Not sure how serious you're being about "mistreating AI." If you are serious, why do you assume an AI has qualia of a type that it becomes worthy of moral consideration? I don't deny that it might have some level of consciousness, but that's only because I think it's probable that everything has some level of consciousness, including rocks, water, etc. But I don't worry about hurting rocks, because if they do have some level of consciousness I assume it's so different from our own that we have no means of discerning what actions would provide the rock with "positive" or "negative" qualia (or whether its consciousness is even of a form that such distinctions make sense).
I don't see why the same thinking wouldn't hold for AI. Yes, it produces text output that sounds quite human. But the way it goes about doing that is so radically different from how our brains lead humans to produce language that I don't see why I should assume anything about the qualia it is experiencing from the text output, or why I should assume that any given action would "help" or "hurt" an AI based on its text output.
Thanks for this clarification - I thought that blanket "still illegal" statement sounded overbroad. (I am a lawyer, but not an IP lawyer.)
From the Midler decision:
"We need not and do not go so far as to hold that every imitation of a voice to advertise merchandise is actionable. We hold only that when a distinctive voice of a professional singer is widely known and is deliberately imitated in order to sell a product, the sellers have appropriated what is not theirs and have committed a tort in California."
I do think that the fact that OpenAI sought to use Scarlett Johansson's voice, and she said no, is a bad fact for them here and makes Midler look more relevant than it would otherwise.
A widow would most probably have come under the protection of her sons so would not have needed to remarry. If the sons are too young she may have married one of her late husband’s brothers.
I think it's the specific legal thing where if a man marries and dies without children his brother must marry the wife and bear children to carry on his name - the general pattern where across a number of cultures a man dying childless (or without a son) is a major tragedy, with the solution of ancient Jewish law being that his brother marries his widow and their son will be that heir. The Sadducees ask Jesus the question modified to the point of ridiculousness - "there were seven brothers and they each married the same woman and then died in turn, with not a one of them getting a kid along the way" - but as I understand the situation actually does come up in that society, and it's specifically because the widow has no sons that it does so.
(I've equivocated between sons and children above - the Bible version I'm reading says children, I'm really dubious a daughter would count, but I'm not a scholar of Jewish law and possibly she would through her eventual husband/son. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levirate_marriage and compare to the story of Tamar.)
Daughters absolutely do count for the purposes of levirate marriage in Jewish law. If a man dies leaving only daughters, the widow does not perform levirate marriage.
It's also worth noting that in such a case the daughter(s) are the heirs of their father and inherit all of his property. Their husbands (if and when they marry) are never viewed as heirs of their father-in-law, although in general they would have use of their wives' property for the duration of the marriage.
Substack banned me for a day a while back (for no reason), and "Deleted - comment deleted" is what all my comments with replies turned into. I'm sure Substack killed the account here.
EDIT: oh wait I'm wrong, looking back mine said "comment removed".
Huh. In the past, I've seen the message "user was banned for this comment", with a link to expand the comment. Maybe there are multiple ways to ban someone, or maybe Substack changed their procedure.
I think I saw this one before it got deleted and it was just some nonsense. It started off sounding like it was addressing one of the points, and then halfway through it turned into a bunch of random crackpot-flavoured words.
> 4: Related, breaking news: A popular Substack claims that COVID didn’t happen at all, and that both “lab leak” and “natural origins” are part of the higher-level conspiracy to distract people from the fact that there was never a virus in the first place.
I know you like contrarian takes but really feel like this is a level of conspiracism you shouldn't be signal boosting.
Well, that hasn't happened (AFAIK) to "birds aren't real". Perhaps it needs a base level of credibility to have that effect. (OTOH, people are training AIs on the web.)
But it seems to have happened to "flat earth" and "space is fake". I had a misfortune to click on some eclipse-related thing on FB and now my feed is inundated by space pictures and trolls shouting "fake" at them.
I've been told "birds aren't real" is some specific generational humor of a sort I don't especially understand. It doesn't seem to have the sort of emotional hooks that more pervasive conspiracy theories have.
It has also spawned a conspiracy theory that the powers-that-be are trying to push this dumb "parody" to discredit actual conspiracy theories or hide surveillance or whatever.
I know my son worked at a summer camp one year, and the guy in charge got *really pissed* when one of the camp counselors was telling the kids "birds aren't real" and told him to knock it off. Presumably he figured some parents would object to their kids coming home and telling them birds weren't real....
1) I am not sure the overall solution to this is in the "more restriction/monitoring of disinformation" camp versus the "more free flow of ideas" camp.
2) They are also funny/amusing sometimes. I used to like to read a blog of a guy who thought some images sent back from Mars showed Alien structures. Hilarious thing was he had the scale of the photos off so he would be finding evidence of complex machines and habitats and transportation infrastructure in what were in effects close ups of rocks that were just like a 3'X3' square. So some formation he clearly thought was 50'x50' was actually ~4 inches X 4 inches if you did your math. Nevertheless it was fascinating to see how his mind worked.
1) I don't think we can include individuals personally deciding not to repeat a specific claim as 'restriction/monitoring'.
If bad ideas don't have *some* penalty in the rate at which people repeat them, then the whole 'marketplace of ideas' thing doesn't work at all, and knowledge is impossible to accumulate.
Individuals deciding not to repeat bad ideas is a pretty normal mechanism of the marketplace. I don't think it becomes top-down authoritarianism or anything just because one commenter suggests it to the author.
2) Sure, but that feels like pretty obviously a different category than this? Lolcows are sometimes conspiracy theorists, but not all conspiracy theories are lolcows.
Highlighting wrong ideas while reasserting that they're wrong is still contributing to the marketplace of ideas, so long as the assertions are correct at a rate better than chance.
Satire just happens to be a slightly less conventional method of doing the reassertion.
Sure, but this seems like an argument of the type 'web platforms not hosting your speech isn't violation of the first amendment'. It's kind of missing the forest for the trees. in that we should be interested in the normative principles, not the narrow semantic question of whether it counts as exactly the sort of thing we've decided is bad.
In other words, it may not technically be restriction or monitoring of ideas, but it clearly proceeds on the same principle that we should limit rather than promote the spread of ideas depending on whether we agree with them or not. So I think the broader point that Martin is gesturing towards, that freely spreading ideas is actually better for our societal epistemology and rationality, does apply here even if the specific words he said were against 'more restriction/monitoring of disinformation' and what he's arguing against is not quite technically that.
I don't think this is a good analogy. Scott isn't a web platform. Unlike Twitter, for example, which has more or less infinite capacity to host ideas, and is one of the default networks for putting ideas on, Scott links to a relatively small number of things, presumably carefully selected, and I think it's fair to assume that even if he doesn't endorse everything he has linked to, he's suggesting that these things are worth linking to. (Incidentally, I think he probably *does* think that particular link is worthwhile to link to, and the problem here is mostly that I don't agree with him.)
Yeah, this week's links has me worrying about Scott's current quality filters for linking to stuff. Looking at obviously dumb and wrong stuff on the internet is a guilty pleasure for many of us, it can be fun for a bit but it's not enriching, and has little value beyond making us feel so much smarter, as if our own brains and opinions were not fallible and often half-cooked.
I wonder too about the sudden profusion of religious-apologetics-adjacent content, both in the comments and now from Scott himself. There are good reasons much of the intellectual world got bored with arguments for this or that religion long ago; there is something uniquely stupefying about people trying to extract their favorite idea of God from a few basic facts like their own existence as an individual, and modern takes rooted in "anthropics" and bayesian language are not looking any better. Plus, what's the point? Even if you managed convince someone to squeeze some kind of god principle out of this kind of intellectual wrangling, what spiritual or emotional good could such a poor, dry deity ever do?
OTOH, and for fairness: Yay for geothermal energy, in-ovo sexing, Golden Gate Claude, and Noah Smith. And I hope the Internet Archive manages to survive this one.
> I wonder too about the sudden profusion of religious-apologetics-adjacent content
Seems like a natural thing for engineers and gamers to do? "Here are the system requirements, produce the most elegant solution." "What would it be like to live in a world with class levels and hit points?"
Plus, mystics can get there too. "See the abstraction behind the world, and proceed upwards into higher- and higher-level abstractions."
That would be philosophy in the wider sense I guess, science being the "natural philosophy" that is amenable to repeated measurements.
Seeking abstract truths is not a problem though. The problem with apologists of all kinds is that when you already believe in the thing you want to prove, it's not an intellectual process of open enquiry and the quality of the result suffers accordingly. In maths it doesn't matter because proofs are water tight or they don't count, which is why you don't much hear of "apologists" for e.g the continuum hypothesis. When it comes to slippery metaphysics though...
Seeing a bad idea clearly marked as "bad and false" is still more than not seeing it at all, with enough time, exposure and vulnerability to that you'll create real belief.
It's my belief that exposure matters more than right and wrong, and that being able to be exposed a lot to something but still deny it as false is a rare skill.
It would be really surprising if Substack managed to be the first ever publishing platform on which people writing brain-hurtingly stupid crap never got a wide audience.
Also, once I found something on a 19th-century British conspiracist who thought the whole Bible happened in Britain and the Hebrews were from the Hebrides and "Egypt" was the Faroe Islands, but I didn't bookmark it and I've never been able to find it again.
Seems like a bad idea in game theory terms, since it incentivizes people to make up and spread crazier and crazier takes, which some people inevitably are going to believe. As the way the internet works people directly make money from getting attention, even if its negative. Doesn't that just result in a more and more polluted information ecosystem where people are competing to say the most insane things?
(Linking to a wiki article on an existing theory is a bit different since there's less direct benefit to the theory proposer, as with other ways of talking about stuff indirectly like writing about it but not linking it.
>As the way the internet works people directly make money from getting attention
And this is why avoiding that attention is like promoting pacifism while in a live boxing match. It doesn't work; you lose by default and the audience doesn't even notice you were intentionally not throwing punches. There are thousands if not millions of other sources for crazy takes, they're not going to starve for lack of appearance here. Might as well take some pie in passing.
I wonder if that would be anything to do with the British Israelites? Apparently some of them tried digging up the Hill of Tara in Ireland because they were convinced that was where the Ark of the Covenant was:
"During 1899 and 1902, members of the British-Israel Association of London came to County Meath to dig up the Hill of Tara. These 'British-Israelites' believed they would find buried there the Ark of the Covenant, the chest said to contain the Ten Commandments inscribed on stone tablets."
Seems like a sensible version of looking for your keys underneath a street lamp. Travelling all the way to the Holy Land or North Africa to dig random holes is expensive and inconvenient and not significantly more likely to yield the Ark of the Covenant than digging in your own backyard.
Could it be William Comyns Beaumont (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comyns_Beaumont)? I think his books The Riddle of the Earth and Britain: The Key to World History are closest to what you have in mind.
He sometimes wrote as Appian Way. I wouldn't bother with a pen name if my surname was Beautiful-Mountain and my middle name sounded like a druid, but he was a bit of a nut.
That seems likely to be at least partially inspired by Geoffrey of Monmouth's (mostly make-up but purporting to be real) History of the Kings of England, which attributes the founding of Celtic British civilization to exiles survivors from the Fall of Troy, and the first King of the Britons in his account was Brutus of Troy. Brutus was in turn grandson of Virgil's Aeneas and thus a first cousin a many times removed of Romulus and Remus.
The same work by Monmouth also have a central role in codifying and popularizing the King Arthur legend.
This is starting to sound like a really good conspiracy theory, where one group has been controlling the fate of everything for 3000 years! Forget all that "Holy Grail" stuff... Unless Jews are somehow the only non-Trojans in Europe? (Aside from Picts and Basques and Hungarians and Finns and Estonians and Roma ...)
My objection is almost the opposite: reading the position paper, their position seems actually to be the much more boring 'covid wasn't a big deal' than the (I agree) interestingly insane and therefore worth-signal-boosting 'covid literally did not exist'.
They're maybe going slightly further than most in saying that it didn't qualify as a pandemic, because it had no discernible effect on the healthy etc., but at its core it doesn't seem substantially different than the mainstream 'covid was nothing to worry about and we overreacted to it' narrative. And I was so excited as well!
I think I spent a while trying to figure out what that group was on about a few months ago. They were usually pretty vague, so I'm still not really sure. I'm not totally sure if they agree that a virus called SARS-CoV-2 existed or not.
But I think one of their main claims is that the COVID story was used as a cover-up for some other unexplained mass mortality event in specific places like NYC (possibly something related to drugs?), since the early NYC mortality data was drastically different from most other cities.
Well that does sound somewhat more interesting again!
I agree that it's not especially clear what exactly they are saying about the existence and/or nature of the virus itself, from what I've read so far. Which you would think would be a red flag to these supposedly discerning sceptics who see the truth behind the lamestream media's lies...
Is their claim that the increase in deaths (I have some data for California here: http://mistybeach.com/mark/Covid.html) was (a) not that big a deal and/or (b) not technically a pandemic?
Because unless you believe in massive data fraud (including hospitals lying about being overrun) then the increase was quite real.
If the claim is that hospitals across the western world (Europe, the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand), Japan, Taiwan and other countries AS WELL AS individual mortuary operators as well as regional death reporting from many/all cities was in on the conspiracy ... well, I just don't think there is enough common ground of how the world works to have a conversation with those people :-)
There were a lot of people in the former Soviet Union who would spontaneously talk about how great it was, including most of the media. I wouldn't call that a "conspiracy", as such, but there was definitely a shared interest in not ending up in a gulag, which incentived people to act in similar ways.
Well that WAS fairly true in some places. While we had in my state "lockdowns to prevent hospital overcrowding" that first month or so I needed to go to the emergency room for a couple days (with likely COVID complications) and at least at my big city hospital...it was completely dead. Like 3 emergency room beds out of 50 being used. It is NEVER like that. Always packed to the gills except in APR 2019.
Not that I think those policies were terrible (don't have enough info to judge), but definitely the "hospitals will be overrun" hysteria peak was badly out of tune with what happened her for quite a while. Maybe there was some specific two week period later where it was a problem, but it was well after people were maximally worried about it.
The comments on that article are pretty interesting. I even found a link to a substack arguing that the eradication of smallpox was a fake, and it is actually the same thing as monkeypox.
Concerning the epistemic status of conspiracy theories: Sabine Hossenfelder has an old and useful discussion with herself about the empirical validity of claims made by the Flat Earth Society.
Treating their claim as based on a radical version of rational scepticism (akin to pyrrhonian scepticism), Sabine argues that it boils down to whom you trust, or (in the aggregate) on the level of trust within a group. Illustrating "the social thing" in epistemiology.
Addendum: To the extent that social media separates us more effectively into different trust-groups than before, conspiracy theories should have a field day in tomorrow's society (or rather: multitude of virtual societies). Creating the preconditions for ever-more theories to signal boost. From 7:26 but in particular from 11:40 and out:
I think it's a matter of where you draw the line at what you call a conspiracy. Is two kids agreeing to keep a secret from their parents a conspiracy? If not, why not. So I think you're technically correct that there are more conspiracies than conspiracy theories. But I also think most people don't count those when they say "conspiracy".
The distinction I'm most familiar with is between "grand conspiracies" and "petty conspiracies", with the difference being that petty conspiracies have a plausible number of people in on the plot and leave realistic amounts of evidence that can permit reasonable efforts to confirm or falsify them.
A theory can start out as a Petty Conspiracy theory, but gradually evolve into a Grand Conspiracy theory as proponents have more and more contrary evidence to explain away. The Kennedy Assassination is a classic example: it's perfectly possible for a group of people to conspire to assassinate a high-level political leader, e.g. the Booth Conspiracy in 1865 or the Black Hand in 1914. But once there have been multiple official investigations with very long paper trails that consistently conclude that Oswald acted alone on his own initiative, then you need to suppose an implausibly large and cohesive conspiracy to keep the theory alive.
If "some of us have talked together" is a conspiracy, then most intra-party politics (plus quite a lot of inter-party politics) is conspiratorial. But that is stretching the concept beyond the everyday meaning of the word.
In everyday language, a conspiracy is a high-level informal agreement where there would be massive reputation losses, perhaps also criminal charges, if someone should reveal what is going on to the press and the public. Few top-level people will think that the potential benefit of such a conspiracy (remember that forming a conspiracy is no guarantee of its success) outweighs the risk of being found out, including the repercussions if being found out. Therefore conspiracies, in this meaning of the word, are likely to be rare.
I did nor mean to strawman you - only to illustrate the rubber-band characteristics of the concept.
If you say "intrigue", I agree that intrigues is what e.g. diplomacy to a large extent is about. But intrigues are not the same as conspiracies.
Anyway, I sense that much of our disagreement comes from different ways to define words. Which is not particularly interesting for any of us. So let us stop the discussion here.
> where there would be massive reputation losses, perhaps also criminal charges, if someone should reveal what is going on to the press and the public.
Why do you think that this is a required or even central element of a conspiracy? I would argue that a much more important aspect of a conspiracy is that it gives ordinary people a very wrong picture of the world. As in, you think that some things happened by themselves, and happen in different places by a coincidence, etc, but actually there are people tirelessly working to make them happen, that keep it to themselves. When such a conspiracy comes to light, instead of righteous anger people are confused for a bit, then shrug and say that it's not illegal and a good thing actually.
Unfortunately I don't have non-culture-warry examples, but I here I tried to use ones that are at least indisputably true, so anyone upset at me will quickly move to the shrugging stage and stop being very upset.
Would you believe that there's a guy in DC that can get 900 people into a zoom call, tell them that there shouldn't be any BLM/antifa/whatever protests about such and such recent event, and there will be no protests, nationwide?
Would you believe that there's a guy who can get a couple of million extra votes for democrats in swing states simply by mailing convenient preprinted requests for voting by mail to certain demographics, and it's like totally legal and cool?
Would you believe that George Soros decided that justice reform by usual means (changing laws via the Congress) is bothersome, and contributed several billion dollars towards electing prosecutors who simply refuse to prosecute a lot of crimes, all across the country?
Con artists, spin doctors, lobbyists and manipulators of public opinion exist. A fair share of idealistic activists can also be accused of sometimes putting forward a bit too alarmist future scenarios "for the good of the cause".
...But you stretch the concept by calling all behavior aimed at manipulating others "conspiracies". A conspiracy involves at least two persons agreeing to do something, usually something blameworthy, and then pin it on someone else - often involving rather convoluted reasoning. As in "9/11 was really done by the CIA, and then CIA blamed it on Saudi immigrants to start a new war with Iraq".
Conspiracy theory people also sometimes push the idea that something that is caused by god-knows-what-conflation-of-cultural-trends is really the result of a deliberate ploy, as in "the Jews in Hollywood attempt to sap the strength of our youth by feeding them gender-bending movies".
Stuff like that.
Do conspiracies (thus perceived) sometimes really exist? Perhaps. But far less often than conspiracy theory people think. And successful conspiracies even less often. Conspiracies seldom materialize because conspirators who are not idiots, must consider the risk of being found out before they set their evil plans into motion.
Apart from that: Poor old Soros! Vilified by the left and right alike.
The problem is the kind of theory that builds an evidence-proof shell around itself, not the kind that considers the possibility that some group of people is lying in order to do something bad.
I think of a conspiracy theory as being an overarching theory of everything that ends up becoming evidence-proof, as even apparent evidence against it turns out to only be more proof that it is true. But that's distinct from the existence of conspiracies, which absolutely do exist and matter sometimes and occasionally show up in the news or in court.
If I recall correctly from the time I actually read some of it, Fomenko's theory includes at least the conspiracy that the Romanov's were purposefully hiding the past existence of the Russo-Turkish horde that was actually responsible for like half of the global history. I think this is where the "Tartaria" theories originate from.
I vaguely remember some other conspiracy theory that "real" time stopped hundreds of years ago (maybe because the world was cast into hell?) and we've been living in false time ever since. But whenever I search for it, I just find phantom time or one of the variations of it. Do you remember this one?
I read an essay by Philip K. Dick, which I can't find now. He explains that he's a Christian living in the 20th century, but, at the same time, he's also an early Christian being persecuted by the Romans. Kind of like alternate realities, I think, but he experienced both simultaneously.
> Dick supposed time had stopped in 70 A.D., the year the temple of Jerusalem was destroyed by a Roman siege. Everything that happened afterwards was an illusion, and the world was still under Rome’s dominion.
That sounds like the strategy of "to make sure children never get sick, we must sterilize the environment around them and not let them touch anything that could be carrying any infection, since they are kids and weak". Unfortunately, the practice, I think, showed conclusively that following this strategy produces very bad results that the child has to struggle with for the rest of their lives.
Is your concern that he wasn't clear that it was a goofy conspiracy theory?
It's easy to forget that the people reading your words online include precocious 10 year olds and foreigners with only a very loose grasp of English and a notion of America shaped by movies and various kinds of non-neurotypical people out on the edges of various bell curves, and all those people may very well take a sarcastic or snarky comment you make literally. OTOH, it would take all the life out of writing to remove humor, which often comes from absurdity, understatement, hyperbole, sarcasm, etc.
Comment on 5. While £35k is $44k at the market exchange rate (1£=$1.27), the purchasing power parity exchange rate (as of 2022 see here https://data.oecd.org/conversion/purchasing-power-parities-ppp.htm) is (1£=$1.54) means a pound in the UK goes much further than it's value in dollars does in the US. This gives an equivalent household income of $54k in the UK, higher than black American households though still much lower than the average across all USA households.
I would be interested to see the comparison in hours worked, and the related average earnings per hour. In general Europeans seem to work less hours than Americans and take more holidays.
This is mostly caused by part time workers working significantly less hours than in the US.
If you compare only full time employees then it's 40.4 hours a week in Germany vs 42.1 in the US, meaning that the average American actually works only about an extra 100 hours. Which is basically just Germans having slightly more vacation.
That's accounted for in the extra 100 hours. Which amounts to roughly an extra two weeks plus a few more holidays.
The real difference in German working hours is that the average German part timer works about 20 hours while the average American part timer works significantly more than that. So if you take all workers (as opposed to all full time workers) that pulls their average down.
Note this is not wages but all benefits received. So the average American worker, even factoring in European higher benefits, receives about 24% more than the average European and even more than the average British person.
The original question was comparison of hours worked. It was a response to someone pointing out the US was richer than Germany. Then someone said, "Ah, but they work less!" To which the response is: even adjusting hour for hour they earn less. That's not nebulous. It just shows the person was wrong.
The next line of defense is what you're bringing up: Ah, but welfare! To which the response is: GDP per hour worked is also lower and you can't redistribute your way out of that math. And the US also comes out ahead in per capita spending on welfare spending anyway. Europe has spent the last two decades economically stagnant while the US has continued to grow.
The specific answer to your question: It includes public benefits received through work. Which includes healthcare in most of Europe but not in the UK.
yeah I always find these US - other country income comparisons a bit odd, because they will fluctuate a lot based on exchange rates that have a only limited impact on the wealth/feeling of wealth of people within these countries.
I also thought so. But I checked at some point, and the gap has been pretty consistent for decades. Exchange rate matter less than I had previously thought.
That's why it's better to use purchasing power parity (PPP) over just comparing salaries or wealth and seeing what the exchange rate is. PPP gives you a better idea of how much wealthier one country is.
True, but PPP has its drawbacks too, it's based on some arbitrary basket of goods which might resemble someone's purchases but not someone else's. A poor person might spend more on rice than they do on Ferraris, for a rich person it might be the other way around.
For what it's worth, the US also beats all the large European countries on PPP GDP per capita although it varies considerably depending on whose numbers you believe. Switzerland, Norway and Ireland may or may not be better off, while Germany/France/Italy/Spain/UK are all substantially worse off. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita
This is one of those things that Europeans and Europhiles like to believe but isn't true. If you include all social spending the US is the second largest social spender as a % of GDP in the world, just behind France and significantly ahead of the UK. In absolute terms (just the raw amount of money) it's the largest. But this includes things like refundable tax credits which are not included in government services. The US system is more privatized than the UK, that's the main difference, but it's not smaller.
I sort of agree with you, but a lot of US social welfare spending is unusually inefficient & wasteful compared to other countries. Like, I don't think running programs for the elderly, poor and so on through refundable tax credits is a particularly good way to go about things. So while I guess one could argue that the US is quite generous, a dollar is clearly not going as far as an equal unit of currency in another developed country
Depends on the program. But broadly speaking, top line spending is unusually high but it's not unusually inefficient. The reason we spend more on welfare is down to two things: we provision more welfare and we pay people who work in it better than foreign counterparts.
In order to get British-like numbers you'd need to pay bureaucrats British wages ($38k vs $83k), limit services like the British, and reduce workforces to British levels (about a 25% cut). We could do that. But American voters have generally opposed it.
For instance, if you live in Houston on $150K then you probably own a big house with a yard and a two car garage and a couple of cars and a speedboat or something. If you live in London on $150K then you probably live in a dingy rented apartment and may or may not drive a Vauxhall Corsa. But it's not really fair to compare London to Houston, you should compare it to New York, and in New York people live in crappy apartments too.
But then where *do* you compare Houston to? There's nothing like it in the UK, where everything is either (a) London, (b) some failing former industrial city equivalent to the US rust belt, or (c) the countryside. There is nowhere in the UK that is socially equivalent to the sort of cities that most of the US population lives in.
If you live in London on $150k you can afford to buy a decent house with a garden. Most people on that kind of salary would be looking at houses in places like Guildford or Kingston, which are nice and very green areas. And you can certainly afford a good car and keep a boat if that's what you want. What you describe is more like $60k salary in London, I'd say.
Well, of course you'd take a mortgage, few people are in a place to buy such properties outright. You can usually buy something that's 4-5 times your annual salary, so $150k would mean you can buy in the region of $600k-$750k.
It looks to me like $150k/year before taxes in the UK would be $102k/year after tax. It also looks like a $600K home financed on a thirty-year mortgage at current UK rates would be about $52K/year in mortgage payments. Except that thirty-year fixed-rate mortgages are not really a thing in the UK. So that's 50% of your income at the outset, with the ongoing risk that this could balloon to a much higher value.
In the US, it's generally considered unwise to put more than 30% of one's income into rent/mortgage, and that's with long-term fixed-rate loans that won't be 40% of your income next year. The British version seems uncomfortably close to living on the edge of ruin.
Yeah, I just got back from the UK. 50p for a bag of six pitas > $3 for a bag of six pitas (roughly same number of calories in each pita, so not a difference steeped in the size of the goods).
Since the GBP/USD exchange rate fell to near enough 1 that I've basically been imagining dollars as equivalent to pounds, I have been surprised quite a few times when hearing how expensive basic stuff like food is in the US.
Yeah, it's pretty bad out here... I would also like to add that there are more needs here in the USA (i.e. a car, car insurance, gas for your car, oil for your car, tires for your... you get the point) than in major cities across most of the developed world. These are also ridiculously expensive.
It's pretty frustrating. I know that people in other countries drive, obviously, but it is an absolute necessity in the US and it's just so expensive.
It is not an absolute necessity in all cities. I've been a non-driver for over three decades now. But it sure is a nuisance. We really need decent public transit, but too many people hate the poor, and will act to harm them even at the cost of harming themselves.
One big expense for anyone who's not over 65 or poor enough to be on Medicaid is health insurance. Medical care and insurance is insanely expensive in the US, and the prices are this weird random number generator that nobody can predict ahead of time.
Possibly C. Think Biden looking like a hypocrite by issuing a pardon makes him look worse than a Trump endorsement helps? (Does Trump in this scenario stop running against him? I'm confused).
My meta response would be that the fact that Trump is offering this deal is evidence that he thinks he's going to lose and/or some new stuff is going to come out that he's afraid of being arrested for.
There's also the general game theory arguments against responding to this kind of thing, setting precedent, etc.
EDIT: Looking at the OP it says Trump can lie. Which changes the scenario, given that he's well known for lying constantly. And would happily tell his supporters "I told Biden that if he pardoned me I'd endorse him, and he did! What an idiot! Vote for me tomorrow!" If you can guarantee Trump's compliance, or do it only after he's formally dropped out, that changes things.
If you don't want people to interpret the hypothetical in light of the possibility that a person who's infamous for dishonesty might lie, you should probably specify that he won't as part of the hypothetical.
I would guess that Biden would lose more votes than he would gain from a Trump endorsement. But maybe Trump would lose more votes than Biden would lose on net if he endorsed Biden. Total turnout would suffer dramatically.
It doesn't change the scenario. It's already well-established that Trump lies, and it seems to me that the opinion being canvassed in this survey is not whether justice should be done though the world perish, but whether Trump is lying.
Trump can *already* say "I told Biden that if he pardoned me I'd endorse him, and he did! What an idiot! Vote for me tomorrow!". It wouldn't be true, but in neither the hypothetical nor in real life does that constrain Trump's options. So if the promise is a private deal between Trump and Biden, then it's a no-op unless Biden actually wins and Trump gains nothing by securing the promise and refusing the endorsement.
If Biden has to *publicly* promise the pardon, then yes, that could backfire.
Also, Biden can't pardon Trump of the alleged NY and GA crimes, so this seems like a really bad plan for Trump.
That is supposedly being done by an impartial justice system, so I think it looks quite different from a situation where the current ruler directly and explicitly offers the opposition candidate such a deal in order to circumvent the democratic process.
>That is supposedly being done by an impartial justice system
Does anyone know if there have been polls on what fraction of the public believes that the current charges against Trump have been brought impartially?
Jury of your peers not "fair" enough for you? What's happened to the patriotism that once existed on the Right? It is virtually entirely gone now. They are like hippies spitting in the faces of returning Veterans.
I don't know what "patriotism" has to do with it, but the stated attitudes toward crime and law & order among the right have certainly changed markedly over the last eight years or so.
It seems different to wait until after a court has tried someone and found them guilty and then allow the state to imprison them in keeping with its laws, compared to promising, before an election, to find some way to arrest and try and convict your opponent.
Not that I trust the average person to make very well-considered decisions, but the results don't seem very strange to me when you consider that the scenario doesn't stipulate that Trump can be trusted to keep his word, letter or spirit.
Yes. Too bad there's not a "none of the above" option. (Actually, though, I feel rather neutral towards Biden. But he sure isn't someone to inspire enthusiasm.)
This is not very charitable. What about all of us who want to vote against the status quo and have no choice but to go with Trump, despite our reservations about his character?
Justices Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh
He ran on the platform of "I am going to put conservative jurists on the bench" and he delivered on that promise. Not just at the Supreme Court. The entire Federal bench. I am willing to forgive a lot of foibles for success on what I really care about.
Now you likely disagree that those were positive changes, but you can't argue that Trump didn't do more for the conservative political cause than anyone since Reagan.
During the civil war, Lincoln was asked to get rid of his general, U.S. Grant. I think the issues was he was a drunk and a boor, but I may have the details wrong. In any case, Lincoln's response is how I feel about Trump. “I can't spare this man–he fights."
I don't hate liberals, but I do hate the direction they want to push the country. That is called politics. Accusing me (and half of the country) of being in a cult of personality because we have political opinions you don't agree with is neither true, kind, or necessary. It is also not fair or helpful, and I am going to call it out when I see it.
Name a single Republican president (or candidate for) from the last 30 years who would not have put 3 Federalist Society Judges onto SCOTUS. Trump accomplished virtually nothing. Only by his own incompetence did he not manage to dramatically rework Obamacare. Trump is better for Democrats because he does so little in office but worse for the country because he alienates our allies and makes the U.S. seem like an unreliable partner-nation.
No, Biden support is a collective run-out-the-clock strategy. Many people who intend to vote for Biden are deeply dissatisfied with the status quo in this country and few of us view Joe Biden as any sort of solution to that. In fact to be honest I don't know of any such voter who does and I know a _lot_ of deeply-dissatisfied voters.
But: putting Trumpism generally and Trump individually back in charge would be just telling our children and/or grandchildren, "fuck you and fuck your future". So we're going to vote for four more years of keeping the chaos muppet out of the White House; then based on current indications by 2028 Trump's physical and mental health will preclude his running again.
[To be clear I'm not personally advancing the above line of thinking, rather am summarizing the comments of a dozen different friends/colleagues during the past six months. Including a couple of lifelong Republicans.]
Since Biden has no pardon power related to Trump's state trials in New York and Georgia, nor will he if Trump in the Arizona or Michigan cases is shifted from unindicted co-conspirator to indicted defendant [due to some of those already charged flipping on him], but Trump under this scenario is apparently unaware of that fact....maybe the "Dark Brandon" move would be to say yes to the deal and then let the fact of it leak as more evidence that Trump is too dumb to be entrusted with the nuclear codes, negotiating treaties, etc.
Or: when Trump approaches with the proposition, Biden calls in the Secret Service and Attorney General to listen in on and record the call on which Trump offers the corrupt bargain. Biden being a cooperating witness he just makes some noncommittal response ("Well I'll think about it Donald"), and then the next day Trump is indicted for some version of the felony that got Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich convicted and sent to prison. And the White House releases the recording of the phone call.
It seems fairly natural to assume Trump is bound to fulfil his promise, or that Biden's commitment only becomes binding if Trump follows through (because otherwise it's a pointless hypothetical; obviously you would not trust Trump's promise), but presumably not everyone did.
Even if we do make that assumption, there are probably lots of ways Trump could technically 'endorse Biden' without shifting a non-trivial number of votes. Again, different people will make different assumptions here -- but I suspect plenty of 'no' voters chose 'no' at least partly because they doubted that taking the deal would actually result in a Biden win.
'I think you’d have to claim that God will only violate the laws of Nature in cases that will bring a tiny number of people to the faith but leave the vast majority unmoved, which is such a weird preference that I think you can no longer call it a “prediction” of the “God exists” hypothesis.'
This seems related to the hypothesis that Bigfoot doesn't merely exist, but also has a field about him that causes any photos of him to become blurred.
You do need to consider things like the Backfire Effect, where presenting more evidence contrary to people's beliefs causes them to dig in their heels. Also, if the goal is to get people to be more loving, one must be wary of creating a system that encourages showing the appearance of faithfulness rather than actually seeking inner conversion.
> it’s basically “bomb approximately every building in Gaza so Hamas can’t hide there, and maybe at some point we’ll kill enough of them that we can feel victorious and leave”. I am not sure what this strategy offers which is worth 50,000 deaths and counting
This one's just blatantly wrong to the point of feeling explicitly dishonest- there's specific military targets (known Hamas commanders and operatives, munitions factories, etc). There's no widespread destruction of buildings in order to remove cover. The number of casualties you quote is also about 30% higher than even the Hamas -run Gaza health ministry's own estimates (not a particularly conservative group on estimating casualty numbers).
My understanding is that this can happen with apparently reasonable rules on targeting if you're trying to hold down casualties while clearing an area. There's a building with people in it shooting at your troops, so you drop a bomb on it. That gets 50% of them, but the other 50% retreat to the next building over, so you drop a bomb on that one. Repeat until you're out of bombs or they are out of people. The result is a string of precision strikes, each individually justified, that leave the area looking like that. This is what Israel appears to be doing, and is quite similar to what we did in Mosul when we retook it from ISIS.
That sounds like... pretty much exactly what Scott said?
> bomb approximately every building in Gaza so Hamas can't hide there, and maybe at some point we'll kill enough of them that we can feel victorious and leave?
Take away the facetious tone, and I'd say this is a pretty reasonable characterisation of what you've just described.
I suppose it depends on how you analyze this. If the only metric you care about is "how many buildings are destroyed", then yes, it's basically the same. But that's not how military law has traditionally worked, and for good reason. The alternative involves telling soldiers "yes, I know it would be convenient to blow up that building full of people shooting at you, but you've used up your quota of destroyed buildings, so sucks to be you, hope that none of you die while clearing it the hard way". Or in other words, at some point buildings in Gaza become more important than the lives of Israeli soldiers, based solely on how many buildings have been destroyed. That seems rather nonsensical, and avoiding things like that is why the laws of war care a lot about motives and circumstances rather than being purely based on outcomes.
In a situation like the 1992 LA Riots, where the "enemy" is mobs of angry civilians and the occasional street gang, you can and should operate under that kind of restrictive rules of engagement and then some (e.g. the declassified "Operation Garden Plot" documents make a big deal about not returning fire on snipers firing from residential buildings). But that doesn't work as well against tens of thousands of Hamas fighters.
I don't have a good sense for how much resistance justifies varying levels of destruction, but it makes sense that how much force you should be using varies wildly depending on how strong and organized the opposing force is relative to your infantry.
Fully granted. There's obviously a big difference between how you'd respond to urban unrest in your own city (where the resistance is rather squishy and going in hard is likely to make more enemies and cause problems for years down the line) and how to deal with a city full of entrenched and very hostile enemies.
But while there are times when you absolutely should be willing to take casualties to hold down destruction, and that includes pretty much all civil unrest cases, this is not civil unrest, this is straight-up urban warfare. And to put it politely, Israel basically wasn't bombing buildings before 10/7, and 10/7 still happened, so it's not clear what benefits restraint would bring.
I lived in Berkeley during the 1992 LA riots (they reached Oakland too, and we were bracing ourselves for impact even up in Cragmont Avenue).
I remember the riots stopped from one day to the next when Rodney King (whose beatings by the police started the whole thing) went public and held a short speech, including the immortal sentence: "We are stuck here for a while. Can we get along?"
Maybe he meant it in an everyday fashion, but it struck me - and many others - as a deeply existential and emotional statement. I still believe that sentence was the main factor that stopped the riots.
Pity it is unlikely to work between Israel and Gaza. So far, they miss a street-level philosopher, like Rodney King turned out to be.
"That sounds like... pretty much exactly what Scott said?
> bomb approximately every building in Gaza so Hamas can't hide there, and maybe at some point we'll kill enough of them that we can feel victorious and leave?"
Wouldn't bean's description be: "Bomb every building that Hamas IS hiding in"? Rather than "bomb every building that Hamas MIGHT hide in"?
The two seem different because one grants agency to Hamas such that by not hiding in specific buildings those building would be safe(r).
The area in question in the second link was being used heavily to concentrate troops.
Overall an estimated 45-50% of buildings are "damaged or destroyed", but that's mostly more reactive than proactive - a hit is called on a building after enemy combatants are seen using it (I think we have some people here who have been directly involved in the fighting and would know more than me).
Two things worth noting here - first, a building can easily be damaged enough to fall into this category even if not directly struck (as many people in central Israel who've had rockets land down the street from them can attest). Second, most buildings damaged are only damaged after the civilian population was evacuated - this is technically consistent with the idea that they're destroying buildings to prevent Hamas having hiding places, but importantly differs in that it implies both a lot of care to avoid collateral damage, and that Palestinians themselves would not see their buildings destroyed if they didn't choose to use them for military purposes, which is an important distinction.
With no offense intended, this seems like a clear case of mood affiliation. Extrapolating 50% destruction from an aerial photo of a few square miles? The rationalist bar is somehow lowered to the floor in this instance?
It's ironic that Israel, due to forever opprobrium from the weird coalition of European Socialists and the UN* is currently fighting the "most clean" urban-warfare battle of the 20th century, with even the UN admitting to only 25k casualties, meaning a 1:1 ratio of civilian to enemy combatant death (the US would've killed [gulp] for that in Mosul). And yes, a clean combat zone means getting the civilians out first. And yes, as battle rages on, more building are destroyed in the battle zone - I've yet to meet someone who prefers to die form sniper fire rather than call in an airstrike on the building where the sniper is.
But I am left with total disdain for those (not suggesting you are one) whose mood affiliation allows them to just inhale Al Jazeera News (Pravda of the Emirate who funds Hamas) hook line an sinker, because it fits what they want to think of the world. That's just a very skewed way to understand the world.
* with its over-representation of Muslim interests, even considering the fact that 1 out of 4 people in the world are Muslim - I'm guessing because no other major group of nations has any real cause in common.
People support a "ceasefire" until it's specified that "ceasefire" means hamas keeps their hostages and keeps bombing Israel, at which point most people change their minds. It's just like how everyone supports more social programs and lower taxes.
I'm curious why anyone is putting any stock in any casualty numbers coming out of Gaza. Reports I'm seeing are that civilian infrastructure across the region is effectively non-functional. If normally you count the number of bodies going through the morgue to account for deaths, and certain hospital admissions to count for wounded, it seems to me that there's no way to produce a credible number for Gaza. Where's the network of morgues and who are they dutifully reporting to? Are all bodies going to them, given that nearly everyone in the region is a refugee without steady access to food/water, let alone cell phone service and a directory to look up directions to the morgue. Nearly every hospital has been bombed/raided at least once, with reports that they're mostly non-functional, so where are the casualty numbers coming from?
It sounds like the Gaza health ministry is trying to put out some kind of official numbers, but IDK what's behind that. Are the numbers legitimate enough for them to really be able to say, "We've identified >50% of the bodies and are credibly working through the backlog. We'll get back to you with the rest." Are they just putting on a front to look like they're still competent/capable, counting what they can and pretending they aren't missing large numbers of people stuck under the rubble? Are they inflating the numbers to drive recruitment? Or are they depressing the numbers to make it look like Hamas is putting up a good fight?
I think the answer to all these questions is "this information is not currently knowable". I'm happy to hear those answers, but with evidence not pontification. I think most of this discussion of casualties is the illusion of knowledge trying to fill the gap in information everyone wishes to know but can't.
There's a difference between saying, "Don't trust the numbers because they come from an agent of Hamas," versus saying, "don't trust numbers coming from a chaotic war zone with no functional civilian government to deal with this kind of situation."
Do you really think that implies that ALL the number from every source aren't faked. I think the argument that you shouldn't believe any of them is quite convincing.
My sense is that everyone is making up numbers here. This doesn't even require anyone to be doing anything maliciously (though it doesn't preclude that), just that the fog of war is real, and there's a concurrent strong desire for knowledge despite the fog of war.
Since I made the case for the Gaza numbers being necessarily unreliable, I'd like to make the case the the IDF numbers are also not reliable. Kind of like in Vietnam when they asked soldiers on the ground to estimate how many Vietcong they killed, collated those numbers, and reported what the top brass wanted to hear, which is that the US was really sticking it to the enemy. Soldiers on the ground didn't know, they could only guess. I knew a guy who served in Vietnam and he talked about spraying bullets in the jungle at targets he couldn't see, then being haunted at night not knowing whether he'd killed someone, or if so how many.
When I hear IDF reports of X# Hamas fighters killed I don't take those numbers any more seriously than I take those from Hamas. How do they know they killed X# Hamas fighters? They don't wear uniforms. Various government officials have said things implying they think all military-age males in Gaza are Hamas, etc. So maybe they're over counting any male Arab-looking body as a Hamas militant. How would they know the difference? Maybe they're under-counting. How do they know whether there's a dozen Hamas buried in the rubble of a building they bombed? Nobody is going in and clearing out the rubble of an active combat zone just to count bodies of militants killed.
These are all guesses. What people think of those guesses, or which direction they think the real value lies, is more a reflection of ideological predisposition than anything else.
From an earlier discussion, here's a link to a PDF that has a good look at the first few months of casualty figures, and a link to what the author has been up to more recently.
With all due respect, my source for the 50% number is the BBC, analyzing satellite data for all territory in Gaza, see https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-68006607 , and you are making a bunch of completely false assumptions about me and then blaming me and my entire community for them.
It doesn't help that you quoted this along with the "50k dead" number, which is 30% higher than even the most extreme estimates by Hamas (which, as an added bonus, include the thousands of terrorists killed inside Israel in the original invasion).
If someone says "Biden reduced inflation-adjusted GDP 10% and also he's a convinctee pedophile", I'd guess the first figure has some source, but quoting it along with the blatantly (easily checked) false and offensive second part makes it clear he's not being honest.
> with the "50k dead" number, which is 30% higher than even the most extreme estimates by Hamas
is it "50k corpses were identified" or "50k people who used be alife before the war, but are currently missing and presumed dead" or "we found body parts of 50k corpses"?
Which one of these are you talking about, and which one is scott talking about?
I am asking, because I remember a couple weeks ago reading news, about how some officials in gaza changed their measurement from one of these counts to another, and "magically" the death count jumped dramatically and people started to blame each other in a very similar manner how you are blaming scott right now.
That jump was between 35k and 25k. So using the 35k is already going with the high end estimates (which, if you don't want to dig into the controversy, is an understandable default number to mention). The 50k number is a further (inexplicable) 30% jump above that.
Note that this claim is often made of Gaza City, not all of Gaza. (I glanced at the article you linked, I think it talks about cities in Northen Gaza in general.)
That said, I think that number is generally considered correct for North Gaza.
The problem as I understand it isn't the known Hamas commanders in those buildings - it's that you need to go through those buildings one by one to look for militants and/or hostages and/or weapons, and many of those buildings are rigged to explode, or e.g. have militants hiding on the top floor waiting to ambush you. Several IDF soldiers have died in exactly that way.
After that happens a few times, it "makes more sense" to just bomb the building rather than risk more soldiers dying, since they are empty of civilians anyway.
> The problem as I understand it isn't the known Hamas commanders in those buildings - it's that you need to go through those buildings one by one to look for militants and/or hostages and/or weapons, and many of those buildings are rigged to explode, or e.g. have militants hiding on the top floor waiting to ambush you. Several IDF soldiers have died in exactly that way.
If the argument is just 'it's difficult and dangerous for our soldiers to prosecute our war without flattening the entire country', my response would be 'tough'- or alternatively 'well have you considered not doing that?'
'But it's much easier for us just to bomb the place' is not an acceptable justification.
This isn't carpet bombing - carpet bombing deliberately targets civilians, while this is pretty careful about not doing that.
"If you can't win a war without killing enemy civilians you should just lie down and die" is also not real advice anyone would follow. If you think you can prosecute this war better you are welcome to come and try. I assume you won't, because you don't particularly feel like risking your life for other people's struggles that aren't your fault - but that's exactly how these soldiers feel.
I actually didn't realise carpet bombing had that precise a meaning; I simply meant 'do lots of bombing of a given area'. The point I was *trying* to make is unaffected, but I realise that I unintentionally made a much stronger point so I've edited the comment to reflect that. Please feel free to respond to the amended point, or not.
> "If you can't win a war without killing enemy civilians you should just lie down and die" is also not real advice anyone would follow. If you think you can prosecute this war better you are welcome to come and try. I assume you won't, because you don't particularly feel like risking your life for other people's struggles that aren't your fault - but that's exactly how these soldiers feel.
This, on the other hand, is just a straw man I'm afraid. Nobody suggested they need to 'lie down and die'; Israel is one of the safest and most affluent countries on earth, and they would have been absolutely fine if they had done exactly nothing in response to October 7.
They are, by many analyses, greatly *increasing* the risk to Israel and its denizens with this insane overreaction.
They would, to be fair, be accepting the continued existence of Hamas. But that's not accepting death, or even defeat; most people don't consider the complete elimination of every one of their enemies a necessary condition of victory. They've already achieved a 50:1 victory, in the 'killing innocent people on the other side' war, which is of course all Hamas actually did.
It would be much more achievable and cheaper to improve the country's defences and capacity to the point where October 7 could not happen again. And it would have the added advantage of not creating new generations of potential threats by doing exactly what created this level of enmity in the first place. But it *wouldn't* have the advantage of wreaking bloody vengeance and making Israel's leaders look tough, which is of course what the real purpose of all this is. And my country did that too, 20 years ago, so I can only cast stones so forcefully on that point; I just find it bizarre that some contrarian rightists want to pretend that there's a strategically and morally justifiable rationale here.
It's reasonable to get rid of Hamas after October 7. Sure, they could PROBABLY be relatively safe leaving Hamas in power, but there would be huge socio-political consequences. The Israeli public doesn't want it, understandably, and Hamas' prestige would be enormous. Israel realizes now that to be safe it has to have better security control of Gaza, probably meaning control over the Egyptian border, etc. Which is a lot easier if you get rid of Hamas.
Also, leaving Hamas in charge dooms the Palestinian people to an endless nightmare. Getting rid of Hamas makes all things possible including two state resolution and peace and prosperity for the Palestinians.
> This, on the other hand, is just a straw man I'm afraid. Nobody suggested they need to 'lie down and die'; Israel is one of the safest and most affluent countries on earth, and they would have been absolutely fine if they had done exactly nothing in response to October 7.
No, this is wrong. You can't just turtle up and let an enemy keep attacking you as much as they want. Israel tried that with Iron dome. October 7 roved they will eventually figure out a way through, and once they do they will kill *everyone*. Kids, grandmas, babies butchered and shot like dogs in the street. No one is ever, ever going to be okay with shrugging that off.
> This, on the other hand, is just a straw man I'm afraid. Nobody suggested they need to 'lie down and die'; Israel is one of the safest and most affluent countries on earth, and they would have been absolutely fine if they had done exactly nothing in response to October 7.
I asked you in another comment what specifically you mean by "do nothing", and you never responded. I won't repeat that whole comment though I urge you to look for it, but suffice it to say I disagree with this quite a bit.
You are imagining Hamas is some threat that can just be "managed", which is exactly what Israel has done for the last 15 years. October 7th proves that a smart enemy that can get a lot of resources will eventually find a way to inflict damage that you cannot ignore. They can wait another 10 years, arm themselves even more thoroughly, and find another weakness to exploit. Maybe next time they kill 10k people. Maybe next time they manage to explode a large bomb inside a city. Who knows.
If you think a population can and should be willing to live under those conditions, you are... mistaken.
"Carpet bombing deliberately targets civilians." Way to ruin your own credibility. It wouldn't be called carpet bombing if it deliberately targeted anything but an area.
> If the argument is just 'it's difficult and dangerous for our soldiers to prosecute our war without flattening the entire country', my response would be 'tough'- or alternatively 'well have you considered not doing that?'
Maybe. And maybe the correct idea right now is to stop the war at this point. But I don't think many armies would choose to risk soldier's lives repeatedly over inflicting only property damage; remember, we're talking about buildings that don't have civilians in them, since they were evacuated.
If you think this war is being fought voluntarily, and Israel can just choose to stop, that makes sense. But if you think Israel has a legitimate reason to fight, then I don't think your answer makes much sense. It's not like Israel could just choose to ignore the invasion of the country, and the effective shutting down of the entire country that followed because of the repeated rocket attacks.
It's entirely possible that *at this point* the war can be stopped, but a lot of this damage happened in the first wave of fighting, which was necessary to stop Hamas from continually bombing Israel.
> Maybe. And maybe the correct idea right now is to stop the war at this point. But I don't think many armies would choose to risk soldier's lives repeatedly over inflicting only property damage; remember, we're talking about buildings that don't have civilians in them, since they were evacuated.
Well to be fair they've managed to kill tens of thousands of civilians, so some of those buildings did. If your choices are to kill tens of thousands of civilians or risk a few soldiers, you should risk the soldiers... or just not pursue the completely unnecessary and probably counter-productive offensive, as you mention.
(And 'a few soldiers' is really not downplaying it much at all; the IDF says fewer than 300 have died so far. Is 290 of your soldiers vs 50,000 civilians on the other side really the right ratio? Or does that suggest they should maybe risk the soldiers a bit more in order to preserve the children?)
> If you think this war is being fought voluntarily, and Israel can just choose to stop, that makes sense. But if you think Israel has a legitimate reason to fight, then I don't think your answer makes much sense. It's not like Israel could just choose to ignore the invasion of the country, and the effective shutting down of the entire country that followed because of the repeated rocket attacks.
I would really rather not get into a wider debate about the entire history of the conflict, but I would argue that essentially ignoring it was both morally and strategically the correct move. The enmity that produced October 7 arose from nearly a century of this disregard for Palestinian lives, and wildly disproportionate response to entirely predictable, even understandable resistance- and the response this time has ensured more October 7s in the future.
Even the goodwill that this has squandered in normally sympathetic nations seems to outweigh whatever advantage has been gained in killing a few Hamas commanders, given that 99.9% of the time Israel had proved completely capable of negating any real risk they posed to its denizens. I've never seen such a worldwide PR disaster; in Britain we went from potential national leaders being completely destroyed for refusing to legally define certain criticisms of Israel as anti-Semitic, to those same criticisms being completely standard positions amongst even those in the political centre.
It just all seems terrible from every perspective, and for every purpose, other than of producing satisfying terrible vengeance and making Israeli leaders look like they're doing something dramatic.
Maybe 20,000 civilians have died, not 50,000. I don't see that they have shown disregard for Palestinian lives, quite the opposite. Hamas has shown a complete disregard for Palestinian lives, but Palestinians don't seem bothered about that.
I couldn't disagree with you more about your assessment. Yes global opinion is very negative but it's much more important to eradicate Hamas, destroy the tunnels and prevent importation of terror weapons than it is for other countries to like you. When Hamas is gone and there is peace, there will be plenty of time for public opinion to improve.
I think your (and Scott's) estimate of 50k civilians killed is very wrong, see my other response to him.
> I would really rather not get into a wider debate about the entire history of the conflict, but I would argue that essentially ignoring it was both morally and strategically the correct move.
Without getting into it, let me just register that I disagree with your statement that there has been a century of disregard for Palestinian lives.
That said, what specifically do you mean by "ignoring it"? Presumably, you think the army should have driven out the Hamas militants that were still inside of Israel for the first two days of the war, I imagine. So setting that aside, I have a few specific questions, because I honestly don't think it's as simple as people seem to think it is (I'm genuinely asking here).
Do you also mean no defensive action should've been taken to prevent more militants from coming into Israel and seal up the border?
If that's the case, what to do with the rocket attacks? Simply let them continue shooting rockets dozens of times per day? Effectively shutting down the entire country for weeks/months?
What of the 150k displaced Israelis who had to flee their homes (some of whom haven't yet returned, e.g. to the north where Hezbollah is still attacking)? Just tell them "ok, effectively our country has just shrunk its borders and your homes are no longer available, sorry?".
What of the hostages? Should the country have just said to the families of the 250 hostages captured into Gaza "sorry, we're not getting them back right now"? And only tried negotiating, with *zero* leverage?
And maybe most crucially - what of the Hezbollah offensive taking place at the same time, and that has gone on since then, effectively destroying 10% of the Israeli North? Nasrallah took 3 weeks before he officially said they *won't* take part in the Hamas attack. Had that gone the other way, the amount of casualties on all sides would probably be *much* higher, and Israel would be at serious risk of mass casualties. I can't say for sure that a strong offensive in Gaza helped dissuade them, but I strongly suspect that had Israel not done *anything*, Hezbollah would've taken that as a sign of weakness and decided to attack, leading to far more dead.
Again, genuinely curious what you mean by "ignore" the attack. Often I see people pattern-matching October 7th to something like 9/11, a lone terror attack that essentially *can* be ignored, without really grappling with the fact that it was an actual invasion and full-on attack by a neighboring country, if a much weaker one.
This is such a facetious standard to hold Israel to. In what possible scenario is a country going to value the property of a hostile state more than the lives of its own soldiers? In fact, I'm not sure what better justification for levelling buildings exists other than preventing your people from dying.
If you want to constructively engage in the conversation, you could surely point out the relevant section(s) of the Geneva Convention that you think have been violated.
A... facetious standard? How could a standard be facetious?
It's not "the property of a hostile state". People live and work and pray there. So yes, they should refrain from levelling it even if it means the soldiers have to actually go and fight in service of their military objectives. The civilised world agreed this decades ago.
Your entire notion is ridiculous. A house is not more valuable than human lives. Further, no military in the history of ever has valued infrastructure more than the lives of their own soldiers. That is why holding Israel to a standard never applied to any other participant in a war is facetious.
And yes, it is a war. Hamas is the governing body of Gaza, and it attacked Israel and killed many Israeli citizens. This makes Gaza a hostile state. There is no "civilized agreement", or any treaty, that nations at war have to avoid destroying each others' buildings.
Property? What manner of language is this? This isn't the enemy's spare beachfront vacation homes. It's primary residences and hospitals and power generation facilities, and water supply infrastructure, and aid delivery routes, directly leading to second-order civilian deaths.
If that's still an acceptable tradeoff to you, fine, but call it what it is.
Property; Physical or intangible entity, owned by a person or group of people. My use of the language is as intended.
It also includes things like ammunition depots, command centers, barracks, supply dumps, artillery positions, strongpoints and tunnel networks for Hamas. Destroying these things without destroying the civilian infrastructure is very difficult in a densely urbanized area, and is only exacerbated by Hamas intentionally positioning their assets to maximize collateral damage.
You can argue this means the IDF should not have entered Gaza at all. I think this is hopelessly naïve and unrealistic, but is at least a consistent position. Expecting Israel to value Gazan *property* more than the lives of Israeli soldiers is simultaneously naïve, unrealistic and inconsistent with the history of warfare.
The fact that so many Gazans are dying is because they have nowhere else to go. If there were still Ukrainian civilians in Bakhmut when that city was being fought over, the situation would have been the same. Israel doesn't want to let the Gazans move freely through their country for obvious reasons. Egypt doesn't want to let them in either, probably because the last time something like this happened in Jordan, the PLO started a war against the Jordanian monarchy.
This leaves the options of a) Israel bombs Gazan buildings and inevitably kills non-Hamas members, b) Israeli troops die in much higher numbers and the war drags on much longer as buildings are manually cleared. Obviously these are both bad options.
Well, if their homes are so valuable to their population, maybe Hamas as the ruling organization of Gaza should release the hostages and surrender to stop the violence? Why would the burden be on Israel (who did not choose to start this war) to prioritize the well-being of Palestinians over their own safety?
>After that happens a few times, it "makes more sense" to just bomb the building rather than risk more soldiers dying, since they are empty of civilians anyway.
There are some minor differences due to advances in weapons technology, but the big difference is that the Germans evacuated the civilian population of their cities before using them as fortified strongpoints for their armies, and Hamas does the opposite. So there's going to be relatively more civilian casualties in Gaza, but in the wrecked-buildings category we should expect fairly similar outcomes.
Because there are basically only four ways anyone has ever figured out for removing an enemy army that has entrenched itself in an urban area.
1 - Besiege them and wait until they starve, or surrender due to imminent starvation. If there are any civilians in the city, they'll starve first.
2 - Destroy any building you think the enemy is at all likely to be hiding in. Which, barring a stunning success of military intelligence, means basically all of them,
3 - Assault every building you think the enemy is at all likely to be hiding in, using firepower to cover for the vulnerability of infantry at close quarters. That means tank guns firing to suppress enemy fire during the approach and also to blast new entrances, grenades thrown preemptively into most rooms, and maybe breaching charges to open up interior walls to circumvent known chokepoints. The building will probably still be physically *standing* after this, but it may not be habitable - and if you started any fires in the process, there isn't a fire department to put them out.
4 - Send in infantry to search every building using only small arms and body armor for protection. This is going to result in an awful lot of dead soldiers on your side, because the first man through any doorway with armed men waiting in ambush behind it is very likely to get shot up before he can do anything about it. Really, even option 3 gives you a lot of that.
There are *many* more doorways in Gaza than there are soldiers in the IDF, even counting reservists, so option #4 is out and option #3 is going to be bloody expensive for the Israelis.
If you've got a fifth option, a lot of people would like to hear about it. But that lot of people have been looking for a fifth option for a long time, and nobody has really found anything that works.
The eventual solution is probably going to be something like having the first man through the door be either an expendable robot or a soldier with heavy enough body armor to withstand most small-arms fire. Some attempts at the former are in the R&D pipeline but nowhere near ready, and the latter would require Starship Troopers style powered armor which is even further down the road.
It sounds like the IDF is already using a fair amount of new tech in the form of expendable drones for reconnaissance and fire support, but that's more in the nature of an incremental improvement to 2 and 3 than a fundamentally new option.
Quite possibly, though with Starship Troopers style armor you have to start worrying about whether the stairways will collapse and deposit your somewhat battered troopers in the basement.
Yes, I think robotics will likely get to the point where non-peer wars are conducted this way (with no casualties for the attacker and much decreased casualties for civilians on the defending side). But we're maybe 10(?) years away from that.
> the big difference is that the Germans evacuated the civilian population of their cities before using them as fortified strongpoints for their armies, and Hamas does the opposite.
Mariupol, where Russia engaged in indiscriminate bombardment, had 93% of buildings destroyed and is near the high end of destruction. Fallujah, where the US had extremely restrictive rules for artillery/air strikes, lost about 20% of buildings. And is probably the record for least destructive urban invasion of all time. In urban operations like this it's normal that the majority of buildings are destroyed. The average Syrian city where there was a battle, for example, saw 70% of buildings lost. And large scale sieges again could reach 90+%.
This looks nothing like an indiscriminate bombardment. If that were happening almost all buildings would be destroyed and casualties would be significantly worse than they are. But also urban war is really, really bad and highly destructive.
I think that if you are trying to move an army through an urban area then you're going to find people shooting at you from a lot of different buildings.
Not sure if someone has already said this, but apparently military experts think that Israel's scale of destruction here is more restrained than the US reclaiming cities from ISIS, and maybe more restrained than any comparable military operation.
What frustrates me most about this conversation is that I can't tell what benchmark anyone wants to use for ethical warfare. I'm not in principle objecting to people who think that warfare is always bad, but like, most people think that WW2 was a just war, or think that there are at least some nations in compliance with the international laws of war when they conduct warfare. So simply citing casualty counts or other measures of destruction can't be sufficient without debating the measures Israel uses to judge and make decisions on civilian casualties.
So why so many building were destroyed? Because all of them were used by the terrorists to wage war against the Jewish state.
"Were there known Hamas commanders in all of those buildings?"
Again I have hard time understanding the logic here. You mean only the building with Hamas commanders inside can be destroyed, but if these are only rank and file terrorists there, the building should be spared?
As people have noted already here, Hamas tactics is to leave caches of weapons in quite a few places. They then get into the next building with arms hidden inside, fire from it and try to run outside unarmed to avoid suspicion. The result is a number of buildings destroyed proportional to the number of hidden arsenals. And the latter are so numerous it will take IDF months and months to discover them.
I'm not sure what you'd consider a source here - from the inside view, there's plenty of statements about the general strategy or the purpose of individual strikes (usually the controversial ones that ended badly, like the one this week that caused an unfortunate number of civilian casualties due to igniting an unexpected munitions dump). From the outside view, the low civilian casualty ratio (lower than e.g. Americans fighting ISIS, which we know we're targeting militants) is inconsistent with tactics which don't try to take care to avoid it.
We had a conversation about this in the open thread - there's a few different sources (Israel claims, Hamas reports of their losses, outside view of what you'd expect from the tactics involved) that give civilian casualty ratios of between 1:1 and 2:1, depending on which reports you find trustworthy.
Ahem, that was your own opinion, not the conclusion of the conversation. My humble opinion was that these rates are implausible and the real rates are way higher.
Summary of the update: I do feel confirmed that a 2:1 civilian casualties rate is very implausible (let alone 1:1). The BBC article researched this in much more depth than either of the two of us, and came to this conclusion. I have not seen any other investigation of similar depth.
I wasn't part of that conversation on the open thread, but the BBC (from 3 months ago) seems to simply repeat claims from various ministries in Gaza, rather than "research[ing] this in much more depth". And even so, their data (from eyeballing the graphs) seems to be significantly closer to 2:1 than 3:1.
Since the UN changed their accounting a few weeks ago, there's been a lot more information on how various groups are assessing casualty numbers. The best popular-media overview I've seen is this from the Washington Post, which says that about ~25k bodies have been counted, and other non-verified deaths get up to ~35k.
The BBC uncritically quotes Hamas numbers, it doesn't do its own research. It has repeatedly had to issue apologies and retractions for printing obvious lies (like claiming Israel had bombed a hospital that had not, in fact, been bombed). A neutral source it is not.
So, on the one hand, I don't trust the government of Israel as a whole, or the IDF in particular, to implement particularly pragmatic military policy. On the other hand, it's very hard for me to find sources which I can trust to give educated and well-informed assessments of what their operations actually are.
I feel like we're in a pretty worst-of-all-worlds scenario where their adversaries' actual strategy is to both motivate Israel to take actions which generate as bad PR as possible (e.g. embedding their highest value targets among civilians to maximize casualties,) and lie or exaggerate about the extent of Israel's actions wherever possible, while the international community, both state actors and civilian populations, are largely split into groups who'll condemn Israel irrespective of its conduct, or will support it unconditionally. Hence, Israel has next to no incentive to conduct its war pragmatically or ethically, because international opinion is being driven almost entirely by agents who won't attend to whether it does so or not.
> Hence, Israel has next to no incentive to conduct its war pragmatically or ethically, because international opinion is being driven almost entirely by agents who won't attend to whether it does so or not.
They still have to justify their actions to their own population, who I hope have more information?
And yet the Israeli government is transferring 3163 calories per person per day to Gaza. Needless to say people do not starve on 3163 calories per day.
It may be a natural human reaction to not want to feed the people who have just committed and cheered perhaps the most terrorizing terrorist attack in human history against you. But luckily the government has more sense than that.
> I actually disagree with Desertopa's opinion that, writ large, the international community will condemn or support Israel no matter what.
To be clear, I don't mean that people are all fixed in their opinions regardless. I think that Hamas has been making a concerted effort to attack Israel's public relations which has been, on the whole, effective, and that Israel's ability to avoid the PR hit by simply refusing to do objectionable things is limited.
Not much more, I don't think. And not that there's no incentive for ethical behavior whatsoever, but Netanyahu is deeply unpopular with the general public in Israel, would almost certainly lose badly if another election took place in the near future, is acting on incentives to postpone that as long as possible, and his own political faction are conservatives who're not in support of a moderate response, so his own incentives don't particularly align with erring on the side of the humane.
There's been no effort to keep Hamas from regrouping in the cleared areas. They've operated in some areas 3 times to clear out Hamas. The analysis I've seen from Western soldiers with experience in Iraq is that the IDF isn't professional and is using air power to spare troops with little consideration for civilian casualties.
1. Have been wishing for a Total War set in a modern urban counter-protest setting forever.
2. My interpretation of miracles is that they only happen when the message "do not make a precedent out of this situation" must be set. See story of Jesus's birth on Quran for example.
> So, roughly the ratio of Germans killed in WW2 relative to Britons killed in WW2. I guess Churchill should have called a ceasefire after the Blitz ended.
Yes, that was also wrong.
> Also, how many Gazan teenagers have been gang raped by the IDF since October?
Hard to quantify, but the answer is certainly 'some':
> I just don’t have much tolerance for these apples to oranges comparisons.
It's great when your opponents just admit what you want to accuse them of! Yes, we know you don't consider Gazan lives equivalent to Israeli ones; that's kind of the point.
Your link does not support your claim of "certainly some". It says there were two claims of Palestinian women raped in prison. Very unlikely a Gazan teenager was gang-raped by the IDF
What should the Allies should have done? Call a ceasefire and leave the Nazi party to rearm? Because that seems to be the 1940s equivalent to what a lot of the pro-Palestine people want; a ceasefire that leaves Hamas in control, with no changes in leadership.
Why would you say 50? Less than 25k versus 1200+, right? But anyway the 1200+ were massacred deliberately while the 20,000+ were killed because Hamas wanted them to and sheltered among them during a war.
If he does I agree. If they could do what they want to do without killing a single civilian or Hamas operative they would. But they can't. the people won't go, and no one will take them. So, on they go, until someone cracks.
Re British nukes, the problem is that the London would likely be destroyed in a first strike, and with it the government. So for Britain to have deterrence, submarine commanders need independent ability to launch a strike. One of the first acts of an incoming Prime Minister is to review the sealed orders of the submarine commanders, as to what to do in the event that the government is destroyed. Exactly what the orders are, is not public.
If memory serves, the US idea was to get the Prez on AF1 as soon as, and remain in the air for as long as possible (ie. until the first strike was over). Can't recall what the Soviets would get up to, but vaguely got the idea that the retaliatory strike was essentially automatic on launch detection (something, something solar flares, Able Archer, Stanislav Petrov).
However, for decades, the rumour has always been that to get around the potential issue of the first strike decapitating the command structure, the US simply set the release codes to 0000. Which produces the same position as the UK.
>Can't recall what the Soviets would get up to, but vaguely got the idea that the retaliatory strike was essentially automatic on launch detection (something, something solar flares, Able Archer, Stanislav Petrov).
Many Thanks! The article also mentions an earlier system:
>In 1967, the Soviet Union first attempted to create a system, called "Signal", which they could use to create 30 premade orders from their headquarters to the missile units.[2] Although the system still was not completely automatic, their intent was no different
I am confused about why any of these systems, once operational, was kept a secret.
<evidence from fiction>
Quoth Dr. Strangelove:
>Strangelove:
>Yes, but the... whole point of the doomsday machine... is lost... if you keep it a secret! Why didn't you tell the world, eh?
>DeSadeski:
>It was to be announced at the Party Congress on Monday. As you know, the Premier loves surprises.
I thought the “codes set to zero” thing was basically a rebellion by SAC against what they saw as dangerous meddling by civilians and was since discovered and corrected.
I would also assume the theory is that even if the President and everyone in the immediate line of succession could be wiped out, they could not be without *some* warning, even if it was just minutes. Which would be long enough to authorize retaliation (perhaps even “conditional” authorization? As in “you are weapons free, please shoot back if I’m dead in 10 minutes)
I covered this in a separate response, but the short version is that the Russians have always been paranoid about loyalty in their military, so they would do whatever it took to maintain positive control. (And they have the Dead Hand/Perimitr system to cover this eventuality, although it's only switched on in times of crisis.) The US has an enormous and very expensive infrastructure to make sure we can get the word out. Also, we're a lot further away from the most likely enemy, which gives the President more time to respond. (We implemented this system on the basis of some extremely dubious theories back in the 60s, but "we want less control over our nukes" is a terrible platform, so it remains in place.)
I suspect the answer is partly just that the US has more time as a result of being much further away from its prospective enemies (Russia, China, etc). If the nuclear threat was from Canada or Mexico, then some sort of system for what to do after the destruction of Washington, DC would need to be in place.
Also, both the US and Russia are a lot bigger. One medium-sized nuclear strike could wipe out the UK; a similar strike might well destroy everything from Boston to Washington and the cores of other major cities, but there would still be 30-40 states that would be intact. As long as there's someone in charge (and the line of succession is both long and robust), then a counterstrike can be kept subject to orders.
Finally, a communications system capable of informing submarines at sea of orders, bearing in mind that no-one, including the shore commanders, knows where those submarines are, is an extreme challenge - The US, the USSR, China and India have built ELF systems that can broadcast encrypted signals across most of the oceans; Britain, France, Israel and Pakistan have not, which makes sending a PAL signal essentially impossible - the submarine has to surface to receive communications, which they will do on a schedule (usually every few days), but that's not really suitable for a launch authorisation.
>If the nuclear threat was from Canada or Mexico, then some sort of system for what to do after the destruction of Washington, DC would need to be in place.
I mean, we do have that system. That's what the E-4B and E-6 fleets are for. But it's a lot easier to make something like that work when you have 3 times as long to respond, and a lot easier to afford that kind of thing when you're the US instead of Britain. (It appears that Looking Glass predates the Kennedy/McNamara strategy, although I suspect that it became much worse under them.)
I think if the Cuban Missile Crisis had been resolved by the US accepting Soviet nuclear weapons based in Cuba, then the launch strategy of the US would have evolved in dramatically different ways, and there might well be more devolved launch authority.
That might actually make a lot of sense of why JFK et al freaked out so much about it, when we were doing the same thing in Turkey. It's a lot harder to have your maniacal control over the nuclear forces, which you stupidly think is necessary to avoid WWIII, when you only have 10 minutes to respond to a launch.
"On The Origins Of War" made the claim that Kennedy only took a stand on nukes because he cornered himself; he didn't think they'd give nukes to Cuba, so publicly declared nukes as the line in the sand to save face.
I'm not sure it's right that a single strike would wipe out the UK. https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/ lets you simulate the effect of nuclear blasts, and plugging in China's current best ICBM, the 5MT "Dong Feng 5", basically flatten London and causes some damage out to the suburbs, but leaves the rest of the UK intact.
This would cripple the UK economy and kill 13% of the population, but in the short term the majority of the UK's cities and population would survive. Even you destroyed the UK's ten largest cities, 80% of the population would survive. If the UK wanted define a line of succession that extended outside its top few largest cities, it could probably do so.
I think ”a medium-sized nuclear strike” here means ”striking with a medium amount of missiles & warheads”, not just ”one medium-sized warhead”.
I didn’t actually bother to look at a map but I’m guessing with a dozen or so ICBMs you can probably get rid of like the five largest cities, five nuclear-war-relevant military bases, and a couple of other objectives.
That won’t ”wipe out” the UK in the sense of sterilizing the country, of course, but it’ll to cripple it enough that it can’t really punish you (except for the subs, of course).
It's not actually clear that the US has the opposite policy; the Pentagon has I believe said that there are PALs on our submarine-launched missiles, but not whether there's a copy of the PAL codes in the Captain's safe. There are arguments to be made either way.
But if we do keep those centrally controlled, it's because the US has enough strategic depth that we can be confident that at least *some* of our leaders will survive and have effective communications with our submarines. That's harder to arrange if you live on an island less than ten minutes from Kaliningrad as the IRBM flies.
To the best of my knowledge, the PAL code in question is the combination to a safe containing one of the four launch keys. But safes can be drilled, and probably would be if for some reason they couldn't get the code, but were clearly in a position where launching was a good idea.
>and have effective communications with our submarines
I do wonder about our ELF sub communications. An ELF antenna, of necessity, must have long conductors. Protecting it against EMP must be ... interesting.
Long conductors, but it by definition doesn't need high frequency response. So you can put a huge inductive low-pass filter on the antenna, and the only thing an EMP will do is very slightly warm the coils of the inductor.
Many Thanks! Good point! After a career in the electronics industry trying (roughly speaking) to get signals to switch as fast as possible, it feels very weird to put a low pass filter in a signal path :-)
Further to other comments, I also think there is a distinction here between control of the nuclear weapons of the absolute top tier powers, who got them first and think of them as "weapons we might use in extremis but we know it likely triggers all out nuclear war"; and control of the nuclear weapons of second tier powers, who got them later and think of them as "a deterrent we maintain so that other nuclear powers cannot target us".
I read somewhere that Moscow and other large Russian cities have a network of tunnels and underground shelters that make Hamas's best efforts look like a mere handful of rabbit warrens. So presumably within a few minutes of a nuclear alert, Putin & co could hop in an elevator and be safe deep underground
More worrying in the present climate is the likely response to fake launch alerts. More than once in the past, Russian nuclear monitor operators have seen the sudden appearance of a mass incoming ICBM strike:
But they rightly concluded this must be a glitch in the system or some training exercise they hadn't been told about, and thus basically ignored it and didn't call it in. But would they take a chance like that today if the same thing happened? And would a US observer in that situation?
Which seems to have been specifically designed so that they *can* "take a chance like that". If it's a false alarm, good that you didn't launch a nuclear strike. If it's a real attack, the nuclear strike still gets launched even if you didn't make it out.
I have a vague recollection the US has a similar dead man's handle system called TACAMO ("take charge and move out"). But that may be something else, either in part or entirely.
The US version isn't automated; it's an airplane with all the communcations gear, the launch codes, and a select group of senior military officers who will act with the delegated authority of POTUS when they see the mushroom cloud over Washington DC. Roughly speaking.
The Russians have a harder time finding generals they are willing to trust with that sort of authority, except possibly among Putin's innermost circle who will probably be within the blast radius of any warhead that takes out Putin.
The US has a massively long chain of command through the entire cabinet and a policy that they're never all allowed to be in one place - when they do all get together for a ceremonial event such as the State of the Union or some such, one of them is ordered to stay away in a secure location elsewhere. There was a TV show, "Designated Survivor", based on this premise. Presumably in the real world, one of the nuclear footballs is with the Designated Survivor for this reason.
The same applies to Paris, and I believe that the French have permissive action links.
There is the "Sacoche nucléaire française" - the French equivalent of the US nuclear football - which certainly implies permissive action links. Whether their strategic missile submarines have independent authority (perhaps using sealed orders, as with the British) is not known, but it seems likely that there would be some means of response after the destruction of their senior leadership.
Their air-launched systems are very unlikely to survive a nuclear strike on France itself, so there's little need for a mechanism to launch a counter-strike after the destruction of France.
That seems to be the case, given that there's documented aid from the US to the French PAL program. (Which for treaty reasons was apparently us telling them when they were on the wrong track.) That said, France's nuclear arsenal has always been kind of baffling. I have yet to encounter a good explanation for why they had silo-launched ballistic missiles, which made no sense given how close they were to the USSR. I also think you slightly underrate the survivability of the air-launched deterrent, particularly given that they apparently continue to operate them from CDG, something I was ignorant of until today. If pressed, I'd guess they're doing the "set the PAL to 0000" trick that SAC did for a long time, or have some other way of bypassing them in an emergency, because I don't think they're doing the whole thing we have with TACAMO and the like.
Fair point about CDG, though I think I've seen that they don't routinely carry them there, in which case, they probably disable the PAL when loading them onto CDG in a crisis.
Part of the bafflement is, I think, that all the journalism about it is in French (just compare how much more comprehensive French Wikipedia is than English Wikipedia) and, unlike Russia and China (both potential US adversaries), American journalism hasn't been especially interested.
In fairness, this is not an issue I've ever looked at very closely, and I will probably dive into what's available on the CDG issue, because I completely missed that the French had any carrier-based deterrent when I wrote about that subject several years ago. At the same time, how these things are managed is often really dependent on national preferences rather than strict logic, as evidenced by the rather different ways the Russians and Americans use their SSBNs, so it's entirely possible that the French made what I would consider bad decisions, and don't actually have an answer to all of this.
Edit: It's also possible that they got PALs as part of some absurd diplomatic deal during the Kennedy/Johnson era, and have kept them around because "we want to make our nukes easier for a rogue commander to use" is really hard to sell politically, even if it's the right thing to do. Much easier to just set the code to 0s.
What I’m confused about is: why would we trust anything we heard about how any country’s nuclear launch protocols actually work?
Yes, it’s fun to speculate the theory of what some theoretical system implies, but the discourse around the subject seems to basically take as true whatever Wikipedia says about it (despite being very careful about known-unknown parts).
What I find a lot more frightening is that the Brits don't seem to have any anti-tampering devices, per that 2007 article.
Even if all British officers are 100% incorruptible and would totally endure seeing their loved ones tortured before disgracing the navy, this still leaves the problem that you don't even have to take the crew alive. You just have to kill them quickly enough so that they can't destroy the nukes in time.
I would really have thought that anyone who builds nukes at a few millions a pop (lowballing here) would obviously pay an extra million to put a state of the art anti-tamper on it.
There are probably different schools of thought about what an anti-tamper should do when it detects tampering. Just igniting the nuke would be mostly pointless -- terrorists could still use that to destroy cities. On the other hand, just blowing up the conventional explosives out of sync would still leave the tamperer with a lot of intact fissile material. My favorite would be a minimal nuclear explosion of a few kilotons -- too small to make it very useful for terrorism, but big enough that someone is going to have a hell of a bad time scrapping all that fissile material out of the mine shaft where they set it off.
Then there are also trade-offs between having a reliable tamper-protection and not blowing up your own servicemen all the time because the tamper-protection is too paranoid. It is easy to build a bomb which is very hard to defuse, just put every kind of sensor you can think of into it (vibrations? go boom. tilted? go boom. x-rayed? go boom. loss of over-pressure? go boom. you get the idea), but much harder to build a device which can reliably prevent tampering while also being safe to handle over a decade (or whatever) in the face of inevitable sensor failure.
>On the other hand, just blowing up the conventional explosives out of sync would still leave the tamperer with a lot of intact fissile material.
The lens system may not be nuclear, but it's inherently got to be enough bang to, in a correct firing, reshape the plutonium from a hollow sphere into a solid one *and* change it from the delta phase into the alpha phase. Firing out of sync AIUI splatters the plutonium into radioactive dust.
Also note that those explosive lenses are *very hard* for terrorists to construct correctly. Weapons-grade uranium is very dangerous in the hands of terrorists because any idiot can make a gun-type device, but that won't work with plutonium so it's actually damned hard for terrorists to convert the plutonium from a ruined nuke into a new working nuke. Not impossible, but I absolutely couldn't do it on the first try and I'd need very-expensive equipment to even make the attempt.
(There's one nuke in Western service that does use a lot of weapons-grade uranium - the W88 - but I'm not sure any of the others do.)
There is a famous edu econ book about US in the post-war period called "The Race Between Education and Technology." My take summary was that we made college skills cheap, which enabled firms to hire cheaper college labor. (What precisely were the skills taught? Idk. Maybe it was middle class socialization, which is a kind of skill.) This knocked down the top end of earners while bringing up the bottom, reducing inequality.
Unfortunately, for obvious-ish reasons, you can't keep doing this forever. But for developing economies the dynamic still is quite possibly true, and I assume that's what's going on in Latin America.
Re Yale biochem, Yale's physics department has (used to have?) a policy that 50% of their grad students offer letters have to go to women (I think this is illegal and wasn't officially advertised, but it was very openly known and pretty explicit).
Suppose you were running a business selling engineering services and you were unable to hire the best and brightest because your workforce lacked any women. Suppose that it turned out that in order to recruit women effectively, required a large number of offer letters. Should this be illegal? The entire point of the hiring philosophy is to employ the best and the brightest but the pursuit of that goal requires hiring a significant subset that meets some other criteria.
> 37: The Blind Centrist’s Guide To Gaza argues that we should assume Israel is pursuing a reasonable military strategy in Gaza (and trying its hardest to avoid unnecessary suffering), because that’s what their political objectives, the international situation, and the media environment incentivize
I think the big issue here is that the decisions aren't being made by an abstraction of the Israeli state pursuing its rational self interest, but Netanyahu and his cabinet. Who have an existing strong ideological commitment to a Palestinian state not being allowed to exist, expanding settlements, etc. And a strong personal interest in prolonging the war to keep himself out of jail and in power.
(This is a general problem with "realist" IR theories that treat states as rational unitary actors)
I believe I read that Netanyahu actually isn't the commander in chief of the IDF. Apparently, it's a separate entity that doesn't report to the prime minister. Can't find a source right now.
Defense Minister Yoav Gallant isn't exactly subservient to Bibi. The third member of the war cabinet (besides Gallant and Bibi) is Gantz, who is Netanyahu's primary political rival. And of course, the IDF's "chain of command" is itself full of people with their own views.
(Even with that, though, I think it's reasonable to model Israel as having decisions made by the state. Israel's "9 million prime ministers" still argue about everything, but the outcome of such arguments typically is reasonable from the group's perspective, especially on military matters.)
I would like to point out there is a straightforward explanation based on realist theory which is compatible with the escalating situation in central and southern Gaza: ethnic cleansing. John Mearsheimer himself lays evidence supporting this claim in a recent highly-viewed lecture, which I recommend: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAfIYtpcBxo&pp
To summarize one part of his talk, the ethnic cleansing (i.e. the deliberate depopulation) of Gaza is the only option currently available to the IDF to address the long-term threat posed by Hamas, since Hamas has not been (and probably can't be) defeated conventionally. Sadly, deliberate mass killing is a rational option for state actors, including democratic ones, especially in times of war (historical examples abound).
To be clear, I wholeheartedly agree with your critical opinion of Netanyahu. But it is not obvious what an alternative Israeli leadership could do to address the long-term threat posed by Hamas' continued presence in Gaza.
I've seen apparently serious proposals by Israelis to institute a system similar to what China did in Xinjiang. Which would probably work, the problem is getting the green light from the US.
Ethnic cleansing and mass killing are different policy options. They should not be conflated.
1) Ethnic cleansing presupposes that there is a country willing to let Gazans in. There is none. To believe otherwise is pure wishful thinking on behalf of IDF (If some in IDF should really believe in this - these are clever people, so I find that highly unlikely). Egypt certainly will not. Israel does not have sufficient money to bribe Egypt or any other country to do so. Remember there are 2.1. million Gazans.
2) Mass killings is in principle a possibility - the final solution. But come on, Israel will not kill 2.1 million, of which more than half are children (under the age of 19). It is an insult to Israel to suggest otherwise. A pure rhetorical insinuation.
Given that this is a war, I'm quite willing to insult both sides. Saying it's an insult is not an argument that it isn't their strategy. (There are arguments, but I'm not sure they are convincing.)
FWIW, driving people out into a desert without food or water is going to result in a very large number of them dying. If you destroy all the infrastructure, that's what you are effectively doing. (And it doesn't matter if you had a good reason, you're still doing it.)
The only desert in the vicinity is in Sinai. Egypt is never going to let Gazans en masse into Sinai, because if they do they will never be able to send the Gazans back to Gaza again. Israel will prevent that. Plus, that 2.1 million Gazans on Egyptian soil is a recepie for an unstable Egypt.
Both Israel and Egypt know this. This is why ethnic cleansing is not an option for Israel.
I think if Bibi wanted to murder all the Gazans, he would have glazed Gaza (or huge portions of it) on Oct 7. The optics would have been way better than killing the Gazans through starvation, conventional weapons or death camps. If Israel was serious about genociding Gazans, the situation would look a lot different, they kinda know how efficient genocide works.
A better explanation of the facts would be that Bibi is not actively in favor of Gazans dying, but mostly indifferent to civilian deaths. From Bibi's point of view, this is rational: most people, including journalists, are mostly scope insensitive. The optics of having a civilian to enemy death ratio of 1:10 will not be drastically different from one of 10:1 -- either way there will be a lot of pictures of dead kids. From my understanding, the Oct 7 attacks were hugely popular in Gaza -- much more than Hamas is. It seems reasonable to suppose that the median Gazan already hates Israel to the maximum amount possible, blowing up a few more family members of them will likely not change their position overly much.
I don't think that the IDF has any reasonable objective in that war. Killing Hamas members is making the world a better place in my book, but the civilian casualties remove that effect. And I don't see them working on a regime change towards a less murderous regime -- not that they would have much success if they did.
My favorite solution would be if the US went Afghanistan on Gaza. Go in, set up a democratic regime. While it did not work out in Afghanistan, the Gaza strip is 1800 times smaller.
Instead, what will happen after Bibi decides that he has killed enough Hamas will be a return to the status quo. In five years, some "from the river to the sea" extremists will still be in charge of Gaza (only that the average age of their goons will be younger) and Israel will still be blockading Gaza (which will prevent the Gazans from building rockets out of water pipes and also ensure that Gaza will remain a hellhole for the foreseeable future).
"From my understanding, the Oct 7 attacks were hugely popular in Gaza -- much more than Hamas is."
That is interesting. Do you base this on your gut feeling/take-away from random media coverage, or are there any systematic study that indicates this?
I ask because if there is any hope for the future, it is in the presumed interest of most ordinary people to live everyday lives without more trouble than necessary. (For this reason, most ordinary people are likely to be political opportunists and "go with the flow", whichever direction it flows. As they said in Florence in the days of Machiavelli: A good life is a life lived hidden.)
Hamas by contrast has a gung-ho activist vibe associated with very young and fired up people. This demographic seldom comprises more than 5-10 percent on an electorate. Gaza has a young population, but I would still assume that the majority would prefer that Hamas had used its considerable tax & development assistance funds to upgrade infrastructure and hospitals, instead of sinking the money into tunnel construction.
For the same reason, I would assume that ordinary grown-ups Gazans (the Gaza silent majority) went pale on October 7th, since they would know that killing 1200 Israeli & foreigners removed them further from the pragmatic aim of most people, once the Sturm und Drang of youth is over: A quiet life.
> Despite the devastation, 57% of respondents in Gaza and 82% in the West Bank believe Hamas was correct in launching the October attack, the poll indicated.
> Support has been less volatile in Gaza, where 38% supported Hamas in September 2023, 42% in December 2023, and 34% this month. [...]
> The divergence between support for Hamas as a political party, which is dropping, and for its role in the war, which is steady at 70%, is indicative of its dual role as an administrative governing body and as a symbol for the decadeslong Palestinian resistance against Israeli occupation.
> In the West Bank, the 71% figure [for 'Oct-7 was correct'] is down from 82% in December who agreed with the decision to launch the onslaught. In Gaza [where it is also 71%], however, the number was a significant increase from the 57% who backed the move three months earlier.
Some remarks:
* The numbers reported by these sources seem to be identical, even though the spin is very different
* There does not seem to be a total coercion of the outcome of the polls by Hamas, otherwise they would likely appear more popular. 66% are comfortable stating that they do not favor Hamas. Yet about half of them (assuming Hamas supporters generally support Oct-7) still think that Oct-7 was a good move.
* Even considering that Hamas is in a somewhat good position to transport their propaganda in Gaza, this seems an remarkable achievement. The Gazans know exactly how well the war is going for their side. They might not know exactly what Hamas did on Oct-7, but it is hard to deny that there is a causal link between that and the IDF response. By contrast, my gut feeling is that if you asked the inhabitants of Berlin in 1945 if they still thought that Hitler attacking the USSR was a great idea, a majority might privately express doubt that this lead to the best possible outcome.
Thanks for your effort in collecting this material. Very interesting results.
I guess a lot can be said about problems surveying people during an ongoing conflict. That said, the results are far from the 95 percent support/not-support one would expect if the respondents were afraid their answers might be communicated back to either Hamas or the Israelis. Which indicates that the responses might be genuine, not dictated by fear (cf. my separate comment about the polling bureau and the concrete questions the pollsters asked).
I find it uplifting ("the glass is half full") that support for Hamas is not even higher - it is less than 50 percent for their day-to-day rule, even though they are presently at war and you would expect a considerable degree of "right or wrong - my government" - effect.
This sort-of feeds into how I myself would think of Hamas’ administration and rule, if I had been a Gaza citizen during their many years in power. Namely that these years has been a missed opportunity. First, Gaza is not challenged by Israeli settlers: Gaza authorities’ control of the land is not disputed (unlike the exhausting situation in the West Bank). Second, Gaza authorities have obviously had large funds available for development, partly from taxation and partly from foreign donors. They could not have built the impressive tunnel system and launched a constant stream of rockets otherwise.
With these resources and territorial control, Gaza could in principle have been developed into an adequately wealthy city-state. Somewhat similar to Singapore or the European micro-states (ok, that is stretching it, but very small states that can afford adequate infrastructure are seldom desperately poor). If Hamas had not chosen to channel so much money into tunnel digging and rockets instead.
Perhaps it is still not too late, when the dust settles after the ongoing war? It will take years of course, but the alternative for Gazans, if they leave Hamas in charge, is to live for the foreseeable future in a large open-air prison.
....I followed your first link further, intrigued that surveys are being conducted in a war situation.
I do survey research as part of my regular work. Judging from the presentation of the methodology & questions asked in the report, the polling bureau (Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research) seems to uphold professional standards.
The results do not necessarily support an assumption that the median Gazan already hates Israel to the maximum amount (which would imply that there is no room at all to influence hearts and minds). More specifically, when asked the question “In your view, given what happened after it, was Hamas decision to launch its offensive against Israel on 7 October a correct or incorrect one?” only a narrow majority (54 percent) of Gazans answer “correct”.
Equally important, when asked “Based on what you have heard or seen, do you think international law allows or does not allow …. Attacking or killing civilian women and children in their own homes?” 68 percent of Gazans answer “Does not allow”. (Admittedly, rather disappointingly low – 84 percent answer “Does not allow” among Palestinians on the West Bank).
How do some/many respondents square supporting the October 7 offensive (notice the somewhat value-neutral choice of word, making it easier to say “yes”), and not supporting killing women, children and other non-combatants? Apparently, by being in denial that autocracies took place. Asked the question: “…did Hamas commit war crimes in the current war?”, only 17 percent of Gazans answer “yes”.
Now there are many reasons why Gazans and others are in (cognitive) denial of quite well-documented empirical facts. But the results at least indicate that the median Gazan is not an emotional basket case driven by primitive bloodlust. Since cognition issues are arguably “colder” than emotional issues (although the links between cognition and emotion are, well, complex). Giving some hope for the future. After all.
Some additional results for the West Bank and Gaza together, illustrating that Palestinians, like all ethnic categories, are a rather diverse group:
“The belief that Hamas' decision was right is higher… among men (75%) compared to women (69%), among the religious and the somewhat religious (76% and 71% respectively) compared to the non-religious (42%),…among supporters of Hamas (92%) compared to supporters of Fateh and other forces (55% and 45% respectively).”
And "it is militarily advantageous for Israel to ethnically cleanse Gaza, therefore Israel must be ethnically cleansing Gaza" is a bizarre argument to begin with, for many reasons: 1) States do not always do things that are militarily advantageous to them - many other considerations affect their decisions 2) In half a year of warfare Israel has not pushed anyone out of Gaza, and in fact is right now pushing Gazans *away* from the Egyptian border, making it impossible for them to leave Gaza 3) An *attempt* to conduct ethnic cleansing would likely fail due to the opposition of Israel's allies as well as the remainder of the international community, and thus such an attempt would not actually be advantageous to Israel.
As I brought up in another comment, I also don't think the international situation and media environment actually incentivize this anyway. They're fighting an adversary whose actual strategy is to make prosecuting a war generate as bad PR for Israel as possible, and the international community is largely split between actors who'll oppose Israel unconditionally and actors who'll support them unconditionally (or at least not make their support contingent on humane and pragmatic prosecution of the war.)
The crowds of protestors whose take on what Israel should actually be doing sums up to "I don't know, but not that" have been causing me a considerable amount of emotional turmoil, because this effectively abdicates the opportunity to have *any* leverage to incentivize Israel to prosecute the war in a more humane and pragmatic manner. It's like stumbling into a resolution to the trolley problem where you congratulate yourself for splitting the train to run down both tracks.
Unfortunately, "I don't know, but not that" is quite close to the way I feel about the problem. Israel is rather small, and the habitable portion is smaller. The analogy I tend to think of is "two cats in a sack", though I need to work the phrase "that hate each other" into that metaphor somehow.
I think Israel's conduct in this war is deserving of some complaints, but all actionable criticism needs at the very least a standard of acceptability to measure against.
I think it's understandable as an emotional reaction, but also literally always bad feedback, in discourse on any subject, and I think this is a subject in which it's particularly harmful.
There was another thread here about then why should Israel ever sustain a single higher infantry casualty to save 100 Gazan civilians. And the answer to that is the same reason why the US didn't just completely cover North Vietnam in bombs. Few in the world accept just glassing an entire people from a far so you don't lose a single soldier.
Not to mention, Israel's approach is probably actually leading to more net-deaths than the infantry-centered, because it could be the difference between an eventual peaceful Palestinian State and 50 more years of this disaster.
It does get brought up occasionally. I'm not an expert on the subject, but the answer I've seen on a number of occasions by people who're better versed in the situation than I am is that Hamas has spent decades outfitting the territory to be outrageously difficult to attack with infantry (vast tunnel networks, buildings rigged up with explosives, etc.)
5.- "average house size in every US state vs. every European country"
That map is wrong. I'll post here what I tweeted a few weeks ago when I first saw that map.
The site this was taken from (http://shrinkthatfootprint.com) uses a Spanish source for 1044 sq ft (97 m2) that explicitly mentions this is for flats only, not houses. It also ignores the fact that 14% of Spanish dwellings are considered empty (second homes, old village houses, etc...), which assuming people prefer more space, means the average size of an inhabited dwelling is larger than the average size of all dwellings.
I can only assume that the figures for most other European countries are equally questionable (the notion that the average UK dwelling is 40% smaller than the average Greek dwelling beggars belief).
UK houses have been shrinking - I understand that bar the soviet union, this is the only place which has ever done this.
The issue is that we often sell by number of rooms and not floor area (often the latter is hard to find on listings!) so we have odd pressures.
1011 feet is large for UK new build. and I don't believe that the average new build is anywhere near this, if flat and houses are both in the sample. If it is just houses I can believe it.
Do you have a source? This seems unlikely to me. Rate of building new houses is very low; rate of building extensions to existing houses is much larger, so I would expect houses to be getting bigger.
The missing point is conversions and HMOs (Houses in Multiple Occupation).
In cities in the UK, it's not uncommon for a house to be chopped up into several flats (apartments), which is generally called a conversion. If you go down a row of houses in Inner London, quite often you'll see whole streets where all of what look like houses have 4+ doorbells on them.
In addition, you get HMOs, which is basically a house share but often (by no means always) with the landlord renting out the rooms individually to different tenants. According to p27 of https://www.london.gov.uk/sites/default/files/2023-10/Housing%20in%20London%202022.pdf there are a little over 150,000 HMOs; not all of these are going to be multiple flats, but a lot will. Confusingly, depending on the size and amenities, some but not all conversions are also technically HMOs.
This also happens in France, I'm not sure about elsewhere in Europe. It occurs to me for the first time now that I've never heard an American mention this, so it may be less common there.
It happens, I've seen houses where each floor was separately rented, or where the upper floor had each bedroom rented out separately but the common areas downstairs were shared. However, that kind of thing is not super common here, as it requires converting an existing house into an apartment building, and that's rarely done. What we have that is more common here are buildings which are vaguely house-like in form factor, but intentionally built to have separate residences. These are called duplexes (or triplexes, or quadplexes). In places where land pressure hasn't forced going vertical to happen yet, apartment buildings tend to be 2 story duplexes, or 2 story quadplexes (the second entry on each floor comes from additional depth being available - the gap between streets will be wider). These will be purpose-built apartment complexes with a few dozen buildings which house a hundred or more renters. Depending on how they're built, they may look on satellite/chopper imagery like the buildings are all one long row, but that's just because they extended the roofline over the corridor between the units, not because it's built like a motel. Sometimes the corridor between units is enclosed, other times it's not. Sometimes the first floor has an enclosed corridor with the mailboxes and amenities while the second floor has staircases outside in the covered walkway, so the first-floor units are slightly smaller but don't have to use stairs to get in and out. Sometimes you see front entries to the first-floor units and the second-floor units use the corridors between the buildings. There's a lot of ways these get built around the country.
I don't know about UK, but the average floor area of a newly built dwelling in New Zealand peaked in 2010 (at 200 sqm, / 2150 sq feet), and is now 30% lower and back where it was in 1992.
Most new builds in NZ (and USA?) include a 1x or 2x attached garage. Probably not the case for Europe. The NZ decline is probably due to increase in inner city apartment not having attached garages.
I'm confused by the map itself - surely the metric is not "house size", but the more generic "living area", i.e. counting the enclosed, livable space of houses, appartment high rises, and everything in between? Or does "house size" mean exactly that in US usage of the words?
Yes, it does. We usually measure the size of houses and apartments in square feet of floor space in enclosed finished rooms. Storage space attached to finished rooms (e.g. bedroom closets and kitchen pantries) is counted, but utility spaces (garages, unfinished basements, furnace rooms, etc) are not. There are regional differences between whether finished basements are counted as living area or if all below-grade space (i.e. the floor is non-trivially lower than the surrounding ground) is treated as utility space.
Yes there are very similar norms in Germany and I imagine most developed countries. I was more wondering about the term "house size". After a bit of googling I found that it is apparently a legal term, but then I'd say it has either been misused, or the map says something else entirely than what it's being used for.
What definitions I found say that "house size" would indeed be the gross floor area of a single-family house, i.e. it would exclude any building that houses 2 or more families, i.e. the vast majority of living space in cities.
So as a measure of living space over an entire country it would be quite misleading and overstated, and even more misleading as comparison between countries.
I've only seen Gross Floor Area used in the context of urban planning and zoning regulations, used to measure how big a building is allowed to be on a given lot and how much parking space it's required to have. In everyday usage, it just means the floor space of the living area.
From personal experience, I would guess that US houses *are* on average larger than European houses, but this also seems, hmm, a very American metric to consider. I actually asked about this a month and a half ago; if I had more money to buy a new place, I guess I'd like a bit more size, at least for kitchen, but the location of the place itself would be considerably more important. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-325/comment/54092753
Furthermore, of course, Europe is bound to have a larger pre-existing housing stock from historical eras when houses were smaller almost by default due to the heating issues and such, though presumably most houses in both Europe and the US would be fairly recent (buit after WW2) now.
I don't understand this response. You seem to be suggesting that Europeans and Americans just have different preferences, so that Europeans put more weight on attributes like location rather than size, relative to Americans.
But Americans also put an enormous premium on location! That's why a studio in Manhattan costs way more than a McMansion in rural South Dakota. Nevertheless, my guess is the Manhattan one-bedroom is much bigger than the Paris one-bedroom, and the new American suburban house is much bigger than the new French suburban house.
Yes, of course both Europeans and Americans consider both location and size to be important and it's a bit hard to assign exact values of importance, the point was mostly that in general Americans seem to find housing size to have a greater importance for quality of life than Europeans. It's not the best of metrics, there are better metrics to demonstrate the wealth of the Americans relative to Europeans, like the income gap Scott mentioned.
Even if the other sources are more reliable, if they're using different sources for different places, it's not wise to compare the numbers directly. They will differ for all sorts of reasons--what data are available, what data are included, methodological differences, etc.
I am also skeptical. Almost half of the population of the state of NY live in NYC. If we assume that the non-city New Yorkers have 2000 sqft (what a godless unit) houses, then this would still mean that the people in the city would have on average as much space as the people in Spain. How does an apartment block even count? One giant house?
The obvious metric one should use is the quotient of total inhabited residential indoor area and the number of residents, thus bypassing what is a house and how many people share a house and the like.
I wonder if anyone has ever written a SF tale with cryonized people of the 21st century coming back to life in like a million years, and having to come together, led by Paris Hilton & Walt Disney, to defend themselves from super-dinosaur overlords of the future. Talk about the lack of a clear endgame.
I read a comic book in which Hitler escapes death by freezing himself. In the far future, he somehow gets an army and starts conquering again. This was written while he was still alive, and as far as I can tell they never finished the story.
Anytime there's a "Hitler Returns" story now I'm just going to think of Inflatable Hitler from Aqua Teen Hunger Force, where Hitler is resurrected as a balloon.
Transmetropolitan is a comic with a subplot or two about people brought back from cyronic suspension in the future and basically left to fend for themselves, mostly ending up homeless or worse.
> Smith suggests that journalists wanted to rely on “experts”, but the pro-missile-defense experts all did classified work for missile defense companies and couldn’t talk, and there was a very talkative and eloquent anti-missile-defense expert at MIT who become every journalist’s go-to source.
This is a problem in a lot of other areas as well. People with the most expertise are generally working directly on the subject, so are bound by commercial confidentiality, NDAs, etc. And also don't have the time to be self promoting on twitter, networking with journalists, etc.
Granted, but I think it's probably worse in defense. When there's a threat of federal prison involved, you tend to tread very carefully, and error on the side of treating things as classified. If nothing else, checking to see what is and isn't classified is kind of a pain, and you probably won't do it if you aren't getting paid. (This is also the mechanism behind a lot of overclassification.) And yes, I speak from experience here.
>When there's a threat of federal prison involved, you tend to tread very carefully, and error on the side of treating things as classified.
I'm currently re-reading Lindsay Ellis's Axiom's End and Truth of the Divine in anticipation of the third book coming out next month. There's a minor plot point of the main character (Cora) being mad at someone she's close to for not telling her about her deeply classified work with aliens. Cora has her reasons for this, but I'm nevertheless deeply offended on the other character's behalf every time this comes up.
Yeah. The USG, and anyone working with classified info, are extremely paranoid about releasing any classified information, and that ends up hitting almost anything they would want to communicate about those projects to the public (well, the government is paranoid, classed workers are acting rationally under threat of jail time).
There's huge swathes of things that you wouldn't expect to be classified, even things that are practically common knowledge (or can easily be inferred with common knowledge), and because either those or adjacent things sit in the complicated web of "either technically classified or classified if you squint" no one in that sector can go on the record without hefty potential penalties.
Bottom line is that the USG cares much more about keeping its secrets than looking good, even when the rational thing would be to just declassify some basic information.
I think the problem is more subtle, and a lot harder to solve. It's not that there's just a bunch of stuff that's classified that is common knowledge (that obviously does happen, although maybe less than you'd think.) The real issue is that it is hard in practice to make sure you keep classified and unclass separate in your head, and so any time you speak in all but the vaguest generalities about something you have a classified briefing in, you need to do so with a very careful eye on the rules for what is and isn't classified, and make very sure you don't slip up. That's a lot of work, and most people aren't going to do it unless that's actually part of their job. Declassifying basic stuff that shouldn't be classified won't make anyone who has knowledge of a specific system more likely to speak out when it means doing a bunch of extra work or taking a reasonable risk.
No, you're exactly right. That was definitely part of what I was trying to express, and you articulated it better than I could. (Even talking about *this* requires some extra mental cycles to articulate - I also speak from experience, though I suspect less than yours, chronologically).
I think part of the problem is also what Noah Smith pointed out about the difference in defense against cruise missiles vs ICBMs. Also there is a difference between conventional missiles and nuclear weapons with regards to the needed efficacy. I also think some of the anit-missile defense people are similar to climate change activists where the focus on one specific failure mode (in this case nuclear war) blinds them to other benefits.
@Scott, regarding 37: I would be happy to help with your questions on the topic, as I missed your question in the open thread and feel like the answer you got is quite off the mark. Reference: I did an AMA in Open Thread 313 which I think had quite high quality answers (more generally about me, quoting from there: "I'm a retired Major from the IDF who just finished about 100 days of reserve duty (in a non-combative role). I also have a degree in Middle-Eastern history, so some added perspective there"). I think the amount of time and depth I gave to the questions there shows that it's worth your time.
In a nutshell, and if you're interested I'd be willing to write something much longer/do some other format: The honest truth is that I believe that what will happen to Gaza is what happened after operation Defensive Shield: Israel is going to stay in it (hopefully without new settlements), and it is going to take years, if not decades, to remove Hamas from power there (which I personally think is in the interest of both the west and Palestinians). The alternative to Hamas isn't clear yet, but it is too early to say who it will be. In an imperfect analogy, talking about the endgame in 1943 would have been difficult at best.
However, while this is the most soothing and rational explanation of Israel's strategy I've seen so far, I still don't agree with it. In particular, the proposition that a particular ethnic group is so debased that it can't be allowed civil rights for a generation or more. That can only result in further abuse and dispossession, as we see in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Nor does it seem plausible as a long term strategy. Other countries have of course crushed opposed ethnic groups and eventually had peace , such as the case of the Native Americans, but in this case Palestinians represent nearly 50% of the population.
I planned to answer only Scott as doing another AMA is out of scope (maybe in a hidden open thread), but you make good points and I'll try to address them at least shortly:
1. "It can't be allowed civil rights" - I think you paint this in very black and white colors, and as I stated in the past, whatever you take from me, please take away that this conflict is most of the time grey. Palestinians aren't living in refugee camps like Uyghurs; but they do have their freedom of movement impeded by the IDF. They have plenty of IPhones, but some parts of their population is in dire lack of better nutrition.
2. "That can only result in further abuse and dispossession" - see my previous AMA - I'm all for starting with baby steps to increase relations between the two people. The joint Israeli-Palestinian Remembrance day is one of them. I'd be happy for extreme-right parties to leave the Knesset on one hand, and on stopping teaching geometry via bullets to IDF soldiers heads in elementary school on the other.
4. "... this action is as a deterrent to others, such as Hezbollah. There are obvious moral and practical problems with this." - This is indeed my stated position. I agree it is morally complicated - I don't like showing strength in Gaza so I won't be invaded by Hezbollah, though that isn't the only rational for the war - and I'd love to hear suggestions. I do require the suggestions though to be grounded in a firm understanding of the middle east - Power radiates strongly here, much more than in the west (something that sadly isn't usually understood well). I'd love to hear about the practical problems though!
I'll try to followup on your comments, but unlike in the AMA, can't promise anything. Thanks for mentioning me though!
I feel like Israel could attempt a destabilizing campaign that promotes exactly the dream of an Arab state many in the region want ... just not within the confines of Israel/Palestine. For example, if Israel were to promote movements for Arab self-government in Jordan and Syria (forcing out dictatorships and promoting democratic self-government) this strategy could benefit them in two major ways:
1. It would help build bridges of friendship/alliance among the Arab populations throughout the region, many of whom have long wanted exactly this kind of thing. This would reduce incentives to fight against Israel, to the extent they're seen as an ally, or at least as 'it's complicated', as opposed to explicitly being cast in the minds of many Arabs as villains. (Israel doesn't have to change their position on blocking Palestinian self-government to pursue this strategy, but it would be seen by many Arabs as inconsistent.)
2. It would promote emigration from Palestine as many (though not all) would rather live under an actual Arab sovereign state as opposed to the dream of one someday specifically in Palestine. This would relieve pressure on Israel from their native populations, and if sufficient numbers of Palestinians voluntarily move it might allow them to eventually integrate the remaining Arabs into Israel proper. This would help solve the demographic problem for Israel, where they can't both have absolute democracy (one person, one vote, regardless of ethnicity/religion/etc.) and a Jewish homeland. A different Jewish/Arab ratio would change that.
I suspect part of the reason this strategy isn't pursued is that Israeli leaders prefer a regional policy (similar to the global US policy) of not allowing the rise of peer nations that might rival their power monopoly. Promoting the rise of a democratically led peer Arab nation would be seen as an unacceptable national security risk, even if the relationship is initially forged in friendship. Israel has a very low risk tolerance, where national security can trump long-term policy strategy.
Destabilizing their neighbours is not a good way to win friends locally. Also, it is notable how friendliness with Israel has tended to lead to popular discontent in Arab countries. This is not a case of evil dictatorships dragging their Israel-loving populations to war. Indeed, from an Israeli perspective I suspect the dictatorships are much more predictable.
Also, destabilizing Jordan, the closest thing they have to an ally in the region (and a country full of Palestinian refugees who already tried a coup attempt once), is such an incredibly stupid idea I genuinely wonder whether you know anything about the history involved at all.
I never made any claims to expertise, though your criticism could potentially be framed a little less pejoratively?
I never suggested it was the "evil dictatorships dragging their Israel-loving populations to war". My impression is that it's more the opposite, where Israel would like to make friends with local dictators to promote peace, but that in the past those dictators tend to lose popular legitimacy when they try to do this. In part because people have relatives from Palestine or there are refugees who complain about this, especially when there's another round of violence in Gaza or the West Bank.
I don't see the current state of Israel making friends with the people in the region. I've always been under the impression it's the opposite, where neighboring governments generally don't want wars with Israel, or would be better served to not have to be at war with a stronger regional force, but if forced to it they're willing to redirect anger from internal reform movements toward suggesting to their people that the 'real enemy' is Israel. I don't know specifics about the countries involved, though. Either way, this situation doesn't seem like it works for Israel, since it allows for multiple regions where terrorist attacks can be staged, thereby jeopardizing their security, separate from the question of Gaza and the West Bank.
The opposite strategy - focusing on improving relationships with the people and not the government - is effectively what I was aiming at addressing. I admit my specific proposal was terrible, and I knew in proposing it that it's not something likely to happen in the real world, and partly because it was framed as turning Israel into a diplomatic liability for its neighbors, as you pointed out. I wasn't thinking I was 'solving peace in the Middle East' with a blog comment or asserting some great knowledge of the region. Just asking why a different strategy wasn't pursued since the current strategy doesn't seem to be working, but whatever.
First of all, it's important for me to answer you as you clearly have tried thinking about solutions and gave them at least some meaningful thoughts - I appreciate that immensely, and wish at least half of those talking about the conflict would do as you did.
Some quick thoughts:
1. Your idea is Pan-Arabism; it was tried before (specifically in the late 50's-60's), you can read about it in Wikipedia in better words than mine. Some problems with it: Like you have multiple parts to your identity, many Arabs consider themselves also Sunni Muslims, perhaps Jordanian or Palestinian, and maybe even more layers on top of that. Creating something generic won't work for the same reason that not all white people have the same religion and get along.
2. Specifically about Palestinians, they are a people, and they have the right to self determine. They truly are connected to the land, the same way that Israelis are. Some of them even in a miniature to the Jewish diaspora - there are Palestinians living in refugee camps in Lebanon, holding the keys to their grandpas apartment in Haifa. This is not exactly 2000 years of living outside your land, but I highly doubt that a Palestinian that cares deeply enough for the right of return that he would blow up negotiations with Israel on that stand alone would be willing to live in Jordan.
I have some more thoughts on your last paragraph, but these are not as relevant to the Israeli-Palestinian conversation.
> In particular, the proposition that a particular ethnic group is so debased that it can't be allowed civil rights for a generation or more
I thought this was what happened in the American South after our Civil War, during Reconstruction. Except that most scholars on the left agree that Reconstruction was ended too early and not enforced strongly enough, so that the racist elements in the South regained power.
Also, it may just be the case whether or not it is racist. Just like it may be the case that most Arab countries without their current dictators would become theocracies or anarchies. It is sad, and is not genetic, and the proper response may be different from "let's back the dictators", but it seem to currently be the case
I hope it's cultural, and thus theoretically amenable to change. But I don't think America, at least, has a track record in modern times of successfully forcing the change while holding to other standards we profess. Hence the dictator support.
Maybe there are ways to do it within the boundaries we set ourselves, which we haven't found. Maybe some of those boundaries are, from a consequentialist standpoint, not as important as having the cultural change happen. Maybe some other group can succeed where we failed, showing that the problem is merely dysfunction of the modern American state.
Happily. The following is written after reading your main post in the open thread and what you have written above; let me know if something else is of interest, and I'll try to address that as well. I expect this to be lengthy and tried to make it more accessible - sorry if I failed.
Some general points on what you've said in your open thread comment:
1. "Invasion" and "occupation" are simple terms that carry a lot of complexity. Obviously, Israel has invaded Gaza, but there are clearly areas in the strip that it hasn't set foot on yet. Israel is also occupying the West Bank, but there are areas in the West Bank that require significant forces and considerable preparation before acting (e.g., eliminating terrorist cells in refugee camps in Nablus). These terms are fluid and are further complicated as they can serve both operational and strategic rationales (e.g., just examples, not reality: "We need to invade Gaza to destroy tunnels and Hamas battalions" vs. "We need to invade Gaza to create new settlements there"). Gaza is a complex problem, even without considering the connection to the West Bank, and thus requires multifaceted solutions. Expect multiple "invasions" and unclear "occupation" of different parts of the strip during this conflict (which I believe will be very long).
2. Your second question, "Does Israel know where Hamas is," is also binary in conjecture, but the answer is nuanced. I know where Hamas is in a general sense — the strip is tiny, after all — but in which house? For how long does this intelligence remain accurate? Who is a refugee child just walking down the street, and who is a child carrying a suicide vest? Who has Hamas recruited since the beginning of the conflict due to the new hatred towards Israel? This is all dynamic and changes frequently.
3. Two more parameters complicate the fighting: the hostages and the tunnel network. The former requires the forces to proceed meticulously — three hostages were killed by IDF fire by mistake, and the hostages are a very sensitive point in the current Israeli mindset. The latter nullifies some of the IDF's advantages. If I recall correctly, the latest numbers indicate that the tunnel network is larger than the NYC metro. Fighting in that environment, where you can't bring tanks or bomb from the air as they are deep underground, is extremely difficult if you're trying to minimize casualties. Don't forget that even before fighting there, you need to know where the tunnels are and map them — this obviously isn't public knowledge.
Some more specifics regarding your questions:
1. Israel has indeed destroyed vast parts of the buildings in the strip. This is due to multiple reasons: a) This happens naturally in war zones. When tanks cross a road, it usually causes significant damage to the road. When a battalion enters an area, there is usually preliminary artillery shelling or air force strikes in that area (note that Israel usually declares where it's going to act beforehand so that civilians can evacuate). b) Hamas, as a terror organization, has hidden a lot of its munitions inside the civilian populace. This includes rocket launchers in kindergartens, command outposts in hospitals, etc. They also usually aim to plant critical infrastructure in critical civilian areas because then Israel can't bomb them from the air or alternatively suffer international criticism. This infrastructure still has to be destroyed, though, as the IDF isn't planning on occupying it 24/7, and it can be used by other Hamas fighters later (I'll explain why the IDF isn't occupying these areas later, but basically, it would mean occupying the whole strip).
You also asked, "What prevents Israel from eliminating Hamas?" This ties nicely to your question about the day-to-day activities of both sides and the strategy of both sides. This will also be the bulk of my answer from now on.
Israel has two strategic goals that are semi-contradictory: return the hostages and destroy Hamas. The former is easy to understand; Israel has historically been, and still is, very sensitive to hostages (even deceased ones), and vast parts of the populace are adamant about returning everybody (yes, EVERYBODY) back. Whether this happens via negotiations or military operations doesn't matter for this point (though it obviously matters in the greater analysis). To be clear, both have happened.
Destroying Hamas is a more difficult endeavor. This can be divided into three possible resolution criteria, ordered by difficulty: 1. Hamas is no longer in control of the Gaza Strip, and additionally, its military force has been routed and broken up into small cells that are no longer working together coherently. 2. Hamas is no longer an effective threat to Israeli security. This is slightly tricky and vague; is firing one rocket at Israel considered effective? Is a single gunman claiming to be Hamas going to the border and shooting at Israel effective? 3. Destroying Hamas as an idea — basically, trying to do what was done to the Nazis in WW2.
In my assessment, Israel is aiming for resolution criteria 1 in the short term and resolution criteria 2 in the long term. Long term is LONG; I'm talking years, if not decades. You don't uproot a terrorist organization that has controlled the land for about two decades and created a network the size of the NYC metro in a year or two or three. Obviously, Israel isn't going to state this publicly—imagine the press response to "Yup, we're gonna be here for years" — but if Israel wants to destroy Hamas to some level of criteria 2, that's the relevant time frame. I'm not going to go into why Israel wants to do that — it has a lot of ties to Iran and Hezbollah — as this comment is going to be lengthy anyway.
Hamas' strategic goal is simple: survive, and ideally keep the hostages as long as possible. The former has been its goal in every conflict since 2005. It has gotten all of what it needed on October 7th, and it believes time is ticking in its favor in the strategic sense because as time passes, more international pressure mounts on Israel to leave the strip and end the war. It is also getting everything it wants from the world — Hamas killed Israelis and captured hostages, and so far, it has received both international condemnation of Israel across the world and EU states recognizing a Palestinian state. This puts it on a much better footing than the PLO. I'll be blunt: every dead Palestinian is another achievement for Hamas, as it increases the pressure. To be clear, I'm not taking a side here (although I'm biased, but I'll state clearly when I think that interferes with the analysis), just stating the facts. Note that there is an interesting balance here: on the strategic level, Hamas believes time is on its side; on the operational level, the more time the IDF has, the more it can further destroy Hamas.
So, how does that translate to the day-to-day life of the Hamas soldier? Easy: survive and protect the hostages. Hide in the tunnels. Hide in the hospitals or simply among refugees. Whenever possible, jump to the nearby apartment of your cousin, where you stashed RPGs under his baby's crib, and try to shoot at Israeli tanks in the area. The moment you do that, run away — and ideally grab a child on your way to the hospital so the IDF won't shoot you. To be clear, there is video footage of such examples, and although I'm oversimplifying for brevity (e.g., there are some battalions that are more combat-ready than this; it changes in different parts of Gaza all the time), this is the bulk of the fighting.
So, how does the Israeli side look from a soldier's perspective? Basically, it depends on whether you're on offense or defense. If you're holding the Netzarim corridor or the Rafah border crossing, your job is to defend the logistical chain of supply to soldiers on offense and to supply and oversee humanitarian aid to civilians. If you're on offense, you're either going into areas that haven't been attacked by the IDF so far — e.g., Rafah — or going into areas that have been attacked and then evacuated, as the vacuum brings back Hamas fighters to existing infrastructure they know, and it's easier and more effective to catch them that way than one by one (a good example of this was the second Shifa hospital operation).
So, how does the conflict look from here on? Israel is going to continue working its way meticulously in areas it hasn't operated in yet — Rafah and some of the center of the strip — both because it is taking measures to minimize civilian casualties (I can claim that this is because we truly aim to keep them to a minimum, but no need to believe me; the Machiavellian incentive of not getting more international condemnation is enough) and because these areas likely have hostages in them. After that, Israel is going to maintain its ability to operate in the strip, at least in the same way it operates in the West Bank; i.e., if the IDF wants to get to Shifa again, it is going to keep whatever forces and outposts it needs in Gaza to maintain that capability. Hamas will continue stalling for time, keeping its munitions and weapons near civilians, and keeping the hostages hidden.
I can write more, but I'd need you to point me in the direction of what areas are of interest. Let me know if anything isn't clear.
>imagine the press response to "Yup, we're gonna be here for years"
The response would be something other than "makes sense, everybody has assumed this all along"? Israel has been in the West Bank all this time after all, and nobody cared too much.
Thank you very much for this long explanation, it's very much appreciated!
One more question, if you have the patience for it: how easy/difficult is it for an IDF soldier to recognize a Hamas fighter? Do the Hamas fighters usually wear uniforms or other signs? Do they carry around their weapons most of the time, or do they hide them and blend into the crowd, and only fetch a weapon when they see an opportunity for ambushing IDF soldiers?
Slightly changes, but as a general rule of thumb: They don't wear uniform, they don't carry weapons unless they have to/they're going to use them soon, they definitely try to hide and blend with the crowd whenever they can (when they fight in areas that have been evacuated, it's obviously harder)
And if you wander how they fetch a weapon that fast is it isn't already on them - I hear for soldiers who occupied neighborhoods in Gaza that they find weapons at half the houses
Could you say more on measures to minimize civilian casualties? I get that Israel wants to minimize these, but where I have less faith is that Israel, or any government, can act perfectly in accord with that interest.
TL,DR, a Gaza dentist gets a call from Israeli military intelligence saying they need to bomb the apartments across the street from him, they think he's someone they can work with, and can they talk him through arranging an evacuation? Which is successful, and gets him put on the list of people who *keep* getting called to help arrange evacuations.
Note that this means essentially no chance of killing any Hamas militants in the strike, only destroying some of their infrastructure.
I think the example John Shilling gave is excellent. Note that this happens regularly - Israel calls beforehand to warn citizens that it is going to bomb a building (However, not all the time - but still very common).
Good rule of thumb - if you see beautiful shots of a building being bombed by Israel, it's because it gave a warning beforehand and the cameramen had time to prepare the short. I honestly find it an easy way to know just from the documentation if Israel gave an early warning or not.
Short answer, as I don't plan to do another AMA here (probably will in a hidden open thread sometime soon if there's enough interest) - it's an effective CT strategy. It's easier to destroy battalions than individuals, and the moment you leave an area, Hamas fills that vacuum. You then go back in and vice-versa, until there is not enough Hamas left to create an effective military organizational structure.
First, thank you for taking your time and sharing here. I don't know if you can answer this, but perhaps you have some insight.
The Wikipedia article [1] on the three Israeli hostages who were shot says the following:
> According to an IDF official, the three male hostages emerged shirtless out of a building toward a group of IDF soldiers "tens of meters" away, with one carrying a white flag. An Israeli sniper then opened fire on them, killing Shamriz and Talalka and wounding Haim. After being shot, Haim ran into a nearby building and shouted for help in Hebrew. The battalion commander then ordered the troops to hold their fire, while Haim was persuaded to exit the building but when he did so 15 minutes later, a soldier acting against the battalion commander's order shot and killed him.
and:
> Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi stated that the shooting was against the IDF's rules of engagement and that the hostages had "done everything to show that they were harmless", including removing shirts to show that they were not carrying explosives.
I was pretty shocked because I can't imagine why a soldier would just shoot someone, after 15 minutes of talking in Hebrew and coaxing a hostage to come out, and where the person had told them they were a hostage, and had "done everything to show that they were harmless". What was going on?
Sure. Tactical answer and more context-aware answer:
1. The soldier simply didn't hear the commander. You can read more details on what happened here via GTranslate: https://news.walla.co.il/item/3631940
2. Since the start of the war, Hamas has recorded cries for help in Hebrew, baby crying sounds, and other things I can't recall right now, and played them from radioes/phones connected to booby-trapped buildings and/or IEDs. 99.99% of the time, if an Israeli soldier hears Hebrew in Gaza, he is thinking, correctly, "I'm walking into an ambush".
I knew from the Wikipedia article that they thought it could be a trick. That doesn't explain much though.
For one, even if they were Hamas militants, it would still be a war crime to shoot them. You can't shoot PoWs. (Or I should say you shouldn't shoot them; surrendering soldiers have often been killed in wars.)
It's always a possibility that any non-combatant or person waving a white flag could be an enemy trying to trick you. This has been true in every conflict.
But that aside, they were in shouting distance. They persuaded Haim to come out, in Hebrew. They clearly knew it wasn't a recording. The soldier did not need to walk into an ambush; Haim agreed to walk to them, as I understand it, shirtless and unarmed. What else could Yotam Haim have done to not get shot?
The soldier not hearing the commander isn't the shocking part that needs explaining. It's why he would persuade an unarmed hostage to come out and then shoot him.
I'd recommend reading the whole article, which I don't have time to do. I'll respond from memory of watching the review on the news:
1. They weren't PoWs; they were walking down the street in an active war zone, where there were basically only IDF soldiers and Hamas soldiers. Fighting has been going on there for weeks already, everyone who has some sense already evacuated from there.
2. The original soldier didn't see the flag because of a tree obscuring it from him. It was a snap decision to fire, but considering that the only people who should have been there at that points were Hamas soldiers, this makes sense.
3. The soldier shooting Haim wasn't with the commander, he was still far from him, IIRC in the house the whole incident started from. You're thinking in very clean terms; imagine a messy street, after weeks of fighting, you can't hear well because of the constant deafening bombing around you, you don't know all the details as we do - as far as you can tell, there is a gunfight happening now and you're buddies are in it. He might have been sitting somewhere far when everything started and didn't have context or the full picture. It's incredibly common for soldiers to continue shooting and for the "Stop" to register, especially after weeks of deployment.
For 1. I know they weren't PoWs. They were escaped hostages. I just mean that if they were Hamas soldiers, from the moment they waved that white flag and surrendered, you can no longer shoot them. They'd be considered PoWs at that point. You can't choose to not accept the surrender and just shoot them.
2. Maybe the translation isn't clear. The article you linked says the following (through Google Translate):
> One sniper stood and watched on the first floor. At 09:42 he recognized three shirtless figures with a white flag - the abductees. [...] The sniper watched them hidden by a tree standing in front of the building. The area where the abductees walked was defined as "red" for him, meaning an area that threatens the forces. He shot and hit two of them.
Which sounds like the sniper recognized they had a white flag and that the sniper was hidden by a tree.
3. Yes, I am very much not clear on the details. But as far as I can tell, the hostages took all the proper steps to get rescued and there were no Hamas soldiers there at the time they were shot. They were unarmed and waving a white flag. It sounds like the soldiers were quick to shoot despite there being no threat from the hostages.
This doesn't bode well for other escaped hostages or non-combatants who approach Israeli soldiers. What would you advise an escaped hostage to do? It seems like approaching the IDF unarmed and waving a white flag is risky.
1. I agree completely, and didn't think that's what you thought - just stated the POV of the soldier. Regular soldiers weren't briefed on meeting hostages before that BTW - which was a mistake ofc - because only Special ops were thought to be able to get near them.
2. Yeah, I'm reading the article in Hebrew and it is unclear. I remember hearing on the news that the tree obscured his view of the flag - but I'm uncertain now. Maybe he just took a very bad decision - I'm definitely not claiming that Israeli soldiers are mistake-proof, or bed-decision-making proof.
I took some time and found the article I read at the time - https://www.ynet.co.il/news/article/rkpl4fida - Seems like there are more details there, and here it appears more explicit that the tree blocked his view. Ctrl + F "38" (meters) for the relevant section.
3. I agree with what your saying, just not about generalizing from the single instance too much. Israel takes quite a lot of PoWs in this war - there are documentations of surrendered Hamas fighters, and not in small numbers. I would think the hostage scenario was the exception to the rule and not the rule itself.
(1) I think you got Matthew 22 wrong. my recollection of that is "Wasn't that the seven brothers?"
It's not a man with two ex-wives, it's a woman with seven ex-husbands:
"23 That same day the Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to him with a question. 24 “Teacher,” they said, “Moses told us that if a man dies without having children, his brother must marry the widow and raise up offspring for him. 25 Now there were seven brothers among us. The first one married and died, and since he had no children, he left his wife to his brother. 26 The same thing happened to the second and third brother, right on down to the seventh. 27 Finally, the woman died. 28 Now then, at the resurrection, whose wife will she be of the seven, since all of them were married to her?”
(2) With regards to St Joseph of Cupertino, he's more famous (or at least was in my time) as the guy you invoke to help you pass exams. Levitating is all very well and good, but getting that grade is more important! His claim to fame was being so stupid he tried and failed multiple times to be admitted to the priesthood until it was arranged that he would be given very simple questions which it was established that he knew the answers to.
For those of you that may need it, here you go - prayer to St Joseph of Cupertino for exam success:
"O great St. Joseph of Cupertino who, by your prayers, obtained from God to be asked at your examination only the propositions which you know, pray that I, like you, may succeed in the examination which lies before me. In return I promise to make your name known and cause you to be loved. Amen."
"Patron: of Aviators, Flying, Studying, and those suffering mental handicaps
St. Joseph was born in 1603 at Cupertino, in the diocese of Nardo in the Kingdom of Naples. ...It is said that his mother often considered him a nuisance and treated him harshly. Joseph was purported to be slow to learn and absent-minded. He was said to frequently wander aimlessly, with his mouth gaping open. And, he had a bad temper, so, he was not at all popular. He tried to learn the trade of shoemaking, but failed. He asked to become a Franciscan, but they initially would not accept him. Finally he did join the Capuchins. However, for a very short period of time. Eight months later, they sent him away. Sources say it was because he could not seem to do anything right.
He dropped piles of dishes and kept forgetting to do what he was told. His mother was not at all pleased to have the eighteen-year-old Joseph back home again, so she finally got him accepted as a servant at the Franciscan monastery. He was given the friars habit and put to hard work taking care of the horses.
About this time, Joseph began to change. He grew in humility and gentleness, fruits of the Holy Spirit at work in a person. He became more careful and successful at his work. He also began to pray more do more voluntary acts of penance. Finally, he was able to enter the Franciscan order and, eventually, study for the priesthood. Although he was a good and holy friar, he had a very hard time with studies. During his seminary exams, the examiner happened to ask him to explain the only thing he knew well, and so he was ordained a deacon, and later a priest."
This, and the Mormon link, have jogged a memory of mine that I was specifically taught as a kid that this *wasn't* a trick question, because it was asked by a Saducee and the Saducees were basically alright (probably not quite in these terms, I'm remembering across decades and into childhood). Is/was this ever a consensus position, or was this just a specific quirk of (I think?) both a school chaplain and a Sunday school teacher I had?
The reason we should go back to Nuns With Rulers in school is my experience with one for our Intermediate Certificate (now the Junior Certificate) exam - state exam for third Year in secondary school (at around age 15). We had her for maths class in the final year before the exam, having had a male lay teacher for the first two years in that subject.
I passed with an even better (not great, but great by my expectations!) grade than I hoped to get, and she dragged the entire class of us over the line with revising two years work and hammering the third year into our heads by means of fear and intimidation. Nobody failed the maths exam, even the no-hopers like me.
Education by sheer terror works!
Lest I be traducing the woman, she was perfectly amiable outside of class once you got to know her. But in class? She would have made Chuck Norris break down in tears like a little baby.
We used to have to line up and recite the particular theorem out of Euclid for the class that day, having drawn it on the sheet of paper beforehand; she would get one student to start, then stop them and the nexxt would have to continue on, and down the line like that.
If the drawing was sloppy or you weren't able to seamlessly switch into recital, you were In Trouble. I remember being lined up with the rest of the class, we all practicing beforehand before she came in to class, and noting that the paper was trembling like a leaf in a breeze, then realising I was so scared my hands were shaking 😁
And she never even used The Ruler, it was all done with quiet force of command. As I said, the funny thing was getting to know her a few years later outside of class, and she was perfectly fine to get on with. But in that class, she ruled like a force of nature by sheer terror imposed on us without even raising her voice!
I'm telling you, a bit more fear in class and a lot of the failing students would stop failing!
My French teacher did me the same service. One time he broke a wooden ruler over my head as he repeated "You must learn your vocab!" (maybe said in French). More typically, he would hold between forefinger and thumb the short hairs in front of one's ear.
Per item 14: In John 14, Jesus says that Christians can do everything He did, and even greater things, too. If nobody used miraculous powers to stop the holocaust, it's not for lack of God making them available, same way they were available to the levitating monk.
That would be pretty in line with the Bible. It happens in the Old Testament a lot. For instance, consider the story of Samson, who lost his miraculous super-strength when his hair was cut, which violated his vows to God.
There's a lot of theological controversy about the role of miraculous powers in the present day. I'm definitely in the camp that thinks that, just like all spiritual things, as far as God's concerned, they're equally available to everybody; it's just that very few of us are able to (or want to) access them.
Also consider that, in the New Testament, spiritual things like forgiving somebody, repenting from sin, doing charitable works or worshiping God have eternal value. Human spirits last forever, while, on the other hand, the world will be destroyed by Christ when He returns in the end. So flying around (which, after all, you can do in an airplane too) has, in itself, no eternal value.
So it may be that there are people who can do miracles now, but they're enlightened enough to put their energy toward other ministries instead. Jesus also said in Luke 16 that miracles don't convince people who don't want to be convinced. (Which makes me skeptical of these projects that try to use miracles to convert people.)
From a different branch of Christianity (no, I'm not going to entertain discussion on that), namely the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, here's my perspective.
I agree that miracles (a) still happen and (b) are not generally flashy. We have direct guidance that miracles are for the faithful, not the convincing of the faithless. I also agree that, for the Lord's purposes, the spiritual is much more important than the physical. I also note that there is doctrinal and scriptural support for the idea that the Adversary can do "miracles"--his tend to be flashy counterfeits.
As to how miracles are performed--there are two types, broadly. Those that come purely by faith/prayer of the righteous and those that are mediated by the power of the priesthood[1]. In either case, it's God performing the miracle, and they happen if and only if they are in accord with God's will for that specific circumstance. And his wisdom is higher than ours--not everyone who prays for healing or receives a blessing of healing will be healed (to take one example).
Anyone can pray in faith for a miracle. Those prayers are answered (although not always in the way we think they will be, nor always with a yes). But to have true faith, you have to have a spiritual assurance through the Holy Spirit that what you are praying for is in accord with divine will. So people who pray for flashy miracles, etc. *can't be praying in faith*.
The priesthood can, under certain circumstances, and when operating with faith, be used to command nature in the name of God. Again, it must be done in accordance with His will, which dramatically limits the scope. This is how most of the biblical miracles occurred, especially those of the prophets and apostles. For example, Peter's command "Silver and gold have I none; but such as I have give I thee: In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth rise up and walk." was efficacious because he was authorized to wield the power of God for the healing of the sick AND that deed was done in faith AND that deed was in accord with God's will for that circumstance.
[1] Note: the Church of Jesus Christ uses this term in its proper meaning not to refer to the *people*, but to the authority and power to act in the name of God. The people *bear* the priesthood, but are not the priesthood. This gets muddled a lot in casual conversation, which kinda sucks.
>We have direct guidance that miracles are for the faithful, not the convincing of the faithless.
That's like saying that the soda bottle at your grocery is there to get beverages to thirsty people, not to convince anyone that the grocery store actually sells soda.
You don't need to do something *specifically* to convince the faithless, for it to convince the faithless. You just have to go about it in an ordinary manner without thinking about the faithless at all. At some point the faithless will get evidence for miracles purely by chance, just like if coelacanths exist, sooner or later a scientist will just happen to be there to see one.
When people say "it isn't there to convince the faithless", 99% of the time they don't mean "it isn't there to convince the faithless". Instead they mean "it's *specifically* contrived so that it *won't* convince the faithless", and that's a *very* different thing.
Regarding the re-hyping of anti-missile defenses, I humbly submit the following counter https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/iran-breaches-anglo-zionist-defenses?utm_source=publication-search If they're so cool, why don't they send them to the Ukrainians? They are not being attacked by ICBMs. Same goes for F-35s. If they're so great, and not a very expensive gizmo to target Afghan sheep-shaggers from across the world, then let's send them to face the Russians and see what happens, no? Over two years after the start the war, that doesn't seem to be in the cards, which tells me they'd rather stick with the sheep-shaggers, thank you very much.
>If they're so cool, why don't they send them to the Ukrainians?
We did. It's been over a year since Patriots started shooting down Kinzal missiles over Ukraine.
As for the F-35s, these are extremely sophisticated warplanes that will take years to teach Ukraine how to use. It's taking quite a while to get the F-16s we (finally) gave them into service, and things would be much worse with a more complicated plane.
And before we sent the Ukrainians Patriots, they were using their own extensive network of S-300 missile batteries, which was basically the Soviet version of the Patriot in the late Cold War. It wasn't as effective as the American version, because Russian weapons rarely are, but it was reasonably capable against most of the missiles Russia was actually hitting Ukraine with and because it was what they were familiar with.
When the Ukrainians started running low on S-300s, and the Russians started using more of the missiles S-300 couldn't stop, we started training Ukrainians to use Patriots and then we sent them Patriots. They seem to work really well, though there aren't enough of them to cover the entire nation.
F-35s, as Bean says, would have a steeper learning curve unless we sent American pilots to fly them and American technicians to maintain them. Granted, it's been more than two years and that probably would have been enough time to stand up a few effective Ukrainian F-35 squadrons, but we spent most of the first year thinking and hoping that the war would be over in a year. Once NATO decided Ukraine needed western combat aircraft, it was a question of getting them F-16s in 2024 or F-35s in 2025 at the earliest.
This war will end when one side runs out of guns, shells, or men willing to stand up to being shelled. There's no reason that has to be Ukraine, and the bit where Russia has to import ammunition from *North Korea* suggests that the limit on Russian endurance is not impossibly far in the future.
But the only side of that equation that Ukraine has any real control over is Ukrainian manpower. Their guns and their shells come almost entirely from NATO, and NATO's policy for the past year and a half seems to have been to prolong the stalemate. Russia can't be allowed to win because that would be a victory for the bad guys, but Ukraine can't be allowed to win because maybe Vladimir Putin will throw a nuclear temper tantrum.
The war will probably end about six months after the United States Government decides who it wants to see win. Right now, the most likely outcome is the second Trump administration deciding that Russia should win, followed shortly by Russia winning. But that's not the only possibility.
North Korea is a Chinese client, not Russian, and Moscow hasn't been much interested in doing them favors in this century. And from reports on Russian social media, some of the North Korean ammunition is complete crap, but the Russians are using it anyway. So it's pretty clear that Russia is scraping the bottom of the barrel w/re domestic production and stockpiles (Ukraine reached that point over a year ago). And note that this isn't just artillery shells; Russia is confirmed to be using North Korean and Iranian ballistic missiles in Ukraine, even though those are well behind the usual Russian state of the art.
That said, nobody knows how much artillery ammunition North Korea has tucked away, but it's probably in the millions of rounds and they're clearly willing to sell at least some of the stockpile. So Russia is unlikely to run out next month, Next year, very possible.
As a counterpoint to John, I would have to say Ukraine can not and will not win without other countries sending their own soldiers. For various reasons, this war is about grinding attritional advances much more reminiscent of WWI than the sweeping maneuver battles of WWII or the Napoleonic wars. Russia has a much larger pool of manpower and much more industrial capacity than Ukraine, which are the determining factors of victory.
Having more men is a compounding advantage, because they can be rotated out of combat to rest and replenish. The general rule of thumb is that a unit of fighting men is no longer combat effective after 15% losses. There are some Ukrainian brigades that have suffered over 50% losses, because they don't have the reserves to rotate their men. The Russians have also been adept at using mercenaries, convict soldiers and militia units from the Donbas to soak up losses in frontal assaults and protect their veteran professional units. This is a relatively recent phenomenon, and a lot of the professional Russian soldiers suffered heavy losses in the first few years of the war.
There are something like 500k Russian troops in Ukraine right now, and another 300-500K recruits/conscripts in the newly formed western military districts. There have been rumblings of using these troops to open a northern flank through Belarus, which would stretch the Ukrainian manpower even further. I don't know at this point whether this is a legitimate plan or a psyop to tangle up Ukraine. These troops have to be trained, and Russia doesn't have enough equipment to deploy more than a fraction of them at present anyway. Still, even another 50-60K Russians on a new front would be pretty rough for Ukraine to counter.
As far as war material goes, consider the production of standard howitzer ammunition (155mm NATO, 152mm RU.) Russia produces somewhere in the neighborhood of 3-4 million shells per year. For comparison, the US currently produces about 700,000 per year. They plan to open a third factory in 2025 to reach a million per year, but the factory will need time to ramp up production to full, which may not happen until late 2025 or 2026. The EU plans to reach 1.4 million shells per year by 2025. They also planned to deliver 1 million shells to Ukraine already, but have only delivered a bit over half of that, so these numbers may not reflect reality. Anyway, the side running out of artillery shells first is clearly not going to be Russia.
During intense operations, tens of thousands of shells are fired per day. That would burn through even millions of shells per year, which is why the NK shells were purchased. I can't imagine the quality of NK goods is great, but making WWII-era military technology seems within the realm of a communist backwater.
Both the US and Russia are limited in their development of ballistic missiles by various treaties. Something which does not hold true for Iran. Iranian cruise missiles have multi-stage boosters, for example, which is prohibited under IRBM treaty. The missile attack on Israel is illustrative here, where the Iranians largely failed to penetrate the missile defenses. This shows that Iranians missiles are not superior to Western/Russian models, which also fail to penetrate missile defenses without large-scale decoys and drone support. It doesn't prove anything about whether they are the same/worse.
All in all, Ukraine is at a significant manpower and firepower disadvantage. Even shitty NK/Iranian tech and refurbished cold war stockpiles that have been gathering rust are better than nothing, which is what Ukraine locally produces for the war effort. Except for drones, which Ukraine is probably the foremost expert country on the planet at utilizing. Sadly, you can't win a war with drones alone. Maybe in a few more decades.
I really have to object to the idea that the US/NATO *desires* Ukraine to lose for some reason. Russia has a significant natural advantage in population and production. Overcoming this would require the west to both a) send their own soldiers to fight in Ukraine, and b) divert significant portions of their economy to war time levels of material production. That they have not been willing to do so is not evidence that they want Russia to win.
As it happens I was professionally involved in this issue some twenty years ago, when the idea was revived under Little Bush, but the objectives the were extremely modest: be able to shoot down a handful of nuclear-tipped ICBMs from North Korea or (one day) Iran. I think it's fair to say that, in spite of the time and the investment, no reliable capability yet exists. The Russian S-500 system has a theoretical capability against ICBMs, but that remains to be demonstrated in practice. In the meantime, Russia has the only real ABM capability in the form of a system around Moscow, first deployed half a century ago and quite recently up-dated, which would destroy warheads in their terminal phase through nuclear explosions. It was originally conceived as a way of soaking up the first wave of US missiles, and giving the Politburo time to authorise the launch of a counter-strike.
The issue of tactical anti-missile missiles is quite different. They have been around for generations: as long ago as the 1982 Falklands War, the British used Sea Wolf missiles against Argentinian aircraft, which had originally been designed as anti-anti-shipping missiles. In Ukraine, the Russians have been able to reliably destroy NATO subsonic missiles with technology that has been around for decades, and that they have invested heavily in, in a way the West has not. Successful attacks from each side have largely resulted from launching massive attacks, and overwhelming the defence with sheer numbers, making use of decoy drones and multiple waves of attacks. But of course you need, not just very large numbers of drones, but very large numbers of the actual missiles to do the damage. By contrast, hypersonic missiles like the Kinzahl are a very new development, and at the moment there is no way of defending against them.
>I think it's fair to say that, in spite of the time and the investment, no reliable capability yet exists. The Russian S-500 system has a theoretical capability against ICBMs, but that remains to be demonstrated in practice. In the meantime, Russia has the only real ABM capability in the form of a system around Moscow, first deployed half a century ago and quite recently up-dated, which would destroy warheads in their terminal phase through nuclear explosions. It was originally conceived as a way of soaking up the first wave of US missiles, and giving the Politburo time to authorise the launch of a counter-strike.
Uhh.... no. None of this is right. I had sort of hoped we'd have gotten over lionizing Russian weapons given their dismal performance in Ukraine. As for the Moscow-protecting ABM system, that was a decoy to soak up US and British missiles during the Cold War. It worked pretty well, too, as evidenced by Chevaline. And you're completing ignoring GMD, which I have a pretty high prior on working given that every other Western BMD system we've tested has worked quite well.
>The issue of tactical anti-missile missiles is quite different. They have been around for generations: as long ago as the 1982 Falklands War, the British used Sea Wolf missiles against Argentinian aircraft, which had originally been designed as anti-anti-shipping missiles.
This is a complete non-sequitur in regards to BMD. None of those were ballistic, and there wasn't a widespread capability to do that before about 20 years ago, with some error bars depending on how you evaluate things like Patriot's performance in Desert Storm.
>By contrast, hypersonic missiles like the Kinzahl are a very new development, and at the moment there is no way of defending against them.
Hypersonic weapons aren't new (the name is, but that's just to blind people to the fact that the concept isn't) and it seems weird that you'd make that specific claim given Patriot's record against Kinzahl in Ukraine.
I think the evidence from Ukraine is a much stronger place to take lessons from than the recent strikes from Iran. The Iranians gave ample notice that they planned a strike against Israel, then orchestrated an attack they must have known would mostly have been struck down. The fact that all of these missiles (and drones) weren't stopped despite all the notice, the multiple parties involved, the clear target path, the long distance in which to act, etc. suggests a specific interpretation of missile defense weakness that squares with observations from Ukraine on both sides: missile defense becomes exponentially more difficult the larger the area that must be defended.
Each system has an operational range. If you know where and when the attack is coming from, you can defend against it. If you know where the missiles are going you can defend against it. Hence the success of Israel's air defense in the past and the failure of Russian and Ukrainian air defense, where they'll send in a bunch of cheap drones to empty out the missile defense systems, followed by more advanced missiles to strike the true targets. This is what has happened multiple times in Ukraine, but was conspicuously absent in the Iranian attack.
Russia's "only real ABM capability" has not really been demonstrated since the end of the Cold War, and I wouldn't bet too heavily on it today. Same goes for the S-500.
On the US side, we have GMD (Ground-Based Midcourse Defense), which was a prototype placed in limited operational service as a placeholder. With ~20 years of debugging, it might work. And we have Aegis, which definitely works. On paper, it's only expected to stop intermediate-range ballistic missiles, which as we recently saw, it does quite well. But it's also been used to shoot down a satellite in low orbit, which indicates that it is capable of engaging targets moving at ICBM speeds. It admittedly doesn't have the continent-spanning range of GMD, but it's cheaper and it has a land-based version so you don't have to build an expensive ship under it if you're defending fixed areas.
Deploying a system to protect against an all-out attack from Russia would be *expensive*, we'd definitely have to turn up the money printers a notch or two(*), but the technology exists. Defending Israel from Iran, or defending Ukraine from a Russia that's keeping its serious missiles in reserve against the US, is affordable.
* Reasons why we might not want to do this, are left as an exercise for the student
Are you referring to the A-135? Is there any reason to assume that it wouldn't work? Especially since the Russians still have the balls to put nukes on the tips?
The success rate for Russian military equipment left over from the Cold War and not regularly tested and exercised since, should give anyone cause to suspect that it would greatly underperform expectations if put to the test.
And putting nuclear missiles on antimissiles, doesn't really help all that much. A competently-built and -maintained modern guidance system, if it works, doesn't need a nuclear warhead, and if it doesn't work, probably won't put the missile close enough for even a nuclear warhead to get the job done. This isn't the 1970s, when we were stuck with fuzzy low-resolution command or beam riding guidance. Putting nuclear warheads on a defensive missile greatly reduces your flexibility in using that missile, even if you've got Russian-grade balls, for a very marginal increase in the capability of that missile.
9: My expectation would be that whatever society welcomes the currently cryonically preserved as its unfrozen citizens will treat them as legally new people who just happen to have adult bodies and memories. Their old identities have already been declared dead, their wills carried out, etc. This may not help with the social practicalities much, but it would help with the legal ones. I don't think mandating a few decades (subjective time) of schooling/acculturation for the newly revived would be out of the question, either.
23: Your impression is basically correct, plus the odds of that extreme right tail have gotten lower over time as more research clarified how unlikely some of the scenarios were, and as the world has actually made significant progress towards making emissions reductions economically viable in more and more cases.
29: The "Yes" answer seems to rely, among other things, on the idea that a significant number of Trump voters would vote for Biden if Trump endorsed Biden, 1 week before the election, after Biden said he'd pardon Trump if Trump endorsed him. One, I don't think that's true. Two, Trump would also pardon Trump if elected, so this doesn't buy Trump voters anything they wouldn't already have gotten.
34: My initial hypothesis, if this is true, would be the LLMs are better than non-conspiracy-theorists at thinking like conspiracy theorists in order to persuade them, whereas most humans would have trouble staying in the proper mindset. Plausibly this stops working when the "They're using LLMs trained to convince you of lies" conspiracy theory gets off the ground.
9: Legally, I think that's how it works already. If you are declared dead (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presumption_of_death), and you show up again, the consequences mostly don't get unwound: your wife was free to remarry and her marriage doesn't get undone, your will remains executed and your assets distributed, and so on. Your widow can just divorce & remarry you if she wants (which she probably won't), and as for the rest, them's the breaks - not much sympathy for someone who fakes their death or deliberately disappears. No one disappears guiltlessly as a castaway for 5+ years in the modern world.
So, since cryonics patients are all declared legally dead before the cryonics organization will touch the body, that's what would happen by default. You'd just wake up as the old person but de facto, effectively new as all your assets and contracts and liabilities etc are all gone and the slate wiped clean having been declared legally dead centuries before. (Which is why you will be relying on the cryonics patient trust to support you after revival, if necessary.)
Made me think of the South Park "gooback" episode with time travelers taking all our jerbs, and it suddenly hit me that if you revived people 200 years in the future, they probably wouldn't be able to speak the language very well. You'd have to give them a crash course on lingo.
29: It'd shatter Trump's credibility though, although he *might* just about be able to charm his way through it. Some voters would flip to Biden (most people aren't very political or politically engaged and vote in ways that seem weird to people who are), but a lot more might stay home or vote for RFK jr.
I will happy pay $1,000 for you or Bentham to do your best to come up with an explanation for the shroud of Turin. Consider all the evidence available and then explain what it is. Anyone else want to help finance this?
Have you done any research? A cursory review of the Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shroud_of_Turin) indicates radiocarbon dating shows it is far too new to have been worn by Jesus. Those who believe it authentic doubt the radiometric analysis, but it doesn't explain how.
Yes. Look into the details of that radiocarbon dating. You’ll find that samples taken two inches apart differed in their measurement by over 100 years. All the samples were taken from one area which is easily seen to be visually anomalous, as it was the place where people held it up for viewing and this was repaired. These results were, for some reason, initially withheld and only the summary conclusion was published.
There is also the question of, “how and why did they create a photographic negative, before photography was invented?”
"it is not possible to affirm that the 1988 radiocarbon dating offers ‘conclusive evidence’ that the calendar age range is accurate and representative of the whole cloth."
But it's quite a leap to say that, even if the estimated age range of AD 1260-1390 interval isn't 95% accurate that the correct age is around 0 AD. Suppose, rather, that the age ought to be around 800 AD, +/- 500 years.
I don't pretend to understand the statistics or methods involved, but it seems like they made an honest scientific effort to analyze the results, which mean the results are less accurate than initially portrayed. I would still think that the most likely explanations for the image are forgery and random chance.
They created a photographic negative after such a technique was invented. Anyone can make a photographic negative nowadays (which actually was the first step in creating a photograph), and such images present a different way of looking at the same thing, which can highlight different things.
You are right that the study being flawed doesn’t show the date as 0, I agree there. But it does suggest that the initial study was flawed, so it’s not useful as evidence for the age of the should as a whole.
I don’t think a honest scientific effort happened if results were hidden for 20 years, and the ambiguity was hidden and replaced with a confident assertion. That sounds like what I’d expect from people who had concern higher than what was true.
As for the negative, You’re not understanding the question. The image on the cloth is barely visible as is. It becomes much more clear when it’s interpreted as a negative. this raises two questions:
- How was the original image created in the first place? There isn’t a known physical process by which the image on the cloth could have been created. Nobody has been able to make a convincing copy. If you think this is wrong, see if you can find a plausible explanation for how the image on the cloth was created, along with a demonstration of someone actually doing this to the same degree of physiological accuracy as on the cloth.
- why would a forgery do this? Why make an image that’s not super convincing, until you use uninvented technology to reveal details that would have been impossible to see for centuries?
I haven't read Philosophy Bear's article yet, but I suspect it's the person with a staunch position that benefits from the interaction with an LLM most (Though I can get back to you on that).
I really don't know much about the Shroud & I don't expect talking to an LLM would leave me convinced of the same position as you are.
The Shroud of Turin is a linen cloth bearing the image of a man who appears to have suffered physical trauma consistent with crucifixion. The cloth is approximately 4.4 by 1.1 meters and contains faint images of the front and back of a man's body, along with what appear to be bloodstains.
The primary evidence in favor of the shroud's authenticity includes:
The negative image: The image on the shroud is a negative, which was only discovered when the shroud was first photographed in 1898.
Anatomical accuracy: The image depicts a crucified man with wounds consistent with biblical accounts of Jesus' crucifixion.
Pollen and dirt: Pollen grains and limestone dust found on the shroud are consistent with the flora and geology of Jerusalem.
However, there is also evidence that suggests the shroud may not be authentic:
Carbon dating: In 1988, three independent radiocarbon dating tests dated the cloth to between 1260 and 1390 AD, suggesting it was a medieval forgery.
Lack of historical record: There is no clear historical record of the shroud before the 14th century.
Artistic similarities: The image on the shroud bears similarities to medieval artistic styles and techniques.
Considering the evidence, the most plausible explanation is that the Shroud of Turin is a medieval artistic creation, possibly a devotional object or a forgery intended to be venerated as a holy relic. The carbon dating results, lack of clear historical record before the 14th century, and similarities to medieval art support this theory.
However, some aspects of the shroud, such as the negative image and the anatomical accuracy, are more difficult to explain. It is possible that the creator of the shroud used techniques that are not yet fully understood or that some of the evidence, such as the pollen and dirt, was transferred to the cloth at a later date.
In conclusion, while the Shroud of Turin remains an enigma, the available evidence suggests that it is most likely a medieval creation rather than the genuine burial cloth of Jesus Christ. Further research and analysis may shed more light on this fascinating artifact.
The people who ran these tests got wildly different dates, off by hundreds of years. They didn’t originally publish these raw numbers, they had bad agreed to, but only the averages. It took ~ 30 years for them to release the raw data. Here’s the relevant scholarly source:
Why would committed scholars publish only an average and say “the artifact is clearly false”, and then hide evidence for 30 years?
I think the simple explanation is they measured only the part of the shroud that had been repaired over time, and even this showed so much variation that they hid the results.
None of this explains the negative image, the 3D encoded data, or the grain pollen. If a forgery, someone did this using techniques that we still can’t mimic today, but which would have been invisible when it was ostensibly made.
The statistical analysis presented in the paper does raise some important questions about the 1988 radiocarbon dating of the Shroud of Turin. A few key points:
The raw data from the three labs (Arizona, Oxford, Zurich) shows significant variation and lack of agreement, both between and within the labs. This heterogeneity calls into question whether the samples can reliably be combined into a single date range.
The labs found foreign material like dye, wax, and cotton fibers on the tested samples, suggesting the area may have been contaminated or repaired.
Not publishing the raw data openly at the time, and taking decades to release it, raises concerns about transparency.
As you note, the unusual characteristics of the Shroud's image are still difficult to fully explain.
Caution overstating the implications. The medieval date range is still supported by each lab's individual results, even if there are problems in how they were combined. And the presence of some foreign material does not necessarily invalidate the dating.
The 1988 tests had issues and the raw data shows more uncertainty than was originally conveyed. But medieval origins remain a strong possibility based on the evidence available.
Sure it’s a possibility. What range is considered normal for variation in carbon dating, for samples on the order of a thousand years old?
Regardless of the date, there’s a bunch of other weird stuff in the shroud that doesn’t add up. If it’s a forgery the negative image and the 3d depth data?
Either way, regardless of the why —- how? How did it happen? Why have attempts to recreate the shroud failed to reproduce so many of its weird features?
The typical margin of error for radiocarbon dating depends on the age of the sample and the dating technology used. For a well-preserved organic sample around a thousand years old, modern techniques can usually provide a date range with a 95% confidence interval of about ±50-100 years. So the several hundred years of variation in the 1988 Shroud results does seem unusually large, even considering possible contamination or repair of the tested area. However, even with this variation, the medieval timeframe is still consistently indicated by all three labs.
You're right that the Shroud has characteristics that are difficult to explain, regardless of its age. The negative image, 3D encoding of information, and resistance to simple replication warrant further study.
If the Shroud is medieval, it suggests that the creator used some sophisticated and unconventional techniques to achieve those effects. Various hypotheses involving chemical reactions, gaseous diffusion, or even primitive photography have been proposed, but none have been conclusively demonstrated. It remains an open question how a medieval artisan could have created such an image.
On the other hand, if the Shroud is genuinely ancient, we still face the challenge of explaining how such an image could have been formed by natural processes associated with crucifixion and burial. No other known ancient burial cloth has similar properties.
While these unsolved mysteries are fun, we shouldn't let that override the evidence we do have. The consistent medieval date range from the radiocarbon tests, even with the acknowledged variability, and the lack of conclusive historical references to the Shroud before the 14th century, still point towards a medieval origin as the most likely scenario based on currently available data.
LLM’s do not evaluate evidence and reason in the face of uncertainty. They only predict the next word, which in this case means its claims about the balance of the evidence are just statements about popular consensus.
My belief is, that I don’t know what this is, but I find it very interesting given the numerous unexplained aspects of it. This is the same position as the Catholic Church, by the way. I don’t think there’s any convincing materialist explanation for what this is or how it came about. The radio carbon dating evidence is weak and is consistent with either a fraud from around the time of its discovery, or else a mixture of fibers from different points in time.
> 5: [...] Related, from @StatisticUrban - average house size in every US state vs. every European country
I'm deeply sceptical of average house size as an indicator of wealth
1. If you were simply optimising for average house size in the absence of any other metrics, it's very simple to do: just ban building anything small! And isn't that what most of American cities are incidentally doing :p Customer choice is reduced, but the number is higher.
2. Related to 1., it says nothing about space per person, or housing availability on the margin.
3. Note that even Norway has much smaller houses than America, despite being fabulously rich in every other metric otherwise
4. Personally speaking, there comes a point for me where extra space inside a house or flat is a net negative for me, not positive, even all other things considered equal, and that point is below the numbers you see in the American map.
5. (related to 4 and 1) I would gladly trade off space for living in a nice urban area, and most of those big houses are in car-dependent suburbs which I really would rather not live in. Judging by the prominence of the American urbanist movement online and what they say, availability of houses that urbanists like in America is really low compared to Europe.
This isn't to say things can't be bad (the UK housing stock is infamously so), but really you can't use a single number as evidence here.
(nevertheless, the America-Europe gap that appeared in the past 15 years is really embarrassing and I wish that more fellow Europeans woke up to that fact and started screaming asking what went wrong)
"Unfortunately the fog has rolled in and our paths must diverge" is a wonderful line for a breakup. For maximum applicability, it should really be done while standing on a bridge. Downside is that the person broken up with might shove you off that bridge 😀
"Nick Fuentes has accused me of being one of the Jews who controls the new conservative movement"
As the Rightful Caliph, are you *completely* sure this does not come under your aegis?
36. But I thought all safety regulations were written in blood!
Sorry, cheap political crack, but a serious look at why individual safety regulations were written and what their effect is would be welcome. I realize this would be a difficult project.
I have thoughts on a couple of these. First, the British SLBMs. Some of this is cultural (and there was a time when the US would have said the same, before Kennedy and McNamara and their rather odd belief that everyone wanted to blow up the world, while Russia has always been paranoid about such things). But a lot of it is probably also economic. The problem the British have is that they're a rather small island, close to the main enemy, so they may not have the time to get word to their submarines, particularly when they also can't really afford the expensive systems the US has for that, which I talk about in https://www.navalgazing.net/NWAS-Polaris-Part-4. The result is that if they did implement a PAL system like we have, they'd run a very large risk of not actually being able to launch if they needed to.
Second, the Noah Smith thing. I will first establish my bona fides as someone who got this right, on both missile defense (https://www.navalgazing.net/In-Defense-of-Missile-Defense) and the F-35 (literally my first comment on SSC). I think he gets most of the main drivers right, particularly the role that experts working on classified stuff play vs Ted Postol, and I would go further and point out that you're going to see adverse selection in your experts because the defense field pays well and only Ted Postol can't get hired there. (I also disagree that he's smart, but that's a different story.)
I remain somewhat baffled at the lack of any serious effort by the defense industry to get its position out to the wider public, because while a lot of this stuff is moderately difficult to explain, it's not that much more difficult than a couple of other fields I'm familiar with that have done a much better job of making explanations available. (Orbital mechanics, for instance.) I'm doing my best, but I'm one guy doing this in my spare time, and I keep getting distracted by weird stuff from WWII. More thoughts on that at https://www.navalgazing.net/The-Defense-Information-Pipeline, but I'll probably write up a full response soon.
>But also, there might have been some confusion between “block Iranian cruise missiles”, which modern systems are now good at, and “block Russian ICBMs”, which is still impossible (for a good overview of the state of ICBM-blocking tech, see here).
This needs some clarification. A cruise missile is basically an unmanned airplane that crashes into things and blows up. We've had the ability to shoot them down approximately forever, as it's a subset of conventional air defense. What we saw was excellent performance against Iranian intermediate-range ballistic missiles. We didn't see use against ICBMs, but all signs point to us being able to handle them in principle. We do not currently have enough interceptors to do much against an attack by anyone except North Korea, but this is a matter of money, not of engineering. I think we should change this. And no, it won't be destabilizing, because I neither expect nor demand the system stop every warhead.
I still don't buy the rationale of the British subs. I am assuming that their sub commanders still require some sort of positive confirmation that there is a nuclear war going on before they launch their tridents towards Moscow. Otherwise, it would be rather simple to start WW3: just jam the radio connection to London as a sub emerges from a routine dive, wait for the commander to conclude that London does not exist any more and enjoy the fireworks. Even if the crew can detect that they are being jammed, they have to have some policy on what to do in that case. A policy of "do nothing" would destroy the deterrence value, while a policy of "nuke away" would make it rather easy to start WW3.
I get that there may be situations where you order your sub to dive and emerge at some later point somewhere and launch their rockets unless they get an all-clear, but in that case the correct time to send them the the codes to their nukes would be with these instructions.
And as I have written lengthily in another comment, tamper-protection devices seem useful even if someone on board knows the code, you want to make it as hard as reasonably possible for someone to steal your nukes and use them for whatever.
If London is silent, the radios are awash with SOS calls and there's a Russian cruiser bearing down on you, odds are you should crack open the safe and launch. If you surface and London is silent but everything else looks totally normal, maybe go yell at your radio technician as a first step. Put simply, if you don't trust a career navy captain to be able to identify whether there's an apocalyptic war going on, why the hell would you put him in charge of the boat?
Even if you could block all communications with jamming (which you can't over the sort of area an SSBN might be operating in) it's pretty easy to tell the difference between being jammed and there not being any signal to start with. The orders definitely aren't "if you can't hear anything, turn the keys immediately". billymorph said this very well.
As for tamper-protection devices, I'm sure those are installed. For one thing, all missile warheads have very strict safeguards to not go off unless they've been fired from a missile. And I strongly suspect that launching would take several keys held in safes which require combinations known to different people. The difference from US practice is mostly that all of the safe combinations are known to people onboard.
"We do not currently have enough interceptors to do much against an attack by anyone except North Korea, but this is a matter of money, not of engineering. "
Except, at some point, the money problem turns into an engineering problem. If Russia has roughly 8000 warhheads, and each one requires 4 GMD interceptors to have a 97% hit chance, and each interceptor costs $75 million, thats over 2 trillion to shoot them all down. Meanwhile Russia or China can easily produce more, while the US has shown no sign of being able to mass manufacture sophisticated missiles in bulk.
I dispute all of your assumptions. Russia does not have 8000 warheads right now. They were limited to 1550 deployed, and that number can't climb too much higher quickly. Second, why do I need 97% to shoot each one down? I'll take 50% as a start, because that's a lot better than 0%. Third, I probably don't need 4 to 1 because I can launch in waves and retarget. Fourth, if I'm buying 32,000 interceptors, the price is going to come down a lot. And fifth, the defense industrial base hasn't exactly covered itself in glory, but it's better than that. No, we can't get to 32,000 quickly, but we're building hundreds of sophisticated missiles a year, and could add more interceptors to that if we wanted to. Also, adding Russia to "easily produce more" makes it hard to take you seriously.
Likewise, it's hard to take you seriously when you think missile defense being "solved" means something like "if we spend trillions of dollars going all out producing as many interceptors as possible, we could maybe shoot down 50% of Russia's current stockpile, assuming they don't build any more." Is this just trying to "win" by killing more of them than they do of us?
Again, trillions is your numbers, not mine. I'd say 3000 interceptors instead of 32,000, and estimate maybe $10 million per interceptor at that rate, which is 30 billion. I'd consider that a good deal on insurance, particularly because the existence of an effective BMD umbrella is going to vastly change how they do targeting, cutting down on the number of bombs landing on American cities.
What bean says, without specifically endorsing his exact numbers.
Also, winning is nice, but even if you set the goalposts so that "winning" a nuclear war is definitionally or practically impossible, there's still a big difference between the sort of defeat where fifty million Americans are dead and the survivors have been Bombed Back to the Stone Age(*), and the sort of defeat where twenty million Americans are dead and the survivors have been bombed back to the 20th century.
Unless you are 100.00% certain you can avoid fighting a nuclear war, then it is worth spending tens of billions of dollars to hedge against the worst sort of defeat. If you are "only" 99% certain your diplomats will come through with a lasting peace, it is genuinely worth trillions. And it probably wouldn't cost trillions.
* Not literally the stone age, as we've discussed before.
5: Higher wages are useless if your country's infrastructure and tax system is so piss poor that you need to spend more on basic necessities. We have economic metrics that account for some of this, such as the difference between income and discretionary income. Free-market propagandists always point to the US having high income, but the same can not be said for discretionary income. For example, if we compare the US to the Netherlands, we see that the US median disposable income is 41K while in the Netherlands it's 36K. But let's compare how much you have to spend in your day to day life and calculate the discretionary income based on that:
________________________US_______Netherlands
income________________41k_______36k
food___________________5.1k_______3.7k
shelter_________________13.2k______13k
clothing________________1.2k_______1.5k
transport______________6.3k_______3.4k
health__________________3.2k_______1.8k
student debt___________2.1k_______0.8k
discretionary income__9.9k_______11.8k
As we see, the case the free-market capitalist makes falls apart once we look at discretionary income, which collectivist and social policies ensure is higher in the Netherlands.
EDIT: Scott has edited the post to make 4 seem less like an endorsement and more an ironic share. This is better, but I still prefer it if these things aren't spread at all.
I think a link plus "here is a bizarre and goofy conspiracy theory" doesn't do the same things as "here is a plausible and important thing to consider," and we should think about them differently.
I agree that the latter is worse than the former, though both are bad, but Scott originally didn't do that. In his original post he only said:
"4: Related, breaking news: A popular Substack claims that COVID didn’t happen at all, and that both “lab leak” and “natural origins” are part of the higher-level conspiracy to distract people from the fact that there was never a virus in the first place."
(with the link) He later edited the post to add:
"I wonder if I could even more Substack likes if I one-upped them with a theory that lockdowns never even happened, and it was just one of those Berenstein Bear or Mandela Effect things where everyone has a false memory."
The implication is so obvious that it's not clear to me how anyone at all could have missed it, though I suppose from the comments we know that the number of people misled is at least one.
"Theory X exists, it is a goofy conspiracy theory, some people nonetheless believe it", is not misinformation. Furthermore, I don't see how you can hope to counter goofy conspiracy theories, if you're not willing to say that much.
Scott originally didn't do that. In his original post he only said:
"4: Related, breaking news: A popular Substack claims that COVID didn’t happen at all, and that both “lab leak” and “natural origins” are part of the higher-level conspiracy to distract people from the fact that there was never a virus in the first place."
(with the link) He later edited the post to add:
"I wonder if I could even more Substack likes if I one-upped them with a theory that lockdowns never even happened, and it was just one of those Berenstein Bear or Mandela Effect things where everyone has a false memory."
I think approximately everyone of the subscribers of this blog is intelligent enough to figure out that this is obviously a conspiracy theory Scott doesn't endorse, even based on the first framing. You can relax your tireless watch to protect the uneducated masses from misinformation with your superior judgement.
I saw at least one commenter that didn't. Also readers of this blog can get a little bit conspiracy-loving at times (e.g. lab leak, 'the cathedral' etc), so better to err on the side of not spreading harmful misinformation.
Data on the median is often not available, do you have reason to believe that median Dutch expenses would consistently be proportionally higher than the average as compared to the US? Because, the opposite seems actually more likely to me.
EDIT: Switched median and average to the correct position. On further reflection I actually think it's probably not going to be much different.
Yes, people usually spend more if they earn more, so since US average income is a lot higher (proportional to median income), I'd expect US average non-discretionary spending to be higher. If one can't find medians for everything, it would make more sense to use means for everything.
Average income is affected a lot by outliers. E.g. Billionaires' disposable income can skew an entire populations average disposable income to be much higher than the median. Things like spending on food are also skewed, but not as much, because while a billionaire may earn millions of times more, they don't spend millions of times more on food. This is known as Engel's law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engel%27s_law
Billionaires was just an extreme example to show the dynamic clearly. Obviously a single billionaire is not going to change a country of hundreds of millions that much (which is why I started with "E.g."), but rich people in general do. The skew is still larger for income. (Engel's law is about more than billionaires, it's about distribution of income in general)
That's quite a demand you're making of me. I tried looking for it online, but couldn't find it so I'd have to do it myself. Would you be willing to pay me for it?
1) free-market capitalism is the best economic system
2) the US is more free-market/capitalistic than European countries
3) therefore we expect US-citizens to have more money
4) US-citizens do indeed have more money, look at income
However, 4 doesn't hold, because income is not the same as discretionary income.
The US spends more on welfare *because* they let private players enter (e.g. capitalists industries like private health insurance and private equity in health care), if they just implemented collectivist policies like universal healthcare they wouldn't need to pay as much.
No one has made this argument in this thread. Scott didn't and I haven't seen any other posters do it either. While someone may make it, I am not sure why you are arguing against it here?
Because Scott (like he did before) presents the higher US income, in comparison to the lower European income, as superior, which is misleading because it's missing part of the picture.
Have a look at Singapore, if you want a cheap and efficient healthcare system.
We spend half of what Britain spends (as proportion of GDP) and have no worse health outcomes.
And no, we don't have a single payer system like the NHS. In fact, basically everyone has their own health savings account they use to pay for procedures (plus some catastrophic health insurance on top.)
It's easier to run an efficient health care system when everyone lives within easy commuting distance of everywhere. You could have a single radiology facility for the entire country, and run it constantly at close to 100% efficiency.
But possibly the bigger factor is just wages. A nurse in Singapore makes about $US26,000 a year. In the UK it's more like $US47,000, and in the US it's about $83,000. Whether it's a good or a bad thing for nurses to get paid like middle class professionals is a question I'll leave open.
Your first paragraph suggests that London or New York City should have really efficient and cheap healthcare? (And similar for basically any city that's large enough to keep a radiology facility busy.) So why don't they have cheap an efficient health care? Are you blaming the need to subsidise the hill billies, or something else?
One part of why Singapore can have cheap nurses is that Singapore hands out visas to foreigners for those jobs. There are lots of people who would like to come and work as nurses in the US and UK, too.
That would be a bargain for US and UK, and an enormous improvement in pay for the migrants.
But voters in those countries seem more interested in the 'out of sight is out of mind' approach to global poverty.
I find quite misleading to use the Netherlands as an example against "free market capitalism", they are the same fundamental model of the US with some different policy tweaks and vastly more efficient state expenditure and infrastructure.
The fundamental point about standard of living in sounds toh, Americans genuinely have no idea how much they are overpaying for stuff
I notice that there is a 3k difference in mean transport costs; aside from the point made above that greater levels of income mean residents will be inclined to spend more on luxuries like travel and cars, the Netherlands is a poor comparison. It is a tiny country that makes it easy to supply public transport. At least compare to France or Germany on that metric.
If higher discretionary income means people will spend more on travel (Which is probably true. The Dutch are in fact notorious for how much they travel), then that argument would work against you. They have more discretionary income yet spend less on transportation.
Also, the US has worse public transport even in places where there is higher density, e.g. almost all of their cities.
The argument isn't that the US is solely capitalistic, but rather that the US is *more* capitalistic; the Dutch state expenditure is more efficient *because* it is less privatized and more publicly owned, e.g., public transport.
That's an interesting point, and in some cases I'm inclined to agree, however I still feel like the free-market vs interventionism is the wrong framing, and you are trying to shoehorn the issue at hand into it fir ideological reasons.
In both cases you have the state using taxpayer money to fund roughly the same stuff. One way of doing so works better, yes, but it's a matter of precise policy choices, not of macro systems
But it's not a shoehorn, and it's not roughly the same stuff; the difference between private and public is central and substantial; e.g., publically funding a public transit system, like metros, instead of every individual owning a private car (and in fact, many Dutch city centers now have restrictions on cars) is the main reason that urban transport is cheaper for the Dutch.
If you are including household level expenses like housing and food, you need to look at household income as well. A small minority of people in the US live alone (either without family or roommates) so looking at individual incomes is not represativate.
Additionally, the US government has very robust economic statistics that it publishes. We dont need to look at whatever money macro is and its odd data sources. Check out this data from the U.S. BUREAU OF LABOR STATISTICS:
The linked analysis does in fact analyse this, but even if it didn't, a small minority of people in the Netherlands *also* live alone, in fact in very similar numbers as the US (14.7% vs 17.4% in 2018). It's better form to use the same dataset when available, like the OECD, because you then have the same methodology and you're comparing two countries directly. And when not available, well I'm sorry to say, but Money and Macro does in fact use data from the U.S. BUREAU OF LABOR STATISTICS in his analysis.
In fact, the very first link in that article links to data from the U.S. BUREAU OF LABOR STATISTICS
The reason to use household income is that some expenses, like rent/mortgage, are paid at a household level. Median gives us an idea of the "typical" experience. In both countries the typical experience is to live in a household with more than one person (and in this US this means more than 1 income, I assume this is true in the netherlands as well).
Yes the article links to the BLS, but uses minor data points instead of using the larger data sets like the one i linked that already do the analysis of cost breakdowns.
Because, like I said, they're economists and prefer to use the same dataset where possible. Yes, rent would be split in two (the other categories not) so just cut it in half for both of them, which would change the size of the lead but not more than that. If there's some small change in expenditure for the other categories it would also be applied to both, the size of the lead could change, but the lead would remain. I mean it might be different for different genders since rent isn't always split equally, and expenditure habits might be different so for a perfect picture we would have to have access to more complex analysis (e.g. feminist economics, household economics...), but we don't really have that data, and based on what we do have I suspect that the Netherlands would perform better there too. If you want an analysis of a shared household, section 5 is about those expenditures. He concludes (and I agree) that it's still better in the Netherlands.
37. I served in the infantry. The tactics of Israel's army in this conflict are completely unremarkable. Boringly conventional. In any urban conflict, you'd expect half or more of the buildings in the area of operations to be destroyed nowadays. For example, in the 2nd Battle of Fallujah, of the 50k buildings in the city, 10k were completely destroyed and 30k damaged by the US Marines over just one month of fighting against more poorly armed guerillas than Hamas. This is because a) assaulting buildings to take them intact is extremely negative EV when the enemy doesn't care about preserving their own buildings and habitually wires them with IEDs that blow them up anyway when your men enter and b) destroying buildings is much easier, cheaper and safer nowadays with precision weaponry. It's been preferred to neutralize enemy urban positions by fire rather than assault them whenever possible since at least WW2, but now it's more preferred and more possible. I think it's poorly understood by civilians how necessarily horrifying urban combat is.
But even if Israel's tactics are completely normal, that doesn't mean that they have a strategy. Their tactics are ruining them strategically. It is probably unavoidable for this level of devastation if Israel wants to force a military defeat on Hamas. But such devastation of Gaza will also destroy Israel, and Hamas knows it. I think that Israel's leaders believe otherwise. This isn't the first time people have gotten really really mad at them over Palestinian deaths, after all. They've weathered all the previous times just fine. Why would this time be different, especially since the provocation by Hamas this time was so clear? Maybe they're right and everyone will just forget about it once the fighting dies down, but I believe that this time really is different and they're making a horrible mistake.
Yes! Hamburg+ levels of destruction are routine and unavoidable in modern urban warfare where both sides decide to give battle over an extended period, and this fact is not well appreciated yet outside of the military. Look at other recent urban battles. Grozny, Mariupol, Sarajevo, etc. If both sides fight a city is rapidly ruined.
I'm confused by how you think this will "destroy Israel", or more specifically how it would destroy Israel *more* then leaving around an armed group that periodically invades and tortures thousands of israelis to death.
Would doing nothing and turning Palestine into a pariah state with a mined DMZ ala North Korea have been a better strategy? It would not stop rocket attacks but it would have maintained international good will fwiw. I think playing the victim and pursuing full isolation might have been an option.
Good will never lasts. Did Israel get good will when it removed all its settlers and soldiers and left Gaza in 2005? Maybe, I don't remember. I do remember what happened after that - in 2007 Hamas came to power in Gaza and started launching wars against Israel every couple years. The number of people dying on both sides skyrocketed compared to before the withdrawal. Did anyone remember their good will from 2005? I don't think so.
This is basically what Israel though they had done before Oct 7th! They never anticipated that Hamas had the capabilities try to infiltrate Israeli territory. The Netanyahu stance on Gaza was that you could just ignore the rockets, respond with some light bombing, and mainly just wall off Gaza, but no one feels safe doing that now.
What if the US stops vetoing UN security council resolutions against Israel? It's vetoed more than 50 so far. How would Israel do under UN-imposed sanctions? Could Israel survive as a literal pariah state, like North Korea except without a friend next door like China?
Hamas cannot destroy Israel, or even seriously harm Israel with its attacks. Yes, every death from Hamas rockets and kidnappings is an outrage and a great evil, but they cannot topple the country. Israel has the absolute right to defend itself and to strike back in self defense. But that right should be exercised wisely. What they are doing now does not seem wise to me, or at best it's a huge gamble.
I doubt the rest of the world starts treating Israel like North Korea just because of that. Israel existed just fine for decades without the American alliance, and those UN votes are mostly just symbolic appeasement to petrostates (which honestly don't even care that much anymore). The left gets frothing insane about Israel, but it's not nearly that universally powerful and even europe is starting to get over it.
This may be optimistic. Israel is very, very unpopular outside of the US (can't find a good source from the last couple of months, this is the best but doesn't properly link through to the Morning Consult poll: https://time.com/6559293/morning-consult-israel-global-opinion/ ). It also probably doesn't have much depth of countervailing goodwill among governments that are currently friendly towards it, particularly if US policy shifts, and it's not really a significant trade partner for anyone.
Absent US support, governments in Europe and the developing world could probably win votes/public support by kicking Israel, and probably wouldn't gain a lot from helping it. From that position, pretty massive sanctions can flow almost absent-mindedly. Autarky never works for anyone, and wouldn't mix well in the longer terms with Israeli politics; someone's going to have to eat the costs of lost trade on that kind of scale, and Israel has unusually large inter-communal economic fissures (eg. Haredi/Secular; German/Russian/Misrahi).
At the moment, any European country that sanctioned Israel beyond a very narrow band (exports of arms, possibly narrowly tailored settlement-related sanctions) would face a huge American backlash, but that's their only major restraint. Israel also has no alternative sponsor, given lack of popular support in the EU (which also lacks a meaningfully unified foreign policy), China's diplomacy being totally at odds with doing so and Russia being a bit busy at the moment.
Israel depends on their survival being an American red line. By contrast, they probably could survive indefinitely with Hamas ruling Gaza given it's doubtful Hamas could hit any harder than they already have. Consider that Hamas has two paths to victory. The first, bleeding out Israel by making life unliveable (cf. ZANU, IRA etc) probably isn't achievable for them. The second (forcing a series of crackdowns to drive a wedge between Israel and the US public) can only work if Israel lets it. Israel, by contrast, probably wins if it lasts long enough.
Israel's odds of survival might increase if they can reduce the Palestinian population, which may be the point of the current Gaza operation, but I don't think they can exercise the freedom of action necessary to do so without a suicidal break from America.
Keeping US support should rationally be the sole focus of Israel's foreign policy, and a guiding light of their defence policy. If that means leaving Gaza, they should leave Gaza.
I doubt that holds (hatred for Israel comes mostly from elitist leftist circles). But more fundamentally, Israel just isn't the sort of place that would be okay with sentencing thousands of its own people to be gruesomely tortured to death for a two point GDP gain.
I suspect Israel would end up more like Taiwan than North Korea in this context. North Korea has almost nothing anyone else wants to buy; Israel has an awful lot of high-tech industry selling things that lots of people want to buy. And there isn't an influential North Korean diaspora spread across the Western world. Probably some pious Western European countries would refuse to do business with Israel, but they'd buy from whatever third party bought stuff from Israel and plastered "Made in Not Israel" stickers all over it.
Quite possibly Taiwan, because Taiwan isn't a member of the UN and is pretty big on the whole internatiional trade and commerce thing.
Re. 3 OK, so let's say there was no lab leak, whatever. What interests me is a discussion about whether there's a sane cost/benefit argument for not banning gain-of-function wholesale. He doesn't really touch this, just mentions in passing how all this unreasonable panic caused a chilling effect for actually useful research, like vaccines. But that's dodging the real question, everybody sane agrees that vaccines are good, but what is GoF good for?
I am a bit concerned that the household income difference between the US and North Europe is being inflated by US householdings just being larger, containing more adult children and retired parents.
Can’t find very good stats on the spot, but according to OurWorldinData, the share of single person households in 2018 in the US was 28% vs 44% in Denmark.
This might actually be because welfare states provide young people and retired people with a better chance of living in their own low-income household, which clearly many of them prefer, but which artificially drives down the median household income.
On the other hand, in Southern Europe this is reversed, meaning that the actual difference with the US might be greater than expected from the map.
Actually a very valid point. Scandinavia has very good records of everybody in living in the country, so you will get counted in the stats even if you live on the street (your identity number will still be in the system, even if you have nothing to do with any government office). But in a country where people who have no official income (homeless people, illegal immigrants etc) doesn't leave a paper trail they are probably a lot more likely to get overlooked in calculations like these.
What is stopping them is subsidies for students, subsidies for unemployed or part time employed people and subsidies for retirement homes. Young and old people in Scandinavia mainly live on their own because they prefer to do so and can.
The preference is of course a part of the genereal socialphobia of Scandinavians, living with your parents until your thirty is seen as less of a problem in South Europe.
So it is just a question of how you choose to spend your money. BUT, if it is part of the reason why households seems richer in the US, then we just have a plain statistical misinterpretation.
Imagine if we instead calculated Median Income for people with jobs. Then there is a big depression where many low paid lose their jobs and have to go live on the street. In that case the median income for people in jobs might actually go up, while the entire country is actually poorer. The same thing happens if young people with low income have to move in with their parents, so their 'households' doesn't get counted. Nobody has become richer when they did so, but the median income pr household have gone up.
Denmark (and all of Scandinavia) has small households while southern Europe has large households. So you cannot extrapolate from Denmark to Europe in general.
You are absolutely right! I think using household income mean we are underestimating northern Europe and Japan and overestimating southern Europe. And per capita income might do the opposite. I still haven't found the perfect metric for comparing countries
#34 - People seem very resistant to ideological prodding. Humans trying to convince them of things almost always have an agenda, which would naturally produce a defense mechanism (notably not believing what is being said).
Perhaps an AI, if believed to be neutral or just sharing facts, doesn't trigger that mechanism? I think the same would be true of other sources that conspiracy theorists would trust. Like, even if they don't trust Wikipedia maybe they would trust a 1980s Encyclopedia Britannica or something else they think isn't tainted by their ideological enemies or the people running the conspiracy.
This could be a significant factor. Even animals know that conspecifics have competing incentives. Humans have several decades of experience 'mechanical integrity' building assumptions on non-bias.
Fun example: the original automated (mechanically) telephone exchange, the Strowger exchange, was invented because Strowger, a funeral director, suspected that the human operators at the phone company were directing his calls to one of his competitors.
People tolerate behaviour from websites that they would instantly be suspicious of in a door-to-door salesman.
What's not obvious to me is whether the interface of LLMs - chat - which is not familiar except with actual humans - really gives off enough machine vibes to allay suspicion.
We really have to get that Pope Alignment Research project off the ground 😀
Apparently Pope Francis is in trouble (or not) for very recent remarks about gay men entering seminaries.
As in telling bishops the (apparent) Italian equivalent of "There are enough cute twinks* there already, we don't want any more".
Now, a few years back, the media were falling all over themselves to praise Francis for being so broad-minded about gay matters (the "who am I to judge?" quote taken out of context).
Well, despite all that, and despite some, um, very liberal directions he's taken, Francis is not as 21st Century Now Pope as presented, and there is some usual reaction about "homophobic remarks".
But! As others have pointed out on other social media:
"Everyone is focussing on the wrong aspect here. It's not "the pope used homophobic language this is unacceptable". It's "someone has been teaching the pope Italian gay slang".
If I go by what I'm reading about all this, the term he used is a slang term exclusively(?) used by gay Italians, so the question to be asked is "where did a Spanish-speaking straight guy learn this term?"
"I can't stress enough how much in my decades living gayly in Italy I have never ever heard a straight person say frociaggine. Only the gays say it. WHO TAUGHT HIM"
I need to ask any native Italians/Italian speakers: do you know the term "frociaggine" and what does it mean?
More respectable sources, for the elevated and educated amongst us (unlike the rest of us unruly peasant Papists):
"The newspaper articles, which were translated from Italian, claimed the Pope had said there is “frociaggine” – an offensive noun which translates into English approximately as “f*****ry” – in some of the seminaries.
...The Corriere della Sera newspaper stated that the Argentine pope, who speaks Italian as a second language, may not have been aware of how offensive his language was, adding that the remark was greeted with incredulous laughter by the bishops.
A source close to the Pope told CNN that the phrase could also be understood as there is a “gay climate” in the seminaries."
Seeing as how we've reverted to the 18th century in what no-no words cannot be printed publically, the offensive term SPOILERS ALERT PERSONS OF SENSITIVE AND NERVOUS DISPOSITIONS GET READY TO CLUTCH YOUR PEARLS is "faggotry".
*Shout out to r/Drama for this useful term to give the savour of what the original Italian is, seemingly
The correct translation would indeed be the latter you mention. As per the corriere della sera article, the Pope's family is of Piedmonts origin, and therefore things that he learned as "Italian" might have instead been slang. But "frociaggine" is definitely not something only gay Italians use, I'd call it quite common (for as common as needing to talk about an atmosphere of diffuse gayness can be)
I agree, the translation is correct, and though I don't expect this particular word to be very common, its meaning is fairly transparent -- it's the standard Italian very-rude-word-for-homosexual-man combined with a suffix that makes abstract nouns. I don't think you need to be deep into any particular subculture to use it, certainly not to understand it.
It would be even worse if the pope had learned such language by reading /r/Drama. Next thing you know, he'll be talking about "bussy". (Sort of derived from Italian, if I am understanding the etymology)
Giant waves are the reverse-- thousands of people or more claimed they existed, but scientists didn't believe in them until there was evidence from instruments.
Re: #24, the OpenAI stuff: it was really telling to me during last fall's aborted coup attempt that Altman held the support of 90% of OpenAI employees. That's essentially consensus support for functionally ditching the company's unique structure which was meant to ensure the supremacy of safety concerns over their mission. (Presumably even more of a consensus exists now that a bunch of its top safety people have left.) And it's notable that the Board's stated concerns at the time - that there was a "loss of trust" in Altman - are essentially corroborated by the recent reporting. Whatever rationalizations the employees there may have about what they're doing, there really can't be any justified belief now that OpenAI has a meaningful commitment to safety. Combine Altman's actions (marginalizing safety; habitual deception) with his stated ambitions (more or less seizing control of the global economy), and add the consensus support for Altman within the company, and you get a picture of a rogue entity without any real internal restraints that is willing to gamble the whole future of humanity for its own agenda. (Whether this agenda is well-intentioned or not hardly matters.)
Would it be too much to ask for a regulatory intervention that had, say, 10% of the force of the DEA's actions against medication factories in #36?
Sam Altman is definitely giving me a Sam Bankman-Fried vibe these days. But the apparently high level of support from OpenAI devs does complicate that assessment, because they presumably know SA much better than I do. So either I'm wrong and SA isn't nearly as bad as he seems from here, or the whole organization is rotten, and I don't have a good way to figure out which.
"But the apparently high level of support from OpenAI devs does complicate that assessment, because they presumably know SA much better than I do."
May I refer you to the links Scott provided about Will MacAskill, and how EA is falling all over themselves to say "Well gosh, *we* had no idea SBF was up to no good when he was throwing money at us and we were happily scooping it up with both hands!"
If Sam Altman is found doing something really really naughty, I see no reason the OpenAI lot won't do the same - "well golly gumdrops, how were we supposed to know? the cunning blighter pulled the wool over all our eyes!"
Reasons to discount the views of OpenAI employees on this question:
1. Altman is by all accounts very persuasive and engaging (or socially manipulative, if you want to put some stank on it). He's probably a pleasant presence around the office - a "nice guy" who you feel you can trust.
2. This is a group self-selected to work under Altman; and for that matter probably selected by Altman himself to some degree. So they'll tend to be favorably disposed toward him.
3. They have enormous incentive to buy into the company's vision, for all sorts of financial, social, and emotional reasons.
4. Some high-profile employees have in fact recently left; for that to be happening at all at a rapidly ascending company that is at the heart of an emerging industry is a pretty notable exception to the rule.
And then on the other hand there's all this public information that points a pretty clear arrow in the other direction...
Given that Altman successfully saw off the coup attempt against him and indeed turned it around on those who hoped to oust him by having them ousted instead, and that Ilya then later decided he needed to spend more time with his geraniums or whatever, and given other reports of how he operated in previous businesses (all online allegations so no independent verification if these were so), I have no problem at all believing he was being economical with the actualité, as the man said.
Guy is a successful businessman who is hoping to surf on the waves of immense money-making via AI. I have no expectations of higher ethics than the bare minimum not to incur legal penalties if he can at all get away with it. And "nice nest egg you have there, be a shame if it got smashed if you don't play ball with us" is no more than the standard operating procedure I'd expect from a large corporation. Why anyone still thinks OpenAI has anything to do with lofty goals and idealism beyond lucre, I have no idea.
I think another factor is that he may treat subordinates differently than peers. If your job involves taking direction from him, he has no real need to deceive you. Whereas if your job is to keep an eye on him, to steer him, or even to employ him (as with the Board), he might find it useful to engage in deceptive behaviors in order to keep doing whatever it is that he wants to do.
The high level support from OpenAI devs can basically be explained by them fearing they'd lose their equity, which for most of them would be valued in millions of dollars
Is it SBF or Zuckerberg vibes? I think there is a general tension between safety vs non-safety people in every organization and reaching the healthy balance is important and very difficult. Because my alignment is not with the safety folks I'm not super concerned about the changes but expect a constant stream of Meta like drama from now on.
37: "I tried to get a good handle on Israel’s military strategy here and the consensus seems to be that it isn’t very strategic, there’s no endgame."
I'll offer an endgame-prediction:
At some point the situation on the ground will revert back to something quite similar to the situation before the Hamas attack October 7th. Probably with more hate among the political actors on all sides, but basically similar.
How about non-political actors, i.e. ordinary people? Gazans have nowhere to go, because no other country will grant them entry in significant numbers. So they are stuck, regardless of how they think and feel. And also regardless of how the Israeli government thinks and feels.
The only ordinary people who have other options, are ordinary Israelis. Since there are lots of countries willing to have Israeli Jews as citizens. In particular young, secular Israeli Jews. And (to my knowledge) the Israeli government puts no restrictions on emigration.
Thus (again to predict) the main, and likely only, long-term effect of the present debackle is that we will see an uptick in emigration from Israel. After the dust has settled.
It's a falsifiable prediction, assuming time-series data on Israeli emigration exist.
...I have been trying to get data on Israeli emigration (and immigration) for other reasons, related to broader demographic questions, but data on emigration is not easy to find. If anybody has a link, or a tip to where to apply for access to data on emigration, I would be grateful for such information.
Not sure how serious you're being about "mistreating AI." If you are serious, why do you assume an AI has qualia of a type that it becomes worthy of moral consideration? I don't deny that it might have some level of consciousness, but that's only because I think it's probable that everything has some level of consciousness, including rocks, water, etc. But I don't worry about hurting rocks, because if they do have some level of consciousness I assume it's so different from our own that we have no means of discerning what actions would provide the rock with "positive" or "negative" qualia (or whether its consciousness is even of a form that such distinctions make sense).
I don't see why the same thinking wouldn't hold for AI. Yes, it produces text output that sounds quite human. But the way it goes about doing that is so radically different from how our brains lead humans to produce language that I don't see why I should assume anything about the qualia it is experiencing from the text output, or why I should assume that any given action would "help" or "hurt" an AI based on its text output.
Thanks for this clarification - I thought that blanket "still illegal" statement sounded overbroad. (I am a lawyer, but not an IP lawyer.)
From the Midler decision:
"We need not and do not go so far as to hold that every imitation of a voice to advertise merchandise is actionable. We hold only that when a distinctive voice of a professional singer is widely known and is deliberately imitated in order to sell a product, the sellers have appropriated what is not theirs and have committed a tort in California."
I do think that the fact that OpenAI sought to use Scarlett Johansson's voice, and she said no, is a bad fact for them here and makes Midler look more relevant than it would otherwise.
I recall the Patriot missile was the "hero" of Operation Desert Storm, especially against the "feared" Scud missiles.
Polyandry wasn't unheard of, although it was much rarer than either monogamy or polygamy.
I suspect it was literally unheard of by the Saducees. Even if it existed in the world, they weren’t watching National Geographic every evening.
A widow would most probably have come under the protection of her sons so would not have needed to remarry. If the sons are too young she may have married one of her late husband’s brothers.
I think it's the specific legal thing where if a man marries and dies without children his brother must marry the wife and bear children to carry on his name - the general pattern where across a number of cultures a man dying childless (or without a son) is a major tragedy, with the solution of ancient Jewish law being that his brother marries his widow and their son will be that heir. The Sadducees ask Jesus the question modified to the point of ridiculousness - "there were seven brothers and they each married the same woman and then died in turn, with not a one of them getting a kid along the way" - but as I understand the situation actually does come up in that society, and it's specifically because the widow has no sons that it does so.
(I've equivocated between sons and children above - the Bible version I'm reading says children, I'm really dubious a daughter would count, but I'm not a scholar of Jewish law and possibly she would through her eventual husband/son. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levirate_marriage and compare to the story of Tamar.)
Daughters absolutely do count for the purposes of levirate marriage in Jewish law. If a man dies leaving only daughters, the widow does not perform levirate marriage.
It's also worth noting that in such a case the daughter(s) are the heirs of their father and inherit all of his property. Their husbands (if and when they marry) are never viewed as heirs of their father-in-law, although in general they would have use of their wives' property for the duration of the marriage.
Ha. Not one of those Joels... although I do have ancestors who hailed from Sighet.
User banned for this comment.
Is there any way to see the offending comment?
'Deleted' means they were banned from Substack entirely, so probably not. At least not on Substack.
I suspect "deleted" means they deleted the comment. I doubt Scott has the power to ban users from Substack.
Substack banned me for a day a while back (for no reason), and "Deleted - comment deleted" is what all my comments with replies turned into. I'm sure Substack killed the account here.
EDIT: oh wait I'm wrong, looking back mine said "comment removed".
Huh. In the past, I've seen the message "user was banned for this comment", with a link to expand the comment. Maybe there are multiple ways to ban someone, or maybe Substack changed their procedure.
Is it possible for individual authors to ban a commenter from all Substacks?
I think I saw this one before it got deleted and it was just some nonsense. It started off sounding like it was addressing one of the points, and then halfway through it turned into a bunch of random crackpot-flavoured words.
22. The lack of controls on British nukes was just a plot point in a recent Doctor Who Episode.
> 4: Related, breaking news: A popular Substack claims that COVID didn’t happen at all, and that both “lab leak” and “natural origins” are part of the higher-level conspiracy to distract people from the fact that there was never a virus in the first place.
I know you like contrarian takes but really feel like this is a level of conspiracism you shouldn't be signal boosting.
If the ideas are clearly bad why worry about linking them?
1. Because a lot of people believe clearly bad ideas
2. Because they become toxoplasmic strawmen that everyone references to show how dumb 'those people' are.
Well, that hasn't happened (AFAIK) to "birds aren't real". Perhaps it needs a base level of credibility to have that effect. (OTOH, people are training AIs on the web.)
I heard that the government ordered the COVID lockdowns so that they could replace the batteries in the birds without being noticed.
But it seems to have happened to "flat earth" and "space is fake". I had a misfortune to click on some eclipse-related thing on FB and now my feed is inundated by space pictures and trolls shouting "fake" at them.
I doesn't distract them. It multiplies them.
I've been told "birds aren't real" is some specific generational humor of a sort I don't especially understand. It doesn't seem to have the sort of emotional hooks that more pervasive conspiracy theories have.
It's a parody of conspiracy theories.
It has also spawned a conspiracy theory that the powers-that-be are trying to push this dumb "parody" to discredit actual conspiracy theories or hide surveillance or whatever.
Maybe it's a parody of cladistics people? "Fish aren't real." is something that I've heard people have serious discussions about.
I know my son worked at a summer camp one year, and the guy in charge got *really pissed* when one of the camp counselors was telling the kids "birds aren't real" and told him to knock it off. Presumably he figured some parents would object to their kids coming home and telling them birds weren't real....
1) I am not sure the overall solution to this is in the "more restriction/monitoring of disinformation" camp versus the "more free flow of ideas" camp.
2) They are also funny/amusing sometimes. I used to like to read a blog of a guy who thought some images sent back from Mars showed Alien structures. Hilarious thing was he had the scale of the photos off so he would be finding evidence of complex machines and habitats and transportation infrastructure in what were in effects close ups of rocks that were just like a 3'X3' square. So some formation he clearly thought was 50'x50' was actually ~4 inches X 4 inches if you did your math. Nevertheless it was fascinating to see how his mind worked.
1) I don't think we can include individuals personally deciding not to repeat a specific claim as 'restriction/monitoring'.
If bad ideas don't have *some* penalty in the rate at which people repeat them, then the whole 'marketplace of ideas' thing doesn't work at all, and knowledge is impossible to accumulate.
Individuals deciding not to repeat bad ideas is a pretty normal mechanism of the marketplace. I don't think it becomes top-down authoritarianism or anything just because one commenter suggests it to the author.
2) Sure, but that feels like pretty obviously a different category than this? Lolcows are sometimes conspiracy theorists, but not all conspiracy theories are lolcows.
Highlighting wrong ideas while reasserting that they're wrong is still contributing to the marketplace of ideas, so long as the assertions are correct at a rate better than chance.
Satire just happens to be a slightly less conventional method of doing the reassertion.
Not linking to that sort of thing isn't restriction or monitoring; it's simply judging that it is not a worthwhile or productive thing to link to.
Sure, but this seems like an argument of the type 'web platforms not hosting your speech isn't violation of the first amendment'. It's kind of missing the forest for the trees. in that we should be interested in the normative principles, not the narrow semantic question of whether it counts as exactly the sort of thing we've decided is bad.
In other words, it may not technically be restriction or monitoring of ideas, but it clearly proceeds on the same principle that we should limit rather than promote the spread of ideas depending on whether we agree with them or not. So I think the broader point that Martin is gesturing towards, that freely spreading ideas is actually better for our societal epistemology and rationality, does apply here even if the specific words he said were against 'more restriction/monitoring of disinformation' and what he's arguing against is not quite technically that.
I don't think this is a good analogy. Scott isn't a web platform. Unlike Twitter, for example, which has more or less infinite capacity to host ideas, and is one of the default networks for putting ideas on, Scott links to a relatively small number of things, presumably carefully selected, and I think it's fair to assume that even if he doesn't endorse everything he has linked to, he's suggesting that these things are worth linking to. (Incidentally, I think he probably *does* think that particular link is worthwhile to link to, and the problem here is mostly that I don't agree with him.)
Yeah, this week's links has me worrying about Scott's current quality filters for linking to stuff. Looking at obviously dumb and wrong stuff on the internet is a guilty pleasure for many of us, it can be fun for a bit but it's not enriching, and has little value beyond making us feel so much smarter, as if our own brains and opinions were not fallible and often half-cooked.
I wonder too about the sudden profusion of religious-apologetics-adjacent content, both in the comments and now from Scott himself. There are good reasons much of the intellectual world got bored with arguments for this or that religion long ago; there is something uniquely stupefying about people trying to extract their favorite idea of God from a few basic facts like their own existence as an individual, and modern takes rooted in "anthropics" and bayesian language are not looking any better. Plus, what's the point? Even if you managed convince someone to squeeze some kind of god principle out of this kind of intellectual wrangling, what spiritual or emotional good could such a poor, dry deity ever do?
OTOH, and for fairness: Yay for geothermal energy, in-ovo sexing, Golden Gate Claude, and Noah Smith. And I hope the Internet Archive manages to survive this one.
> I wonder too about the sudden profusion of religious-apologetics-adjacent content
Seems like a natural thing for engineers and gamers to do? "Here are the system requirements, produce the most elegant solution." "What would it be like to live in a world with class levels and hit points?"
Plus, mystics can get there too. "See the abstraction behind the world, and proceed upwards into higher- and higher-level abstractions."
Why are there so many songs about rainbows?
Isn't a ton of science basically about seeing the abstractions behind the world?
That would be philosophy in the wider sense I guess, science being the "natural philosophy" that is amenable to repeated measurements.
Seeking abstract truths is not a problem though. The problem with apologists of all kinds is that when you already believe in the thing you want to prove, it's not an intellectual process of open enquiry and the quality of the result suffers accordingly. In maths it doesn't matter because proofs are water tight or they don't count, which is why you don't much hear of "apologists" for e.g the continuum hypothesis. When it comes to slippery metaphysics though...
Yeah. Usually mystics aren't very good about testing their abstractions rigorously through replication and physical application, but some manage it.
and what's on the other side?
Rainbows are visions, but only illusions, and
rainbows have nothing to hide.
Why are there so many lost instant memos
And badly downloaded files
Firewalls configured and ports we must forward
So people can't see inside
Online there's gold if you manage to reach it
On all of the iPods for free
Someday we'll find it
A stable connection
The hackers, the coders, and me...
https://youtu.be/sBioZ6m2hRU?si=2NuoFwU4Rs85G1nn
Why can't/shouldn't Scott link to things that are "fun for a bit but not enriching"?
Seeing a bad idea clearly marked as "bad and false" is still more than not seeing it at all, with enough time, exposure and vulnerability to that you'll create real belief.
It's my belief that exposure matters more than right and wrong, and that being able to be exposed a lot to something but still deny it as false is a rare skill.
I think it is valuable to highlight that a popular substack has published what is presumably utter rotted tripe.
It would be really surprising if Substack managed to be the first ever publishing platform on which people writing brain-hurtingly stupid crap never got a wide audience.
I will always signal boost the most insane takes. If somebody finds even crazier takes, let me know, and I will signal-boost those too.
I only regret that other people got to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_time_conspiracy_theory before I did and now it's well-known and boring.
Also, once I found something on a 19th-century British conspiracist who thought the whole Bible happened in Britain and the Hebrews were from the Hebrides and "Egypt" was the Faroe Islands, but I didn't bookmark it and I've never been able to find it again.
Seems like a bad idea in game theory terms, since it incentivizes people to make up and spread crazier and crazier takes, which some people inevitably are going to believe. As the way the internet works people directly make money from getting attention, even if its negative. Doesn't that just result in a more and more polluted information ecosystem where people are competing to say the most insane things?
(Linking to a wiki article on an existing theory is a bit different since there's less direct benefit to the theory proposer, as with other ways of talking about stuff indirectly like writing about it but not linking it.
"it incentivizes people to make up and spread crazier and crazier takes"
Right, what you're missing is that that these takes are hilarious and Scott is a fun person who wants to increase the amount of hilarity in the world.
>As the way the internet works people directly make money from getting attention
And this is why avoiding that attention is like promoting pacifism while in a live boxing match. It doesn't work; you lose by default and the audience doesn't even notice you were intentionally not throwing punches. There are thousands if not millions of other sources for crazy takes, they're not going to starve for lack of appearance here. Might as well take some pie in passing.
sir you are writing this in a world where tiktok exists
I wonder if that would be anything to do with the British Israelites? Apparently some of them tried digging up the Hill of Tara in Ireland because they were convinced that was where the Ark of the Covenant was:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Israelism
https://www.newgrange.com/tara-ark-of-the-covenant.htm
"During 1899 and 1902, members of the British-Israel Association of London came to County Meath to dig up the Hill of Tara. These 'British-Israelites' believed they would find buried there the Ark of the Covenant, the chest said to contain the Ten Commandments inscribed on stone tablets."
Perhaps they should have tried digging in Dinas Emrys instead.
Seems like a sensible version of looking for your keys underneath a street lamp. Travelling all the way to the Holy Land or North Africa to dig random holes is expensive and inconvenient and not significantly more likely to yield the Ark of the Covenant than digging in your own backyard.
Exactly! Just ask Joseph Smith! ;)
Look, if the Ark of the Covenant was in Tara, it would have been mentioned in the Book of Invasions; we know all about Noah's daughter coming here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebor_Gab%C3%A1la_%C3%89renn
Oh, so "wrong Ark"? Is this one of those "da Vinci Code" things where Noah's "real" Ark was his children?
What if the real ark was the giant wooden boat we made along the way?
Could it be William Comyns Beaumont (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comyns_Beaumont)? I think his books The Riddle of the Earth and Britain: The Key to World History are closest to what you have in mind.
He sometimes wrote as Appian Way. I wouldn't bother with a pen name if my surname was Beautiful-Mountain and my middle name sounded like a druid, but he was a bit of a nut.
I read something similar about the Trojan war happening in Britain: Where Troy Once Stood, by Iman Jacob Wilkens.
That seems likely to be at least partially inspired by Geoffrey of Monmouth's (mostly make-up but purporting to be real) History of the Kings of England, which attributes the founding of Celtic British civilization to exiles survivors from the Fall of Troy, and the first King of the Britons in his account was Brutus of Troy. Brutus was in turn grandson of Virgil's Aeneas and thus a first cousin a many times removed of Romulus and Remus.
The same work by Monmouth also have a central role in codifying and popularizing the King Arthur legend.
So was the Roman conquest of Britain, since the Julii were also descended from Aeneas.
This is starting to sound like a really good conspiracy theory, where one group has been controlling the fate of everything for 3000 years! Forget all that "Holy Grail" stuff... Unless Jews are somehow the only non-Trojans in Europe? (Aside from Picts and Basques and Hungarians and Finns and Estonians and Roma ...)
My objection is almost the opposite: reading the position paper, their position seems actually to be the much more boring 'covid wasn't a big deal' than the (I agree) interestingly insane and therefore worth-signal-boosting 'covid literally did not exist'.
They're maybe going slightly further than most in saying that it didn't qualify as a pandemic, because it had no discernible effect on the healthy etc., but at its core it doesn't seem substantially different than the mainstream 'covid was nothing to worry about and we overreacted to it' narrative. And I was so excited as well!
I think I spent a while trying to figure out what that group was on about a few months ago. They were usually pretty vague, so I'm still not really sure. I'm not totally sure if they agree that a virus called SARS-CoV-2 existed or not.
But I think one of their main claims is that the COVID story was used as a cover-up for some other unexplained mass mortality event in specific places like NYC (possibly something related to drugs?), since the early NYC mortality data was drastically different from most other cities.
Well that does sound somewhat more interesting again!
I agree that it's not especially clear what exactly they are saying about the existence and/or nature of the virus itself, from what I've read so far. Which you would think would be a red flag to these supposedly discerning sceptics who see the truth behind the lamestream media's lies...
I didn't dig into their argument.
Is their claim that the increase in deaths (I have some data for California here: http://mistybeach.com/mark/Covid.html) was (a) not that big a deal and/or (b) not technically a pandemic?
Because unless you believe in massive data fraud (including hospitals lying about being overrun) then the increase was quite real.
"The hospitals are lying about being overrun" was a recurrent claim, as it was happening.
I realize this :-)
If the claim is that hospitals across the western world (Europe, the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand), Japan, Taiwan and other countries AS WELL AS individual mortuary operators as well as regional death reporting from many/all cities was in on the conspiracy ... well, I just don't think there is enough common ground of how the world works to have a conversation with those people :-)
Well, agreed. I'm just saying their argument is not innovative.
There were a lot of people in the former Soviet Union who would spontaneously talk about how great it was, including most of the media. I wouldn't call that a "conspiracy", as such, but there was definitely a shared interest in not ending up in a gulag, which incentived people to act in similar ways.
Well that WAS fairly true in some places. While we had in my state "lockdowns to prevent hospital overcrowding" that first month or so I needed to go to the emergency room for a couple days (with likely COVID complications) and at least at my big city hospital...it was completely dead. Like 3 emergency room beds out of 50 being used. It is NEVER like that. Always packed to the gills except in APR 2019.
Not that I think those policies were terrible (don't have enough info to judge), but definitely the "hospitals will be overrun" hysteria peak was badly out of tune with what happened her for quite a while. Maybe there was some specific two week period later where it was a problem, but it was well after people were maximally worried about it.
The comments on that article are pretty interesting. I even found a link to a substack arguing that the eradication of smallpox was a fake, and it is actually the same thing as monkeypox.
So the answer is literally "It's bad on purpose to make you click?" (Or at least laugh.)
Humor is included in my utility function, so if it makes me laugh hard enough, it was absolutely worth clicking on.
Concerning the epistemic status of conspiracy theories: Sabine Hossenfelder has an old and useful discussion with herself about the empirical validity of claims made by the Flat Earth Society.
Treating their claim as based on a radical version of rational scepticism (akin to pyrrhonian scepticism), Sabine argues that it boils down to whom you trust, or (in the aggregate) on the level of trust within a group. Illustrating "the social thing" in epistemiology.
Addendum: To the extent that social media separates us more effectively into different trust-groups than before, conspiracy theories should have a field day in tomorrow's society (or rather: multitude of virtual societies). Creating the preconditions for ever-more theories to signal boost. From 7:26 but in particular from 11:40 and out:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8DQSM-b2cc
I think it's a matter of where you draw the line at what you call a conspiracy. Is two kids agreeing to keep a secret from their parents a conspiracy? If not, why not. So I think you're technically correct that there are more conspiracies than conspiracy theories. But I also think most people don't count those when they say "conspiracy".
The distinction I'm most familiar with is between "grand conspiracies" and "petty conspiracies", with the difference being that petty conspiracies have a plausible number of people in on the plot and leave realistic amounts of evidence that can permit reasonable efforts to confirm or falsify them.
A theory can start out as a Petty Conspiracy theory, but gradually evolve into a Grand Conspiracy theory as proponents have more and more contrary evidence to explain away. The Kennedy Assassination is a classic example: it's perfectly possible for a group of people to conspire to assassinate a high-level political leader, e.g. the Booth Conspiracy in 1865 or the Black Hand in 1914. But once there have been multiple official investigations with very long paper trails that consistently conclude that Oswald acted alone on his own initiative, then you need to suppose an implausibly large and cohesive conspiracy to keep the theory alive.
If "some of us have talked together" is a conspiracy, then most intra-party politics (plus quite a lot of inter-party politics) is conspiratorial. But that is stretching the concept beyond the everyday meaning of the word.
In everyday language, a conspiracy is a high-level informal agreement where there would be massive reputation losses, perhaps also criminal charges, if someone should reveal what is going on to the press and the public. Few top-level people will think that the potential benefit of such a conspiracy (remember that forming a conspiracy is no guarantee of its success) outweighs the risk of being found out, including the repercussions if being found out. Therefore conspiracies, in this meaning of the word, are likely to be rare.
I did nor mean to strawman you - only to illustrate the rubber-band characteristics of the concept.
If you say "intrigue", I agree that intrigues is what e.g. diplomacy to a large extent is about. But intrigues are not the same as conspiracies.
Anyway, I sense that much of our disagreement comes from different ways to define words. Which is not particularly interesting for any of us. So let us stop the discussion here.
> where there would be massive reputation losses, perhaps also criminal charges, if someone should reveal what is going on to the press and the public.
Why do you think that this is a required or even central element of a conspiracy? I would argue that a much more important aspect of a conspiracy is that it gives ordinary people a very wrong picture of the world. As in, you think that some things happened by themselves, and happen in different places by a coincidence, etc, but actually there are people tirelessly working to make them happen, that keep it to themselves. When such a conspiracy comes to light, instead of righteous anger people are confused for a bit, then shrug and say that it's not illegal and a good thing actually.
Unfortunately I don't have non-culture-warry examples, but I here I tried to use ones that are at least indisputably true, so anyone upset at me will quickly move to the shrugging stage and stop being very upset.
Would you believe that there's a guy in DC that can get 900 people into a zoom call, tell them that there shouldn't be any BLM/antifa/whatever protests about such and such recent event, and there will be no protests, nationwide?
Would you believe that there's a guy who can get a couple of million extra votes for democrats in swing states simply by mailing convenient preprinted requests for voting by mail to certain demographics, and it's like totally legal and cool?
Would you believe that George Soros decided that justice reform by usual means (changing laws via the Congress) is bothersome, and contributed several billion dollars towards electing prosecutors who simply refuse to prosecute a lot of crimes, all across the country?
https://web.archive.org/web/20210124100738/https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/24/us/politics/democrats-trump-election-plan.html
https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/
https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-prosecutor-campaign-20180523-story.html
Con artists, spin doctors, lobbyists and manipulators of public opinion exist. A fair share of idealistic activists can also be accused of sometimes putting forward a bit too alarmist future scenarios "for the good of the cause".
...But you stretch the concept by calling all behavior aimed at manipulating others "conspiracies". A conspiracy involves at least two persons agreeing to do something, usually something blameworthy, and then pin it on someone else - often involving rather convoluted reasoning. As in "9/11 was really done by the CIA, and then CIA blamed it on Saudi immigrants to start a new war with Iraq".
Conspiracy theory people also sometimes push the idea that something that is caused by god-knows-what-conflation-of-cultural-trends is really the result of a deliberate ploy, as in "the Jews in Hollywood attempt to sap the strength of our youth by feeding them gender-bending movies".
Stuff like that.
Do conspiracies (thus perceived) sometimes really exist? Perhaps. But far less often than conspiracy theory people think. And successful conspiracies even less often. Conspiracies seldom materialize because conspirators who are not idiots, must consider the risk of being found out before they set their evil plans into motion.
Apart from that: Poor old Soros! Vilified by the left and right alike.
The problem is the kind of theory that builds an evidence-proof shell around itself, not the kind that considers the possibility that some group of people is lying in order to do something bad.
I think of a conspiracy theory as being an overarching theory of everything that ends up becoming evidence-proof, as even apparent evidence against it turns out to only be more proof that it is true. But that's distinct from the existence of conspiracies, which absolutely do exist and matter sometimes and occasionally show up in the news or in court.
Not quite it, but probably related—this is a book arguing that many locations from Genesis are actually in Britain, based mainly on extensive alleged similarities between Celtic and Hebrew names: Ireland, Ur of the Chaldees, by Anna Wilkes, 1871. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Ireland_Ur_of_the_Chaldees/4pABAAAAQAAJ?hl=en&gl=US
There are several different phantom time theories (Illig's, Fomenko's, Heinsohn's etc.), so clearly there's market for more.
Fomenko's is my favorite, since it doesn't even require a conspiracy, and it rewards independent research.
If I recall correctly from the time I actually read some of it, Fomenko's theory includes at least the conspiracy that the Romanov's were purposefully hiding the past existence of the Russo-Turkish horde that was actually responsible for like half of the global history. I think this is where the "Tartaria" theories originate from.
Faroe Islands, more like the Pharaoh Islands
I vaguely remember some other conspiracy theory that "real" time stopped hundreds of years ago (maybe because the world was cast into hell?) and we've been living in false time ever since. But whenever I search for it, I just find phantom time or one of the variations of it. Do you remember this one?
I read an essay by Philip K. Dick, which I can't find now. He explains that he's a Christian living in the 20th century, but, at the same time, he's also an early Christian being persecuted by the Romans. Kind of like alternate realities, I think, but he experienced both simultaneously.
This might be it! I found https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/tip-sheet/article/70857-was-philip-k-dick-a-madman-or-a-mystic.html which says:
> Dick supposed time had stopped in 70 A.D., the year the temple of Jerusalem was destroyed by a Roman siege. Everything that happened afterwards was an illusion, and the world was still under Rome’s dominion.
Lovely, even better if those who cannot think will be believe these theories!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comyns_Beaumont
That sounds like the strategy of "to make sure children never get sick, we must sterilize the environment around them and not let them touch anything that could be carrying any infection, since they are kids and weak". Unfortunately, the practice, I think, showed conclusively that following this strategy produces very bad results that the child has to struggle with for the rest of their lives.
Is your concern that he wasn't clear that it was a goofy conspiracy theory?
It's easy to forget that the people reading your words online include precocious 10 year olds and foreigners with only a very loose grasp of English and a notion of America shaped by movies and various kinds of non-neurotypical people out on the edges of various bell curves, and all those people may very well take a sarcastic or snarky comment you make literally. OTOH, it would take all the life out of writing to remove humor, which often comes from absurdity, understatement, hyperbole, sarcasm, etc.
Typo: 5: I’ll never tired
Comment on 5. While £35k is $44k at the market exchange rate (1£=$1.27), the purchasing power parity exchange rate (as of 2022 see here https://data.oecd.org/conversion/purchasing-power-parities-ppp.htm) is (1£=$1.54) means a pound in the UK goes much further than it's value in dollars does in the US. This gives an equivalent household income of $54k in the UK, higher than black American households though still much lower than the average across all USA households.
I would be interested to see the comparison in hours worked, and the related average earnings per hour. In general Europeans seem to work less hours than Americans and take more holidays.
This is mostly caused by part time workers working significantly less hours than in the US.
If you compare only full time employees then it's 40.4 hours a week in Germany vs 42.1 in the US, meaning that the average American actually works only about an extra 100 hours. Which is basically just Germans having slightly more vacation.
Don't forget that Germans get much longer holidays than Americans!
That's accounted for in the extra 100 hours. Which amounts to roughly an extra two weeks plus a few more holidays.
The real difference in German working hours is that the average German part timer works about 20 hours while the average American part timer works significantly more than that. So if you take all workers (as opposed to all full time workers) that pulls their average down.
Average Labour Income Per Hour:
US: $43.11
EU: $34.89
UK: $32.95
Note this is not wages but all benefits received. So the average American worker, even factoring in European higher benefits, receives about 24% more than the average European and even more than the average British person.
Does this include the benefit of public services? That seems like a nebulous concept to quantify for the purposes of comparison.
The original question was comparison of hours worked. It was a response to someone pointing out the US was richer than Germany. Then someone said, "Ah, but they work less!" To which the response is: even adjusting hour for hour they earn less. That's not nebulous. It just shows the person was wrong.
The next line of defense is what you're bringing up: Ah, but welfare! To which the response is: GDP per hour worked is also lower and you can't redistribute your way out of that math. And the US also comes out ahead in per capita spending on welfare spending anyway. Europe has spent the last two decades economically stagnant while the US has continued to grow.
The specific answer to your question: It includes public benefits received through work. Which includes healthcare in most of Europe but not in the UK.
yeah I always find these US - other country income comparisons a bit odd, because they will fluctuate a lot based on exchange rates that have a only limited impact on the wealth/feeling of wealth of people within these countries.
Hack to having a better standard of living, live in country with the global reserve currency
I also thought so. But I checked at some point, and the gap has been pretty consistent for decades. Exchange rate matter less than I had previously thought.
That's why it's better to use purchasing power parity (PPP) over just comparing salaries or wealth and seeing what the exchange rate is. PPP gives you a better idea of how much wealthier one country is.
True, but PPP has its drawbacks too, it's based on some arbitrary basket of goods which might resemble someone's purchases but not someone else's. A poor person might spend more on rice than they do on Ferraris, for a rich person it might be the other way around.
For what it's worth, the US also beats all the large European countries on PPP GDP per capita although it varies considerably depending on whose numbers you believe. Switzerland, Norway and Ireland may or may not be better off, while Germany/France/Italy/Spain/UK are all substantially worse off. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita
As an American living in London, I agree. Brits also get more social services than Americans.
Subjectively, living in the UK doesn't feel any poorer to me than living in the US.
How much did your salary change going from US to UK?
It depends on the exchange rates. At the time it was roughly 15%.
(Whereas black household incomes in the US are about 36% lower than white, if I'm doing my math right.)
That's not bad. I am currently preparing to move to Europe and seems that I will need to take at least a 50% pay cut.
I can't find the link now, but recently saw data indicating that London's standard of living is roughly 40% higher than it is in the rest of England.
Of course that cuts both ways: aggregate US stats hide a lot of variation too.
Of course, London's prices are also higher. Especially rent.
> Subjectively, living in the UK doesn't feel any poorer to me than living in the US.
I figured that was the point: that money goes further in the UK, or that cost disease is worse in the US.
The US spends more on social welfare per person than Britain does.
Yeah, but again, don't forget the costs for the relevant services.
Spending more (per capita) to give 20% of the population Medicare than the UK does for universal health care is pretty indicative in this regard.
"Spending more (per capita) to give 20% of the population Medicare than the UK does for universal health care is pretty indicative in this regard."
Pretty damning comparison.
This is one of those things that Europeans and Europhiles like to believe but isn't true. If you include all social spending the US is the second largest social spender as a % of GDP in the world, just behind France and significantly ahead of the UK. In absolute terms (just the raw amount of money) it's the largest. But this includes things like refundable tax credits which are not included in government services. The US system is more privatized than the UK, that's the main difference, but it's not smaller.
I sort of agree with you, but a lot of US social welfare spending is unusually inefficient & wasteful compared to other countries. Like, I don't think running programs for the elderly, poor and so on through refundable tax credits is a particularly good way to go about things. So while I guess one could argue that the US is quite generous, a dollar is clearly not going as far as an equal unit of currency in another developed country
Depends on the program. But broadly speaking, top line spending is unusually high but it's not unusually inefficient. The reason we spend more on welfare is down to two things: we provision more welfare and we pay people who work in it better than foreign counterparts.
In order to get British-like numbers you'd need to pay bureaucrats British wages ($38k vs $83k), limit services like the British, and reduce workforces to British levels (about a 25% cut). We could do that. But American voters have generally opposed it.
I think it's a difficult comparison.
For instance, if you live in Houston on $150K then you probably own a big house with a yard and a two car garage and a couple of cars and a speedboat or something. If you live in London on $150K then you probably live in a dingy rented apartment and may or may not drive a Vauxhall Corsa. But it's not really fair to compare London to Houston, you should compare it to New York, and in New York people live in crappy apartments too.
But then where *do* you compare Houston to? There's nothing like it in the UK, where everything is either (a) London, (b) some failing former industrial city equivalent to the US rust belt, or (c) the countryside. There is nowhere in the UK that is socially equivalent to the sort of cities that most of the US population lives in.
If you live in London on $150k you can afford to buy a decent house with a garden. Most people on that kind of salary would be looking at houses in places like Guildford or Kingston, which are nice and very green areas. And you can certainly afford a good car and keep a boat if that's what you want. What you describe is more like $60k salary in London, I'd say.
Well, of course you'd take a mortgage, few people are in a place to buy such properties outright. You can usually buy something that's 4-5 times your annual salary, so $150k would mean you can buy in the region of $600k-$750k.
It looks to me like $150k/year before taxes in the UK would be $102k/year after tax. It also looks like a $600K home financed on a thirty-year mortgage at current UK rates would be about $52K/year in mortgage payments. Except that thirty-year fixed-rate mortgages are not really a thing in the UK. So that's 50% of your income at the outset, with the ongoing risk that this could balloon to a much higher value.
In the US, it's generally considered unwise to put more than 30% of one's income into rent/mortgage, and that's with long-term fixed-rate loans that won't be 40% of your income next year. The British version seems uncomfortably close to living on the edge of ruin.
Yeah, I just got back from the UK. 50p for a bag of six pitas > $3 for a bag of six pitas (roughly same number of calories in each pita, so not a difference steeped in the size of the goods).
Since the GBP/USD exchange rate fell to near enough 1 that I've basically been imagining dollars as equivalent to pounds, I have been surprised quite a few times when hearing how expensive basic stuff like food is in the US.
Yeah, it's pretty bad out here... I would also like to add that there are more needs here in the USA (i.e. a car, car insurance, gas for your car, oil for your car, tires for your... you get the point) than in major cities across most of the developed world. These are also ridiculously expensive.
It's pretty frustrating. I know that people in other countries drive, obviously, but it is an absolute necessity in the US and it's just so expensive.
It is not an absolute necessity in all cities. I've been a non-driver for over three decades now. But it sure is a nuisance. We really need decent public transit, but too many people hate the poor, and will act to harm them even at the cost of harming themselves.
One big expense for anyone who's not over 65 or poor enough to be on Medicaid is health insurance. Medical care and insurance is insanely expensive in the US, and the prices are this weird random number generator that nobody can predict ahead of time.
Btw, the US also spends more per person on social welfare than France.
For sources, see the numbers on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_social_welfare_spending given in percentage of GDP, and multiply by GDP per capita.
The result of 29 seems insane to me (I'm assuming the tweet's audience is broadly left-wing) unless you are:
A. Extremely confident of a Biden win.
B. Not really all that serious about the threat of a Trump presidency.
Possibly C. Think Biden looking like a hypocrite by issuing a pardon makes him look worse than a Trump endorsement helps? (Does Trump in this scenario stop running against him? I'm confused).
My meta response would be that the fact that Trump is offering this deal is evidence that he thinks he's going to lose and/or some new stuff is going to come out that he's afraid of being arrested for.
There's also the general game theory arguments against responding to this kind of thing, setting precedent, etc.
EDIT: Looking at the OP it says Trump can lie. Which changes the scenario, given that he's well known for lying constantly. And would happily tell his supporters "I told Biden that if he pardoned me I'd endorse him, and he did! What an idiot! Vote for me tomorrow!" If you can guarantee Trump's compliance, or do it only after he's formally dropped out, that changes things.
Yes, the scenario is constructed weirdly, but this seems to me like fighting the hypothetical.
If you don't want people to interpret the hypothetical in light of the possibility that a person who's infamous for dishonesty might lie, you should probably specify that he won't as part of the hypothetical.
Also, Biden might very well lose more votes by promising the pardon than he gained from Trump's endorsement.
I would guess that Biden would lose more votes than he would gain from a Trump endorsement. But maybe Trump would lose more votes than Biden would lose on net if he endorsed Biden. Total turnout would suffer dramatically.
The hypothetical specifies it's a week before the election when it doesn't have to. It's inviting this kind of analysis.
It doesn't change the scenario. It's already well-established that Trump lies, and it seems to me that the opinion being canvassed in this survey is not whether justice should be done though the world perish, but whether Trump is lying.
Trump can *already* say "I told Biden that if he pardoned me I'd endorse him, and he did! What an idiot! Vote for me tomorrow!". It wouldn't be true, but in neither the hypothetical nor in real life does that constrain Trump's options. So if the promise is a private deal between Trump and Biden, then it's a no-op unless Biden actually wins and Trump gains nothing by securing the promise and refusing the endorsement.
If Biden has to *publicly* promise the pardon, then yes, that could backfire.
Also, Biden can't pardon Trump of the alleged NY and GA crimes, so this seems like a really bad plan for Trump.
Or maybe getting elected by threatening to put the opposing candidate in prison unless he withdraws is just not a good look?
Justified or not, they're already trying to put the opposing candidate in prison, though.
That is supposedly being done by an impartial justice system, so I think it looks quite different from a situation where the current ruler directly and explicitly offers the opposition candidate such a deal in order to circumvent the democratic process.
>That is supposedly being done by an impartial justice system
Does anyone know if there have been polls on what fraction of the public believes that the current charges against Trump have been brought impartially?
Jury of your peers not "fair" enough for you? What's happened to the patriotism that once existed on the Right? It is virtually entirely gone now. They are like hippies spitting in the faces of returning Veterans.
I don't know what "patriotism" has to do with it, but the stated attitudes toward crime and law & order among the right have certainly changed markedly over the last eight years or so.
He's not promising to withdraw, he's just promising to endorse. And he hasn't committed to any particular phrasing for his endorsement.
Making a deal with Donald Trump is a bit like making a deal with some kind of mysterious genie, and I wouldn't recommend it to anybody.
I mean Trump's rallying cry in 2016 was "Lock Her Up", and he won.
I think that's pretty different. E.g. no one would have minded if Navalny had campaigned on impeaching Putin.
It seems different to wait until after a court has tried someone and found them guilty and then allow the state to imprison them in keeping with its laws, compared to promising, before an election, to find some way to arrest and try and convict your opponent.
So if Putin had promised Navalny a pardon in exchange for ending his opposition to Putin's rule, would you have considered this appropriate or not?
I don’t know the nature of the allegations against Navalny, so I don’t know how to think about the appropriateness of this sort of thing.
Not that I trust the average person to make very well-considered decisions, but the results don't seem very strange to me when you consider that the scenario doesn't stipulate that Trump can be trusted to keep his word, letter or spirit.
AFAICT: Trump support is first and foremost a cult of personality. Trump's actual positions are irrelevant to the cult.
Lest I be accused of simping for Biden, Biden support is a cult of the Status Quo.
> Lest I be accused of simping for Biden, Biden support is a cult of the Status Quo.
Well, I thought Biden's appeal was mostly as the go you vote for, if you want to vote against Trump?
That checks out.
Yes. Too bad there's not a "none of the above" option. (Actually, though, I feel rather neutral towards Biden. But he sure isn't someone to inspire enthusiasm.)
Emigration is that option?
It's a grossly inferior substitute, and comes with it's own problems and expenses.
It's a vastly superior alternative. You are right that it comes with its own trade-offs.
Voting doesn't come with those trade-offs for the same reason homoeopathy doesn't come with side effects: approximately it doesn't do anything.
This is not very charitable. What about all of us who want to vote against the status quo and have no choice but to go with Trump, despite our reservations about his character?
Justices Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh
He ran on the platform of "I am going to put conservative jurists on the bench" and he delivered on that promise. Not just at the Supreme Court. The entire Federal bench. I am willing to forgive a lot of foibles for success on what I really care about.
Now you likely disagree that those were positive changes, but you can't argue that Trump didn't do more for the conservative political cause than anyone since Reagan.
During the civil war, Lincoln was asked to get rid of his general, U.S. Grant. I think the issues was he was a drunk and a boor, but I may have the details wrong. In any case, Lincoln's response is how I feel about Trump. “I can't spare this man–he fights."
I don't hate liberals, but I do hate the direction they want to push the country. That is called politics. Accusing me (and half of the country) of being in a cult of personality because we have political opinions you don't agree with is neither true, kind, or necessary. It is also not fair or helpful, and I am going to call it out when I see it.
Name a single Republican president (or candidate for) from the last 30 years who would not have put 3 Federalist Society Judges onto SCOTUS. Trump accomplished virtually nothing. Only by his own incompetence did he not manage to dramatically rework Obamacare. Trump is better for Democrats because he does so little in office but worse for the country because he alienates our allies and makes the U.S. seem like an unreliable partner-nation.
Bush gave us John Roberts and (almost) Harriet Miers. Neither are federalist society. Alito is fantastic but he wasn't Bush's first choice.
To be fair, Trump's SC nominations were basically rubberstamping the names given to him by The Federalist Society.
Any replacement-level Team R president would have nominated similar.
False binary.
No, Biden support is a collective run-out-the-clock strategy. Many people who intend to vote for Biden are deeply dissatisfied with the status quo in this country and few of us view Joe Biden as any sort of solution to that. In fact to be honest I don't know of any such voter who does and I know a _lot_ of deeply-dissatisfied voters.
But: putting Trumpism generally and Trump individually back in charge would be just telling our children and/or grandchildren, "fuck you and fuck your future". So we're going to vote for four more years of keeping the chaos muppet out of the White House; then based on current indications by 2028 Trump's physical and mental health will preclude his running again.
[To be clear I'm not personally advancing the above line of thinking, rather am summarizing the comments of a dozen different friends/colleagues during the past six months. Including a couple of lifelong Republicans.]
That sounds like the status quo, or at least "the devil you know" as opposed to the other one.
Only if all that you care about is the specific period 2025-2029.
Trump is now immortal?
Now you're just being pointlessly obtuse. My comment above was clear.
The wording of the question is "Trump says he'll endorse", why assume that he would?
Since Biden has no pardon power related to Trump's state trials in New York and Georgia, nor will he if Trump in the Arizona or Michigan cases is shifted from unindicted co-conspirator to indicted defendant [due to some of those already charged flipping on him], but Trump under this scenario is apparently unaware of that fact....maybe the "Dark Brandon" move would be to say yes to the deal and then let the fact of it leak as more evidence that Trump is too dumb to be entrusted with the nuclear codes, negotiating treaties, etc.
Or: when Trump approaches with the proposition, Biden calls in the Secret Service and Attorney General to listen in on and record the call on which Trump offers the corrupt bargain. Biden being a cooperating witness he just makes some noncommittal response ("Well I'll think about it Donald"), and then the next day Trump is indicted for some version of the felony that got Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich convicted and sent to prison. And the White House releases the recording of the phone call.
It seems fairly natural to assume Trump is bound to fulfil his promise, or that Biden's commitment only becomes binding if Trump follows through (because otherwise it's a pointless hypothetical; obviously you would not trust Trump's promise), but presumably not everyone did.
Even if we do make that assumption, there are probably lots of ways Trump could technically 'endorse Biden' without shifting a non-trivial number of votes. Again, different people will make different assumptions here -- but I suspect plenty of 'no' voters chose 'no' at least partly because they doubted that taking the deal would actually result in a Biden win.
Makes sense to me. Would Trump's endorsement actually swing the election away from Trump? I'd give that a 30% chance at highest.
'I think you’d have to claim that God will only violate the laws of Nature in cases that will bring a tiny number of people to the faith but leave the vast majority unmoved, which is such a weird preference that I think you can no longer call it a “prediction” of the “God exists” hypothesis.'
This seems related to the hypothesis that Bigfoot doesn't merely exist, but also has a field about him that causes any photos of him to become blurred.
You do need to consider things like the Backfire Effect, where presenting more evidence contrary to people's beliefs causes them to dig in their heels. Also, if the goal is to get people to be more loving, one must be wary of creating a system that encourages showing the appearance of faithfulness rather than actually seeking inner conversion.
The Backfire Effect doesn't replicate. It's probably not real, or if it is, only in very specific circumstances.
(Yes, I realize I'm inviting people to claim that their belief in the Backfire Effect is now strengthened. :-) )
> one must be wary of creating a system that encourages showing the appearance of faithfulness
Too late, social media exists. :-(
"Every European country" except the ones where I was born, grew up, studied, or am living and working now. And some others.
Yeah, half of Europe is missing, even a lot of the EU is
> it’s basically “bomb approximately every building in Gaza so Hamas can’t hide there, and maybe at some point we’ll kill enough of them that we can feel victorious and leave”. I am not sure what this strategy offers which is worth 50,000 deaths and counting
This one's just blatantly wrong to the point of feeling explicitly dishonest- there's specific military targets (known Hamas commanders and operatives, munitions factories, etc). There's no widespread destruction of buildings in order to remove cover. The number of casualties you quote is also about 30% higher than even the Hamas -run Gaza health ministry's own estimates (not a particularly conservative group on estimating casualty numbers).
Again, I have heard claims that about 50% of buildings in Gaza are destroyed - is this false? See also photos like https://news.sky.com/story/israel-hamas-conflict-before-and-after-images-show-damage-to-northern-parts-of-gaza-after-airstrikes-12993057 . Were there known Hamas commanders in all of those buildings?
My understanding is that this can happen with apparently reasonable rules on targeting if you're trying to hold down casualties while clearing an area. There's a building with people in it shooting at your troops, so you drop a bomb on it. That gets 50% of them, but the other 50% retreat to the next building over, so you drop a bomb on that one. Repeat until you're out of bombs or they are out of people. The result is a string of precision strikes, each individually justified, that leave the area looking like that. This is what Israel appears to be doing, and is quite similar to what we did in Mosul when we retook it from ISIS.
That sounds like... pretty much exactly what Scott said?
> bomb approximately every building in Gaza so Hamas can't hide there, and maybe at some point we'll kill enough of them that we can feel victorious and leave?
Take away the facetious tone, and I'd say this is a pretty reasonable characterisation of what you've just described.
I suppose it depends on how you analyze this. If the only metric you care about is "how many buildings are destroyed", then yes, it's basically the same. But that's not how military law has traditionally worked, and for good reason. The alternative involves telling soldiers "yes, I know it would be convenient to blow up that building full of people shooting at you, but you've used up your quota of destroyed buildings, so sucks to be you, hope that none of you die while clearing it the hard way". Or in other words, at some point buildings in Gaza become more important than the lives of Israeli soldiers, based solely on how many buildings have been destroyed. That seems rather nonsensical, and avoiding things like that is why the laws of war care a lot about motives and circumstances rather than being purely based on outcomes.
In a situation like the 1992 LA Riots, where the "enemy" is mobs of angry civilians and the occasional street gang, you can and should operate under that kind of restrictive rules of engagement and then some (e.g. the declassified "Operation Garden Plot" documents make a big deal about not returning fire on snipers firing from residential buildings). But that doesn't work as well against tens of thousands of Hamas fighters.
I don't have a good sense for how much resistance justifies varying levels of destruction, but it makes sense that how much force you should be using varies wildly depending on how strong and organized the opposing force is relative to your infantry.
Fully granted. There's obviously a big difference between how you'd respond to urban unrest in your own city (where the resistance is rather squishy and going in hard is likely to make more enemies and cause problems for years down the line) and how to deal with a city full of entrenched and very hostile enemies.
But while there are times when you absolutely should be willing to take casualties to hold down destruction, and that includes pretty much all civil unrest cases, this is not civil unrest, this is straight-up urban warfare. And to put it politely, Israel basically wasn't bombing buildings before 10/7, and 10/7 still happened, so it's not clear what benefits restraint would bring.
I lived in Berkeley during the 1992 LA riots (they reached Oakland too, and we were bracing ourselves for impact even up in Cragmont Avenue).
I remember the riots stopped from one day to the next when Rodney King (whose beatings by the police started the whole thing) went public and held a short speech, including the immortal sentence: "We are stuck here for a while. Can we get along?"
Maybe he meant it in an everyday fashion, but it struck me - and many others - as a deeply existential and emotional statement. I still believe that sentence was the main factor that stopped the riots.
Pity it is unlikely to work between Israel and Gaza. So far, they miss a street-level philosopher, like Rodney King turned out to be.
"That sounds like... pretty much exactly what Scott said?
> bomb approximately every building in Gaza so Hamas can't hide there, and maybe at some point we'll kill enough of them that we can feel victorious and leave?"
Wouldn't bean's description be: "Bomb every building that Hamas IS hiding in"? Rather than "bomb every building that Hamas MIGHT hide in"?
The two seem different because one grants agency to Hamas such that by not hiding in specific buildings those building would be safe(r).
The area in question in the second link was being used heavily to concentrate troops.
Overall an estimated 45-50% of buildings are "damaged or destroyed", but that's mostly more reactive than proactive - a hit is called on a building after enemy combatants are seen using it (I think we have some people here who have been directly involved in the fighting and would know more than me).
Two things worth noting here - first, a building can easily be damaged enough to fall into this category even if not directly struck (as many people in central Israel who've had rockets land down the street from them can attest). Second, most buildings damaged are only damaged after the civilian population was evacuated - this is technically consistent with the idea that they're destroying buildings to prevent Hamas having hiding places, but importantly differs in that it implies both a lot of care to avoid collateral damage, and that Palestinians themselves would not see their buildings destroyed if they didn't choose to use them for military purposes, which is an important distinction.
With no offense intended, this seems like a clear case of mood affiliation. Extrapolating 50% destruction from an aerial photo of a few square miles? The rationalist bar is somehow lowered to the floor in this instance?
It's ironic that Israel, due to forever opprobrium from the weird coalition of European Socialists and the UN* is currently fighting the "most clean" urban-warfare battle of the 20th century, with even the UN admitting to only 25k casualties, meaning a 1:1 ratio of civilian to enemy combatant death (the US would've killed [gulp] for that in Mosul). And yes, a clean combat zone means getting the civilians out first. And yes, as battle rages on, more building are destroyed in the battle zone - I've yet to meet someone who prefers to die form sniper fire rather than call in an airstrike on the building where the sniper is.
But I am left with total disdain for those (not suggesting you are one) whose mood affiliation allows them to just inhale Al Jazeera News (Pravda of the Emirate who funds Hamas) hook line an sinker, because it fits what they want to think of the world. That's just a very skewed way to understand the world.
* with its over-representation of Muslim interests, even considering the fact that 1 out of 4 people in the world are Muslim - I'm guessing because no other major group of nations has any real cause in common.
People support a "ceasefire" until it's specified that "ceasefire" means hamas keeps their hostages and keeps bombing Israel, at which point most people change their minds. It's just like how everyone supports more social programs and lower taxes.
Where are you sourcing this number? https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/un-says-gaza-death-toll-still-over-35000-not-all-bodies-identified-2024-05-13/ this recent article says they've only recovered and identified ~25,000 bodies but of them only 10,000 are even non-elderly adult men. But they also say there are another 10,000 bodies to be identified.
Also I'm curious what you think the Mosul numbers are. There's a range on Wikipedia but 1:1 seems somewhat plausible.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Mosul_(2016%E2%80%932017)
I'm curious why anyone is putting any stock in any casualty numbers coming out of Gaza. Reports I'm seeing are that civilian infrastructure across the region is effectively non-functional. If normally you count the number of bodies going through the morgue to account for deaths, and certain hospital admissions to count for wounded, it seems to me that there's no way to produce a credible number for Gaza. Where's the network of morgues and who are they dutifully reporting to? Are all bodies going to them, given that nearly everyone in the region is a refugee without steady access to food/water, let alone cell phone service and a directory to look up directions to the morgue. Nearly every hospital has been bombed/raided at least once, with reports that they're mostly non-functional, so where are the casualty numbers coming from?
It sounds like the Gaza health ministry is trying to put out some kind of official numbers, but IDK what's behind that. Are the numbers legitimate enough for them to really be able to say, "We've identified >50% of the bodies and are credibly working through the backlog. We'll get back to you with the rest." Are they just putting on a front to look like they're still competent/capable, counting what they can and pretending they aren't missing large numbers of people stuck under the rubble? Are they inflating the numbers to drive recruitment? Or are they depressing the numbers to make it look like Hamas is putting up a good fight?
I think the answer to all these questions is "this information is not currently knowable". I'm happy to hear those answers, but with evidence not pontification. I think most of this discussion of casualties is the illusion of knowledge trying to fill the gap in information everyone wishes to know but can't.
There's a difference between saying, "Don't trust the numbers because they come from an agent of Hamas," versus saying, "don't trust numbers coming from a chaotic war zone with no functional civilian government to deal with this kind of situation."
Here https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/how-gaza-health-ministry-fakes-casualty-numbers are some interesting statistics showing that the number of deaths in Gaza reported by the Hamas health ministry are manifestly faked.
Do you really think that implies that ALL the number from every source aren't faked. I think the argument that you shouldn't believe any of them is quite convincing.
My sense is that everyone is making up numbers here. This doesn't even require anyone to be doing anything maliciously (though it doesn't preclude that), just that the fog of war is real, and there's a concurrent strong desire for knowledge despite the fog of war.
Since I made the case for the Gaza numbers being necessarily unreliable, I'd like to make the case the the IDF numbers are also not reliable. Kind of like in Vietnam when they asked soldiers on the ground to estimate how many Vietcong they killed, collated those numbers, and reported what the top brass wanted to hear, which is that the US was really sticking it to the enemy. Soldiers on the ground didn't know, they could only guess. I knew a guy who served in Vietnam and he talked about spraying bullets in the jungle at targets he couldn't see, then being haunted at night not knowing whether he'd killed someone, or if so how many.
When I hear IDF reports of X# Hamas fighters killed I don't take those numbers any more seriously than I take those from Hamas. How do they know they killed X# Hamas fighters? They don't wear uniforms. Various government officials have said things implying they think all military-age males in Gaza are Hamas, etc. So maybe they're over counting any male Arab-looking body as a Hamas militant. How would they know the difference? Maybe they're under-counting. How do they know whether there's a dozen Hamas buried in the rubble of a building they bombed? Nobody is going in and clearing out the rubble of an active combat zone just to count bodies of militants killed.
These are all guesses. What people think of those guesses, or which direction they think the real value lies, is more a reflection of ideological predisposition than anything else.
From an earlier discussion, here's a link to a PDF that has a good look at the first few months of casualty figures, and a link to what the author has been up to more recently.
https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/how-hamas-manipulates-gaza-fatality-numbers-examining-male-undercount-and-other
https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/experts/gabriel-epstein
According to Hamas' numbers, the 10,000 unidentified would have to be 100% women and children, which is not plausible.
Given that Reuters was once caught photoshopping images to make Israel look worse, how much trust can we put in their figures?
With all due respect, my source for the 50% number is the BBC, analyzing satellite data for all territory in Gaza, see https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-68006607 , and you are making a bunch of completely false assumptions about me and then blaming me and my entire community for them.
It doesn't help that you quoted this along with the "50k dead" number, which is 30% higher than even the most extreme estimates by Hamas (which, as an added bonus, include the thousands of terrorists killed inside Israel in the original invasion).
If someone says "Biden reduced inflation-adjusted GDP 10% and also he's a convinctee pedophile", I'd guess the first figure has some source, but quoting it along with the blatantly (easily checked) false and offensive second part makes it clear he's not being honest.
> with the "50k dead" number, which is 30% higher than even the most extreme estimates by Hamas
is it "50k corpses were identified" or "50k people who used be alife before the war, but are currently missing and presumed dead" or "we found body parts of 50k corpses"?
Which one of these are you talking about, and which one is scott talking about?
I am asking, because I remember a couple weeks ago reading news, about how some officials in gaza changed their measurement from one of these counts to another, and "magically" the death count jumped dramatically and people started to blame each other in a very similar manner how you are blaming scott right now.
That jump was between 35k and 25k. So using the 35k is already going with the high end estimates (which, if you don't want to dig into the controversy, is an understandable default number to mention). The 50k number is a further (inexplicable) 30% jump above that.
Note that this claim is often made of Gaza City, not all of Gaza. (I glanced at the article you linked, I think it talks about cities in Northen Gaza in general.)
That said, I think that number is generally considered correct for North Gaza.
The problem as I understand it isn't the known Hamas commanders in those buildings - it's that you need to go through those buildings one by one to look for militants and/or hostages and/or weapons, and many of those buildings are rigged to explode, or e.g. have militants hiding on the top floor waiting to ambush you. Several IDF soldiers have died in exactly that way.
After that happens a few times, it "makes more sense" to just bomb the building rather than risk more soldiers dying, since they are empty of civilians anyway.
> The problem as I understand it isn't the known Hamas commanders in those buildings - it's that you need to go through those buildings one by one to look for militants and/or hostages and/or weapons, and many of those buildings are rigged to explode, or e.g. have militants hiding on the top floor waiting to ambush you. Several IDF soldiers have died in exactly that way.
If the argument is just 'it's difficult and dangerous for our soldiers to prosecute our war without flattening the entire country', my response would be 'tough'- or alternatively 'well have you considered not doing that?'
'But it's much easier for us just to bomb the place' is not an acceptable justification.
This isn't carpet bombing - carpet bombing deliberately targets civilians, while this is pretty careful about not doing that.
"If you can't win a war without killing enemy civilians you should just lie down and die" is also not real advice anyone would follow. If you think you can prosecute this war better you are welcome to come and try. I assume you won't, because you don't particularly feel like risking your life for other people's struggles that aren't your fault - but that's exactly how these soldiers feel.
I actually didn't realise carpet bombing had that precise a meaning; I simply meant 'do lots of bombing of a given area'. The point I was *trying* to make is unaffected, but I realise that I unintentionally made a much stronger point so I've edited the comment to reflect that. Please feel free to respond to the amended point, or not.
> "If you can't win a war without killing enemy civilians you should just lie down and die" is also not real advice anyone would follow. If you think you can prosecute this war better you are welcome to come and try. I assume you won't, because you don't particularly feel like risking your life for other people's struggles that aren't your fault - but that's exactly how these soldiers feel.
This, on the other hand, is just a straw man I'm afraid. Nobody suggested they need to 'lie down and die'; Israel is one of the safest and most affluent countries on earth, and they would have been absolutely fine if they had done exactly nothing in response to October 7.
They are, by many analyses, greatly *increasing* the risk to Israel and its denizens with this insane overreaction.
They would, to be fair, be accepting the continued existence of Hamas. But that's not accepting death, or even defeat; most people don't consider the complete elimination of every one of their enemies a necessary condition of victory. They've already achieved a 50:1 victory, in the 'killing innocent people on the other side' war, which is of course all Hamas actually did.
It would be much more achievable and cheaper to improve the country's defences and capacity to the point where October 7 could not happen again. And it would have the added advantage of not creating new generations of potential threats by doing exactly what created this level of enmity in the first place. But it *wouldn't* have the advantage of wreaking bloody vengeance and making Israel's leaders look tough, which is of course what the real purpose of all this is. And my country did that too, 20 years ago, so I can only cast stones so forcefully on that point; I just find it bizarre that some contrarian rightists want to pretend that there's a strategically and morally justifiable rationale here.
It's reasonable to get rid of Hamas after October 7. Sure, they could PROBABLY be relatively safe leaving Hamas in power, but there would be huge socio-political consequences. The Israeli public doesn't want it, understandably, and Hamas' prestige would be enormous. Israel realizes now that to be safe it has to have better security control of Gaza, probably meaning control over the Egyptian border, etc. Which is a lot easier if you get rid of Hamas.
Also, leaving Hamas in charge dooms the Palestinian people to an endless nightmare. Getting rid of Hamas makes all things possible including two state resolution and peace and prosperity for the Palestinians.
> This, on the other hand, is just a straw man I'm afraid. Nobody suggested they need to 'lie down and die'; Israel is one of the safest and most affluent countries on earth, and they would have been absolutely fine if they had done exactly nothing in response to October 7.
No, this is wrong. You can't just turtle up and let an enemy keep attacking you as much as they want. Israel tried that with Iron dome. October 7 roved they will eventually figure out a way through, and once they do they will kill *everyone*. Kids, grandmas, babies butchered and shot like dogs in the street. No one is ever, ever going to be okay with shrugging that off.
> This, on the other hand, is just a straw man I'm afraid. Nobody suggested they need to 'lie down and die'; Israel is one of the safest and most affluent countries on earth, and they would have been absolutely fine if they had done exactly nothing in response to October 7.
I asked you in another comment what specifically you mean by "do nothing", and you never responded. I won't repeat that whole comment though I urge you to look for it, but suffice it to say I disagree with this quite a bit.
You are imagining Hamas is some threat that can just be "managed", which is exactly what Israel has done for the last 15 years. October 7th proves that a smart enemy that can get a lot of resources will eventually find a way to inflict damage that you cannot ignore. They can wait another 10 years, arm themselves even more thoroughly, and find another weakness to exploit. Maybe next time they kill 10k people. Maybe next time they manage to explode a large bomb inside a city. Who knows.
If you think a population can and should be willing to live under those conditions, you are... mistaken.
"Carpet bombing deliberately targets civilians." Way to ruin your own credibility. It wouldn't be called carpet bombing if it deliberately targeted anything but an area.
> If the argument is just 'it's difficult and dangerous for our soldiers to prosecute our war without flattening the entire country', my response would be 'tough'- or alternatively 'well have you considered not doing that?'
Maybe. And maybe the correct idea right now is to stop the war at this point. But I don't think many armies would choose to risk soldier's lives repeatedly over inflicting only property damage; remember, we're talking about buildings that don't have civilians in them, since they were evacuated.
If you think this war is being fought voluntarily, and Israel can just choose to stop, that makes sense. But if you think Israel has a legitimate reason to fight, then I don't think your answer makes much sense. It's not like Israel could just choose to ignore the invasion of the country, and the effective shutting down of the entire country that followed because of the repeated rocket attacks.
It's entirely possible that *at this point* the war can be stopped, but a lot of this damage happened in the first wave of fighting, which was necessary to stop Hamas from continually bombing Israel.
> Maybe. And maybe the correct idea right now is to stop the war at this point. But I don't think many armies would choose to risk soldier's lives repeatedly over inflicting only property damage; remember, we're talking about buildings that don't have civilians in them, since they were evacuated.
Well to be fair they've managed to kill tens of thousands of civilians, so some of those buildings did. If your choices are to kill tens of thousands of civilians or risk a few soldiers, you should risk the soldiers... or just not pursue the completely unnecessary and probably counter-productive offensive, as you mention.
(And 'a few soldiers' is really not downplaying it much at all; the IDF says fewer than 300 have died so far. Is 290 of your soldiers vs 50,000 civilians on the other side really the right ratio? Or does that suggest they should maybe risk the soldiers a bit more in order to preserve the children?)
> If you think this war is being fought voluntarily, and Israel can just choose to stop, that makes sense. But if you think Israel has a legitimate reason to fight, then I don't think your answer makes much sense. It's not like Israel could just choose to ignore the invasion of the country, and the effective shutting down of the entire country that followed because of the repeated rocket attacks.
I would really rather not get into a wider debate about the entire history of the conflict, but I would argue that essentially ignoring it was both morally and strategically the correct move. The enmity that produced October 7 arose from nearly a century of this disregard for Palestinian lives, and wildly disproportionate response to entirely predictable, even understandable resistance- and the response this time has ensured more October 7s in the future.
Even the goodwill that this has squandered in normally sympathetic nations seems to outweigh whatever advantage has been gained in killing a few Hamas commanders, given that 99.9% of the time Israel had proved completely capable of negating any real risk they posed to its denizens. I've never seen such a worldwide PR disaster; in Britain we went from potential national leaders being completely destroyed for refusing to legally define certain criticisms of Israel as anti-Semitic, to those same criticisms being completely standard positions amongst even those in the political centre.
It just all seems terrible from every perspective, and for every purpose, other than of producing satisfying terrible vengeance and making Israeli leaders look like they're doing something dramatic.
Maybe 20,000 civilians have died, not 50,000. I don't see that they have shown disregard for Palestinian lives, quite the opposite. Hamas has shown a complete disregard for Palestinian lives, but Palestinians don't seem bothered about that.
I couldn't disagree with you more about your assessment. Yes global opinion is very negative but it's much more important to eradicate Hamas, destroy the tunnels and prevent importation of terror weapons than it is for other countries to like you. When Hamas is gone and there is peace, there will be plenty of time for public opinion to improve.
I think your (and Scott's) estimate of 50k civilians killed is very wrong, see my other response to him.
> I would really rather not get into a wider debate about the entire history of the conflict, but I would argue that essentially ignoring it was both morally and strategically the correct move.
Without getting into it, let me just register that I disagree with your statement that there has been a century of disregard for Palestinian lives.
That said, what specifically do you mean by "ignoring it"? Presumably, you think the army should have driven out the Hamas militants that were still inside of Israel for the first two days of the war, I imagine. So setting that aside, I have a few specific questions, because I honestly don't think it's as simple as people seem to think it is (I'm genuinely asking here).
Do you also mean no defensive action should've been taken to prevent more militants from coming into Israel and seal up the border?
If that's the case, what to do with the rocket attacks? Simply let them continue shooting rockets dozens of times per day? Effectively shutting down the entire country for weeks/months?
What of the 150k displaced Israelis who had to flee their homes (some of whom haven't yet returned, e.g. to the north where Hezbollah is still attacking)? Just tell them "ok, effectively our country has just shrunk its borders and your homes are no longer available, sorry?".
What of the hostages? Should the country have just said to the families of the 250 hostages captured into Gaza "sorry, we're not getting them back right now"? And only tried negotiating, with *zero* leverage?
And maybe most crucially - what of the Hezbollah offensive taking place at the same time, and that has gone on since then, effectively destroying 10% of the Israeli North? Nasrallah took 3 weeks before he officially said they *won't* take part in the Hamas attack. Had that gone the other way, the amount of casualties on all sides would probably be *much* higher, and Israel would be at serious risk of mass casualties. I can't say for sure that a strong offensive in Gaza helped dissuade them, but I strongly suspect that had Israel not done *anything*, Hezbollah would've taken that as a sign of weakness and decided to attack, leading to far more dead.
Again, genuinely curious what you mean by "ignore" the attack. Often I see people pattern-matching October 7th to something like 9/11, a lone terror attack that essentially *can* be ignored, without really grappling with the fact that it was an actual invasion and full-on attack by a neighboring country, if a much weaker one.
This is such a facetious standard to hold Israel to. In what possible scenario is a country going to value the property of a hostile state more than the lives of its own soldiers? In fact, I'm not sure what better justification for levelling buildings exists other than preventing your people from dying.
If you want to constructively engage in the conversation, you could surely point out the relevant section(s) of the Geneva Convention that you think have been violated.
A... facetious standard? How could a standard be facetious?
It's not "the property of a hostile state". People live and work and pray there. So yes, they should refrain from levelling it even if it means the soldiers have to actually go and fight in service of their military objectives. The civilised world agreed this decades ago.
Your entire notion is ridiculous. A house is not more valuable than human lives. Further, no military in the history of ever has valued infrastructure more than the lives of their own soldiers. That is why holding Israel to a standard never applied to any other participant in a war is facetious.
And yes, it is a war. Hamas is the governing body of Gaza, and it attacked Israel and killed many Israeli citizens. This makes Gaza a hostile state. There is no "civilized agreement", or any treaty, that nations at war have to avoid destroying each others' buildings.
Property? What manner of language is this? This isn't the enemy's spare beachfront vacation homes. It's primary residences and hospitals and power generation facilities, and water supply infrastructure, and aid delivery routes, directly leading to second-order civilian deaths.
If that's still an acceptable tradeoff to you, fine, but call it what it is.
Property; Physical or intangible entity, owned by a person or group of people. My use of the language is as intended.
It also includes things like ammunition depots, command centers, barracks, supply dumps, artillery positions, strongpoints and tunnel networks for Hamas. Destroying these things without destroying the civilian infrastructure is very difficult in a densely urbanized area, and is only exacerbated by Hamas intentionally positioning their assets to maximize collateral damage.
You can argue this means the IDF should not have entered Gaza at all. I think this is hopelessly naïve and unrealistic, but is at least a consistent position. Expecting Israel to value Gazan *property* more than the lives of Israeli soldiers is simultaneously naïve, unrealistic and inconsistent with the history of warfare.
The fact that so many Gazans are dying is because they have nowhere else to go. If there were still Ukrainian civilians in Bakhmut when that city was being fought over, the situation would have been the same. Israel doesn't want to let the Gazans move freely through their country for obvious reasons. Egypt doesn't want to let them in either, probably because the last time something like this happened in Jordan, the PLO started a war against the Jordanian monarchy.
This leaves the options of a) Israel bombs Gazan buildings and inevitably kills non-Hamas members, b) Israeli troops die in much higher numbers and the war drags on much longer as buildings are manually cleared. Obviously these are both bad options.
Well, if their homes are so valuable to their population, maybe Hamas as the ruling organization of Gaza should release the hostages and surrender to stop the violence? Why would the burden be on Israel (who did not choose to start this war) to prioritize the well-being of Palestinians over their own safety?
>After that happens a few times, it "makes more sense" to just bomb the building rather than risk more soldiers dying, since they are empty of civilians anyway.
Very much agreed.
That doesn't look hugely different than pictures of Berlin in 1945. Which, yes, was the Russian Army, but here's one of Aachen, which was taken by the Americans - https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/M-Aachen-2-HT-Apr03.jpg
There are some minor differences due to advances in weapons technology, but the big difference is that the Germans evacuated the civilian population of their cities before using them as fortified strongpoints for their armies, and Hamas does the opposite. So there's going to be relatively more civilian casualties in Gaza, but in the wrecked-buildings category we should expect fairly similar outcomes.
Because there are basically only four ways anyone has ever figured out for removing an enemy army that has entrenched itself in an urban area.
1 - Besiege them and wait until they starve, or surrender due to imminent starvation. If there are any civilians in the city, they'll starve first.
2 - Destroy any building you think the enemy is at all likely to be hiding in. Which, barring a stunning success of military intelligence, means basically all of them,
3 - Assault every building you think the enemy is at all likely to be hiding in, using firepower to cover for the vulnerability of infantry at close quarters. That means tank guns firing to suppress enemy fire during the approach and also to blast new entrances, grenades thrown preemptively into most rooms, and maybe breaching charges to open up interior walls to circumvent known chokepoints. The building will probably still be physically *standing* after this, but it may not be habitable - and if you started any fires in the process, there isn't a fire department to put them out.
4 - Send in infantry to search every building using only small arms and body armor for protection. This is going to result in an awful lot of dead soldiers on your side, because the first man through any doorway with armed men waiting in ambush behind it is very likely to get shot up before he can do anything about it. Really, even option 3 gives you a lot of that.
There are *many* more doorways in Gaza than there are soldiers in the IDF, even counting reservists, so option #4 is out and option #3 is going to be bloody expensive for the Israelis.
If you've got a fifth option, a lot of people would like to hear about it. But that lot of people have been looking for a fifth option for a long time, and nobody has really found anything that works.
The eventual solution is probably going to be something like having the first man through the door be either an expendable robot or a soldier with heavy enough body armor to withstand most small-arms fire. Some attempts at the former are in the R&D pipeline but nowhere near ready, and the latter would require Starship Troopers style powered armor which is even further down the road.
It sounds like the IDF is already using a fair amount of new tech in the form of expendable drones for reconnaissance and fire support, but that's more in the nature of an incremental improvement to 2 and 3 than a fundamentally new option.
Quite possibly, though with Starship Troopers style armor you have to start worrying about whether the stairways will collapse and deposit your somewhat battered troopers in the basement.
Yes, I think robotics will likely get to the point where non-peer wars are conducted this way (with no casualties for the attacker and much decreased casualties for civilians on the defending side). But we're maybe 10(?) years away from that.
> the big difference is that the Germans evacuated the civilian population of their cities before using them as fortified strongpoints for their armies, and Hamas does the opposite.
Huh. Literally worse than Nazis.
Mariupol, where Russia engaged in indiscriminate bombardment, had 93% of buildings destroyed and is near the high end of destruction. Fallujah, where the US had extremely restrictive rules for artillery/air strikes, lost about 20% of buildings. And is probably the record for least destructive urban invasion of all time. In urban operations like this it's normal that the majority of buildings are destroyed. The average Syrian city where there was a battle, for example, saw 70% of buildings lost. And large scale sieges again could reach 90+%.
This looks nothing like an indiscriminate bombardment. If that were happening almost all buildings would be destroyed and casualties would be significantly worse than they are. But also urban war is really, really bad and highly destructive.
Thanks for this comment. Those aren't numbers I would have expected and it helps put things in perspective.
I think that if you are trying to move an army through an urban area then you're going to find people shooting at you from a lot of different buildings.
Not sure if someone has already said this, but apparently military experts think that Israel's scale of destruction here is more restrained than the US reclaiming cities from ISIS, and maybe more restrained than any comparable military operation.
What frustrates me most about this conversation is that I can't tell what benchmark anyone wants to use for ethical warfare. I'm not in principle objecting to people who think that warfare is always bad, but like, most people think that WW2 was a just war, or think that there are at least some nations in compliance with the international laws of war when they conduct warfare. So simply citing casualty counts or other measures of destruction can't be sufficient without debating the measures Israel uses to judge and make decisions on civilian casualties.
"Again, I have heard claims that about 50% of buildings in Gaza are destroyed - is this false?"
Sorry I fail to see the logic in this question. Even if 1% percent of the buildings are destroyed without justification, this is totally unacceptable. So the correct question would be: are there buildings that were destroyed without military necessity, on whim or just for revenge? I have not seen anybody giving evidence for that. What I have seen was mosques that became military installations https://www.idf.il/en/mini-sites/the-hamas-terrorist-organization/hamas-uses-holy-places-in-gaza-as-terrorist-facilities/#:~:text=On%20July%2029%2C%20IDF%20special,rifles%2C%20RPGs%20and%20machine%20guns. and as such turned into legitimate military targets. I have seen kindergartens and elementary schools turned into ammunition depots https://www.idf.il/en/mini-sites/idf-press-releases-regarding-the-hamas-israel-war/november-23-pr/shoulder-fired-missiles-mortar-shells-numerous-weapons-located-inside-a-kindergarten-and-elementary-school-in-gaza/ and thus should be demolished. I have seen hospitals, maternity wards to be specific, turned into caches of weapons and military command centers https://www.i24news.tv/en/news/israel-at-war/artc-gaza-idf-uncovers-a-cache-of-weapons-at-shifa-hospital-s-maternity-ward#:~:text=The%20arsenal%2C%20hidden%20in%20beds,firefight%20at%20the%20maternity%20ward.
And it is not just the public buildings: private apartments are no better, specifically children beds https://www.i24news.tv/en/news/israel-at-war/1700759995-weapons-cache-unearthed-under-children-s-beds-reveals-hamas-illegal-tactics#:~:text=Here%2C%20soldiers%20uncovered%20a%20cache,spaces%20to%20shield%20its%20arsenal.
So why so many building were destroyed? Because all of them were used by the terrorists to wage war against the Jewish state.
"Were there known Hamas commanders in all of those buildings?"
Again I have hard time understanding the logic here. You mean only the building with Hamas commanders inside can be destroyed, but if these are only rank and file terrorists there, the building should be spared?
As people have noted already here, Hamas tactics is to leave caches of weapons in quite a few places. They then get into the next building with arms hidden inside, fire from it and try to run outside unarmed to avoid suspicion. The result is a number of buildings destroyed proportional to the number of hidden arsenals. And the latter are so numerous it will take IDF months and months to discover them.
The 50k does seem high. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-69014893
However, there are widespread reports of large scale destruction. Have any sources to back up the point about military targeting?
I'm not sure what you'd consider a source here - from the inside view, there's plenty of statements about the general strategy or the purpose of individual strikes (usually the controversial ones that ended badly, like the one this week that caused an unfortunate number of civilian casualties due to igniting an unexpected munitions dump). From the outside view, the low civilian casualty ratio (lower than e.g. Americans fighting ISIS, which we know we're targeting militants) is inconsistent with tactics which don't try to take care to avoid it.
I've seen people assert this but haven't seen an actual analysis of civilian casualty ratios.
We had a conversation about this in the open thread - there's a few different sources (Israel claims, Hamas reports of their losses, outside view of what you'd expect from the tactics involved) that give civilian casualty ratios of between 1:1 and 2:1, depending on which reports you find trustworthy.
Ahem, that was your own opinion, not the conclusion of the conversation. My humble opinion was that these rates are implausible and the real rates are way higher.
I actually added an update some time later, which you may not have seen: https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/open-thread-330?r=fg7og&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=57403230
Summary of the update: I do feel confirmed that a 2:1 civilian casualties rate is very implausible (let alone 1:1). The BBC article researched this in much more depth than either of the two of us, and came to this conclusion. I have not seen any other investigation of similar depth.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-68387864
I wasn't part of that conversation on the open thread, but the BBC (from 3 months ago) seems to simply repeat claims from various ministries in Gaza, rather than "research[ing] this in much more depth". And even so, their data (from eyeballing the graphs) seems to be significantly closer to 2:1 than 3:1.
Since the UN changed their accounting a few weeks ago, there's been a lot more information on how various groups are assessing casualty numbers. The best popular-media overview I've seen is this from the Washington Post, which says that about ~25k bodies have been counted, and other non-verified deaths get up to ~35k.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/05/24/united-nations-gaza-death-toll-adustment/
The BBC uncritically quotes Hamas numbers, it doesn't do its own research. It has repeatedly had to issue apologies and retractions for printing obvious lies (like claiming Israel had bombed a hospital that had not, in fact, been bombed). A neutral source it is not.
Here's a guy who's done a fair bit of analysis of the casualties in Gaza:
https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/experts/gabriel-epstein
So, on the one hand, I don't trust the government of Israel as a whole, or the IDF in particular, to implement particularly pragmatic military policy. On the other hand, it's very hard for me to find sources which I can trust to give educated and well-informed assessments of what their operations actually are.
I feel like we're in a pretty worst-of-all-worlds scenario where their adversaries' actual strategy is to both motivate Israel to take actions which generate as bad PR as possible (e.g. embedding their highest value targets among civilians to maximize casualties,) and lie or exaggerate about the extent of Israel's actions wherever possible, while the international community, both state actors and civilian populations, are largely split into groups who'll condemn Israel irrespective of its conduct, or will support it unconditionally. Hence, Israel has next to no incentive to conduct its war pragmatically or ethically, because international opinion is being driven almost entirely by agents who won't attend to whether it does so or not.
> Hence, Israel has next to no incentive to conduct its war pragmatically or ethically, because international opinion is being driven almost entirely by agents who won't attend to whether it does so or not.
They still have to justify their actions to their own population, who I hope have more information?
So they still have to justify their actions to their local voting population.
I explicitly didn't mean to imply that you or me would agree with the justification.
And yet the Israeli government is transferring 3163 calories per person per day to Gaza. Needless to say people do not starve on 3163 calories per day.
It may be a natural human reaction to not want to feed the people who have just committed and cheered perhaps the most terrorizing terrorist attack in human history against you. But luckily the government has more sense than that.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/new-study-finds-food-supply-to-gaza-more-than-sufficient-for-populations-needs/
Natural yes, acceptable no.
> I actually disagree with Desertopa's opinion that, writ large, the international community will condemn or support Israel no matter what.
To be clear, I don't mean that people are all fixed in their opinions regardless. I think that Hamas has been making a concerted effort to attack Israel's public relations which has been, on the whole, effective, and that Israel's ability to avoid the PR hit by simply refusing to do objectionable things is limited.
Do they? I assumed the mood amongst Israelis was mostly similar to early 00s America still, where justification was sort of preloaded.
And Americans changed their minds on that over a few years.
Not much more, I don't think. And not that there's no incentive for ethical behavior whatsoever, but Netanyahu is deeply unpopular with the general public in Israel, would almost certainly lose badly if another election took place in the near future, is acting on incentives to postpone that as long as possible, and his own political faction are conservatives who're not in support of a moderate response, so his own incentives don't particularly align with erring on the side of the humane.
There's been no effort to keep Hamas from regrouping in the cleared areas. They've operated in some areas 3 times to clear out Hamas. The analysis I've seen from Western soldiers with experience in Iraq is that the IDF isn't professional and is using air power to spare troops with little consideration for civilian casualties.
If anyone's interested in seeing more Google AI screwups, I made a whole thread of them here - https://x.com/JeremiahDJohns/status/1794543007129387208
1. Have been wishing for a Total War set in a modern urban counter-protest setting forever.
2. My interpretation of miracles is that they only happen when the message "do not make a precedent out of this situation" must be set. See story of Jesus's birth on Quran for example.
3. Really Scott? You really, really, truly can't fathom Israel's goal here? Really?
I think that Scott means something beyond an eye (or rather, several dozen eyes) for an eye.
Currently we're at almost 50 eyes per eye
> So, roughly the ratio of Germans killed in WW2 relative to Britons killed in WW2. I guess Churchill should have called a ceasefire after the Blitz ended.
Yes, that was also wrong.
> Also, how many Gazan teenagers have been gang raped by the IDF since October?
Hard to quantify, but the answer is certainly 'some':
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_and_gender-based_violence_against_Palestinians_during_the_Israel%E2%80%93Hamas_war
> I just don’t have much tolerance for these apples to oranges comparisons.
It's great when your opponents just admit what you want to accuse them of! Yes, we know you don't consider Gazan lives equivalent to Israeli ones; that's kind of the point.
Your link does not support your claim of "certainly some". It says there were two claims of Palestinian women raped in prison. Very unlikely a Gazan teenager was gang-raped by the IDF
>Yes, that was also wrong.
What should the Allies should have done? Call a ceasefire and leave the Nazi party to rearm? Because that seems to be the 1940s equivalent to what a lot of the pro-Palestine people want; a ceasefire that leaves Hamas in control, with no changes in leadership.
Why would you say 50? Less than 25k versus 1200+, right? But anyway the 1200+ were massacred deliberately while the 20,000+ were killed because Hamas wanted them to and sheltered among them during a war.
If he does I agree. If they could do what they want to do without killing a single civilian or Hamas operative they would. But they can't. the people won't go, and no one will take them. So, on they go, until someone cracks.
Re British nukes, the problem is that the London would likely be destroyed in a first strike, and with it the government. So for Britain to have deterrence, submarine commanders need independent ability to launch a strike. One of the first acts of an incoming Prime Minister is to review the sealed orders of the submarine commanders, as to what to do in the event that the government is destroyed. Exactly what the orders are, is not public.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letters_of_last_resort
That's a good point, but then why do the US and Russia have the opposite policy? Are their leaders better protected?
If memory serves, the US idea was to get the Prez on AF1 as soon as, and remain in the air for as long as possible (ie. until the first strike was over). Can't recall what the Soviets would get up to, but vaguely got the idea that the retaliatory strike was essentially automatic on launch detection (something, something solar flares, Able Archer, Stanislav Petrov).
However, for decades, the rumour has always been that to get around the potential issue of the first strike decapitating the command structure, the US simply set the release codes to 0000. Which produces the same position as the UK.
>Can't recall what the Soviets would get up to, but vaguely got the idea that the retaliatory strike was essentially automatic on launch detection (something, something solar flares, Able Archer, Stanislav Petrov).
This? : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Hand
Probably, although that in-service date looks a bit late, just can’t remember.
Many Thanks! The article also mentions an earlier system:
>In 1967, the Soviet Union first attempted to create a system, called "Signal", which they could use to create 30 premade orders from their headquarters to the missile units.[2] Although the system still was not completely automatic, their intent was no different
I am confused about why any of these systems, once operational, was kept a secret.
<evidence from fiction>
Quoth Dr. Strangelove:
>Strangelove:
>Yes, but the... whole point of the doomsday machine... is lost... if you keep it a secret! Why didn't you tell the world, eh?
>DeSadeski:
>It was to be announced at the Party Congress on Monday. As you know, the Premier loves surprises.
</evidence from fiction>
I thought the “codes set to zero” thing was basically a rebellion by SAC against what they saw as dangerous meddling by civilians and was since discovered and corrected.
I would also assume the theory is that even if the President and everyone in the immediate line of succession could be wiped out, they could not be without *some* warning, even if it was just minutes. Which would be long enough to authorize retaliation (perhaps even “conditional” authorization? As in “you are weapons free, please shoot back if I’m dead in 10 minutes)
There's also the designated survivor as a failsafe
There are three US ' Nuclear footballs'; I guess the US tries to arrange that they can't all be taken out with the same strike?
Russia has an (semi-?) automated nuclear response: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Hand
which apparently becomes fully automated when armed during a crisis.
I covered this in a separate response, but the short version is that the Russians have always been paranoid about loyalty in their military, so they would do whatever it took to maintain positive control. (And they have the Dead Hand/Perimitr system to cover this eventuality, although it's only switched on in times of crisis.) The US has an enormous and very expensive infrastructure to make sure we can get the word out. Also, we're a lot further away from the most likely enemy, which gives the President more time to respond. (We implemented this system on the basis of some extremely dubious theories back in the 60s, but "we want less control over our nukes" is a terrible platform, so it remains in place.)
Russia and the US have more nukes. So it would be hard to take all of them out?
Britain basically only has three (or so?) nuclear-armed submarines.
Four. Though only one is on station at all times (there are sometimes two at sea, as one is on station and the other is on the way out or back).
How many nukes you have is not relevant if the PAL codes to arm them are not available because all copies have been destroyed.
I suspect the answer is partly just that the US has more time as a result of being much further away from its prospective enemies (Russia, China, etc). If the nuclear threat was from Canada or Mexico, then some sort of system for what to do after the destruction of Washington, DC would need to be in place.
Also, both the US and Russia are a lot bigger. One medium-sized nuclear strike could wipe out the UK; a similar strike might well destroy everything from Boston to Washington and the cores of other major cities, but there would still be 30-40 states that would be intact. As long as there's someone in charge (and the line of succession is both long and robust), then a counterstrike can be kept subject to orders.
Finally, a communications system capable of informing submarines at sea of orders, bearing in mind that no-one, including the shore commanders, knows where those submarines are, is an extreme challenge - The US, the USSR, China and India have built ELF systems that can broadcast encrypted signals across most of the oceans; Britain, France, Israel and Pakistan have not, which makes sending a PAL signal essentially impossible - the submarine has to surface to receive communications, which they will do on a schedule (usually every few days), but that's not really suitable for a launch authorisation.
>If the nuclear threat was from Canada or Mexico, then some sort of system for what to do after the destruction of Washington, DC would need to be in place.
I mean, we do have that system. That's what the E-4B and E-6 fleets are for. But it's a lot easier to make something like that work when you have 3 times as long to respond, and a lot easier to afford that kind of thing when you're the US instead of Britain. (It appears that Looking Glass predates the Kennedy/McNamara strategy, although I suspect that it became much worse under them.)
Yeah, that's fair.
I think if the Cuban Missile Crisis had been resolved by the US accepting Soviet nuclear weapons based in Cuba, then the launch strategy of the US would have evolved in dramatically different ways, and there might well be more devolved launch authority.
That might actually make a lot of sense of why JFK et al freaked out so much about it, when we were doing the same thing in Turkey. It's a lot harder to have your maniacal control over the nuclear forces, which you stupidly think is necessary to avoid WWIII, when you only have 10 minutes to respond to a launch.
It's a link I never made before this conversation, and one I'm glad to have made, because it puts a whole lot of the crisis into a new perspective.
"On The Origins Of War" made the claim that Kennedy only took a stand on nukes because he cornered himself; he didn't think they'd give nukes to Cuba, so publicly declared nukes as the line in the sand to save face.
I'm not sure it's right that a single strike would wipe out the UK. https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/ lets you simulate the effect of nuclear blasts, and plugging in China's current best ICBM, the 5MT "Dong Feng 5", basically flatten London and causes some damage out to the suburbs, but leaves the rest of the UK intact.
This would cripple the UK economy and kill 13% of the population, but in the short term the majority of the UK's cities and population would survive. Even you destroyed the UK's ten largest cities, 80% of the population would survive. If the UK wanted define a line of succession that extended outside its top few largest cities, it could probably do so.
I think ”a medium-sized nuclear strike” here means ”striking with a medium amount of missiles & warheads”, not just ”one medium-sized warhead”.
I didn’t actually bother to look at a map but I’m guessing with a dozen or so ICBMs you can probably get rid of like the five largest cities, five nuclear-war-relevant military bases, and a couple of other objectives.
That won’t ”wipe out” the UK in the sense of sterilizing the country, of course, but it’ll to cripple it enough that it can’t really punish you (except for the subs, of course).
It's not actually clear that the US has the opposite policy; the Pentagon has I believe said that there are PALs on our submarine-launched missiles, but not whether there's a copy of the PAL codes in the Captain's safe. There are arguments to be made either way.
But if we do keep those centrally controlled, it's because the US has enough strategic depth that we can be confident that at least *some* of our leaders will survive and have effective communications with our submarines. That's harder to arrange if you live on an island less than ten minutes from Kaliningrad as the IRBM flies.
To the best of my knowledge, the PAL code in question is the combination to a safe containing one of the four launch keys. But safes can be drilled, and probably would be if for some reason they couldn't get the code, but were clearly in a position where launching was a good idea.
>and have effective communications with our submarines
I do wonder about our ELF sub communications. An ELF antenna, of necessity, must have long conductors. Protecting it against EMP must be ... interesting.
Long conductors, but it by definition doesn't need high frequency response. So you can put a huge inductive low-pass filter on the antenna, and the only thing an EMP will do is very slightly warm the coils of the inductor.
Many Thanks! Good point! After a career in the electronics industry trying (roughly speaking) to get signals to switch as fast as possible, it feels very weird to put a low pass filter in a signal path :-)
It now occurs to me that you could probably use an Alexanderson Alternator to drive an ELF transmitter. Good luck trying to EMP a flywheel!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexanderson_alternator
Yeah, the ordinary low-pass filter is probably good enough and much cheaper, but I'd be tempted just for the coolness value.
Further to other comments, I also think there is a distinction here between control of the nuclear weapons of the absolute top tier powers, who got them first and think of them as "weapons we might use in extremis but we know it likely triggers all out nuclear war"; and control of the nuclear weapons of second tier powers, who got them later and think of them as "a deterrent we maintain so that other nuclear powers cannot target us".
I read somewhere that Moscow and other large Russian cities have a network of tunnels and underground shelters that make Hamas's best efforts look like a mere handful of rabbit warrens. So presumably within a few minutes of a nuclear alert, Putin & co could hop in an elevator and be safe deep underground
More worrying in the present climate is the likely response to fake launch alerts. More than once in the past, Russian nuclear monitor operators have seen the sudden appearance of a mass incoming ICBM strike:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-24280831
But they rightly concluded this must be a glitch in the system or some training exercise they hadn't been told about, and thus basically ignored it and didn't call it in. But would they take a chance like that today if the same thing happened? And would a US observer in that situation?
I'm pretty sure Moscow's secret-tunnel network isn't nearly as extensive as Gaza's, but it is geared towards getting Putin and company to safety.
And on their way out the door, they'll be turning on the Perimetr: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Hand
Which seems to have been specifically designed so that they *can* "take a chance like that". If it's a false alarm, good that you didn't launch a nuclear strike. If it's a real attack, the nuclear strike still gets launched even if you didn't make it out.
I have a vague recollection the US has a similar dead man's handle system called TACAMO ("take charge and move out"). But that may be something else, either in part or entirely.
The US version isn't automated; it's an airplane with all the communcations gear, the launch codes, and a select group of senior military officers who will act with the delegated authority of POTUS when they see the mushroom cloud over Washington DC. Roughly speaking.
The Russians have a harder time finding generals they are willing to trust with that sort of authority, except possibly among Putin's innermost circle who will probably be within the blast radius of any warhead that takes out Putin.
The US has a massively long chain of command through the entire cabinet and a policy that they're never all allowed to be in one place - when they do all get together for a ceremonial event such as the State of the Union or some such, one of them is ordered to stay away in a secure location elsewhere. There was a TV show, "Designated Survivor", based on this premise. Presumably in the real world, one of the nuclear footballs is with the Designated Survivor for this reason.
The same applies to Paris, and I believe that the French have permissive action links.
There is the "Sacoche nucléaire française" - the French equivalent of the US nuclear football - which certainly implies permissive action links. Whether their strategic missile submarines have independent authority (perhaps using sealed orders, as with the British) is not known, but it seems likely that there would be some means of response after the destruction of their senior leadership.
Their air-launched systems are very unlikely to survive a nuclear strike on France itself, so there's little need for a mechanism to launch a counter-strike after the destruction of France.
That seems to be the case, given that there's documented aid from the US to the French PAL program. (Which for treaty reasons was apparently us telling them when they were on the wrong track.) That said, France's nuclear arsenal has always been kind of baffling. I have yet to encounter a good explanation for why they had silo-launched ballistic missiles, which made no sense given how close they were to the USSR. I also think you slightly underrate the survivability of the air-launched deterrent, particularly given that they apparently continue to operate them from CDG, something I was ignorant of until today. If pressed, I'd guess they're doing the "set the PAL to 0000" trick that SAC did for a long time, or have some other way of bypassing them in an emergency, because I don't think they're doing the whole thing we have with TACAMO and the like.
Fair point about CDG, though I think I've seen that they don't routinely carry them there, in which case, they probably disable the PAL when loading them onto CDG in a crisis.
Part of the bafflement is, I think, that all the journalism about it is in French (just compare how much more comprehensive French Wikipedia is than English Wikipedia) and, unlike Russia and China (both potential US adversaries), American journalism hasn't been especially interested.
In fairness, this is not an issue I've ever looked at very closely, and I will probably dive into what's available on the CDG issue, because I completely missed that the French had any carrier-based deterrent when I wrote about that subject several years ago. At the same time, how these things are managed is often really dependent on national preferences rather than strict logic, as evidenced by the rather different ways the Russians and Americans use their SSBNs, so it's entirely possible that the French made what I would consider bad decisions, and don't actually have an answer to all of this.
Edit: It's also possible that they got PALs as part of some absurd diplomatic deal during the Kennedy/Johnson era, and have kept them around because "we want to make our nukes easier for a rogue commander to use" is really hard to sell politically, even if it's the right thing to do. Much easier to just set the code to 0s.
What I’m confused about is: why would we trust anything we heard about how any country’s nuclear launch protocols actually work?
Yes, it’s fun to speculate the theory of what some theoretical system implies, but the discourse around the subject seems to basically take as true whatever Wikipedia says about it (despite being very careful about known-unknown parts).
What I find a lot more frightening is that the Brits don't seem to have any anti-tampering devices, per that 2007 article.
Even if all British officers are 100% incorruptible and would totally endure seeing their loved ones tortured before disgracing the navy, this still leaves the problem that you don't even have to take the crew alive. You just have to kill them quickly enough so that they can't destroy the nukes in time.
I would really have thought that anyone who builds nukes at a few millions a pop (lowballing here) would obviously pay an extra million to put a state of the art anti-tamper on it.
There are probably different schools of thought about what an anti-tamper should do when it detects tampering. Just igniting the nuke would be mostly pointless -- terrorists could still use that to destroy cities. On the other hand, just blowing up the conventional explosives out of sync would still leave the tamperer with a lot of intact fissile material. My favorite would be a minimal nuclear explosion of a few kilotons -- too small to make it very useful for terrorism, but big enough that someone is going to have a hell of a bad time scrapping all that fissile material out of the mine shaft where they set it off.
Then there are also trade-offs between having a reliable tamper-protection and not blowing up your own servicemen all the time because the tamper-protection is too paranoid. It is easy to build a bomb which is very hard to defuse, just put every kind of sensor you can think of into it (vibrations? go boom. tilted? go boom. x-rayed? go boom. loss of over-pressure? go boom. you get the idea), but much harder to build a device which can reliably prevent tampering while also being safe to handle over a decade (or whatever) in the face of inevitable sensor failure.
>On the other hand, just blowing up the conventional explosives out of sync would still leave the tamperer with a lot of intact fissile material.
The lens system may not be nuclear, but it's inherently got to be enough bang to, in a correct firing, reshape the plutonium from a hollow sphere into a solid one *and* change it from the delta phase into the alpha phase. Firing out of sync AIUI splatters the plutonium into radioactive dust.
Also note that those explosive lenses are *very hard* for terrorists to construct correctly. Weapons-grade uranium is very dangerous in the hands of terrorists because any idiot can make a gun-type device, but that won't work with plutonium so it's actually damned hard for terrorists to convert the plutonium from a ruined nuke into a new working nuke. Not impossible, but I absolutely couldn't do it on the first try and I'd need very-expensive equipment to even make the attempt.
(There's one nuke in Western service that does use a lot of weapons-grade uranium - the W88 - but I'm not sure any of the others do.)
I really want to have a DEI like screening, but for atheists or Mormons or something. It is so obviously religious.
There is a famous edu econ book about US in the post-war period called "The Race Between Education and Technology." My take summary was that we made college skills cheap, which enabled firms to hire cheaper college labor. (What precisely were the skills taught? Idk. Maybe it was middle class socialization, which is a kind of skill.) This knocked down the top end of earners while bringing up the bottom, reducing inequality.
Unfortunately, for obvious-ish reasons, you can't keep doing this forever. But for developing economies the dynamic still is quite possibly true, and I assume that's what's going on in Latin America.
Re Yale biochem, Yale's physics department has (used to have?) a policy that 50% of their grad students offer letters have to go to women (I think this is illegal and wasn't officially advertised, but it was very openly known and pretty explicit).
Reminds me of pre-Elon Twitter stating in huge bold letters that their hiring mission was that more than 50% of the company would be women???
Suppose you were running a business selling engineering services and you were unable to hire the best and brightest because your workforce lacked any women. Suppose that it turned out that in order to recruit women effectively, required a large number of offer letters. Should this be illegal? The entire point of the hiring philosophy is to employ the best and the brightest but the pursuit of that goal requires hiring a significant subset that meets some other criteria.
Arguments over whether hiring quotas should be illegal aside, they are under current law
https://www.dol.gov/agencies/ofccp/faqs/AAFAQs#:~:text=No%2C%20OFCCP%20regulations%20do%20not,They%20are%20strictly%20forbidden.
> 37: The Blind Centrist’s Guide To Gaza argues that we should assume Israel is pursuing a reasonable military strategy in Gaza (and trying its hardest to avoid unnecessary suffering), because that’s what their political objectives, the international situation, and the media environment incentivize
I think the big issue here is that the decisions aren't being made by an abstraction of the Israeli state pursuing its rational self interest, but Netanyahu and his cabinet. Who have an existing strong ideological commitment to a Palestinian state not being allowed to exist, expanding settlements, etc. And a strong personal interest in prolonging the war to keep himself out of jail and in power.
(This is a general problem with "realist" IR theories that treat states as rational unitary actors)
I believe I read that Netanyahu actually isn't the commander in chief of the IDF. Apparently, it's a separate entity that doesn't report to the prime minister. Can't find a source right now.
Chief of the general staff? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chief_of_the_General_Staff_(Israel)#Legal_position Says he's appointed by and subservient to the defence minister, who would be subservient to Bibi
Defense Minister Yoav Gallant isn't exactly subservient to Bibi. The third member of the war cabinet (besides Gallant and Bibi) is Gantz, who is Netanyahu's primary political rival. And of course, the IDF's "chain of command" is itself full of people with their own views.
(Even with that, though, I think it's reasonable to model Israel as having decisions made by the state. Israel's "9 million prime ministers" still argue about everything, but the outcome of such arguments typically is reasonable from the group's perspective, especially on military matters.)
I would like to point out there is a straightforward explanation based on realist theory which is compatible with the escalating situation in central and southern Gaza: ethnic cleansing. John Mearsheimer himself lays evidence supporting this claim in a recent highly-viewed lecture, which I recommend: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAfIYtpcBxo&pp
To summarize one part of his talk, the ethnic cleansing (i.e. the deliberate depopulation) of Gaza is the only option currently available to the IDF to address the long-term threat posed by Hamas, since Hamas has not been (and probably can't be) defeated conventionally. Sadly, deliberate mass killing is a rational option for state actors, including democratic ones, especially in times of war (historical examples abound).
To be clear, I wholeheartedly agree with your critical opinion of Netanyahu. But it is not obvious what an alternative Israeli leadership could do to address the long-term threat posed by Hamas' continued presence in Gaza.
I've seen apparently serious proposals by Israelis to institute a system similar to what China did in Xinjiang. Which would probably work, the problem is getting the green light from the US.
Ethnic cleansing and mass killing are different policy options. They should not be conflated.
1) Ethnic cleansing presupposes that there is a country willing to let Gazans in. There is none. To believe otherwise is pure wishful thinking on behalf of IDF (If some in IDF should really believe in this - these are clever people, so I find that highly unlikely). Egypt certainly will not. Israel does not have sufficient money to bribe Egypt or any other country to do so. Remember there are 2.1. million Gazans.
2) Mass killings is in principle a possibility - the final solution. But come on, Israel will not kill 2.1 million, of which more than half are children (under the age of 19). It is an insult to Israel to suggest otherwise. A pure rhetorical insinuation.
Given that this is a war, I'm quite willing to insult both sides. Saying it's an insult is not an argument that it isn't their strategy. (There are arguments, but I'm not sure they are convincing.)
FWIW, driving people out into a desert without food or water is going to result in a very large number of them dying. If you destroy all the infrastructure, that's what you are effectively doing. (And it doesn't matter if you had a good reason, you're still doing it.)
The only desert in the vicinity is in Sinai. Egypt is never going to let Gazans en masse into Sinai, because if they do they will never be able to send the Gazans back to Gaza again. Israel will prevent that. Plus, that 2.1 million Gazans on Egyptian soil is a recepie for an unstable Egypt.
Both Israel and Egypt know this. This is why ethnic cleansing is not an option for Israel.
I think if Bibi wanted to murder all the Gazans, he would have glazed Gaza (or huge portions of it) on Oct 7. The optics would have been way better than killing the Gazans through starvation, conventional weapons or death camps. If Israel was serious about genociding Gazans, the situation would look a lot different, they kinda know how efficient genocide works.
A better explanation of the facts would be that Bibi is not actively in favor of Gazans dying, but mostly indifferent to civilian deaths. From Bibi's point of view, this is rational: most people, including journalists, are mostly scope insensitive. The optics of having a civilian to enemy death ratio of 1:10 will not be drastically different from one of 10:1 -- either way there will be a lot of pictures of dead kids. From my understanding, the Oct 7 attacks were hugely popular in Gaza -- much more than Hamas is. It seems reasonable to suppose that the median Gazan already hates Israel to the maximum amount possible, blowing up a few more family members of them will likely not change their position overly much.
I don't think that the IDF has any reasonable objective in that war. Killing Hamas members is making the world a better place in my book, but the civilian casualties remove that effect. And I don't see them working on a regime change towards a less murderous regime -- not that they would have much success if they did.
My favorite solution would be if the US went Afghanistan on Gaza. Go in, set up a democratic regime. While it did not work out in Afghanistan, the Gaza strip is 1800 times smaller.
Instead, what will happen after Bibi decides that he has killed enough Hamas will be a return to the status quo. In five years, some "from the river to the sea" extremists will still be in charge of Gaza (only that the average age of their goons will be younger) and Israel will still be blockading Gaza (which will prevent the Gazans from building rockets out of water pipes and also ensure that Gaza will remain a hellhole for the foreseeable future).
"From my understanding, the Oct 7 attacks were hugely popular in Gaza -- much more than Hamas is."
That is interesting. Do you base this on your gut feeling/take-away from random media coverage, or are there any systematic study that indicates this?
I ask because if there is any hope for the future, it is in the presumed interest of most ordinary people to live everyday lives without more trouble than necessary. (For this reason, most ordinary people are likely to be political opportunists and "go with the flow", whichever direction it flows. As they said in Florence in the days of Machiavelli: A good life is a life lived hidden.)
Hamas by contrast has a gung-ho activist vibe associated with very young and fired up people. This demographic seldom comprises more than 5-10 percent on an electorate. Gaza has a young population, but I would still assume that the majority would prefer that Hamas had used its considerable tax & development assistance funds to upgrade infrastructure and hospitals, instead of sinking the money into tunnel construction.
For the same reason, I would assume that ordinary grown-ups Gazans (the Gaza silent majority) went pale on October 7th, since they would know that killing 1200 Israeli & foreigners removed them further from the pragmatic aim of most people, once the Sturm und Drang of youth is over: A quiet life.
Well, https://www.google.com/search?q=gaza+poll+hamas gives results such as:
https://apnews.com/article/israel-hamas-palestinians-opinion-poll-wartime-views-a0baade915619cd070b5393844bc4514 (From December)
> Despite the devastation, 57% of respondents in Gaza and 82% in the West Bank believe Hamas was correct in launching the October attack, the poll indicated.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/gazans-back-two-state-solution-rcna144183 (From March)
> Support has been less volatile in Gaza, where 38% supported Hamas in September 2023, 42% in December 2023, and 34% this month. [...]
> The divergence between support for Hamas as a political party, which is dropping, and for its role in the war, which is steady at 70%, is indicative of its dual role as an administrative governing body and as a symbol for the decadeslong Palestinian resistance against Israeli occupation.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/palestinians-increasingly-happy-with-october-7-even-as-hamas-support-droops-poll/ (also from March)
> In the West Bank, the 71% figure [for 'Oct-7 was correct'] is down from 82% in December who agreed with the decision to launch the onslaught. In Gaza [where it is also 71%], however, the number was a significant increase from the 57% who backed the move three months earlier.
Some remarks:
* The numbers reported by these sources seem to be identical, even though the spin is very different
* There does not seem to be a total coercion of the outcome of the polls by Hamas, otherwise they would likely appear more popular. 66% are comfortable stating that they do not favor Hamas. Yet about half of them (assuming Hamas supporters generally support Oct-7) still think that Oct-7 was a good move.
* Even considering that Hamas is in a somewhat good position to transport their propaganda in Gaza, this seems an remarkable achievement. The Gazans know exactly how well the war is going for their side. They might not know exactly what Hamas did on Oct-7, but it is hard to deny that there is a causal link between that and the IDF response. By contrast, my gut feeling is that if you asked the inhabitants of Berlin in 1945 if they still thought that Hitler attacking the USSR was a great idea, a majority might privately express doubt that this lead to the best possible outcome.
Thanks for your effort in collecting this material. Very interesting results.
I guess a lot can be said about problems surveying people during an ongoing conflict. That said, the results are far from the 95 percent support/not-support one would expect if the respondents were afraid their answers might be communicated back to either Hamas or the Israelis. Which indicates that the responses might be genuine, not dictated by fear (cf. my separate comment about the polling bureau and the concrete questions the pollsters asked).
I find it uplifting ("the glass is half full") that support for Hamas is not even higher - it is less than 50 percent for their day-to-day rule, even though they are presently at war and you would expect a considerable degree of "right or wrong - my government" - effect.
This sort-of feeds into how I myself would think of Hamas’ administration and rule, if I had been a Gaza citizen during their many years in power. Namely that these years has been a missed opportunity. First, Gaza is not challenged by Israeli settlers: Gaza authorities’ control of the land is not disputed (unlike the exhausting situation in the West Bank). Second, Gaza authorities have obviously had large funds available for development, partly from taxation and partly from foreign donors. They could not have built the impressive tunnel system and launched a constant stream of rockets otherwise.
With these resources and territorial control, Gaza could in principle have been developed into an adequately wealthy city-state. Somewhat similar to Singapore or the European micro-states (ok, that is stretching it, but very small states that can afford adequate infrastructure are seldom desperately poor). If Hamas had not chosen to channel so much money into tunnel digging and rockets instead.
Perhaps it is still not too late, when the dust settles after the ongoing war? It will take years of course, but the alternative for Gazans, if they leave Hamas in charge, is to live for the foreseeable future in a large open-air prison.
....I followed your first link further, intrigued that surveys are being conducted in a war situation.
I do survey research as part of my regular work. Judging from the presentation of the methodology & questions asked in the report, the polling bureau (Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research) seems to uphold professional standards.
The results do not necessarily support an assumption that the median Gazan already hates Israel to the maximum amount (which would imply that there is no room at all to influence hearts and minds). More specifically, when asked the question “In your view, given what happened after it, was Hamas decision to launch its offensive against Israel on 7 October a correct or incorrect one?” only a narrow majority (54 percent) of Gazans answer “correct”.
Equally important, when asked “Based on what you have heard or seen, do you think international law allows or does not allow …. Attacking or killing civilian women and children in their own homes?” 68 percent of Gazans answer “Does not allow”. (Admittedly, rather disappointingly low – 84 percent answer “Does not allow” among Palestinians on the West Bank).
How do some/many respondents square supporting the October 7 offensive (notice the somewhat value-neutral choice of word, making it easier to say “yes”), and not supporting killing women, children and other non-combatants? Apparently, by being in denial that autocracies took place. Asked the question: “…did Hamas commit war crimes in the current war?”, only 17 percent of Gazans answer “yes”.
Now there are many reasons why Gazans and others are in (cognitive) denial of quite well-documented empirical facts. But the results at least indicate that the median Gazan is not an emotional basket case driven by primitive bloodlust. Since cognition issues are arguably “colder” than emotional issues (although the links between cognition and emotion are, well, complex). Giving some hope for the future. After all.
Some additional results for the West Bank and Gaza together, illustrating that Palestinians, like all ethnic categories, are a rather diverse group:
“The belief that Hamas' decision was right is higher… among men (75%) compared to women (69%), among the religious and the somewhat religious (76% and 71% respectively) compared to the non-religious (42%),…among supporters of Hamas (92%) compared to supporters of Fateh and other forces (55% and 45% respectively).”
Link to the polling bureau: www.pcpsr.org
…follow links further to the pdf file with the report, including the methodology and questions asked.
Mearsheimer has become a crackpot in his old age, for instance arguing that Russia had no choice but to invade Ukraine, and was justified in doing so.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/11/putin-mearsheimer-realpolitik-ukraine-political-science.html
And "it is militarily advantageous for Israel to ethnically cleanse Gaza, therefore Israel must be ethnically cleansing Gaza" is a bizarre argument to begin with, for many reasons: 1) States do not always do things that are militarily advantageous to them - many other considerations affect their decisions 2) In half a year of warfare Israel has not pushed anyone out of Gaza, and in fact is right now pushing Gazans *away* from the Egyptian border, making it impossible for them to leave Gaza 3) An *attempt* to conduct ethnic cleansing would likely fail due to the opposition of Israel's allies as well as the remainder of the international community, and thus such an attempt would not actually be advantageous to Israel.
As I brought up in another comment, I also don't think the international situation and media environment actually incentivize this anyway. They're fighting an adversary whose actual strategy is to make prosecuting a war generate as bad PR for Israel as possible, and the international community is largely split between actors who'll oppose Israel unconditionally and actors who'll support them unconditionally (or at least not make their support contingent on humane and pragmatic prosecution of the war.)
The crowds of protestors whose take on what Israel should actually be doing sums up to "I don't know, but not that" have been causing me a considerable amount of emotional turmoil, because this effectively abdicates the opportunity to have *any* leverage to incentivize Israel to prosecute the war in a more humane and pragmatic manner. It's like stumbling into a resolution to the trolley problem where you congratulate yourself for splitting the train to run down both tracks.
Unfortunately, "I don't know, but not that" is quite close to the way I feel about the problem. Israel is rather small, and the habitable portion is smaller. The analogy I tend to think of is "two cats in a sack", though I need to work the phrase "that hate each other" into that metaphor somehow.
I think Israel's conduct in this war is deserving of some complaints, but all actionable criticism needs at the very least a standard of acceptability to measure against.
I think it's understandable as an emotional reaction, but also literally always bad feedback, in discourse on any subject, and I think this is a subject in which it's particularly harmful.
Why isn't the infantry-centered alternative almost ever brought up?
Military History Professor: https://twitter.com/BretDevereaux/status/1794875492618957281
There was another thread here about then why should Israel ever sustain a single higher infantry casualty to save 100 Gazan civilians. And the answer to that is the same reason why the US didn't just completely cover North Vietnam in bombs. Few in the world accept just glassing an entire people from a far so you don't lose a single soldier.
Not to mention, Israel's approach is probably actually leading to more net-deaths than the infantry-centered, because it could be the difference between an eventual peaceful Palestinian State and 50 more years of this disaster.
It does get brought up occasionally. I'm not an expert on the subject, but the answer I've seen on a number of occasions by people who're better versed in the situation than I am is that Hamas has spent decades outfitting the territory to be outrageously difficult to attack with infantry (vast tunnel networks, buildings rigged up with explosives, etc.)
5.- "average house size in every US state vs. every European country"
That map is wrong. I'll post here what I tweeted a few weeks ago when I first saw that map.
The site this was taken from (http://shrinkthatfootprint.com) uses a Spanish source for 1044 sq ft (97 m2) that explicitly mentions this is for flats only, not houses. It also ignores the fact that 14% of Spanish dwellings are considered empty (second homes, old village houses, etc...), which assuming people prefer more space, means the average size of an inhabited dwelling is larger than the average size of all dwellings.
A more reliable source mentions the average size for dwellings on sale as 138m2 (1485 sq ft): https://cohispania.com/comunicacion/blog/las-provincias-con-las-viviendas-de-mas-superficie-en-2020/
I can only assume that the figures for most other European countries are equally questionable (the notion that the average UK dwelling is 40% smaller than the average Greek dwelling beggars belief).
Thanks, I've added a link to this comment into the post.
I have a figure of 1011 sq feet for a UK house: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5f047a01d3bf7f2be8350262/Size_of_English_Homes_Fact_Sheet_EHS_2018.pdf
And this is some years old; probably it's got a bit bigger since then.
UK houses have been shrinking - I understand that bar the soviet union, this is the only place which has ever done this.
The issue is that we often sell by number of rooms and not floor area (often the latter is hard to find on listings!) so we have odd pressures.
1011 feet is large for UK new build. and I don't believe that the average new build is anywhere near this, if flat and houses are both in the sample. If it is just houses I can believe it.
Do you have a source? This seems unlikely to me. Rate of building new houses is very low; rate of building extensions to existing houses is much larger, so I would expect houses to be getting bigger.
This page https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/chapters-for-english-housing-survey-2022-to-2023-headline-report/chapter-1-profile-of-households-and-dwellings suggests size had increased to 1044 sq feet by 2022.
Hard to find a good primary source, but secondary sources are around, e.g. https://www.propertynotify.co.uk/news/more-money-for-less-space-uk-houses-shrinking-through-the-ages/
This might apply to new build only mind, and ignore extensions
The missing point is conversions and HMOs (Houses in Multiple Occupation).
In cities in the UK, it's not uncommon for a house to be chopped up into several flats (apartments), which is generally called a conversion. If you go down a row of houses in Inner London, quite often you'll see whole streets where all of what look like houses have 4+ doorbells on them.
In addition, you get HMOs, which is basically a house share but often (by no means always) with the landlord renting out the rooms individually to different tenants. According to p27 of https://www.london.gov.uk/sites/default/files/2023-10/Housing%20in%20London%202022.pdf there are a little over 150,000 HMOs; not all of these are going to be multiple flats, but a lot will. Confusingly, depending on the size and amenities, some but not all conversions are also technically HMOs.
This also happens in France, I'm not sure about elsewhere in Europe. It occurs to me for the first time now that I've never heard an American mention this, so it may be less common there.
It happens, I've seen houses where each floor was separately rented, or where the upper floor had each bedroom rented out separately but the common areas downstairs were shared. However, that kind of thing is not super common here, as it requires converting an existing house into an apartment building, and that's rarely done. What we have that is more common here are buildings which are vaguely house-like in form factor, but intentionally built to have separate residences. These are called duplexes (or triplexes, or quadplexes). In places where land pressure hasn't forced going vertical to happen yet, apartment buildings tend to be 2 story duplexes, or 2 story quadplexes (the second entry on each floor comes from additional depth being available - the gap between streets will be wider). These will be purpose-built apartment complexes with a few dozen buildings which house a hundred or more renters. Depending on how they're built, they may look on satellite/chopper imagery like the buildings are all one long row, but that's just because they extended the roofline over the corridor between the units, not because it's built like a motel. Sometimes the corridor between units is enclosed, other times it's not. Sometimes the first floor has an enclosed corridor with the mailboxes and amenities while the second floor has staircases outside in the covered walkway, so the first-floor units are slightly smaller but don't have to use stairs to get in and out. Sometimes you see front entries to the first-floor units and the second-floor units use the corridors between the buildings. There's a lot of ways these get built around the country.
I don't know about UK, but the average floor area of a newly built dwelling in New Zealand peaked in 2010 (at 200 sqm, / 2150 sq feet), and is now 30% lower and back where it was in 1992.
Still sounds a lot roomier than UK homes though!
Most new builds in NZ (and USA?) include a 1x or 2x attached garage. Probably not the case for Europe. The NZ decline is probably due to increase in inner city apartment not having attached garages.
I'm confused by the map itself - surely the metric is not "house size", but the more generic "living area", i.e. counting the enclosed, livable space of houses, appartment high rises, and everything in between? Or does "house size" mean exactly that in US usage of the words?
Yes, it does. We usually measure the size of houses and apartments in square feet of floor space in enclosed finished rooms. Storage space attached to finished rooms (e.g. bedroom closets and kitchen pantries) is counted, but utility spaces (garages, unfinished basements, furnace rooms, etc) are not. There are regional differences between whether finished basements are counted as living area or if all below-grade space (i.e. the floor is non-trivially lower than the surrounding ground) is treated as utility space.
Yes there are very similar norms in Germany and I imagine most developed countries. I was more wondering about the term "house size". After a bit of googling I found that it is apparently a legal term, but then I'd say it has either been misused, or the map says something else entirely than what it's being used for.
What definitions I found say that "house size" would indeed be the gross floor area of a single-family house, i.e. it would exclude any building that houses 2 or more families, i.e. the vast majority of living space in cities.
https://www.lawinsider.com/dictionary/maximum-house-size
https://www.lawinsider.com/clause/gross-floor-area
So as a measure of living space over an entire country it would be quite misleading and overstated, and even more misleading as comparison between countries.
I've only seen Gross Floor Area used in the context of urban planning and zoning regulations, used to measure how big a building is allowed to be on a given lot and how much parking space it's required to have. In everyday usage, it just means the floor space of the living area.
From personal experience, I would guess that US houses *are* on average larger than European houses, but this also seems, hmm, a very American metric to consider. I actually asked about this a month and a half ago; if I had more money to buy a new place, I guess I'd like a bit more size, at least for kitchen, but the location of the place itself would be considerably more important. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-325/comment/54092753
Furthermore, of course, Europe is bound to have a larger pre-existing housing stock from historical eras when houses were smaller almost by default due to the heating issues and such, though presumably most houses in both Europe and the US would be fairly recent (buit after WW2) now.
I don't understand this response. You seem to be suggesting that Europeans and Americans just have different preferences, so that Europeans put more weight on attributes like location rather than size, relative to Americans.
But Americans also put an enormous premium on location! That's why a studio in Manhattan costs way more than a McMansion in rural South Dakota. Nevertheless, my guess is the Manhattan one-bedroom is much bigger than the Paris one-bedroom, and the new American suburban house is much bigger than the new French suburban house.
Yes, of course both Europeans and Americans consider both location and size to be important and it's a bit hard to assign exact values of importance, the point was mostly that in general Americans seem to find housing size to have a greater importance for quality of life than Europeans. It's not the best of metrics, there are better metrics to demonstrate the wealth of the Americans relative to Europeans, like the income gap Scott mentioned.
Even if the other sources are more reliable, if they're using different sources for different places, it's not wise to compare the numbers directly. They will differ for all sorts of reasons--what data are available, what data are included, methodological differences, etc.
Yes, exactly.
I am also skeptical. Almost half of the population of the state of NY live in NYC. If we assume that the non-city New Yorkers have 2000 sqft (what a godless unit) houses, then this would still mean that the people in the city would have on average as much space as the people in Spain. How does an apartment block even count? One giant house?
The obvious metric one should use is the quotient of total inhabited residential indoor area and the number of residents, thus bypassing what is a house and how many people share a house and the like.
I wonder if anyone has ever written a SF tale with cryonized people of the 21st century coming back to life in like a million years, and having to come together, led by Paris Hilton & Walt Disney, to defend themselves from super-dinosaur overlords of the future. Talk about the lack of a clear endgame.
Yes to this movie .
I read a comic book in which Hitler escapes death by freezing himself. In the far future, he somehow gets an army and starts conquering again. This was written while he was still alive, and as far as I can tell they never finished the story.
Anytime there's a "Hitler Returns" story now I'm just going to think of Inflatable Hitler from Aqua Teen Hunger Force, where Hitler is resurrected as a balloon.
This was a recurring motif in Futurama.
Transmetropolitan is a comic with a subplot or two about people brought back from cyronic suspension in the future and basically left to fend for themselves, mostly ending up homeless or worse.
> Smith suggests that journalists wanted to rely on “experts”, but the pro-missile-defense experts all did classified work for missile defense companies and couldn’t talk, and there was a very talkative and eloquent anti-missile-defense expert at MIT who become every journalist’s go-to source.
This is a problem in a lot of other areas as well. People with the most expertise are generally working directly on the subject, so are bound by commercial confidentiality, NDAs, etc. And also don't have the time to be self promoting on twitter, networking with journalists, etc.
Granted, but I think it's probably worse in defense. When there's a threat of federal prison involved, you tend to tread very carefully, and error on the side of treating things as classified. If nothing else, checking to see what is and isn't classified is kind of a pain, and you probably won't do it if you aren't getting paid. (This is also the mechanism behind a lot of overclassification.) And yes, I speak from experience here.
>When there's a threat of federal prison involved, you tend to tread very carefully, and error on the side of treating things as classified.
I'm currently re-reading Lindsay Ellis's Axiom's End and Truth of the Divine in anticipation of the third book coming out next month. There's a minor plot point of the main character (Cora) being mad at someone she's close to for not telling her about her deeply classified work with aliens. Cora has her reasons for this, but I'm nevertheless deeply offended on the other character's behalf every time this comes up.
Yeah. The USG, and anyone working with classified info, are extremely paranoid about releasing any classified information, and that ends up hitting almost anything they would want to communicate about those projects to the public (well, the government is paranoid, classed workers are acting rationally under threat of jail time).
There's huge swathes of things that you wouldn't expect to be classified, even things that are practically common knowledge (or can easily be inferred with common knowledge), and because either those or adjacent things sit in the complicated web of "either technically classified or classified if you squint" no one in that sector can go on the record without hefty potential penalties.
Bottom line is that the USG cares much more about keeping its secrets than looking good, even when the rational thing would be to just declassify some basic information.
I think the problem is more subtle, and a lot harder to solve. It's not that there's just a bunch of stuff that's classified that is common knowledge (that obviously does happen, although maybe less than you'd think.) The real issue is that it is hard in practice to make sure you keep classified and unclass separate in your head, and so any time you speak in all but the vaguest generalities about something you have a classified briefing in, you need to do so with a very careful eye on the rules for what is and isn't classified, and make very sure you don't slip up. That's a lot of work, and most people aren't going to do it unless that's actually part of their job. Declassifying basic stuff that shouldn't be classified won't make anyone who has knowledge of a specific system more likely to speak out when it means doing a bunch of extra work or taking a reasonable risk.
No, you're exactly right. That was definitely part of what I was trying to express, and you articulated it better than I could. (Even talking about *this* requires some extra mental cycles to articulate - I also speak from experience, though I suspect less than yours, chronologically).
It seems almost like journalists aren’t allowed to make inferences, they have to rely on sources to make them.
Clearly Russia and China perceive that ballistic missile defense works to some degree, why else would they invest in hypersonic weapons?
I think part of the problem is also what Noah Smith pointed out about the difference in defense against cruise missiles vs ICBMs. Also there is a difference between conventional missiles and nuclear weapons with regards to the needed efficacy. I also think some of the anit-missile defense people are similar to climate change activists where the focus on one specific failure mode (in this case nuclear war) blinds them to other benefits.
@Scott, regarding 37: I would be happy to help with your questions on the topic, as I missed your question in the open thread and feel like the answer you got is quite off the mark. Reference: I did an AMA in Open Thread 313 which I think had quite high quality answers (more generally about me, quoting from there: "I'm a retired Major from the IDF who just finished about 100 days of reserve duty (in a non-combative role). I also have a degree in Middle-Eastern history, so some added perspective there"). I think the amount of time and depth I gave to the questions there shows that it's worth your time.
In a nutshell, and if you're interested I'd be willing to write something much longer/do some other format: The honest truth is that I believe that what will happen to Gaza is what happened after operation Defensive Shield: Israel is going to stay in it (hopefully without new settlements), and it is going to take years, if not decades, to remove Hamas from power there (which I personally think is in the interest of both the west and Palestinians). The alternative to Hamas isn't clear yet, but it is too early to say who it will be. In an imperfect analogy, talking about the endgame in 1943 would have been difficult at best.
I'd be interested in hearing more.
Yes, I was going to point out TheZeroWave's original thread, because your question was exactly what I was asking him. In particular this comment: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-313/comment/48395356
However, while this is the most soothing and rational explanation of Israel's strategy I've seen so far, I still don't agree with it. In particular, the proposition that a particular ethnic group is so debased that it can't be allowed civil rights for a generation or more. That can only result in further abuse and dispossession, as we see in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Nor does it seem plausible as a long term strategy. Other countries have of course crushed opposed ethnic groups and eventually had peace , such as the case of the Native Americans, but in this case Palestinians represent nearly 50% of the population.
In this comment: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-313/comment/48394101 TheZeroWave states that partially this action is as a deterrent to others, such as Hezbollah. There are obvious moral and practical problems with this.
Hey Ajb!
I planned to answer only Scott as doing another AMA is out of scope (maybe in a hidden open thread), but you make good points and I'll try to address them at least shortly:
1. "It can't be allowed civil rights" - I think you paint this in very black and white colors, and as I stated in the past, whatever you take from me, please take away that this conflict is most of the time grey. Palestinians aren't living in refugee camps like Uyghurs; but they do have their freedom of movement impeded by the IDF. They have plenty of IPhones, but some parts of their population is in dire lack of better nutrition.
2. "That can only result in further abuse and dispossession" - see my previous AMA - I'm all for starting with baby steps to increase relations between the two people. The joint Israeli-Palestinian Remembrance day is one of them. I'd be happy for extreme-right parties to leave the Knesset on one hand, and on stopping teaching geometry via bullets to IDF soldiers heads in elementary school on the other.
3. "Other countries..." - I think a common misunderstanding is how unique and complicated this conflict is. I can link to an article in Hebrew that I hope can help explain why that is so - https://dannyorbach.com/2022/01/01/%d7%99%d7%99%d7%97%d7%95%d7%93%d7%99%d7%95%d7%aa%d7%95-%d7%a9%d7%9c-%d7%94%d7%a1%d7%9b%d7%a1%d7%95%d7%9a-%d7%94%d7%99%d7%a9%d7%a8%d7%90%d7%9c%d7%99-%d7%a4%d7%9c%d7%a1%d7%98%d7%99%d7%a0%d7%99-%d7%94/
4. "... this action is as a deterrent to others, such as Hezbollah. There are obvious moral and practical problems with this." - This is indeed my stated position. I agree it is morally complicated - I don't like showing strength in Gaza so I won't be invaded by Hezbollah, though that isn't the only rational for the war - and I'd love to hear suggestions. I do require the suggestions though to be grounded in a firm understanding of the middle east - Power radiates strongly here, much more than in the west (something that sadly isn't usually understood well). I'd love to hear about the practical problems though!
I'll try to followup on your comments, but unlike in the AMA, can't promise anything. Thanks for mentioning me though!
"I'd love to hear suggestions."
I feel like Israel could attempt a destabilizing campaign that promotes exactly the dream of an Arab state many in the region want ... just not within the confines of Israel/Palestine. For example, if Israel were to promote movements for Arab self-government in Jordan and Syria (forcing out dictatorships and promoting democratic self-government) this strategy could benefit them in two major ways:
1. It would help build bridges of friendship/alliance among the Arab populations throughout the region, many of whom have long wanted exactly this kind of thing. This would reduce incentives to fight against Israel, to the extent they're seen as an ally, or at least as 'it's complicated', as opposed to explicitly being cast in the minds of many Arabs as villains. (Israel doesn't have to change their position on blocking Palestinian self-government to pursue this strategy, but it would be seen by many Arabs as inconsistent.)
2. It would promote emigration from Palestine as many (though not all) would rather live under an actual Arab sovereign state as opposed to the dream of one someday specifically in Palestine. This would relieve pressure on Israel from their native populations, and if sufficient numbers of Palestinians voluntarily move it might allow them to eventually integrate the remaining Arabs into Israel proper. This would help solve the demographic problem for Israel, where they can't both have absolute democracy (one person, one vote, regardless of ethnicity/religion/etc.) and a Jewish homeland. A different Jewish/Arab ratio would change that.
I suspect part of the reason this strategy isn't pursued is that Israeli leaders prefer a regional policy (similar to the global US policy) of not allowing the rise of peer nations that might rival their power monopoly. Promoting the rise of a democratically led peer Arab nation would be seen as an unacceptable national security risk, even if the relationship is initially forged in friendship. Israel has a very low risk tolerance, where national security can trump long-term policy strategy.
What are your thoughts?
Destabilizing their neighbours is not a good way to win friends locally. Also, it is notable how friendliness with Israel has tended to lead to popular discontent in Arab countries. This is not a case of evil dictatorships dragging their Israel-loving populations to war. Indeed, from an Israeli perspective I suspect the dictatorships are much more predictable.
Also, destabilizing Jordan, the closest thing they have to an ally in the region (and a country full of Palestinian refugees who already tried a coup attempt once), is such an incredibly stupid idea I genuinely wonder whether you know anything about the history involved at all.
I never made any claims to expertise, though your criticism could potentially be framed a little less pejoratively?
I never suggested it was the "evil dictatorships dragging their Israel-loving populations to war". My impression is that it's more the opposite, where Israel would like to make friends with local dictators to promote peace, but that in the past those dictators tend to lose popular legitimacy when they try to do this. In part because people have relatives from Palestine or there are refugees who complain about this, especially when there's another round of violence in Gaza or the West Bank.
I don't see the current state of Israel making friends with the people in the region. I've always been under the impression it's the opposite, where neighboring governments generally don't want wars with Israel, or would be better served to not have to be at war with a stronger regional force, but if forced to it they're willing to redirect anger from internal reform movements toward suggesting to their people that the 'real enemy' is Israel. I don't know specifics about the countries involved, though. Either way, this situation doesn't seem like it works for Israel, since it allows for multiple regions where terrorist attacks can be staged, thereby jeopardizing their security, separate from the question of Gaza and the West Bank.
The opposite strategy - focusing on improving relationships with the people and not the government - is effectively what I was aiming at addressing. I admit my specific proposal was terrible, and I knew in proposing it that it's not something likely to happen in the real world, and partly because it was framed as turning Israel into a diplomatic liability for its neighbors, as you pointed out. I wasn't thinking I was 'solving peace in the Middle East' with a blog comment or asserting some great knowledge of the region. Just asking why a different strategy wasn't pursued since the current strategy doesn't seem to be working, but whatever.
First of all, it's important for me to answer you as you clearly have tried thinking about solutions and gave them at least some meaningful thoughts - I appreciate that immensely, and wish at least half of those talking about the conflict would do as you did.
Some quick thoughts:
1. Your idea is Pan-Arabism; it was tried before (specifically in the late 50's-60's), you can read about it in Wikipedia in better words than mine. Some problems with it: Like you have multiple parts to your identity, many Arabs consider themselves also Sunni Muslims, perhaps Jordanian or Palestinian, and maybe even more layers on top of that. Creating something generic won't work for the same reason that not all white people have the same religion and get along.
2. Specifically about Palestinians, they are a people, and they have the right to self determine. They truly are connected to the land, the same way that Israelis are. Some of them even in a miniature to the Jewish diaspora - there are Palestinians living in refugee camps in Lebanon, holding the keys to their grandpas apartment in Haifa. This is not exactly 2000 years of living outside your land, but I highly doubt that a Palestinian that cares deeply enough for the right of return that he would blow up negotiations with Israel on that stand alone would be willing to live in Jordan.
I have some more thoughts on your last paragraph, but these are not as relevant to the Israeli-Palestinian conversation.
> In particular, the proposition that a particular ethnic group is so debased that it can't be allowed civil rights for a generation or more
I thought this was what happened in the American South after our Civil War, during Reconstruction. Except that most scholars on the left agree that Reconstruction was ended too early and not enforced strongly enough, so that the racist elements in the South regained power.
Also, it may just be the case whether or not it is racist. Just like it may be the case that most Arab countries without their current dictators would become theocracies or anarchies. It is sad, and is not genetic, and the proper response may be different from "let's back the dictators", but it seem to currently be the case
I hope it's cultural, and thus theoretically amenable to change. But I don't think America, at least, has a track record in modern times of successfully forcing the change while holding to other standards we profess. Hence the dictator support.
Maybe there are ways to do it within the boundaries we set ourselves, which we haven't found. Maybe some of those boundaries are, from a consequentialist standpoint, not as important as having the cultural change happen. Maybe some other group can succeed where we failed, showing that the problem is merely dysfunction of the modern American state.
Happily. The following is written after reading your main post in the open thread and what you have written above; let me know if something else is of interest, and I'll try to address that as well. I expect this to be lengthy and tried to make it more accessible - sorry if I failed.
Some general points on what you've said in your open thread comment:
1. "Invasion" and "occupation" are simple terms that carry a lot of complexity. Obviously, Israel has invaded Gaza, but there are clearly areas in the strip that it hasn't set foot on yet. Israel is also occupying the West Bank, but there are areas in the West Bank that require significant forces and considerable preparation before acting (e.g., eliminating terrorist cells in refugee camps in Nablus). These terms are fluid and are further complicated as they can serve both operational and strategic rationales (e.g., just examples, not reality: "We need to invade Gaza to destroy tunnels and Hamas battalions" vs. "We need to invade Gaza to create new settlements there"). Gaza is a complex problem, even without considering the connection to the West Bank, and thus requires multifaceted solutions. Expect multiple "invasions" and unclear "occupation" of different parts of the strip during this conflict (which I believe will be very long).
2. Your second question, "Does Israel know where Hamas is," is also binary in conjecture, but the answer is nuanced. I know where Hamas is in a general sense — the strip is tiny, after all — but in which house? For how long does this intelligence remain accurate? Who is a refugee child just walking down the street, and who is a child carrying a suicide vest? Who has Hamas recruited since the beginning of the conflict due to the new hatred towards Israel? This is all dynamic and changes frequently.
3. Two more parameters complicate the fighting: the hostages and the tunnel network. The former requires the forces to proceed meticulously — three hostages were killed by IDF fire by mistake, and the hostages are a very sensitive point in the current Israeli mindset. The latter nullifies some of the IDF's advantages. If I recall correctly, the latest numbers indicate that the tunnel network is larger than the NYC metro. Fighting in that environment, where you can't bring tanks or bomb from the air as they are deep underground, is extremely difficult if you're trying to minimize casualties. Don't forget that even before fighting there, you need to know where the tunnels are and map them — this obviously isn't public knowledge.
Some more specifics regarding your questions:
1. Israel has indeed destroyed vast parts of the buildings in the strip. This is due to multiple reasons: a) This happens naturally in war zones. When tanks cross a road, it usually causes significant damage to the road. When a battalion enters an area, there is usually preliminary artillery shelling or air force strikes in that area (note that Israel usually declares where it's going to act beforehand so that civilians can evacuate). b) Hamas, as a terror organization, has hidden a lot of its munitions inside the civilian populace. This includes rocket launchers in kindergartens, command outposts in hospitals, etc. They also usually aim to plant critical infrastructure in critical civilian areas because then Israel can't bomb them from the air or alternatively suffer international criticism. This infrastructure still has to be destroyed, though, as the IDF isn't planning on occupying it 24/7, and it can be used by other Hamas fighters later (I'll explain why the IDF isn't occupying these areas later, but basically, it would mean occupying the whole strip).
You also asked, "What prevents Israel from eliminating Hamas?" This ties nicely to your question about the day-to-day activities of both sides and the strategy of both sides. This will also be the bulk of my answer from now on.
Israel has two strategic goals that are semi-contradictory: return the hostages and destroy Hamas. The former is easy to understand; Israel has historically been, and still is, very sensitive to hostages (even deceased ones), and vast parts of the populace are adamant about returning everybody (yes, EVERYBODY) back. Whether this happens via negotiations or military operations doesn't matter for this point (though it obviously matters in the greater analysis). To be clear, both have happened.
Destroying Hamas is a more difficult endeavor. This can be divided into three possible resolution criteria, ordered by difficulty: 1. Hamas is no longer in control of the Gaza Strip, and additionally, its military force has been routed and broken up into small cells that are no longer working together coherently. 2. Hamas is no longer an effective threat to Israeli security. This is slightly tricky and vague; is firing one rocket at Israel considered effective? Is a single gunman claiming to be Hamas going to the border and shooting at Israel effective? 3. Destroying Hamas as an idea — basically, trying to do what was done to the Nazis in WW2.
In my assessment, Israel is aiming for resolution criteria 1 in the short term and resolution criteria 2 in the long term. Long term is LONG; I'm talking years, if not decades. You don't uproot a terrorist organization that has controlled the land for about two decades and created a network the size of the NYC metro in a year or two or three. Obviously, Israel isn't going to state this publicly—imagine the press response to "Yup, we're gonna be here for years" — but if Israel wants to destroy Hamas to some level of criteria 2, that's the relevant time frame. I'm not going to go into why Israel wants to do that — it has a lot of ties to Iran and Hezbollah — as this comment is going to be lengthy anyway.
Hamas' strategic goal is simple: survive, and ideally keep the hostages as long as possible. The former has been its goal in every conflict since 2005. It has gotten all of what it needed on October 7th, and it believes time is ticking in its favor in the strategic sense because as time passes, more international pressure mounts on Israel to leave the strip and end the war. It is also getting everything it wants from the world — Hamas killed Israelis and captured hostages, and so far, it has received both international condemnation of Israel across the world and EU states recognizing a Palestinian state. This puts it on a much better footing than the PLO. I'll be blunt: every dead Palestinian is another achievement for Hamas, as it increases the pressure. To be clear, I'm not taking a side here (although I'm biased, but I'll state clearly when I think that interferes with the analysis), just stating the facts. Note that there is an interesting balance here: on the strategic level, Hamas believes time is on its side; on the operational level, the more time the IDF has, the more it can further destroy Hamas.
So, how does that translate to the day-to-day life of the Hamas soldier? Easy: survive and protect the hostages. Hide in the tunnels. Hide in the hospitals or simply among refugees. Whenever possible, jump to the nearby apartment of your cousin, where you stashed RPGs under his baby's crib, and try to shoot at Israeli tanks in the area. The moment you do that, run away — and ideally grab a child on your way to the hospital so the IDF won't shoot you. To be clear, there is video footage of such examples, and although I'm oversimplifying for brevity (e.g., there are some battalions that are more combat-ready than this; it changes in different parts of Gaza all the time), this is the bulk of the fighting.
So, how does the Israeli side look from a soldier's perspective? Basically, it depends on whether you're on offense or defense. If you're holding the Netzarim corridor or the Rafah border crossing, your job is to defend the logistical chain of supply to soldiers on offense and to supply and oversee humanitarian aid to civilians. If you're on offense, you're either going into areas that haven't been attacked by the IDF so far — e.g., Rafah — or going into areas that have been attacked and then evacuated, as the vacuum brings back Hamas fighters to existing infrastructure they know, and it's easier and more effective to catch them that way than one by one (a good example of this was the second Shifa hospital operation).
So, how does the conflict look from here on? Israel is going to continue working its way meticulously in areas it hasn't operated in yet — Rafah and some of the center of the strip — both because it is taking measures to minimize civilian casualties (I can claim that this is because we truly aim to keep them to a minimum, but no need to believe me; the Machiavellian incentive of not getting more international condemnation is enough) and because these areas likely have hostages in them. After that, Israel is going to maintain its ability to operate in the strip, at least in the same way it operates in the West Bank; i.e., if the IDF wants to get to Shifa again, it is going to keep whatever forces and outposts it needs in Gaza to maintain that capability. Hamas will continue stalling for time, keeping its munitions and weapons near civilians, and keeping the hostages hidden.
I can write more, but I'd need you to point me in the direction of what areas are of interest. Let me know if anything isn't clear.
>imagine the press response to "Yup, we're gonna be here for years"
The response would be something other than "makes sense, everybody has assumed this all along"? Israel has been in the West Bank all this time after all, and nobody cared too much.
Thank you very much for this long explanation, it's very much appreciated!
One more question, if you have the patience for it: how easy/difficult is it for an IDF soldier to recognize a Hamas fighter? Do the Hamas fighters usually wear uniforms or other signs? Do they carry around their weapons most of the time, or do they hide them and blend into the crowd, and only fetch a weapon when they see an opportunity for ambushing IDF soldiers?
Slightly changes, but as a general rule of thumb: They don't wear uniform, they don't carry weapons unless they have to/they're going to use them soon, they definitely try to hide and blend with the crowd whenever they can (when they fight in areas that have been evacuated, it's obviously harder)
Thank you very much!
And if you wander how they fetch a weapon that fast is it isn't already on them - I hear for soldiers who occupied neighborhoods in Gaza that they find weapons at half the houses
Could you say more on measures to minimize civilian casualties? I get that Israel wants to minimize these, but where I have less faith is that Israel, or any government, can act perfectly in accord with that interest.
I'm not ZeroWave, but this seems pretty extraordinary: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67327079
TL,DR, a Gaza dentist gets a call from Israeli military intelligence saying they need to bomb the apartments across the street from him, they think he's someone they can work with, and can they talk him through arranging an evacuation? Which is successful, and gets him put on the list of people who *keep* getting called to help arrange evacuations.
Note that this means essentially no chance of killing any Hamas militants in the strike, only destroying some of their infrastructure.
I think the example John Shilling gave is excellent. Note that this happens regularly - Israel calls beforehand to warn citizens that it is going to bomb a building (However, not all the time - but still very common).
Good rule of thumb - if you see beautiful shots of a building being bombed by Israel, it's because it gave a warning beforehand and the cameramen had time to prepare the short. I honestly find it an easy way to know just from the documentation if Israel gave an early warning or not.
why has the idf withdrawn from all the positions it occupied in gaza city and khan younis?
Short answer, as I don't plan to do another AMA here (probably will in a hidden open thread sometime soon if there's enough interest) - it's an effective CT strategy. It's easier to destroy battalions than individuals, and the moment you leave an area, Hamas fills that vacuum. You then go back in and vice-versa, until there is not enough Hamas left to create an effective military organizational structure.
ok so you're predicting that israel will return and reoccupy gaza city? willing to bet?
You don't need to "return and reoccupy", just raid and destroy specific battalions (like in the second raid on Al shifa)
What Shaked said is accurate.
I'd be interested. And in case I didn't say so enough in your first AMA, thanks for your time.
First, thank you for taking your time and sharing here. I don't know if you can answer this, but perhaps you have some insight.
The Wikipedia article [1] on the three Israeli hostages who were shot says the following:
> According to an IDF official, the three male hostages emerged shirtless out of a building toward a group of IDF soldiers "tens of meters" away, with one carrying a white flag. An Israeli sniper then opened fire on them, killing Shamriz and Talalka and wounding Haim. After being shot, Haim ran into a nearby building and shouted for help in Hebrew. The battalion commander then ordered the troops to hold their fire, while Haim was persuaded to exit the building but when he did so 15 minutes later, a soldier acting against the battalion commander's order shot and killed him.
and:
> Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi stated that the shooting was against the IDF's rules of engagement and that the hostages had "done everything to show that they were harmless", including removing shirts to show that they were not carrying explosives.
I was pretty shocked because I can't imagine why a soldier would just shoot someone, after 15 minutes of talking in Hebrew and coaxing a hostage to come out, and where the person had told them they were a hostage, and had "done everything to show that they were harmless". What was going on?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Alon_Shamriz,_Yotam_Haim,_and_Samer_Talalka
Sure. Tactical answer and more context-aware answer:
1. The soldier simply didn't hear the commander. You can read more details on what happened here via GTranslate: https://news.walla.co.il/item/3631940
2. Since the start of the war, Hamas has recorded cries for help in Hebrew, baby crying sounds, and other things I can't recall right now, and played them from radioes/phones connected to booby-trapped buildings and/or IEDs. 99.99% of the time, if an Israeli soldier hears Hebrew in Gaza, he is thinking, correctly, "I'm walking into an ambush".
I knew from the Wikipedia article that they thought it could be a trick. That doesn't explain much though.
For one, even if they were Hamas militants, it would still be a war crime to shoot them. You can't shoot PoWs. (Or I should say you shouldn't shoot them; surrendering soldiers have often been killed in wars.)
It's always a possibility that any non-combatant or person waving a white flag could be an enemy trying to trick you. This has been true in every conflict.
But that aside, they were in shouting distance. They persuaded Haim to come out, in Hebrew. They clearly knew it wasn't a recording. The soldier did not need to walk into an ambush; Haim agreed to walk to them, as I understand it, shirtless and unarmed. What else could Yotam Haim have done to not get shot?
The soldier not hearing the commander isn't the shocking part that needs explaining. It's why he would persuade an unarmed hostage to come out and then shoot him.
I'd recommend reading the whole article, which I don't have time to do. I'll respond from memory of watching the review on the news:
1. They weren't PoWs; they were walking down the street in an active war zone, where there were basically only IDF soldiers and Hamas soldiers. Fighting has been going on there for weeks already, everyone who has some sense already evacuated from there.
2. The original soldier didn't see the flag because of a tree obscuring it from him. It was a snap decision to fire, but considering that the only people who should have been there at that points were Hamas soldiers, this makes sense.
3. The soldier shooting Haim wasn't with the commander, he was still far from him, IIRC in the house the whole incident started from. You're thinking in very clean terms; imagine a messy street, after weeks of fighting, you can't hear well because of the constant deafening bombing around you, you don't know all the details as we do - as far as you can tell, there is a gunfight happening now and you're buddies are in it. He might have been sitting somewhere far when everything started and didn't have context or the full picture. It's incredibly common for soldiers to continue shooting and for the "Stop" to register, especially after weeks of deployment.
For 1. I know they weren't PoWs. They were escaped hostages. I just mean that if they were Hamas soldiers, from the moment they waved that white flag and surrendered, you can no longer shoot them. They'd be considered PoWs at that point. You can't choose to not accept the surrender and just shoot them.
2. Maybe the translation isn't clear. The article you linked says the following (through Google Translate):
> One sniper stood and watched on the first floor. At 09:42 he recognized three shirtless figures with a white flag - the abductees. [...] The sniper watched them hidden by a tree standing in front of the building. The area where the abductees walked was defined as "red" for him, meaning an area that threatens the forces. He shot and hit two of them.
Which sounds like the sniper recognized they had a white flag and that the sniper was hidden by a tree.
3. Yes, I am very much not clear on the details. But as far as I can tell, the hostages took all the proper steps to get rescued and there were no Hamas soldiers there at the time they were shot. They were unarmed and waving a white flag. It sounds like the soldiers were quick to shoot despite there being no threat from the hostages.
This doesn't bode well for other escaped hostages or non-combatants who approach Israeli soldiers. What would you advise an escaped hostage to do? It seems like approaching the IDF unarmed and waving a white flag is risky.
1. I agree completely, and didn't think that's what you thought - just stated the POV of the soldier. Regular soldiers weren't briefed on meeting hostages before that BTW - which was a mistake ofc - because only Special ops were thought to be able to get near them.
2. Yeah, I'm reading the article in Hebrew and it is unclear. I remember hearing on the news that the tree obscured his view of the flag - but I'm uncertain now. Maybe he just took a very bad decision - I'm definitely not claiming that Israeli soldiers are mistake-proof, or bed-decision-making proof.
I took some time and found the article I read at the time - https://www.ynet.co.il/news/article/rkpl4fida - Seems like there are more details there, and here it appears more explicit that the tree blocked his view. Ctrl + F "38" (meters) for the relevant section.
3. I agree with what your saying, just not about generalizing from the single instance too much. Israel takes quite a lot of PoWs in this war - there are documentations of surrendered Hamas fighters, and not in small numbers. I would think the hostage scenario was the exception to the rule and not the rule itself.
More discussion about religion!
(1) I think you got Matthew 22 wrong. my recollection of that is "Wasn't that the seven brothers?"
It's not a man with two ex-wives, it's a woman with seven ex-husbands:
"23 That same day the Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to him with a question. 24 “Teacher,” they said, “Moses told us that if a man dies without having children, his brother must marry the widow and raise up offspring for him. 25 Now there were seven brothers among us. The first one married and died, and since he had no children, he left his wife to his brother. 26 The same thing happened to the second and third brother, right on down to the seventh. 27 Finally, the woman died. 28 Now then, at the resurrection, whose wife will she be of the seven, since all of them were married to her?”
(2) With regards to St Joseph of Cupertino, he's more famous (or at least was in my time) as the guy you invoke to help you pass exams. Levitating is all very well and good, but getting that grade is more important! His claim to fame was being so stupid he tried and failed multiple times to be admitted to the priesthood until it was arranged that he would be given very simple questions which it was established that he knew the answers to.
For those of you that may need it, here you go - prayer to St Joseph of Cupertino for exam success:
"O great St. Joseph of Cupertino who, by your prayers, obtained from God to be asked at your examination only the propositions which you know, pray that I, like you, may succeed in the examination which lies before me. In return I promise to make your name known and cause you to be loved. Amen."
https://www.catholic.org/saints/saint.php?saint_id=72
"Patron: of Aviators, Flying, Studying, and those suffering mental handicaps
St. Joseph was born in 1603 at Cupertino, in the diocese of Nardo in the Kingdom of Naples. ...It is said that his mother often considered him a nuisance and treated him harshly. Joseph was purported to be slow to learn and absent-minded. He was said to frequently wander aimlessly, with his mouth gaping open. And, he had a bad temper, so, he was not at all popular. He tried to learn the trade of shoemaking, but failed. He asked to become a Franciscan, but they initially would not accept him. Finally he did join the Capuchins. However, for a very short period of time. Eight months later, they sent him away. Sources say it was because he could not seem to do anything right.
He dropped piles of dishes and kept forgetting to do what he was told. His mother was not at all pleased to have the eighteen-year-old Joseph back home again, so she finally got him accepted as a servant at the Franciscan monastery. He was given the friars habit and put to hard work taking care of the horses.
About this time, Joseph began to change. He grew in humility and gentleness, fruits of the Holy Spirit at work in a person. He became more careful and successful at his work. He also began to pray more do more voluntary acts of penance. Finally, he was able to enter the Franciscan order and, eventually, study for the priesthood. Although he was a good and holy friar, he had a very hard time with studies. During his seminary exams, the examiner happened to ask him to explain the only thing he knew well, and so he was ordained a deacon, and later a priest."
Thanks, I've corrected the gender (though not given all the details, for sake of space)
No problem, I have to get some use out of hearing all those Gospel readings every Sunday!
This, and the Mormon link, have jogged a memory of mine that I was specifically taught as a kid that this *wasn't* a trick question, because it was asked by a Saducee and the Saducees were basically alright (probably not quite in these terms, I'm remembering across decades and into childhood). Is/was this ever a consensus position, or was this just a specific quirk of (I think?) both a school chaplain and a Sunday school teacher I had?
>With regards to St Joseph of Cupertino, he's more famous (or at least was in my time) as the guy you invoke to help you pass exams.
I have heard it said that, as long as there are math exams, there will be heartfelt prayers in schools. :-)
The reason we should go back to Nuns With Rulers in school is my experience with one for our Intermediate Certificate (now the Junior Certificate) exam - state exam for third Year in secondary school (at around age 15). We had her for maths class in the final year before the exam, having had a male lay teacher for the first two years in that subject.
I passed with an even better (not great, but great by my expectations!) grade than I hoped to get, and she dragged the entire class of us over the line with revising two years work and hammering the third year into our heads by means of fear and intimidation. Nobody failed the maths exam, even the no-hopers like me.
Education by sheer terror works!
Lest I be traducing the woman, she was perfectly amiable outside of class once you got to know her. But in class? She would have made Chuck Norris break down in tears like a little baby.
Many Thanks! That is quite an anecdote! I guess this is the pedagogical equivalent of the Russian "Brutality works, but only in large doses." :-)
We used to have to line up and recite the particular theorem out of Euclid for the class that day, having drawn it on the sheet of paper beforehand; she would get one student to start, then stop them and the nexxt would have to continue on, and down the line like that.
If the drawing was sloppy or you weren't able to seamlessly switch into recital, you were In Trouble. I remember being lined up with the rest of the class, we all practicing beforehand before she came in to class, and noting that the paper was trembling like a leaf in a breeze, then realising I was so scared my hands were shaking 😁
And she never even used The Ruler, it was all done with quiet force of command. As I said, the funny thing was getting to know her a few years later outside of class, and she was perfectly fine to get on with. But in that class, she ruled like a force of nature by sheer terror imposed on us without even raising her voice!
I'm telling you, a bit more fear in class and a lot of the failing students would stop failing!
Wow! Many Thanks!
My French teacher did me the same service. One time he broke a wooden ruler over my head as he repeated "You must learn your vocab!" (maybe said in French). More typically, he would hold between forefinger and thumb the short hairs in front of one's ear.
Per item 14: In John 14, Jesus says that Christians can do everything He did, and even greater things, too. If nobody used miraculous powers to stop the holocaust, it's not for lack of God making them available, same way they were available to the levitating monk.
That's assuming that the verse is correct. What if miraculous powers are available, but we lost the rules?
That would be pretty in line with the Bible. It happens in the Old Testament a lot. For instance, consider the story of Samson, who lost his miraculous super-strength when his hair was cut, which violated his vows to God.
There's a lot of theological controversy about the role of miraculous powers in the present day. I'm definitely in the camp that thinks that, just like all spiritual things, as far as God's concerned, they're equally available to everybody; it's just that very few of us are able to (or want to) access them.
Also consider that, in the New Testament, spiritual things like forgiving somebody, repenting from sin, doing charitable works or worshiping God have eternal value. Human spirits last forever, while, on the other hand, the world will be destroyed by Christ when He returns in the end. So flying around (which, after all, you can do in an airplane too) has, in itself, no eternal value.
So it may be that there are people who can do miracles now, but they're enlightened enough to put their energy toward other ministries instead. Jesus also said in Luke 16 that miracles don't convince people who don't want to be convinced. (Which makes me skeptical of these projects that try to use miracles to convert people.)
From a different branch of Christianity (no, I'm not going to entertain discussion on that), namely the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, here's my perspective.
I agree that miracles (a) still happen and (b) are not generally flashy. We have direct guidance that miracles are for the faithful, not the convincing of the faithless. I also agree that, for the Lord's purposes, the spiritual is much more important than the physical. I also note that there is doctrinal and scriptural support for the idea that the Adversary can do "miracles"--his tend to be flashy counterfeits.
As to how miracles are performed--there are two types, broadly. Those that come purely by faith/prayer of the righteous and those that are mediated by the power of the priesthood[1]. In either case, it's God performing the miracle, and they happen if and only if they are in accord with God's will for that specific circumstance. And his wisdom is higher than ours--not everyone who prays for healing or receives a blessing of healing will be healed (to take one example).
Anyone can pray in faith for a miracle. Those prayers are answered (although not always in the way we think they will be, nor always with a yes). But to have true faith, you have to have a spiritual assurance through the Holy Spirit that what you are praying for is in accord with divine will. So people who pray for flashy miracles, etc. *can't be praying in faith*.
The priesthood can, under certain circumstances, and when operating with faith, be used to command nature in the name of God. Again, it must be done in accordance with His will, which dramatically limits the scope. This is how most of the biblical miracles occurred, especially those of the prophets and apostles. For example, Peter's command "Silver and gold have I none; but such as I have give I thee: In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth rise up and walk." was efficacious because he was authorized to wield the power of God for the healing of the sick AND that deed was done in faith AND that deed was in accord with God's will for that circumstance.
[1] Note: the Church of Jesus Christ uses this term in its proper meaning not to refer to the *people*, but to the authority and power to act in the name of God. The people *bear* the priesthood, but are not the priesthood. This gets muddled a lot in casual conversation, which kinda sucks.
>We have direct guidance that miracles are for the faithful, not the convincing of the faithless.
That's like saying that the soda bottle at your grocery is there to get beverages to thirsty people, not to convince anyone that the grocery store actually sells soda.
You don't need to do something *specifically* to convince the faithless, for it to convince the faithless. You just have to go about it in an ordinary manner without thinking about the faithless at all. At some point the faithless will get evidence for miracles purely by chance, just like if coelacanths exist, sooner or later a scientist will just happen to be there to see one.
When people say "it isn't there to convince the faithless", 99% of the time they don't mean "it isn't there to convince the faithless". Instead they mean "it's *specifically* contrived so that it *won't* convince the faithless", and that's a *very* different thing.
Regarding the re-hyping of anti-missile defenses, I humbly submit the following counter https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/iran-breaches-anglo-zionist-defenses?utm_source=publication-search If they're so cool, why don't they send them to the Ukrainians? They are not being attacked by ICBMs. Same goes for F-35s. If they're so great, and not a very expensive gizmo to target Afghan sheep-shaggers from across the world, then let's send them to face the Russians and see what happens, no? Over two years after the start the war, that doesn't seem to be in the cards, which tells me they'd rather stick with the sheep-shaggers, thank you very much.
>If they're so cool, why don't they send them to the Ukrainians?
We did. It's been over a year since Patriots started shooting down Kinzal missiles over Ukraine.
As for the F-35s, these are extremely sophisticated warplanes that will take years to teach Ukraine how to use. It's taking quite a while to get the F-16s we (finally) gave them into service, and things would be much worse with a more complicated plane.
And before we sent the Ukrainians Patriots, they were using their own extensive network of S-300 missile batteries, which was basically the Soviet version of the Patriot in the late Cold War. It wasn't as effective as the American version, because Russian weapons rarely are, but it was reasonably capable against most of the missiles Russia was actually hitting Ukraine with and because it was what they were familiar with.
When the Ukrainians started running low on S-300s, and the Russians started using more of the missiles S-300 couldn't stop, we started training Ukrainians to use Patriots and then we sent them Patriots. They seem to work really well, though there aren't enough of them to cover the entire nation.
F-35s, as Bean says, would have a steeper learning curve unless we sent American pilots to fly them and American technicians to maintain them. Granted, it's been more than two years and that probably would have been enough time to stand up a few effective Ukrainian F-35 squadrons, but we spent most of the first year thinking and hoping that the war would be over in a year. Once NATO decided Ukraine needed western combat aircraft, it was a question of getting them F-16s in 2024 or F-35s in 2025 at the earliest.
An American revolution would also suffice.
This war will end when one side runs out of guns, shells, or men willing to stand up to being shelled. There's no reason that has to be Ukraine, and the bit where Russia has to import ammunition from *North Korea* suggests that the limit on Russian endurance is not impossibly far in the future.
But the only side of that equation that Ukraine has any real control over is Ukrainian manpower. Their guns and their shells come almost entirely from NATO, and NATO's policy for the past year and a half seems to have been to prolong the stalemate. Russia can't be allowed to win because that would be a victory for the bad guys, but Ukraine can't be allowed to win because maybe Vladimir Putin will throw a nuclear temper tantrum.
The war will probably end about six months after the United States Government decides who it wants to see win. Right now, the most likely outcome is the second Trump administration deciding that Russia should win, followed shortly by Russia winning. But that's not the only possibility.
North Korea is a Chinese client, not Russian, and Moscow hasn't been much interested in doing them favors in this century. And from reports on Russian social media, some of the North Korean ammunition is complete crap, but the Russians are using it anyway. So it's pretty clear that Russia is scraping the bottom of the barrel w/re domestic production and stockpiles (Ukraine reached that point over a year ago). And note that this isn't just artillery shells; Russia is confirmed to be using North Korean and Iranian ballistic missiles in Ukraine, even though those are well behind the usual Russian state of the art.
That said, nobody knows how much artillery ammunition North Korea has tucked away, but it's probably in the millions of rounds and they're clearly willing to sell at least some of the stockpile. So Russia is unlikely to run out next month, Next year, very possible.
As a counterpoint to John, I would have to say Ukraine can not and will not win without other countries sending their own soldiers. For various reasons, this war is about grinding attritional advances much more reminiscent of WWI than the sweeping maneuver battles of WWII or the Napoleonic wars. Russia has a much larger pool of manpower and much more industrial capacity than Ukraine, which are the determining factors of victory.
Having more men is a compounding advantage, because they can be rotated out of combat to rest and replenish. The general rule of thumb is that a unit of fighting men is no longer combat effective after 15% losses. There are some Ukrainian brigades that have suffered over 50% losses, because they don't have the reserves to rotate their men. The Russians have also been adept at using mercenaries, convict soldiers and militia units from the Donbas to soak up losses in frontal assaults and protect their veteran professional units. This is a relatively recent phenomenon, and a lot of the professional Russian soldiers suffered heavy losses in the first few years of the war.
There are something like 500k Russian troops in Ukraine right now, and another 300-500K recruits/conscripts in the newly formed western military districts. There have been rumblings of using these troops to open a northern flank through Belarus, which would stretch the Ukrainian manpower even further. I don't know at this point whether this is a legitimate plan or a psyop to tangle up Ukraine. These troops have to be trained, and Russia doesn't have enough equipment to deploy more than a fraction of them at present anyway. Still, even another 50-60K Russians on a new front would be pretty rough for Ukraine to counter.
As far as war material goes, consider the production of standard howitzer ammunition (155mm NATO, 152mm RU.) Russia produces somewhere in the neighborhood of 3-4 million shells per year. For comparison, the US currently produces about 700,000 per year. They plan to open a third factory in 2025 to reach a million per year, but the factory will need time to ramp up production to full, which may not happen until late 2025 or 2026. The EU plans to reach 1.4 million shells per year by 2025. They also planned to deliver 1 million shells to Ukraine already, but have only delivered a bit over half of that, so these numbers may not reflect reality. Anyway, the side running out of artillery shells first is clearly not going to be Russia.
During intense operations, tens of thousands of shells are fired per day. That would burn through even millions of shells per year, which is why the NK shells were purchased. I can't imagine the quality of NK goods is great, but making WWII-era military technology seems within the realm of a communist backwater.
Both the US and Russia are limited in their development of ballistic missiles by various treaties. Something which does not hold true for Iran. Iranian cruise missiles have multi-stage boosters, for example, which is prohibited under IRBM treaty. The missile attack on Israel is illustrative here, where the Iranians largely failed to penetrate the missile defenses. This shows that Iranians missiles are not superior to Western/Russian models, which also fail to penetrate missile defenses without large-scale decoys and drone support. It doesn't prove anything about whether they are the same/worse.
All in all, Ukraine is at a significant manpower and firepower disadvantage. Even shitty NK/Iranian tech and refurbished cold war stockpiles that have been gathering rust are better than nothing, which is what Ukraine locally produces for the war effort. Except for drones, which Ukraine is probably the foremost expert country on the planet at utilizing. Sadly, you can't win a war with drones alone. Maybe in a few more decades.
I really have to object to the idea that the US/NATO *desires* Ukraine to lose for some reason. Russia has a significant natural advantage in population and production. Overcoming this would require the west to both a) send their own soldiers to fight in Ukraine, and b) divert significant portions of their economy to war time levels of material production. That they have not been willing to do so is not evidence that they want Russia to win.
As it happens I was professionally involved in this issue some twenty years ago, when the idea was revived under Little Bush, but the objectives the were extremely modest: be able to shoot down a handful of nuclear-tipped ICBMs from North Korea or (one day) Iran. I think it's fair to say that, in spite of the time and the investment, no reliable capability yet exists. The Russian S-500 system has a theoretical capability against ICBMs, but that remains to be demonstrated in practice. In the meantime, Russia has the only real ABM capability in the form of a system around Moscow, first deployed half a century ago and quite recently up-dated, which would destroy warheads in their terminal phase through nuclear explosions. It was originally conceived as a way of soaking up the first wave of US missiles, and giving the Politburo time to authorise the launch of a counter-strike.
The issue of tactical anti-missile missiles is quite different. They have been around for generations: as long ago as the 1982 Falklands War, the British used Sea Wolf missiles against Argentinian aircraft, which had originally been designed as anti-anti-shipping missiles. In Ukraine, the Russians have been able to reliably destroy NATO subsonic missiles with technology that has been around for decades, and that they have invested heavily in, in a way the West has not. Successful attacks from each side have largely resulted from launching massive attacks, and overwhelming the defence with sheer numbers, making use of decoy drones and multiple waves of attacks. But of course you need, not just very large numbers of drones, but very large numbers of the actual missiles to do the damage. By contrast, hypersonic missiles like the Kinzahl are a very new development, and at the moment there is no way of defending against them.
>I think it's fair to say that, in spite of the time and the investment, no reliable capability yet exists. The Russian S-500 system has a theoretical capability against ICBMs, but that remains to be demonstrated in practice. In the meantime, Russia has the only real ABM capability in the form of a system around Moscow, first deployed half a century ago and quite recently up-dated, which would destroy warheads in their terminal phase through nuclear explosions. It was originally conceived as a way of soaking up the first wave of US missiles, and giving the Politburo time to authorise the launch of a counter-strike.
Uhh.... no. None of this is right. I had sort of hoped we'd have gotten over lionizing Russian weapons given their dismal performance in Ukraine. As for the Moscow-protecting ABM system, that was a decoy to soak up US and British missiles during the Cold War. It worked pretty well, too, as evidenced by Chevaline. And you're completing ignoring GMD, which I have a pretty high prior on working given that every other Western BMD system we've tested has worked quite well.
>The issue of tactical anti-missile missiles is quite different. They have been around for generations: as long ago as the 1982 Falklands War, the British used Sea Wolf missiles against Argentinian aircraft, which had originally been designed as anti-anti-shipping missiles.
This is a complete non-sequitur in regards to BMD. None of those were ballistic, and there wasn't a widespread capability to do that before about 20 years ago, with some error bars depending on how you evaluate things like Patriot's performance in Desert Storm.
>By contrast, hypersonic missiles like the Kinzahl are a very new development, and at the moment there is no way of defending against them.
Hypersonic weapons aren't new (the name is, but that's just to blind people to the fact that the concept isn't) and it seems weird that you'd make that specific claim given Patriot's record against Kinzahl in Ukraine.
I think the evidence from Ukraine is a much stronger place to take lessons from than the recent strikes from Iran. The Iranians gave ample notice that they planned a strike against Israel, then orchestrated an attack they must have known would mostly have been struck down. The fact that all of these missiles (and drones) weren't stopped despite all the notice, the multiple parties involved, the clear target path, the long distance in which to act, etc. suggests a specific interpretation of missile defense weakness that squares with observations from Ukraine on both sides: missile defense becomes exponentially more difficult the larger the area that must be defended.
Each system has an operational range. If you know where and when the attack is coming from, you can defend against it. If you know where the missiles are going you can defend against it. Hence the success of Israel's air defense in the past and the failure of Russian and Ukrainian air defense, where they'll send in a bunch of cheap drones to empty out the missile defense systems, followed by more advanced missiles to strike the true targets. This is what has happened multiple times in Ukraine, but was conspicuously absent in the Iranian attack.
Russia's "only real ABM capability" has not really been demonstrated since the end of the Cold War, and I wouldn't bet too heavily on it today. Same goes for the S-500.
On the US side, we have GMD (Ground-Based Midcourse Defense), which was a prototype placed in limited operational service as a placeholder. With ~20 years of debugging, it might work. And we have Aegis, which definitely works. On paper, it's only expected to stop intermediate-range ballistic missiles, which as we recently saw, it does quite well. But it's also been used to shoot down a satellite in low orbit, which indicates that it is capable of engaging targets moving at ICBM speeds. It admittedly doesn't have the continent-spanning range of GMD, but it's cheaper and it has a land-based version so you don't have to build an expensive ship under it if you're defending fixed areas.
Deploying a system to protect against an all-out attack from Russia would be *expensive*, we'd definitely have to turn up the money printers a notch or two(*), but the technology exists. Defending Israel from Iran, or defending Ukraine from a Russia that's keeping its serious missiles in reserve against the US, is affordable.
* Reasons why we might not want to do this, are left as an exercise for the student
Are you referring to the A-135? Is there any reason to assume that it wouldn't work? Especially since the Russians still have the balls to put nukes on the tips?
The success rate for Russian military equipment left over from the Cold War and not regularly tested and exercised since, should give anyone cause to suspect that it would greatly underperform expectations if put to the test.
And putting nuclear missiles on antimissiles, doesn't really help all that much. A competently-built and -maintained modern guidance system, if it works, doesn't need a nuclear warhead, and if it doesn't work, probably won't put the missile close enough for even a nuclear warhead to get the job done. This isn't the 1970s, when we were stuck with fuzzy low-resolution command or beam riding guidance. Putting nuclear warheads on a defensive missile greatly reduces your flexibility in using that missile, even if you've got Russian-grade balls, for a very marginal increase in the capability of that missile.
Odd question: were you also involved in the reconquest of Palmyra?
9: My expectation would be that whatever society welcomes the currently cryonically preserved as its unfrozen citizens will treat them as legally new people who just happen to have adult bodies and memories. Their old identities have already been declared dead, their wills carried out, etc. This may not help with the social practicalities much, but it would help with the legal ones. I don't think mandating a few decades (subjective time) of schooling/acculturation for the newly revived would be out of the question, either.
23: Your impression is basically correct, plus the odds of that extreme right tail have gotten lower over time as more research clarified how unlikely some of the scenarios were, and as the world has actually made significant progress towards making emissions reductions economically viable in more and more cases.
29: The "Yes" answer seems to rely, among other things, on the idea that a significant number of Trump voters would vote for Biden if Trump endorsed Biden, 1 week before the election, after Biden said he'd pardon Trump if Trump endorsed him. One, I don't think that's true. Two, Trump would also pardon Trump if elected, so this doesn't buy Trump voters anything they wouldn't already have gotten.
34: My initial hypothesis, if this is true, would be the LLMs are better than non-conspiracy-theorists at thinking like conspiracy theorists in order to persuade them, whereas most humans would have trouble staying in the proper mindset. Plausibly this stops working when the "They're using LLMs trained to convince you of lies" conspiracy theory gets off the ground.
9: Legally, I think that's how it works already. If you are declared dead (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presumption_of_death), and you show up again, the consequences mostly don't get unwound: your wife was free to remarry and her marriage doesn't get undone, your will remains executed and your assets distributed, and so on. Your widow can just divorce & remarry you if she wants (which she probably won't), and as for the rest, them's the breaks - not much sympathy for someone who fakes their death or deliberately disappears. No one disappears guiltlessly as a castaway for 5+ years in the modern world.
So, since cryonics patients are all declared legally dead before the cryonics organization will touch the body, that's what would happen by default. You'd just wake up as the old person but de facto, effectively new as all your assets and contracts and liabilities etc are all gone and the slate wiped clean having been declared legally dead centuries before. (Which is why you will be relying on the cryonics patient trust to support you after revival, if necessary.)
Made me think of the South Park "gooback" episode with time travelers taking all our jerbs, and it suddenly hit me that if you revived people 200 years in the future, they probably wouldn't be able to speak the language very well. You'd have to give them a crash course on lingo.
I assumed as much but wasn't 100% sure, thanks!
29: It'd shatter Trump's credibility though, although he *might* just about be able to charm his way through it. Some voters would flip to Biden (most people aren't very political or politically engaged and vote in ways that seem weird to people who are), but a lot more might stay home or vote for RFK jr.
Why do Iowans have such small houses?
My guess is that it's related to old housing stock. Iowa's population is slow growing, so they have a lot of houses left over from the days when houses tended to be built smaller. https://eyeonhousing.org/2023/02/age-of-housing-stock-by-state-4/
My first guess was "log cabins" and a quick google shows lots of (small) offerings in Iowa.
I will happy pay $1,000 for you or Bentham to do your best to come up with an explanation for the shroud of Turin. Consider all the evidence available and then explain what it is. Anyone else want to help finance this?
Have you done any research? A cursory review of the Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shroud_of_Turin) indicates radiocarbon dating shows it is far too new to have been worn by Jesus. Those who believe it authentic doubt the radiometric analysis, but it doesn't explain how.
Yes. Look into the details of that radiocarbon dating. You’ll find that samples taken two inches apart differed in their measurement by over 100 years. All the samples were taken from one area which is easily seen to be visually anomalous, as it was the place where people held it up for viewing and this was repaired. These results were, for some reason, initially withheld and only the summary conclusion was published.
There is also the question of, “how and why did they create a photographic negative, before photography was invented?”
Here’s the relevant academic source:
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Counts-of-radiocarbon-atoms-in-the-Turin-Shroud-subsamples-by-Arizona_tbl1_331956466
From that source:
"it is not possible to affirm that the 1988 radiocarbon dating offers ‘conclusive evidence’ that the calendar age range is accurate and representative of the whole cloth."
But it's quite a leap to say that, even if the estimated age range of AD 1260-1390 interval isn't 95% accurate that the correct age is around 0 AD. Suppose, rather, that the age ought to be around 800 AD, +/- 500 years.
I don't pretend to understand the statistics or methods involved, but it seems like they made an honest scientific effort to analyze the results, which mean the results are less accurate than initially portrayed. I would still think that the most likely explanations for the image are forgery and random chance.
They created a photographic negative after such a technique was invented. Anyone can make a photographic negative nowadays (which actually was the first step in creating a photograph), and such images present a different way of looking at the same thing, which can highlight different things.
You are right that the study being flawed doesn’t show the date as 0, I agree there. But it does suggest that the initial study was flawed, so it’s not useful as evidence for the age of the should as a whole.
I don’t think a honest scientific effort happened if results were hidden for 20 years, and the ambiguity was hidden and replaced with a confident assertion. That sounds like what I’d expect from people who had concern higher than what was true.
As for the negative, You’re not understanding the question. The image on the cloth is barely visible as is. It becomes much more clear when it’s interpreted as a negative. this raises two questions:
- How was the original image created in the first place? There isn’t a known physical process by which the image on the cloth could have been created. Nobody has been able to make a convincing copy. If you think this is wrong, see if you can find a plausible explanation for how the image on the cloth was created, along with a demonstration of someone actually doing this to the same degree of physiological accuracy as on the cloth.
- why would a forgery do this? Why make an image that’s not super convincing, until you use uninvented technology to reveal details that would have been impossible to see for centuries?
Why would god do any of this?
According to link 34 an LLM would probably do a better job of changing your mind than they would
By all means! Ask an LLM what’s unexplained about it.
I haven't read Philosophy Bear's article yet, but I suspect it's the person with a staunch position that benefits from the interaction with an LLM most (Though I can get back to you on that).
I really don't know much about the Shroud & I don't expect talking to an LLM would leave me convinced of the same position as you are.
The Shroud of Turin is a linen cloth bearing the image of a man who appears to have suffered physical trauma consistent with crucifixion. The cloth is approximately 4.4 by 1.1 meters and contains faint images of the front and back of a man's body, along with what appear to be bloodstains.
The primary evidence in favor of the shroud's authenticity includes:
The negative image: The image on the shroud is a negative, which was only discovered when the shroud was first photographed in 1898.
Anatomical accuracy: The image depicts a crucified man with wounds consistent with biblical accounts of Jesus' crucifixion.
Pollen and dirt: Pollen grains and limestone dust found on the shroud are consistent with the flora and geology of Jerusalem.
However, there is also evidence that suggests the shroud may not be authentic:
Carbon dating: In 1988, three independent radiocarbon dating tests dated the cloth to between 1260 and 1390 AD, suggesting it was a medieval forgery.
Lack of historical record: There is no clear historical record of the shroud before the 14th century.
Artistic similarities: The image on the shroud bears similarities to medieval artistic styles and techniques.
Considering the evidence, the most plausible explanation is that the Shroud of Turin is a medieval artistic creation, possibly a devotional object or a forgery intended to be venerated as a holy relic. The carbon dating results, lack of clear historical record before the 14th century, and similarities to medieval art support this theory.
However, some aspects of the shroud, such as the negative image and the anatomical accuracy, are more difficult to explain. It is possible that the creator of the shroud used techniques that are not yet fully understood or that some of the evidence, such as the pollen and dirt, was transferred to the cloth at a later date.
In conclusion, while the Shroud of Turin remains an enigma, the available evidence suggests that it is most likely a medieval creation rather than the genuine burial cloth of Jesus Christ. Further research and analysis may shed more light on this fascinating artifact.
The radiocarbon tests in 1988 were flawed.
The people who ran these tests got wildly different dates, off by hundreds of years. They didn’t originally publish these raw numbers, they had bad agreed to, but only the averages. It took ~ 30 years for them to release the raw data. Here’s the relevant scholarly source:
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Counts-of-radiocarbon-atoms-in-the-Turin-Shroud-subsamples-by-Arizona_tbl1_331956466
Why would committed scholars publish only an average and say “the artifact is clearly false”, and then hide evidence for 30 years?
I think the simple explanation is they measured only the part of the shroud that had been repaired over time, and even this showed so much variation that they hid the results.
None of this explains the negative image, the 3D encoded data, or the grain pollen. If a forgery, someone did this using techniques that we still can’t mimic today, but which would have been invisible when it was ostensibly made.
The statistical analysis presented in the paper does raise some important questions about the 1988 radiocarbon dating of the Shroud of Turin. A few key points:
The raw data from the three labs (Arizona, Oxford, Zurich) shows significant variation and lack of agreement, both between and within the labs. This heterogeneity calls into question whether the samples can reliably be combined into a single date range.
The labs found foreign material like dye, wax, and cotton fibers on the tested samples, suggesting the area may have been contaminated or repaired.
Not publishing the raw data openly at the time, and taking decades to release it, raises concerns about transparency.
As you note, the unusual characteristics of the Shroud's image are still difficult to fully explain.
Caution overstating the implications. The medieval date range is still supported by each lab's individual results, even if there are problems in how they were combined. And the presence of some foreign material does not necessarily invalidate the dating.
The 1988 tests had issues and the raw data shows more uncertainty than was originally conveyed. But medieval origins remain a strong possibility based on the evidence available.
Sure it’s a possibility. What range is considered normal for variation in carbon dating, for samples on the order of a thousand years old?
Regardless of the date, there’s a bunch of other weird stuff in the shroud that doesn’t add up. If it’s a forgery the negative image and the 3d depth data?
Either way, regardless of the why —- how? How did it happen? Why have attempts to recreate the shroud failed to reproduce so many of its weird features?
The typical margin of error for radiocarbon dating depends on the age of the sample and the dating technology used. For a well-preserved organic sample around a thousand years old, modern techniques can usually provide a date range with a 95% confidence interval of about ±50-100 years. So the several hundred years of variation in the 1988 Shroud results does seem unusually large, even considering possible contamination or repair of the tested area. However, even with this variation, the medieval timeframe is still consistently indicated by all three labs.
You're right that the Shroud has characteristics that are difficult to explain, regardless of its age. The negative image, 3D encoding of information, and resistance to simple replication warrant further study.
If the Shroud is medieval, it suggests that the creator used some sophisticated and unconventional techniques to achieve those effects. Various hypotheses involving chemical reactions, gaseous diffusion, or even primitive photography have been proposed, but none have been conclusively demonstrated. It remains an open question how a medieval artisan could have created such an image.
On the other hand, if the Shroud is genuinely ancient, we still face the challenge of explaining how such an image could have been formed by natural processes associated with crucifixion and burial. No other known ancient burial cloth has similar properties.
While these unsolved mysteries are fun, we shouldn't let that override the evidence we do have. The consistent medieval date range from the radiocarbon tests, even with the acknowledged variability, and the lack of conclusive historical references to the Shroud before the 14th century, still point towards a medieval origin as the most likely scenario based on currently available data.
LLM’s do not evaluate evidence and reason in the face of uncertainty. They only predict the next word, which in this case means its claims about the balance of the evidence are just statements about popular consensus.
My belief is, that I don’t know what this is, but I find it very interesting given the numerous unexplained aspects of it. This is the same position as the Catholic Church, by the way. I don’t think there’s any convincing materialist explanation for what this is or how it came about. The radio carbon dating evidence is weak and is consistent with either a fraud from around the time of its discovery, or else a mixture of fibers from different points in time.
(first time commenter)
> 5: [...] Related, from @StatisticUrban - average house size in every US state vs. every European country
I'm deeply sceptical of average house size as an indicator of wealth
1. If you were simply optimising for average house size in the absence of any other metrics, it's very simple to do: just ban building anything small! And isn't that what most of American cities are incidentally doing :p Customer choice is reduced, but the number is higher.
2. Related to 1., it says nothing about space per person, or housing availability on the margin.
3. Note that even Norway has much smaller houses than America, despite being fabulously rich in every other metric otherwise
4. Personally speaking, there comes a point for me where extra space inside a house or flat is a net negative for me, not positive, even all other things considered equal, and that point is below the numbers you see in the American map.
5. (related to 4 and 1) I would gladly trade off space for living in a nice urban area, and most of those big houses are in car-dependent suburbs which I really would rather not live in. Judging by the prominence of the American urbanist movement online and what they say, availability of houses that urbanists like in America is really low compared to Europe.
This isn't to say things can't be bad (the UK housing stock is infamously so), but really you can't use a single number as evidence here.
(nevertheless, the America-Europe gap that appeared in the past 15 years is really embarrassing and I wish that more fellow Europeans woke up to that fact and started screaming asking what went wrong)
"Unfortunately the fog has rolled in and our paths must diverge" is a wonderful line for a breakup. For maximum applicability, it should really be done while standing on a bridge. Downside is that the person broken up with might shove you off that bridge 😀
"Nick Fuentes has accused me of being one of the Jews who controls the new conservative movement"
As the Rightful Caliph, are you *completely* sure this does not come under your aegis?
The Rationalist Caliphate usurped by a Jew? Eliezer must be warned!
This is the funniest thing I have read on the internet all week.
Thanks, wasn't sure if it was too dumb to post.
36. But I thought all safety regulations were written in blood!
Sorry, cheap political crack, but a serious look at why individual safety regulations were written and what their effect is would be welcome. I realize this would be a difficult project.
I have thoughts on a couple of these. First, the British SLBMs. Some of this is cultural (and there was a time when the US would have said the same, before Kennedy and McNamara and their rather odd belief that everyone wanted to blow up the world, while Russia has always been paranoid about such things). But a lot of it is probably also economic. The problem the British have is that they're a rather small island, close to the main enemy, so they may not have the time to get word to their submarines, particularly when they also can't really afford the expensive systems the US has for that, which I talk about in https://www.navalgazing.net/NWAS-Polaris-Part-4. The result is that if they did implement a PAL system like we have, they'd run a very large risk of not actually being able to launch if they needed to.
Second, the Noah Smith thing. I will first establish my bona fides as someone who got this right, on both missile defense (https://www.navalgazing.net/In-Defense-of-Missile-Defense) and the F-35 (literally my first comment on SSC). I think he gets most of the main drivers right, particularly the role that experts working on classified stuff play vs Ted Postol, and I would go further and point out that you're going to see adverse selection in your experts because the defense field pays well and only Ted Postol can't get hired there. (I also disagree that he's smart, but that's a different story.)
I remain somewhat baffled at the lack of any serious effort by the defense industry to get its position out to the wider public, because while a lot of this stuff is moderately difficult to explain, it's not that much more difficult than a couple of other fields I'm familiar with that have done a much better job of making explanations available. (Orbital mechanics, for instance.) I'm doing my best, but I'm one guy doing this in my spare time, and I keep getting distracted by weird stuff from WWII. More thoughts on that at https://www.navalgazing.net/The-Defense-Information-Pipeline, but I'll probably write up a full response soon.
>But also, there might have been some confusion between “block Iranian cruise missiles”, which modern systems are now good at, and “block Russian ICBMs”, which is still impossible (for a good overview of the state of ICBM-blocking tech, see here).
This needs some clarification. A cruise missile is basically an unmanned airplane that crashes into things and blows up. We've had the ability to shoot them down approximately forever, as it's a subset of conventional air defense. What we saw was excellent performance against Iranian intermediate-range ballistic missiles. We didn't see use against ICBMs, but all signs point to us being able to handle them in principle. We do not currently have enough interceptors to do much against an attack by anyone except North Korea, but this is a matter of money, not of engineering. I think we should change this. And no, it won't be destabilizing, because I neither expect nor demand the system stop every warhead.
I just want to take this opportunity to say that your blog is great, I've learned a ton from it, and I recommend it to everyone here.
I still don't buy the rationale of the British subs. I am assuming that their sub commanders still require some sort of positive confirmation that there is a nuclear war going on before they launch their tridents towards Moscow. Otherwise, it would be rather simple to start WW3: just jam the radio connection to London as a sub emerges from a routine dive, wait for the commander to conclude that London does not exist any more and enjoy the fireworks. Even if the crew can detect that they are being jammed, they have to have some policy on what to do in that case. A policy of "do nothing" would destroy the deterrence value, while a policy of "nuke away" would make it rather easy to start WW3.
I get that there may be situations where you order your sub to dive and emerge at some later point somewhere and launch their rockets unless they get an all-clear, but in that case the correct time to send them the the codes to their nukes would be with these instructions.
And as I have written lengthily in another comment, tamper-protection devices seem useful even if someone on board knows the code, you want to make it as hard as reasonably possible for someone to steal your nukes and use them for whatever.
If London is silent, the radios are awash with SOS calls and there's a Russian cruiser bearing down on you, odds are you should crack open the safe and launch. If you surface and London is silent but everything else looks totally normal, maybe go yell at your radio technician as a first step. Put simply, if you don't trust a career navy captain to be able to identify whether there's an apocalyptic war going on, why the hell would you put him in charge of the boat?
Even if you could block all communications with jamming (which you can't over the sort of area an SSBN might be operating in) it's pretty easy to tell the difference between being jammed and there not being any signal to start with. The orders definitely aren't "if you can't hear anything, turn the keys immediately". billymorph said this very well.
As for tamper-protection devices, I'm sure those are installed. For one thing, all missile warheads have very strict safeguards to not go off unless they've been fired from a missile. And I strongly suspect that launching would take several keys held in safes which require combinations known to different people. The difference from US practice is mostly that all of the safe combinations are known to people onboard.
"We do not currently have enough interceptors to do much against an attack by anyone except North Korea, but this is a matter of money, not of engineering. "
Except, at some point, the money problem turns into an engineering problem. If Russia has roughly 8000 warhheads, and each one requires 4 GMD interceptors to have a 97% hit chance, and each interceptor costs $75 million, thats over 2 trillion to shoot them all down. Meanwhile Russia or China can easily produce more, while the US has shown no sign of being able to mass manufacture sophisticated missiles in bulk.
I dispute all of your assumptions. Russia does not have 8000 warheads right now. They were limited to 1550 deployed, and that number can't climb too much higher quickly. Second, why do I need 97% to shoot each one down? I'll take 50% as a start, because that's a lot better than 0%. Third, I probably don't need 4 to 1 because I can launch in waves and retarget. Fourth, if I'm buying 32,000 interceptors, the price is going to come down a lot. And fifth, the defense industrial base hasn't exactly covered itself in glory, but it's better than that. No, we can't get to 32,000 quickly, but we're building hundreds of sophisticated missiles a year, and could add more interceptors to that if we wanted to. Also, adding Russia to "easily produce more" makes it hard to take you seriously.
Likewise, it's hard to take you seriously when you think missile defense being "solved" means something like "if we spend trillions of dollars going all out producing as many interceptors as possible, we could maybe shoot down 50% of Russia's current stockpile, assuming they don't build any more." Is this just trying to "win" by killing more of them than they do of us?
Again, trillions is your numbers, not mine. I'd say 3000 interceptors instead of 32,000, and estimate maybe $10 million per interceptor at that rate, which is 30 billion. I'd consider that a good deal on insurance, particularly because the existence of an effective BMD umbrella is going to vastly change how they do targeting, cutting down on the number of bombs landing on American cities.
What bean says, without specifically endorsing his exact numbers.
Also, winning is nice, but even if you set the goalposts so that "winning" a nuclear war is definitionally or practically impossible, there's still a big difference between the sort of defeat where fifty million Americans are dead and the survivors have been Bombed Back to the Stone Age(*), and the sort of defeat where twenty million Americans are dead and the survivors have been bombed back to the 20th century.
Unless you are 100.00% certain you can avoid fighting a nuclear war, then it is worth spending tens of billions of dollars to hedge against the worst sort of defeat. If you are "only" 99% certain your diplomats will come through with a lasting peace, it is genuinely worth trillions. And it probably wouldn't cost trillions.
* Not literally the stone age, as we've discussed before.
4: Please stop sharing conspiracy theories
5: Higher wages are useless if your country's infrastructure and tax system is so piss poor that you need to spend more on basic necessities. We have economic metrics that account for some of this, such as the difference between income and discretionary income. Free-market propagandists always point to the US having high income, but the same can not be said for discretionary income. For example, if we compare the US to the Netherlands, we see that the US median disposable income is 41K while in the Netherlands it's 36K. But let's compare how much you have to spend in your day to day life and calculate the discretionary income based on that:
________________________US_______Netherlands
income________________41k_______36k
food___________________5.1k_______3.7k
shelter_________________13.2k______13k
clothing________________1.2k_______1.5k
transport______________6.3k_______3.4k
health__________________3.2k_______1.8k
student debt___________2.1k_______0.8k
discretionary income__9.9k_______11.8k
As we see, the case the free-market capitalist makes falls apart once we look at discretionary income, which collectivist and social policies ensure is higher in the Netherlands.
EDIT: Scott has edited the post to make 4 seem less like an endorsement and more an ironic share. This is better, but I still prefer it if these things aren't spread at all.
EDIT 2: Source for the 2021 US-Dutch disposable income vs discretionary income (as well as a lot of other comparisons between median US and Dutch expenditure): https://www.moneymacro.rocks/2021-07-02-dutch-vs-america-middle-class/
How would you justify your demand to stop sharing conspiracy theories? What's the rationale?
Because it's misinformation.
I think a link plus "here is a bizarre and goofy conspiracy theory" doesn't do the same things as "here is a plausible and important thing to consider," and we should think about them differently.
I agree that the latter is worse than the former, though both are bad, but Scott originally didn't do that. In his original post he only said:
"4: Related, breaking news: A popular Substack claims that COVID didn’t happen at all, and that both “lab leak” and “natural origins” are part of the higher-level conspiracy to distract people from the fact that there was never a virus in the first place."
(with the link) He later edited the post to add:
"I wonder if I could even more Substack likes if I one-upped them with a theory that lockdowns never even happened, and it was just one of those Berenstein Bear or Mandela Effect things where everyone has a false memory."
Adding irony.
Proof: https://web.archive.org/web/20240529103717/https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-may-2024
The implication is so obvious that it's not clear to me how anyone at all could have missed it, though I suppose from the comments we know that the number of people misled is at least one.
"Theory X exists, it is a goofy conspiracy theory, some people nonetheless believe it", is not misinformation. Furthermore, I don't see how you can hope to counter goofy conspiracy theories, if you're not willing to say that much.
Scott originally didn't do that. In his original post he only said:
"4: Related, breaking news: A popular Substack claims that COVID didn’t happen at all, and that both “lab leak” and “natural origins” are part of the higher-level conspiracy to distract people from the fact that there was never a virus in the first place."
(with the link) He later edited the post to add:
"I wonder if I could even more Substack likes if I one-upped them with a theory that lockdowns never even happened, and it was just one of those Berenstein Bear or Mandela Effect things where everyone has a false memory."
Adding irony.
Proof: https://web.archive.org/web/20240529103717/https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-may-2024
If you are going to expose your audience to a climate truther conspiracy theorist, you best do it in the form of a debunking.
I think approximately everyone of the subscribers of this blog is intelligent enough to figure out that this is obviously a conspiracy theory Scott doesn't endorse, even based on the first framing. You can relax your tireless watch to protect the uneducated masses from misinformation with your superior judgement.
I saw at least one commenter that didn't. Also readers of this blog can get a little bit conspiracy-loving at times (e.g. lab leak, 'the cathedral' etc), so better to err on the side of not spreading harmful misinformation.
Using median for income but mean for expenses seems misleading.
Data on the median is often not available, do you have reason to believe that median Dutch expenses would consistently be proportionally higher than the average as compared to the US? Because, the opposite seems actually more likely to me.
EDIT: Switched median and average to the correct position. On further reflection I actually think it's probably not going to be much different.
Yes, people usually spend more if they earn more, so since US average income is a lot higher (proportional to median income), I'd expect US average non-discretionary spending to be higher. If one can't find medians for everything, it would make more sense to use means for everything.
Average income is affected a lot by outliers. E.g. Billionaires' disposable income can skew an entire populations average disposable income to be much higher than the median. Things like spending on food are also skewed, but not as much, because while a billionaire may earn millions of times more, they don't spend millions of times more on food. This is known as Engel's law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engel%27s_law
I don't think outliers are that big a deal. There's just not that many of them, and even the biggest outlier, Bill Gates, only has an effect of around $10/year according to https://projects.propublica.org/americas-highest-incomes-and-taxes-revealed/#table-jump-link.
Billionaires was just an extreme example to show the dynamic clearly. Obviously a single billionaire is not going to change a country of hundreds of millions that much (which is why I started with "E.g."), but rich people in general do. The skew is still larger for income. (Engel's law is about more than billionaires, it's about distribution of income in general)
Now do Italy.
That's quite a demand you're making of me. I tried looking for it online, but couldn't find it so I'd have to do it myself. Would you be willing to pay me for it?
> Free-market propagandists [...]
The US is not a particularly free market..
Btw, the US spends more on social welfare per person than eg France (or probably any other country on the planet).
The argument is something like:
1) free-market capitalism is the best economic system
2) the US is more free-market/capitalistic than European countries
3) therefore we expect US-citizens to have more money
4) US-citizens do indeed have more money, look at income
However, 4 doesn't hold, because income is not the same as discretionary income.
The US spends more on welfare *because* they let private players enter (e.g. capitalists industries like private health insurance and private equity in health care), if they just implemented collectivist policies like universal healthcare they wouldn't need to pay as much.
No one has made this argument in this thread. Scott didn't and I haven't seen any other posters do it either. While someone may make it, I am not sure why you are arguing against it here?
Because Scott (like he did before) presents the higher US income, in comparison to the lower European income, as superior, which is misleading because it's missing part of the picture.
Have a look at Singapore, if you want a cheap and efficient healthcare system.
We spend half of what Britain spends (as proportion of GDP) and have no worse health outcomes.
And no, we don't have a single payer system like the NHS. In fact, basically everyone has their own health savings account they use to pay for procedures (plus some catastrophic health insurance on top.)
It's easier to run an efficient health care system when everyone lives within easy commuting distance of everywhere. You could have a single radiology facility for the entire country, and run it constantly at close to 100% efficiency.
But possibly the bigger factor is just wages. A nurse in Singapore makes about $US26,000 a year. In the UK it's more like $US47,000, and in the US it's about $83,000. Whether it's a good or a bad thing for nurses to get paid like middle class professionals is a question I'll leave open.
(Sources https://www.incrediblehealth.com/blog/the-highest-paying-states-for-nurses/ for the US, https://www.nurses.co.uk/blog/a-quick-overview-of-nurses--salaries-in-the-uk/ for the UK, and https://www.glassdoor.com.au/Salaries/singapore-nurse-salary-SRCH_IL.0,9_IM1123_KO10,15.htm for Singapore)
Your first paragraph suggests that London or New York City should have really efficient and cheap healthcare? (And similar for basically any city that's large enough to keep a radiology facility busy.) So why don't they have cheap an efficient health care? Are you blaming the need to subsidise the hill billies, or something else?
One part of why Singapore can have cheap nurses is that Singapore hands out visas to foreigners for those jobs. There are lots of people who would like to come and work as nurses in the US and UK, too.
That would be a bargain for US and UK, and an enormous improvement in pay for the migrants.
But voters in those countries seem more interested in the 'out of sight is out of mind' approach to global poverty.
I find quite misleading to use the Netherlands as an example against "free market capitalism", they are the same fundamental model of the US with some different policy tweaks and vastly more efficient state expenditure and infrastructure.
The fundamental point about standard of living in sounds toh, Americans genuinely have no idea how much they are overpaying for stuff
I notice that there is a 3k difference in mean transport costs; aside from the point made above that greater levels of income mean residents will be inclined to spend more on luxuries like travel and cars, the Netherlands is a poor comparison. It is a tiny country that makes it easy to supply public transport. At least compare to France or Germany on that metric.
If higher discretionary income means people will spend more on travel (Which is probably true. The Dutch are in fact notorious for how much they travel), then that argument would work against you. They have more discretionary income yet spend less on transportation.
Also, the US has worse public transport even in places where there is higher density, e.g. almost all of their cities.
The argument isn't that the US is solely capitalistic, but rather that the US is *more* capitalistic; the Dutch state expenditure is more efficient *because* it is less privatized and more publicly owned, e.g., public transport.
That's an interesting point, and in some cases I'm inclined to agree, however I still feel like the free-market vs interventionism is the wrong framing, and you are trying to shoehorn the issue at hand into it fir ideological reasons.
In both cases you have the state using taxpayer money to fund roughly the same stuff. One way of doing so works better, yes, but it's a matter of precise policy choices, not of macro systems
But it's not a shoehorn, and it's not roughly the same stuff; the difference between private and public is central and substantial; e.g., publically funding a public transit system, like metros, instead of every individual owning a private car (and in fact, many Dutch city centers now have restrictions on cars) is the main reason that urban transport is cheaper for the Dutch.
If you are including household level expenses like housing and food, you need to look at household income as well. A small minority of people in the US live alone (either without family or roommates) so looking at individual incomes is not represativate.
Additionally, the US government has very robust economic statistics that it publishes. We dont need to look at whatever money macro is and its odd data sources. Check out this data from the U.S. BUREAU OF LABOR STATISTICS:
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cesan.nr0.htm
I don't know how this compares to the Dutch numbers, your conclusion may be the same, but these are better numbers to use.
The linked analysis does in fact analyse this, but even if it didn't, a small minority of people in the Netherlands *also* live alone, in fact in very similar numbers as the US (14.7% vs 17.4% in 2018). It's better form to use the same dataset when available, like the OECD, because you then have the same methodology and you're comparing two countries directly. And when not available, well I'm sorry to say, but Money and Macro does in fact use data from the U.S. BUREAU OF LABOR STATISTICS in his analysis.
In fact, the very first link in that article links to data from the U.S. BUREAU OF LABOR STATISTICS
The reason to use household income is that some expenses, like rent/mortgage, are paid at a household level. Median gives us an idea of the "typical" experience. In both countries the typical experience is to live in a household with more than one person (and in this US this means more than 1 income, I assume this is true in the netherlands as well).
Yes the article links to the BLS, but uses minor data points instead of using the larger data sets like the one i linked that already do the analysis of cost breakdowns.
Because, like I said, they're economists and prefer to use the same dataset where possible. Yes, rent would be split in two (the other categories not) so just cut it in half for both of them, which would change the size of the lead but not more than that. If there's some small change in expenditure for the other categories it would also be applied to both, the size of the lead could change, but the lead would remain. I mean it might be different for different genders since rent isn't always split equally, and expenditure habits might be different so for a perfect picture we would have to have access to more complex analysis (e.g. feminist economics, household economics...), but we don't really have that data, and based on what we do have I suspect that the Netherlands would perform better there too. If you want an analysis of a shared household, section 5 is about those expenditures. He concludes (and I agree) that it's still better in the Netherlands.
The fact that capitalism allows more ppl to become high earners (much higher mean) is part of its appeal.
The numbers on these categories also arent basic needs, discretionary spending is part of it.
Americans have more cars and bigger houses and thats part of what makes their standard of living better.
37. I served in the infantry. The tactics of Israel's army in this conflict are completely unremarkable. Boringly conventional. In any urban conflict, you'd expect half or more of the buildings in the area of operations to be destroyed nowadays. For example, in the 2nd Battle of Fallujah, of the 50k buildings in the city, 10k were completely destroyed and 30k damaged by the US Marines over just one month of fighting against more poorly armed guerillas than Hamas. This is because a) assaulting buildings to take them intact is extremely negative EV when the enemy doesn't care about preserving their own buildings and habitually wires them with IEDs that blow them up anyway when your men enter and b) destroying buildings is much easier, cheaper and safer nowadays with precision weaponry. It's been preferred to neutralize enemy urban positions by fire rather than assault them whenever possible since at least WW2, but now it's more preferred and more possible. I think it's poorly understood by civilians how necessarily horrifying urban combat is.
But even if Israel's tactics are completely normal, that doesn't mean that they have a strategy. Their tactics are ruining them strategically. It is probably unavoidable for this level of devastation if Israel wants to force a military defeat on Hamas. But such devastation of Gaza will also destroy Israel, and Hamas knows it. I think that Israel's leaders believe otherwise. This isn't the first time people have gotten really really mad at them over Palestinian deaths, after all. They've weathered all the previous times just fine. Why would this time be different, especially since the provocation by Hamas this time was so clear? Maybe they're right and everyone will just forget about it once the fighting dies down, but I believe that this time really is different and they're making a horrible mistake.
Yes! Hamburg+ levels of destruction are routine and unavoidable in modern urban warfare where both sides decide to give battle over an extended period, and this fact is not well appreciated yet outside of the military. Look at other recent urban battles. Grozny, Mariupol, Sarajevo, etc. If both sides fight a city is rapidly ruined.
I'm confused by how you think this will "destroy Israel", or more specifically how it would destroy Israel *more* then leaving around an armed group that periodically invades and tortures thousands of israelis to death.
Would doing nothing and turning Palestine into a pariah state with a mined DMZ ala North Korea have been a better strategy? It would not stop rocket attacks but it would have maintained international good will fwiw. I think playing the victim and pursuing full isolation might have been an option.
Is playing the victim a thing in Israeli culture? I’ve read many pieces that say this is a product of Christianity, we literally deified a victim.
Good will never lasts. Did Israel get good will when it removed all its settlers and soldiers and left Gaza in 2005? Maybe, I don't remember. I do remember what happened after that - in 2007 Hamas came to power in Gaza and started launching wars against Israel every couple years. The number of people dying on both sides skyrocketed compared to before the withdrawal. Did anyone remember their good will from 2005? I don't think so.
This is basically what Israel though they had done before Oct 7th! They never anticipated that Hamas had the capabilities try to infiltrate Israeli territory. The Netanyahu stance on Gaza was that you could just ignore the rockets, respond with some light bombing, and mainly just wall off Gaza, but no one feels safe doing that now.
What if the US stops vetoing UN security council resolutions against Israel? It's vetoed more than 50 so far. How would Israel do under UN-imposed sanctions? Could Israel survive as a literal pariah state, like North Korea except without a friend next door like China?
Hamas cannot destroy Israel, or even seriously harm Israel with its attacks. Yes, every death from Hamas rockets and kidnappings is an outrage and a great evil, but they cannot topple the country. Israel has the absolute right to defend itself and to strike back in self defense. But that right should be exercised wisely. What they are doing now does not seem wise to me, or at best it's a huge gamble.
I doubt the rest of the world starts treating Israel like North Korea just because of that. Israel existed just fine for decades without the American alliance, and those UN votes are mostly just symbolic appeasement to petrostates (which honestly don't even care that much anymore). The left gets frothing insane about Israel, but it's not nearly that universally powerful and even europe is starting to get over it.
This may be optimistic. Israel is very, very unpopular outside of the US (can't find a good source from the last couple of months, this is the best but doesn't properly link through to the Morning Consult poll: https://time.com/6559293/morning-consult-israel-global-opinion/ ). It also probably doesn't have much depth of countervailing goodwill among governments that are currently friendly towards it, particularly if US policy shifts, and it's not really a significant trade partner for anyone.
Absent US support, governments in Europe and the developing world could probably win votes/public support by kicking Israel, and probably wouldn't gain a lot from helping it. From that position, pretty massive sanctions can flow almost absent-mindedly. Autarky never works for anyone, and wouldn't mix well in the longer terms with Israeli politics; someone's going to have to eat the costs of lost trade on that kind of scale, and Israel has unusually large inter-communal economic fissures (eg. Haredi/Secular; German/Russian/Misrahi).
At the moment, any European country that sanctioned Israel beyond a very narrow band (exports of arms, possibly narrowly tailored settlement-related sanctions) would face a huge American backlash, but that's their only major restraint. Israel also has no alternative sponsor, given lack of popular support in the EU (which also lacks a meaningfully unified foreign policy), China's diplomacy being totally at odds with doing so and Russia being a bit busy at the moment.
Israel depends on their survival being an American red line. By contrast, they probably could survive indefinitely with Hamas ruling Gaza given it's doubtful Hamas could hit any harder than they already have. Consider that Hamas has two paths to victory. The first, bleeding out Israel by making life unliveable (cf. ZANU, IRA etc) probably isn't achievable for them. The second (forcing a series of crackdowns to drive a wedge between Israel and the US public) can only work if Israel lets it. Israel, by contrast, probably wins if it lasts long enough.
Israel's odds of survival might increase if they can reduce the Palestinian population, which may be the point of the current Gaza operation, but I don't think they can exercise the freedom of action necessary to do so without a suicidal break from America.
Keeping US support should rationally be the sole focus of Israel's foreign policy, and a guiding light of their defence policy. If that means leaving Gaza, they should leave Gaza.
I doubt that holds (hatred for Israel comes mostly from elitist leftist circles). But more fundamentally, Israel just isn't the sort of place that would be okay with sentencing thousands of its own people to be gruesomely tortured to death for a two point GDP gain.
I suspect Israel would end up more like Taiwan than North Korea in this context. North Korea has almost nothing anyone else wants to buy; Israel has an awful lot of high-tech industry selling things that lots of people want to buy. And there isn't an influential North Korean diaspora spread across the Western world. Probably some pious Western European countries would refuse to do business with Israel, but they'd buy from whatever third party bought stuff from Israel and plastered "Made in Not Israel" stickers all over it.
Quite possibly Taiwan, because Taiwan isn't a member of the UN and is pretty big on the whole internatiional trade and commerce thing.
Re. 3 OK, so let's say there was no lab leak, whatever. What interests me is a discussion about whether there's a sane cost/benefit argument for not banning gain-of-function wholesale. He doesn't really touch this, just mentions in passing how all this unreasonable panic caused a chilling effect for actually useful research, like vaccines. But that's dodging the real question, everybody sane agrees that vaccines are good, but what is GoF good for?
Fwiw, I was convinced by that rationally speaking podcast episode that it is a bad idea. http://rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/136-should-scientists-try-to-create-dangerous-viruses-marc-lipsitch/
To clarify, "it" being "attempting GoF research" or "banning GoF research"?
Yes, I meant GoF being the bad idea, banning it seems fine.
I am a bit concerned that the household income difference between the US and North Europe is being inflated by US householdings just being larger, containing more adult children and retired parents.
Can’t find very good stats on the spot, but according to OurWorldinData, the share of single person households in 2018 in the US was 28% vs 44% in Denmark.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/one-person-households-vs-gdp-per-capita?tab=table&showSelectionOnlyInTable=1&country=DNK~USA~GBR
Also in 2021 the number of 18-34 years olds living with their parents was 33% in the US vs 16% in Denmark
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/05/03/in-the-u-s-and-abroad-more-young-adults-are-living-with-their-parents/
This might actually be because welfare states provide young people and retired people with a better chance of living in their own low-income household, which clearly many of them prefer, but which artificially drives down the median household income.
On the other hand, in Southern Europe this is reversed, meaning that the actual difference with the US might be greater than expected from the map.
Maybe also the US has more homeless people? That is people with no household.
Actually a very valid point. Scandinavia has very good records of everybody in living in the country, so you will get counted in the stats even if you live on the street (your identity number will still be in the system, even if you have nothing to do with any government office). But in a country where people who have no official income (homeless people, illegal immigrants etc) doesn't leave a paper trail they are probably a lot more likely to get overlooked in calculations like these.
What's stopping Europeans from living with their parents or roommates, and having more kids? Seems like they are leaving money on the table.
What is stopping them is subsidies for students, subsidies for unemployed or part time employed people and subsidies for retirement homes. Young and old people in Scandinavia mainly live on their own because they prefer to do so and can.
The preference is of course a part of the genereal socialphobia of Scandinavians, living with your parents until your thirty is seen as less of a problem in South Europe.
So it is just a question of how you choose to spend your money. BUT, if it is part of the reason why households seems richer in the US, then we just have a plain statistical misinterpretation.
Imagine if we instead calculated Median Income for people with jobs. Then there is a big depression where many low paid lose their jobs and have to go live on the street. In that case the median income for people in jobs might actually go up, while the entire country is actually poorer. The same thing happens if young people with low income have to move in with their parents, so their 'households' doesn't get counted. Nobody has become richer when they did so, but the median income pr household have gone up.
Denmark (and all of Scandinavia) has small households while southern Europe has large households. So you cannot extrapolate from Denmark to Europe in general.
You are absolutely right! I think using household income mean we are underestimating northern Europe and Japan and overestimating southern Europe. And per capita income might do the opposite. I still haven't found the perfect metric for comparing countries
"Some AI people I know think this is probably a result of Google putting impossible demands on their AI"
Stanley Kubrick made a movie like this once...
Regarding 5 (the house size graph), the 2 obvious things I'd like to look at before making a comment would be:
1. The Urban-Suburban-Rural split of the population, and the average home size for each subgroup.
2. How many children are there? I assume more children would put upward pressure on home sizes
>You’ve probably all followed recent OpenAI drama, but again out of duty
Nope, you're my main window into this world, thanks for continuing to share this kind of stuff.
#34 - People seem very resistant to ideological prodding. Humans trying to convince them of things almost always have an agenda, which would naturally produce a defense mechanism (notably not believing what is being said).
Perhaps an AI, if believed to be neutral or just sharing facts, doesn't trigger that mechanism? I think the same would be true of other sources that conspiracy theorists would trust. Like, even if they don't trust Wikipedia maybe they would trust a 1980s Encyclopedia Britannica or something else they think isn't tainted by their ideological enemies or the people running the conspiracy.
This could be a significant factor. Even animals know that conspecifics have competing incentives. Humans have several decades of experience 'mechanical integrity' building assumptions on non-bias.
Fun example: the original automated (mechanically) telephone exchange, the Strowger exchange, was invented because Strowger, a funeral director, suspected that the human operators at the phone company were directing his calls to one of his competitors.
People tolerate behaviour from websites that they would instantly be suspicious of in a door-to-door salesman.
What's not obvious to me is whether the interface of LLMs - chat - which is not familiar except with actual humans - really gives off enough machine vibes to allay suspicion.
"On Nov 28 '07, Paris Hilton denied being signed up for cryonics. Oh well"
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PNXjsEGBpR2WjTdsH/congratulations-to-paris-hilton
And in more religion news!
We really have to get that Pope Alignment Research project off the ground 😀
Apparently Pope Francis is in trouble (or not) for very recent remarks about gay men entering seminaries.
As in telling bishops the (apparent) Italian equivalent of "There are enough cute twinks* there already, we don't want any more".
Now, a few years back, the media were falling all over themselves to praise Francis for being so broad-minded about gay matters (the "who am I to judge?" quote taken out of context).
Well, despite all that, and despite some, um, very liberal directions he's taken, Francis is not as 21st Century Now Pope as presented, and there is some usual reaction about "homophobic remarks".
But! As others have pointed out on other social media:
https://www.tumblr.com/fedtothenight/751755226404552704?source=share
"Everyone is focussing on the wrong aspect here. It's not "the pope used homophobic language this is unacceptable". It's "someone has been teaching the pope Italian gay slang".
If I go by what I'm reading about all this, the term he used is a slang term exclusively(?) used by gay Italians, so the question to be asked is "where did a Spanish-speaking straight guy learn this term?"
https://www.tumblr.com/frociaggine/751707639766024192?source=share
"I can't stress enough how much in my decades living gayly in Italy I have never ever heard a straight person say frociaggine. Only the gays say it. WHO TAUGHT HIM"
I need to ask any native Italians/Italian speakers: do you know the term "frociaggine" and what does it mean?
More respectable sources, for the elevated and educated amongst us (unlike the rest of us unruly peasant Papists):
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/05/28/world/pope-francis-apologizes-reports-anti-gay-slur-intl/index.html
"The newspaper articles, which were translated from Italian, claimed the Pope had said there is “frociaggine” – an offensive noun which translates into English approximately as “f*****ry” – in some of the seminaries.
...The Corriere della Sera newspaper stated that the Argentine pope, who speaks Italian as a second language, may not have been aware of how offensive his language was, adding that the remark was greeted with incredulous laughter by the bishops.
A source close to the Pope told CNN that the phrase could also be understood as there is a “gay climate” in the seminaries."
Seeing as how we've reverted to the 18th century in what no-no words cannot be printed publically, the offensive term SPOILERS ALERT PERSONS OF SENSITIVE AND NERVOUS DISPOSITIONS GET READY TO CLUTCH YOUR PEARLS is "faggotry".
*Shout out to r/Drama for this useful term to give the savour of what the original Italian is, seemingly
The correct translation would indeed be the latter you mention. As per the corriere della sera article, the Pope's family is of Piedmonts origin, and therefore things that he learned as "Italian" might have instead been slang. But "frociaggine" is definitely not something only gay Italians use, I'd call it quite common (for as common as needing to talk about an atmosphere of diffuse gayness can be)
I agree, the translation is correct, and though I don't expect this particular word to be very common, its meaning is fairly transparent -- it's the standard Italian very-rude-word-for-homosexual-man combined with a suffix that makes abstract nouns. I don't think you need to be deep into any particular subculture to use it, certainly not to understand it.
It would be even worse if the pope had learned such language by reading /r/Drama. Next thing you know, he'll be talking about "bussy". (Sort of derived from Italian, if I am understanding the etymology)
I would love a list of things which had thousands or millions of observers but most people now don't think they occured.
The only one I can think of is "the miracle of the Sun" at Fatima.
Giant waves are the reverse-- thousands of people or more claimed they existed, but scientists didn't believe in them until there was evidence from instruments.
How about encounters with Satan, as testified by numerous witnesses in witchcraft trials in the Early Modern Era?
Re: #24, the OpenAI stuff: it was really telling to me during last fall's aborted coup attempt that Altman held the support of 90% of OpenAI employees. That's essentially consensus support for functionally ditching the company's unique structure which was meant to ensure the supremacy of safety concerns over their mission. (Presumably even more of a consensus exists now that a bunch of its top safety people have left.) And it's notable that the Board's stated concerns at the time - that there was a "loss of trust" in Altman - are essentially corroborated by the recent reporting. Whatever rationalizations the employees there may have about what they're doing, there really can't be any justified belief now that OpenAI has a meaningful commitment to safety. Combine Altman's actions (marginalizing safety; habitual deception) with his stated ambitions (more or less seizing control of the global economy), and add the consensus support for Altman within the company, and you get a picture of a rogue entity without any real internal restraints that is willing to gamble the whole future of humanity for its own agenda. (Whether this agenda is well-intentioned or not hardly matters.)
Would it be too much to ask for a regulatory intervention that had, say, 10% of the force of the DEA's actions against medication factories in #36?
Sam Altman is definitely giving me a Sam Bankman-Fried vibe these days. But the apparently high level of support from OpenAI devs does complicate that assessment, because they presumably know SA much better than I do. So either I'm wrong and SA isn't nearly as bad as he seems from here, or the whole organization is rotten, and I don't have a good way to figure out which.
"But the apparently high level of support from OpenAI devs does complicate that assessment, because they presumably know SA much better than I do."
May I refer you to the links Scott provided about Will MacAskill, and how EA is falling all over themselves to say "Well gosh, *we* had no idea SBF was up to no good when he was throwing money at us and we were happily scooping it up with both hands!"
If Sam Altman is found doing something really really naughty, I see no reason the OpenAI lot won't do the same - "well golly gumdrops, how were we supposed to know? the cunning blighter pulled the wool over all our eyes!"
Reasons to discount the views of OpenAI employees on this question:
1. Altman is by all accounts very persuasive and engaging (or socially manipulative, if you want to put some stank on it). He's probably a pleasant presence around the office - a "nice guy" who you feel you can trust.
2. This is a group self-selected to work under Altman; and for that matter probably selected by Altman himself to some degree. So they'll tend to be favorably disposed toward him.
3. They have enormous incentive to buy into the company's vision, for all sorts of financial, social, and emotional reasons.
4. Some high-profile employees have in fact recently left; for that to be happening at all at a rapidly ascending company that is at the heart of an emerging industry is a pretty notable exception to the rule.
And then on the other hand there's all this public information that points a pretty clear arrow in the other direction...
Given that Altman successfully saw off the coup attempt against him and indeed turned it around on those who hoped to oust him by having them ousted instead, and that Ilya then later decided he needed to spend more time with his geraniums or whatever, and given other reports of how he operated in previous businesses (all online allegations so no independent verification if these were so), I have no problem at all believing he was being economical with the actualité, as the man said.
Guy is a successful businessman who is hoping to surf on the waves of immense money-making via AI. I have no expectations of higher ethics than the bare minimum not to incur legal penalties if he can at all get away with it. And "nice nest egg you have there, be a shame if it got smashed if you don't play ball with us" is no more than the standard operating procedure I'd expect from a large corporation. Why anyone still thinks OpenAI has anything to do with lofty goals and idealism beyond lucre, I have no idea.
I think another factor is that he may treat subordinates differently than peers. If your job involves taking direction from him, he has no real need to deceive you. Whereas if your job is to keep an eye on him, to steer him, or even to employ him (as with the Board), he might find it useful to engage in deceptive behaviors in order to keep doing whatever it is that he wants to do.
The high level support from OpenAI devs can basically be explained by them fearing they'd lose their equity, which for most of them would be valued in millions of dollars
Is it SBF or Zuckerberg vibes? I think there is a general tension between safety vs non-safety people in every organization and reaching the healthy balance is important and very difficult. Because my alignment is not with the safety folks I'm not super concerned about the changes but expect a constant stream of Meta like drama from now on.
38. There's a great line from the Americans about Reagans’s anti-ballistic missile program:
“It is incredible. From the Latin incredibilis."
37: "I tried to get a good handle on Israel’s military strategy here and the consensus seems to be that it isn’t very strategic, there’s no endgame."
I'll offer an endgame-prediction:
At some point the situation on the ground will revert back to something quite similar to the situation before the Hamas attack October 7th. Probably with more hate among the political actors on all sides, but basically similar.
How about non-political actors, i.e. ordinary people? Gazans have nowhere to go, because no other country will grant them entry in significant numbers. So they are stuck, regardless of how they think and feel. And also regardless of how the Israeli government thinks and feels.
The only ordinary people who have other options, are ordinary Israelis. Since there are lots of countries willing to have Israeli Jews as citizens. In particular young, secular Israeli Jews. And (to my knowledge) the Israeli government puts no restrictions on emigration.
Thus (again to predict) the main, and likely only, long-term effect of the present debackle is that we will see an uptick in emigration from Israel. After the dust has settled.
It's a falsifiable prediction, assuming time-series data on Israeli emigration exist.
...I have been trying to get data on Israeli emigration (and immigration) for other reasons, related to broader demographic questions, but data on emigration is not easy to find. If anybody has a link, or a tip to where to apply for access to data on emigration, I would be grateful for such information.
The situation before 10/7 had Hamas controlling Gaza and