domain:asteriskmag.com
Forgotpassword
4m ago
Hell if someone's fired a sleeper ship at us at the point of our first radio waves and it's not going to get here till some arbitrary future year I don't really consider it of major concern.
sun_the_second
4m ago
Aside from the fact that it appeals to the doomers, why?
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
8m ago
I'm "Pro-Palestine" in the sense that I find the most defensible solution to the conflict would be two states on 1949 borders, PA in charge of the whole State of Palestine (undemocratically if necessarily), right to return to those who actually have been expelled but not to descendants, resettlement with compensation to descendants in their current countries of habitation, and international security guarantees to the two countries in a suitable way. Furthermore, I find that Israel and its policy of settlement are chiefly responsible for this not being achieved and the onus would be on Israel to take most of the steps to actualize this.
I do not base this on any moral claims on either party but simply on my understanding of what would be the most consistent solution in lieu of the international law; clearly no matter what historical injustices were perpetrated to establish Israel, its existence is fait accompli at this point, and the forceful ending of a generally internationally recognized state would have drastic international consequences. At the same time, the one question I've never seen Israel defenders answer in a proper way is; considering that Israel has in fact never claimed that West Bank and Gaza belong to it, who do they belong to? Israel still, in some weird vague way? Then why isn't it claiming them, or offering the inhabitants citizenship? Egypt and Jordan?
But those countries recognize them as a part of the State of Palestine. To some "Hamastan", in case of Gaza? Hamas is not claiming independence for Gaza. Are they completely out of jurisdiction by any state? This does not apply to any other part of the Earth apart from Antarctica, covered by an international treaty, and has not itself been defined by a treaty, so clearly this claim is just an attempt to create a new international status to some territory for the specific purpose of benefitting Israel.
The only answer that seems consistent would be that the territories are already a part of the State of Palestine, the Western countries are hypocritical in not recognizing it, and the only task would be making this situation into an internationally accepted reality. At the same time, it seems unlikely that this would happen strictly in this form, but one has to have some starting point to try and figure it all out.
Forgotpassword
20m ago
Personally I feel the entire anti-colonial case is entirely overblown. Independent Palestine likely equates to Lebanon 2.0, or another oil-poor Arabic mediocrity. Whilst I think it'd be better for all involved if Israel were located in Madagascar or the Northern Territory of Australia, that is not the case. They're certainly acting in a way inconsistent with modern Western ethics, but the vast majority of pro-Palestine Westerners would find living in independent Palestine to be a lot harder than living in 2024 Israel.
I also feel that if a return to a sufficient level of realpolitik and putting Western interests first is ever going to be pulled into the Overton window at this point, it's going to be through supporting Israel and hoping that the media eventually pivots away from the anti-colonialist meme. I fail to see the personal good of supporting Palestine, I fail to see how independent Palestine is a better lifestyle for practically anybody involved and I feel that this is potentially the lynchpin issue that will help to restore sanity to the world as a whole.
OliveTapenade
28m ago
Haven't you noticed by now?
Anything done by anyone Jewish, or any cause that might be interpreted as positive for Israel, is inherently sinister and evil.
It really is quite tiresome.
sun_the_second
33m ago
What's the gag?
Corvos
1hr ago
A big part of the pro-Israel case rests on the (asserted) status of the Jews as an ethnically-distinct group under constant persecution. Basically, the claim is that even though occupying Palestinian territory isn't great, Israel is the only place the Jews will ever be safe. Whereas the Palestinians are basically just standard Arabs who could fit in anywhere if they gave up their grudge.
I think this is a pretty self-serving argument, but it has a grain of truth and probably comes closest to the real belief of a lot of people (rather than being a justification).
Folamh3
1hr ago
Having had more than one close friend who struggled with anorexia, this jibes with my experience. At no point did "slimming down in order to become more attractive to men" ever enter into it.
Folamh3
1hr ago
I got into a debate with some fat acceptance types on Substack, who were arguing that dating fat people is "stigmatised" i.e. there are lots of people who find fat people very attractive and would very much like to date them, but choose not to because dating fat people is seen as low-status.
I thought this was, frankly, a load of hogwash: fat people have a harder time getting a date because, all things being equal, people find fat people less attractive. I was trying to find this exact article to illustrate my point - the body types that RealDolls are manufactured in are practically the ultimate revealed preference. But I couldn't for the life of me remember what the article was called.
Corvos
1hr ago
Legally you're correct, of course, but morally it makes America look cynical as hell, and seems to be part of a long-standing pattern where America demands that every other country submit to a rules-based international order whilst America does exactly as it likes.
America demands the right to extradite British citizens accused of crimes against US law, but refuses to extradite a diplomat's wife to face charges of running over a British teenager while driving on the wrong side of the road. It demands that banks in other countries release all financial information related to American citizens, but as far as I'm aware has never made an equivalent commitment. It talks constantly about free trade, but then tries to destroy the Russian and Chinese economies.
I'm all for not signing away your sovereignty, it's the hypocrisy that grates.
orthoxerox
I realized I can change my flair color to Barbie pink
1hr ago
(I don't have the heart to kick my son out of my home office, all of this is written in jest)
We all know that Paw Patrol is libertarian propaganda for kids, it's even on Wikipedia: the heroes of the day are the privatized emergency services, every single time, while elected officials are not.
But what I've realized is that it's also a different kind of propaganda. Mayor Goodway is a proud woman of color, and she's so profoundly incompetent that she couldn't have won a fair election against literally anyone unless the party nominated her as a token diversity candidate and let her run practically unopposed. Yes, Mayor Humdinger of Foggy Bottom is an evil old white male, but he is at least competent enough to manage his own team of cat minions and come up with underhanded schemes. Goodway in comparison is worse than useless. Is the show teaching the kids that women of color are incompetent figureheads at best?
functor
1hr ago
My honest guess is an overrepresentation of jews and they are overrepresented in the posts on the conflict. Add on to this a large overrepresentation of Americans who have grown up in a society that is almost religiously pro Israel. I think a lot of the justifications for Israel starts with support for Israel and then the arguments are constructed to justify the belief. It is more akin to the support of a football team than a political position.
I have met people who are pro Israel because they want to own the libs. How being on the same side as the ADL and JIDF owns the libs is beyond me.
Israel support is also a safety valve for ventilating anger towards non whites. Back in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars era I met several people who signed up just because they wanted to ventilate their anger caused by immigration. That the wars ended up causing mass immigration to Europe didn't seem to bother them. We get this sentiment a lot in Europe. People who would never say the word repatriation and talk about how migrants have to come here legally will happily cheer on bombing Gaza because they just want to see the cousins of their migrants get killed. Advocating for doing 2% of what Israel does in the suburbs of France isn't politically acceptable so we can bomb their relatives in the middle east causing another refugee crisis.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
1hr ago
I think they have. Aliens are given either by technology or by psychic powers the abilities of former polytheistic gods. They can create wonders in the heavens, they can gift us ideas and technology and revelations. And because they have an aura of the scientific about them, even things that we know make little sense get brushed aside because they’re advanced.
And like everything else, it’s used by people with something to gain from the belief. Space agencies and astronomers and astrophysicists use aliens to get funding. The military uses them to hide black projects. History channel gets views by claiming that every weird text in sacred books is really about aliens. It’s a cheap trick but it works where credulous talk of angels, gods, demons, fairies, and orcs would be mocked and dismissed as crazy talk. I find it rather instructive to mentally substitute “angels” in places where people are talking about aliens. Most of the time the story sounds insane at that point, almost exactly like a religion.
orthoxerox
I realized I can change my flair color to Barbie pink
1hr ago
This kind of dimorphism is also found in Turkey and Azerbaijan.
orthoxerox
I realized I can change my flair color to Barbie pink
1hr ago
And the same with makeup. Women keep hearing from men that the best-looking makeup is "NMM", but intra-gender competition pushes them towards heavier and more explicit warpaints to show off their proficiency.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
2hr ago
As you suspect I am speaking English and it's dubbed in Japanese. There is (or was) a version with just English but I won't search for it for two reasons:
a) They assured me only the dubbed one would be released
b) I just spoke the exact words as written, complete with grammatical errors, so I'm speaking shitty English.
Yes it is a strange place.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
2hr ago
Don't most of these still require exotic matter? Trading breaking conservation of momentum for negative mass never really sounded to me like a gain in credibility.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
2hr ago
it would be like if Edison had created the light bulb and physicists had only discovered electricity afterwards to figure out how it works
To be fair it's not like that kind of stuff never happens. A lot of the history of semi-conductors is engineers trying various random things intuitively to get a particular defined effect and only explaining why that worked after the fact.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
2hr ago
Based on the steady torrent of Israel-Palestine threads, the general impression I get is that a majority of people here is quite solidly pro-Israel in this conflict. I would like to understand the pro-Israel position better; in particular, I wonder if there are arguments for the Israeli position in the current war that don't mostly rest on one of the following:
-
An arbitrary cutoff of historical reckoning either shortly before the most recent Hamas attack, or else somewhere in the early '90s following the general Western mode of thinking about other geopolitical conflicts. Unilaterally declaring all scores settled is not a persuasive or universalizable moral principle.
-
Invocation of inherent superior qualities of Israeli Jews relative to Palestinians, be it intelligence, education or general "civilizedness". You would almost certainly either need to cut out a very contrived set of conditions to make the principle only apply to this case, or accept some hypothetical corollary you probably don't want that involves similar abuse being heaped on morally/intellectually/civilizationally inferior people that you care about or feel kinship to.
The way I see it, the moral case for Palestine is pretty clear, and unlike some seem to assume does not require you to subscribe to a lot of oppressed-are-always-right slave morality (though you do need to stop short of maximally might-makes-right master morality). The present ruling population of Israel mostly moved to that territory in the late '40s, and from the start has continued violently expelling the ancestors of present Palestinians from their homes to acquire their land for themselves. I do not think that Palestinians' stupidity or backwardness or whatever are so great that they can't be afforded what we otherwise consider basic human rights to property and safety, even if the people who want to take those from them for themselves were all literal Von Neumanns.
I don't think that this original wrong has been made right to the Palestinians, and the argument that some Palestinians submitted and got to live better lives under the Israelis than they would have had in an independent Palestine does not morally convince me either. If Bill Gates steals the plots some rednecks built their houses on, builds a mansion in its place and then offers them lavish jobs as domestic servants, do the ones who don't accept forfeit their right to complain about the theft? Another counterargument seems to rest on something like statute of limitations (like, the Palestinians and Israelis alive nowadays are not the ones who got robbed and their robbers), which would be more persuasive if Israeli settlements were not still expanding, and there weren't still Palestinians who are quite directly being made to suffer at the hands of the Israeli men with guns for no other reason than that they do not accept the "become Bill Gates's domestic servant" deal. It seems pretty clear to me that there is no recourse left to the Palestinians who do not want to to take this deal that preserves their human dignity - their conquerors certainly won't hear them out themselves, and they are backed by the US machine which not only could produce a personal cruise missile for every Palestinian if it put its mind to it but also has enough intellectual and propaganda firepower that they could make even the Palestinians doubt that they are themselves humans with rights.
If you are continuously denied justice in an existential matter, though, I don't think it's at all an alien viewpoint that you are morally entitled to do whatever you find appropriate to seize justice for yourself, including ineffectual and vile acts of revenge such as murdering the women and children of those who wronged you. To claim otherwise, to me, seems to amount to claiming that you can be absolved for arbitrary wrongs if you just amass enough power to make effective resistance impossible, and I don't like that even before we start taking into the account that the targets of Hamas terror were intended and more often than not happy beneficiaries of the original wrongs committed. (If you have been driven out of your house and into a corner at gunpoint by the mafia, the mafia boss's kid stands by watching the show and mocking you, and, seeing an opening, you shoot the kid, I will find it hard to fault you for the murder even though the kid is technically innocent of the misfortunes that befell you and this did absolutely nothing to help your situation. As a bonus, the corrupt police (my country) is then called in to arrest you, after sharing a smoke with the mafiosi.)
Though I said that the moral case for Palestine is clear, this is emphatically not to say that I rule out the possibility of a clear moral case for Israel existing at the same time. "They're both justified to continue murdering each other" is a sad reality of a lot of tribal conflict. However, in this particular case, I actually do not even see that case, or at least what I have seen seems much weaker to me, given that Israelis still have the option to leave Israel at any time as a large part of the world would welcome them with open arms (while the anti-Palestinians like reiterating that not even other Muslim countries want to take in the Palestinians, as if that helps their case), and even though in some sense they would also then be "driven from their homes" it's not like they are usually unaware of those homes' provenance.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
2hr ago
It is a bit funny how the US is now on the same side of this issue as Russia.
What was the diplomatic position of the United States about the ICC charging Vladimir Putin?
Astranagant
2hr ago
What I'm confused about: why is this a story at all? Presumably, the main effects of this are to make him unemployable and perhaps cause some interpersonal issues.
It's a story pour encourager les autres, of course.
I think what gets me is that there's simultaneously an appropriation of victimhood (evil bad guy publishes anonymous essay causing evilness!) combined with an inquisitorial zeal to punish, and apparently the power to do exactly that.
This has always been the case, and is nothing new. The establishment has now styled itself as a revolution against its victims. People who call themselves "punks" enthusiastically sign up to the same stifling speech rules as every HR department in every multinational megacorporation in the western world and excoriate others who deviate.
why is this a story at all?
Why was Scott's identity a story at all? Why was Beff Jezos'?
Dissident not only exists but has the impudence of publishing dissident litterature? That gets written because he is now a known quantity to networks of activists that will attempt to make his life and that of his friends hell if tries to get a hold of any power. It's a signal to friends that enemies exist in this particular place and must be destroyed, nothing more.
At best it sounds a little bit absurd because the power of those activists has recently diminished and they're no longer able to cancel people at will, so this type of "Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?" publications are thankfully impotent complaints.
There is no larger story, no bigger picture, just journalists throwing mud at people they find contemptuous, as is, disgustingly, their job.
SteveKirk
3hr ago
Are you doing this to get in front of a hostile doxxing from a certain notoriously vindictive group you've upset?
I hinted at this with "liberal total state", but I think that this is a new environment of omnipresent state control + supposed "liberal norms" about the use of state power.
Once upon a time a feuding clan could come and kill you and the king couldn't do much about it. Sometime later the king could send his men to kill you and nobody could do much about it.
Now we're at a point where the state has almost total power to restrain or permit violence, but in theory isn't supposed to have you murdered for opposing the state. So state violence against its victims is carried out extrajudicially by a criminal underclass that is allowed to e.g. carry guns in Chicago to do drivebys without being prosecuted. Or antifa thugs in Portland and Seattle that carry around illegal rifles in public to burn police stations. Or leftist hackers allowed to DDOS opposition websites, spam them with child porn uploads, and call in threats to the host/registrar/tier1 networks.
Or, even more hilariously, gangs of IDF-backed Jewish frat boys lol.
The state uses the criminal class as a hands-off weapon of anarcho-tyranny. It's not a subtle tool, and sometimes to their shock it bites the hand that feeds it; as Marion Barry said after being beaten by home invaders who stole his drugs, "I thought they knew I'm on their side"
This is all pretty new and unexpected as far as I can tell. Everyone predicted totalitarian control through a surveillance state and the secret police, not party NGOs raising money for violent street thugs, hacking rings, and doxxing groups.
It's not aimed at men.
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