"And most law firm partners are also conservative on most issues except LGBTQ and abortion, that’s why the political viewpoints they single out for hiring bans are on the left, not the right"
Can you explain this? I found Woodgrains' clerkship-based explanation intuitive but it feels like it doesn't go all the way to explaining why this would be true.
"Socially liberal, fiscally conservative" views? Gay marriage doesn't really affect them or their multi-million/billion dollar clients, but taxation and the like certainly do. Big difference between "Yes, I'll draw up the pre-nup for your daughter's wedding to her girlfriend" and "Yes, I'll set up the foundation for your children so they can avoid estate taxes". That's why hiring someone who is happy to work on the latter is more likely than "In college, I was involved in the Tax The 1% Activist Movement because I firmly and fervently believe there should be no billionaires" type, even if both are happy to pin up the rainbow flags for Pride Month.
You have to remember who it is that big law firms represent - largely major corporations being accused of misconduct (sometimes by other corporations). I think if you looked at the partners of, e.g. plaintiff-side class action firms, you'd see a different set of folks.
This is almost diametrically opposed to my own experiences graduating from an Ivy League law school a few years back. Law is a notoriously left-leaning industry. Fedsoc members were actively discriminated against in law firm hiring, to the point where we were told to make two resumes and only give the "full" one to specifically pre-vetted employers who wouldn't just immediately trash our applications (we literally had a secret list of firms we passed around). Literally every right-of-center law firm partner I've ever met was eventually forced out and is now either at a boutique or in-house. And this is on top of the fact that there were no resources available for conservative-leaning public interest, no right-leaning career counselors to advise us, etc.
To the extent you've seen conservative lawyers tend to punch above their weight career-wise, it's probably because only the rock stars feel secure enough to be open about their politics, so they stand out more.
I think it is a little bit of a 'just so' story; if we believe St. Jerome, what wealthy Roman widows (even Christian ones) were doing was *not* "oh dearie me, I will be forced to get re-married and then all my property goes to my husband, let me set up a scam with my local priest" but in fact, enjoying being merry widows with full control of their own money:
"Of all the ladies in Rome, the only ones that caused scandal were Paula and Melanium, who, despising their wealth and deserting their children, uplifted the cross of the Lord as a standard of religion. Had they frequented the baths, or chosen to use perfumes, or taken advantage of their wealth and position as widows to enjoy life and to be independent, they would have been saluted as ladies of high rank and saintliness."
- Yeah the monetary support of women is what I've heard the most about- it's traditionally thought that Jesus and the disciples were funded by wealthy women supporters. The Apostle Paul is thought to have supported himself by tentmaking, though that is an exception since tentmaking is silent work - he can preach while doing it. I haven't heard a lot about women being significant proselytizers.
-Observationally, young churches and cult movements are heavily skewed towards women. It's a common stereotype that the wife will bring the kids to church while the dad will stay home.
-It's mentioned in a caption in Ruxandra's post but it is worth repeating that Constantine's mother was a Christian. Constantine himself had some sort of experience before a battle, his conversion is rather famous
-Point against the use of historiographical data is that when Constantine made Christianity officially legal (not the official religion, that was Theodosius 70yrs later) only 10% of Romans were Christian.
-I think the elites thought Constantine was indulging too far into his own favorite cult when he started making Christianity more official and expected it to be a fad.
-Another point is that Constantine didn't convert to Christianity for political reasons - actually Christianity was fairly unpopular among the elite and the intelligentsia, who wanted to stick with the old religions. Christianity was mainly adopted by lower (though not destitute) classes.
Funny enough I've also been on an Early Christianity binge / biblical textual analysis. If anyone else is interested, Bart Ehrman is the rockstar secular scholar in this field (lost his faith over the problem of suffering).
If you squint you might see patterns of female/long-term/persuasive soft-power strategies working under the radar of male/short-term/coercive hard power strategies.
Scott, do you think you have moved politically to the right recently? That's what I am getting from here. At least, you have moved to the right on issues involving Jews and Israel and you seem more willing to directly link Hanania, Sailer, Greer, etcetera.
I would like to think I've always been willing to link good articles by right wing people when they happen.
I did decide not to link a terrible article trying to argue against race-mixing (even though I really wanted to argue against the article) because people would freak out and blame me for acknowledging its existence enough to argue about it. But aside from being fun to argue against it didn't really have any value, and I'd like to think I'm willing to take the flak when it's worth it.
It's just a general sense I get from your links and so on, and just your overall commentary on the topic and the tone. In your Neo-reactionary FAQ you called Netanyahu crazy, and after 10/7 you said that the best outcome, even for Palestinian welfare, is for Israel to totally remove Hamas. These two statements aren't technically incompatible but they are Bayesian signals of something and of your System 1 reactions on the topic. You used to post about Dianne Feinstein and her husband wanting to shut down the speech of anti-Israel people. Now it seems that you are saying that left-wing antisemitism is a much more serious problem than you realized. I agree of course that strictly speaking this is separate from the issue of what's actually happening in the region, but it's a Bayesian signal of something.
I think that many of the things the Israeli right have said about the Palestinians have unfortunately been proven correct. 10-15 years ago, a lot of centrist liberals believed that if Netanyahu was replaced by a center-left guy, they could sign a two-state deal with the PA. I think recent events have disabused people of this notion. The Israeli right has always claimed that even if a Palestinian leader wanted to make peace, they would never do it because their society has too many extremists and they would get shot or something. I didn't believe this 10 years ago but now I do. I think that aside from the conflict, their early rollout of vaccines, their embrace of lab-grown meat, their embrace of reprotech and high TFRs, their targeting by woke, and the weakening influence of Evangelical Christians have endeared them more to rationalists.
I think you were more scared of being associated with the "HBD" crowd a while ago. Remember the parable of lightning? You beat around the bush quite a bit. Openly linking to Hanania and to Steve Sailer's substack is a huge vibe shift. Back in your SSC days you weren't so willing to post links to content by these more right-wing people. I mean, when you interacted with Yarvin it was to argue with him. Back on SSC were you linking articles by Steve Sailer and saying they were interesting? Granted, linking to substack is a lot better than linking to unz. I would not want to link to the un z.c om trash fire either. I put spaces to not link to it. I think that HBD type views have gotten more mainstream recently. Noah Smith is now interacting with I/o on twitter.
To be clear I view all of these "rightward shifts" as a positive development. I definitely support Israel and I definitely support open discussion of group differences. Of course I would love to wave a magic wand to remove Palestinian rejectionism and to increase black genotypic IQ to 100. I also think one can certainly make many legitimate criticisms of Israel. And one can certainly make many legitimate criticisms of the HBD crowd.
I'm too emotionally invested in my day in, day out, work to end the desire for war in the holy land (not the war, but even the very desire for it -- see my substack for details) to feel like addressing that particular issue, but I think Scott has always been willing to engage with Steve Sailer in reverse proportion to how much of a pariah Steve happen to be generally considered at the time.
Luck recently fortuned Steve when out-of-the-blue a young man of means and skill decided to professionally go about bringing Steve out of damnation with professional help in the form of book tours, PR work, etc.
That doesn't make Steve's work any more or less valuable, accurate, or moral but it gave Scott the safety to quote him without risking the moronically "moral" mob's ire quite as surely.
I think you might be collapsing everything into one left-right dimension too hard. I still believe it's bad that Hamas is committing terrorist attacks, bad that Israel is stealing land in the West Bank, bad that lots of Gazans are being killed, and also bad that people in Columbia seem to be spitting on Jews.
See my newest video (please). As a non-Yeshiva but through-and-through Jew, I think you will find my past and present lived experience as a "Yeshiva Jew" pretty interesting.
I agree that you have always thought all of these things. But there's a matter of context and emphasis. The Israeli right has always said that it the conflict was never about the creation of a Palestinian state but rather the destruction of Israel. 10 years ago this seemed dumb, and I didn't believe it, but I think in 2024 we can safely say that they were right. It's unfortunate that they are right.
Your view definitely is or at least codes as pro-Israel, and in Israel would be considered a center-left Zionist view. Virtually no one who codes as "pro-Palestine" acknowledge that Hamas is bad and that what's going on in the US campuses is bad. Many people who are pro-Israel are unhappy about the settlement enterprise and would rather Gazan civilians not die. You could go to Israel or to a pro-Israel gathering and say "it's bad that Gazan civilians are dying, and settlements are a bad idea" and no one would shun you. I wouldn't go to an encampment or go to the West Bank and say that it's bad Hamas commits terrorism and that there is a horrible antisemitism problem in Columbia.
I consider myself very pro-Israel and agree with your views. Everyone except Kahanist types thinks it's bad that lots of Gazan civilians are being killed, and would rather they not be. Yes I think that Israel needs to take out Hamas, but the fewer civilians are killed in the war the better. Israel should try and jail soldiers that commit war crimes.
Half of Israelis and most of Israel's international supporters (including me) oppose the settlement project. By "stealing land" do you mean just building settlements, or do you mean the ones that are on private Palestinian property are illegal under *Israeli* law? The vast majority of settlements are not on private Palestinian land. I'm not sure how the first one qualifies as "theft". Theft from whom? I don't think you can say "the Palestinians" collectively own Area C in any meaningful sense. To clarify I definitely think both are bad, though the second is obviously worse (and is prosecuted by Israel to some extent, see Amona, though not enough). I would say that the first is more akin to gerrymandering or illegal immigration (also bad) than theft. So again, I consider myself very pro-Israel and I don't find anything to disagree with among your opinions. I quibble with calling all settlement construction "theft" but I certainly agree that it's bad in any case. And I think Israel needs to defeat Hamas, but of course I agree that it's bad that civilians are dying.
> Many people who are pro-Israel are unhappy about the settlement enterprise and would rather Gazan civilians not die.
Unhappy in the sense of "This is a really awful thing that keeps me up at night and makes me think that we're the bad guys", or unhappy in the sense of "Guys this is really Bad Hasbara you know,,, could we at least settle the West Bank in peace and kill Gazans slowly, because it's not doing any favors to the image of Israel right now" ? Because the 2 attitudes are different, radically different.
I have seen plenty of r/Israel commenters and pro-Israel commenters in general "unhappy" in the second sense, just a fleeting lightning-quick blink-and-you-will-miss-it acknowledgement that - why, yes - Israel *IS* a colonial power that *does* steal land from Palestinians and kill them and burn them alive and then laugh about them on Television and TikToks with millions of viewers. Now that we have quickly established that, let's go back to why Israel Is The Only Victim In The Middle East because... because... the US delayed an arms shipment once or twice in the last year.
Before you object that first sense of being unhappy is an isolated demand for rigor, I feel the same way - as an Arab - about the Mizrahim Jews that the Arabs forced/harassed out of Arab societies through the 1950s and the 1960s and the 1970s and well into the 1990s.
> You could go to Israel or to a pro-Israel gathering and say "it's bad that Gazan civilians are dying, and settlements are a bad idea"
No you couldn't, unless the protest or gathering is by a pro-peace group like Standing Together. You couldn't even do that in the privacy of your social media or workplace, here's an Israeli teacher being shunned and reprimanded because he verbally supported refusing to serve in IDF units in the West Banks https://archive.ph/WFmPw. Here's a journalist https://archive.ph/l5fdQ who says she has been called a "Whore" and a paid shill for participating in peace protests since she was 12.
Oh don't get me wrong, there is not even an equivalent to Standing Together in Arab world, all the Arabic initiatives for peace are top-down dictator decisions for pragmatic reasons, intensely opposed by mainstream thinking, which is at best indifferent to Israelis and Palestinians in the sense of "Let them kill each other see if I care", and at worst incredibly and unbelievably antisemitic.
So Israeli society does win the somewhat low-stakes contest of being better and more peaceful overall than a lot of Middle Eastern societies and cultures that I know of, but the problem comes when you try to compare the Israeli society with serious competition like a Western Pro-Palestine culture.
> Everyone except Kahanist types thinks it's bad that lots of Gazan civilians are being killed
You seem to have optimized the phrasing of this one to imply "Everyone except a few fringe individuals who don't have any real power". When the literal Head of State of the Israel parades a map of "Greater Israel" in front of the UN showing Gaza and the West Bank as "Israel" [1], and more recently when Israel's Finance Minister says "It's sad that the world won't let us starve 2 million Gazans to death, even though it's moral" [2]. I don't think you get to play the old "A Few Bad Apples" card anymore.
> Israel should try and jail soldiers that commit war crimes.
Or make a show of doing it for the sake of the cameras, you wouldn't mind too much anyway.
> I'm not sure how the first one qualifies as "theft". Theft from whom? I don't think you can say "the Palestinians" collectively own Area C in any meaningful sense
If you truly oppose something, you wouldn't qualify and performatively sophisterize about definitions.
It doesn't keep me up at night and I don't think Israel is the bad guy, but I do think it's a real concern and not just a PR concern. I don't doubt your sincerity about what happened to Jews in Arab countries. I also don't think that Arabs today should be morally culpable for this, and quite honestly in some sense it's a favor anyway. Good that Iraqi Jews got kicked out in the 1950s, if they had stayed they would be getting gassed by Saddam like the Kurds, shot by ISIS. Israel is a much more pleasant place to live than non-oily Arab countries *even if you're Arab* and certainly if you're Jewish.
Benny Morris was jailed for refusing to serve in the West Bank. He is one of Israel's pre-eminent historians. I really don't like at all what happened to this teacher, that's terrible. But I will say that unfortunately the free speech of teachers and public sector employees is often restricted in lots of strange ways, and I think you are over indexing on this. If you're a private citizen in Israel you can certainly say this. Israel generally has free speech. Oded Goldreich, who is a far-left Hadash guy, is a professor at Weizmann and was awarded the Israel Prize. Yes I'm sure people are called whores and paid shills. Those are stupid comments but that is not a restriction on freedom of speech. The first example was better. I think that there is more free speech in Israel than at Western pro-Palestinian protests, encampments, rallies, etc. Unfortunately, Western pro-Palestinian culture is not some good faith Arab guy writing about Israel on ACX. I wish it was.
Netanyahu is the head of government, not the head of state. That's a dumb map, but Netanyahu himself (I'm no fan) has come out against resettling Gaza. One shouldn't read too much into the map. I don't think the PLO is very sincere about peace, but the river to the sea map on their logo is not the reason. Their refusal to compromise on the "right of return" is more important. Yes, the Finance guy Smotrich is definitely a Kahanist type. These fuckers are 5% of the Israeli population and Netanyahu let them into the government. Disgraceful. Bad guy. I never said that Kahanist types were only a few bad apples. But I do think they are a minority, probably ~5% of the Israeli Jewish population, certainly at most 10%. Compare with ~75% of Palestinians who supported October 7. The analogue of Kahanism is far more mainstream on the other side.
Yes I think Israel should actually jail soldiers that commit war crimes and not just do it for the cameras. War crimes are bad. I definitely oppose the settlements. But I don't like the term "theft" because it's not accurate. Theft from whom? Who "owns" Area C? Can we go with "illegal immigration"? I also just wasn't sure what Scott meant. Does he mean when the IDF declares some area of the West Bank to be a security zone? Settlements? Settlements on private property?
Shalom and Salaam. I'll quote Scott Aaronson, if they put you in charge of the Palestinians and me in charge of Israel, I'm sure we could sign a two-state solution and then go eat some falafel. By the way I really like Egyptian falafel, but due to favism among Mizrahi Jews they don't have it in Israel.
Any left-right division is inherently arbitrary to some extent but it seems at best odd and at worst suspicious to insist on using one that puts the majority of US Democrats on the right-wing side.
Not at all. Globally, the Democratic Party is commonly referred to as center-right. The Overton Window here in America is centered in the right side of global politics.
" The Israeli right has always said that it the conflict was never about the creation of a Palestinian state but rather the destruction of Israel. 10 years ago this seemed dumb, and I didn't believe it, but I think in 2024 we can safely say that they were right. It's unfortunate that they are right."
This sort of thinking is both reductionist and EXTREMELY self-fulfilling. The conflict involves many millions of people, both within the territory in question and elsewhere in the world. What it is "about" is going to vary quite a lot from year to year and person to person. But to the extent that your read IS correct, consider the following thought-experiment:
Two large groups of people, call them Group A and Group B are living and in close proximity to each other. At time 0, a few people in both groups start whispering and muttering about how "we'll never be safe until that other group is gone." Most people within their group ignore them, but a few people from the other group overhear and start shouting about it. "Those people in Group A(B) want us gone! They'll do anything to get rid of us!" Now a few more people in Group A will take the Group A whisperers-and-mutterers seriously, which means more Group A-ers whispering-and-muttering, which means its easier for those in Group B to overhear and vice versa. The belief that everybody in an opposing group wants you dead and the only way you'll be safe is to kill them first can be a really strong positive feedback loop even if all that happens is talk. Adding even a little bit of real, tangible, violent action to the mix only makes it stronger.
I think in general this is a very difficult problem to solve. If you want to avoid the outcome where everybody tries their hardest to kill everybody else, you HAVE to act as though the other side has some reasonable people who are acting in good faith and want peace. But you can't do that TOO much because there certainly are *some* people on the other side who want you dead, and leaving yourself exposed will only make things worse.
I say in general, because it is emphatically NOT a hard problem in this case. I don't believe for a minute that every single Palestinian fervently wants Israel gone, but even if that were true, they clearly, OBVIOUSLY don't have the power to get that want. Not even close. There are countries outside Israel that want it gone--I'm skeptical they have the power to make that happen either--but absolutely nothing Israel does to the Palestinians within its borders will help them achieve that either. Every Palestinian civilian that the IDF kills is a net loss for Israel's existential security. Probably most Hamas members are too. To the extent that ANY rational security purpose is being served by the bloodbath in Gaza, it's Israel trading somewhat reduced risk of terrorist attacks for slightly *increased* risk to its existence as a nation. I think the only nation that poses a real and serious existential risk to Israel right now is Isreal itself: it could tear itself apart on this issue, it could alienate itself among the international community, it could completely warp its political landscape around the "demands" of the conflict: all of these are more threatening to the state than the wildest, most ambitious dreams of Hamas.
"Virtually no one who codes as "pro-Palestine" acknowledge that Hamas is bad and that what's going on in the US campuses is bad. "
How are you counting "virtually no one?" I've seen many people acknowledge that Hamas is bad while stridently opposing the violence being done to the Palestinian people. They don't talk about it a lot, but that should hardly be surprising. The IDF has killed upwards of 20 times as many people in the past year as Hamas has, and many of them far more recently. Far too often this sort of remark is really trying to insist that every sentence included a "both sides are bad" disclaimer, and while I think very few people who consider themselves pro-Palestinian think Hamas is good or right or morally justified, nobody has very much patience for pretending they are *equally* bad. If the Israeli government had sufficient concern for its reputation to want to merely be considered *as bad* as Hamas, it was perfectly free to stop after killing 2 or 3 thousand Palestinians, instead of 30 or 40 thousand.
As for acknowledging the situation on campuses, I think Scott's own commentary to the link explained it perfectly: most people simply don't know about it. I'd heard plenty of hand-wringing about campus protests being anti-Semitic from the right, and dismissed it the same way I dismiss most hand-wringing from the right: as a mix of selective reporting and exaggeration. I'm pretty shocked at the behaviour reported in the link, and I'll freely acknowledge it's bad and it shouldn't be happening. I've seen actual anti-Semitism only very occasional in the online spaces I frequent, and stood up to it when I've seen it. I've never seen it in the real world, despite spending a good portion of the past year on university campuses (albeit, Canadian ones). I know many people who consider themselves pro-Palestinian, and zero people who would engage in or even tolerate that sort of thing: hopefully more widespread knowledge and social pressure puts a stop to it.
I think as an empirical matter than killing Hamas terrorists is good and helps Israel. I agree, killing civilians is bad. I wonder if we can operationalize this. Do you want to predict how many Israeli civilians will be killed by Palestinian terrorists over the next N years? Do you think it will be more or fewer than have been killed in the last N years? Put N=5,10,15,20,25, whatever. We should make a prediction market and bet on it. Do you want to bet on if Israel continues to exist conditional on various events?
I don't believe for a minute that every single Palestinian wants Israel gone. Of course not! Have I ever said anything like that? But three-quarters of them supported October 7. There are Kahanists but there is nothing comparable.
I wouldn't code you as pro-Palestinian, just as left-wing and anti-war. You want a two-state solution and don't want Israel gone. You oppose October 7 strongly, you oppose Hamas, and you want a two-state solution. Quite honestly you'll find a higher proportion of Israeli Jews who share your view than Palestinians who share your view. Your view is fringe among Palestinians, but not among Israeli Jews.
I'm a bit puzzled why moderate pro-Israel types talk as if there's some other equilibrium outcome to the ongoing settlement expansion (supported by a plurality of Israelis according to polls, and this number is steadily growing; for demographic reasons the trajectory of Israeli politics is going steadily rightward) other than annexation of the West Bank and expulsion of the Palestinians there. So I'm less inclined to view Palestinian extremism as some crazy ex nihilo phenomenon rooted in mere religious fundamentalism. Even 5 years ago a resident of the West Bank would be reasonable to believe that even if they all embraced Gandhiesque pacifism, they would still eventually lose everything to the settler movement. There's still no point in fighting a war you're destined to lose, but any prospect for any peace other than total capitulation basically died with the Olmert government.
I think you're doing a kind of meaningless attempt to set a neutral point so that you can say everyone on one side of the point is one one side and vice versa. I don't think that's really meaningful. For example, if I said that anyone who was against Israel's current war was "pro-Hamas", that's . . . a thing I could do . . . but it would obviously be a lot of inflammatoriness for no gain.
Almost no one is saying this. Netanyahu would not say such a thing, and would never accuse Biden of being pro-Hamas.
Meanwhile there are plenty of people who believe that if you accept the existence of Israel in any borders, but you are a Zionist and that therefore you are bad. I think that these people are crazy, but they are actually right about the nature of the conflict.
Really at its core this “neutral point” is not so arbitrary. It’s by far the most natural and important dividing line. This principle - the one that Israel exists - is really the one that is most at stake. It’s not an arbitrary point. It passes the following empirical test. If most Palestinians became OK with the existence of Israel, the conflict would have been solved long ago.
In the same way I do think that the abortion debate is really about if life begins at conception. I think it’s a mistake to call people who really are OK with 12-week bans and that’s it “pro-life”, even if they are more pro-life than the median American. The principle really at the heart of the debate is the conception thing. You have 10-20% of Americans who really believe this. If everyone agreed that the conception thing was ridiculous, abortion would cease to be a relevant political issue. People would fight on the number of weeks but once you accept the principle that conceptionism is wrong it becomes a matter of science and not religion.
Once you accept the existence of Israel, the conflict becomes some kind of normal ethnic conflict / real estate dispute which can be settled in a negotiated deal by rational actors, and not a nationalist holy war. The PA’s admirable verbal commitment to the acceptance of Israel notwithstanding, we are really not at this point yet. All of this talk about the Palestinian “right of return”, which Palestinian negotiators have never conceded (not in 2000, 2008, 2014, 2015, whenever), is at the core of the conflict.
Again there is the asymmetry here. If conception people went away then abortion would cease to be an issue. People might have disagreements on T3 but that would all get worked out. If people who support T3 abortions went away, it wouldn’t solve the issue. The end of Palestinian rejectionism would very quickly lead to a dovish Israeli government signing a two-state solution with a dovish Palestinian government and the settlers getting outvoted. It’s the Second Intifada after all that ousted Barak and put Olmert in power, after Arafat failed to accept the Clinton parameters. The end of the settlement project and the end of the Gaza war would not lead to the end of Palestinian rejectionism, which doesn’t care at all about the Green Line. It’s not at all a coincidence that the conception people and the encampment people are both extremely uncompromising and willing to lose the election for their own political party.
If you disagree, let’s formulate some kind of empirical question and put a prediction market. I did make a lot of empirical claims here.
Are your views different from those of Yair Golan in any meaningful way? Meanwhile there are no influential Palestinian politicians or major political factions who have these views. So yes these are pro-Israel views. Any view that supports the continuation of the existence of Israel, the "Zionist entity", is pro-Israel. Palestinian and their supporters think that the existence of Israel is a moral atrocity.
It sounds like you want to forcibly make Scott "Pro-Israel", by intentionally Motte-And-Baileying the "Pro-Israel" position so much that it becomes meaningless.
You remind me of feminists who - when it suits them - insist that anyone who doesn't literally think that women are breeding mares Untermenschen designed by the creator god to be a slave half-species for men is a feminist. When someone says something reasonable like "Ohh I'm not sure, I do like women but I don't like it when feminists are being misandrist piece of shits", they are made fun of as snowflakes who care about trivialities while women are facing <insert grievance here>.
> Palestinian and their supporters think that the existence of Israel is a moral atrocity.
You don't seem conversant enough in the Pro-Palestine coalition to know that, and no, seeing a protest on a street doesn't qualify as "Know some Pro-Palestine people", street protestors are an atrociously biased sample of any population.
**points to self** This Pro-Palestinian, at the very least, seems to contradict your assertion. I think that Israel's **founding** is a moral atrocity - which it is - but I think that enough time has passed that it's no longer morally meaningful to punish anyone by dismantling Israel, even the scum on Israeli television that say things like "Nakba ! Nakba ! Nakba 2.0 !!" are not - in my view - worthy of institutional violence, since I see them as equivalents to someone who praises the Holocaust or the genocide of Native Americans: horrible, but at the end of the day just speech, and speech shouldn't get bullets. (Now, I wouldn't be too opposed if someone were to dispense *non-institutional* violence to our Nakba-celebrating friends.)
I'm not a prominent pro-Palestinian by any definition of fame, but you're posting on ACX and I have written perhaps north of 500K or more [1] words on Israel and Palestine on ACX, mostly but not exclusively on Open Threads. When a Pro-Palestinian right next to you is posting half-million-strong walls of text saying "I DONT WANT ISRAEL TO BE DESTROYED", it sounds that you have a glaring hole in your characterization of "Pro-Palestinians" then.
[1] Quick back-of-envelope Fermi estimation: My average post is about 2.5 or 3 screenfuls of words, about 2 times longer than your other post in this thread. On my laptop that works out to ~5000 characters or so according to Notepad, assuming the average number of letters per English word is 5, that works out to 1000 words per post. 500K words is therefore 500 posts. There have been 48 Open Threads since I made my account, the third Open Thread I participated in is https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-299, the first is https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-297. 500 posts divided by 49 Open Threads is ~10 posts per Open Thread, above the average of the last 2 months or so of comparative radio silence, but well below my average since October and until May. The first Open Thread has 50 matches for Ctrl-F of "LearnsHebrew". Plus, I sometimes post outside of Open Threads, and a lot of time I post far far lengthier than 1K words. This is a slight overestimation of the number of words I have posted on ACX on Israel-Palestine in particular, because I also post on other topics, but it's a an underestimation of the total amount of words and thoughts and video frames I had read and written in total on the Israel-Palestine issue.
I very much appreciate your point of view. We've got to have some way of accepting current people rather than making the past the most important thing.
Would you be safe expressing your views about Israel under your own name in Palestine?
I see the situation as both Gaza and Israel having murderous leadership.
OK, "Palestinians and their supporters think that the existence of Israel is a moral atrocity" is too strong of a phrase, I apologize for saying that. Most Palestinians think that the existence of Israel is a moral atrocity.
Yes there are people in the West - a few ACX commentators, Irish leftists, not encampment people - who are "pro-Palestinian" but not on board with destroying Israel. Quite honestly this is just LARPing, as it's not a position that anyone in the region really has. Meanwhile there are plenty of people in Israel, including major Zionist political parties like The Democrats, that agree with Scott's position.
The feminism analogy is bad. To make it better you have to consider a hypothetical. If US university campuses were full of people chanting that women should not have rights or should be allowed to vote, then you would be a feminist for disagreeing with them. If we got back to 1920's social norms, and you talked about male variability and about the excesses of MeToo, no one would call you anti-feminist.
Also if you are going to criticize some Israeli action, of course I'm not going to deflect and say that Palestinians also did some bad thing. This is an extremely dumb thing to do and it's a non sequitur. If someone talks about Dresden you don't go and say that Auschwitz was so much worse. Yes it was but that doesn't address the point, and civilians in Dresden didn't even know about the gas chambers. I am very different from the feminists you bring up.
> It sounds like you want to forcibly make Scott "Pro-Israel", by intentionally Motte-And-Baileying the "Pro-Israel" position so much that it becomes meaningless.
I'm not sure Motte and Bailey is the right frame here. To use an American example. When Trump first won the Republican primaries, a lot of senior GOP figures endorsed Clinton. Did they move left?
If you define "left" as a series of beliefs and policies no they didn't.
If you define "left" as a team that's opposed to the team called "right" they did.
And I think there is a reasonable case that when "left" is used by the man on the street they think of it in the sense of the second term. Why is solar power left wing? Surely cheap reliable off-the-grid energy fits the rugged individualism and rural localities of the archetypical right wing voter?
Bringing it back to Israel. Replace Trump with "October 11th was a mask off moment for the western pro-Palestine movement".
> You remind me of feminists who - when it suits them - insist that anyone who doesn't literally think that women are breeding mares Untermenschen designed by the creator god to be a slave half-species for men is a feminist.
Does "want to turn women into breeding mare untermenschen" and "everyone else" accurately describe the sides in the culture war over woman's issues in the west?
Does "want to end the existence of Israel as a Jewish state" and "everyone else" accurately describe the two sides of the culture war over support for Israel in the west? It ignores a lot of people in the middle, but I would argue its *much* closer to accurate than the preceding paragraph.
>I think that Israel's **founding** is a moral atrocity - which it is - but I think that enough time has passed that it's no longer morally meaningful to punish anyone by dismantling Israel
In your view, how much more morally atrocious would the current activities of the currently-existing Israel have to be before it became morally meaningful to punish anyone by dismantling it?
Settlements are more "illegal immigration" or "gerrymandering" (both bad, to be clear) than "theft". The ones on private Palestinian property are theft, yes, but that's a small minority of them. Not a fan of the settlements, but important to use words accurately.
If you are hoping for a two state solution, then "annexation" is probably the best word. They are an effort to shrink the borders of any potential Palestinian state by putting down enough people that it's easier to change where the border is than displace the settlers.
Often people call it "creeping annexation" because "annexation" has a specific meaning. But yeah, I generally agree.
I wouldn't say that they are actually an effort to "shrink the borders of any potential Palestinian state", more like an effort to prevent one entirely. It's a failed effort. While there has been expansion of existing settlements, creation of actually new settlements has all but stopped. There hasn't been and won't be nearly enough settlement construction to make a two-state solution unviable.
Fair point, I agree. It’s illegal immigration into the West Bank, backed by the Israeli government. As I said, I think that “theft” is also wrong though, at least for the vast majority of settlers who go to Area C but not Palestinian private property. I think that a stable and lasting two-state solution would be great, but I don’t think it’s meaningful to say that Area C is the collective property of the Palestinians. It’s not actually owned by the PA the way the US government owns US federal land.
Just picking up one little piece: I'm a bit surprised Scott hadn't picked up on the many stories from Jews about being personally harassed on campuses. It's not a big deal that he didn't, it's just possible that I was reading more frightened sources, or that he was more optimistic about universities.
The vast majority of these stories are, to put it nicely, impossible to parse in relation to anti-Semitism. That's because most mainstream sources bizarrely conflate anti-Semitic sentiment with anti-Zionist sentiment and anti-Israel sentiment. (Obviously these things can all co-exist, but definitionally conflating them seems absurd)
Perhaps Scott noticed this glaring conflation issue and so he didn't take the stories seriously until this report from a known quantity like Columbia.
I am skeptical that Columbia's anti-Semitism task force didn't also engage in these fallacious conflations, which are possibly designed to shut down dissent and debate. But truthfully, I haven't read the report yet, so I don't really know.
There can be no question but that flat out Jew hating is on the rise, and those unwise conflations are making it impossible for us to accurately measure anti-Semitism, which in turn makes it hard to efficiently address the problem. The Jew haters are benefited enormously when we spend our energy bashing pro-Semitic dislikers of Zionism/Israel.
One of the reasons for conflating antisemitism and anti-zionism, is the dishonesty, lies by omission, and worse that come out of anti-zionist circles.
If someone denies any Jewish connection to the land, mistranslates 'Yahud' to 'occupation forces', and consistently fails to analyze the conflict honestly, assuming they are antisemitic makes sense.
Usually they are just deranged 'anti-imperial' leftists borrowing narratives and terms from antisemites from the middle east, but at that point, what's the difference?
The difference is that anti-Semitism, by long-standing common assent, means Literally Hating The Jews. It doesn't mean being dishonest about Israel, it doesn't mean doing lies of omission and it doesn't mean mistranslating Yahud. It means Jew Hating. And your attempt to change this definition is precisely of a kind with the woke left trying to change the meaning of basic words like racism and woman. PRECISELY.
The occupied Palestinians universally call the occupying army on their land either الاحتلال "The Occupation" or اليهود "Yahud, i.e. The Jews".
It's perhaps too much to ask of people whose villages, trees, cars, and children are being burned alive by Jews to be politically correct, I don't think you would be too offended if the Nova Concert party goers called Hamas "The Arabs" either, and neither would I be.
That said, faithful translation is a key marker of good faith and truth seeking, and yes, anti-Zionism brings out the worst out of anyone supporting Palestinians and does more harm than any amount of good anyone could argue it does with a straight face. I have a solid policy of not identifying as an "Anti-Zionist" for this reason, and I think many Pro-Palestinian spaces would benefit by banning any term that matches "*Zionist*" entirely.
Do you think this is how Jews, Zionists, or potential Zionists should be treated?
"One of the essential obligations of a university is to provide a feeling of safety, in the most basic sense of the word: the feeling of being safe in one’s room, on one’s way to class or to study. After October 7, numerous students reported that they no longer felt safe. One student who had
moved into her dorm room in September, told us she placed a mezuzah on her doorway as required by ritual law, as traditional Jews have done for centuries. In October, people began banging on her door at all hours of the night, demanding she explain Israel’s actions. She was forced to move out of the dorm. Visibly observant students, like ones who wear traditional head coverings, have been frequently met with extreme hostility. “On campus, my friends have been spit on, been called like terrible,
terrible names, a very close friend of mine was called, a lover of genocide and then a lover of baby killing. This was only a couple of days after October seventh.” A student told us she had been chased off campus with her brother one night. In many cases, episodes like these have led
to efforts to hide markers of Jewish identity: while some students felt that they could previously “wear our Jewish identity,” now they don’t want their peers to know that they are Jewish. The fear of consequences permeated the atmosphere of campus during these months. One student put
it this way: “If I walk on campus right now with my star out or kippah or say ‘am Yisrael chai’ “the people of Israel live,” a traditional song], I could start World War III.” Many Jewish students said they now avoid walking alone on campus.
Students have reported having necklaces ripped off their necks and being pinned against walls, while walking back to their dorms on Friday afternoon and when they were on their way to synagogue. There were also multiple reports of visibly Jewish individuals simply walking past 116th Street who have been followed, stalked, and subjected to ethnic slurs and hateful
statements, like “go back to Poland” and “I hope you guys suffer. You guys think it’s okay to kill innocent babies and bomb hospitals. Yes, Habibi, I’m talking to you,” and, when the hecklers saw that the student was filming them, one said to send the video “to all your Israelis.” Students also recounted finding jokes about Hitler written on communal dormitory whiteboards. Many students described walking down hallways as a painful daily routine.
This hateful rhetoric has often been accompanied by an unwillingness on the part of listeners to engage with Jewish and Israeli students in a wide variety of encounters that are held to be the bedrock of a university community: discussion, empathy, intellectual nuance, argument. Some
Jewish students found that whatever they said, their words were distorted. Some students were made to feel as though their support of Israel, or empathy for Israelis, was inseparable from support for the actions being carried out by the Israeli government. A student said, “There’s a lot
of times where Jewish students are made to justify the actions of Israel, for good and for bad. When you assume that someone’s religious beliefs mean they want a group of people dead, that is hurtful.” Another recounted feeling unable to criticize what’s going on Israel for fear that such discussion would be associated with support for the destruction of the state. Others feared that the assumption that all Jewish students were aligned politically was particularly dangerous for Jews of color, and they were especially concerned about the heightened presence of police on
campus. Still students spoke of what they perceive as the University’s failure to distinguish between different Jewish denominations, mindsets, and beliefs. Several students argued that the administration was only supportive of Zionist Jews. Others expressed their firm belief in the
inextricable connection between Zionism and Jewish identity."
I'll read it. Pretty grim stuff and anti-Semitic incidents should be investigated properly, and action should be taken. Unfortunately, based on this excerpt, I don't believe Columbia is capable of dealing with anti-Semitism effectively. It's s clear from the language here that they don't even understand that Zionism is a form of ethnofascism, as my Jewish friends will attest.
Of course Israelis have a right to be safe and to keep their property safe. But no one has the right to organize and maintain an ethnofascist regime. Calling for regime change is not the same thing as calling for genocide. No matter how one tries to spin it.
These stories are very bad, whether or not they are "anti semitic". The definition of anti semitism doesn't influence how bad these stories are.
I agree, ideally there should be no special "antisemitism" task force. Certainly, universities shouldn't police the speech and action of their students for any kind of protected free speech, but should punish violations of university policy.
Still, conditional on the existence of all of the DEI bureaucracies and so on and the current state of US universities in 2024, I guess it's better to have one than not have one to expose how hypocritical these universities are. I strongly support removing all DEI, but harping about anti-Semitism is a good way to accomplish that. We have to operate within the system we have. Ideally we'd have more libertarian civil rights laws and free association, but given the ones we have it's appropriate to play the game a bit and sue Harvard for anti-Asian discrimination.
I agree we don't want Jews to be added to any DEI bureaucracy, and should try to dismantle DEI, but this "antisemitism task force" is not becoming an institutionalized and permanent part of the university, so it's not as much of a concern.
>I am skeptical that Columbia's anti-Semitism task force didn't also engage in these fallacious conflations, which are possibly designed to shut down dissent and debate
>That's because most mainstream sources bizarrely conflate anti-Semitic sentiment with anti-Zionist sentiment and anti-Israel sentiment
There is nothing "bizarre" about "conflating" Judaism with a thing that is extremely important to most Jews and a central part of Judaism.
Imagine somebody who said "I don't hate Catholics, I just hate the ones who think the Pope in Rome speaks with the authority of God." I'm sorry, but that guy is an anti-Catholic even if he's convinced himself that he is not: he's invented a definition of Catholicism that he uses as a get-out-of-jail-free card.
A quick look at the history of Zionism shows that it was a controversial movement at first among Jews, a movement that gradually grew into dominance over the course of a couple of generations. Even as late as the 1940s, the Orthodox world was pretty skeptical of Zionism.
So it's easy to establish that no, Zionism is not central to Judaism.
I am going to express my strong support for not treating Scott as emphasising that he thinks Israel has a right to exist (without pogroms!) as a change in his point of view. Unfortunately, it probably a sign of a broader "vibe shift" that it is so often topical for him to do so.
I am also strongly supportive of not treating "takes plausible arguments about very serious topics seriously" as right-coded.
As for the fact that you find his views somehow zionist or right coded, that may be all about you.
You have a point, but I don't think it's all about me. I do think that the more prominent far-left crazy people are, the more sanity becomes right-coded. And of course the prominence of far-right crazy people makes sanity more left-coded.
Yes, we agree about the extreme shifting around a fairly stable center, but your previous comments were about Scott's position changing when I would have thought it was more an illustration of the former phenomenon.
I'd rather say that it's the Israel-related cracks in the leftist-dominated establishment that incidentally lend the right some grudging veneer of respectability. However crazy the radicals are about sex/gender, for example, the establishment entirely has their back, so any dissent is misinformation/bigotry/Russian propaganda. Whereas there's a genuine split on the Hamas apologia, and so a legitimate space for calling out the crazy as such.
The way I see it is that you've always wished you lived in the more mature internet era of 1999 when you could discuss anything without fear of being burned by puritan mobs. I've seen you waffle or take precautions only so as not to get charlie hebdo'd, but as the rules keep changing so you modify what you let yourself say or link to.
As a Rabbi traching history in a Jewish School in California, I spent a day with my class taking the Nazi arguments seriously - without knee-jerk condemnation or any other vocal or mental "crime stop" tactics. It was a please for us all and undoubtedly a maturing moment for my students.
You make a public point about areas where you've changed your mind regarding a serious opinion you've once had. The rest of the time you're just teasing good points by a wide collection of people without fully endorsing them.
I'm a long time fan and I get the impression that on the 20% of your stuff that slightly rankles me, we would come to a common conclusion if we were to speak it out on one. That committment to truth over ego or tribe is why it's so easy to get past the rankling.
I know that it's a defense mechanism against closed-minded online assholes, which you most decidedly are not.
Too bad we haven't met. Any plans to visit Egypt soon?
Well in 1999 the Internet was mostly people who worked in an IT related field. Or in other words, it had a culture of autistic bluntness. I mean, two things changed, today not only IT workers use the Internet, but crucially, IT workers were also a smaller group with a definite kind of, huh, traits, or culture. Not simply maturity. I would say empathy levels were low, but intellectual rigor high. I don't really think we can have both the same time.
In 1999, the culture was also leaning towards classical liberalism--heavy emphasis on individualism, personal freedom, and personal responsibility (eg. RTFM). If you look at the Hackers Manifesto or the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace, you might be overpowered by the smell of horses strong black coffee. The writer of the Declaration was the cofounder of the Electronic _Frontier_ Foundation.
But like you say that has been swallowed up by the mass influx of newbies. It's eternal September.
It would be nice if there were some corner of the internet where OGs like ourselves could speak without the censorship of children.
I'm trying out some revolutionary ideas to be implemented immediately if we can come to a consensus but YouTube has no discernable demographic with whom to share my videos because they don't fit any of the mass markets.
This morning's video is specifically made (and even titled!) for the sort of people who enjoyed the internet of 1999 so I hope a few fellas here give it a go. It's my atheist-orthodox-rabbi manifesto for offering mankind a different culture than the one that currently prevails.
As most of my viewers are people familiar with my work, the beginning addresses them specifically vis a vis rhe urgency of getting this out there, so if that pary doesn't speak to you, please start 5 minutes in.
"NEW! For Intelligent Skeptics: One Rabbi's Torah Mission"
It would be nice if there were some corner of the internet where OGs like ourselves could speak without the censorship of children.
I'm trying out some revolutionary ideas to be implemented immediately if we can come to a consensus but YouTube has no discernable demographic with whom to share my videos because they don't fit any of the mass markets.
This morning's video is specifically made (and even titled!) for the sort of people who enjoyed the internet of 1999 so I hope a few fellas here give it a go. It's my atheist-orthodox-rabbi manifesto for offering mankind a different culture than the one that currently prevails.
As most of my viewers are people familiar with my work, the beginning addresses them specifically vis a vis rhe urgency of getting this out there, so if that pary doesn't speak to you, please start 5 minutes in.
"NEW! For Intelligent Skeptics: One Rabbi's Torah Mission"
What's the terrible argument against race-mixing? Many "races" are already mixed, right? The "white race" was created by race mixing between steppe and farmer. Mexicans are a mix of White and Native, and even African Americans are a mixed population that is only ~75% African genetically on average. Someone like Skip Gates is already mixed, genetically half-white. Cory Booker has blue eyes. If you are talking about black-white mixing in the US context, at least one parent is already mixed, unless his parents came from Nigeria or Ghana or some place like that. Oh, and let's not forget race-mixing between farmers and hunter-gatherers. Ashkenazi Jews are a mix of Italian women and Israelite men. Ethiopians are a mix of East Africans and Middle Easterners. Brazil is a country full of race-mixing. There's already so much race-mixing. Like, on what timescale does this guy think race mixing is bad?
Forgive me if you don't want to engage here. I can only imagine what kind of person would argue against "race mixing". Not even interracial marriage, but calling it "race mixing". Some Neo-Nazi?
I did see quite a lot of stuff online recently saying that mixed race kids were more distant from either parent than a random member of the parents race. The force of the argument coming from evolution. Suprised to see little push back on these claims, and don't know enough to evaluate them properly.
OK say that's true for some ways to measure genetic distance. Then what? Who cares? There are tribes of bushmen or whatever so an average pair of people is as distant as an Italian and a Japanese, and more than an Italian and a Spaniard. Should they have an identity crisis? Perhaps a child from this tribe is less related to his father than a random English guy is to a random German guy. What's wrong with genetic distance not lining up with paternity? Should adoption also be banned then?
I'm not actually sure what adaptive preferences look like, even about things like mutated descendants or what genes are (Hanson has warned against othering AIs since they would have our "genes")etc. But supposing it is true that adaptive preferences would caution against mixed raced kids, I can see why some might be moved by such an argument.
Bushmen are genetically diverse, but morphologically they are very homogenous. Most genetic diversity is neutral and morphological traits like, skin color, height, facial features, and so on are under intense selection pressures. So they vary much less and reproductively isolated groups converge on a common phenotype relatively quickly. Bushmen don't generally have higher variance in their morphological phenotype then other people. Which is obvious if you've ever seen a group of Bushmen. Genetically they are extremely diverse, but they all look the same.
Humans are visual animals and appearance matters a lot. A person who looks racially different will always be naturally out-grouped, red haired people get out-grouped even by people almost genetically identical to them, same with dwarves.
It's also about culture. Black and white culture are quite distinct in the USA and a mixed race child of ambiguous phenotype will have to choose whether to assimilate more into the white or black culture. They will be alienated from friends and family on the opposite side of that cultural divide. The divide isn't insurmountable, but it is an issue.
I'm still an advocate of race-mixing in general on the grounds that it's the only way to deal with these issues in the long run, by converging the groups genetically and culturally. But, I understand why someone would be apprehensive about having kids that look very different from their cousins and other relatives.
IIRC I saw a rebuttal of that claim. Don't remember the details, but the argument might have been that so many genes are not strongly correlated with race that your child's similarly in terms of those genes outweighs the difference due to race-correlated genes.
But even if it's true that mixed race kids are further from you in DNA than other members of your race, who says that's bad? Most of us, if we had an adopted child or loving step-parent, would treat them as akin to a blood relative despite having no DNA in common (beyond the human baseline). For normal people, our degree of caring is based as much or more on social and moral factors as on common biological descent.
Personally my suspicion is that the claim about a lack of relatedness is probably wrong. But taking it for granted as true, moderns seem especially unsual in this regard, that probably the vast majority of humans historically would have treated blood relatives as different to outsiders and would not have been keen to waste resources on such outsiders (for obvious evolutionary reasons).
Thee "problem" I've seen is with mixed-race kids getting radicalized by activists into hating one race or the other, and that can be easily solved by putting those activists at the bottom of a coal mine and sealing the entrance.
I will caveat that mixed race kids with black mothers would be, I imagine, uniquely prone to become anti-white radicals, due to certain pathologies in African-American culture.
Scott can speak for himself and quite eloquently to boot, but post-10/6 I'm like, well, looks like we can't have peace, so I want my relatives to survive. I expect people with Palestinian relatives take the equal and opposite position. We'll see who wins.
Also, a lot of the far right is anti-Israel and explicitly antisemitic (mostly ultimately due to the prominence of Jews on the left over here from what I can tell).
I don't know about politics, but as you get older and settle down and have kids and all that jazz, you tend to trend more small-c conservative. Suddenly all the fuddy-duddy advice about being responsible and sensible seems less fuddy-duddy 😀
"If you’re not a liberal when you’re 25, you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative by the time you’re 35, you have no brain” is a quote attributed to Churchill but seems very likely he didn't say it, so probably our friend Anonymous again.
It’s important to note that WWI ended with maneuver warfare. The Ukrainians have demonstrated the ability to take significant swathes of territory with relatively few casualties at least twice so far (in Kharkiv offensive and Kursk offensive), so maneuver warfare is not hopeless in this war.
Yes, maneuver and attrition warfare are two different tools that are used in concert. It's rare for any war to be purely one or the other. Even the first Gulf War against Iraq -- normally thought of as a brilliant maneuver war where the Coalition quickly achieved victory with large scale flanking maneuvers and deep attacks with smart weapons -- was preceded by intense bombing and shelling explicitly described by the general staff as an attrition campaign. Attrition opens up the opportunity for maneuver, and maneuver permits more effective attrition.
The current Ukraine conflict is in an attrition *phase*. It was in a maneuver phase for the first few months, when the incompetent Russian thrusts toward Kyiv and Kharkiv were thrown back. The reasons for the current phase are a lot more complex than just artillery vs air power. I would add a lot more factors like the age of the conflict -- since 2014 -- meaning that continuous and immensely deep fortifications (50 km in places) exist, political limits (Russia doesn't want to call a general mobilization, Ukraine doesn't want to annoy its Western friends), terrain (neither side can go around the fortified lines, the ground is difficult to attack through), and so forth. But it's only a phase. It can shift back into maneuver warfare again.
> when the incompetent Russian thrusts toward Kyiv and Kharkiv were thrown back
... and when Russians got the land bridge to Crimea, which is still under their control.
Agree about phases, and self-imposed political limits on *Russia only* - Ukraine pretty much gets everything (but with moderate delays - which make things harder for them).
Lay public were shocked by trench warfare between developed nations in the 21st century. Military professionals recognize that the conditions which led to the trenches of the western front in 1915-1918 were re-created in Ukraine:
1. Can't go around them: the Joint Ops Area is bounded naturally by coastlines and legally by national borders/limits on long range strikes beyond national borders, once the line of contact stabilizes neither side can easily turn the other's flanks and opening additional fronts has been below the threshold of large-scale combat ops (e.g. clandestine and special ops, info ops, international diplomacy, economic sanctions, etc.)
2. Can't go over them: both sides can effectively contest the airspace, so neither can launch vertical envelopments, air interdiction and close air support is risky, strategic bombing is done by long range standoff munitions (rockets, missiles and drones) instead of waves of manned aircraft.
3. Can't go through them: 21st century weapons defeat 21st century armour, but earthworks offer cheap protection, so defense is stronger than offense. Neither side can rapidly break through so many prepared lines of defense, although Russia seems able/willing to grind it out on the offense.
It's a weird premise, expecting a war to last just a few news cycles.
If I pick 17 assorted conflicts since World War II—Vietnam, the Soviet-Afghan War, the ongoing Syrian Civil War, others—the average duration is ~2,163 days, or nearly 6 years.
The median is 1,812 days (about 5 years), so most of these wars lasted at least half a decade. The standard deviation is around 1,954 days, so there's a lot of variance, and some wars last decades, even with bigger gaps in professional capabilities.
For instance:
The Vietnam War endured for 3,919 days (~11 years).
The Soviet-Afghan War lasted 3,342 days (~9 years).
US was in Afghanistan for arguably ~7,268 days (~20 years).
On the shorter end of the spectrum, we have conflicts like the Six-Day War in 1967 (6 days, per the name) and the Yom Kippur War in 1973 (20 days). But these seem to be exceptions rather than the rule.
It's been 933 (awful) days so far, unless you extend back to 2014. Still relatively short compared to many historical conflicts. If you look at the high standard deviation and range of the durations, a 20 year conflict, while difficult to imagine, would not be unprecedented.
On 13, I see that the commenters on that tweet got it right; it's not one in a trillion, it's about one in a hundred million. (Once you fill in two, the other one will usually match.)
It's even worse than that, because of post-selection. Basically, there's thousands of possible vote tallies that are equally surprising / obviously doctored.
I dislike this kind of reasoning, since literally every possible percentage has the same probability- there are a hundred million possible outcomes and you will get exactly one of them. Statistically speaking a round number is no different to any other.
Now you can look at that and say they obviously fixed the percentages first and stupidly worked backwards to get the vote numbers, and you are certainly right. But the probabilistic argument isn't the right one to then make.
The chance that the vote is exactly 5150092 is 1 in 10058774.
Does that mean a vote is unlikely to be any specific number? Sure? But that doesn't mean its doctored. It has to be one number, after all.
Even glossing over the idea that the chance of at least 1 of a bunch of low-probability things happening is high already so you should expect to see some low-probability outcomes in real life.
Yes, but perfectly round numbers are something a human mind would like choose if asked to pick a percentage. I believe there is actually a science if this in forensic accounting, the kind of numbers humans make up when cooking books is not the same as numbers chosen at random.
I think everyone is in agreement. That such artificial-looking vote totals would crop up by random chance is very unlikely, but it's impossible to quantify exactly how unlikely because the class of "such artificial-looking vote totals" is not well defined.
I don't think that's what everyone is saying, but it is a good point that the situation is underspecified such that we could reasonably disagree about the probability of the observed outcome. Are we taking the total vote as a given, for one, and if not what the is the possible range of vote totals.
While people may disagree about what the complete set of artificial-looking vote percentages is, I think just about every version of that set would include round numbers with no decimals.
We could use Bayes theorem to get somewhat close to what I understand the situation is: calculating the probability that this is doctored , given it is a round number.
We probably align on the first probability P(Round Number∣Doctored) ~ 80%?
The second probability , the prior likelihood of it being doctored - I'm not sure since I haven't been following this election, but since popular opinion here online is that its doctored, lets say 20%? This number is ridiculously high compared to a probability I would give normal election being doctored. Let me know if theres a better estimate.
The Probability in the denominator, P(Round number) is a marginal probability:
So the existence of a round number here moves the probability of the election being doctored from 20% to 80% using this back-of-the-napkin calculation.
Still pretty damning, but we did use a high prior likelihood (20%) for this. Regardless , i think this approach is better than just saying the probability of a round number appearing is 1 in a trillion, which is just a weird underspecified claim.
20% may be too low: the country in question is a dictatorship and the dictator who "won" the election has been in power for 11 years now, and happened to be the handpicked successor of the previous dictator.
So what would be a reasonable probability in your opinion?
I'm not disputing the claim that the election is doctored, I'm just claiming the 'rounded number' statistic used as it is in the tweet is misleading and inflammatory.
How are you getting P(Round Number∣Not Doctored) = 0.05? That seems empirically and theoretically false. Taking your 1 in 10058774 and multiplying by all 1000 possible XX.X00..% values gives 0.0001; extending it to XX.XX00..% gives 0.001. Both of those suggest a movement from 20% to 99%+, provided I'm doing my math correctly. P(Round Number∣Doctored) = .8 also seems quite high- don't election doctors prefer to seem legitimate?
The probability that we get a round number, given that the vote totals were not doctored, is the 1 - in - 100 million chance that was discussed earlier.
Edit: The odds of an undoctored round number is actually closer to 1,000 / 10 million, since there are about 1000 round numbers that the percentages can coalesce around, and 10 million possible vote total results.
Yep, this is a clear case of a bad argument in service of an obviously correct idea that proponents of such ideas tend to be much less critical about. Just because in general it's obvious that P(glaring coincidence|funny business) > P(glaring coincidence|no funny business) it doesn't mean that it's easy to provide meaningful numbers.
Ok, bear with me for a second. Any particular set of (let's say) five cards is equally likely to be drawn, but some patterns (suited Ace through 10) can occur in fewer ways than other patterns (any five suited cards). Once you've drawn five cards, the probability that you have some specific set of five cards is 1. But the probability that you have a low value hand > flush > royal flush. Now, the way to flesh out the statistical argument is with conditional probabilities. Round numbers are "special" like flushes--they have to meet a condition to be included in the set, and there are fewer of them. If the outcome were random, the probability of one of these "special" outcomes occurring wouldn't be 0, but it would be very low. But there are lots of ways to designate special kinds of numbers, you might say, and you could probably find something interesting about any outcome if you tried hard enough. The relevant special property that round numbers have in this case is that humans like to use them much more than they like randomly selected rational numbers. Conditional on the numbers being selected by a human, the probability that they will be "round" at however many digits is much greater, and this gives evidence (not proof) that a human selected them. This conclusion requires probabilistic reasoning. If round numbers were more likely to occur by chance, a round outcome provides less evidence of a human interference.
I looked on the Wiki page which reports different numbers and percentages than those in the tweet. By no means a deep dive. Is there a source for the tweets data?
"And most law firm partners are also conservative on most issues except LGBTQ and abortion, that’s why the political viewpoints they single out for hiring bans are on the left, not the right"
Can you explain this? I found Woodgrains' clerkship-based explanation intuitive but it feels like it doesn't go all the way to explaining why this would be true.
"Socially liberal, fiscally conservative" views? Gay marriage doesn't really affect them or their multi-million/billion dollar clients, but taxation and the like certainly do. Big difference between "Yes, I'll draw up the pre-nup for your daughter's wedding to her girlfriend" and "Yes, I'll set up the foundation for your children so they can avoid estate taxes". That's why hiring someone who is happy to work on the latter is more likely than "In college, I was involved in the Tax The 1% Activist Movement because I firmly and fervently believe there should be no billionaires" type, even if both are happy to pin up the rainbow flags for Pride Month.
You have to remember who it is that big law firms represent - largely major corporations being accused of misconduct (sometimes by other corporations). I think if you looked at the partners of, e.g. plaintiff-side class action firms, you'd see a different set of folks.
This is almost diametrically opposed to my own experiences graduating from an Ivy League law school a few years back. Law is a notoriously left-leaning industry. Fedsoc members were actively discriminated against in law firm hiring, to the point where we were told to make two resumes and only give the "full" one to specifically pre-vetted employers who wouldn't just immediately trash our applications (we literally had a secret list of firms we passed around). Literally every right-of-center law firm partner I've ever met was eventually forced out and is now either at a boutique or in-house. And this is on top of the fact that there were no resources available for conservative-leaning public interest, no right-leaning career counselors to advise us, etc.
To the extent you've seen conservative lawyers tend to punch above their weight career-wise, it's probably because only the rock stars feel secure enough to be open about their politics, so they stand out more.
Re: #3 (the role of aristocratic women in the spread of early Christianity), the version of that theory I'm familiar with is a bit more, uh, materialist, than the one that Teslo argues against. https://balioc.tumblr.com/post/162371120846/so-if-my-historical-sources-are-telling-me-the
(The exact story in that post strikes me as slightly too cute to be true, but I do wonder whether something close to it could be right.)
Is that link from a very old Slatetarcodex links post?
That's not where *I* found it (I follow Balioc on Tumblr, and consider him the most underrated writer on this-part-of-the-internet), but a search confirms that it was indeed featured there: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/07/19/links-717-url-of-sandwich/#:~:text=Something%20I%20didn%E2%80%99t%20expect%20to%20see%20a%20serious%20argument%20for%20today%3A%20%E2%80%9CThe%20entire%20edifice%20of%20Western%20civilization%20%E2%80%93%20all%20the%20cultural%2C%20social%2C%20and%20philosophical%20structures%20that%20define%20the%20world%20in%20which%20we%20live%20today%20%E2%80%93%20can%20be%20traced%20back%20to%20a%20stupid%20loophole%20in%20Roman%20inheritance%20law.%E2%80%9D
I think it is a little bit of a 'just so' story; if we believe St. Jerome, what wealthy Roman widows (even Christian ones) were doing was *not* "oh dearie me, I will be forced to get re-married and then all my property goes to my husband, let me set up a scam with my local priest" but in fact, enjoying being merry widows with full control of their own money:
https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/3001045.htm
"Of all the ladies in Rome, the only ones that caused scandal were Paula and Melanium, who, despising their wealth and deserting their children, uplifted the cross of the Lord as a standard of religion. Had they frequented the baths, or chosen to use perfumes, or taken advantage of their wealth and position as widows to enjoy life and to be independent, they would have been saluted as ladies of high rank and saintliness."
- Yeah the monetary support of women is what I've heard the most about- it's traditionally thought that Jesus and the disciples were funded by wealthy women supporters. The Apostle Paul is thought to have supported himself by tentmaking, though that is an exception since tentmaking is silent work - he can preach while doing it. I haven't heard a lot about women being significant proselytizers.
-Observationally, young churches and cult movements are heavily skewed towards women. It's a common stereotype that the wife will bring the kids to church while the dad will stay home.
-It's mentioned in a caption in Ruxandra's post but it is worth repeating that Constantine's mother was a Christian. Constantine himself had some sort of experience before a battle, his conversion is rather famous
-Point against the use of historiographical data is that when Constantine made Christianity officially legal (not the official religion, that was Theodosius 70yrs later) only 10% of Romans were Christian.
-I think the elites thought Constantine was indulging too far into his own favorite cult when he started making Christianity more official and expected it to be a fad.
-Another point is that Constantine didn't convert to Christianity for political reasons - actually Christianity was fairly unpopular among the elite and the intelligentsia, who wanted to stick with the old religions. Christianity was mainly adopted by lower (though not destitute) classes.
Funny enough I've also been on an Early Christianity binge / biblical textual analysis. If anyone else is interested, Bart Ehrman is the rockstar secular scholar in this field (lost his faith over the problem of suffering).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfheSAcCsrE&t=3134s
What makes him quite remarkable is that he speaks with the passion of a pastor; "anti-evangelist" the apologetics crowd calls him.
John Psmith hypothesized that women add more mass to new hypertitious cascades than contemporary men: "The pattern is always the same: a few charismatic male leaders, and a large number of women making up the bulk of the support. Women are rarely moral entrepreneurs, but they act as something like the moral venture capitalists of the human race, wielding tremendous influence over which religions and revival movements succeed and which fail." https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-the-albigensian-crusade-by?utm_source=post-banner&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=posts-open-in-app&triedRedirect=true
Edward Watts argues that Rome's pagan bureaucrats (all men) were too socially disorganized and too focused on short-term gains to realize that they were losing a bigger culture war. https://aeon.co/essays/pagan-complacency-and-the-birth-of-the-christian-roman-empire
If you squint you might see patterns of female/long-term/persuasive soft-power strategies working under the radar of male/short-term/coercive hard power strategies.
Really great set of links!
Scott, do you think you have moved politically to the right recently? That's what I am getting from here. At least, you have moved to the right on issues involving Jews and Israel and you seem more willing to directly link Hanania, Sailer, Greer, etcetera.
How have I moved to the right on Israel?
I would like to think I've always been willing to link good articles by right wing people when they happen.
I did decide not to link a terrible article trying to argue against race-mixing (even though I really wanted to argue against the article) because people would freak out and blame me for acknowledging its existence enough to argue about it. But aside from being fun to argue against it didn't really have any value, and I'd like to think I'm willing to take the flak when it's worth it.
It's just a general sense I get from your links and so on, and just your overall commentary on the topic and the tone. In your Neo-reactionary FAQ you called Netanyahu crazy, and after 10/7 you said that the best outcome, even for Palestinian welfare, is for Israel to totally remove Hamas. These two statements aren't technically incompatible but they are Bayesian signals of something and of your System 1 reactions on the topic. You used to post about Dianne Feinstein and her husband wanting to shut down the speech of anti-Israel people. Now it seems that you are saying that left-wing antisemitism is a much more serious problem than you realized. I agree of course that strictly speaking this is separate from the issue of what's actually happening in the region, but it's a Bayesian signal of something.
I think that many of the things the Israeli right have said about the Palestinians have unfortunately been proven correct. 10-15 years ago, a lot of centrist liberals believed that if Netanyahu was replaced by a center-left guy, they could sign a two-state deal with the PA. I think recent events have disabused people of this notion. The Israeli right has always claimed that even if a Palestinian leader wanted to make peace, they would never do it because their society has too many extremists and they would get shot or something. I didn't believe this 10 years ago but now I do. I think that aside from the conflict, their early rollout of vaccines, their embrace of lab-grown meat, their embrace of reprotech and high TFRs, their targeting by woke, and the weakening influence of Evangelical Christians have endeared them more to rationalists.
I think you were more scared of being associated with the "HBD" crowd a while ago. Remember the parable of lightning? You beat around the bush quite a bit. Openly linking to Hanania and to Steve Sailer's substack is a huge vibe shift. Back in your SSC days you weren't so willing to post links to content by these more right-wing people. I mean, when you interacted with Yarvin it was to argue with him. Back on SSC were you linking articles by Steve Sailer and saying they were interesting? Granted, linking to substack is a lot better than linking to unz. I would not want to link to the un z.c om trash fire either. I put spaces to not link to it. I think that HBD type views have gotten more mainstream recently. Noah Smith is now interacting with I/o on twitter.
To be clear I view all of these "rightward shifts" as a positive development. I definitely support Israel and I definitely support open discussion of group differences. Of course I would love to wave a magic wand to remove Palestinian rejectionism and to increase black genotypic IQ to 100. I also think one can certainly make many legitimate criticisms of Israel. And one can certainly make many legitimate criticisms of the HBD crowd.
I'm too emotionally invested in my day in, day out, work to end the desire for war in the holy land (not the war, but even the very desire for it -- see my substack for details) to feel like addressing that particular issue, but I think Scott has always been willing to engage with Steve Sailer in reverse proportion to how much of a pariah Steve happen to be generally considered at the time.
Luck recently fortuned Steve when out-of-the-blue a young man of means and skill decided to professionally go about bringing Steve out of damnation with professional help in the form of book tours, PR work, etc.
That doesn't make Steve's work any more or less valuable, accurate, or moral but it gave Scott the safety to quote him without risking the moronically "moral" mob's ire quite as surely.
I think you might be collapsing everything into one left-right dimension too hard. I still believe it's bad that Hamas is committing terrorist attacks, bad that Israel is stealing land in the West Bank, bad that lots of Gazans are being killed, and also bad that people in Columbia seem to be spitting on Jews.
In Colombia too.
See my newest video (please). As a non-Yeshiva but through-and-through Jew, I think you will find my past and present lived experience as a "Yeshiva Jew" pretty interesting.
https://youtu.be/gp53ggoLsaY
I agree that you have always thought all of these things. But there's a matter of context and emphasis. The Israeli right has always said that it the conflict was never about the creation of a Palestinian state but rather the destruction of Israel. 10 years ago this seemed dumb, and I didn't believe it, but I think in 2024 we can safely say that they were right. It's unfortunate that they are right.
Your view definitely is or at least codes as pro-Israel, and in Israel would be considered a center-left Zionist view. Virtually no one who codes as "pro-Palestine" acknowledge that Hamas is bad and that what's going on in the US campuses is bad. Many people who are pro-Israel are unhappy about the settlement enterprise and would rather Gazan civilians not die. You could go to Israel or to a pro-Israel gathering and say "it's bad that Gazan civilians are dying, and settlements are a bad idea" and no one would shun you. I wouldn't go to an encampment or go to the West Bank and say that it's bad Hamas commits terrorism and that there is a horrible antisemitism problem in Columbia.
I consider myself very pro-Israel and agree with your views. Everyone except Kahanist types thinks it's bad that lots of Gazan civilians are being killed, and would rather they not be. Yes I think that Israel needs to take out Hamas, but the fewer civilians are killed in the war the better. Israel should try and jail soldiers that commit war crimes.
Half of Israelis and most of Israel's international supporters (including me) oppose the settlement project. By "stealing land" do you mean just building settlements, or do you mean the ones that are on private Palestinian property are illegal under *Israeli* law? The vast majority of settlements are not on private Palestinian land. I'm not sure how the first one qualifies as "theft". Theft from whom? I don't think you can say "the Palestinians" collectively own Area C in any meaningful sense. To clarify I definitely think both are bad, though the second is obviously worse (and is prosecuted by Israel to some extent, see Amona, though not enough). I would say that the first is more akin to gerrymandering or illegal immigration (also bad) than theft. So again, I consider myself very pro-Israel and I don't find anything to disagree with among your opinions. I quibble with calling all settlement construction "theft" but I certainly agree that it's bad in any case. And I think Israel needs to defeat Hamas, but of course I agree that it's bad that civilians are dying.
> Many people who are pro-Israel are unhappy about the settlement enterprise and would rather Gazan civilians not die.
Unhappy in the sense of "This is a really awful thing that keeps me up at night and makes me think that we're the bad guys", or unhappy in the sense of "Guys this is really Bad Hasbara you know,,, could we at least settle the West Bank in peace and kill Gazans slowly, because it's not doing any favors to the image of Israel right now" ? Because the 2 attitudes are different, radically different.
I have seen plenty of r/Israel commenters and pro-Israel commenters in general "unhappy" in the second sense, just a fleeting lightning-quick blink-and-you-will-miss-it acknowledgement that - why, yes - Israel *IS* a colonial power that *does* steal land from Palestinians and kill them and burn them alive and then laugh about them on Television and TikToks with millions of viewers. Now that we have quickly established that, let's go back to why Israel Is The Only Victim In The Middle East because... because... the US delayed an arms shipment once or twice in the last year.
Before you object that first sense of being unhappy is an isolated demand for rigor, I feel the same way - as an Arab - about the Mizrahim Jews that the Arabs forced/harassed out of Arab societies through the 1950s and the 1960s and the 1970s and well into the 1990s.
> You could go to Israel or to a pro-Israel gathering and say "it's bad that Gazan civilians are dying, and settlements are a bad idea"
No you couldn't, unless the protest or gathering is by a pro-peace group like Standing Together. You couldn't even do that in the privacy of your social media or workplace, here's an Israeli teacher being shunned and reprimanded because he verbally supported refusing to serve in IDF units in the West Banks https://archive.ph/WFmPw. Here's a journalist https://archive.ph/l5fdQ who says she has been called a "Whore" and a paid shill for participating in peace protests since she was 12.
Oh don't get me wrong, there is not even an equivalent to Standing Together in Arab world, all the Arabic initiatives for peace are top-down dictator decisions for pragmatic reasons, intensely opposed by mainstream thinking, which is at best indifferent to Israelis and Palestinians in the sense of "Let them kill each other see if I care", and at worst incredibly and unbelievably antisemitic.
So Israeli society does win the somewhat low-stakes contest of being better and more peaceful overall than a lot of Middle Eastern societies and cultures that I know of, but the problem comes when you try to compare the Israeli society with serious competition like a Western Pro-Palestine culture.
> Everyone except Kahanist types thinks it's bad that lots of Gazan civilians are being killed
You seem to have optimized the phrasing of this one to imply "Everyone except a few fringe individuals who don't have any real power". When the literal Head of State of the Israel parades a map of "Greater Israel" in front of the UN showing Gaza and the West Bank as "Israel" [1], and more recently when Israel's Finance Minister says "It's sad that the world won't let us starve 2 million Gazans to death, even though it's moral" [2]. I don't think you get to play the old "A Few Bad Apples" card anymore.
> Israel should try and jail soldiers that commit war crimes.
Or make a show of doing it for the sake of the cameras, you wouldn't mind too much anyway.
> I'm not sure how the first one qualifies as "theft". Theft from whom? I don't think you can say "the Palestinians" collectively own Area C in any meaningful sense
If you truly oppose something, you wouldn't qualify and performatively sophisterize about definitions.
[1] https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/netanyahu-brandishes-map-of-israel-that-includes-west-bank-and-gaza-at-un-speech/
[2] https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/smotrich-might-be-justified-and-moral-to-cause-2-million-gazans-to-die-of-hunger-but-world-wont-let-us/
It doesn't keep me up at night and I don't think Israel is the bad guy, but I do think it's a real concern and not just a PR concern. I don't doubt your sincerity about what happened to Jews in Arab countries. I also don't think that Arabs today should be morally culpable for this, and quite honestly in some sense it's a favor anyway. Good that Iraqi Jews got kicked out in the 1950s, if they had stayed they would be getting gassed by Saddam like the Kurds, shot by ISIS. Israel is a much more pleasant place to live than non-oily Arab countries *even if you're Arab* and certainly if you're Jewish.
Benny Morris was jailed for refusing to serve in the West Bank. He is one of Israel's pre-eminent historians. I really don't like at all what happened to this teacher, that's terrible. But I will say that unfortunately the free speech of teachers and public sector employees is often restricted in lots of strange ways, and I think you are over indexing on this. If you're a private citizen in Israel you can certainly say this. Israel generally has free speech. Oded Goldreich, who is a far-left Hadash guy, is a professor at Weizmann and was awarded the Israel Prize. Yes I'm sure people are called whores and paid shills. Those are stupid comments but that is not a restriction on freedom of speech. The first example was better. I think that there is more free speech in Israel than at Western pro-Palestinian protests, encampments, rallies, etc. Unfortunately, Western pro-Palestinian culture is not some good faith Arab guy writing about Israel on ACX. I wish it was.
Netanyahu is the head of government, not the head of state. That's a dumb map, but Netanyahu himself (I'm no fan) has come out against resettling Gaza. One shouldn't read too much into the map. I don't think the PLO is very sincere about peace, but the river to the sea map on their logo is not the reason. Their refusal to compromise on the "right of return" is more important. Yes, the Finance guy Smotrich is definitely a Kahanist type. These fuckers are 5% of the Israeli population and Netanyahu let them into the government. Disgraceful. Bad guy. I never said that Kahanist types were only a few bad apples. But I do think they are a minority, probably ~5% of the Israeli Jewish population, certainly at most 10%. Compare with ~75% of Palestinians who supported October 7. The analogue of Kahanism is far more mainstream on the other side.
Yes I think Israel should actually jail soldiers that commit war crimes and not just do it for the cameras. War crimes are bad. I definitely oppose the settlements. But I don't like the term "theft" because it's not accurate. Theft from whom? Who "owns" Area C? Can we go with "illegal immigration"? I also just wasn't sure what Scott meant. Does he mean when the IDF declares some area of the West Bank to be a security zone? Settlements? Settlements on private property?
Shalom and Salaam. I'll quote Scott Aaronson, if they put you in charge of the Palestinians and me in charge of Israel, I'm sure we could sign a two-state solution and then go eat some falafel. By the way I really like Egyptian falafel, but due to favism among Mizrahi Jews they don't have it in Israel.
Any left-right division is inherently arbitrary to some extent but it seems at best odd and at worst suspicious to insist on using one that puts the majority of US Democrats on the right-wing side.
Not at all. Globally, the Democratic Party is commonly referred to as center-right. The Overton Window here in America is centered in the right side of global politics.
Also somehow in many ways left and right switched sides! 20 years ago the following things were left-coded:
1) liking Russia
2) not trusting Big Pharma
3) not liking American imperialism
4) not liking free trade
" The Israeli right has always said that it the conflict was never about the creation of a Palestinian state but rather the destruction of Israel. 10 years ago this seemed dumb, and I didn't believe it, but I think in 2024 we can safely say that they were right. It's unfortunate that they are right."
This sort of thinking is both reductionist and EXTREMELY self-fulfilling. The conflict involves many millions of people, both within the territory in question and elsewhere in the world. What it is "about" is going to vary quite a lot from year to year and person to person. But to the extent that your read IS correct, consider the following thought-experiment:
Two large groups of people, call them Group A and Group B are living and in close proximity to each other. At time 0, a few people in both groups start whispering and muttering about how "we'll never be safe until that other group is gone." Most people within their group ignore them, but a few people from the other group overhear and start shouting about it. "Those people in Group A(B) want us gone! They'll do anything to get rid of us!" Now a few more people in Group A will take the Group A whisperers-and-mutterers seriously, which means more Group A-ers whispering-and-muttering, which means its easier for those in Group B to overhear and vice versa. The belief that everybody in an opposing group wants you dead and the only way you'll be safe is to kill them first can be a really strong positive feedback loop even if all that happens is talk. Adding even a little bit of real, tangible, violent action to the mix only makes it stronger.
I think in general this is a very difficult problem to solve. If you want to avoid the outcome where everybody tries their hardest to kill everybody else, you HAVE to act as though the other side has some reasonable people who are acting in good faith and want peace. But you can't do that TOO much because there certainly are *some* people on the other side who want you dead, and leaving yourself exposed will only make things worse.
I say in general, because it is emphatically NOT a hard problem in this case. I don't believe for a minute that every single Palestinian fervently wants Israel gone, but even if that were true, they clearly, OBVIOUSLY don't have the power to get that want. Not even close. There are countries outside Israel that want it gone--I'm skeptical they have the power to make that happen either--but absolutely nothing Israel does to the Palestinians within its borders will help them achieve that either. Every Palestinian civilian that the IDF kills is a net loss for Israel's existential security. Probably most Hamas members are too. To the extent that ANY rational security purpose is being served by the bloodbath in Gaza, it's Israel trading somewhat reduced risk of terrorist attacks for slightly *increased* risk to its existence as a nation. I think the only nation that poses a real and serious existential risk to Israel right now is Isreal itself: it could tear itself apart on this issue, it could alienate itself among the international community, it could completely warp its political landscape around the "demands" of the conflict: all of these are more threatening to the state than the wildest, most ambitious dreams of Hamas.
"Virtually no one who codes as "pro-Palestine" acknowledge that Hamas is bad and that what's going on in the US campuses is bad. "
How are you counting "virtually no one?" I've seen many people acknowledge that Hamas is bad while stridently opposing the violence being done to the Palestinian people. They don't talk about it a lot, but that should hardly be surprising. The IDF has killed upwards of 20 times as many people in the past year as Hamas has, and many of them far more recently. Far too often this sort of remark is really trying to insist that every sentence included a "both sides are bad" disclaimer, and while I think very few people who consider themselves pro-Palestinian think Hamas is good or right or morally justified, nobody has very much patience for pretending they are *equally* bad. If the Israeli government had sufficient concern for its reputation to want to merely be considered *as bad* as Hamas, it was perfectly free to stop after killing 2 or 3 thousand Palestinians, instead of 30 or 40 thousand.
As for acknowledging the situation on campuses, I think Scott's own commentary to the link explained it perfectly: most people simply don't know about it. I'd heard plenty of hand-wringing about campus protests being anti-Semitic from the right, and dismissed it the same way I dismiss most hand-wringing from the right: as a mix of selective reporting and exaggeration. I'm pretty shocked at the behaviour reported in the link, and I'll freely acknowledge it's bad and it shouldn't be happening. I've seen actual anti-Semitism only very occasional in the online spaces I frequent, and stood up to it when I've seen it. I've never seen it in the real world, despite spending a good portion of the past year on university campuses (albeit, Canadian ones). I know many people who consider themselves pro-Palestinian, and zero people who would engage in or even tolerate that sort of thing: hopefully more widespread knowledge and social pressure puts a stop to it.
I think as an empirical matter than killing Hamas terrorists is good and helps Israel. I agree, killing civilians is bad. I wonder if we can operationalize this. Do you want to predict how many Israeli civilians will be killed by Palestinian terrorists over the next N years? Do you think it will be more or fewer than have been killed in the last N years? Put N=5,10,15,20,25, whatever. We should make a prediction market and bet on it. Do you want to bet on if Israel continues to exist conditional on various events?
I don't believe for a minute that every single Palestinian wants Israel gone. Of course not! Have I ever said anything like that? But three-quarters of them supported October 7. There are Kahanists but there is nothing comparable.
I wouldn't code you as pro-Palestinian, just as left-wing and anti-war. You want a two-state solution and don't want Israel gone. You oppose October 7 strongly, you oppose Hamas, and you want a two-state solution. Quite honestly you'll find a higher proportion of Israeli Jews who share your view than Palestinians who share your view. Your view is fringe among Palestinians, but not among Israeli Jews.
I'm a bit puzzled why moderate pro-Israel types talk as if there's some other equilibrium outcome to the ongoing settlement expansion (supported by a plurality of Israelis according to polls, and this number is steadily growing; for demographic reasons the trajectory of Israeli politics is going steadily rightward) other than annexation of the West Bank and expulsion of the Palestinians there. So I'm less inclined to view Palestinian extremism as some crazy ex nihilo phenomenon rooted in mere religious fundamentalism. Even 5 years ago a resident of the West Bank would be reasonable to believe that even if they all embraced Gandhiesque pacifism, they would still eventually lose everything to the settler movement. There's still no point in fighting a war you're destined to lose, but any prospect for any peace other than total capitulation basically died with the Olmert government.
That’s nonsense, if they engaged in Gandhiesque pacifism, the settler movement would lose overwhelmingly in Israeli elections.
I think you're doing a kind of meaningless attempt to set a neutral point so that you can say everyone on one side of the point is one one side and vice versa. I don't think that's really meaningful. For example, if I said that anyone who was against Israel's current war was "pro-Hamas", that's . . . a thing I could do . . . but it would obviously be a lot of inflammatoriness for no gain.
Almost no one is saying this. Netanyahu would not say such a thing, and would never accuse Biden of being pro-Hamas.
Meanwhile there are plenty of people who believe that if you accept the existence of Israel in any borders, but you are a Zionist and that therefore you are bad. I think that these people are crazy, but they are actually right about the nature of the conflict.
Really at its core this “neutral point” is not so arbitrary. It’s by far the most natural and important dividing line. This principle - the one that Israel exists - is really the one that is most at stake. It’s not an arbitrary point. It passes the following empirical test. If most Palestinians became OK with the existence of Israel, the conflict would have been solved long ago.
In the same way I do think that the abortion debate is really about if life begins at conception. I think it’s a mistake to call people who really are OK with 12-week bans and that’s it “pro-life”, even if they are more pro-life than the median American. The principle really at the heart of the debate is the conception thing. You have 10-20% of Americans who really believe this. If everyone agreed that the conception thing was ridiculous, abortion would cease to be a relevant political issue. People would fight on the number of weeks but once you accept the principle that conceptionism is wrong it becomes a matter of science and not religion.
Once you accept the existence of Israel, the conflict becomes some kind of normal ethnic conflict / real estate dispute which can be settled in a negotiated deal by rational actors, and not a nationalist holy war. The PA’s admirable verbal commitment to the acceptance of Israel notwithstanding, we are really not at this point yet. All of this talk about the Palestinian “right of return”, which Palestinian negotiators have never conceded (not in 2000, 2008, 2014, 2015, whenever), is at the core of the conflict.
Again there is the asymmetry here. If conception people went away then abortion would cease to be an issue. People might have disagreements on T3 but that would all get worked out. If people who support T3 abortions went away, it wouldn’t solve the issue. The end of Palestinian rejectionism would very quickly lead to a dovish Israeli government signing a two-state solution with a dovish Palestinian government and the settlers getting outvoted. It’s the Second Intifada after all that ousted Barak and put Olmert in power, after Arafat failed to accept the Clinton parameters. The end of the settlement project and the end of the Gaza war would not lead to the end of Palestinian rejectionism, which doesn’t care at all about the Green Line. It’s not at all a coincidence that the conception people and the encampment people are both extremely uncompromising and willing to lose the election for their own political party.
If you disagree, let’s formulate some kind of empirical question and put a prediction market. I did make a lot of empirical claims here.
Are your views different from those of Yair Golan in any meaningful way? Meanwhile there are no influential Palestinian politicians or major political factions who have these views. So yes these are pro-Israel views. Any view that supports the continuation of the existence of Israel, the "Zionist entity", is pro-Israel. Palestinian and their supporters think that the existence of Israel is a moral atrocity.
It sounds like you want to forcibly make Scott "Pro-Israel", by intentionally Motte-And-Baileying the "Pro-Israel" position so much that it becomes meaningless.
You remind me of feminists who - when it suits them - insist that anyone who doesn't literally think that women are breeding mares Untermenschen designed by the creator god to be a slave half-species for men is a feminist. When someone says something reasonable like "Ohh I'm not sure, I do like women but I don't like it when feminists are being misandrist piece of shits", they are made fun of as snowflakes who care about trivialities while women are facing <insert grievance here>.
> Palestinian and their supporters think that the existence of Israel is a moral atrocity.
You don't seem conversant enough in the Pro-Palestine coalition to know that, and no, seeing a protest on a street doesn't qualify as "Know some Pro-Palestine people", street protestors are an atrociously biased sample of any population.
**points to self** This Pro-Palestinian, at the very least, seems to contradict your assertion. I think that Israel's **founding** is a moral atrocity - which it is - but I think that enough time has passed that it's no longer morally meaningful to punish anyone by dismantling Israel, even the scum on Israeli television that say things like "Nakba ! Nakba ! Nakba 2.0 !!" are not - in my view - worthy of institutional violence, since I see them as equivalents to someone who praises the Holocaust or the genocide of Native Americans: horrible, but at the end of the day just speech, and speech shouldn't get bullets. (Now, I wouldn't be too opposed if someone were to dispense *non-institutional* violence to our Nakba-celebrating friends.)
I'm not a prominent pro-Palestinian by any definition of fame, but you're posting on ACX and I have written perhaps north of 500K or more [1] words on Israel and Palestine on ACX, mostly but not exclusively on Open Threads. When a Pro-Palestinian right next to you is posting half-million-strong walls of text saying "I DONT WANT ISRAEL TO BE DESTROYED", it sounds that you have a glaring hole in your characterization of "Pro-Palestinians" then.
[1] Quick back-of-envelope Fermi estimation: My average post is about 2.5 or 3 screenfuls of words, about 2 times longer than your other post in this thread. On my laptop that works out to ~5000 characters or so according to Notepad, assuming the average number of letters per English word is 5, that works out to 1000 words per post. 500K words is therefore 500 posts. There have been 48 Open Threads since I made my account, the third Open Thread I participated in is https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-299, the first is https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-297. 500 posts divided by 49 Open Threads is ~10 posts per Open Thread, above the average of the last 2 months or so of comparative radio silence, but well below my average since October and until May. The first Open Thread has 50 matches for Ctrl-F of "LearnsHebrew". Plus, I sometimes post outside of Open Threads, and a lot of time I post far far lengthier than 1K words. This is a slight overestimation of the number of words I have posted on ACX on Israel-Palestine in particular, because I also post on other topics, but it's a an underestimation of the total amount of words and thoughts and video frames I had read and written in total on the Israel-Palestine issue.
I very much appreciate your point of view. We've got to have some way of accepting current people rather than making the past the most important thing.
Would you be safe expressing your views about Israel under your own name in Palestine?
I see the situation as both Gaza and Israel having murderous leadership.
OK, "Palestinians and their supporters think that the existence of Israel is a moral atrocity" is too strong of a phrase, I apologize for saying that. Most Palestinians think that the existence of Israel is a moral atrocity.
Yes there are people in the West - a few ACX commentators, Irish leftists, not encampment people - who are "pro-Palestinian" but not on board with destroying Israel. Quite honestly this is just LARPing, as it's not a position that anyone in the region really has. Meanwhile there are plenty of people in Israel, including major Zionist political parties like The Democrats, that agree with Scott's position.
The feminism analogy is bad. To make it better you have to consider a hypothetical. If US university campuses were full of people chanting that women should not have rights or should be allowed to vote, then you would be a feminist for disagreeing with them. If we got back to 1920's social norms, and you talked about male variability and about the excesses of MeToo, no one would call you anti-feminist.
Also if you are going to criticize some Israeli action, of course I'm not going to deflect and say that Palestinians also did some bad thing. This is an extremely dumb thing to do and it's a non sequitur. If someone talks about Dresden you don't go and say that Auschwitz was so much worse. Yes it was but that doesn't address the point, and civilians in Dresden didn't even know about the gas chambers. I am very different from the feminists you bring up.
> It sounds like you want to forcibly make Scott "Pro-Israel", by intentionally Motte-And-Baileying the "Pro-Israel" position so much that it becomes meaningless.
I'm not sure Motte and Bailey is the right frame here. To use an American example. When Trump first won the Republican primaries, a lot of senior GOP figures endorsed Clinton. Did they move left?
If you define "left" as a series of beliefs and policies no they didn't.
If you define "left" as a team that's opposed to the team called "right" they did.
And I think there is a reasonable case that when "left" is used by the man on the street they think of it in the sense of the second term. Why is solar power left wing? Surely cheap reliable off-the-grid energy fits the rugged individualism and rural localities of the archetypical right wing voter?
Bringing it back to Israel. Replace Trump with "October 11th was a mask off moment for the western pro-Palestine movement".
> You remind me of feminists who - when it suits them - insist that anyone who doesn't literally think that women are breeding mares Untermenschen designed by the creator god to be a slave half-species for men is a feminist.
Does "want to turn women into breeding mare untermenschen" and "everyone else" accurately describe the sides in the culture war over woman's issues in the west?
Does "want to end the existence of Israel as a Jewish state" and "everyone else" accurately describe the two sides of the culture war over support for Israel in the west? It ignores a lot of people in the middle, but I would argue its *much* closer to accurate than the preceding paragraph.
>I think that Israel's **founding** is a moral atrocity - which it is - but I think that enough time has passed that it's no longer morally meaningful to punish anyone by dismantling Israel
In your view, how much more morally atrocious would the current activities of the currently-existing Israel have to be before it became morally meaningful to punish anyone by dismantling it?
Settlements are more "illegal immigration" or "gerrymandering" (both bad, to be clear) than "theft". The ones on private Palestinian property are theft, yes, but that's a small minority of them. Not a fan of the settlements, but important to use words accurately.
If you are hoping for a two state solution, then "annexation" is probably the best word. They are an effort to shrink the borders of any potential Palestinian state by putting down enough people that it's easier to change where the border is than displace the settlers.
Often people call it "creeping annexation" because "annexation" has a specific meaning. But yeah, I generally agree.
I wouldn't say that they are actually an effort to "shrink the borders of any potential Palestinian state", more like an effort to prevent one entirely. It's a failed effort. While there has been expansion of existing settlements, creation of actually new settlements has all but stopped. There hasn't been and won't be nearly enough settlement construction to make a two-state solution unviable.
"illegal immigration" is misleading, because the settlers are backed by the Israeli government, not in spite of it.
Fair point, I agree. It’s illegal immigration into the West Bank, backed by the Israeli government. As I said, I think that “theft” is also wrong though, at least for the vast majority of settlers who go to Area C but not Palestinian private property. I think that a stable and lasting two-state solution would be great, but I don’t think it’s meaningful to say that Area C is the collective property of the Palestinians. It’s not actually owned by the PA the way the US government owns US federal land.
Just picking up one little piece: I'm a bit surprised Scott hadn't picked up on the many stories from Jews about being personally harassed on campuses. It's not a big deal that he didn't, it's just possible that I was reading more frightened sources, or that he was more optimistic about universities.
The vast majority of these stories are, to put it nicely, impossible to parse in relation to anti-Semitism. That's because most mainstream sources bizarrely conflate anti-Semitic sentiment with anti-Zionist sentiment and anti-Israel sentiment. (Obviously these things can all co-exist, but definitionally conflating them seems absurd)
Perhaps Scott noticed this glaring conflation issue and so he didn't take the stories seriously until this report from a known quantity like Columbia.
I am skeptical that Columbia's anti-Semitism task force didn't also engage in these fallacious conflations, which are possibly designed to shut down dissent and debate. But truthfully, I haven't read the report yet, so I don't really know.
There can be no question but that flat out Jew hating is on the rise, and those unwise conflations are making it impossible for us to accurately measure anti-Semitism, which in turn makes it hard to efficiently address the problem. The Jew haters are benefited enormously when we spend our energy bashing pro-Semitic dislikers of Zionism/Israel.
One of the reasons for conflating antisemitism and anti-zionism, is the dishonesty, lies by omission, and worse that come out of anti-zionist circles.
If someone denies any Jewish connection to the land, mistranslates 'Yahud' to 'occupation forces', and consistently fails to analyze the conflict honestly, assuming they are antisemitic makes sense.
Usually they are just deranged 'anti-imperial' leftists borrowing narratives and terms from antisemites from the middle east, but at that point, what's the difference?
The difference is that anti-Semitism, by long-standing common assent, means Literally Hating The Jews. It doesn't mean being dishonest about Israel, it doesn't mean doing lies of omission and it doesn't mean mistranslating Yahud. It means Jew Hating. And your attempt to change this definition is precisely of a kind with the woke left trying to change the meaning of basic words like racism and woman. PRECISELY.
> mistranslates 'Yahud' to 'occupation forces'
The occupied Palestinians universally call the occupying army on their land either الاحتلال "The Occupation" or اليهود "Yahud, i.e. The Jews".
It's perhaps too much to ask of people whose villages, trees, cars, and children are being burned alive by Jews to be politically correct, I don't think you would be too offended if the Nova Concert party goers called Hamas "The Arabs" either, and neither would I be.
That said, faithful translation is a key marker of good faith and truth seeking, and yes, anti-Zionism brings out the worst out of anyone supporting Palestinians and does more harm than any amount of good anyone could argue it does with a straight face. I have a solid policy of not identifying as an "Anti-Zionist" for this reason, and I think many Pro-Palestinian spaces would benefit by banning any term that matches "*Zionist*" entirely.
Have you read the article?
Do you think this is how Jews, Zionists, or potential Zionists should be treated?
"One of the essential obligations of a university is to provide a feeling of safety, in the most basic sense of the word: the feeling of being safe in one’s room, on one’s way to class or to study. After October 7, numerous students reported that they no longer felt safe. One student who had
moved into her dorm room in September, told us she placed a mezuzah on her doorway as required by ritual law, as traditional Jews have done for centuries. In October, people began banging on her door at all hours of the night, demanding she explain Israel’s actions. She was forced to move out of the dorm. Visibly observant students, like ones who wear traditional head coverings, have been frequently met with extreme hostility. “On campus, my friends have been spit on, been called like terrible,
terrible names, a very close friend of mine was called, a lover of genocide and then a lover of baby killing. This was only a couple of days after October seventh.” A student told us she had been chased off campus with her brother one night. In many cases, episodes like these have led
to efforts to hide markers of Jewish identity: while some students felt that they could previously “wear our Jewish identity,” now they don’t want their peers to know that they are Jewish. The fear of consequences permeated the atmosphere of campus during these months. One student put
it this way: “If I walk on campus right now with my star out or kippah or say ‘am Yisrael chai’ “the people of Israel live,” a traditional song], I could start World War III.” Many Jewish students said they now avoid walking alone on campus.
Students have reported having necklaces ripped off their necks and being pinned against walls, while walking back to their dorms on Friday afternoon and when they were on their way to synagogue. There were also multiple reports of visibly Jewish individuals simply walking past 116th Street who have been followed, stalked, and subjected to ethnic slurs and hateful
statements, like “go back to Poland” and “I hope you guys suffer. You guys think it’s okay to kill innocent babies and bomb hospitals. Yes, Habibi, I’m talking to you,” and, when the hecklers saw that the student was filming them, one said to send the video “to all your Israelis.” Students also recounted finding jokes about Hitler written on communal dormitory whiteboards. Many students described walking down hallways as a painful daily routine.
This hateful rhetoric has often been accompanied by an unwillingness on the part of listeners to engage with Jewish and Israeli students in a wide variety of encounters that are held to be the bedrock of a university community: discussion, empathy, intellectual nuance, argument. Some
Jewish students found that whatever they said, their words were distorted. Some students were made to feel as though their support of Israel, or empathy for Israelis, was inseparable from support for the actions being carried out by the Israeli government. A student said, “There’s a lot
of times where Jewish students are made to justify the actions of Israel, for good and for bad. When you assume that someone’s religious beliefs mean they want a group of people dead, that is hurtful.” Another recounted feeling unable to criticize what’s going on Israel for fear that such discussion would be associated with support for the destruction of the state. Others feared that the assumption that all Jewish students were aligned politically was particularly dangerous for Jews of color, and they were especially concerned about the heightened presence of police on
campus. Still students spoke of what they perceive as the University’s failure to distinguish between different Jewish denominations, mindsets, and beliefs. Several students argued that the administration was only supportive of Zionist Jews. Others expressed their firm belief in the
inextricable connection between Zionism and Jewish identity."
I'll read it. Pretty grim stuff and anti-Semitic incidents should be investigated properly, and action should be taken. Unfortunately, based on this excerpt, I don't believe Columbia is capable of dealing with anti-Semitism effectively. It's s clear from the language here that they don't even understand that Zionism is a form of ethnofascism, as my Jewish friends will attest.
Of course Israelis have a right to be safe and to keep their property safe. But no one has the right to organize and maintain an ethnofascist regime. Calling for regime change is not the same thing as calling for genocide. No matter how one tries to spin it.
These stories are very bad, whether or not they are "anti semitic". The definition of anti semitism doesn't influence how bad these stories are.
I agree, ideally there should be no special "antisemitism" task force. Certainly, universities shouldn't police the speech and action of their students for any kind of protected free speech, but should punish violations of university policy.
Still, conditional on the existence of all of the DEI bureaucracies and so on and the current state of US universities in 2024, I guess it's better to have one than not have one to expose how hypocritical these universities are. I strongly support removing all DEI, but harping about anti-Semitism is a good way to accomplish that. We have to operate within the system we have. Ideally we'd have more libertarian civil rights laws and free association, but given the ones we have it's appropriate to play the game a bit and sue Harvard for anti-Asian discrimination.
I agree we don't want Jews to be added to any DEI bureaucracy, and should try to dismantle DEI, but this "antisemitism task force" is not becoming an institutionalized and permanent part of the university, so it's not as much of a concern.
>I am skeptical that Columbia's anti-Semitism task force didn't also engage in these fallacious conflations, which are possibly designed to shut down dissent and debate
"Possibly" is being very generous here.
Yeah, the word he should have been reaching for was "not."
>That's because most mainstream sources bizarrely conflate anti-Semitic sentiment with anti-Zionist sentiment and anti-Israel sentiment
There is nothing "bizarre" about "conflating" Judaism with a thing that is extremely important to most Jews and a central part of Judaism.
Imagine somebody who said "I don't hate Catholics, I just hate the ones who think the Pope in Rome speaks with the authority of God." I'm sorry, but that guy is an anti-Catholic even if he's convinced himself that he is not: he's invented a definition of Catholicism that he uses as a get-out-of-jail-free card.
A quick look at the history of Zionism shows that it was a controversial movement at first among Jews, a movement that gradually grew into dominance over the course of a couple of generations. Even as late as the 1940s, the Orthodox world was pretty skeptical of Zionism.
So it's easy to establish that no, Zionism is not central to Judaism.
I am going to express my strong support for not treating Scott as emphasising that he thinks Israel has a right to exist (without pogroms!) as a change in his point of view. Unfortunately, it probably a sign of a broader "vibe shift" that it is so often topical for him to do so.
I am also strongly supportive of not treating "takes plausible arguments about very serious topics seriously" as right-coded.
As for the fact that you find his views somehow zionist or right coded, that may be all about you.
You have a point, but I don't think it's all about me. I do think that the more prominent far-left crazy people are, the more sanity becomes right-coded. And of course the prominence of far-right crazy people makes sanity more left-coded.
Yes, we agree about the extreme shifting around a fairly stable center, but your previous comments were about Scott's position changing when I would have thought it was more an illustration of the former phenomenon.
I'd rather say that it's the Israel-related cracks in the leftist-dominated establishment that incidentally lend the right some grudging veneer of respectability. However crazy the radicals are about sex/gender, for example, the establishment entirely has their back, so any dissent is misinformation/bigotry/Russian propaganda. Whereas there's a genuine split on the Hamas apologia, and so a legitimate space for calling out the crazy as such.
The way I see it is that you've always wished you lived in the more mature internet era of 1999 when you could discuss anything without fear of being burned by puritan mobs. I've seen you waffle or take precautions only so as not to get charlie hebdo'd, but as the rules keep changing so you modify what you let yourself say or link to.
As a Rabbi traching history in a Jewish School in California, I spent a day with my class taking the Nazi arguments seriously - without knee-jerk condemnation or any other vocal or mental "crime stop" tactics. It was a please for us all and undoubtedly a maturing moment for my students.
The online puritan mobs are odious and I've always been ambivalent about the benefit of imposing universal literacy as I wrote today: https://ydydy.substack.com/p/literacy-should-be-an-earned-privilege
You make a public point about areas where you've changed your mind regarding a serious opinion you've once had. The rest of the time you're just teasing good points by a wide collection of people without fully endorsing them.
I'm a long time fan and I get the impression that on the 20% of your stuff that slightly rankles me, we would come to a common conclusion if we were to speak it out on one. That committment to truth over ego or tribe is why it's so easy to get past the rankling.
I know that it's a defense mechanism against closed-minded online assholes, which you most decidedly are not.
Too bad we haven't met. Any plans to visit Egypt soon?
Well in 1999 the Internet was mostly people who worked in an IT related field. Or in other words, it had a culture of autistic bluntness. I mean, two things changed, today not only IT workers use the Internet, but crucially, IT workers were also a smaller group with a definite kind of, huh, traits, or culture. Not simply maturity. I would say empathy levels were low, but intellectual rigor high. I don't really think we can have both the same time.
In 1999, the culture was also leaning towards classical liberalism--heavy emphasis on individualism, personal freedom, and personal responsibility (eg. RTFM). If you look at the Hackers Manifesto or the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace, you might be overpowered by the smell of horses strong black coffee. The writer of the Declaration was the cofounder of the Electronic _Frontier_ Foundation.
But like you say that has been swallowed up by the mass influx of newbies. It's eternal September.
An unfortunate loss.
It would be nice if there were some corner of the internet where OGs like ourselves could speak without the censorship of children.
I'm trying out some revolutionary ideas to be implemented immediately if we can come to a consensus but YouTube has no discernable demographic with whom to share my videos because they don't fit any of the mass markets.
This morning's video is specifically made (and even titled!) for the sort of people who enjoyed the internet of 1999 so I hope a few fellas here give it a go. It's my atheist-orthodox-rabbi manifesto for offering mankind a different culture than the one that currently prevails.
As most of my viewers are people familiar with my work, the beginning addresses them specifically vis a vis rhe urgency of getting this out there, so if that pary doesn't speak to you, please start 5 minutes in.
"NEW! For Intelligent Skeptics: One Rabbi's Torah Mission"
https://youtu.be/7jesi_6VDOc?feature=shared
An unfortunate loss.
It would be nice if there were some corner of the internet where OGs like ourselves could speak without the censorship of children.
I'm trying out some revolutionary ideas to be implemented immediately if we can come to a consensus but YouTube has no discernable demographic with whom to share my videos because they don't fit any of the mass markets.
This morning's video is specifically made (and even titled!) for the sort of people who enjoyed the internet of 1999 so I hope a few fellas here give it a go. It's my atheist-orthodox-rabbi manifesto for offering mankind a different culture than the one that currently prevails.
As most of my viewers are people familiar with my work, the beginning addresses them specifically vis a vis rhe urgency of getting this out there, so if that pary doesn't speak to you, please start 5 minutes in.
"NEW! For Intelligent Skeptics: One Rabbi's Torah Mission"
https://youtu.be/7jesi_6VDOc?feature=shared
What's the terrible argument against race-mixing? Many "races" are already mixed, right? The "white race" was created by race mixing between steppe and farmer. Mexicans are a mix of White and Native, and even African Americans are a mixed population that is only ~75% African genetically on average. Someone like Skip Gates is already mixed, genetically half-white. Cory Booker has blue eyes. If you are talking about black-white mixing in the US context, at least one parent is already mixed, unless his parents came from Nigeria or Ghana or some place like that. Oh, and let's not forget race-mixing between farmers and hunter-gatherers. Ashkenazi Jews are a mix of Italian women and Israelite men. Ethiopians are a mix of East Africans and Middle Easterners. Brazil is a country full of race-mixing. There's already so much race-mixing. Like, on what timescale does this guy think race mixing is bad?
Forgive me if you don't want to engage here. I can only imagine what kind of person would argue against "race mixing". Not even interracial marriage, but calling it "race mixing". Some Neo-Nazi?
I did see quite a lot of stuff online recently saying that mixed race kids were more distant from either parent than a random member of the parents race. The force of the argument coming from evolution. Suprised to see little push back on these claims, and don't know enough to evaluate them properly.
OK say that's true for some ways to measure genetic distance. Then what? Who cares? There are tribes of bushmen or whatever so an average pair of people is as distant as an Italian and a Japanese, and more than an Italian and a Spaniard. Should they have an identity crisis? Perhaps a child from this tribe is less related to his father than a random English guy is to a random German guy. What's wrong with genetic distance not lining up with paternity? Should adoption also be banned then?
I'm not actually sure what adaptive preferences look like, even about things like mutated descendants or what genes are (Hanson has warned against othering AIs since they would have our "genes")etc. But supposing it is true that adaptive preferences would caution against mixed raced kids, I can see why some might be moved by such an argument.
Bushmen are genetically diverse, but morphologically they are very homogenous. Most genetic diversity is neutral and morphological traits like, skin color, height, facial features, and so on are under intense selection pressures. So they vary much less and reproductively isolated groups converge on a common phenotype relatively quickly. Bushmen don't generally have higher variance in their morphological phenotype then other people. Which is obvious if you've ever seen a group of Bushmen. Genetically they are extremely diverse, but they all look the same.
Humans are visual animals and appearance matters a lot. A person who looks racially different will always be naturally out-grouped, red haired people get out-grouped even by people almost genetically identical to them, same with dwarves.
It's also about culture. Black and white culture are quite distinct in the USA and a mixed race child of ambiguous phenotype will have to choose whether to assimilate more into the white or black culture. They will be alienated from friends and family on the opposite side of that cultural divide. The divide isn't insurmountable, but it is an issue.
I'm still an advocate of race-mixing in general on the grounds that it's the only way to deal with these issues in the long run, by converging the groups genetically and culturally. But, I understand why someone would be apprehensive about having kids that look very different from their cousins and other relatives.
People tried your long term solution and the result is Latin America. How impressive.
IIRC I saw a rebuttal of that claim. Don't remember the details, but the argument might have been that so many genes are not strongly correlated with race that your child's similarly in terms of those genes outweighs the difference due to race-correlated genes.
But even if it's true that mixed race kids are further from you in DNA than other members of your race, who says that's bad? Most of us, if we had an adopted child or loving step-parent, would treat them as akin to a blood relative despite having no DNA in common (beyond the human baseline). For normal people, our degree of caring is based as much or more on social and moral factors as on common biological descent.
Personally my suspicion is that the claim about a lack of relatedness is probably wrong. But taking it for granted as true, moderns seem especially unsual in this regard, that probably the vast majority of humans historically would have treated blood relatives as different to outsiders and would not have been keen to waste resources on such outsiders (for obvious evolutionary reasons).
Distant genetically or psychologically?
Thee "problem" I've seen is with mixed-race kids getting radicalized by activists into hating one race or the other, and that can be easily solved by putting those activists at the bottom of a coal mine and sealing the entrance.
This is a problem. but let us not presuppose that mixed-race kids who have a self-image as mixed race are uniquely susceptible to radicalization.
I would think the opposite would be true.
I will caveat that mixed race kids with black mothers would be, I imagine, uniquely prone to become anti-white radicals, due to certain pathologies in African-American culture.
Not on Israel, Scott, but on other things. I wrote a long comment on your link #6, it's.... uh, it's quite something.
Without details, I'll just say I got the opposite impression (that Scott's moved pretty far to the left on these specific issues).
By "these specific issues", do you mean just issues concerning Israel and the Jews? Or do you mean both Jews/Israel issues and race/HBD/DEI issues?
The former.
Without details- I strongly agree.
You're all wrong. Scott secretly agrees with me on almost every issue.
Agreed, and more generally true, the obnoxiousness of his closing link commentary highlights that.
Banania is also a poor example to use, and Scott has been referencing/interacting with Sailer for many years now, that's not a change.
Scott can speak for himself and quite eloquently to boot, but post-10/6 I'm like, well, looks like we can't have peace, so I want my relatives to survive. I expect people with Palestinian relatives take the equal and opposite position. We'll see who wins.
Also, a lot of the far right is anti-Israel and explicitly antisemitic (mostly ultimately due to the prominence of Jews on the left over here from what I can tell).
I don't know about politics, but as you get older and settle down and have kids and all that jazz, you tend to trend more small-c conservative. Suddenly all the fuddy-duddy advice about being responsible and sensible seems less fuddy-duddy 😀
"If you’re not a liberal when you’re 25, you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative by the time you’re 35, you have no brain” is a quote attributed to Churchill but seems very likely he didn't say it, so probably our friend Anonymous again.
My understanding is that the earliest version of the quote was about republicanism rather than liberalism.
It’s important to note that WWI ended with maneuver warfare. The Ukrainians have demonstrated the ability to take significant swathes of territory with relatively few casualties at least twice so far (in Kharkiv offensive and Kursk offensive), so maneuver warfare is not hopeless in this war.
Yes, maneuver and attrition warfare are two different tools that are used in concert. It's rare for any war to be purely one or the other. Even the first Gulf War against Iraq -- normally thought of as a brilliant maneuver war where the Coalition quickly achieved victory with large scale flanking maneuvers and deep attacks with smart weapons -- was preceded by intense bombing and shelling explicitly described by the general staff as an attrition campaign. Attrition opens up the opportunity for maneuver, and maneuver permits more effective attrition.
The current Ukraine conflict is in an attrition *phase*. It was in a maneuver phase for the first few months, when the incompetent Russian thrusts toward Kyiv and Kharkiv were thrown back. The reasons for the current phase are a lot more complex than just artillery vs air power. I would add a lot more factors like the age of the conflict -- since 2014 -- meaning that continuous and immensely deep fortifications (50 km in places) exist, political limits (Russia doesn't want to call a general mobilization, Ukraine doesn't want to annoy its Western friends), terrain (neither side can go around the fortified lines, the ground is difficult to attack through), and so forth. But it's only a phase. It can shift back into maneuver warfare again.
> when the incompetent Russian thrusts toward Kyiv and Kharkiv were thrown back
... and when Russians got the land bridge to Crimea, which is still under their control.
Agree about phases, and self-imposed political limits on *Russia only* - Ukraine pretty much gets everything (but with moderate delays - which make things harder for them).
Lay public were shocked by trench warfare between developed nations in the 21st century. Military professionals recognize that the conditions which led to the trenches of the western front in 1915-1918 were re-created in Ukraine:
1. Can't go around them: the Joint Ops Area is bounded naturally by coastlines and legally by national borders/limits on long range strikes beyond national borders, once the line of contact stabilizes neither side can easily turn the other's flanks and opening additional fronts has been below the threshold of large-scale combat ops (e.g. clandestine and special ops, info ops, international diplomacy, economic sanctions, etc.)
2. Can't go over them: both sides can effectively contest the airspace, so neither can launch vertical envelopments, air interdiction and close air support is risky, strategic bombing is done by long range standoff munitions (rockets, missiles and drones) instead of waves of manned aircraft.
3. Can't go through them: 21st century weapons defeat 21st century armour, but earthworks offer cheap protection, so defense is stronger than offense. Neither side can rapidly break through so many prepared lines of defense, although Russia seems able/willing to grind it out on the offense.
It's a weird premise, expecting a war to last just a few news cycles.
If I pick 17 assorted conflicts since World War II—Vietnam, the Soviet-Afghan War, the ongoing Syrian Civil War, others—the average duration is ~2,163 days, or nearly 6 years.
The median is 1,812 days (about 5 years), so most of these wars lasted at least half a decade. The standard deviation is around 1,954 days, so there's a lot of variance, and some wars last decades, even with bigger gaps in professional capabilities.
For instance:
The Vietnam War endured for 3,919 days (~11 years).
The Soviet-Afghan War lasted 3,342 days (~9 years).
US was in Afghanistan for arguably ~7,268 days (~20 years).
On the shorter end of the spectrum, we have conflicts like the Six-Day War in 1967 (6 days, per the name) and the Yom Kippur War in 1973 (20 days). But these seem to be exceptions rather than the rule.
It's been 933 (awful) days so far, unless you extend back to 2014. Still relatively short compared to many historical conflicts. If you look at the high standard deviation and range of the durations, a 20 year conflict, while difficult to imagine, would not be unprecedented.
On 13, I see that the commenters on that tweet got it right; it's not one in a trillion, it's about one in a hundred million. (Once you fill in two, the other one will usually match.)
It's even worse than that, because of post-selection. Basically, there's thousands of possible vote tallies that are equally surprising / obviously doctored.
I dislike this kind of reasoning, since literally every possible percentage has the same probability- there are a hundred million possible outcomes and you will get exactly one of them. Statistically speaking a round number is no different to any other.
Now you can look at that and say they obviously fixed the percentages first and stupidly worked backwards to get the vote numbers, and you are certainly right. But the probabilistic argument isn't the right one to then make.
I agree with this.
The chance that the vote is exactly 5150092 is 1 in 10058774.
Does that mean a vote is unlikely to be any specific number? Sure? But that doesn't mean its doctored. It has to be one number, after all.
Even glossing over the idea that the chance of at least 1 of a bunch of low-probability things happening is high already so you should expect to see some low-probability outcomes in real life.
Yes, but perfectly round numbers are something a human mind would like choose if asked to pick a percentage. I believe there is actually a science if this in forensic accounting, the kind of numbers humans make up when cooking books is not the same as numbers chosen at random.
I think everyone is in agreement. That such artificial-looking vote totals would crop up by random chance is very unlikely, but it's impossible to quantify exactly how unlikely because the class of "such artificial-looking vote totals" is not well defined.
I don't think that's what everyone is saying, but it is a good point that the situation is underspecified such that we could reasonably disagree about the probability of the observed outcome. Are we taking the total vote as a given, for one, and if not what the is the possible range of vote totals.
While people may disagree about what the complete set of artificial-looking vote percentages is, I think just about every version of that set would include round numbers with no decimals.
We could use Bayes theorem to get somewhat close to what I understand the situation is: calculating the probability that this is doctored , given it is a round number.
P(Doctored∣Round Number)= ( P(Round Number∣Doctored)⋅P(Doctored) ) / P(Round Number)
We probably align on the first probability P(Round Number∣Doctored) ~ 80%?
The second probability , the prior likelihood of it being doctored - I'm not sure since I haven't been following this election, but since popular opinion here online is that its doctored, lets say 20%? This number is ridiculously high compared to a probability I would give normal election being doctored. Let me know if theres a better estimate.
The Probability in the denominator, P(Round number) is a marginal probability:
(P(Round Number∣Doctored)⋅P(Doctored) )+ (P(Round Number∣Not Doctored)⋅P(Not Doctored))
something like (0.80×0.20)+(0.05×0.80) = 0.20
That makes the equation ( 80% * 20% ) / 20% = 80%
So the existence of a round number here moves the probability of the election being doctored from 20% to 80% using this back-of-the-napkin calculation.
Still pretty damning, but we did use a high prior likelihood (20%) for this. Regardless , i think this approach is better than just saying the probability of a round number appearing is 1 in a trillion, which is just a weird underspecified claim.
20% may be too low: the country in question is a dictatorship and the dictator who "won" the election has been in power for 11 years now, and happened to be the handpicked successor of the previous dictator.
So what would be a reasonable probability in your opinion?
I'm not disputing the claim that the election is doctored, I'm just claiming the 'rounded number' statistic used as it is in the tweet is misleading and inflammatory.
How are you getting P(Round Number∣Not Doctored) = 0.05? That seems empirically and theoretically false. Taking your 1 in 10058774 and multiplying by all 1000 possible XX.X00..% values gives 0.0001; extending it to XX.XX00..% gives 0.001. Both of those suggest a movement from 20% to 99%+, provided I'm doing my math correctly. P(Round Number∣Doctored) = .8 also seems quite high- don't election doctors prefer to seem legitimate?
That's a good point, that number is rather unsubstantiated on my end. I'm happy to have more informed probabilities.
The probability that we get a round number, given that the vote totals were not doctored, is the 1 - in - 100 million chance that was discussed earlier.
So we end up with:
P(Round Number∣Doctored)⋅P(Doctored)
/
(P(Round Number∣Doctored)⋅P(Doctored) ) + (P(Round Number∣Not Doctored)⋅P(Not Doctored))
Where:
P(Round Number∣Not Doctored)⋅P(Not Doctored) ~= 0
and we get the result that the odds of a doctored vote total is approximately 100%. No need for any more contrarian sophistry.
Edit: The odds of an undoctored round number is actually closer to 1,000 / 10 million, since there are about 1000 round numbers that the percentages can coalesce around, and 10 million possible vote total results.
Yep, this is a clear case of a bad argument in service of an obviously correct idea that proponents of such ideas tend to be much less critical about. Just because in general it's obvious that P(glaring coincidence|funny business) > P(glaring coincidence|no funny business) it doesn't mean that it's easy to provide meaningful numbers.
Ok, bear with me for a second. Any particular set of (let's say) five cards is equally likely to be drawn, but some patterns (suited Ace through 10) can occur in fewer ways than other patterns (any five suited cards). Once you've drawn five cards, the probability that you have some specific set of five cards is 1. But the probability that you have a low value hand > flush > royal flush. Now, the way to flesh out the statistical argument is with conditional probabilities. Round numbers are "special" like flushes--they have to meet a condition to be included in the set, and there are fewer of them. If the outcome were random, the probability of one of these "special" outcomes occurring wouldn't be 0, but it would be very low. But there are lots of ways to designate special kinds of numbers, you might say, and you could probably find something interesting about any outcome if you tried hard enough. The relevant special property that round numbers have in this case is that humans like to use them much more than they like randomly selected rational numbers. Conditional on the numbers being selected by a human, the probability that they will be "round" at however many digits is much greater, and this gives evidence (not proof) that a human selected them. This conclusion requires probabilistic reasoning. If round numbers were more likely to occur by chance, a round outcome provides less evidence of a human interference.
I looked on the Wiki page which reports different numbers and percentages than those in the tweet. By no means a deep dive. Is there a source for the tweets data?