden didn’t make this decision himself. It was definitely his team which did this, in order to show his support for the ‘marginalized’, even as he has declared this day one for ‘visibility’ years before in his term. It raises the question, though, on whether or not Biden actually has these thoughts of support for these people and their identities, with this support even superseding the remembrance of Christ’s resurrection (keep in mind that Biden is an 80 year old ‘devout Catholic’, allegedly). I really doubt he does, but I’m more interested in what he actually thinks about these developments. And, how would his team react to the fact that the black community would significantly oppose this, given their high rate of religiosity? Does Biden still think this is 1969, where if you were transgender you would probably lose your job and become exiled from all institutions in society? Thoughts?
The Canadian government is increasing the capital gains tax for the relatively well off. They claim it only affects 0.13% of Canadians, but this is a lie, since capital gains are extremely lumpy, mostly affecting estates. A much larger share of the population will be in that 0.13% at some point in their lives. The tax will affect a lot of middle class people, distort the economy, and, as I'll explain at the end, redistribute wealth to foreigners.
Currently, 50% of capital gains count towards your taxable income and so you'd pay half the marginal rate, which tops out at between 44.5% and 54.8% depending on which province or territory you live in. The new rule would raise the portion of capital gains that is taxable from half to two thirds for capital gains over $250,000. Primary residences are exempt and it doesn't affect tax protected savings accounts like RRSP and the relatively new TFSA. Most people don't save enough to have savings outside of these accounts and their primary residences, but you certainly don't need to be rich to do so. You could be someone who chose never to own his primary residence and increased savings in the stock market instead. You could own a cottage, to which the capital gains tax applies when you either give it to your children or when you die. Lots of middle class people will be affected.
The capital gains tax is actually a very unfair and even absurd tax. You invest after-tax income from your salary and then when you realize a gain on those savings, even if it's just enough to keep up with inflation such that you have no real gain, you pay taxes again. Someone who is equally wealthy but doesn't save his income for as long would pay less tax. So it taxes savers more than spenders and discourages investment. There are further distortions due to the fact that primary residences are exempt, which incentivizes people to save by investing in their primary residences, inflating property values and making housing more expensive.
This brings me to my last point. The Liberals are far behind the Conservatives in the polls and an election is at most a year and a half away. The main issues tanking their popularity are housing and immigration, particularly for young people, who see a connection between those two issues. Older people don't care so much and are happy to see their property values rise (property values have risen far out of proportion to incomes in recent decades). However, this new tax rule is being promoted in the name of generational fairness.
This makes no sense. The Liberals have dramatically increased the immigration rate, which certainly has inflated property values. There are good arguments to defend this, among them that the higher property values are a net gain for Canada since the vast majority of property is owned by Canadians and most Canadians are homeowners. It really only hurts renters whose parents aren't homeonwers and therefore won't inherit that wealth. Most young Canadians, even if they rent, have parents who are benefiting from this and therefore shouldn't really complain (although they do). Now, the government is doing the one thing that messes this up: they're redistributing much of those gains to the younger generations who include, in very large and increasing numbers, immigrants and their children. What is the point of inflating asset prices with immigration if you're just going to redistirbute the gains to those immigrants? If your goal is to be maximally charitable to immigrants, fine, but this is not in the best interests of Canadians.
The tax increase does exempt primary residences, but not other assets like secondary residences, and the reason for this tax increase is to fund the enormous increase in spending on things like subsidies for new home buyers and affordable housing. The deficit has ballooned to $40 billion dollars under Trudeau and I think the government is actually starting to get desperate and trying to think of ways to raise revenue without spending political capital. Corporations and trusts will also pay this higher capital gains tax. This will reduce business investment. The tax seems calculated to actually raise a fair bit of money while minimizing the number of people who think they'll have to pay it.
Quantumfreakonomics
16d ago
Found on Twitter:
This caught my attention because there is an important point to be made about both the realities of sham "recycling" for the vast majority of discarded material and the shamelessness of corporate advertising/propaganda, but I am (for some reason) surprised at the amount of people using this to dunk on wind power.
To start: Yes, this whole process is probably a waste of time. Landfills are safe and effective™ (and cheap). There is no real reason we can't just bury the blades in a glorified hole in the ground. That said, sending waste materials to cement kilns to be burned is actually a very common method of disposal. Cement kinds have lots of desirable properties for waste disposal. They're typically used for high-calorie materials like oil or organic solvents, but this isn't some hairbrained scheme someone cooked up when they thought EPA wasn't looking.
Does this prove that "green energy" is a scam? Some quick back of the envelope calculations (provided by ChatGPT, but spot-checked by me) indicate that a typical wind turbine over the 20-year life of the blades will produce about as much energy as 18,000 tons of coal. That's 6000 tons per blade. I couldn't find a consistent figure for the weight of a turbine blade, but all of the numbers I saw were between 5 and 35 tons. The idea that burning the turbine blades counteracts the environmental benefits from the clean energy provided is absurd.
I'm not here to stan for Big Wind, but there is a lack of quantitative reasoning ability when it comes to the public discussion of environmental issues. I spent about 15-minutes figuring out the right numbers because I wanted to write this post, but I knew intuitively that there would be at least an order of magnitude difference. Gell-Mann amnesia suggests that actually, all public discussions are this bad, I just recognize this one because of my STEM background.
SomethingMusic
5d ago
Why America's social policy is not helping the poor
There's a section of Youtube lately that is focusing on the faces of poverty in America. Not in a predatory way like 'get rich quick' influences, crypto scammers, and redpill adjacent-sphere individuals like Andrew Tate who are looking to exploit the desperate poor to make profit, but rather to shine a light on the mindset of poverty in America.
One of the most recent videos is by Andrew Callaghan interview and documentary about the Kia Boys, a group of young teenagers around New Haven notorious for stealing and lifting Kia's and Hyundais who had a vulnerability in their system allowing easy theft. It's a fascinating watch, but what's most interesting is how they want to spend the money they earn from carjacking. Not to support their families, not to pay for college or to get a GED, but rather to consume the latest fashion trends and to aspire to selfish hedonism.
Another youtuber is tackling American consumer debt and looks at how consumer choices end them in significant, and often insurmountable debt without extreme lifestyle and person changes. Caleb Hammer interviews people (in a fairly obnoxious and click-baity style) in significant loan and credit card debt, breaks down their finances, and tries to get them on a budget with a varying amount of success. The most common factor of the guests he has on his show is eating out- for most of his guests, almost 33% of most of their monthly income is eating out at various establishments and other spending that does not significantly increase their quality of life. Many of his guests would have significant personal income if they could have some self-control in their consumptive habits.
The problem America is currently facing is not entirely related to HBD, which is a low hanging fruit for discussing antisocial behavior. Rather, it is the culmination of various American policies which have created an underclass which sucks endless resources and only returns crime. It is plenty possible to gainfully employ low intelligence people into socially acceptable positions even as technology improves and our AI overlords come near. In fact, it would probably significantly increase the quality of life of many jobs having lower intelligence people working menial tasks to the best of their ability alongside more trained and capable individuals. The problem is that we have created a society in which there is not enough incentive or will to create the stability necessary to turn around these neighborhoods and communities.
This is the same problem America had in the occupation of Afganistan. A true occupation and social change would need significant more support and time than what the American politics around. It would probably need a full generation to be educated as well as an extreme prejudice to crackdown on Islamic extremism for Afganistan to actually significantly change, maybe 40-60 years.
Unfettered illegal immigration further strangles poverty-stricken America. The social resources are stretched thinner, to the point our politicians decided it's better to serve incoming illegals than their own constituents on the off-chance they're willing to work the menial jobs for well below livable wage for the area. Of course it helps the government are subsidizing migrants to the tune of $350 per day, or $127,750 per year per migrant which would launch them almost into the top 10% of earners in the United States.
So the question remains, what can be done? It's quite possible liberal policy is somewhat correct but doesn't go far enough. Instead of social security checks, benefits should be more tied between work programs and corporations. Imagine that individuals in section housing have to work at Amazon fulfilment centers. Perhaps the government and Amazon could strike up a deal that with enough workers, Amazon could lower the throughput per worker (to increase livability) in exchange for a tax subsidy to offset the cost of having to hire a non-optimum amount of workers. People in section housing could be bussed to the job, and also have regular police presence and social workers more intimately involved in their lives along with people helping them understand budgeting. It would require insane amounts of manpower, but it would also be the first step in actually beginning to address the problems of the slums.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
11d ago
Will they tire of being NATO's cat's paw? Ukrainian men are getting a raw deal in an effort to reconquer lost territory, whose residents probably want to be part of Russia anyway. Why should Ukrainians fight and die for some abstract geopolitical goal of NATO?
Are you suggesting that the existence of Ukraine is an abstract geopolitical goal of NATO? The fighting today may center around the east, but the Russian invasion was clearly aimed at decapitating the Ukrainian regime and either installing a puppet government or annexing it outright. If the Ukrainian army crumbles, is there any doubt that Russia would roll into Kyiv and Ukraine would functionally stop existing as an independent nation?
Since you seem concerned about the right to self-determination of Ukrainians, let me ask you which course of action better serves that goal - arming them so they can defend themselves, or paternalistically telling them 'Sorry, we've all decided your cause is hopeless, now you have to take peace on whatever terms you can get it. Good luck!' People below have argued that Boris Johnson (and presumably the US was on the same page at the time) sabotaged early peace talks - I'd agree with them that this was bad, and Ukraine should be able to choose for themselves - but others have linked polls showing strong support among the Ukrainian public for the war.
As for your language about Ukrainians just being our hapless puppets that we carelessly throw into the meatgrinder, I feel like you've fallen for Putin's narrative. The west has a propensity to believe that they are the only actors on the world stage with any kind of agency; see the oceans of ink spilled about how the west is solely responsible for every conflict and humanitarian crisis in the past 100 years whether they've been directly involved or not. The one actor responsible for this war is Putin, and all the kvetching about NATO expansion and Euromaidan elides the fact that Putin singlehandedly launched an expansionary war of aggression to conquer territory, massage his ego and restore the glory of the Russian empire. Putin was under no personal threat from the west, nor was Russia.
Lastly, for those complaining about the atrophied defense production capacity of the west and shipping money off to Ukraine: two thirds of the 60 billion is earmarked to be spent with American defense manufacturers. If your goal is increasing defense manufacturing capacity in the west, how would you do it if not spending money on domestic defense manufacturing?
A Tone-Shift in the Ukraine War
Lately, I've noticed that the tone of the discussion regarding Ukraine both on the Motte and on X has changed considerably. Notably, it seems that people are taking a much more pessimistic view of Ukraine's chances. The default assumption now is that Ukraine will lose the war.
I think a stalemate is still quite possible, but the more optimistic assumptions that Ukraine would regain lost territory (or comically, Crimea) are now a dead letter. So what, exactly, are our leaders thinking? Recently, Macron went off-narrative a bit, suggesting that France could send troops into Ukraine. More ominously, Secretary of State Blinken said that Ukraine will join NATO.
Perhaps Western leaders view this sabre-rattling as good for their electoral chances. And, until recently, the war was seen as a relatively cost-effective way to weaken Russia. (Sadly, this seems to have failed as Russia has freely exported oil to India and China and is making armaments in great numbers).
But what of Ukrainians themselves? Will they tire of being NATO's cat's paw? It's impossible to find good numbers on how many Ukrainian men have been killed so far in this war. It's likely in the hundreds of thousands. Towns and villages throughout the country are devoid of men, as the men (hunted by conscription) either flee, hide, or are sent to the fronts.
User @Sloot shared this nuclear-grade propoganda. While Ukrainian men fight and die in some trench, an increasing number of Ukrainian women are finding new homes (and Tinder dates) in Germany. Concern about female fidelity has always been a prominent feature of wartime propaganda. But, this takes it to a new level, since the women are in a different country, making new, better lives for themselves. How many will ever even return to Ukraine?
Ukrainian men are getting a raw deal in an effort to reconquer lost territory, whose residents probably want to be part of Russia anyway. Why should Ukrainians fight and die for some abstract geopolitical goal of NATO?
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