Have seen a lot of comments questioning the authenticity of the crimes reported on October 7th.
Someone did a deep dive on most of the videos and pictures uploaded to X (Twitter) to see what was likely true or false- it also speculates on the fate of Shani Louk (the girl who's body was apparently seen in the back of a truck with two broken legs). Have a look and see what you think!
It does not discuss the allegation of beheaded babies, which seems to be a point of contention. The original claim, that around 40 babies were killed in a kibbutz and that some of them were beheaded- has not explicitly been verified. That said, it does appear that some babies were beheaded, though it is not clear whether they were from the kibbutz being discussed at the time, nor whether the beheading was after death or not:
The State of AI Report analyses the most interesting developments in AI. We aim to trigger an informed conversation about the state of AI and its implications for the future. The Report is produced by AI investors Nathan Benaich and the Air Street Capital team.
2) We're Not Platonists, We've Just Learned The Bitter Lesson
Not the answer you're looking for, but while from an Effective Altruism perspective, I think that donations to relief in Gaza would be much more impactful than donations to relief in Israel, I don't know that there is any way to guarantee resources in Gaza going to their desired recipients in Gaza, rather than to Hamas et al. Just today, for example, UNRWA tweeted (and deleted) a statement that a group of people purporting to be from the Hamas controlled ministry of health stole fuel and medical supplies from them.
Israeli government TWITTER ACCOUNT literally fabricating a photo of blood in a child's bedroom. If they feel the need to do this, they are bankrupt in their claims Hamas targeted civilians.
[As can clearly be seen and heard in the footage: uniformed, armed 'Israeli' interlopers are exchanging fire with the Hamas fighters.
Any ravers that got ironed out clearly were caught in the crossfire.
I'll say it again, GENIUSES: if you don't want to get iced, don't go partying on occupied land! DUH!
🔴 @Cultures_of_Resistance]
2)The burned baby
You actually don't need that though, just look at the morphology of the image it's clearly not human. Considering the fabrication of the 40 beheaded babies that even the Biden government was forced to retract, the image is highly suspect.
3) The beheaded baby story was a complete Israeli lie that reached the HIGHEST LEVELS OF GOVERNMENT
4) The scantily clad EMD chick was literally just in rave-wear, she wasn't stripped and raped by Hamas and is apparently still alive.
5) Israeli government TWITTER ACCOUNT literally fabricating a photo of blood in a child's bedroom. If they feel the need to do this, they are bankrupt in their claims Hamas targeted civilians.
The puppy picture was a shitpost by Stellar Man @stellarman22, look it up. He took the original from what had been posted by the Israeli government and substituted a puppy. He didn't think it would be taken seriously, but unfortunately you are tangible proof that half the people are below average intelligence.
I wouldn't personally bother engaging with those who deny atrocities taking place, while also gleefully celebrating them. Remember that you can flag such spam comments for moderation.
It morphologicaly doesn't look like a burnt child at all.
"All these things tell me that this is not even partially AI-generated," Farid said. He could not say what the photo shows or when it was taken. "I don't know what it is. It doesn't look like a person. You need a coroner to tell you that."
Well wahddya know, no evidence whatsoever for the beheading/burning Jewish infants story!
The fact that Israelis felt the need to fabricate that story, the fact that it spread to the highest levels of government and was spread in mainstream media really raises some eyebrows. I suppose the endless parade of videos of Israelis happily cheering on a massacre of Gazans tells us nothing about what they intend.
Do we have a source for the false claim that Hamas was beheading babies? It could have been an Israeli (the government?), though I don't think they needed to exaggerate the horror.
It could have been someone at a distance who wanted to spread confusion, or someone who misheard something, or someone who thought it was "emotionally true" and thought literal truth didn't matter.
It's the government, not merely some right wing Israeli rag, even President Biden had to retract after having believed their lies.
If you want to see pictures of targeted, murdered children, Israelis have does so to Palestinians in spades, now and in the past 75 years. It's how you get land. Strike terror into the hearts of parents by gleefully showing them their kids you just murdered.
Israeli leaders (and the population) have ALWAYS been genocidal.
Yes, Netanyahu spokesman. I don't think this completely discredits Israel, and it would have been easier for me if I'd heard about it from someone more coherent and less malevolent.
The original claim, from an Israeli news report, stated that around 40 babies were killed in a kibbutz and that some of them were beheaded. This then turned into "40 babies were beheaded" over time.
Though, some may argue it comes from an Israeli source. Due to the bizarreness of the claim, and the cost of being found to be lying about such things- would guess there's a greater than 50% chance it actually happened.
Adding for clarity so that nobody confuses "technically, there's no evidence any infants were *beheaded*" for "there's no evidence infants were killed." One of the photos (blurred) would appear to qualify as evidence of burning (desc: "A since-blurred photo released by the Prime Minister’s Office on October 12, 2023, showing the charred corpse of a baby who was murdered by Hamas in southern Israel on October 7").
That charred corpse photo is literally AI on a photo of a dog. This is getting pathetic.
I think one potential silver lining for Palestinians is, when the dust clears, it will forever be said of the people who were brutally oppressed for thousands of years, "these are the atrocities, the crimes, the injustices, the lies they committed the moment they were handed power over others. An exemplar of utterly depraved evil, they were a darkness unto nations"
Do you have an unblurred copy of it? As awful as that would be to look at, it would be good to have the evidence you're basing that claim on.
Edit: Never mind, found an article that appears to have them unredacted. And the burnt infant ones do not appear to be AI on a photo of a dog. Link below if anyone has a strong stomach and is trying to parse claims here.
THAT CHARRED CORPSE IMAGE IS LITERALLY AI OF A DOG IT HAS BEEN DEBUNKED. Can't comment myself on the other photo of the child on a plastic sheet but even that would have to be verified at this point. I wouldn't be surprised if its a Palestinian child as there are no shortage of images of Palestinian children and infants murdered by Israelis laid on plastic sheets. And it hilariously has been the case that media shared images of Palestinian victims of Israeli terrorism and portrayed them as Israelis to garner sympathy. Even social media influencers/entertainers like Jaime Lee Curtis and Justin Bieber have done this.
Look, I appreciate the authoritative gravitas of all-caps as much as the next man on the internet, but some evidence that goes beyond "IT HAS BEEN DEBUNKED" would be appreciated here.
You actually don't need that though, just look at the morphology of the image it's clearly not human. Another indicator is the distorted fingers of the surgeon typical for AI.
This can't be chalked up to mere disinformation from some Israeli magazine because this is literally a fabrication FROM THE ISRAELI GOVERNMENTS ACCOUNT.
I started playing the video but this is isn't a great moment to listen to it. I absolutely loved the first words. Pure Tao.
Inshallah I will hear more when the time is right.
Also you may find it of interest that around 2004 Theodore Bikel was one of the VIPs at a Yiddish Comedy show my father performed together with his identical twin. My dad is still very proud that Bikel was there and apparently really loved it. (If you can't trust the showman to quote his own reviews, who cannyou trust 😂. I'm kidding, I believe my dad. It's also possible, I'm now recalling that Theodore Bikel may have attended 2 of the 3 shows, which makes for a more trustworthy endorsement. Oh and Elie Weisel was there too.)
It is rare to meet people who are genuinely extraordinary in some way.
I have had the divine good fortune to have interacted in meaningful ways with a great many people and while of course every person is special because he or she is a unique individual, a very small number of people are TRULY unique in some astonishing way. Fools can't get past "person x on bad team!" and miss out on the glorious show of life on earth.
I hope you have signed up for my page. I don't know how much you know about me but hopefully things will soon get hectic.
War is here, and I can not leave it to be prosecuted by the individuals and classes of people who are running it.
MADNESS. Palestinian residential towers are getting bombed by israeli occupation warplanes. The massacres are ongoing.
October 13, 2023.
The long list of massacres committed at the hands of apartheid israel goes back to the 1940’s till today.
Some of the massacres committed by apartheid israel:
Tantura: The Palestinian village of Tantura is located on the Mediterranean Sea near the city of Haifa. The village of Tantura was occupied by apartheid Israel in 1948 and it has a buried history.
Albert Einstein joined others to sign an open letter to New York Times, entitled “New Palestine Party,” on December 2, 1948, warning of fascism in Israel, and distress about the Deir Yasin massacre.
Burayr is the location of another massacre on their long list:
Historians have recovered official israeli apartheid army documentation offering proof that soldiers poisoned wells in Palestinian villages to prevent Palestinians from trying to return to their homes after the 1948 Nakba.
When Israel slaughters Palestinian civilians, it is with the purpose of inducing despair into their hearts and breaking their will, so it can steal the remaining land with impunity as they have been doing in the West Bank. Likewise in 2018 when they viciously slaughtered peaceful Palestinian protestors who protested at the fence. When Hamas does it, it is collateral damage in the effort to free Palestinians from Israelis terrorist dictatorship over their lives. The former kills civilians as an end goal, the latter as collateral. The two cannot be compared-Israeli forces are utterly irredeemable savages.
If Israel wanted to kill civilians as an end goal, why did it warn everyone in North Gaza to evacuate before soldiers move in and things get even more dangerous for civilians? Why do they warn civilians in buildings they are about to bomb in advance?
If Hamas is trying to free Palestinians, then why have they ordered them to stay put and not evacuate, even though they know North Gaza is about to become a warzone? Wouldn't that just help their enemies "end goal" of killing Palestinian civilians? Why are they helping Israel to do that?
I'm so tired of this line to be honest. If you're going to give cookies to civilian-genociders because they performatively declare "pls move", give some to Hamas too, it did the same thing before bombing Ashkelon [1].
Everyone from Assad to ISIS loves to "warn" civilians before attacks, it's a very affordable package of free PR. Those stunts have dubious effects in terms of net total of civilians "saved".
If you are targeting civilians, no amount of notice is going to fix the problem.
In contrast, if you're targeting military installations, then warning civilians is the best way to deal with a human shield problem, without giving in to the human shield tactic.
What military target in Ashkelon was Hamas targeting?
> If you are targeting civilians, no amount of notice is going to fix the problem.
How so ?
1- I want to bomb the city of Tel Aviv
2- I say "I WILL BOMB TEL AVIV, EVERYBODY WHO DOESNT WANT TO DIE MOVE"
3- People of Tel Aviv
4- I bomb Tel Aviv
This sounds like a scenario where I both target "Civilians" and still let them escape, but really I'm just targeting the **Civilian Infrastructure**, not civilians per se.
> What military target in Ashkelon was Hamas targeting?
What military target in Gaza was/is the IDF targeting ?
It seems to me by the sheer number of Hamas videos online showing IDF in pools of blood that they had plenty of military targets. I think if their target was actually civilians the civilian death toll would be a lot higher.
>>I think if their target was actually civilians the civilian death toll would be a lot higher.
They shot up a concert and killed 260 people. Maybe you have some kind of theory on the military value of EDM that I'm unaware of, but I don't see how that can be explained as anything other than "deliberately targeting civilians."
The military targets were on the border. They had to go through the military targets to get to the civilian ones.
Consider Be'eri - a kibbutz near the border. It had 1,000 civilian residents. Hamas killed 100 of them and abducted many more. What military target was Hamas aiming for in Be'eri?
When Hamas took civilian hostages, what conceivable military objective was furthered by that? When Hamas shot unarmed people at point blank range, what conceivable military objective was furthered by that?
Finally, if Hamas wanted to kill more civilians, what would they have done differently? They already went house-to-house, shooting at every unarmed person they saw. If they wanted to kill more civilians they would...?
Yes, very true. And, by warning the Gazan civilians and allowing them to evacuate, the Israelis are _accepting_ the risk that some Hamas members will hide themselves amongst the evacuating civilians, and will not be killed in north Gaza.
It'd be pretty easy to test this hypothesis. Just have Hamas move their military equipment away from Palestinian population centers.
If Israel strikes the population centers, there's your answer. If Israel strikes the Hamas bases - having been moved away from innocent civilians - and leaves the population centers alone, wouldn't that disprove this argument?
No such thought experiment is needed ZACH considering the nearly endless on video examples of Israelis deliberately targeting, and successfully murdering Palestinian civilians, one recent example being the 2018 march at the border.
We're still getting the same problem as before, which is that Hamas does not separate its military forces from civilians. Instead, I would argue it tries to blend in with the civilians.
To prove the contrast, I can show you a list of Israeli military locations. I can show you how far they are from civilian centers. For example, the IDF headquarters is located at Hakirya, IDF and MOD HQ 6473424.
Can you do the same for Hamas? Where's their headquarters?
"We're still getting the same problem as before, which is that Hamas does not separate its military forces from civilians. Instead, I would argue it tries to blend in with the civilians. "
It was universally observed by basically every observer, NGO, government what have you that Israels claims any of those protestors were violent was complete nonsense. You are essentially saying Israel can call any protestors violent on the pretext that maybe Hamas is among them even without showing a shred of actual proof. It was merely a targeted massacre. I think if you are willing to deny that there is literally no level of evidence that would convince you, you're going to just continue to deny reality and produce contrived thought experiments because there is no case where you will admit what every observer has admitted and what all the evidence shows and it gets me to thinking that there is no right answer for you that doesn't involve Jews being justified in killing whichever Palestinians they feel fit to, and no instance whatsoever where Palestinians have the right to even PEACEFULLY PROTEST without being butchered. I can't see you as anything but a genocide apologist.
An Israeli official did recommend that Gazan's use that border crossing to leave Gaza, but rescinded that advice on last Tuesday because Egypt closed the border crossing that day. Israel bombed the Gaza side of the crossing to keep supplies from entering Gaza until the hostages are released.
I'm sure Israel would love for the people of Gaza to leave and go to Egypt, but Egypt doesn't want them and won't let them in.
After using Manifold for a couple weeks, I think "prediction market" should be replaced with "poll of ten nerds". And that's if you make a market about AI. If you make a market about anything else, good luck getting even one trader.
We are a few hours away from a likely ground incursion / invasion of Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) into Northern Gaza. For the past week I've been trying to figure out a more reasonable way that the world can deal with Hamas, as an alternative to what the Israeli government is considering doing. I am having trouble coming up with a rational option aside from status quo (leave the group as is) or Israel's option (eliminate no matter the cost).
What other option exists to deal with a group with the following fact sheet (and please correct anything that is factually wrong in the statements below):
Hamas was elected democratically in 2006 and stayed in power since then.
The leaders of Hamas and their families live in relative luxury while the average Gazan lives near the poverty line.
They promote radicalized education in Gaza, half of which are under the age of 19.
They use humanitarian aid for war (for example, digging up water pipes and turning them into missiles).
They strategically place their military operations near school, hospitals, residences, and commercial areas.
They convince Gazans to stay in urban areas and not to head to places IDF is advising them to go to in order not to get bombed.
They recruit minors to their cause and send them in paragliders to murder people (and be murdered by IDF)
They have the sympathy of many, EVEN IN ISRAEL, because of the civilian death toll every time there is an IDF operation.
I really don't know what can be done that is better than either option presented above.
Isreal is in a no-win situation now, but that's because they spent the last 15 years repeatedly destroying any possibility of peace, colonizing the West Bank despite repeated appeals to stop and radicalizing the Gazans through oppression.
As the Economist recently wrote,
> A second error was the divide-and-rule policy towards the Palestinians of Binyamin Netanyahu, who has been Israel’s prime minister for 12 of the past 14 years. He has long sought to undermine the PA, which still runs parts of the West Bank. He has refused to resume peace negotiations since half-hearted talks broke down in 2014. He has frozen transfers of the tax revenues Israel collects on the pa’s behalf. At the same time, he has treated Hamas like a legitimate power in Gaza. In 2011, for instance, he approved a deal to swap 1,027 Palestinian prisoners for Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier the militants had captured in 2006. The exchange, naturally, raised Hamas’s standing among Palestinians.
> For Mr Netanyahu, the logic was clear. The PA is committed to negotiating a two-state solution with Israel, which is anathema to the prime minister’s right-wing supporters. Undermining the PA and boosting its militant rival would help him to claim that Israel has no “partner for peace”. But Palestinians drew a different, if predictable lesson: that the only way to extract concessions from Israel is through force.
Wait, your argument is seriously that Israel traded prisoners to save a hostage, which made the hostage-takers appear better to the Gazan public, thereby making the massacre of Israelis their own fault?
That’s the best excuse for the intentional massacre of civilians that you could come up with? Really? At least put in a little effort next time.
Are you referring to when the Israel declared the First Intifada on Palestine simply for existing, and then did everything in their power to kill as many of their civilians as possible? Oh wait, that was Palestine.
Or maybe you’re referring to when the Israel declared the Second Intifada on Palestine for refusing peace talks even after being granted many concessions? Oh wait, it was Palestine who was granted concessions,
I think he's referring to the clause in the Israeli constitution which explicitly rejects the notion of peaceful co-existence and commits to a worldwide genocide against Muslims.
Pro-Israelis operate on a special kind of memory that goes back to exactly the date best optimized to best show Israel as victim and not a single day before or after.
> 1948
So you don't go back to 1890s-1917 when a bunch of people who haven't been to a land in 2000 years demand it from its latest colonizer, or to 1928-1947 when they form gangs and militias and practice terrorism on both British soldiers and Palestinian civilians alike, or even to a few days after the declaration of war when those same gangs, now the proud IDF, were killing children and kniving pregnant women in Der Yassin.
No, exactly the moment the Arabs declared war on Israel. Why did Arabs declare the war ? What was "Israel" (which didn't exist yet) doing then and what did it do in response ? None of your concern, you have the date to the millisecond and - by God - you're going to go back to it and remind everyone how Israel, the pRoMiSEd LaNd, is the real victim here.
> 1973
Another banger. 6% of Egypt's land in the form of the Sinai peninsula. The Golan Heights. The West Bank. Gaza. Some Lebnanese territories on the side. All taken by force in true Thug tradition, the proud tradition of Israel. But no, that's the wrong date right ? 1967, yuck, you don't like that number. Your date is 1973, when the land's owners decide they maybe don't want a bunch of US-armed thugs on their property, that's the right date you want to go back to. Poor thugs, they were just frolicking in peace in the land they stole and the aggressive meany Arabs came knocking.
And on and on and on and on. Tiring. Exhausting. Energy-draining.
Everyone prefers to go to the dates that support their position. You, for example, do not go back to the Jerusalem anti-Jewish riot of 1920 or the 1929 Palestine riots and the Hebron massacre of Jews. For a detailed and not particularly biased account of the long intercommunal conflict in mandatory Palestine, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intercommunal_conflict_in_Mandatory_Palestine
Thank you for the free education. I knew about the 1929 riots, but the 1920 riots were new to me.
I don't see this as evidence against me, I'm not playing the eye-for-an-eye stupid game sincerely. I was just showing SunSphere how it's an unwinnable game and that I can always beat him/her at it by simply picking an earlier (or later) date. Besides a few politicians that I want to see imprisoned for life or executed, I believe most Israelis were born innocent, so they deserve to live no matter the crimes of their ancestors.
After all, as Pro-Israeli people are so very quick to point out on every occasion, if fairness means the sons should bear the sins of the fathers, then most Arabs should be killed too. I see this as a very valid argument, I despise the colonizing Arabs and I hate their pathetic religion, but it's all too likely at least one counts among my ancestors, and I don't understand why would I or any living Arab be responsible for the Caliphate.
I demand only that one doesn't cheer for evil in their lifetime. Anything else is optional.
there is not really any need to shy away from 1948, Tom Suarez details jewish massacres of arabs in State of Terror. Deir Yassin was but one example. Jewish militias quite literally attempted a genocide right after the Holocaust. In fact that was used to shove off scrutiny!
I saw an Israeli legislator calling for a second Nakba, so I looked up what was the Nakba, and now I think the state of Israel is illegitimate. After displacing (more like ethnically cleansing when you look up the details) almost a million Palestinians, it's no wonder that at least some of them will never accept Israel, and honestly, the time for founding countries in this way should have expired with the end of the 19th century: I can't buy that someone should get away with pulling a stunt like that right after WW II.
Ethically, the Israelis should have a moment of clarity and just pack up and leave, but that will likely not happen. Since Israel is pretty much Fitzcarraldo the country, all it takes is America cutting ties to make it wind down, and this could happen in a few decades if a sufficiently left wing administration comes around.
And why not? Countries can just end, as the Soviet Union showed.
It’s hard to take these arguments as anything but an attempt to convince uninterested parties to join a side considering how precisely the context is being tailored. The nakba was the direct consequence of the Palestinian Arabs and surrounding countries waging on Israel whose declared purpose was genocide.
The Israeli claims are as follows:
1. Indigenous homeland
2. Needed as refuge from anti semitism
3. Prior to the British was insignificant, sparely populated part of southern Syria with no nations tied to that specific area
4. The zionists bought all their land legally and established new cities
5. All land gained was in defensive wars and land taken is necessary for defense
6. Were always prepared to live in peace with neighbors
No doubt you know the Palestinian side.
It should be noted that this conflict is among the smallest and least deadly in the ME and hating Israel has become a something of a holy cow for many groups.
Palestinians rejected the Peel Commission plan and the UN resolution 181 plan and went to war. This followed decades of Palestinian massacres of Jews. There were many refugee crises at the time in Europe and the decolonizing empires, and as happened in all those cases, Israel didn’t let the refugees return. The nakba is only special because the Arab countries they fled to have never given them citizenship.
Most Israeli Jews are descendants of Mizrahi refugees from the Middle East and North Africa. Most Israeli Ashkenazim descend from refugees from eastern Europe. Where should they “go back” to?
That analogy does not seem very salient. Yes the Soviet Union, the nation-state, ended; that did not also result in the Russian people departing the land of their collective origins.
To the degree that the reestablishment of a Jewish nation in its current location was illegitimate because it required forcibly dispossessing another people, then so too was the forcible dispossession of the Judean people from that same ground long ago. (Actually repeatedly, but in every instance it was long ago.)
And World War II being some sort of arbitrary cutoff line on that point doesn't have any obvious logic behind it.
> then so too was the forcible dispossession of the Judean people from that same ground long ago
Take it with the Romans. What do Arabs got to do with this ?
And did the Judean people just stumble into this empty land, or did they also take it from those living there ?
And are the Eruropean immigrants who founded Israel those same "Judeans" from 2000 years ago ? Can they trace their roots all the way back ? Do they speak the same language or did they have to invent a new one ?
> World War II being some sort of arbitrary cutoff line on that point doesn't have any obvious logic behind it.
What should be the cutoff ? Why is Russia in the wrong for trying to take back what was once theirs in 2022, just like Israel ? If Arabs tried to take back Spain, why would they be wrong ?
Jewish immigrants purchased land and developed it. Palestinians massacred them a few times and rejected any peace plan that created a Jewish state (look up the peel commission plan, which offered Palestinians 90% of the territory, with a Jewish state on Jewish owned land on the coast and in the north). Somehow Palestinians have convinced themselves and the Arab world that they had the right to deny Jews a state on Jewish owned land. They’ve started multiple wars and have rejected a half dozen peace deals between 1937-2008.
World War II being the cutoff would be because it would be good to say that was the last time a supposedly civilized country went on a conquering rampage, due to the magnitude of evil perpetrated during it. If at least the civilized portion of the world can't get "CONQUEST BAD" into its head after that, then things are looking pretty bad.
The cycle has to end at some point, and it can't end with a regime established like that staking a claim to civilization. Israel is definitely gambling hard on its founding atrocity receding in the distance with the passage of time, but I don't know if they can get away with that given that it happened within modernity. They should be cut loose and left to fend for themselves.
Listen to Netanyahu:
> The weak crumble, are slaughtered and are erased from history while the strong, for good or for ill, survive. The strong are respected, and alliances are made with the strong, and in the end peace is made with the strong.
This is straight from the Bronze Age, Israel is no civilization.
I'm dying to bring you the news that Israel is a colonizer hated by everybody who reads history all the way to before your magic number 1948, inlcuding this ex-Muslim who hates Islam to his deep bones. I'm just no sure you will handle the news well.
"the last time a supposedly civilized country went on a conquering rampage, due to the magnitude of evil perpetrated during it" -- so then your definition of civilization excludes Russia, and China, and India....that's a helluva lot of the world's people who you're declaring to be not civilized.
Arguably the UK is out as well (google "Bloody Sunday" and "The Troubles"), and France (google the Algerian War). Iran and Iraq are definitely excluded given the mutually-genocidal war they fought during the 1980s.
Also, Afghanistan and Iraq would like a word regarding the US and its allies in the wake of 9/11. [Osama Bin laden and his lieutenants probably would too but they can't because they were all hunted down and assassinated.]
Etc, etc. My point of course is not to defend or in any way re-litigate any of the above events. Rather it is that the real world of real-life nations and cultures is way too complex to decide that Israel is some sort of glaring post-WW II outlier.
<i>Arguably the UK is out as well (google "Bloody Sunday" and "The Troubles"),</i>
The majority of people in Northern Ireland wanted, and still want, to remain part of the UK. The "conquering rampage" people here are the IRA, albeit they lack the competence to pull it off.
"and now I think the state of Israel is illegitimate." How so? AFAIK, the founding of Israel followed the plan laid out by the United Nations. Palestinians didn't like it, started a guerilla war, got aid from neighboring Arab states, lost anyway, got expelled. Sucks to be them, for sure, but when you start and lose a war, you don't get to be picky. The second wave came after the Yom-Kippur war: Arab countries gang up on Israel, get their butt kicked, more Palestinians get displaced. Sucks to be them, for sure, but...
"I can't buy that someone should get away with pulling a stunt like that right after WW II." Plenty of people got displaced right after WWII. Most of their descendants don't commit massacres of civilians in retribution anymore.
"Ethically, the Israelis should have a moment of clarity and just pack up and leave". First off, leave to where exactly? Second, it would be the ethical thing to abandon the only country approaching a liberal democracy in the whole Middle East, with civil rights, an advanced industry, a thriving academic and cultural scene, and leave it for Palestinians to turn it into a fundamentalist Muslim s******e? Does not compute.
Arabs weren't consulted so it wasn't fair to tell them to give up land for Jews. I don't think you or anyone reading this would accept giving up land without even being consulted.
Palestinians didn't like it and this is why Irgun and Lehi felt the need to depopulate Palestinian town after down, one massacre and gang rape after the next, just a merry band of murdering looters. Palestinians didn't start it, Jews did.
The first episode of large scale violence in the conflict was when Palestinians massacred Jews in 1921.
Palestinians rejected the peel commission plan which offered them a state on 90% of the territory because they couldn’t accept its parallel creation of a Jewish state on Jewish owned territory.
> when you start and lose a war, you don't get to be picky.
A message to be heeded by every Pro-Israeli complaining about airstrikes and Hamas, for sure.
I personally am a "Do the fair and moral thing no matter what your enemy did" kind of guy, but it's curious that even by your macho logic the Israeli complaints about bombardments are just pointless pussifications.
> liberal democracy
The meaning of "liberal" flew right past your head and into the stratosphere. The UN-designated Apartheid, the Nelson-Mandela-designated Apartheid, is a "Liberal Democracy" now. Strange and ugly times.
> A message to be heeded by every Pro-Israeli complaining about airstrikes and Hamas, for sure.
Sure, but “fuck around and find out” has to go both ways. If you support the Palestinian massacres we saw on the 7th on the basis of “well it was just a matter of time, it was inevitable this was going to happen” then you can’t also cry about the predictable destruction of Gaza brought on by that attack and pretend to be a victim.
> If you support the Palestinian massacres we saw on the 7th
I don't support any massacres, and those who did the massacres on the 7th are not just any ordinary Palestinians, they are Hamas.
> then you can’t also cry about the predictable destruction of Gaza brought on by that attack
Well, ignoring for the moment that situation is not symmetric because the land is rightfully the Palestinians', yes. What I'm saying in your parent comment is actually a reductio ad absurdum of FluffyBuffalo "Suks to be lozer, Go Go Israel" Logic. If it suks to be a lozer, then Israel must suck it up and stop "crying" (as you so classily put it) over its dead victims, after all, they are a loser of the intelligence wars and Hamas successfully bamboozled them.
Me ? I'm actually crying over every innocent soul, not just so who just so happen to be called "Palestinian"|"Israeli"|blah blah. As a general rule, Life is sacred. Life is wonderful. And Life is rare. I'm generally against those ruining or ending lives.
> followed the plan laid out by the United Nations
So? The UN does not have the authority to impose that sort of thing. If the natives aren't accepting your plan, you back off, not ethnically cleanse them.
> leave to where exactly
Europe.
> liberal democracy
All a sham when it got started that way. A legitimate liberal democracy is a bottom up affair, you can't establish one through conquest.
>So? The UN does not have the authority to impose that sort of thing. If the natives aren't accepting your plan, you back off, not ethnically cleanse them.
Arabs are neither native to the levant, or an actual majority of countries in which they're the predominant ethnic group. This "native rights" crap is entirely opportunistic.
>Europe.
A large majority of israelis do not have majority european ancestry
Quite hard to be a native to a country younger than some grandmas. At best, they're a third/fourth generation immigrant, merely with a firehose of US taxes protecting the unnatural situation that made them be there.
> You’re *literally* calling for the ethnic cleansing of Jews
They didn't. You just want it to seem that way.
> is there some cutoff date where you become a “native”? [...] is it 100? 500?
It's "Never". As long as 300+ million person don't see you as native, don't treat you as native, and read/see/hear every year what you do to the actual natives who were there way way before you, you're never a native.
> Quite hard to be a native to a country younger than some grandmas.
So “Palestinians” are not native either then, got it. “The Palestinian people” as a concept was only invented in the 1960s, and the vast majority of them were colonizers sent by surrounding Muslim countries to fight and kill the Jewish minority that has been present in the area of today’s Israel for centuries.
> They didn't. You just want it to seem that way.
No, I’m not talking about what “they” said, I’m talking about what you specially just said above - that they should all be ethnically cleansed and sent to Europe.
> It's "Never". As long as 300+ million person don't see you as native, don't treat you as native, and read/see/hear every year what you do to the actual natives who were there way way before you, you're never a native.
Interesting! So “Native Americans” are not really native then? And any ethnic minorities in any region of the world are not native either? If the majority of a region is racist against you, you’re not a native?
I’m glad to see you making your racist hatred so loud and clear.
Half of the Jews in Israel are Mizrahi or Sephardic: they're not from Europe. They were either living in Palestine at the time Israel was created, or they were expelled by the neighboring Arab countries in the 40s and 50s and came to Israel as refugees. How would making them refugees again be just?
> Hamas was elected democratically in 2006 and stayed in power since then.
I imagine that it is quite difficult for a Palestinian to found a party opposed to Hamas and survive until the election day. Democracy is not just about organizing elections, but also about not murdering your competitors, including the new ones who do not have a great power base yet.
So, the question is, how many Palestinians would support the effort to overthrow Hamas, if they were realistically offered an option better than "we will verbally appreciate your help today, and then leave you alone and let the remaining members of Hamas murder you and your family".
In my opinion, Israel should take more responsibility for the situation they significantly contributed to. You can't just create a huge mess, then step back and say "now it's not *my* mess anymore". You have successfully collapsed a system that existed previously, and it is nontrivial to build a new one -- when a system collapses, the most likely outcome is a rule of thugs, which is exactly what happened. It is difficult to get out of that situation, because that would require coordination on a large scale... while there are already coordinated thugs who murder everyone the see (or only suspect of) coordinating against them. While everyone is in a kind of war-or-not-war situation with strangers who took their homes and are probably preparing to take more in future (which would make everyone who advocated for peace with them look like a complete moron).
If I was in charge of Israel, my strategy would probably be to produce lots of propaganda in Arabic to communicate to the Palestinians, and at the same time declare entire Hamas to be outlaws that will be killed on sight (though actually I would prefer to take them in prisons). If you have technological and financial superiority, how hard it is to install thousands of megaphones that will scream in Arabic "the leaders of Hamas are taking all your money, and then they send your kids to die, and you know it, and your neighbors also know it, you are just afraid to say it" all day long? What is Hamas going to do about it? If they try to destroy the megaphones, they just expose themselves to your snipers. Also, if you give people food, randomly selected packages should contain propaganda leaflets in Arabic.
And by "propaganda" I mean stuff that is somehow useful for the receiver. (For example, an important part of South Korean propaganda is weather forecast. Because the stupid regime in North Korea can't even predict the weather, so North Korean soldiers start listening to enemy broadcast first because they want to hear the weather forecast... and then they get curious and listen some more.) You say that education in Palestine is completely fucked up? That's a perfect opportunity. Make leaflets that have interesting or educational stories on one side, and propaganda on the other side. If people could do samizdats during communist regime, how easy it would be for the Israeli government to print one subversive newspaper and distribute it among the Palestinians?
The question is, is anyone in power actually trying? Or is it perhaps more convenient to have a permanent crisis that serves as an excuse for all political problems, and provides a motivation to support our leaders in these hard times?
As unpalatable as it may seem right now, experience from other successful peace processes dictates that Israel will have to talk to them eventually - as it has in 2005, 2008, and 2014. Your facts are mostly factual, but they present Hamas as if operating in a vacuum - the list omits its rivalry with Fatah and Israel's own actions.
I don't think 'elimination whatever the cost' is especially farsighted. Perhaps Hamas might cease to exist - its tunnels ripped up, its rocket stockpiles destroyed, its principals assassinated - but that 'whatever the cost' is going to leave enough people orphaned, bereft, and ready to dedicate their lives to revenge that something very Hamas-like will reform fairly quickly.
I mean, it’s not like there’s much more room for the Palestinians to go in terms of radicalization. When you, unprovoked, intentionally massacre as many civilians as possible, including rape, torture, and the burning of babies, you’re basically as low as you can possibly go on the “human” scale, to the point where you’re essentially just an animal. Letting these terrorist massacres go unpunished for the sake of appearing better to the terrorist-supporting population doesn’t seem to have been very effective for Israel for the past 15+ years.
That 'unprovoked' is doing plenty of work. I won't be baited into recounting all the things Israelis have done to Palestinians - babies and otherwise - over the years, or into speculating where that fits on your 'human' scale. I suspect you know perfectly well.
At some point, all those things, on both sides, will have to be forgotten (or at least set aside) for the sake of peace, as with the IRA, the ETA, the ANC, the Felquistes, and plenty others.
I’m curious, please name even just the top 3 things Israel has done that compares in any way to the barbarity we’ve just witnessed from the Palestinians.
Well its kind of not a fair question because like all Zionists you DID kinda just make up the burning babies, raping women "fact"! The widely circulated pic of the scantily clad woman in rave wear was not a woman stripped by Hamas but a woman wearing...rave wear. And she is alive, apparently at a hospital and a German Israeli citizen, not merely a tourist. Of course we can point to Israeli rape of Palestinian minors in jail and the gang rapes in 48 and 67.
Because that's how Israel was founded. Massacres, gang rapes, threats of annihilation forcing Palestinians to flee, simply for existing on land Jewish terrorist groups wanted. They would form the first IDF and they have not changed their genocidal efforts since.
There's no evidence Shani Louk, the German raver, is alive. She was last seen with her limbs broken, unconscious. Hamas sources reached out to the mom that she's just injured, and of course the mom is wishful thinking, but no voice or physical evidence was given. They're likely just going to eventually blaim her death on Israel's bombing. $100 on it. Also there are many eyewitnesses testifying to the rapes.
The fact that no Muslim country without oil has ever been even moderately prosperous disagrees with you. The only way I can see this being true is if by “because of Israel” you mean “because Israel is not providing them the free welfare handouts that they are entitled to, cuz something something brown people.”
> Israeli settlers were inspiring potential hatred among those sitting in the refugee camps in Gaza
So you support the Russian invasion of Ukraine then, right? (Not a rhetorical question, genuinely curious.) Ukraine was Russian land just 30 years ago, and Russia claims that ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine are oppressed and live in an apartheid state.
If you don’t support Russia, though, I don’t see how you can possibly be consistent with your belief in this particular case that anyone whose ancestors have ever lived in an area have eternal control over that area and are free to slaughter the people who currently live there.
> Gazans seem willing to do things that result in certain death because their lives are so miserable as to be barely worth living.
That tends to happen when you repeatedly reject the large concessions Israel offers for peace, elect a genocidal terrorist organization as your leader, and immediately declare an intifada. They haven’t been occupied for 15+ years, Israel is not responsible for babysitting them. Perhaps they shouldn’t widely support a government that spends their international aid money on guns, rockets, and bombs, and uses them as human shields.
> they have no hope of any change - non-violence hasn’t worked either
Oh, right, that... 2 day long period without a Palestinian rocket being fired. Really tried that. And rejecting all of the vast sacrifices Israel agreed to during negotiations, instead demanding the complete ethnic cleansing of all Jews “from the river to the sea” - they really had no choice but to “roll the dice” and slaughter 1300 people.
Can you do a more in-depth blog post on the axis I and axis II divide? I know the 5th edition of DSM seems to switch the approach, but does it? It makes no difference what the chapter is called as long as the overall approach is not much different in practice.
You shouldn't link to your substack more than once per open thread - people have been warned for posting less frequently than that. It would be one thing if this were a specific article adressing something someone says, but it's just unsolicited self-promotion.
I don't think we need five links to your substack in one Open Thread. Especially not one with a clickbait title and no additional commentary or value added by posting it here
Hey all, I must admit I'm not a reader of ACX or interested in much of the subject matter, but I'm a bit desperate for advice, so apologies for being selfish.
I'm currently working as an "AI" software engineer for $XB B2B startup. I'm super burned out, but not in the way a vacation or therapy appointment could fix (or maybe I haven't found the right therapist). I just really don't care about the company or even software as a craft anymore. I feel like I'm wasting my time away doing something I actively hate every day. The internal torture is extremely bad and I only manage to keep it at bay by constantly reminding myself of how privileged I am.
I have considered starting something myself or even quitting with no plan, but there is a glaring issue. I have pretty severe ADHD and I'm afraid I will never be able to stick to something past the hyper-fixation phase. For example, a few years ago I was extremely into growing psychedelic mushrooms. Didn't care about consuming them at all, just wanted to reach the highest level of cultivation. It got to the point where I was reading several papers a day on the subject and purchasing thousands of dollars of lab equipment. Then, the interest just evaporated. Haven't touched the equipment since. The same thing has happened for the potential tech startup ideas I had. It's also difficult to explore new ideas after work because I'm constantly stressed about getting fired.
I did talk about this with my friends and family, but for the most part they all say something along the lines of: "Duh, everyone doesn't like working. Just work harder, pick up a hobby or side-project, and retire early."
What else can I do here? Plan B is I ask my psychiatrist to get me back on stimulants and try to autopilot through work.
I also have this exact problem. I can’t do anything if I’m not deeply obsessed with it. How did you get through college? I’m in college and am basically (literally) failing out. Half my thoughts are about a girl I haven’t talked to in years, and I keep spending hours writing her several hundred word notes about technical topics she has no interest in even though she’s probably blocked me on all platforms. I’ve been doing that same thing for years. I don’t know how to stop. It takes immense effort to read single sentences from an intro textbook, and even then my mind won’t absorb any information, but none to spend entire days relistening to Joscha Bach’s lectures or thinking about the anthropic principle. It’s weird. My psychiatrist said stimulants aren’t right for me while I broke down crying about how my mind is always in four places at once and I can’t get it to operate like normal. She said something about exacerbating OCD symptoms, but I expect this is moral high ground behavior to avoid giving me the legal right to put an adderall factory in my house. How do I rewrite my brain’s code? I promise to do anything anyone says as long as it avoids the dangers from typical mind fallacy. People keep calling my crazy, but I promise I’ll act normal if I can solve this problem.
If you have enough savings to get by for several months and think you could get an SWE job again if necessary, why not quit and take time to relax and then decide what to do?
Hi! Your problems sound familiar (though I don't think I had it nearly so bad) so maybe what helped me can help you a bit too.
- If you have been a software engineer for a good while and have been reasonably prudent with your money, you probably have a lot of slack there that you might not be aware of. Try to find a way to take some (unpaid) extended leave -- for a few months, maybe. This might have to mean quitting your job (it did for me) but if you are good at your job, even if you are *currently* not feeling like you are doing well, you can almost certainly find a new one before money becomes an issue. Taking some extended time off, while scary, may help you to get out of an emotional rut.
- If the hyperfixation -> evaporating interest thing is as big a problem as you are saying, it might be worth getting some therapy/professional advice on how to manage it. If it's manageable, it doesn't need to be completely fixed (plenty of successful people have this sort of thing going on with their hobbies, where it's not as big a deal so long as you don't spend too much money), but you probably want to figure out how to manage it rather that just accept it as a given.
- I can't speak to prescription stimulants as I've never been on them. I do self medicate with coffee when necessary, though. If they've been helpful in the past, they may be worth a try, but you probably still need to deal with the emotional baggage rather than just trying to tough it out.
- Can you do some introspection and figure out what you need to enjoy your work / do your best work? Presumably you got into the field because you liked it and were good at it -- what changed? You might seek out a role that lets you play to your strengths rather than fighting with your weaknesses.
Welcome! I never had an official diagnosis, but I think that's the Catch-22 aspect of this thing: if you have ADHD and it requires nontrivial effort to find a specialist, then... Unfortunately, I hate the taste of coffee, and I do not have a reliable provider of cocaine.
I spent yesterday learning the technical details of 8086 and 80286 processors, so that I could reverse-engineer an old computer game. So far I have successfully disassembled only the first seven bytes, but I am proud that after reading the 5000-page official manual from Intel, I finally understand how ModR/M works.
> Duh, everyone doesn't like working.
That's not really true. In my bubble, most teachers love their jobs (though they complain about the salaries a lot). Most people *in IT* hate their jobs. And even that is not universal. I think surveys show that data scientists are on average happier than the ordinary IT folks.
In my experience (not sure how much of it would apply to other people), what really helps me are good relations at the workplace, and having enough time to talk. I have a a problem to focus on my work alone, but I enjoy talking about the work with my colleagues, assuming that they are friendly. I strongly suspect that "pair programming" was invented by someone with ADHD. (The problem is, it requires two nice people. Otherwise it becomes torture.) Unfortunately, the modern trend seems to be that although everyone is sitting in one huge open space, everyone is supposed to work on something different. Also, open spaces are themselves a paradox: they bring people together physically, but they actually *discourage* communication, because there is no privacy, and if you talk too much, you disturb other people.
It also helps if you have clear specifications and a lot of autonomy. This allows you to bring your bursts of hyperactivity to your job. Some days you accomplish little, other days you accomplish a lot, on average it is okay. Problem is, when the burst of hyperactivity is interrupted by one of the many meetings, or by figuring out many missing details in the specification. Again, unfortunately, the trend is towards "agile" development (which in practice is often the opposite of what its authors intended), and micromanagement.
It is difficult to delve deep in the details, when again the trend is the opposite, and your responsibilities keep expanding. It is no longer okay to be a specialist; you are supposed to be a "full-stack" developer (i.e. know a little bit of everything, rather than deeply understand something), and a tester, and a "dev-ops", and a "dev-sec-ops", and an on-call customer support, and a network administrator if you work with cloud. (The only jobs in the company you are allowed not to do are the accountant and the janitor.) Or to be more precise, it is okay to be a specialist, but only if you do it on top of all the things that I have already mentioned.
In other words, large parts of the IT industry have reshaped themselves in the recent decades, to be a more hostile environment for people with ADHD, who are over-represented in these jobs today, but perhaps the industry it trying to get rid of them in long term. In my generation, people joined IT often as a result of some autistic or hyper-active interest in computers in their childhood; the "normal" people did not know what computers are or why they should be interested in them. The next generation already knows computers from their childhood, and most of them join IT simply because that is where the money is, not because they care about computers intrinsically. As a consequence, it all goes downhill for people like us. Though you can still find a niche that the normies haven't yet noticed in masse, such as data science or crypto-something.
> Just work harder
Similarly, the depressed people get told to "just smile". The folk psychotherapy can be generalized to "just magically make your problem go away".
> pick up a hobby or side-project
Unless the hobby or the side project brings you a lot of money (in which case it de facto becomes your new job), I don't see how this is supposed to help with the problems you currently have at your job.
> retire early
Heh, I'd be very happy to, I just don't have the money this requires. What a useful advice, all this!
As someone with ADHD as well, stimulants help a bit. The inherent work environment is also important.
I'm lucky that as part of my job, I have managed to rotate through a number of roles and worked in different shifts (office, temporary site based, site based 12 hour days during maintenance downtime) and this has helped me internalise that disengagement with work is not entirely a me problem.
Some ways to notice that your work isn't set up for *anyone* to succeed - if you're in an office, observe if your coworkers or managers seem checked out, too. If you're remote, that's harder, but try phone calls and video calls to gauge. At the end of one on one meetings, see if you can sneak in a quick "how's it going for you" and gauge how your coworkers feel.
While it's useful to speak with friends and family, you actually wanna speak with your coworkers to figure out if it's something wrong with the team or the org.
I feel like one of the signs that a workplace might not be a sustainable is coworker relations either being abnormally close or distant. In a healthy workplace, you should be able to have a friendly conversation, e.g chat about what you did on the weekend or on holiday. If you're too close, it probably means that no one at this place has a life outside of work, which is also scary if you want to have a life outside of work.
If when you book leave, you feel like you can't even tell your boss what you're booking leave for without it being a Whole Thing, it's the social aspect - leave the team or the company.
If everyone is civil but sort of checked out, that probably means your company doesn't know what they're doing (or the people in charge isn't communicating with you guys). People who can put in a crazy amount of work tend to only do that when there's also a clear mission and a clear way their work segues into the mission. If you find yourself looking at your tasks and not understanding why you're doing this, try to figure out the context, and if the company can't give you the context, start looking for new job (they don't know what they're doing or they're doing some weird power play of keeping you in the dark about what exactly you're working on. The latter is a pattern in companies doing something shady. If it was just normal confidentiality, you'd just be asked to sign something and not tell anyone. You always need to understand how your tasks fit in the big picture).
Good luck! I've been struggling for about a year, but seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. My work had this big restructure and massively changed role descriptions and reporting lines. Nothing was clear for months, and work happened in terrible ad-hoc ways because half the time no one know who was supposed to be doing what and I often got told about things way too late. But the dust is finally settling enough that it's improving somewhat.
Funnily enough, it was the on paper worst work schedule (13 hour days, 6 day workweek, living away from home) that made me realise what I was missing during my normal role. Mostly clarity of purpose and mentoring.
If stimulants clearly help you, then go back to taking them. And what about hiring not a therapist but a coach? (Most are psychotherapists who have elected to help people who are doing OK in life reach goals, rather than helping people in trouble get it together).
That ADHD does sound like something that calls for psychiatric treatment. Other than that, you could pick up meditation for a bit to maybe learn to stabilize your attention a little.
I have just learned of "Miyake Events" which are giant solar storms that would likely do very substantial damage to nearly all modern electronics including things like communication networks and the power grid. The best estimate available now is that one happens roughly once every 1000 years. If there is a 10% chance of this happening in the next 100 years I am contemplating whether this is actually a greater threat to humanity than global warming is.
Would running electric lines underground protect the grid from storms like this? Having all our satellites fried would still suck but isn't going to kill nearly as many people as losing electricity across half the planet
If they are buried deep enough, sure. But burying high-tension lines (“tension” is an old-fashion word for voltage in English; in many languages it’s still used this way) is not feasible.
No problem. We'll just back our electric pickup trucks up to the house, and we'll be back in business. And we can recharge our smart phones in the seventeen USB ports in the trucks. But if the electric storm lasts more than a few hours, we'll probably be S.O.L.
I agree this is a major threat. I’m not sure there is anything we can do about it, nor that current infrastructure isn’t mostly adapted to this either. The best we can do conditional on events of such magnitude that we *can’t* predict being possible is back up human knowledge girding the Information Age, while providing everyone with accessible manuals detailing agricultural best practices and how to prepare for winter. Anyone interested in talking more (and hopefully starting something), please email me at ishaan [at] koratkar [dot] com.
My dream is to print a version of the King James Bible mass distributed to every church that contains all the information needed to self-sustain a human colony - or something of that scale (curious if something like that already exists). While I think civilization level collapses are highly unlikely, I don’t know how to have a confident measure this kind of risk.
This almost looks like a joke. The first picture has SBF looking great, much better than he actually looks with incredible coloring and shading, whereas Caroline has a giant forehead, mostly the same tone for the whole face, and no whites around her eyes. Her eyes and mouth look like they ran out of time and got the intern to draw them on with pen.
That sketch artist seems to be ... not great? I thought the sketches of SBF were poor, because comparing how he looked going into the court and what the artist produced didn't line up well.
But poor Caroline. This is "Hunchback of Notre Dame" facial features:
What interesting differences have you noticed between the way the media covers the war in Ukraine vs wars in the Middle East?
One thing I just noticed is the grim obsession with "death toll". I've been reading articles on the Ukraine War for a year and a half, and the words "death toll" rarely come up; occasionally you'll see it in the context of one particular strike, but never in the context of a trying to keep a running count of deaths in the entire war. But now we're back to wars in Israel, and all of a sudden we're back to having the words "the death toll has reached..." in every article like it's a bridge collapse or an earthquake. Why is it so? It can't just be a lack of reliable numbers, because the numbers are pretty darn unreliable in the Middle East too (especially on the Palestinian side where they can be presumed to be entirely made up).
I suspect it's because large death counts during a hot war aren't surprising or eyebrow raising (the more interesting matter is the fact of the war itself), whereas terrorists inflicting 1k+ casualties is a pretty rare event, the numbers being central to its noteworthiness.
Nobody is reporting reliable casualty figures from Ukraine. Both sides classify their own number of military dead and exaggerate the other side's. The Ukrainians are probably being honest about the number of civilian dead on their own territory, but most of the civilian casualties occurred in places the Russian army occupied and they aren't talking. Sometimes when the Ukrainians manage to retake territory they find things like e.g. Bucha, and that gets talked about a lot. But most days, there's nothing but educated guesses to talk about.
As an educated guess, not quite half a million people have died in the Ukraine war, roughly half of them Russian soldiers.
Israel, is counting the bodies as they come in to their hospitals, and they aren't being quiet about it.
Israel is a reasonable approximate of a liberal democracy. Liberal democracies tend to be moderate in their dishonesty about vital statistics because their institutions and political cultures aren't really set up to sustain brazenly making up the numbers out of whole cloth.
Where liberal democracies put out bullshit numbers, it's usually in the nature of sloppy methodologies and misleading framings, not the kinds of outright fabrication that authoritarian polities often indulge in.
Yeah, actual deaths are pretty reliably reported almost everywhere. I've seen studies of early postwar Iraq, in the middle of a major insurgency, that indicate the Iraqi coroners and bureaucrats were playing it pretty straight.
In particular, if you report deaths, your own people demand that you report the *names* of the dead, so they can e.g. see if their friends and family survived the catastrophe du jour. If you report someone dead who isn't dead (or wasting away in your oubliette), that's going to fail when they show up alive and talking to a reporter. If you don't report as dead someone who is dead, their families are going to complain that not-officially-dead Bob disappeared three months ago and why haven't you found him yet, are you even looking? If this happens too often, you start to look like a failed state that can't keep track of its own people. You can maybe get away with reporting the deaths of people who never really existed, but sooner or later some reporter looking for a human-interest story is going to try looking up the family of one of those fictional dead, and really creating specific fictional people is hard work.
Why do muslims around the world feel so categorically different about Xinjiang than they do about Palestine? Sure, there's a lot of differences, but if Israel explicitly annexed Gaza and then treated the people of Gaza the way the people of Xinjiang are being treated e.g. 'reeducation camps', destroying mosques, would people be okay with that? It seems like they would be much less happy about it than the current status quo, despite such a state of affairs being much more similar to the Xinjiang situation that they basically are okay with.
partly because China isn't jewish (and doesn't contain any muslim holy sites), and partly because polarizing their people against Israel was a useful way for Arab dictators to maintain power and legitimacy for many years and war propaganda has taken a life of its own.
Of all the reasons given so far, the race angle seems to fit best.
Helplessness because China is too strong: then at least there'd be some emotional response. Hasn't the US gotten a lot of hate for being perceived as an enemy of Muslims?
No PR department: Uighur activists seem to have done a good enough job garnering some outrage in the West.
It's Western propaganda: What about the Rohingya?
Arab/Middle Eastern Muslims just don't seem all that interested in the problems of Asian Muslims and vice versa.
`Helplessness because China is too strong' seems sufficient. As John Schilling says, caring deeply about something where you can't do a thing is depressing, and people instinctively shy away from it. What are they going to do? China can't be shamed, the great firewall will keep external propaganda attempts out, and they have no ability to project power into Xinjiang.
The crackdown on Uighurs was initiated after a series of terrorist attacks and riots in the 90s to the mid 2010s. China wasn't so powerful then and terror attacks were demonstrably possible, yet Arab Muslims seem to have been largely disinterested back then as well.
Second, it doesn't explain anger against the US, a stronger and more influential country than China. Have we forgotten 9/11 already?
Third, Myanmar is definitely not powerful and they've been giving a good go at genociding the mostly Muslim Rohingya for the better part of a decade now.
Middle Eastern Muslim disinterest in East/Southeast Asian Muslim affairs appears constant regardless of the strength of the adversary.
By and large they do not believe it. Muslim countries see it as western propaganda. Quite a few Muslim countries sent a letter to the UN condoning the Chinese actions in response to a letter from western countries condemning it.
Because there's nothing they can do about Xinjiang. The Muslim world can't project power into China, and China isn't going to care about anybody's silly protests or UN resolutions or whatever. It's really depressing to care about something you know you can't do anything about, so most people care about something else instead.
Israel, the Muslim world thinks it can do something about. Israel can be shamed, or the West can be shamed into restraining Israel, and if necessary Israelis can be killed in significant numbers so that at least there's vengeance on the table.
Sounds like an excellent argument for Israel to destroy the possibility of palestians doing anything then, if the alternative is allowing the risk of defeat and being punished for doing so anyway
a) Palestine initially caught the public interest and has remained the center of attention, because people don't measure their causes by utility but by "what everyone else in my in-group cares about".
b) Israel is, aside from the enormous problem of the Palestinians (and John Wilkes Booth), an open liberal democracy which generally allows reporters to do reporting. China is not. If Israel clamped down the way China did, we'd see a lot less Palestinian suffering.
c) Israel is much closer to the Muslim heartland, and by "closer" I mean "on top of" and "underneath". From what I can tell, the inciting incident was something at Al Aqsa mosque, which may be built in literally the same place as the Second Temple. (Historians differ.)
d) Israel is smaller and weaker than China, and could plausibly be defeated in a war. I doubt this is conscious, but it seems like a normal human instinct.
e) In a particular sense, anti-Semitism. I'm not being picky for the pedantic reason, but because my understanding is that Jewish/Muslim relations were generally better than Jewish/Christian relations, up until the founding of Israel (or maybe a bit before, when there was informal settling going on). So while there is a lot of of anti-Semitism, and my understanding is that historically it was a response not a cause, at this point in time has become an ongoing cause: there's a self-sustaining feedback loop of hate and prejudice.
I was just being pedantic, and talking about a difference of hundreds of feet. :-) And depending on what one considers "Al Aqsa" - is it the central mosque itself, or the entire grounds? And the same goes for what one considers "the Temple".
On the last point, I think there's also a broader sense in which jews are also viewed as being 'white' (despite less than a third of israelis having majority ashkenazi ancestry) which plays into this. "Colonialism" is a term basically only ever used to describe conquest by Europeans, and also Israelis, and Israelis are very much viewed as European colonizers. If it were Turkic muslims doing this to arab muslims and treating them just as badly, there's no chance in hell is would be called 'colonialism' and I can't imagine a half as many people would care. Of course, they would be much less likely to be supported by the US, which complicates things.
I have another bit of speculation: If some people who aren't allied to the West are angry at some other people who aren't allied to the West, Western media doesn't pick it up.
Sure, but it's not remotely clear that's what Gazan Palestinians what. I don't think it's what they ever wanted, but certainly not today. Hamas and a majority of surveyed Gazans want Israel to be ethnically cleansed of jews, 'from the river to the sea'. You can say this results precisely from Israel's treatment of them, but the problem to begin with was never just 'jews are taking our land'. They never wanted jews moving to palestine in the first place.
It's also very striking that pro-palestinian muslims/leftists around the world talk about israeli 'apartheid' in terms of discrimination against arabs, but the rest of arab world does not give full rights or unlimited asylum to palestianians. Obviously palestinians want to live in what they feel is "their" land, but I surely if a rich arab gulf state allowed as many Palestinians to live there as want to and gave them full citizenship, vast swathes would have already left, but even arabs don't give equality to arab palestinians.
Palestinian refugees have made Lebanon ungovernable, and almost did the same thing to Jordan before getting kicked out.
To try to channel Machiavelli, I suspect that the leaders of neighboring Arab countries are most concerned with staying in power. (Iran and the Taliban might be an exception, but they're neither neighboring nor Arab.) And to that end I think they want to both avoid a war with Israel, and keep their population's hostility directed away from themselves and toward a convenient scapegoat. So they're fine with the situation as is.
It wasn't a "refugee crisis" like in Europe or the southern US. It was importing a large number of very passionate people into countries with lower population. When Jordan annexed the West Bank, it tripled their population. And Jordan granted citizenship to all of them, too. But no one else seemed to like that solution, not the Palestinians and not the rest of the world.
It's not the mere existence of the refugees, it's what they do. If it were merely a matter of feeding and taking care of them, that could be blamed on Israel. But when they start literally waging war on the country they came from, using your country as a base, that's on them. They are human, they have agency, and they have moral responsibility for the choices they make.
The fact that Arab Israelis accept full citizenship means that Gazans might have accepted full Israeli citizenship in 1948, if it had been offered, and their grandchildren would probably still be OK with it. But that didn't happen, and what did happen over the next seventy-five years has created a present reality where the Gazans are exceedingly unlikely to accept Israeli citizenship.
Unless it comes with enough other Palestinian-Israeli citizens that they can vote to rename the country "Palestine" and kick the Jews off the island.
I do think a large majority of Palestinians would (initially) accept citizenship with equal rights in Israel. The problems are
- the minority who wouldn't accept it and would continue terrorism, and who could now freely come and go in Israel, would be more than enough to spoil it.
- Unlike the Native Americans, Australians etc., there are about as many Arabs in Israel/Palestine as Jews, more if Palestinians in neighboring countries return, meaning that control of the government would be contested, or dominated by Arabs. Given all the historical enmity, conflicts would likely escalate until they tear apart the state, and lead to a civil war.
Nobody but the Arabs care whose fault it was that bad stuff happened 75 years ago. The rest of us care about the bad stuff that happened last weekend. To the extent that we care whose fault it is, the dead ravers and the decapitated babies and all that, is 100% Hamas's fault (and any co-conspirators they might have had).
The more useful question is what can be done about any of this? The bad stuff that happened 75 years ago, nothing can be done about. The vctims and the perpetrators are dead. The bad stuff that happened this weekend, there may be things we can do about that. But it doesn't matter for that purpose what happened 75 years ago or whose fault it is, it matters what the situation is today.
The situation today is, the Gazans aren't going to accept egalitarian citizenship in Israel, and nobody is going to offer citizenship to more than a small fraction of the Gazans. That sucks. It sucks no matter whose fault it is. Now, what solutions are compatible with that sucky reality?
Palestinians are in a very different position from a typical "indigenous people," for several reasons. They share an ethnicity the citizens of several large, strong, well-armed states that surround Israel, and these states have a history of supporting them in wars against the "civilized" colonizer. That ethnicity also sees itself as "civilized" in the full sense (i.e. literate, urbanized, and otherwise different from surrounding "barbarians" in ways that facilitate and justify imperial expansion).
But just as importantly, it is not remotely true that "basically every indigenous group on Earth accepts this arrangement." It would be more accurate to say that basically every indigenous group fights back against attempts to colonize its traditional territories. In many cases, such groups have been unsuccessful because of their technological or strategic disadvantages; the arrangements that you describe are then put in place to deal with the surviving members of a group that has failed in its attempts at armed resistance.
> but the fact that we didn’t does not excuse Nazi actions or make the US responsible for the Holocaust in even the slightest way.
My point was that the people complaining about unequal treatment do not support equal treatment themselves and by and large do not want to take in palestinians or give them equal rights.
>Just personally I’d be happy to give US citizenship to every Palestinian.
That would make the US a much, much worse place. When even other arab muslims don't want these people, you know that they're no good.
But arab countries most vocal about the opposition to israel are the ones who should be taking them, instead of people of the other side of the world who are culturally, linguistically and religiously very different to these people, and the US has a large number of jews and homosexuals, so bringing in a bunch of homophobic anti-semites would not be very fair to them.
>Though Israel ought to pay for all the lost Palestinian land and property,
When did muslims ever pay anyone for their conquests? Arabs are even indigenous to the levant for crying out loud, and you're acting like all these people "own" this land by virtue of being its original inhabitants or something. They're just the (second) latest in a very long line of occupants, and so if we're being consistent here, Israelis should be able to "own" this land if they just hang onto it long enough.
But again, it's not clear palestinians would accept this arrangement and it's very clear israel would never pay for it to happen
>But in general people have more of a claim to equal treatment in their home country than they do as refugees.
The point is more about how people outside of palestine talk about things, as if there's something unique at israel not wanting these people to have full rights, when its a universal for the reigion.
>Also the polls in your links seem all over the place so I’m not sure how reliable they are. But figure A.1 at least shows that a large majority of Palestinians supported a two-state solution in 2014-15
No, A.1 does not show a majority support for a two-state solution. It says 52% probably or definitely reject it.
A.2 shows a slight majority for Gazans in 2014...but we're not talking about 2014
Also...this is all irrelevant. Look at figures A.7 and A.8
A majority of palestianians think that a two-state solution would at best be a stepping stone towards full 'liberation' of palestine
Looks like AI in business is the hot new topic, at least if the Microsoft Ignite seminar (workshops? event? I don't know what exactly to call it) is any example.
This bit made me both twitch and go "hmmm".
There's an unmerciful amount of guff on the session descriptions, as you'd expect (I don't want to be engaged with whatever you're selling to spy on employees) and this jewel of prose leaves me as it found me, but I think the straws in the wind as to what big businesses hope to achieve with AI are to be seen there, and also why it's naive to call for slowdowns or pauses or halts. There's money to be made, Chuck! Big money! And you expect me to leave all those dollar bills lying on the sidewalk?
"Adopting “decision intelligence” powered by AI will lead to exponential growth, but People, Process and Culture are the impediment that needs to be addressed with an impactful AI strategy. Hear how you can operationalize and embed AI organically in enterprise with focus on value stream mapping, to harness AI driven insights in business processes, to drive agility."
People are impediments to AI. So inconvenient, we fleshbags, aren't we? Seems more and more like 'AI was not made for man, but man was made for the AI' is the likely future, and not "it'll free us all up to be cultured gentlepersons of leisure, rich fat and happy, while AI does all the work and pulls magical post-scarcity rabbits out of the cosmic hat".
I'm registered for online access to two days of the hoo-ha, so maybe I'll learn something applicable to work (very unlikely) or at least how to properly grovel before our new AI overlords.
EDIT: Look at the digital swag I can get! God bless Microsoft, they've never been cool and they'll never be cool and they may have more brains than an illithid banqueting hall but they're *hopeless* at design 😁
It sounds like you need tantric spirituality, to override this kind of absolutism. Though I don't understand why that particular passage is causing you trouble. What is the thing you're currently not doing that you wish you were doing (or that you currently do, but it causes you immense guilt)?
Boy, I appreciate your instructive response so I've been spending 20 minutes here attempting to pen a response....
And that's kind of the thing. I tend towards the impractical, in part because the math that was so deeply inculcated into me was in fact pretty good (most people due in fact benefit more from being good to people than they lose from it) but as you noticed it wa taught to me with a religious absolutism that is of course false and is reducio-ad-hitlerum, in the sense that you end up bringing about your own extermination for the sake of others.
I'm tempted to quite you thrice daily prayers for just this degree of self abnegation and then more about my own precious personal history (that sarcasm is a good natured self-ribbing, I'm keeping that) but you asked a soecific question.
Guilt I can't speak to because I no longer have the kind of guilt that I used to have at all. Presumably what most people mean by "guilt" I have as well but I felt guilty over being even the slightest bit morally imperfect so once I conquered that it went away for good. Praise Allah.
I'll take a sentence to clarify how I conquered it.
Well, after 19 years of failed attempts I finally did achieve moral perfection as I understood it. I refused to engage in any self-centered pleasure so long as anyone was suffering and there was a chance that if I were less attatched to the comforts of a mattress, socializing or food (other than bread and water) that I would be able to help them.
Yeah, it led to rescuing a hostage in Chechnya, improving the lives and longevities of people who were presumed to be on their deathbeds, and some other interesting stuff.
Anyway, that's more than a sentence but the point is that if anything in your final parentheses applies, I don't know it as guilt because what I knew as guilt I conquered by having absolutely nothing at all that I felt it was possible to feel guilty about.
Wild, ey? 😂
Anyway, in case anyone misreads this as me saying that either I actually *was* perfect (by standards other than my own, which I just spelled out) or that I am currently perfect (by the afore-spelled standards) I'm not saying either.
So, what am I not doing that I wish I were doing?
Okay.
I think I tend to focus on the "cognitive" aspects rather than the behavioral bevause of course if you have a strong enough WHY, you might find the HOW.
But it is correct to begin eith the end in mind.
There's plenty I wish I were doing that is attributable easily enough to "the symptoms of adhd" (in quotes because I disapprove of how this mindset is pathologized) but in this case I'm probably referring to things that I'm already doing and am driven to do but which I feel I am not doing well (or perhaps at all) because of how I was raised.
The girl thing I mentioned in comically stark terms is true. But that's too complicated a subject, too interesting a subject and too low down on my list of concerns right now.
How's this.
I don't know whether I want to have a relationship or publicity or all of the other things that people raised normally go for, but I do know that I don't want to be at the mercy of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune through having zero money.
It's likely that I should also want wealth, not all normal people prefer, but, while I'm working very hard on preferring wealth to non-wealth (so that at least my own personal distaste for it won't be a factor getting in the way) I KNOW from a few recent experiences I want money.
However I know of no way of talking or thinking about it other than as selfish, and therefore wrong, thing.
In fact, because I regard money making as "wrong" I think and speak of it that way. I am, in theory, perfectly willing to make and have money but I have a hard time thinking of it as the right thing to do.
That's not useful.
Particularly because on a moment to moment basis, I really prefer standard issue goodness, hell, I still prefer even perfectionist utopian goodness!
I'm just mad at the fact that it doesn't pay its debts so I changed my philosophical opposition to making money. And will tell you that if I could get away with killing a baby and zelling its organs for $1,000,000 then I would do it but that's just the traditional Jewish talmudistic theorizing about right and wrong in the harshest of theoretical terms, and not very useful.
Not only does it do nothing practical to have "decided" this but I've known myself for 47 years and I'm pretty sure that I would not even be remotely prepared to take that opportunity if it presented itself, or even a far far easier one.
I despise the moralizing of the present day because I'm saturated with it and don't need any more of it.
But the unfortunate fact is that pretty much all the moralizers are benefiting from saying the right thing even if they never do it, while I incur the opposite of benefit by opposing all these publicly stated moral "shoulds", while in real life still dancing pretty damn close to the side of angels.
I don't know precisely what I want to be *doing*, but I know that I want to *have* money.
And because my brain type is "Naturally Taoist" (i e. "Severe ADHD") the normal ways of making money are not available to me. At least not in any way that I can remotely imagine (I have already tried every last way that I can imagine).
So getting rich quickly seems a whole lot more likely than doing it slowly. That doesn't make it necessarily likely, but more likely than slowly and more likely than some might think.
Perhaps this bit of apologetics I posted a few days ago (for deciding that for two days I would not doubt the righteousness of making money and would therefore try to do so) will provide a viewer other than myself with a clear insight into what I wish I were doing but am somehow held back from.
" I KNOW from a few recent experiences I want money.
However I know of no way of talking or thinking about it other than as selfish, and therefore wrong, thing."
Yeah, I think St Francis de Sales might have something here for you:
"WHEN God created the world He commanded each tree to bear fruit after its kind; and even so He bids Christians,—the living trees of His Church,—to bring forth fruits of devotion, each one according to his kind and vocation. A different exercise of devotion is required of each—the noble, the artisan, the servant, the prince, the maiden and the wife; and furthermore such practice must be modified according to the strength, the calling, and the duties of each individual. I ask you, my child, would it be fitting that a Bishop should seek to lead the solitary life of a Carthusian? And if the father of a family were as regardless in making provision for the future as a Capucin, if the artisan spent the day in church like a Religious, if the Religious involved himself in all manner of business on his neighbour’s behalf as a Bishop is called upon to do, would not such a devotion be ridiculous, ill-regulated, and intolerable? Nevertheless such a mistake is often made, and the world, which cannot or will not discriminate between real devotion and the indiscretion of those who fancy themselves devout, grumbles and finds fault with devotion, which is really nowise concerned in these errors. No indeed, my child, the devotion which is true hinders nothing, but on the contrary it perfects everything; and that which runs counter to the rightful vocation of any one is, you may be sure, a spurious devotion.
...Of course a purely contemplative devotion, such as is specially proper to the religious and monastic life, cannot be practised in these outer vocations, but there are various other kinds of devotion well-suited to lead those whose calling is secular, along the paths of perfection. The Old Testament furnishes us examples in Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, David, Job, Tobias, Sarah, Rebecca and Judith; and in the New Testament we read of St. Joseph, Lydia and Crispus, who led a perfectly devout life in their trades:—we have S. Anne, Martha, S. Monica, Aquila and Priscilla, as examples of household devotion, Cornelius, S. Sebastian, and S. Maurice among soldiers;—Constantine, S. Helena, S. Louis, the Blessed Amadaeus, and S. Edward on the throne. And we even find instances of some who fell away in solitude,—usually so helpful to perfection,—some who had led a higher life in the world, which seems so antagonistic to it. S. Gregory dwells on how Lot, who had kept himself pure in the city, fell in his mountain solitude."
It has to do with your station in life. Wanting to make money is not wrong, and indeed those who say "but I need expensive clothes etc. for my job and my position" may well be right. In that case, if you need to wear a good suit, then buy a good suit, and earn the money to be able to buy a good suit. That's not wrong.
"And will tell you that if I could get away with killing a baby and zelling its organs for $1,000,000 then I would do it"
That *is* wrong but you seem to realise that. There are limits to what we should do in the pursuit of our ends. If you're starving, it's not a crime or sin to steal food, but it is a crime and sin if you're doing it because you calculate "by stealing one loaf of bread per week I can save $X" when you can perfectly well afford to pay for the bread.
And maybe exercising gentleness towards yourself, neither exaggerating all your faults or excusing them or angrily declaring you have none:
"ONE important direction in which to exercise gentleness, is with respect to ourselves, never growing irritated with one’s self or one’s imperfections; for although it is but reasonable that we should be displeased and grieved at our own faults, yet ought we to guard against a bitter, angry, or peevish feeling about them. Many people fall into the error of being angry because they have been angry, vexed because they have given way to vexation, thus keeping up a chronic state of irritation, which adds to the evil of what is past, and prepares the way for a fresh fall on the first occasion. Moreover, all this anger and irritation against one’s self fosters pride, and springs entirely from self-love, which is disturbed and fretted by its own imperfection. What we want is a quiet, steady, firm displeasure at our own faults. A judge gives sentence more effectually speaking deliberately and calmly than if he be impetuous and passionate (for in the latter case he punishes not so much the actual faults before him, but what they appear to him to be); and so we can chasten ourselves far better by a quiet stedfast repentance, than by eager hasty ways of penitence, which, in fact, are proportioned not by the weight of our faults, but according to our feelings and inclinations. Thus one man who specially aims at purity will be intensely vexed with himself at some very trifling fault against it, while he looks upon some gross slander of which he has been guilty as a mere laughing matter. On the other hand, another will torment himself painfully over some slight exaggeration, while he altogether overlooks some serious offence against purity; and so on with other things. All this arises solely because men do not judge themselves by the light of reason, but under the influence of passion."
I'm not trying to scold here, but you do seem to write under the influence of passion. A little more balance in looking at yourself, and letting go a little of resentment (which is hard! but the past is over, it can't be changed now. I struggle with this a lot myself) and accepting that however it was, it's not possible to alter it now, just how you deal with it and regard it.
Have you been in a psych ward? You sound crazy in an interesting way. No offense meant: I've been in psych wards 3 times myself, and I don't think it's ever gonna happen again, but still.
As to making money and just being more selfish generally... Yeah, tantra would help you to integrate impulses that you currently regard as wrong. There are tantric rituals that involve offering meat and shit and semen to statues of the Buddha to get over submission to the sacred.
I invented a little tantric ritual myself: down a bottle of wine, then go to mass/synagogue. But perhaps that doesn't work so well for you, since ethics is the thing tormenting you, not so much religion.
I did write an essay about how altruistic one should be that you might find helpful:
Don't think I've ever been in a psych ward. Ar least not as a patient. I may be crazy but probably not in a way that is a physical danger to myself or others. At least not others who don't have it coming 😄.
Naw, I'm just one of those people widely considered either a genius or a madman depending upon whether they've got institutional backing at the time.
E.G. I've never succeeded at selling myself (which probably would be the shortest answer for what I want to be able to do like a normal person) so I've rarely ever successfully arranged a speaking engagement for myself (I just feel so slimy doing it that those few times that I do go ahead with it, I come across pretty bad) but whenever I'm willing to set aside the purity of my principles and risk speaking under the aegis of an institution (through their sellimg me to the venue and setting it all up) I tend to be regarded as so loftily that my ingrained humility can't stand it.
Anyway, I don't put much stock in labeling so I take no more offense in being called Mad than I take pleasure in being called Great, because I know that from many shiploads full of evidence that the label is no more than an indication of whether, well, whether I'm assumed by that individual to be powerful or not 🤷♂️.
That's not a critique of your query. Presumably most people who act as freely as I do despite lacking those things their society happens to regard as preconditions for such freedom (see: "fuck you money") are regarded as mad and, generally, regard themselves as fundamentally faulty as well.
I've had the good fortune to be me so I, well, I dunno, I think I'm pretty great...mainly because when I receive a novel criticism I tend to consider it, so I think I've ended up pretty okay.
Anyway, I have no problems with psych wards or with people who have been in them. Among the gazillion things I'd want to try in fact would BE getting committed to a psych ward to see what the experience would be like. Besides, while I doubt the value judgements of popular notions of psychiatry/psychology, I adsume the professionals are actually pretty good. Hell, for all a psych ward is just what I need! 😂
I doubt it. I'm just sayin' that I lack fundamental biases about such things.
Good catch on the importance of desecrating the sacred and also that my issue isn't the sanctity of the Moral Preachers (be they things or people) but the fundamental, deep level coding that makes me *enjoy* sklavenmoral over, I don't know, something at least a *little* closer to Conan's morals.
Religion I've got covered. Hell, I'm a religious *authority* and it doesn't stop me from speaking and acting freely and openly in defiance of what pretty much all other Orthodox Rabbis believe to be right. (That's one of the benefits of not having to doubt your own righteousness right there.)
What I feel I *ought* to be doing is to gollow Maimonides' Aristotlean ethics about getting your traits to hover comfortably on the path of the golden mean, so that you have equal capacity to go to the right or the left as the situation demands.
For example, Maimonides tells the stingy guy to make a conscious effort to override his automatic impulses and to repeatedly spend money like a wastrel until he's gotten over whatever a-rational emotional thing was making him stingy (this assumes of course that he isn't stingy for a good reason).
And the opposite for the spendthrift.
I actually did a teeny bit of this. I went out rabbit hunting. (It's more interesting than that but unless you've got a publisher for us that'll do.)
Im this instance, huh, well I ought to at the very least, consciously stop myself from caring about whether a word I said (or didn't say) might have hurt someone's feelings (or helped them - in the case of things I say or do entirely for someone else's sake).
It's interesting. I don't mind if I come across as rude so long as the misunderstanding belongs to the other party.
What bothers me is when I'm being short with someone (or otherwise not saintly) because I *want* to be (because how long can I be expected to stand frozen listening to some bore simply because it makes her/him feel good, or whatever).
And because *that* isn't proactively doable I think I ought to go out and proactively hurt people's feelings and thus get over whatever was keeping my conscience saintly.
A few times I've done this by passing beggars (who are common in manhattan) without making eye contact.
Don't get me wrong, I'm certain I've hurt people lots more then not making eye contact with them and apologizing for not giving them money. But, like I said before, not for small selfish benefit like just being ignoring someone because who gives a shit about this strangers feelings anyway.
Cereal killing would probably qualify as a maimonidean remedy but I don't know where to find cereal.
In any case, the error in my wiring is the feeling that it's better to be regarded as bad while secretly knowing you are good, than to be good while secretly knowing you are bad.
The logic that my mind offers me as an excuse for keeping at this is that my conscience is more or less clean and thus keeps me from having to lie too much, or whatever.
Besides, my deepest desire - and the only way that I (currently) would feel *comfortable* having money, acclaim, power, and a harem - IS to bring about a moral revolution on Earth.
Like all people I suppose, I'm more afraid of possibly *losing* the goodies that caring about folk brings my life, than I am excited about *gaining* what not-caring about them could bring to my life.
So, because I believe in trying things that could be correct despite their being against my inclination.
Hmmmm.....I guess I could call customer service lines and make fun of their names? Or be an asshole troll to get a rise out of people and just laugh about it...
But I'd really prefer it if someone just gave me a few hundred dollars so that I could cover the inevitable expenses that arise from being a somewhat overly nice guy who's uncomfortable with making money even in the limited fields that his adhd allows.
"Like all people I suppose, I'm more afraid of possibly *losing* the goodies that caring about folk brings my life, than I am excited about *gaining* what not-caring about them could bring to my life."
What do you think not-caring could bring? "I don't give a shit about your granny losing her life-savings and being cast out in the snow, I sold her that shitty mortgage and made a bundle of commission on it"?
Do you know what you want? Because you don't seem to be making things clear, here. Other than "I want a moral revolution where we do away with slave morality and everyone behaves like a Cimmerian barbarian" which, uh, you might not like as much as you think you would (how else would you characterise what Hamas is doing?)
Are you entirely sure you know what Conan's morals are? Because for a barbarian, he had a lot of moral delicacy (e.g. in many of the stories there's a sexy hot and helpless wench who is throwing herself on his... mercy and he could, if he wished, take full advantage. But he doesn't. Conan suffers from sklavenmorality himself, it would seem). The part I like best is this from "The Tower of the Elephant":
"Tears rolled from the sightless eyes, and Conan's gaze strayed to the limbs stretched on the marble couch. And he knew the monster would not rise to attack him. He knew the marks of the rack, and the searing brand of the flame, and tough-souled as he was, he stood aghast at the ruined deformities which his reason told him had once been limbs as comely as his own. And suddenly all fear and repulsion went from him, to be replaced by a great pity. What this monster was, Conan could not know, but the evidences of its sufferings were so terrible and pathetic that a strange aching sadness came over the Cimmerian, he knew not why. He only felt that he was looking upon a cosmic tragedy, and he shrank with shame, as if the guilt of a whole race were laid upon him."
I understand Maimonides' advice, and indeed there's a tradition in Western thought that virtue lies in moderation, in the middle way. But I think you over-correct and don't get the idea there of *balance*; going out and ignoring beggars isn't auto-correction, it's tipping the scale in the pan the opposite way. You're only doing what others do every day, and acting against those who cannot harm you and are the ones suffering these small humiliations all the time. The real way to overcome wanting to be thought well of, even/especially by yourself ('look how patient and saintly I am being, listening to this bore!') is to risk something; offend someone whose good opinion you *do* want or who can get back at you in some way, be it telling everyone you are a jerk, or hurting you in our pocket, or some other way. That will break wanting to be well thought of by your own self-esteem much faster than scorning those who are already despised.
D-baby, I wrote you back a letter that would have delighted you to read and eould have delighted me to have delighted you.
Alas but that my phone turned off as I was selecting the final word and the entire comment was lost.
As I am certain that the Divine wished YOU to have been delighted, I can only assume that the message was to ME to put down the phone and stop writing.
Or at least to keep my phone charged, but the first one sounds more correct.
Having watched your video, and reading this comment, all I can say is that I've been there, I once thought I was both the Messiah and the Antichrist. I think you need to go to a psychiatrist and tell him exactly what you think is gonna happen on 10/12/2024 (it seems you actually have a very clear idea of what that is that you're not sharing).
Or hell, lay it on me, because I'm curious to know. But yeah, I know it's probably impossible to get through to you right now, but it would be a lack of compassion not to insist on you talking to a psychiatrist, and just speak your truth to him, such as it is at this moment.
Eh? I think the distance of text is making you read me incorrectly. I don't think anything is going to happen on that day unless we make it happen.
I speak in a variety of flavors, which obviously makes it *really* hard to come across as anything but nuts I suppose. But that's a practical question.
Do you think I actually believe something that is irrational? If so I would like to be corrected, but I don't think that's so.
As for being the messiah and/or antichrist. They both sound like a lot of fun so if you can put in a good word for me with either hod or the devil I'd be much obliged, but I'm pretty certain that I do not have anything even remotely approximating certitude about either.
I appreciate the suggestion and, in general, would *love* to speak to a good shrink, but not because I have any delusions.
Though of course a delusional person *would* say that, wouldn't he 😂.
So, f'realz, other than cognitive or emotional stuff, in which bwe're in agreement that I would like to speak to a good shrink but just don't have the money for it, what gave you the impression that I believed in something crazy?
If it's the certitude in my, "Final Chance" video, rest assured I have no certitudes. I didn't bother to qualify or explain every (or even any)thing because what I was conveying can't be conveyed that way.
I am, after all, an Orthodox Rabbi. We have over 3,000 years worth of concepts, and ways of speaking that don't translate.
If you are still of the opinion that I think something definitive that is definitively and demonstrably false please tell me.
Otherwise, well, you already know that I don't know how to accurately convey the fact that I believe that my words are highly worthy of consideration, but if I did know how to convey that I would.
Besides, I thought I linked to the video about money? Did I mention that date in that video, or did you watch "Final Chance For A Fresh Start"?
It is not for no reason that Justice is held to be the chief of the virtues - it is the one that allows us to apply all the others in their correct place and measure.
The message of the Sermon on the Mount quote you give seems quite simple to me, and it is eminently *good* advice: when you do something praiseworthy, do it for its own sake, rather than to be praised. It's difficult to see how you get from that to martyrdom, and self-sacrifice, other than through a lot of missing context relating to your upbringing (which, to be fair, you hint at).
Since you asked for practical advice, here's some that works regardless of whether you believe in any higher power or not: the development and exercise of personal virtue is something that is ultimately subject to your personal control and judgement. You can neither shirk the responsibility, nor deceive yourself as to your true motives, and it is best not to try.
(If you do believe in a higher power, you might also note that this higher power knows the depths of your soul at least as well as you do, so you should take extra care to avoid trying to deceive yourself. You can't deceive God.)
The essential equality of all humans (taken as an axiom) implies you are no more important than anyone else, but - equally - nobody else is more important than you. Therefore, to ask whether some other man deserves "access to a woman's womb" more than you do - as you do elsewhere - is asking the wrong sort of question. No man, fundamentally, "deserves access" - the woman ought to have something to say about it, after all (also being equal), and if she chose you as the father of her children, then that's that.
Going beyond that particular example, nobody has the right to demand your self-sacrifice, because that would imply they are more important than you are - a proposition that requires demonstration to *your* satisfaction. That doesn't, however, imply that you cannot freely give of your own, if you choose to. To do so or not is ultimately a choice you must make, based on what sort of person you would like to see yourself as being - and that's where the virtue of Justice comes in. There's a difference between being generous or humble, and being a doormat, and being Just is how you know the difference.
I take it none of y'all were raised by a young mother for whom the central event in her life was her mother failing to rescue her young niece as she was murdered before her eyes in Auschwitz, ey?
Methinks you misunderstood all that boy girl thing before. But thank you for informing me that rape is wrong. lol.
Here be da ting (sorry, I live in a Jamaican neighborhood and the accent slips out every so often. just lightening the mood!) ---
In case none of you have visited America circa 2023, Jews have a thing about guilt. About "not doing enough". And about the sanctity of victimhood.
This is ancient shit.
But for the meme to be sticky it requires a social mechanism that will ensure events which leave an indelible impression every few generation.
The Holocaust was a relatively recent version of such an event. (Perhaps you won't fail to notice an even *more* recent one.)
In the particular mini story in which I am one of the main characters, a young woman named Dvori who was around 20 years old saved the lives of her younger sister and cousin whom Josef Mengele had sent to the gas chambers.
In fact, the whole reason she was able to survive hell on earth was due to the viktorfrankl'esque "meaning" she got from her mission of continuing to save these two girls in their young teens. If we're going to be clinical about something which really seems pretty intuitive.
Well, one day she failed to give her own life for her nieces so her niece was murdered while shrieking for her aunt to save her, and for the rest of her life Dvori was, well, done.
THAT is the foundation upon which my mother's psyche was forged.
So, (said, in a jewish friendly kibbitziy way) Fuck You for your kindly moral explanation about to whom fall the rights to reproduction. What you fail to realize is that for true and proper kikes, raised right, each Jew has the moral obligation to rescue everyone else even from their own mistakes.
Sure you may have a life to spend that you're game to spend as my spouse but what in the hell does THAT have to do with anything?
My responsibility is to protect you EVEN FROM YOURSELF.
And *most especially* FROM ME.
So you may want to marry me but unless I can determine with absolute certitude that you are best off with me rather than with yankel or shmendrick or zisha leah, I'm MAMESH A NAZI if I marry you just because you're "willing".
Boy, shkutzim and yidden on the margins really don't know what they're missing!
________________________________
TONE: Sans vocal inflections and facial expressions there is some small room for massively misunderstanding a playful comment as a hateful or otherwise ill-humored and large room for assiming that someone somewhere may misunderstand the comment and that therefore certain public responses are required.... and all of the horrifying game theory that goes on under the hood every time we engage in this two generation old experiment of communicating as strangers, to strangers, before strangers, forever.
I had suggested to Elon Musk that tweets be color code for mood. It seems like if someone says, "I'm gonna kill you", it would be helpful for clarifying humorous intent if it came in a playful pink and comic sans. (The same does not apply for ransom notes.)
Nothing I wrote was comical in the "not true" sense. But nothing I wrote was in anger, desperation or sadness either. I am a happy and playful chap who is also Dead Fuckin Serious.
Yeah, I already got the impression you have Mommy Issues.
Leaving all that aside, and there's a huge heap of weight there, on a strictly religious basis what you are talking about in part is what is called "scrupulosity" and part of the treatment is to abandon your own attempts to judge your own case and surrender to the guidance of a spiritual director (whose job mainly will be to say "no you did not commit the unforgiveable sin and no you are not going to burn in hell for all eternity just because you think you only said four hail marys instead of five for your penance after your last confession, now trust and believe me because you are under obedience to do so and stop obsessively praying the rosary to 'make up' for the omission which you may not even have omitted').
That, I can already tell, is not gonna work in your case because you have *massively* over-corrected for being told what to do all your life by going to the opposite extreme of "fudge you nobody can tell me nothing and i know best of all even better than you guys who claim to be the experts", you hugely believe in your own intelligence, and an Authority Figure setting up to tell you how to handle your conscience is going to trigger *all* the fire alarms.
But it's how it works - therapy would probably be the next best thing. Psychology has commandeered the term for itself, but it is religious in origin.
"Treatment is similar to that for other forms of obsessive–compulsive disorder. Exposure and response prevention (ERP), a form of behavior therapy, is widely used for OCD in general and may be promising for scrupulosity in particular. ERP is based on the idea that deliberate repeated exposure to obsessional stimuli lessens anxiety, and that avoiding rituals lowers the urge to behave compulsively."
"Resolve to accept the judgments of your confessor or therapist over your own distorted standards. This is not a vow of obedience; it is simply a practical tool and can be stopped at any time. But relying on reliable people who model a healthy conscience can assist us to emulate a right moral measure for judging between sin, temptation and pathology."
Some of it, it sounds like you are self-applying (e.g. using Maimonides' advice). But maybe an outside view would be helpful as to when you're going off the rails over-correcting.
Your response was cool. It didn't reply to what I meant but I can totally see how one could have read me as being the sort of person to whom your reply was an accurate one.
Once a piece of writing is shared its truth is in the eyes of the beholder.
So it was a good response to article! Just not to the way my article intended to be.
But like I said in the PostScript, my response should be read as two guys joshing while high. Spilling truths, but in a spirit of love rather than the usual internet, uh, less than love I guess.
Wading into the deep waters here, but what the hell, I'm a fool so let me rush in while my guardian angel covers its eyes and goes "Eight billion humans and I have to get *this* one".
The bit about not blowing your own trumpet is held to mean - well, a couple of things. Be sincere in doing good, that is, don't do it just for praise (the ur-example here for me is - thank you AOC for a stellar photo-op - things like the Met Gala. Themed ball every year where it's a big charity bash for the deep-pocketed, the famous, and those who would like to think they're at least one of those. It's Conspicuous Showing-Off, all the money that the (likely borrowed) gowns and jewellery and everything to hold the do costs could more easily be given directly to whatever the point of this do is (keep an elite cultural organisation going?)
(If you are now going "But Deiseach didn't you hop on the Judas criticism about him saying that in regard to the expensive oinment?", ahem I am clearing my throat here VERY LOUDLY and unfortunately can't hear you).
This pearl of obliviousness has been criticised and defended so I'm not going to thrash it out again, but you get what we're saying, right? About Conspicuously Showing Off Your Virtue?
So number one is Sincerity. Closely related to it is probably (I hope) what your mom was going for, "and what makes you think you're so great anyway, huh?" If you hang your self-image off a peg of being *so* good and *so* virtuous and *so* generous, then what is the charity about in reality - the people for whom you are doing it, or yourself?
You're a Nice Person? Great! But all our righteousness is as filthy rags and even the heavens are not pure in His sight, so who do you think you're fooling? You give things to, or do things for, people you care about or like or who share your values? Even the pagans do that, what is so great about you doing it, then? That's number two, Honesty.
And now comes number three, which I can't put a pithy title on. "Be kind to yourself". Do the giving or deeds in privacy, anonymously. Take the pressure off yourself to do more, be more, give more. We've had some mention previously of how EA types are prone to scrupulousness and will worry themselves into a tizzy about "but I *could* live on 10% of what I earn and give all the rest away" or "Am I doing enough, aren't there more expenses I could cut down on so as to have more money to give away, do I really need to eat more than three times a week?"
Shhhh. You are not St. Francis of Assisi wedded to the Lady Poverty. Nobody is watching with beady, judgemental eyes as to "did you hold back a single penny from giving?". Give what you can. Don't put pressure on yourself to be Public Virtue All The Time.
Ehhhh - I was going somewhere with this, lemme think. Ah, yes! Humility! Now what is humility, and what is the wrong kind of humility, and what is the right kind of humility? I'm going to be quoting heavily here from smarter people than me.
C.S. Lewis, "The Screwtape Letters":
"You must therefore conceal from the patient the true end of Humility. Let him think of it not as self-forgetfulness but as a certain kind of opinion (namely, a low opinion) of his own talents and character. Some talents, I gather, he really has. Fix in his mind the idea that humility consists in trying to believe those talents to be less valuable than he believes them to be. No doubt they are in fact less valuable than he believes, but that is not the point. The great thing is to make him value an opinion for some quality other than truth, thus introducing an element of dishonesty and make-believe into the heart of what otherwise threatens to become a virtue. By this method thousands of humans have been brought to think that humility means pretty women trying to believe they are ugly and clever men trying to believe they are fools. And since what they are trying to believe may, in some cases, be manifest nonsense, they cannot succeed in believing it and we have the chance of keeping their minds endlessly revolving on themselves in an effort to achieve the impossible. To anticipate the Enemy's strategy, we must consider His aims. The Enemy wants to bring the man to a state of mind in which he could design the best cathedral in the world, and know it to be the best, and rejoice in the, fact, without being any more (or less) or otherwise glad at having done it than he would be if it had been done by another. The Enemy wants him, in the end, to be so free from any bias in his own favour that he can rejoice in his own talents as frankly and gratefully as in his neighbour's talents — or in a sunrise, an elephant, or a waterfall. He wants each man, in the long run, to be able to recognise all creatures (even himself) as glorious and excellent things. He wants to kill their animal self-love as soon as possible; but it is His long-term policy, I fear, to restore to them a new kind of self-love — a charity and gratitude for all selves, including their own; when they have really learned to love their neighbours as themselves, they will be allowed to love themselves as their neighbours."
Chesterton (too many to quote, but here's a chunk from "Heretics"):
"It is only with one aspect of humility that we are here concerned. Humility was largely meant as a restraint upon the arrogance and infinity of the appetite of man. He was always outstripping his mercies with his own newly invented needs. His very power of enjoyment destroyed half his joys. By asking for pleasure, he lost the chief pleasure; for the chief pleasure is surprise. Hence it became evident that if a man would make his world large, he must be always making himself small. Even the haughty visions, the tall cities, and the toppling pinnacles are the creations of humility. Giants that tread down forests like grass are the creations of humility. Towers that vanish upwards above the loneliest star are the creations of humility. For towers are not tall unless we look up at them; and giants are not giants unless they are larger than we. All this gigantesque imagination, which is, perhaps, the mightiest of the pleasures of man, is at bottom entirely humble. It is impossible without humility to enjoy anything — even pride.
But what we suffer from to-day is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction; where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert — himself. The part he doubts is exactly the part he ought not to doubt — the Divine Reason. Huxley preached a humility content to learn from Nature. But the new sceptic is so humble that he doubts if he can even learn. Thus we should be wrong if we had said hastily that there is no humility typical of our time. The truth is that there is a real humility typical of our time; but it so happens that it is practically a more poisonous humility than the wildest prostrations of the ascetic. The old humility was a spur that prevented a man from stopping; not a nail in his boot that prevented him from going on. For the old humility made a man doubtful about his efforts, which might make him work harder. But the new humility makes a man doubtful about his aims, which will make him stop working altogether."
One minor point, rather peripheral to the bulk of the discussion, re:
"You're a Nice Person? Great! But all our righteousness is as filthy rags"
If one wants pro-social actions to continue, it is prudent to de-emphasize likening them to rags. I, personally, do not aspire to righteousness ("neither pure, nor wise, nor good"), but rather to intelligent selfishness and I donate blood. My blood bank (the Red Cross) thanks me. That is sufficent motivation for me. If, instead, they were to liken my donations to rags, I would stop.
Verbose but interesting. I'm halfway through this comment thus far and it really is interesting but (thus far) continues to point to potentially suicidal virtues.
I have achieved the mentioned ideals. All of them. And found that as deeply and truly satisfying they have been, they were so very non-selfish as to provide the precise benefits that thukdam provides - truly divine bliss.... briefly.
The talmud tells a story, a parable really but the best parables (think Old Testament stuff) don't introduce themselves with a disclaimer.
In brief, the rabbis capture the evil inclination and debate whether to execute it or not. As they debate they discover that since the evil inclination has been in custody creatures haven't been fucking.
The story continues but I'm not a storyteller. The point of this segment is plain enough. All's fair in live and war.
After all, every man who gained access to a woman's womb did so despite the fact that this meant some other guy would be bereft of that access. Generally speaking he also failed to spend to have spent years in fasting, meditation and unbiased analysis to determine whether in fact his sperm and company was rhe best this woman could do.
Absolute Pacifists werr weeded out of the gene pool long, long, long ago. And whenever some mutational accident or particularly virulent meme should produce another, nature makes quick shrift of him.
Ditto for doing the nasty, getting a family, and making babies.
All's fair in live and war...
It's possible that ¡Jeb! Bush is an alien (from north of the stratospheric border) and it's possible that some dude named Joshua who really really didn't seem to enjoy his crucifixion 1990 years ago is actually ¡Alive! but odds are pretty equally naaah.
Jesus is dead. And his f'n mother killed him.
Every Jewish Woman should be legally required to read 2 books before she gets custody if her first born: Portnoy's Complaint and The Christian Bible.
Sure, the world 50 years later would have less comedy and tear-jerking tales of righteous sufferers but....well, no buts. I don't care. We're over 2,000 years behind schedule for Jewish men to oppose one or both of their mutilating circumcisions.
Dad cutting off part of a baby's penis on the newborn's 8th day of life is Quite The Thing.
Mom spending the rest of her interminable existence circumcising her child's heart however is even worse.
I think part of the problem here is that humility has been tangled up with selfishness which is a different problem; humility and pride are the pairing. Selfishness and charity are that pairing.
'Should you fuck this woman and have a baby?' is not a problem of humility.
The wrong kind of humility is "always think you are terrible" and "never make a target of yourself" and I *think* that may be what is driving your mother in part; the lesson of Jews in Europe was to emulate Uriah Heep and always be so very 'umble before your betters because prominent Jews tended to make very good targets when the wind changed. So there's the ancestral fear there of standing out, like a nail to be hammered flat. But this is just me speculating.
Ah, if ONLY it was the fat targets who caught the stake.
Nay, t'was the religious. The most humble and righteous.
And you're right not to get caught up in the word humility. When a man puts his penis inside of a fertile woman's netheregions he is saying "I want this. Me! "
He is not pondering "Am I absolutely confident that this is what's best for her? Or that I should be the one to get this poontang, company, and baby rather than that any of my brothers should get to?"
Believe me D, the religion of Mary and golden boy can be found in their original pristine condition to this day.
But only smong people who know nothing about them.
The wrong sort of humility is that exemplified by Dickens' Uriah Heep, who comes from a low station in life and poverty, and has been ground down by society that he *ought* to be humble, because the likes of him are worthless. So he weaponises humility, and takes his natural resentment and melds it with spite and makes a horrible mockery of what a 'humble' person should be, in order to dig the knife in between the ribs of the proud and the superior.
"‘I am not fond of professions of humility,’ I returned, ‘or professions of anything else.’
‘There now!’ said Uriah, looking flabby and lead-coloured in the moonlight. ‘Didn’t I know it! But how little you think of the rightful 'umbleness of a person in my station, Master Copperfield! Father and me was both brought up at a foundation school for boys; and mother, she was likewise brought up at a public, sort of charitable, establishment. They taught us all a deal of 'umbleness — not much else that I know of, from morning to night. We was to be 'umble to this person, and 'umble to that; and to pull off our caps here, and to make bows there; and always to know our place, and abase ourselves before our betters. And we had such a lot of betters! Father got the monitor-medal by being 'umble. So did I. Father got made a sexton by being 'umble. He had the character, among the gentlefolks, of being such a well-behaved man, that they were determined to bring him in. “Be 'umble, Uriah,” says father to me, “and you’ll get on. It was what was always being dinned into you and me at school; it’s what goes down best. Be 'umble,” says father, “and you’ll do!” And really it ain’t done bad!’
It was the first time it had ever occurred to me, that this detestable cant of false humility might have originated out of the Heep family. I had seen the harvest, but had never thought of the seed.
‘When I was quite a young boy,’ said Uriah, ‘I got to know what 'umbleness did, and I took to it. I ate 'umble pie with an appetite. I stopped at the 'umble point of my learning, and says I, “Hold hard!” When you offered to teach me Latin, I knew better. “People like to be above you,” says father, “keep yourself down.” I am very 'umble to the present moment, Master Copperfield, but I’ve got a little power!’
And he said all this — I knew, as I saw his face in the moonlight — that I might understand he was resolved to recompense himself by using his power. I had never doubted his meanness, his craft and malice; but I fully comprehended now, for the first time, what a base, unrelenting, and revengeful spirit, must have been engendered by this early, and this long, suppression."
This is tied in with pride, as there is the wrong sort of pride and the right sort of pride. We all know the wrong sort - and indeed folk on here are fond of quoting the pet example of the Dunning-Kruger effect - the vain, cocksure know-it-all who has opinions on everything and thinks they're an instant expert on something they only heard of five minutes ago.
(Damn it, stop holding that mirror up to me!)
Ahem. Well, yes, there's the right kind of pride, too: self-respect, self-esteem. Knowing your true worth. And that is where the balance, or indeed dance, between Humility and Pride comes in - virtue lies in the median way, in between the extremes of Uriah Heep's poisoned and venomous fake humility, and the Luciferian pride.
"Reply to Objection 1. Humility is not set before justice, but before that justice which is coupled with pride, and is no longer a virtue; even so, on the other hand, sin is pardoned through humility: for it is said of the publican (Luke 18:14) that through the merit of his humility "he went down into his house justified." Hence Chrysostom says [De incompr. Nat. Dei, Hom. v]: "Bring me a pair of two-horse chariots: in the one harness pride with justice, in the other sin with humility: and you will see that sin outrunning justice wins not by its own strength, but by that of humility: while you will see the other pair beaten, not by the weakness of justice, but by the weight and size of pride."
"Reply to Objection 1. Pride [superbia] may be understood in two ways. First, as overpassing [supergreditur] the rule of reason, and in this sense we say that it is a sin. Secondly, it may simply denominate "super-abundance"; in which sense any super-abundant thing may be called pride: and it is thus that God promises pride as significant of super-abundant good. Hence a gloss of Jerome on the same passage (Isaiah 61:6) says that "there is a good and an evil pride"; or "a sinful pride which God resists, and a pride that denotes the glory which He bestows."
It may also be replied that pride there signifies abundance of those things in which men may take pride."
And then there is the Litany of Humility by Cardinal Merry del Val:
There is a certain line of argument employed by Pro-Israeli commenters (elsewhere, not ACX) that goes something like this :
1- Nothing ever excuses the rape and murder of civilians that Hamas did
2- Therefore, we can't really blame the IDF when it bombs Gaza
Which stares Contradiction in the face and then gives him a kiss.
(If **Nothing** can ever justify what Hamas did, not even the amount of murder or rape or pillage which happened to Palestinians from 1948 till October 7th 2023, then, surely, the comparatively tiny amount of murder and rape and pillage that Hamas did in that one day can't ever justify the murder and rape and pillage that the IDF has started in October 8th and that the ground forces amassing on Gaza's perimeter is no doubt planning to finish ?)
Other than
[Implied] 3- Israelis/Jews and Arabs/Muslims should play by different rulebooks because the lives/dignity of the former exceeds those of the latter
, what other implied premises can one append to (1) and (2) to make the argument not contradictory-ish ?
My attempt at this looks something like :
[Implied] 3- Rape and Murder and Pillage are worse when they're done by non-state actors than when they're done by state actors
[3's Justification, good faith] 3-a Because state actors are often better trained, more restrained, and with lots of things to lose if they got too far in the Rape and Murder and Pillage
[3's Justification, bad faith] 3-b Because I have been brain washed into thinking so, there are no meaningful difference in the Rape and Murder and Pillage done by both kinds of actors
[Implied] 4- Hamas is a Jihadi non-state actor that justifies Rape and Murder and Pillage with icky Muslim rhetoric and commits it using icky-looking middle eastern men with overgrown beards
[Implied] 5- Israel is a state actor that justifies Rape and Murder and Pillage with sob stories about the Holocaust, and commits it with an army containing sexy models/conscripts posing on instagram and tiktok
[Implied] 6- Therefore, Israel's RMP is not "really" true RMP, or maybe a less intense style of RMP than the brutal style practiced by Hamas. The RMP mentioned in (1) references only the brutal kind, not the lite kind practiced by Israel.
In other words, a Motte-And-Bailey. (1) and (2) can only hold together if you switch the definition of RMP in the midst, and quietly so.
I don't think anyone on the Israeli side claims rape is justified. I don't know if Hamas does.
The obvious difference between the two cases is that the Israelis at least claim to only kill civilians when they cannot avoid doing so in the process of fighting non-civilians. The Hamas fighters were deliberately killing civilians, as shown in their videos as well as in the instructions their leaders were carrying.
The Hamas fighters were pretty clearly trying to kill or capture as many Israelis as they could. If the Israeli objective was to kill as many Gazans as possible they would kill them all by a siege. I don't know how much water is produced by wells in Gaza but it doesn't feed itself.
> the Israelis at least claim to only kill civilians when they cannot avoid doing so in the process of fighting non-civilians
And the mere claiming of something is enough ? Can every tyrant and aggressor now expect cookies for claiming what their actions are loudly and resoundingly contradict ?
> The Hamas fighters were pretty clearly trying to kill or capture as many Israelis as they could.
Watching the videos of IDF's jets bombing Gaza, I can say the exact same sentence minus the "capture" part.
> If the Israeli objective was to kill as many Gazans as possible they would kill them all by a siege
If, when this is over, most of the Gazans are still alive, will you concede that your view of the conflict was mistaken?
You gave a list of possible justifications for distinguishing the Palestinian raid from the Israeli response, a list that ignored the most obvious difference, the distinction between choosing to kill innocents and being willing to kill innocents in the process of killing not-innocents.
You could argue that the Israelis are lying, that they are deliberately targeting innocents, as your response to my "claim" is presumably intended to imply, but then you have to respond to my point that the Israelis could easily kill many more Palestinians than they do kill, which is evidence that they are not lying. You could argue that earlier acts by Israeli terrorists just before or during the 1948 war were the moral equivalent of the raid, which might be true, but you were specifically talking about the IDF in Gaza.
Deliberately making bad arguments and defending them when you are called on them is demagoguery, not reason.
> If, when this is over, most of the Gazans are still alive, will you concede that your view of the conflict was mistaken?
No. Why would I do that ? After all, most Israelis are still alive, that doesn't prevent people from saying Hamas wants to genocide them.
I'm willing to concede I'm mistaken when I see the breakdown of Israeli bombing victims, how many Hamas vs. Non-Hamas. If the majority or even 40% were Hamas, I'm willing to concede you're right and that the IDF is trying to kill Hamas more than it's trying to kill Palestinian civilians.
Failing that, access to internal communications and plans where air raids that could have killed more Palestinian civilians were discussed and cancelled will convince me.
> a list that ignored the most obvious difference, the distinction between choosing to kill innocents and being willing to kill innocents in the process of killing not-innocents.
I argue that this difference is illusory and performative, and - furthermore - so easy to fake if you have substantial media control and PR department like the Israeli state has.
Unless you can read minds, "Choosing to do X" and "Totally not choosing X, just willing to let it happen in pursuit of Y" are indistinguishable.
> you have to respond to my point that the Israelis could easily kill many more Palestinians than they do kill
Sorry if I didn't, I responded to it so many times in other threads with other people (not saying its your fault).
My short answer is this : They're killing as many as their benefactors will let them. Israel is surrounded by hundreds of millions of Arabs, their oil comes from outside, their tech industry depend on the outside, and of course the jet fighters they kill civilians with are mostly a generous gift from US taxpayers.
Vast majorities of those people that Israel depend on are against murder of Palestinians. Therefore, they can't go too far in their murder of the Palestinians.
This is quite different than saying "Israel doesn't want to kill civilians", the "want" here implies an internal motive, a motive which I claim to be non-existent. It's entirely external, Israel is killing the maximum amount of Palestinians that will not result in their demise.
> Deliberately making bad arguments and defending them when you are called on them is demagoguery, not reason.
Noted. Tell me what you think is a bad argument in my comments, and I will either trace it back to the premises that I believe justifies it or retract it.
Have seen a lot of comments questioning the authenticity of the crimes reported on October 7th.
Someone did a deep dive on most of the videos and pictures uploaded to X (Twitter) to see what was likely true or false- it also speculates on the fate of Shani Louk (the girl who's body was apparently seen in the back of a truck with two broken legs). Have a look and see what you think!
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qpk2asgZzGitpLSq1B0h4LGpcRizGUER/mobilebasic
It does not discuss the allegation of beheaded babies, which seems to be a point of contention. The original claim, that around 40 babies were killed in a kibbutz and that some of them were beheaded- has not explicitly been verified. That said, it does appear that some babies were beheaded, though it is not clear whether they were from the kibbutz being discussed at the time, nor whether the beheading was after death or not:
https://themedialine.org/top-stories/evidence-on-display-at-israels-forensic-pathology-center-confirms-hamas-atrocities/
OC ACXLW Irvine Campus Market place! Year in AI report and AI safety is not Platonism 10/21/23
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kLi3HD4tzZsbfE7mQNdd64fzgroNydH5RefAqq6-W3s/edit?usp=sharing
Hello Folks!
We are excited to announce the 46th Orange County ACX/LW meetup, happening this Saturday and most Saturdays thereafter. Change in venue this week!
Host: Michael Michalchik
Email: michaelmichalchik@gmail.com (For questions or requests)
Location: Irvine campus marketplace
https://maps.app.goo.gl/f2k2VRouufhx6GAdA
(949) 375-2045
Date: Saturday, Oct 21, 2023
Time: 2 PM
Conversation Starters:
1) Year In AI Summary Report
REPORT: The State of AI
https://youtu.be/-u3lKoUgtWI?si=Nkcar5TuNQochxjn
Powerpoint and text summary
https://www.stateof.ai/
State of AI Report 2023
The State of AI Report analyses the most interesting developments in AI. We aim to trigger an informed conversation about the state of AI and its implications for the future. The Report is produced by AI investors Nathan Benaich and the Air Street Capital team.
2) We're Not Platonists, We've Just Learned The Bitter Lesson
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/were-not-platonists-weve-just-learned
Audio:
We're Not Platonists, We've Just Learned The Bitter Lesson
https://sscpodcast.libsyn.com/were-not-platonists-weve-just-learned-the-bitter-lesson
I'm pro-Israel but would like to donate to the relief efforts in Gaza. What would be a good charity to donate to?
Not the answer you're looking for, but while from an Effective Altruism perspective, I think that donations to relief in Gaza would be much more impactful than donations to relief in Israel, I don't know that there is any way to guarantee resources in Gaza going to their desired recipients in Gaza, rather than to Hamas et al. Just today, for example, UNRWA tweeted (and deleted) a statement that a group of people purporting to be from the Hamas controlled ministry of health stole fuel and medical supplies from them.
Good to know, thanks!
Israeli government TWITTER ACCOUNT literally fabricating a photo of blood in a child's bedroom. If they feel the need to do this, they are bankrupt in their claims Hamas targeted civilians.
https://x.com/israel/status/1713074806722015495?s=46&t=mdziosEggeNXPN3I6HSBeA
DEBUNKING ISRAELI GOVERNMENT FABRICATIONS THAT EVEN THE USA GOVERNMENT HAD TO REBUT!
1) - BREAKING: New footage has emerged putting paid to the 'Hamas desert rave massacre' propaganda.
It sucks when a music festival happens to be in the middle of IDF and Hamas fighting.
https://t.me/c/1333086089/180954
[As can clearly be seen and heard in the footage: uniformed, armed 'Israeli' interlopers are exchanging fire with the Hamas fighters.
Any ravers that got ironed out clearly were caught in the crossfire.
I'll say it again, GENIUSES: if you don't want to get iced, don't go partying on occupied land! DUH!
🔴 @Cultures_of_Resistance]
2)The burned baby
You actually don't need that though, just look at the morphology of the image it's clearly not human. Considering the fabrication of the 40 beheaded babies that even the Biden government was forced to retract, the image is highly suspect.
3) The beheaded baby story was a complete Israeli lie that reached the HIGHEST LEVELS OF GOVERNMENT
https://twitter.com/sarasidnerCNN/status/1712415116363169884
Biden actually confirmed having seen evidence for it! Then had to retract
after evidence mounted it was a fabrication
https://twitter.com/sarasidnerCNN/status/1712415904791712095
4) The scantily clad EMD chick was literally just in rave-wear, she wasn't stripped and raped by Hamas and is apparently still alive.
5) Israeli government TWITTER ACCOUNT literally fabricating a photo of blood in a child's bedroom. If they feel the need to do this, they are bankrupt in their claims Hamas targeted civilians.
https://x.com/israel/status/1713074806722015495?s=46&t=mdziosEggeNXPN3I6HSBeA
When Israel feels the need to fabricate THIS MUCH, I think we all know who the real victims are.
>I'll say it again, GENIUSES: if you don't want to get iced, don't go partying on occupied land! DUH!
When have muslims at any point is history ever voluntarily relinquished conquered territory?
Please stop spamming.
The puppy picture was a shitpost by Stellar Man @stellarman22, look it up. He took the original from what had been posted by the Israeli government and substituted a puppy. He didn't think it would be taken seriously, but unfortunately you are tangible proof that half the people are below average intelligence.
I wouldn't personally bother engaging with those who deny atrocities taking place, while also gleefully celebrating them. Remember that you can flag such spam comments for moderation.
Fair enough but:
It morphologicaly doesn't look like a burnt child at all.
"All these things tell me that this is not even partially AI-generated," Farid said. He could not say what the photo shows or when it was taken. "I don't know what it is. It doesn't look like a person. You need a coroner to tell you that."
https://interestingengineering.com/culture/expert-debunks-ai-tools-claim-that-israels-photo-is-fake
Well wahddya know, no evidence whatsoever for the beheading/burning Jewish infants story!
The fact that Israelis felt the need to fabricate that story, the fact that it spread to the highest levels of government and was spread in mainstream media really raises some eyebrows. I suppose the endless parade of videos of Israelis happily cheering on a massacre of Gazans tells us nothing about what they intend.
Do we have a source for the false claim that Hamas was beheading babies? It could have been an Israeli (the government?), though I don't think they needed to exaggerate the horror.
It could have been someone at a distance who wanted to spread confusion, or someone who misheard something, or someone who thought it was "emotionally true" and thought literal truth didn't matter.
From CNN
https://twitter.com/sarasidnerCNN/status/1712415116363169884
Biden actually confirmed having seen evidence for it! Then had to retract
after evidence mounted it was a fabrication
https://twitter.com/sarasidnerCNN/status/1712415904791712095
It's the government, not merely some right wing Israeli rag, even President Biden had to retract after having believed their lies.
If you want to see pictures of targeted, murdered children, Israelis have does so to Palestinians in spades, now and in the past 75 years. It's how you get land. Strike terror into the hearts of parents by gleefully showing them their kids you just murdered.
Israeli leaders (and the population) have ALWAYS been genocidal.
https://twitter.com/KeithWoodsYT/status/1713606941920948488?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Etweet
https://www.cnn.com/middleeast/live-news/israel-hamas-war-gaza-10-11-23/h_a63b0fd57f2df717147ea8e26a2f758c
Yes, Netanyahu spokesman. I don't think this completely discredits Israel, and it would have been easier for me if I'd heard about it from someone more coherent and less malevolent.
https://news.sky.com/story/its-important-to-separate-the-facts-from-speculation-what-we-actually-know-about-the-viral-report-of-beheaded-babies-in-israel-12982329
An Israeli reporter said a soldier told her babies were beheaded, and the Israeli government picked it up. There's no evidence one way or the other.
Hi Nancy,
The original claim, from an Israeli news report, stated that around 40 babies were killed in a kibbutz and that some of them were beheaded. This then turned into "40 babies were beheaded" over time.
The truth of the matter is difficult to ascertain, but there have been some additional reports suggesting at least some babies were beheaded: https://themedialine.org/top-stories/evidence-on-display-at-israels-forensic-pathology-center-confirms-hamas-atrocities/
Though, some may argue it comes from an Israeli source. Due to the bizarreness of the claim, and the cost of being found to be lying about such things- would guess there's a greater than 50% chance it actually happened.
Furthermore, a rationalist type did a deep dive on all the claims here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qpk2asgZzGitpLSq1B0h4LGpcRizGUER/mobilebasic
Hope this helps!
Adding for clarity so that nobody confuses "technically, there's no evidence any infants were *beheaded*" for "there's no evidence infants were killed." One of the photos (blurred) would appear to qualify as evidence of burning (desc: "A since-blurred photo released by the Prime Minister’s Office on October 12, 2023, showing the charred corpse of a baby who was murdered by Hamas in southern Israel on October 7").
https://www.timesofisrael.com/netanyahus-office-releases-horrifying-images-of-infants-murdered-by-hamas/
That charred corpse photo is literally AI on a photo of a dog. This is getting pathetic.
I think one potential silver lining for Palestinians is, when the dust clears, it will forever be said of the people who were brutally oppressed for thousands of years, "these are the atrocities, the crimes, the injustices, the lies they committed the moment they were handed power over others. An exemplar of utterly depraved evil, they were a darkness unto nations"
And it will be true, because it is true now.
Do you have an unblurred copy of it? As awful as that would be to look at, it would be good to have the evidence you're basing that claim on.
Edit: Never mind, found an article that appears to have them unredacted. And the burnt infant ones do not appear to be AI on a photo of a dog. Link below if anyone has a strong stomach and is trying to parse claims here.
https://www.livemint.com/news/world/babies-murdered-burned-by-hamas-monsters-israel-shares-photos-amid-war-11697128208963.html
THAT CHARRED CORPSE IMAGE IS LITERALLY AI OF A DOG IT HAS BEEN DEBUNKED. Can't comment myself on the other photo of the child on a plastic sheet but even that would have to be verified at this point. I wouldn't be surprised if its a Palestinian child as there are no shortage of images of Palestinian children and infants murdered by Israelis laid on plastic sheets. And it hilariously has been the case that media shared images of Palestinian victims of Israeli terrorism and portrayed them as Israelis to garner sympathy. Even social media influencers/entertainers like Jaime Lee Curtis and Justin Bieber have done this.
Look, I appreciate the authoritative gravitas of all-caps as much as the next man on the internet, but some evidence that goes beyond "IT HAS BEEN DEBUNKED" would be appreciated here.
https://t.me/keith_woods/4527
You actually don't need that though, just look at the morphology of the image it's clearly not human. Another indicator is the distorted fingers of the surgeon typical for AI.
Look additionally at the photo shared here
https://twitter.com/jacksonhinklle/status/1713526867620204977
It's been debunked, no burned babies.
oh WOW another example of fake news
This may be the craziest tweet I’ve ever seen from a government: https://x.com/jacksonhinklle/status/1713588262420267068?s=46&t=gSZ7SVs_SpVQs3yqlf1zPw
This can't be chalked up to mere disinformation from some Israeli magazine because this is literally a fabrication FROM THE ISRAELI GOVERNMENTS ACCOUNT.
If you are anonymous this is not for you
If you are not anonymous, it is.
https://ydydy.substack.com/p/ezra
Ezra sounds like quite a character! I am reminded of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15MlzYEcCT4 . ( "I Am Free" from "Zorba the Greek" )
I started playing the video but this is isn't a great moment to listen to it. I absolutely loved the first words. Pure Tao.
Inshallah I will hear more when the time is right.
Also you may find it of interest that around 2004 Theodore Bikel was one of the VIPs at a Yiddish Comedy show my father performed together with his identical twin. My dad is still very proud that Bikel was there and apparently really loved it. (If you can't trust the showman to quote his own reviews, who cannyou trust 😂. I'm kidding, I believe my dad. It's also possible, I'm now recalling that Theodore Bikel may have attended 2 of the 3 shows, which makes for a more trustworthy endorsement. Oh and Elie Weisel was there too.)
Many Thanks!
It is rare to meet people who are genuinely extraordinary in some way.
I have had the divine good fortune to have interacted in meaningful ways with a great many people and while of course every person is special because he or she is a unique individual, a very small number of people are TRULY unique in some astonishing way. Fools can't get past "person x on bad team!" and miss out on the glorious show of life on earth.
I hope you have signed up for my page. I don't know how much you know about me but hopefully things will soon get hectic.
War is here, and I can not leave it to be prosecuted by the individuals and classes of people who are running it.
They are all, at best, misguided.
MADNESS. Palestinian residential towers are getting bombed by israeli occupation warplanes. The massacres are ongoing.
October 13, 2023.
The long list of massacres committed at the hands of apartheid israel goes back to the 1940’s till today.
Some of the massacres committed by apartheid israel:
Tantura: The Palestinian village of Tantura is located on the Mediterranean Sea near the city of Haifa. The village of Tantura was occupied by apartheid Israel in 1948 and it has a buried history.
Tantura, TRT World:
https://lnkd.in/gWSYpc8V
Tantura, Middle East Eye (MEE):
https://lnkd.in/gUVuqb_t
Tantura is not the only Palestinian village that has a buried history, here is another place, Deir Yassin:
“They told him: “throw your son in the oven, throw your son in the oven”
He said: “I will not throw my son,
They said: “grill him”
Then they hit Haj Hamed on his head and took his child, and they threw the child into the oven.
They then took the father and threw him after his son in the oven.
They told him: “follow your son.””
(Othman Akel. A survivor of the Deir Yasin massacre committed by the zionists in Palestine in 1948).
You can watch the Deir Yassin massacre testimonies:
https://lnkd.in/egq4X2Yu
Albert Einstein joined others to sign an open letter to New York Times, entitled “New Palestine Party,” on December 2, 1948, warning of fascism in Israel, and distress about the Deir Yasin massacre.
Burayr is the location of another massacre on their long list:
https://lnkd.in/gphATZb9
Qibya massacre of 1953:
https://lnkd.in/gWET3ZMt
Historians have recovered official israeli apartheid army documentation offering proof that soldiers poisoned wells in Palestinian villages to prevent Palestinians from trying to return to their homes after the 1948 Nakba.
https://lnkd.in/g268Dmm5
Official documentation of the ‘Cast Thy Bread’ operation." – Haaretz
► Archived version: https://archive.ph/vzUqe
……………………………………………………………………………..
All rights and credits are reserved to the respective owner(s).
"Aparatheid"
Werid how its not apartheid when even other arab/muslim countries don't give palestinians full rights, even when they're born there.
When Israel slaughters Palestinian civilians, it is with the purpose of inducing despair into their hearts and breaking their will, so it can steal the remaining land with impunity as they have been doing in the West Bank. Likewise in 2018 when they viciously slaughtered peaceful Palestinian protestors who protested at the fence. When Hamas does it, it is collateral damage in the effort to free Palestinians from Israelis terrorist dictatorship over their lives. The former kills civilians as an end goal, the latter as collateral. The two cannot be compared-Israeli forces are utterly irredeemable savages.
If Israel wanted to kill civilians as an end goal, why did it warn everyone in North Gaza to evacuate before soldiers move in and things get even more dangerous for civilians? Why do they warn civilians in buildings they are about to bomb in advance?
If Hamas is trying to free Palestinians, then why have they ordered them to stay put and not evacuate, even though they know North Gaza is about to become a warzone? Wouldn't that just help their enemies "end goal" of killing Palestinian civilians? Why are they helping Israel to do that?
I'm so tired of this line to be honest. If you're going to give cookies to civilian-genociders because they performatively declare "pls move", give some to Hamas too, it did the same thing before bombing Ashkelon [1].
Everyone from Assad to ISIS loves to "warn" civilians before attacks, it's a very affordable package of free PR. Those stunts have dubious effects in terms of net total of civilians "saved".
[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-10-10/israel-palestinian-conflict-latest-updates-live/102954538 , ctrl-f for "deadline"
If you are targeting civilians, no amount of notice is going to fix the problem.
In contrast, if you're targeting military installations, then warning civilians is the best way to deal with a human shield problem, without giving in to the human shield tactic.
What military target in Ashkelon was Hamas targeting?
> If you are targeting civilians, no amount of notice is going to fix the problem.
How so ?
1- I want to bomb the city of Tel Aviv
2- I say "I WILL BOMB TEL AVIV, EVERYBODY WHO DOESNT WANT TO DIE MOVE"
3- People of Tel Aviv
4- I bomb Tel Aviv
This sounds like a scenario where I both target "Civilians" and still let them escape, but really I'm just targeting the **Civilian Infrastructure**, not civilians per se.
> What military target in Ashkelon was Hamas targeting?
What military target in Gaza was/is the IDF targeting ?
It seems to me by the sheer number of Hamas videos online showing IDF in pools of blood that they had plenty of military targets. I think if their target was actually civilians the civilian death toll would be a lot higher.
>>I think if their target was actually civilians the civilian death toll would be a lot higher.
They shot up a concert and killed 260 people. Maybe you have some kind of theory on the military value of EDM that I'm unaware of, but I don't see how that can be explained as anything other than "deliberately targeting civilians."
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/10/what-to-know-about-deadly-hamas-attack-on-the-israeli-music-festival
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/10/08/israel-festival-attack-gaza-militants/
The military targets were on the border. They had to go through the military targets to get to the civilian ones.
Consider Be'eri - a kibbutz near the border. It had 1,000 civilian residents. Hamas killed 100 of them and abducted many more. What military target was Hamas aiming for in Be'eri?
When Hamas took civilian hostages, what conceivable military objective was furthered by that? When Hamas shot unarmed people at point blank range, what conceivable military objective was furthered by that?
Finally, if Hamas wanted to kill more civilians, what would they have done differently? They already went house-to-house, shooting at every unarmed person they saw. If they wanted to kill more civilians they would...?
Yes, very true. And, by warning the Gazan civilians and allowing them to evacuate, the Israelis are _accepting_ the risk that some Hamas members will hide themselves amongst the evacuating civilians, and will not be killed in north Gaza.
One propaganda line is Hamas aims for Israeli civilians whereas Israel kills Palestinian civilians as collateral
This link eliminates that doubt
https://themessenger.com/news/israel-bombs-egypt-border-crossing-it-had-touted-as-an-escape-route-for-besieged-palestinians
They don't want Palestinians to escape their massacre. Slaughtering Palestinians IS the purpose
It'd be pretty easy to test this hypothesis. Just have Hamas move their military equipment away from Palestinian population centers.
If Israel strikes the population centers, there's your answer. If Israel strikes the Hamas bases - having been moved away from innocent civilians - and leaves the population centers alone, wouldn't that disprove this argument?
No such thought experiment is needed ZACH considering the nearly endless on video examples of Israelis deliberately targeting, and successfully murdering Palestinian civilians, one recent example being the 2018 march at the border.
We're still getting the same problem as before, which is that Hamas does not separate its military forces from civilians. Instead, I would argue it tries to blend in with the civilians.
To prove the contrast, I can show you a list of Israeli military locations. I can show you how far they are from civilian centers. For example, the IDF headquarters is located at Hakirya, IDF and MOD HQ 6473424.
Can you do the same for Hamas? Where's their headquarters?
"We're still getting the same problem as before, which is that Hamas does not separate its military forces from civilians. Instead, I would argue it tries to blend in with the civilians. "
It was universally observed by basically every observer, NGO, government what have you that Israels claims any of those protestors were violent was complete nonsense. You are essentially saying Israel can call any protestors violent on the pretext that maybe Hamas is among them even without showing a shred of actual proof. It was merely a targeted massacre. I think if you are willing to deny that there is literally no level of evidence that would convince you, you're going to just continue to deny reality and produce contrived thought experiments because there is no case where you will admit what every observer has admitted and what all the evidence shows and it gets me to thinking that there is no right answer for you that doesn't involve Jews being justified in killing whichever Palestinians they feel fit to, and no instance whatsoever where Palestinians have the right to even PEACEFULLY PROTEST without being butchered. I can't see you as anything but a genocide apologist.
An Israeli official did recommend that Gazan's use that border crossing to leave Gaza, but rescinded that advice on last Tuesday because Egypt closed the border crossing that day. Israel bombed the Gaza side of the crossing to keep supplies from entering Gaza until the hostages are released.
I'm sure Israel would love for the people of Gaza to leave and go to Egypt, but Egypt doesn't want them and won't let them in.
After using Manifold for a couple weeks, I think "prediction market" should be replaced with "poll of ten nerds". And that's if you make a market about AI. If you make a market about anything else, good luck getting even one trader.
How can the world deal with Hamas?
We are a few hours away from a likely ground incursion / invasion of Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) into Northern Gaza. For the past week I've been trying to figure out a more reasonable way that the world can deal with Hamas, as an alternative to what the Israeli government is considering doing. I am having trouble coming up with a rational option aside from status quo (leave the group as is) or Israel's option (eliminate no matter the cost).
What other option exists to deal with a group with the following fact sheet (and please correct anything that is factually wrong in the statements below):
Hamas was elected democratically in 2006 and stayed in power since then.
The leaders of Hamas and their families live in relative luxury while the average Gazan lives near the poverty line.
They promote radicalized education in Gaza, half of which are under the age of 19.
They use humanitarian aid for war (for example, digging up water pipes and turning them into missiles).
They strategically place their military operations near school, hospitals, residences, and commercial areas.
They convince Gazans to stay in urban areas and not to head to places IDF is advising them to go to in order not to get bombed.
They recruit minors to their cause and send them in paragliders to murder people (and be murdered by IDF)
They have the sympathy of many, EVEN IN ISRAEL, because of the civilian death toll every time there is an IDF operation.
I really don't know what can be done that is better than either option presented above.
Isreal is in a no-win situation now, but that's because they spent the last 15 years repeatedly destroying any possibility of peace, colonizing the West Bank despite repeated appeals to stop and radicalizing the Gazans through oppression.
As the Economist recently wrote,
> A second error was the divide-and-rule policy towards the Palestinians of Binyamin Netanyahu, who has been Israel’s prime minister for 12 of the past 14 years. He has long sought to undermine the PA, which still runs parts of the West Bank. He has refused to resume peace negotiations since half-hearted talks broke down in 2014. He has frozen transfers of the tax revenues Israel collects on the pa’s behalf. At the same time, he has treated Hamas like a legitimate power in Gaza. In 2011, for instance, he approved a deal to swap 1,027 Palestinian prisoners for Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier the militants had captured in 2006. The exchange, naturally, raised Hamas’s standing among Palestinians.
> For Mr Netanyahu, the logic was clear. The PA is committed to negotiating a two-state solution with Israel, which is anathema to the prime minister’s right-wing supporters. Undermining the PA and boosting its militant rival would help him to claim that Israel has no “partner for peace”. But Palestinians drew a different, if predictable lesson: that the only way to extract concessions from Israel is through force.
Wait, your argument is seriously that Israel traded prisoners to save a hostage, which made the hostage-takers appear better to the Gazan public, thereby making the massacre of Israelis their own fault?
That’s the best excuse for the intentional massacre of civilians that you could come up with? Really? At least put in a little effort next time.
> radicalizing the Gazans through oppression
Are you referring to when the Israel declared the First Intifada on Palestine simply for existing, and then did everything in their power to kill as many of their civilians as possible? Oh wait, that was Palestine.
Or maybe you’re referring to when the Israel declared the Second Intifada on Palestine for refusing peace talks even after being granted many concessions? Oh wait, it was Palestine who was granted concessions,
Or perhaps you’re referring to the 1948 war, when Israel attacked and attempted to conquer all its surrounding Muslim neighbors?
Or maybe the 1973 war where Israel attacked its Muslim neighbors on a Muslim holiday and tried to kill them simply for existing?
Oh, wait...
I think he's referring to the clause in the Israeli constitution which explicitly rejects the notion of peaceful co-existence and commits to a worldwide genocide against Muslims.
Wait, no...
Pro-Israelis operate on a special kind of memory that goes back to exactly the date best optimized to best show Israel as victim and not a single day before or after.
> 1948
So you don't go back to 1890s-1917 when a bunch of people who haven't been to a land in 2000 years demand it from its latest colonizer, or to 1928-1947 when they form gangs and militias and practice terrorism on both British soldiers and Palestinian civilians alike, or even to a few days after the declaration of war when those same gangs, now the proud IDF, were killing children and kniving pregnant women in Der Yassin.
No, exactly the moment the Arabs declared war on Israel. Why did Arabs declare the war ? What was "Israel" (which didn't exist yet) doing then and what did it do in response ? None of your concern, you have the date to the millisecond and - by God - you're going to go back to it and remind everyone how Israel, the pRoMiSEd LaNd, is the real victim here.
> 1973
Another banger. 6% of Egypt's land in the form of the Sinai peninsula. The Golan Heights. The West Bank. Gaza. Some Lebnanese territories on the side. All taken by force in true Thug tradition, the proud tradition of Israel. But no, that's the wrong date right ? 1967, yuck, you don't like that number. Your date is 1973, when the land's owners decide they maybe don't want a bunch of US-armed thugs on their property, that's the right date you want to go back to. Poor thugs, they were just frolicking in peace in the land they stole and the aggressive meany Arabs came knocking.
And on and on and on and on. Tiring. Exhausting. Energy-draining.
Everyone prefers to go to the dates that support their position. You, for example, do not go back to the Jerusalem anti-Jewish riot of 1920 or the 1929 Palestine riots and the Hebron massacre of Jews. For a detailed and not particularly biased account of the long intercommunal conflict in mandatory Palestine, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intercommunal_conflict_in_Mandatory_Palestine
Thank you for the free education. I knew about the 1929 riots, but the 1920 riots were new to me.
I don't see this as evidence against me, I'm not playing the eye-for-an-eye stupid game sincerely. I was just showing SunSphere how it's an unwinnable game and that I can always beat him/her at it by simply picking an earlier (or later) date. Besides a few politicians that I want to see imprisoned for life or executed, I believe most Israelis were born innocent, so they deserve to live no matter the crimes of their ancestors.
After all, as Pro-Israeli people are so very quick to point out on every occasion, if fairness means the sons should bear the sins of the fathers, then most Arabs should be killed too. I see this as a very valid argument, I despise the colonizing Arabs and I hate their pathetic religion, but it's all too likely at least one counts among my ancestors, and I don't understand why would I or any living Arab be responsible for the Caliphate.
I demand only that one doesn't cheer for evil in their lifetime. Anything else is optional.
I think you're bringing reason to an emotion-fight.
there is not really any need to shy away from 1948, Tom Suarez details jewish massacres of arabs in State of Terror. Deir Yassin was but one example. Jewish militias quite literally attempted a genocide right after the Holocaust. In fact that was used to shove off scrutiny!
I saw an Israeli legislator calling for a second Nakba, so I looked up what was the Nakba, and now I think the state of Israel is illegitimate. After displacing (more like ethnically cleansing when you look up the details) almost a million Palestinians, it's no wonder that at least some of them will never accept Israel, and honestly, the time for founding countries in this way should have expired with the end of the 19th century: I can't buy that someone should get away with pulling a stunt like that right after WW II.
Ethically, the Israelis should have a moment of clarity and just pack up and leave, but that will likely not happen. Since Israel is pretty much Fitzcarraldo the country, all it takes is America cutting ties to make it wind down, and this could happen in a few decades if a sufficiently left wing administration comes around.
And why not? Countries can just end, as the Soviet Union showed.
It’s hard to take these arguments as anything but an attempt to convince uninterested parties to join a side considering how precisely the context is being tailored. The nakba was the direct consequence of the Palestinian Arabs and surrounding countries waging on Israel whose declared purpose was genocide.
The Israeli claims are as follows:
1. Indigenous homeland
2. Needed as refuge from anti semitism
3. Prior to the British was insignificant, sparely populated part of southern Syria with no nations tied to that specific area
4. The zionists bought all their land legally and established new cities
5. All land gained was in defensive wars and land taken is necessary for defense
6. Were always prepared to live in peace with neighbors
No doubt you know the Palestinian side.
It should be noted that this conflict is among the smallest and least deadly in the ME and hating Israel has become a something of a holy cow for many groups.
Palestinians rejected the Peel Commission plan and the UN resolution 181 plan and went to war. This followed decades of Palestinian massacres of Jews. There were many refugee crises at the time in Europe and the decolonizing empires, and as happened in all those cases, Israel didn’t let the refugees return. The nakba is only special because the Arab countries they fled to have never given them citizenship.
Most Israeli Jews are descendants of Mizrahi refugees from the Middle East and North Africa. Most Israeli Ashkenazim descend from refugees from eastern Europe. Where should they “go back” to?
That analogy does not seem very salient. Yes the Soviet Union, the nation-state, ended; that did not also result in the Russian people departing the land of their collective origins.
To the degree that the reestablishment of a Jewish nation in its current location was illegitimate because it required forcibly dispossessing another people, then so too was the forcible dispossession of the Judean people from that same ground long ago. (Actually repeatedly, but in every instance it was long ago.)
And World War II being some sort of arbitrary cutoff line on that point doesn't have any obvious logic behind it.
> then so too was the forcible dispossession of the Judean people from that same ground long ago
Take it with the Romans. What do Arabs got to do with this ?
And did the Judean people just stumble into this empty land, or did they also take it from those living there ?
And are the Eruropean immigrants who founded Israel those same "Judeans" from 2000 years ago ? Can they trace their roots all the way back ? Do they speak the same language or did they have to invent a new one ?
> World War II being some sort of arbitrary cutoff line on that point doesn't have any obvious logic behind it.
What should be the cutoff ? Why is Russia in the wrong for trying to take back what was once theirs in 2022, just like Israel ? If Arabs tried to take back Spain, why would they be wrong ?
Jewish immigrants purchased land and developed it. Palestinians massacred them a few times and rejected any peace plan that created a Jewish state (look up the peel commission plan, which offered Palestinians 90% of the territory, with a Jewish state on Jewish owned land on the coast and in the north). Somehow Palestinians have convinced themselves and the Arab world that they had the right to deny Jews a state on Jewish owned land. They’ve started multiple wars and have rejected a half dozen peace deals between 1937-2008.
World War II being the cutoff would be because it would be good to say that was the last time a supposedly civilized country went on a conquering rampage, due to the magnitude of evil perpetrated during it. If at least the civilized portion of the world can't get "CONQUEST BAD" into its head after that, then things are looking pretty bad.
The cycle has to end at some point, and it can't end with a regime established like that staking a claim to civilization. Israel is definitely gambling hard on its founding atrocity receding in the distance with the passage of time, but I don't know if they can get away with that given that it happened within modernity. They should be cut loose and left to fend for themselves.
Listen to Netanyahu:
> The weak crumble, are slaughtered and are erased from history while the strong, for good or for ill, survive. The strong are respected, and alliances are made with the strong, and in the end peace is made with the strong.
This is straight from the Bronze Age, Israel is no civilization.
Ah yes, Israel’s “founding atrocity” of trying to genocide all the Muslim countries around it, simply for existing.
Oh, wait, nope - that was the Muslims, who tried to genocide the one Jewish country in the region simply for existing.
And no, annexing some land from your enemies after winning a defensive war against them is not an “atrocity,” and is perfectly justified.
> simply for existing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Irgun_attacks
> Muslims
I'm dying to bring you the news that Israel is a colonizer hated by everybody who reads history all the way to before your magic number 1948, inlcuding this ex-Muslim who hates Islam to his deep bones. I'm just no sure you will handle the news well.
Why don’t you read about what happened in 1921 and 1929 and 1937
"the last time a supposedly civilized country went on a conquering rampage, due to the magnitude of evil perpetrated during it" -- so then your definition of civilization excludes Russia, and China, and India....that's a helluva lot of the world's people who you're declaring to be not civilized.
Arguably the UK is out as well (google "Bloody Sunday" and "The Troubles"), and France (google the Algerian War). Iran and Iraq are definitely excluded given the mutually-genocidal war they fought during the 1980s.
Also, Afghanistan and Iraq would like a word regarding the US and its allies in the wake of 9/11. [Osama Bin laden and his lieutenants probably would too but they can't because they were all hunted down and assassinated.]
Etc, etc. My point of course is not to defend or in any way re-litigate any of the above events. Rather it is that the real world of real-life nations and cultures is way too complex to decide that Israel is some sort of glaring post-WW II outlier.
<i>Arguably the UK is out as well (google "Bloody Sunday" and "The Troubles"),</i>
The majority of people in Northern Ireland wanted, and still want, to remain part of the UK. The "conquering rampage" people here are the IRA, albeit they lack the competence to pull it off.
"and now I think the state of Israel is illegitimate." How so? AFAIK, the founding of Israel followed the plan laid out by the United Nations. Palestinians didn't like it, started a guerilla war, got aid from neighboring Arab states, lost anyway, got expelled. Sucks to be them, for sure, but when you start and lose a war, you don't get to be picky. The second wave came after the Yom-Kippur war: Arab countries gang up on Israel, get their butt kicked, more Palestinians get displaced. Sucks to be them, for sure, but...
"I can't buy that someone should get away with pulling a stunt like that right after WW II." Plenty of people got displaced right after WWII. Most of their descendants don't commit massacres of civilians in retribution anymore.
"Ethically, the Israelis should have a moment of clarity and just pack up and leave". First off, leave to where exactly? Second, it would be the ethical thing to abandon the only country approaching a liberal democracy in the whole Middle East, with civil rights, an advanced industry, a thriving academic and cultural scene, and leave it for Palestinians to turn it into a fundamentalist Muslim s******e? Does not compute.
Arabs weren't consulted so it wasn't fair to tell them to give up land for Jews. I don't think you or anyone reading this would accept giving up land without even being consulted.
Palestinians didn't like it and this is why Irgun and Lehi felt the need to depopulate Palestinian town after down, one massacre and gang rape after the next, just a merry band of murdering looters. Palestinians didn't start it, Jews did.
The first episode of large scale violence in the conflict was when Palestinians massacred Jews in 1921.
Palestinians rejected the peel commission plan which offered them a state on 90% of the territory because they couldn’t accept its parallel creation of a Jewish state on Jewish owned territory.
When did arabs ever get permission for their conquests?
> when you start and lose a war, you don't get to be picky.
A message to be heeded by every Pro-Israeli complaining about airstrikes and Hamas, for sure.
I personally am a "Do the fair and moral thing no matter what your enemy did" kind of guy, but it's curious that even by your macho logic the Israeli complaints about bombardments are just pointless pussifications.
> liberal democracy
The meaning of "liberal" flew right past your head and into the stratosphere. The UN-designated Apartheid, the Nelson-Mandela-designated Apartheid, is a "Liberal Democracy" now. Strange and ugly times.
> A message to be heeded by every Pro-Israeli complaining about airstrikes and Hamas, for sure.
Sure, but “fuck around and find out” has to go both ways. If you support the Palestinian massacres we saw on the 7th on the basis of “well it was just a matter of time, it was inevitable this was going to happen” then you can’t also cry about the predictable destruction of Gaza brought on by that attack and pretend to be a victim.
> If you support the Palestinian massacres we saw on the 7th
I don't support any massacres, and those who did the massacres on the 7th are not just any ordinary Palestinians, they are Hamas.
> then you can’t also cry about the predictable destruction of Gaza brought on by that attack
Well, ignoring for the moment that situation is not symmetric because the land is rightfully the Palestinians', yes. What I'm saying in your parent comment is actually a reductio ad absurdum of FluffyBuffalo "Suks to be lozer, Go Go Israel" Logic. If it suks to be a lozer, then Israel must suck it up and stop "crying" (as you so classily put it) over its dead victims, after all, they are a loser of the intelligence wars and Hamas successfully bamboozled them.
Me ? I'm actually crying over every innocent soul, not just so who just so happen to be called "Palestinian"|"Israeli"|blah blah. As a general rule, Life is sacred. Life is wonderful. And Life is rare. I'm generally against those ruining or ending lives.
> followed the plan laid out by the United Nations
So? The UN does not have the authority to impose that sort of thing. If the natives aren't accepting your plan, you back off, not ethnically cleanse them.
> leave to where exactly
Europe.
> liberal democracy
All a sham when it got started that way. A legitimate liberal democracy is a bottom up affair, you can't establish one through conquest.
>So? The UN does not have the authority to impose that sort of thing. If the natives aren't accepting your plan, you back off, not ethnically cleanse them.
Arabs are neither native to the levant, or an actual majority of countries in which they're the predominant ethnic group. This "native rights" crap is entirely opportunistic.
>Europe.
A large majority of israelis do not have majority european ancestry
> If the natives aren't accepting your plan, you back off, not ethnically cleanse them.
Is this a joke? Are you so dense as to not see the irony dripping off of this statement?
You’re *literally* calling for the ethnic cleansing of Jews, native to Israel, from the Middle East!
Or is there some cutoff date where you become a “native”? I guess 75 years isn’t enough for you, is it 100? 500?
> native to Israel
Quite hard to be a native to a country younger than some grandmas. At best, they're a third/fourth generation immigrant, merely with a firehose of US taxes protecting the unnatural situation that made them be there.
> You’re *literally* calling for the ethnic cleansing of Jews
They didn't. You just want it to seem that way.
> is there some cutoff date where you become a “native”? [...] is it 100? 500?
It's "Never". As long as 300+ million person don't see you as native, don't treat you as native, and read/see/hear every year what you do to the actual natives who were there way way before you, you're never a native.
> Quite hard to be a native to a country younger than some grandmas.
So “Palestinians” are not native either then, got it. “The Palestinian people” as a concept was only invented in the 1960s, and the vast majority of them were colonizers sent by surrounding Muslim countries to fight and kill the Jewish minority that has been present in the area of today’s Israel for centuries.
> They didn't. You just want it to seem that way.
No, I’m not talking about what “they” said, I’m talking about what you specially just said above - that they should all be ethnically cleansed and sent to Europe.
> It's "Never". As long as 300+ million person don't see you as native, don't treat you as native, and read/see/hear every year what you do to the actual natives who were there way way before you, you're never a native.
Interesting! So “Native Americans” are not really native then? And any ethnic minorities in any region of the world are not native either? If the majority of a region is racist against you, you’re not a native?
I’m glad to see you making your racist hatred so loud and clear.
>Europe
Half of the Jews in Israel are Mizrahi or Sephardic: they're not from Europe. They were either living in Palestine at the time Israel was created, or they were expelled by the neighboring Arab countries in the 40s and 50s and came to Israel as refugees. How would making them refugees again be just?
> Hamas was elected democratically in 2006 and stayed in power since then.
I imagine that it is quite difficult for a Palestinian to found a party opposed to Hamas and survive until the election day. Democracy is not just about organizing elections, but also about not murdering your competitors, including the new ones who do not have a great power base yet.
So, the question is, how many Palestinians would support the effort to overthrow Hamas, if they were realistically offered an option better than "we will verbally appreciate your help today, and then leave you alone and let the remaining members of Hamas murder you and your family".
In my opinion, Israel should take more responsibility for the situation they significantly contributed to. You can't just create a huge mess, then step back and say "now it's not *my* mess anymore". You have successfully collapsed a system that existed previously, and it is nontrivial to build a new one -- when a system collapses, the most likely outcome is a rule of thugs, which is exactly what happened. It is difficult to get out of that situation, because that would require coordination on a large scale... while there are already coordinated thugs who murder everyone the see (or only suspect of) coordinating against them. While everyone is in a kind of war-or-not-war situation with strangers who took their homes and are probably preparing to take more in future (which would make everyone who advocated for peace with them look like a complete moron).
If I was in charge of Israel, my strategy would probably be to produce lots of propaganda in Arabic to communicate to the Palestinians, and at the same time declare entire Hamas to be outlaws that will be killed on sight (though actually I would prefer to take them in prisons). If you have technological and financial superiority, how hard it is to install thousands of megaphones that will scream in Arabic "the leaders of Hamas are taking all your money, and then they send your kids to die, and you know it, and your neighbors also know it, you are just afraid to say it" all day long? What is Hamas going to do about it? If they try to destroy the megaphones, they just expose themselves to your snipers. Also, if you give people food, randomly selected packages should contain propaganda leaflets in Arabic.
And by "propaganda" I mean stuff that is somehow useful for the receiver. (For example, an important part of South Korean propaganda is weather forecast. Because the stupid regime in North Korea can't even predict the weather, so North Korean soldiers start listening to enemy broadcast first because they want to hear the weather forecast... and then they get curious and listen some more.) You say that education in Palestine is completely fucked up? That's a perfect opportunity. Make leaflets that have interesting or educational stories on one side, and propaganda on the other side. If people could do samizdats during communist regime, how easy it would be for the Israeli government to print one subversive newspaper and distribute it among the Palestinians?
The question is, is anyone in power actually trying? Or is it perhaps more convenient to have a permanent crisis that serves as an excuse for all political problems, and provides a motivation to support our leaders in these hard times?
As unpalatable as it may seem right now, experience from other successful peace processes dictates that Israel will have to talk to them eventually - as it has in 2005, 2008, and 2014. Your facts are mostly factual, but they present Hamas as if operating in a vacuum - the list omits its rivalry with Fatah and Israel's own actions.
I don't think 'elimination whatever the cost' is especially farsighted. Perhaps Hamas might cease to exist - its tunnels ripped up, its rocket stockpiles destroyed, its principals assassinated - but that 'whatever the cost' is going to leave enough people orphaned, bereft, and ready to dedicate their lives to revenge that something very Hamas-like will reform fairly quickly.
Iraq eliminated ISIS and so far so good. The battle of Mosul destroyed the city and killed 10,000 civilians.
I mean, it’s not like there’s much more room for the Palestinians to go in terms of radicalization. When you, unprovoked, intentionally massacre as many civilians as possible, including rape, torture, and the burning of babies, you’re basically as low as you can possibly go on the “human” scale, to the point where you’re essentially just an animal. Letting these terrorist massacres go unpunished for the sake of appearing better to the terrorist-supporting population doesn’t seem to have been very effective for Israel for the past 15+ years.
That 'unprovoked' is doing plenty of work. I won't be baited into recounting all the things Israelis have done to Palestinians - babies and otherwise - over the years, or into speculating where that fits on your 'human' scale. I suspect you know perfectly well.
At some point, all those things, on both sides, will have to be forgotten (or at least set aside) for the sake of peace, as with the IRA, the ETA, the ANC, the Felquistes, and plenty others.
I’m curious, please name even just the top 3 things Israel has done that compares in any way to the barbarity we’ve just witnessed from the Palestinians.
Well its kind of not a fair question because like all Zionists you DID kinda just make up the burning babies, raping women "fact"! The widely circulated pic of the scantily clad woman in rave wear was not a woman stripped by Hamas but a woman wearing...rave wear. And she is alive, apparently at a hospital and a German Israeli citizen, not merely a tourist. Of course we can point to Israeli rape of Palestinian minors in jail and the gang rapes in 48 and 67.
Because that's how Israel was founded. Massacres, gang rapes, threats of annihilation forcing Palestinians to flee, simply for existing on land Jewish terrorist groups wanted. They would form the first IDF and they have not changed their genocidal efforts since.
At this point this is conspiracy theorizing.
There’s video of Shani at the rave minutes before the massacre. That’s not what she was wearing.
There’s pictures and video of the atrocities. Much of it posted by Hamas. And pictures of the condition of the corpses.
There's no evidence Shani Louk, the German raver, is alive. She was last seen with her limbs broken, unconscious. Hamas sources reached out to the mom that she's just injured, and of course the mom is wishful thinking, but no voice or physical evidence was given. They're likely just going to eventually blaim her death on Israel's bombing. $100 on it. Also there are many eyewitnesses testifying to the rapes.
"The world" beyond the middle east shouldn't be doing anything involving israel or palestine.
> Gazans live in poverty because of Israel
The fact that no Muslim country without oil has ever been even moderately prosperous disagrees with you. The only way I can see this being true is if by “because of Israel” you mean “because Israel is not providing them the free welfare handouts that they are entitled to, cuz something something brown people.”
> Israeli settlers were inspiring potential hatred among those sitting in the refugee camps in Gaza
So you support the Russian invasion of Ukraine then, right? (Not a rhetorical question, genuinely curious.) Ukraine was Russian land just 30 years ago, and Russia claims that ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine are oppressed and live in an apartheid state.
If you don’t support Russia, though, I don’t see how you can possibly be consistent with your belief in this particular case that anyone whose ancestors have ever lived in an area have eternal control over that area and are free to slaughter the people who currently live there.
> Gazans seem willing to do things that result in certain death because their lives are so miserable as to be barely worth living.
That tends to happen when you repeatedly reject the large concessions Israel offers for peace, elect a genocidal terrorist organization as your leader, and immediately declare an intifada. They haven’t been occupied for 15+ years, Israel is not responsible for babysitting them. Perhaps they shouldn’t widely support a government that spends their international aid money on guns, rockets, and bombs, and uses them as human shields.
> they have no hope of any change - non-violence hasn’t worked either
Oh, right, that... 2 day long period without a Palestinian rocket being fired. Really tried that. And rejecting all of the vast sacrifices Israel agreed to during negotiations, instead demanding the complete ethnic cleansing of all Jews “from the river to the sea” - they really had no choice but to “roll the dice” and slaughter 1300 people.
Can you do a more in-depth blog post on the axis I and axis II divide? I know the 5th edition of DSM seems to switch the approach, but does it? It makes no difference what the chapter is called as long as the overall approach is not much different in practice.
Israel's One Real Mistake Isn't What You Thought It Was
https://ydydy.substack.com/p/the-only-mistake
You shouldn't link to your substack more than once per open thread - people have been warned for posting less frequently than that. It would be one thing if this were a specific article adressing something someone says, but it's just unsolicited self-promotion.
I don't think we need five links to your substack in one Open Thread. Especially not one with a clickbait title and no additional commentary or value added by posting it here
Hey all, I must admit I'm not a reader of ACX or interested in much of the subject matter, but I'm a bit desperate for advice, so apologies for being selfish.
I'm currently working as an "AI" software engineer for $XB B2B startup. I'm super burned out, but not in the way a vacation or therapy appointment could fix (or maybe I haven't found the right therapist). I just really don't care about the company or even software as a craft anymore. I feel like I'm wasting my time away doing something I actively hate every day. The internal torture is extremely bad and I only manage to keep it at bay by constantly reminding myself of how privileged I am.
I have considered starting something myself or even quitting with no plan, but there is a glaring issue. I have pretty severe ADHD and I'm afraid I will never be able to stick to something past the hyper-fixation phase. For example, a few years ago I was extremely into growing psychedelic mushrooms. Didn't care about consuming them at all, just wanted to reach the highest level of cultivation. It got to the point where I was reading several papers a day on the subject and purchasing thousands of dollars of lab equipment. Then, the interest just evaporated. Haven't touched the equipment since. The same thing has happened for the potential tech startup ideas I had. It's also difficult to explore new ideas after work because I'm constantly stressed about getting fired.
I did talk about this with my friends and family, but for the most part they all say something along the lines of: "Duh, everyone doesn't like working. Just work harder, pick up a hobby or side-project, and retire early."
What else can I do here? Plan B is I ask my psychiatrist to get me back on stimulants and try to autopilot through work.
I also have this exact problem. I can’t do anything if I’m not deeply obsessed with it. How did you get through college? I’m in college and am basically (literally) failing out. Half my thoughts are about a girl I haven’t talked to in years, and I keep spending hours writing her several hundred word notes about technical topics she has no interest in even though she’s probably blocked me on all platforms. I’ve been doing that same thing for years. I don’t know how to stop. It takes immense effort to read single sentences from an intro textbook, and even then my mind won’t absorb any information, but none to spend entire days relistening to Joscha Bach’s lectures or thinking about the anthropic principle. It’s weird. My psychiatrist said stimulants aren’t right for me while I broke down crying about how my mind is always in four places at once and I can’t get it to operate like normal. She said something about exacerbating OCD symptoms, but I expect this is moral high ground behavior to avoid giving me the legal right to put an adderall factory in my house. How do I rewrite my brain’s code? I promise to do anything anyone says as long as it avoids the dangers from typical mind fallacy. People keep calling my crazy, but I promise I’ll act normal if I can solve this problem.
If you have enough savings to get by for several months and think you could get an SWE job again if necessary, why not quit and take time to relax and then decide what to do?
Hi! Your problems sound familiar (though I don't think I had it nearly so bad) so maybe what helped me can help you a bit too.
- If you have been a software engineer for a good while and have been reasonably prudent with your money, you probably have a lot of slack there that you might not be aware of. Try to find a way to take some (unpaid) extended leave -- for a few months, maybe. This might have to mean quitting your job (it did for me) but if you are good at your job, even if you are *currently* not feeling like you are doing well, you can almost certainly find a new one before money becomes an issue. Taking some extended time off, while scary, may help you to get out of an emotional rut.
- If the hyperfixation -> evaporating interest thing is as big a problem as you are saying, it might be worth getting some therapy/professional advice on how to manage it. If it's manageable, it doesn't need to be completely fixed (plenty of successful people have this sort of thing going on with their hobbies, where it's not as big a deal so long as you don't spend too much money), but you probably want to figure out how to manage it rather that just accept it as a given.
- I can't speak to prescription stimulants as I've never been on them. I do self medicate with coffee when necessary, though. If they've been helpful in the past, they may be worth a try, but you probably still need to deal with the emotional baggage rather than just trying to tough it out.
- Can you do some introspection and figure out what you need to enjoy your work / do your best work? Presumably you got into the field because you liked it and were good at it -- what changed? You might seek out a role that lets you play to your strengths rather than fighting with your weaknesses.
Welcome! I never had an official diagnosis, but I think that's the Catch-22 aspect of this thing: if you have ADHD and it requires nontrivial effort to find a specialist, then... Unfortunately, I hate the taste of coffee, and I do not have a reliable provider of cocaine.
I spent yesterday learning the technical details of 8086 and 80286 processors, so that I could reverse-engineer an old computer game. So far I have successfully disassembled only the first seven bytes, but I am proud that after reading the 5000-page official manual from Intel, I finally understand how ModR/M works.
> Duh, everyone doesn't like working.
That's not really true. In my bubble, most teachers love their jobs (though they complain about the salaries a lot). Most people *in IT* hate their jobs. And even that is not universal. I think surveys show that data scientists are on average happier than the ordinary IT folks.
In my experience (not sure how much of it would apply to other people), what really helps me are good relations at the workplace, and having enough time to talk. I have a a problem to focus on my work alone, but I enjoy talking about the work with my colleagues, assuming that they are friendly. I strongly suspect that "pair programming" was invented by someone with ADHD. (The problem is, it requires two nice people. Otherwise it becomes torture.) Unfortunately, the modern trend seems to be that although everyone is sitting in one huge open space, everyone is supposed to work on something different. Also, open spaces are themselves a paradox: they bring people together physically, but they actually *discourage* communication, because there is no privacy, and if you talk too much, you disturb other people.
It also helps if you have clear specifications and a lot of autonomy. This allows you to bring your bursts of hyperactivity to your job. Some days you accomplish little, other days you accomplish a lot, on average it is okay. Problem is, when the burst of hyperactivity is interrupted by one of the many meetings, or by figuring out many missing details in the specification. Again, unfortunately, the trend is towards "agile" development (which in practice is often the opposite of what its authors intended), and micromanagement.
It is difficult to delve deep in the details, when again the trend is the opposite, and your responsibilities keep expanding. It is no longer okay to be a specialist; you are supposed to be a "full-stack" developer (i.e. know a little bit of everything, rather than deeply understand something), and a tester, and a "dev-ops", and a "dev-sec-ops", and an on-call customer support, and a network administrator if you work with cloud. (The only jobs in the company you are allowed not to do are the accountant and the janitor.) Or to be more precise, it is okay to be a specialist, but only if you do it on top of all the things that I have already mentioned.
In other words, large parts of the IT industry have reshaped themselves in the recent decades, to be a more hostile environment for people with ADHD, who are over-represented in these jobs today, but perhaps the industry it trying to get rid of them in long term. In my generation, people joined IT often as a result of some autistic or hyper-active interest in computers in their childhood; the "normal" people did not know what computers are or why they should be interested in them. The next generation already knows computers from their childhood, and most of them join IT simply because that is where the money is, not because they care about computers intrinsically. As a consequence, it all goes downhill for people like us. Though you can still find a niche that the normies haven't yet noticed in masse, such as data science or crypto-something.
> Just work harder
Similarly, the depressed people get told to "just smile". The folk psychotherapy can be generalized to "just magically make your problem go away".
> pick up a hobby or side-project
Unless the hobby or the side project brings you a lot of money (in which case it de facto becomes your new job), I don't see how this is supposed to help with the problems you currently have at your job.
> retire early
Heh, I'd be very happy to, I just don't have the money this requires. What a useful advice, all this!
As someone with ADHD as well, stimulants help a bit. The inherent work environment is also important.
I'm lucky that as part of my job, I have managed to rotate through a number of roles and worked in different shifts (office, temporary site based, site based 12 hour days during maintenance downtime) and this has helped me internalise that disengagement with work is not entirely a me problem.
Some ways to notice that your work isn't set up for *anyone* to succeed - if you're in an office, observe if your coworkers or managers seem checked out, too. If you're remote, that's harder, but try phone calls and video calls to gauge. At the end of one on one meetings, see if you can sneak in a quick "how's it going for you" and gauge how your coworkers feel.
While it's useful to speak with friends and family, you actually wanna speak with your coworkers to figure out if it's something wrong with the team or the org.
I feel like one of the signs that a workplace might not be a sustainable is coworker relations either being abnormally close or distant. In a healthy workplace, you should be able to have a friendly conversation, e.g chat about what you did on the weekend or on holiday. If you're too close, it probably means that no one at this place has a life outside of work, which is also scary if you want to have a life outside of work.
If when you book leave, you feel like you can't even tell your boss what you're booking leave for without it being a Whole Thing, it's the social aspect - leave the team or the company.
If everyone is civil but sort of checked out, that probably means your company doesn't know what they're doing (or the people in charge isn't communicating with you guys). People who can put in a crazy amount of work tend to only do that when there's also a clear mission and a clear way their work segues into the mission. If you find yourself looking at your tasks and not understanding why you're doing this, try to figure out the context, and if the company can't give you the context, start looking for new job (they don't know what they're doing or they're doing some weird power play of keeping you in the dark about what exactly you're working on. The latter is a pattern in companies doing something shady. If it was just normal confidentiality, you'd just be asked to sign something and not tell anyone. You always need to understand how your tasks fit in the big picture).
Good luck! I've been struggling for about a year, but seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. My work had this big restructure and massively changed role descriptions and reporting lines. Nothing was clear for months, and work happened in terrible ad-hoc ways because half the time no one know who was supposed to be doing what and I often got told about things way too late. But the dust is finally settling enough that it's improving somewhat.
Funnily enough, it was the on paper worst work schedule (13 hour days, 6 day workweek, living away from home) that made me realise what I was missing during my normal role. Mostly clarity of purpose and mentoring.
If stimulants clearly help you, then go back to taking them. And what about hiring not a therapist but a coach? (Most are psychotherapists who have elected to help people who are doing OK in life reach goals, rather than helping people in trouble get it together).
That ADHD does sound like something that calls for psychiatric treatment. Other than that, you could pick up meditation for a bit to maybe learn to stabilize your attention a little.
I have just learned of "Miyake Events" which are giant solar storms that would likely do very substantial damage to nearly all modern electronics including things like communication networks and the power grid. The best estimate available now is that one happens roughly once every 1000 years. If there is a 10% chance of this happening in the next 100 years I am contemplating whether this is actually a greater threat to humanity than global warming is.
Would running electric lines underground protect the grid from storms like this? Having all our satellites fried would still suck but isn't going to kill nearly as many people as losing electricity across half the planet
If they are buried deep enough, sure. But burying high-tension lines (“tension” is an old-fashion word for voltage in English; in many languages it’s still used this way) is not feasible.
No problem. We'll just back our electric pickup trucks up to the house, and we'll be back in business. And we can recharge our smart phones in the seventeen USB ports in the trucks. But if the electric storm lasts more than a few hours, we'll probably be S.O.L.
If the grid gets fried we’d be looking at blackouts lasting months.
That could have a chilling affect on social media. Thousands of narcissists could lose their livelihood.
I agree this is a major threat. I’m not sure there is anything we can do about it, nor that current infrastructure isn’t mostly adapted to this either. The best we can do conditional on events of such magnitude that we *can’t* predict being possible is back up human knowledge girding the Information Age, while providing everyone with accessible manuals detailing agricultural best practices and how to prepare for winter. Anyone interested in talking more (and hopefully starting something), please email me at ishaan [at] koratkar [dot] com.
My dream is to print a version of the King James Bible mass distributed to every church that contains all the information needed to self-sustain a human colony - or something of that scale (curious if something like that already exists). While I think civilization level collapses are highly unlikely, I don’t know how to have a confident measure this kind of risk.
On a lighter note, the SBF trial is underway and the courtroom sketches of Caroline Ellison are absolutely hilarious (couldn't find them collated in one place outside a paywall) : https://www.google.com/search?q=courtroom+sketch+caroline+ellison&sca_esv=572772429&tbm=isch&sxsrf=AM9HkKkot93rF8KoozN5kxIEBgnfeuQFpg:1697088933825&source=lnms&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiy5rX45O-BAxXbbfUHHXCSCVoQ_AUoAXoECAIQAw&cshid=1697089050045177&biw=2048&bih=1033&dpr=1.25
In the most flattering pictures, she's Daria.
In the least flattering pictures, she's Gollum wearing a long brown wig.
This almost looks like a joke. The first picture has SBF looking great, much better than he actually looks with incredible coloring and shading, whereas Caroline has a giant forehead, mostly the same tone for the whole face, and no whites around her eyes. Her eyes and mouth look like they ran out of time and got the intern to draw them on with pen.
That sketch artist seems to be ... not great? I thought the sketches of SBF were poor, because comparing how he looked going into the court and what the artist produced didn't line up well.
But poor Caroline. This is "Hunchback of Notre Dame" facial features:
https://universalmonstersblog.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/hunchback-of-notre-dame-lon-chaney.jpg
What interesting differences have you noticed between the way the media covers the war in Ukraine vs wars in the Middle East?
One thing I just noticed is the grim obsession with "death toll". I've been reading articles on the Ukraine War for a year and a half, and the words "death toll" rarely come up; occasionally you'll see it in the context of one particular strike, but never in the context of a trying to keep a running count of deaths in the entire war. But now we're back to wars in Israel, and all of a sudden we're back to having the words "the death toll has reached..." in every article like it's a bridge collapse or an earthquake. Why is it so? It can't just be a lack of reliable numbers, because the numbers are pretty darn unreliable in the Middle East too (especially on the Palestinian side where they can be presumed to be entirely made up).
I suspect it's because large death counts during a hot war aren't surprising or eyebrow raising (the more interesting matter is the fact of the war itself), whereas terrorists inflicting 1k+ casualties is a pretty rare event, the numbers being central to its noteworthiness.
Nobody is reporting reliable casualty figures from Ukraine. Both sides classify their own number of military dead and exaggerate the other side's. The Ukrainians are probably being honest about the number of civilian dead on their own territory, but most of the civilian casualties occurred in places the Russian army occupied and they aren't talking. Sometimes when the Ukrainians manage to retake territory they find things like e.g. Bucha, and that gets talked about a lot. But most days, there's nothing but educated guesses to talk about.
As an educated guess, not quite half a million people have died in the Ukraine war, roughly half of them Russian soldiers.
Israel, is counting the bodies as they come in to their hospitals, and they aren't being quiet about it.
>Israel, is counting the bodies as they come in to their hospitals, and they aren't being quiet about it.
Any reason to think their figures are especially truthful/untruthful?
Israel is a reasonable approximate of a liberal democracy. Liberal democracies tend to be moderate in their dishonesty about vital statistics because their institutions and political cultures aren't really set up to sustain brazenly making up the numbers out of whole cloth.
Where liberal democracies put out bullshit numbers, it's usually in the nature of sloppy methodologies and misleading framings, not the kinds of outright fabrication that authoritarian polities often indulge in.
Yeah, actual deaths are pretty reliably reported almost everywhere. I've seen studies of early postwar Iraq, in the middle of a major insurgency, that indicate the Iraqi coroners and bureaucrats were playing it pretty straight.
In particular, if you report deaths, your own people demand that you report the *names* of the dead, so they can e.g. see if their friends and family survived the catastrophe du jour. If you report someone dead who isn't dead (or wasting away in your oubliette), that's going to fail when they show up alive and talking to a reporter. If you don't report as dead someone who is dead, their families are going to complain that not-officially-dead Bob disappeared three months ago and why haven't you found him yet, are you even looking? If this happens too often, you start to look like a failed state that can't keep track of its own people. You can maybe get away with reporting the deaths of people who never really existed, but sooner or later some reporter looking for a human-interest story is going to try looking up the family of one of those fictional dead, and really creating specific fictional people is hard work.
Why do muslims around the world feel so categorically different about Xinjiang than they do about Palestine? Sure, there's a lot of differences, but if Israel explicitly annexed Gaza and then treated the people of Gaza the way the people of Xinjiang are being treated e.g. 'reeducation camps', destroying mosques, would people be okay with that? It seems like they would be much less happy about it than the current status quo, despite such a state of affairs being much more similar to the Xinjiang situation that they basically are okay with.
partly because China isn't jewish (and doesn't contain any muslim holy sites), and partly because polarizing their people against Israel was a useful way for Arab dictators to maintain power and legitimacy for many years and war propaganda has taken a life of its own.
Somewhat ironically, Palestine (along with many Muslim countries) is one of the regions that actually expressed support for China's actions in Xinjiang. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_internment_camps#Reactions_by_countries)
Of all the reasons given so far, the race angle seems to fit best.
Helplessness because China is too strong: then at least there'd be some emotional response. Hasn't the US gotten a lot of hate for being perceived as an enemy of Muslims?
No PR department: Uighur activists seem to have done a good enough job garnering some outrage in the West.
It's Western propaganda: What about the Rohingya?
Arab/Middle Eastern Muslims just don't seem all that interested in the problems of Asian Muslims and vice versa.
`Helplessness because China is too strong' seems sufficient. As John Schilling says, caring deeply about something where you can't do a thing is depressing, and people instinctively shy away from it. What are they going to do? China can't be shamed, the great firewall will keep external propaganda attempts out, and they have no ability to project power into Xinjiang.
The crackdown on Uighurs was initiated after a series of terrorist attacks and riots in the 90s to the mid 2010s. China wasn't so powerful then and terror attacks were demonstrably possible, yet Arab Muslims seem to have been largely disinterested back then as well.
Second, it doesn't explain anger against the US, a stronger and more influential country than China. Have we forgotten 9/11 already?
Third, Myanmar is definitely not powerful and they've been giving a good go at genociding the mostly Muslim Rohingya for the better part of a decade now.
Middle Eastern Muslim disinterest in East/Southeast Asian Muslim affairs appears constant regardless of the strength of the adversary.
Most likely because China is too strong / there's nothing the Muslim world can do about Xinjiang.
By and large they do not believe it. Muslim countries see it as western propaganda. Quite a few Muslim countries sent a letter to the UN condoning the Chinese actions in response to a letter from western countries condemning it.
The Uyghurs are noticeably East Asian racially while the Palestinians are Arabs.
Hamas has a great public relations department, the Xinjiang Muslims lack one entirely. That's all there is to it.
No. Bad publicity is a thing after all.
Because there's nothing they can do about Xinjiang. The Muslim world can't project power into China, and China isn't going to care about anybody's silly protests or UN resolutions or whatever. It's really depressing to care about something you know you can't do anything about, so most people care about something else instead.
Israel, the Muslim world thinks it can do something about. Israel can be shamed, or the West can be shamed into restraining Israel, and if necessary Israelis can be killed in significant numbers so that at least there's vengeance on the table.
Sounds like an excellent argument for Israel to destroy the possibility of palestians doing anything then, if the alternative is allowing the risk of defeat and being punished for doing so anyway
Speculation:
a) Palestine initially caught the public interest and has remained the center of attention, because people don't measure their causes by utility but by "what everyone else in my in-group cares about".
b) Israel is, aside from the enormous problem of the Palestinians (and John Wilkes Booth), an open liberal democracy which generally allows reporters to do reporting. China is not. If Israel clamped down the way China did, we'd see a lot less Palestinian suffering.
c) Israel is much closer to the Muslim heartland, and by "closer" I mean "on top of" and "underneath". From what I can tell, the inciting incident was something at Al Aqsa mosque, which may be built in literally the same place as the Second Temple. (Historians differ.)
d) Israel is smaller and weaker than China, and could plausibly be defeated in a war. I doubt this is conscious, but it seems like a normal human instinct.
e) In a particular sense, anti-Semitism. I'm not being picky for the pedantic reason, but because my understanding is that Jewish/Muslim relations were generally better than Jewish/Christian relations, up until the founding of Israel (or maybe a bit before, when there was informal settling going on). So while there is a lot of of anti-Semitism, and my understanding is that historically it was a response not a cause, at this point in time has become an ongoing cause: there's a self-sustaining feedback loop of hate and prejudice.
Afaik there’s no credible case that Al Aqsa isn’t on the Temple Mount
I was just being pedantic, and talking about a difference of hundreds of feet. :-) And depending on what one considers "Al Aqsa" - is it the central mosque itself, or the entire grounds? And the same goes for what one considers "the Temple".
On the last point, I think there's also a broader sense in which jews are also viewed as being 'white' (despite less than a third of israelis having majority ashkenazi ancestry) which plays into this. "Colonialism" is a term basically only ever used to describe conquest by Europeans, and also Israelis, and Israelis are very much viewed as European colonizers. If it were Turkic muslims doing this to arab muslims and treating them just as badly, there's no chance in hell is would be called 'colonialism' and I can't imagine a half as many people would care. Of course, they would be much less likely to be supported by the US, which complicates things.
Doesn't that prove the point - there is an inescapable racial and religious aspect to anti-zionism
I have another bit of speculation: If some people who aren't allied to the West are angry at some other people who aren't allied to the West, Western media doesn't pick it up.
Sure, but it's not remotely clear that's what Gazan Palestinians what. I don't think it's what they ever wanted, but certainly not today. Hamas and a majority of surveyed Gazans want Israel to be ethnically cleansed of jews, 'from the river to the sea'. You can say this results precisely from Israel's treatment of them, but the problem to begin with was never just 'jews are taking our land'. They never wanted jews moving to palestine in the first place.
It's also very striking that pro-palestinian muslims/leftists around the world talk about israeli 'apartheid' in terms of discrimination against arabs, but the rest of arab world does not give full rights or unlimited asylum to palestianians. Obviously palestinians want to live in what they feel is "their" land, but I surely if a rich arab gulf state allowed as many Palestinians to live there as want to and gave them full citizenship, vast swathes would have already left, but even arabs don't give equality to arab palestinians.
Palestinian refugees have made Lebanon ungovernable, and almost did the same thing to Jordan before getting kicked out.
To try to channel Machiavelli, I suspect that the leaders of neighboring Arab countries are most concerned with staying in power. (Iran and the Taliban might be an exception, but they're neither neighboring nor Arab.) And to that end I think they want to both avoid a war with Israel, and keep their population's hostility directed away from themselves and toward a convenient scapegoat. So they're fine with the situation as is.
It wasn't a "refugee crisis" like in Europe or the southern US. It was importing a large number of very passionate people into countries with lower population. When Jordan annexed the West Bank, it tripled their population. And Jordan granted citizenship to all of them, too. But no one else seemed to like that solution, not the Palestinians and not the rest of the world.
It's not the mere existence of the refugees, it's what they do. If it were merely a matter of feeding and taking care of them, that could be blamed on Israel. But when they start literally waging war on the country they came from, using your country as a base, that's on them. They are human, they have agency, and they have moral responsibility for the choices they make.
The fact that Arab Israelis accept full citizenship means that Gazans might have accepted full Israeli citizenship in 1948, if it had been offered, and their grandchildren would probably still be OK with it. But that didn't happen, and what did happen over the next seventy-five years has created a present reality where the Gazans are exceedingly unlikely to accept Israeli citizenship.
Unless it comes with enough other Palestinian-Israeli citizens that they can vote to rename the country "Palestine" and kick the Jews off the island.
I do think a large majority of Palestinians would (initially) accept citizenship with equal rights in Israel. The problems are
- the minority who wouldn't accept it and would continue terrorism, and who could now freely come and go in Israel, would be more than enough to spoil it.
- Unlike the Native Americans, Australians etc., there are about as many Arabs in Israel/Palestine as Jews, more if Palestinians in neighboring countries return, meaning that control of the government would be contested, or dominated by Arabs. Given all the historical enmity, conflicts would likely escalate until they tear apart the state, and lead to a civil war.
Nobody but the Arabs care whose fault it was that bad stuff happened 75 years ago. The rest of us care about the bad stuff that happened last weekend. To the extent that we care whose fault it is, the dead ravers and the decapitated babies and all that, is 100% Hamas's fault (and any co-conspirators they might have had).
The more useful question is what can be done about any of this? The bad stuff that happened 75 years ago, nothing can be done about. The vctims and the perpetrators are dead. The bad stuff that happened this weekend, there may be things we can do about that. But it doesn't matter for that purpose what happened 75 years ago or whose fault it is, it matters what the situation is today.
The situation today is, the Gazans aren't going to accept egalitarian citizenship in Israel, and nobody is going to offer citizenship to more than a small fraction of the Gazans. That sucks. It sucks no matter whose fault it is. Now, what solutions are compatible with that sucky reality?
Palestinians are in a very different position from a typical "indigenous people," for several reasons. They share an ethnicity the citizens of several large, strong, well-armed states that surround Israel, and these states have a history of supporting them in wars against the "civilized" colonizer. That ethnicity also sees itself as "civilized" in the full sense (i.e. literate, urbanized, and otherwise different from surrounding "barbarians" in ways that facilitate and justify imperial expansion).
But just as importantly, it is not remotely true that "basically every indigenous group on Earth accepts this arrangement." It would be more accurate to say that basically every indigenous group fights back against attempts to colonize its traditional territories. In many cases, such groups have been unsuccessful because of their technological or strategic disadvantages; the arrangements that you describe are then put in place to deal with the surviving members of a group that has failed in its attempts at armed resistance.
>Do you have a citation for your first claim?
https://www.i24news.tv/en/news/middle-east/1608029687-hamas-renews-call-to-free-palestine-from-river-to-sea
https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/media/510?disposition=inline
> but the fact that we didn’t does not excuse Nazi actions or make the US responsible for the Holocaust in even the slightest way.
My point was that the people complaining about unequal treatment do not support equal treatment themselves and by and large do not want to take in palestinians or give them equal rights.
>Just personally I’d be happy to give US citizenship to every Palestinian.
That would make the US a much, much worse place. When even other arab muslims don't want these people, you know that they're no good.
But arab countries most vocal about the opposition to israel are the ones who should be taking them, instead of people of the other side of the world who are culturally, linguistically and religiously very different to these people, and the US has a large number of jews and homosexuals, so bringing in a bunch of homophobic anti-semites would not be very fair to them.
>Though Israel ought to pay for all the lost Palestinian land and property,
When did muslims ever pay anyone for their conquests? Arabs are even indigenous to the levant for crying out loud, and you're acting like all these people "own" this land by virtue of being its original inhabitants or something. They're just the (second) latest in a very long line of occupants, and so if we're being consistent here, Israelis should be able to "own" this land if they just hang onto it long enough.
But again, it's not clear palestinians would accept this arrangement and it's very clear israel would never pay for it to happen
>But in general people have more of a claim to equal treatment in their home country than they do as refugees.
The point is more about how people outside of palestine talk about things, as if there's something unique at israel not wanting these people to have full rights, when its a universal for the reigion.
>Also the polls in your links seem all over the place so I’m not sure how reliable they are. But figure A.1 at least shows that a large majority of Palestinians supported a two-state solution in 2014-15
No, A.1 does not show a majority support for a two-state solution. It says 52% probably or definitely reject it.
A.2 shows a slight majority for Gazans in 2014...but we're not talking about 2014
Also...this is all irrelevant. Look at figures A.7 and A.8
A majority of palestianians think that a two-state solution would at best be a stepping stone towards full 'liberation' of palestine
Looks like AI in business is the hot new topic, at least if the Microsoft Ignite seminar (workshops? event? I don't know what exactly to call it) is any example.
This bit made me both twitch and go "hmmm".
There's an unmerciful amount of guff on the session descriptions, as you'd expect (I don't want to be engaged with whatever you're selling to spy on employees) and this jewel of prose leaves me as it found me, but I think the straws in the wind as to what big businesses hope to achieve with AI are to be seen there, and also why it's naive to call for slowdowns or pauses or halts. There's money to be made, Chuck! Big money! And you expect me to leave all those dollar bills lying on the sidewalk?
https://ignite.microsoft.com/en-US/sessions/d3a944cd-d6e9-4dd8-a98f-112709c59ccd?source=sessions
"Adopting “decision intelligence” powered by AI will lead to exponential growth, but People, Process and Culture are the impediment that needs to be addressed with an impactful AI strategy. Hear how you can operationalize and embed AI organically in enterprise with focus on value stream mapping, to harness AI driven insights in business processes, to drive agility."
People are impediments to AI. So inconvenient, we fleshbags, aren't we? Seems more and more like 'AI was not made for man, but man was made for the AI' is the likely future, and not "it'll free us all up to be cultured gentlepersons of leisure, rich fat and happy, while AI does all the work and pulls magical post-scarcity rabbits out of the cosmic hat".
https://ignite.microsoft.com/en-US/home
I'm registered for online access to two days of the hoo-ha, so maybe I'll learn something applicable to work (very unlikely) or at least how to properly grovel before our new AI overlords.
EDIT: Look at the digital swag I can get! God bless Microsoft, they've never been cool and they'll never be cool and they may have more brains than an illithid banqueting hall but they're *hopeless* at design 😁
https://ignite.microsoft.com/en-US/social-swag
Hey guys, I have a humble request for any practical advice you could offer to aid me in overcoming a counterproductive humility.
I know that sounds like a joke so I made a post explaining it.
https://ydydy.substack.com/p/my-goodness
It sounds like you need tantric spirituality, to override this kind of absolutism. Though I don't understand why that particular passage is causing you trouble. What is the thing you're currently not doing that you wish you were doing (or that you currently do, but it causes you immense guilt)?
Boy, I appreciate your instructive response so I've been spending 20 minutes here attempting to pen a response....
And that's kind of the thing. I tend towards the impractical, in part because the math that was so deeply inculcated into me was in fact pretty good (most people due in fact benefit more from being good to people than they lose from it) but as you noticed it wa taught to me with a religious absolutism that is of course false and is reducio-ad-hitlerum, in the sense that you end up bringing about your own extermination for the sake of others.
I'm tempted to quite you thrice daily prayers for just this degree of self abnegation and then more about my own precious personal history (that sarcasm is a good natured self-ribbing, I'm keeping that) but you asked a soecific question.
Guilt I can't speak to because I no longer have the kind of guilt that I used to have at all. Presumably what most people mean by "guilt" I have as well but I felt guilty over being even the slightest bit morally imperfect so once I conquered that it went away for good. Praise Allah.
I'll take a sentence to clarify how I conquered it.
Well, after 19 years of failed attempts I finally did achieve moral perfection as I understood it. I refused to engage in any self-centered pleasure so long as anyone was suffering and there was a chance that if I were less attatched to the comforts of a mattress, socializing or food (other than bread and water) that I would be able to help them.
Yeah, it led to rescuing a hostage in Chechnya, improving the lives and longevities of people who were presumed to be on their deathbeds, and some other interesting stuff.
Anyway, that's more than a sentence but the point is that if anything in your final parentheses applies, I don't know it as guilt because what I knew as guilt I conquered by having absolutely nothing at all that I felt it was possible to feel guilty about.
Wild, ey? 😂
Anyway, in case anyone misreads this as me saying that either I actually *was* perfect (by standards other than my own, which I just spelled out) or that I am currently perfect (by the afore-spelled standards) I'm not saying either.
So, what am I not doing that I wish I were doing?
Okay.
I think I tend to focus on the "cognitive" aspects rather than the behavioral bevause of course if you have a strong enough WHY, you might find the HOW.
But it is correct to begin eith the end in mind.
There's plenty I wish I were doing that is attributable easily enough to "the symptoms of adhd" (in quotes because I disapprove of how this mindset is pathologized) but in this case I'm probably referring to things that I'm already doing and am driven to do but which I feel I am not doing well (or perhaps at all) because of how I was raised.
The girl thing I mentioned in comically stark terms is true. But that's too complicated a subject, too interesting a subject and too low down on my list of concerns right now.
How's this.
I don't know whether I want to have a relationship or publicity or all of the other things that people raised normally go for, but I do know that I don't want to be at the mercy of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune through having zero money.
It's likely that I should also want wealth, not all normal people prefer, but, while I'm working very hard on preferring wealth to non-wealth (so that at least my own personal distaste for it won't be a factor getting in the way) I KNOW from a few recent experiences I want money.
However I know of no way of talking or thinking about it other than as selfish, and therefore wrong, thing.
In fact, because I regard money making as "wrong" I think and speak of it that way. I am, in theory, perfectly willing to make and have money but I have a hard time thinking of it as the right thing to do.
That's not useful.
Particularly because on a moment to moment basis, I really prefer standard issue goodness, hell, I still prefer even perfectionist utopian goodness!
I'm just mad at the fact that it doesn't pay its debts so I changed my philosophical opposition to making money. And will tell you that if I could get away with killing a baby and zelling its organs for $1,000,000 then I would do it but that's just the traditional Jewish talmudistic theorizing about right and wrong in the harshest of theoretical terms, and not very useful.
Not only does it do nothing practical to have "decided" this but I've known myself for 47 years and I'm pretty sure that I would not even be remotely prepared to take that opportunity if it presented itself, or even a far far easier one.
I despise the moralizing of the present day because I'm saturated with it and don't need any more of it.
But the unfortunate fact is that pretty much all the moralizers are benefiting from saying the right thing even if they never do it, while I incur the opposite of benefit by opposing all these publicly stated moral "shoulds", while in real life still dancing pretty damn close to the side of angels.
I don't know precisely what I want to be *doing*, but I know that I want to *have* money.
And because my brain type is "Naturally Taoist" (i e. "Severe ADHD") the normal ways of making money are not available to me. At least not in any way that I can remotely imagine (I have already tried every last way that I can imagine).
So getting rich quickly seems a whole lot more likely than doing it slowly. That doesn't make it necessarily likely, but more likely than slowly and more likely than some might think.
Perhaps this bit of apologetics I posted a few days ago (for deciding that for two days I would not doubt the righteousness of making money and would therefore try to do so) will provide a viewer other than myself with a clear insight into what I wish I were doing but am somehow held back from.
Thank you for reading and watching.
https://youtu.be/x0-RG4QCLs8?feature=shared
" I KNOW from a few recent experiences I want money.
However I know of no way of talking or thinking about it other than as selfish, and therefore wrong, thing."
Yeah, I think St Francis de Sales might have something here for you:
"WHEN God created the world He commanded each tree to bear fruit after its kind; and even so He bids Christians,—the living trees of His Church,—to bring forth fruits of devotion, each one according to his kind and vocation. A different exercise of devotion is required of each—the noble, the artisan, the servant, the prince, the maiden and the wife; and furthermore such practice must be modified according to the strength, the calling, and the duties of each individual. I ask you, my child, would it be fitting that a Bishop should seek to lead the solitary life of a Carthusian? And if the father of a family were as regardless in making provision for the future as a Capucin, if the artisan spent the day in church like a Religious, if the Religious involved himself in all manner of business on his neighbour’s behalf as a Bishop is called upon to do, would not such a devotion be ridiculous, ill-regulated, and intolerable? Nevertheless such a mistake is often made, and the world, which cannot or will not discriminate between real devotion and the indiscretion of those who fancy themselves devout, grumbles and finds fault with devotion, which is really nowise concerned in these errors. No indeed, my child, the devotion which is true hinders nothing, but on the contrary it perfects everything; and that which runs counter to the rightful vocation of any one is, you may be sure, a spurious devotion.
...Of course a purely contemplative devotion, such as is specially proper to the religious and monastic life, cannot be practised in these outer vocations, but there are various other kinds of devotion well-suited to lead those whose calling is secular, along the paths of perfection. The Old Testament furnishes us examples in Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, David, Job, Tobias, Sarah, Rebecca and Judith; and in the New Testament we read of St. Joseph, Lydia and Crispus, who led a perfectly devout life in their trades:—we have S. Anne, Martha, S. Monica, Aquila and Priscilla, as examples of household devotion, Cornelius, S. Sebastian, and S. Maurice among soldiers;—Constantine, S. Helena, S. Louis, the Blessed Amadaeus, and S. Edward on the throne. And we even find instances of some who fell away in solitude,—usually so helpful to perfection,—some who had led a higher life in the world, which seems so antagonistic to it. S. Gregory dwells on how Lot, who had kept himself pure in the city, fell in his mountain solitude."
It has to do with your station in life. Wanting to make money is not wrong, and indeed those who say "but I need expensive clothes etc. for my job and my position" may well be right. In that case, if you need to wear a good suit, then buy a good suit, and earn the money to be able to buy a good suit. That's not wrong.
"And will tell you that if I could get away with killing a baby and zelling its organs for $1,000,000 then I would do it"
That *is* wrong but you seem to realise that. There are limits to what we should do in the pursuit of our ends. If you're starving, it's not a crime or sin to steal food, but it is a crime and sin if you're doing it because you calculate "by stealing one loaf of bread per week I can save $X" when you can perfectly well afford to pay for the bread.
And maybe exercising gentleness towards yourself, neither exaggerating all your faults or excusing them or angrily declaring you have none:
"ONE important direction in which to exercise gentleness, is with respect to ourselves, never growing irritated with one’s self or one’s imperfections; for although it is but reasonable that we should be displeased and grieved at our own faults, yet ought we to guard against a bitter, angry, or peevish feeling about them. Many people fall into the error of being angry because they have been angry, vexed because they have given way to vexation, thus keeping up a chronic state of irritation, which adds to the evil of what is past, and prepares the way for a fresh fall on the first occasion. Moreover, all this anger and irritation against one’s self fosters pride, and springs entirely from self-love, which is disturbed and fretted by its own imperfection. What we want is a quiet, steady, firm displeasure at our own faults. A judge gives sentence more effectually speaking deliberately and calmly than if he be impetuous and passionate (for in the latter case he punishes not so much the actual faults before him, but what they appear to him to be); and so we can chasten ourselves far better by a quiet stedfast repentance, than by eager hasty ways of penitence, which, in fact, are proportioned not by the weight of our faults, but according to our feelings and inclinations. Thus one man who specially aims at purity will be intensely vexed with himself at some very trifling fault against it, while he looks upon some gross slander of which he has been guilty as a mere laughing matter. On the other hand, another will torment himself painfully over some slight exaggeration, while he altogether overlooks some serious offence against purity; and so on with other things. All this arises solely because men do not judge themselves by the light of reason, but under the influence of passion."
I'm not trying to scold here, but you do seem to write under the influence of passion. A little more balance in looking at yourself, and letting go a little of resentment (which is hard! but the past is over, it can't be changed now. I struggle with this a lot myself) and accepting that however it was, it's not possible to alter it now, just how you deal with it and regard it.
Have you been in a psych ward? You sound crazy in an interesting way. No offense meant: I've been in psych wards 3 times myself, and I don't think it's ever gonna happen again, but still.
As to making money and just being more selfish generally... Yeah, tantra would help you to integrate impulses that you currently regard as wrong. There are tantric rituals that involve offering meat and shit and semen to statues of the Buddha to get over submission to the sacred.
I invented a little tantric ritual myself: down a bottle of wine, then go to mass/synagogue. But perhaps that doesn't work so well for you, since ethics is the thing tormenting you, not so much religion.
I did write an essay about how altruistic one should be that you might find helpful:
https://squarecircle.substack.com/p/the-trolley-problem-is-all-too-real
I'm gonna watch your video later.
Don't think I've ever been in a psych ward. Ar least not as a patient. I may be crazy but probably not in a way that is a physical danger to myself or others. At least not others who don't have it coming 😄.
Naw, I'm just one of those people widely considered either a genius or a madman depending upon whether they've got institutional backing at the time.
E.G. I've never succeeded at selling myself (which probably would be the shortest answer for what I want to be able to do like a normal person) so I've rarely ever successfully arranged a speaking engagement for myself (I just feel so slimy doing it that those few times that I do go ahead with it, I come across pretty bad) but whenever I'm willing to set aside the purity of my principles and risk speaking under the aegis of an institution (through their sellimg me to the venue and setting it all up) I tend to be regarded as so loftily that my ingrained humility can't stand it.
Anyway, I don't put much stock in labeling so I take no more offense in being called Mad than I take pleasure in being called Great, because I know that from many shiploads full of evidence that the label is no more than an indication of whether, well, whether I'm assumed by that individual to be powerful or not 🤷♂️.
That's not a critique of your query. Presumably most people who act as freely as I do despite lacking those things their society happens to regard as preconditions for such freedom (see: "fuck you money") are regarded as mad and, generally, regard themselves as fundamentally faulty as well.
I've had the good fortune to be me so I, well, I dunno, I think I'm pretty great...mainly because when I receive a novel criticism I tend to consider it, so I think I've ended up pretty okay.
Anyway, I have no problems with psych wards or with people who have been in them. Among the gazillion things I'd want to try in fact would BE getting committed to a psych ward to see what the experience would be like. Besides, while I doubt the value judgements of popular notions of psychiatry/psychology, I adsume the professionals are actually pretty good. Hell, for all a psych ward is just what I need! 😂
I doubt it. I'm just sayin' that I lack fundamental biases about such things.
Good catch on the importance of desecrating the sacred and also that my issue isn't the sanctity of the Moral Preachers (be they things or people) but the fundamental, deep level coding that makes me *enjoy* sklavenmoral over, I don't know, something at least a *little* closer to Conan's morals.
Religion I've got covered. Hell, I'm a religious *authority* and it doesn't stop me from speaking and acting freely and openly in defiance of what pretty much all other Orthodox Rabbis believe to be right. (That's one of the benefits of not having to doubt your own righteousness right there.)
What I feel I *ought* to be doing is to gollow Maimonides' Aristotlean ethics about getting your traits to hover comfortably on the path of the golden mean, so that you have equal capacity to go to the right or the left as the situation demands.
For example, Maimonides tells the stingy guy to make a conscious effort to override his automatic impulses and to repeatedly spend money like a wastrel until he's gotten over whatever a-rational emotional thing was making him stingy (this assumes of course that he isn't stingy for a good reason).
And the opposite for the spendthrift.
I actually did a teeny bit of this. I went out rabbit hunting. (It's more interesting than that but unless you've got a publisher for us that'll do.)
Im this instance, huh, well I ought to at the very least, consciously stop myself from caring about whether a word I said (or didn't say) might have hurt someone's feelings (or helped them - in the case of things I say or do entirely for someone else's sake).
It's interesting. I don't mind if I come across as rude so long as the misunderstanding belongs to the other party.
What bothers me is when I'm being short with someone (or otherwise not saintly) because I *want* to be (because how long can I be expected to stand frozen listening to some bore simply because it makes her/him feel good, or whatever).
And because *that* isn't proactively doable I think I ought to go out and proactively hurt people's feelings and thus get over whatever was keeping my conscience saintly.
A few times I've done this by passing beggars (who are common in manhattan) without making eye contact.
Don't get me wrong, I'm certain I've hurt people lots more then not making eye contact with them and apologizing for not giving them money. But, like I said before, not for small selfish benefit like just being ignoring someone because who gives a shit about this strangers feelings anyway.
Cereal killing would probably qualify as a maimonidean remedy but I don't know where to find cereal.
In any case, the error in my wiring is the feeling that it's better to be regarded as bad while secretly knowing you are good, than to be good while secretly knowing you are bad.
The logic that my mind offers me as an excuse for keeping at this is that my conscience is more or less clean and thus keeps me from having to lie too much, or whatever.
Besides, my deepest desire - and the only way that I (currently) would feel *comfortable* having money, acclaim, power, and a harem - IS to bring about a moral revolution on Earth.
Like all people I suppose, I'm more afraid of possibly *losing* the goodies that caring about folk brings my life, than I am excited about *gaining* what not-caring about them could bring to my life.
So, because I believe in trying things that could be correct despite their being against my inclination.
Hmmmm.....I guess I could call customer service lines and make fun of their names? Or be an asshole troll to get a rise out of people and just laugh about it...
But I'd really prefer it if someone just gave me a few hundred dollars so that I could cover the inevitable expenses that arise from being a somewhat overly nice guy who's uncomfortable with making money even in the limited fields that his adhd allows.
"Like all people I suppose, I'm more afraid of possibly *losing* the goodies that caring about folk brings my life, than I am excited about *gaining* what not-caring about them could bring to my life."
What do you think not-caring could bring? "I don't give a shit about your granny losing her life-savings and being cast out in the snow, I sold her that shitty mortgage and made a bundle of commission on it"?
Do you know what you want? Because you don't seem to be making things clear, here. Other than "I want a moral revolution where we do away with slave morality and everyone behaves like a Cimmerian barbarian" which, uh, you might not like as much as you think you would (how else would you characterise what Hamas is doing?)
"a *little* closer to Conan's morals"
Are you entirely sure you know what Conan's morals are? Because for a barbarian, he had a lot of moral delicacy (e.g. in many of the stories there's a sexy hot and helpless wench who is throwing herself on his... mercy and he could, if he wished, take full advantage. But he doesn't. Conan suffers from sklavenmorality himself, it would seem). The part I like best is this from "The Tower of the Elephant":
"Tears rolled from the sightless eyes, and Conan's gaze strayed to the limbs stretched on the marble couch. And he knew the monster would not rise to attack him. He knew the marks of the rack, and the searing brand of the flame, and tough-souled as he was, he stood aghast at the ruined deformities which his reason told him had once been limbs as comely as his own. And suddenly all fear and repulsion went from him, to be replaced by a great pity. What this monster was, Conan could not know, but the evidences of its sufferings were so terrible and pathetic that a strange aching sadness came over the Cimmerian, he knew not why. He only felt that he was looking upon a cosmic tragedy, and he shrank with shame, as if the guilt of a whole race were laid upon him."
I understand Maimonides' advice, and indeed there's a tradition in Western thought that virtue lies in moderation, in the middle way. But I think you over-correct and don't get the idea there of *balance*; going out and ignoring beggars isn't auto-correction, it's tipping the scale in the pan the opposite way. You're only doing what others do every day, and acting against those who cannot harm you and are the ones suffering these small humiliations all the time. The real way to overcome wanting to be thought well of, even/especially by yourself ('look how patient and saintly I am being, listening to this bore!') is to risk something; offend someone whose good opinion you *do* want or who can get back at you in some way, be it telling everyone you are a jerk, or hurting you in our pocket, or some other way. That will break wanting to be well thought of by your own self-esteem much faster than scorning those who are already despised.
D-baby, I wrote you back a letter that would have delighted you to read and eould have delighted me to have delighted you.
Alas but that my phone turned off as I was selecting the final word and the entire comment was lost.
As I am certain that the Divine wished YOU to have been delighted, I can only assume that the message was to ME to put down the phone and stop writing.
Or at least to keep my phone charged, but the first one sounds more correct.
Have a Good Shabbos, YDYDY
Having watched your video, and reading this comment, all I can say is that I've been there, I once thought I was both the Messiah and the Antichrist. I think you need to go to a psychiatrist and tell him exactly what you think is gonna happen on 10/12/2024 (it seems you actually have a very clear idea of what that is that you're not sharing).
Or hell, lay it on me, because I'm curious to know. But yeah, I know it's probably impossible to get through to you right now, but it would be a lack of compassion not to insist on you talking to a psychiatrist, and just speak your truth to him, such as it is at this moment.
Eh? I think the distance of text is making you read me incorrectly. I don't think anything is going to happen on that day unless we make it happen.
I speak in a variety of flavors, which obviously makes it *really* hard to come across as anything but nuts I suppose. But that's a practical question.
Do you think I actually believe something that is irrational? If so I would like to be corrected, but I don't think that's so.
As for being the messiah and/or antichrist. They both sound like a lot of fun so if you can put in a good word for me with either hod or the devil I'd be much obliged, but I'm pretty certain that I do not have anything even remotely approximating certitude about either.
I appreciate the suggestion and, in general, would *love* to speak to a good shrink, but not because I have any delusions.
Though of course a delusional person *would* say that, wouldn't he 😂.
So, f'realz, other than cognitive or emotional stuff, in which bwe're in agreement that I would like to speak to a good shrink but just don't have the money for it, what gave you the impression that I believed in something crazy?
If it's the certitude in my, "Final Chance" video, rest assured I have no certitudes. I didn't bother to qualify or explain every (or even any)thing because what I was conveying can't be conveyed that way.
I am, after all, an Orthodox Rabbi. We have over 3,000 years worth of concepts, and ways of speaking that don't translate.
If you are still of the opinion that I think something definitive that is definitively and demonstrably false please tell me.
Otherwise, well, you already know that I don't know how to accurately convey the fact that I believe that my words are highly worthy of consideration, but if I did know how to convey that I would.
Besides, I thought I linked to the video about money? Did I mention that date in that video, or did you watch "Final Chance For A Fresh Start"?
It is not for no reason that Justice is held to be the chief of the virtues - it is the one that allows us to apply all the others in their correct place and measure.
The message of the Sermon on the Mount quote you give seems quite simple to me, and it is eminently *good* advice: when you do something praiseworthy, do it for its own sake, rather than to be praised. It's difficult to see how you get from that to martyrdom, and self-sacrifice, other than through a lot of missing context relating to your upbringing (which, to be fair, you hint at).
Since you asked for practical advice, here's some that works regardless of whether you believe in any higher power or not: the development and exercise of personal virtue is something that is ultimately subject to your personal control and judgement. You can neither shirk the responsibility, nor deceive yourself as to your true motives, and it is best not to try.
(If you do believe in a higher power, you might also note that this higher power knows the depths of your soul at least as well as you do, so you should take extra care to avoid trying to deceive yourself. You can't deceive God.)
The essential equality of all humans (taken as an axiom) implies you are no more important than anyone else, but - equally - nobody else is more important than you. Therefore, to ask whether some other man deserves "access to a woman's womb" more than you do - as you do elsewhere - is asking the wrong sort of question. No man, fundamentally, "deserves access" - the woman ought to have something to say about it, after all (also being equal), and if she chose you as the father of her children, then that's that.
Going beyond that particular example, nobody has the right to demand your self-sacrifice, because that would imply they are more important than you are - a proposition that requires demonstration to *your* satisfaction. That doesn't, however, imply that you cannot freely give of your own, if you choose to. To do so or not is ultimately a choice you must make, based on what sort of person you would like to see yourself as being - and that's where the virtue of Justice comes in. There's a difference between being generous or humble, and being a doormat, and being Just is how you know the difference.
Boy o' boy.
I take it none of y'all were raised by a young mother for whom the central event in her life was her mother failing to rescue her young niece as she was murdered before her eyes in Auschwitz, ey?
Methinks you misunderstood all that boy girl thing before. But thank you for informing me that rape is wrong. lol.
Here be da ting (sorry, I live in a Jamaican neighborhood and the accent slips out every so often. just lightening the mood!) ---
In case none of you have visited America circa 2023, Jews have a thing about guilt. About "not doing enough". And about the sanctity of victimhood.
This is ancient shit.
But for the meme to be sticky it requires a social mechanism that will ensure events which leave an indelible impression every few generation.
The Holocaust was a relatively recent version of such an event. (Perhaps you won't fail to notice an even *more* recent one.)
In the particular mini story in which I am one of the main characters, a young woman named Dvori who was around 20 years old saved the lives of her younger sister and cousin whom Josef Mengele had sent to the gas chambers.
In fact, the whole reason she was able to survive hell on earth was due to the viktorfrankl'esque "meaning" she got from her mission of continuing to save these two girls in their young teens. If we're going to be clinical about something which really seems pretty intuitive.
Well, one day she failed to give her own life for her nieces so her niece was murdered while shrieking for her aunt to save her, and for the rest of her life Dvori was, well, done.
THAT is the foundation upon which my mother's psyche was forged.
So, (said, in a jewish friendly kibbitziy way) Fuck You for your kindly moral explanation about to whom fall the rights to reproduction. What you fail to realize is that for true and proper kikes, raised right, each Jew has the moral obligation to rescue everyone else even from their own mistakes.
Sure you may have a life to spend that you're game to spend as my spouse but what in the hell does THAT have to do with anything?
My responsibility is to protect you EVEN FROM YOURSELF.
And *most especially* FROM ME.
So you may want to marry me but unless I can determine with absolute certitude that you are best off with me rather than with yankel or shmendrick or zisha leah, I'm MAMESH A NAZI if I marry you just because you're "willing".
Boy, shkutzim and yidden on the margins really don't know what they're missing!
________________________________
TONE: Sans vocal inflections and facial expressions there is some small room for massively misunderstanding a playful comment as a hateful or otherwise ill-humored and large room for assiming that someone somewhere may misunderstand the comment and that therefore certain public responses are required.... and all of the horrifying game theory that goes on under the hood every time we engage in this two generation old experiment of communicating as strangers, to strangers, before strangers, forever.
I had suggested to Elon Musk that tweets be color code for mood. It seems like if someone says, "I'm gonna kill you", it would be helpful for clarifying humorous intent if it came in a playful pink and comic sans. (The same does not apply for ransom notes.)
Nothing I wrote was comical in the "not true" sense. But nothing I wrote was in anger, desperation or sadness either. I am a happy and playful chap who is also Dead Fuckin Serious.
Yeah, I already got the impression you have Mommy Issues.
Leaving all that aside, and there's a huge heap of weight there, on a strictly religious basis what you are talking about in part is what is called "scrupulosity" and part of the treatment is to abandon your own attempts to judge your own case and surrender to the guidance of a spiritual director (whose job mainly will be to say "no you did not commit the unforgiveable sin and no you are not going to burn in hell for all eternity just because you think you only said four hail marys instead of five for your penance after your last confession, now trust and believe me because you are under obedience to do so and stop obsessively praying the rosary to 'make up' for the omission which you may not even have omitted').
That, I can already tell, is not gonna work in your case because you have *massively* over-corrected for being told what to do all your life by going to the opposite extreme of "fudge you nobody can tell me nothing and i know best of all even better than you guys who claim to be the experts", you hugely believe in your own intelligence, and an Authority Figure setting up to tell you how to handle your conscience is going to trigger *all* the fire alarms.
But it's how it works - therapy would probably be the next best thing. Psychology has commandeered the term for itself, but it is religious in origin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrupulosity
"Treatment is similar to that for other forms of obsessive–compulsive disorder. Exposure and response prevention (ERP), a form of behavior therapy, is widely used for OCD in general and may be promising for scrupulosity in particular. ERP is based on the idea that deliberate repeated exposure to obsessional stimuli lessens anxiety, and that avoiding rituals lowers the urge to behave compulsively."
https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/scrupulosity-the-occupational-hazard-of-the-catholic-moral-life
https://www.ncregister.com/blog/12-ways-to-overcome-a-scrupulous-conscience
"Resolve to accept the judgments of your confessor or therapist over your own distorted standards. This is not a vow of obedience; it is simply a practical tool and can be stopped at any time. But relying on reliable people who model a healthy conscience can assist us to emulate a right moral measure for judging between sin, temptation and pathology."
https://sanctuarymentalhealth.org/2021/01/22/scrupulosity-in-the-confessional/
Some of it, it sounds like you are self-applying (e.g. using Maimonides' advice). But maybe an outside view would be helpful as to when you're going off the rails over-correcting.
I'm sorry. I seem to have mistakenly assumed you wanted a serious reply.
Your response was cool. It didn't reply to what I meant but I can totally see how one could have read me as being the sort of person to whom your reply was an accurate one.
Once a piece of writing is shared its truth is in the eyes of the beholder.
So it was a good response to article! Just not to the way my article intended to be.
But like I said in the PostScript, my response should be read as two guys joshing while high. Spilling truths, but in a spirit of love rather than the usual internet, uh, less than love I guess.
Wading into the deep waters here, but what the hell, I'm a fool so let me rush in while my guardian angel covers its eyes and goes "Eight billion humans and I have to get *this* one".
The bit about not blowing your own trumpet is held to mean - well, a couple of things. Be sincere in doing good, that is, don't do it just for praise (the ur-example here for me is - thank you AOC for a stellar photo-op - things like the Met Gala. Themed ball every year where it's a big charity bash for the deep-pocketed, the famous, and those who would like to think they're at least one of those. It's Conspicuous Showing-Off, all the money that the (likely borrowed) gowns and jewellery and everything to hold the do costs could more easily be given directly to whatever the point of this do is (keep an elite cultural organisation going?)
(If you are now going "But Deiseach didn't you hop on the Judas criticism about him saying that in regard to the expensive oinment?", ahem I am clearing my throat here VERY LOUDLY and unfortunately can't hear you).
This pearl of obliviousness has been criticised and defended so I'm not going to thrash it out again, but you get what we're saying, right? About Conspicuously Showing Off Your Virtue?
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2021-09-14/met-gala-2021-aoc-tax-the-rich-dress
So number one is Sincerity. Closely related to it is probably (I hope) what your mom was going for, "and what makes you think you're so great anyway, huh?" If you hang your self-image off a peg of being *so* good and *so* virtuous and *so* generous, then what is the charity about in reality - the people for whom you are doing it, or yourself?
You're a Nice Person? Great! But all our righteousness is as filthy rags and even the heavens are not pure in His sight, so who do you think you're fooling? You give things to, or do things for, people you care about or like or who share your values? Even the pagans do that, what is so great about you doing it, then? That's number two, Honesty.
And now comes number three, which I can't put a pithy title on. "Be kind to yourself". Do the giving or deeds in privacy, anonymously. Take the pressure off yourself to do more, be more, give more. We've had some mention previously of how EA types are prone to scrupulousness and will worry themselves into a tizzy about "but I *could* live on 10% of what I earn and give all the rest away" or "Am I doing enough, aren't there more expenses I could cut down on so as to have more money to give away, do I really need to eat more than three times a week?"
Shhhh. You are not St. Francis of Assisi wedded to the Lady Poverty. Nobody is watching with beady, judgemental eyes as to "did you hold back a single penny from giving?". Give what you can. Don't put pressure on yourself to be Public Virtue All The Time.
Ehhhh - I was going somewhere with this, lemme think. Ah, yes! Humility! Now what is humility, and what is the wrong kind of humility, and what is the right kind of humility? I'm going to be quoting heavily here from smarter people than me.
C.S. Lewis, "The Screwtape Letters":
"You must therefore conceal from the patient the true end of Humility. Let him think of it not as self-forgetfulness but as a certain kind of opinion (namely, a low opinion) of his own talents and character. Some talents, I gather, he really has. Fix in his mind the idea that humility consists in trying to believe those talents to be less valuable than he believes them to be. No doubt they are in fact less valuable than he believes, but that is not the point. The great thing is to make him value an opinion for some quality other than truth, thus introducing an element of dishonesty and make-believe into the heart of what otherwise threatens to become a virtue. By this method thousands of humans have been brought to think that humility means pretty women trying to believe they are ugly and clever men trying to believe they are fools. And since what they are trying to believe may, in some cases, be manifest nonsense, they cannot succeed in believing it and we have the chance of keeping their minds endlessly revolving on themselves in an effort to achieve the impossible. To anticipate the Enemy's strategy, we must consider His aims. The Enemy wants to bring the man to a state of mind in which he could design the best cathedral in the world, and know it to be the best, and rejoice in the, fact, without being any more (or less) or otherwise glad at having done it than he would be if it had been done by another. The Enemy wants him, in the end, to be so free from any bias in his own favour that he can rejoice in his own talents as frankly and gratefully as in his neighbour's talents — or in a sunrise, an elephant, or a waterfall. He wants each man, in the long run, to be able to recognise all creatures (even himself) as glorious and excellent things. He wants to kill their animal self-love as soon as possible; but it is His long-term policy, I fear, to restore to them a new kind of self-love — a charity and gratitude for all selves, including their own; when they have really learned to love their neighbours as themselves, they will be allowed to love themselves as their neighbours."
Chesterton (too many to quote, but here's a chunk from "Heretics"):
"It is only with one aspect of humility that we are here concerned. Humility was largely meant as a restraint upon the arrogance and infinity of the appetite of man. He was always outstripping his mercies with his own newly invented needs. His very power of enjoyment destroyed half his joys. By asking for pleasure, he lost the chief pleasure; for the chief pleasure is surprise. Hence it became evident that if a man would make his world large, he must be always making himself small. Even the haughty visions, the tall cities, and the toppling pinnacles are the creations of humility. Giants that tread down forests like grass are the creations of humility. Towers that vanish upwards above the loneliest star are the creations of humility. For towers are not tall unless we look up at them; and giants are not giants unless they are larger than we. All this gigantesque imagination, which is, perhaps, the mightiest of the pleasures of man, is at bottom entirely humble. It is impossible without humility to enjoy anything — even pride.
But what we suffer from to-day is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction; where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert — himself. The part he doubts is exactly the part he ought not to doubt — the Divine Reason. Huxley preached a humility content to learn from Nature. But the new sceptic is so humble that he doubts if he can even learn. Thus we should be wrong if we had said hastily that there is no humility typical of our time. The truth is that there is a real humility typical of our time; but it so happens that it is practically a more poisonous humility than the wildest prostrations of the ascetic. The old humility was a spur that prevented a man from stopping; not a nail in his boot that prevented him from going on. For the old humility made a man doubtful about his efforts, which might make him work harder. But the new humility makes a man doubtful about his aims, which will make him stop working altogether."
(1/2, because Substack thinks I'm too verbose)
One minor point, rather peripheral to the bulk of the discussion, re:
"You're a Nice Person? Great! But all our righteousness is as filthy rags"
If one wants pro-social actions to continue, it is prudent to de-emphasize likening them to rags. I, personally, do not aspire to righteousness ("neither pure, nor wise, nor good"), but rather to intelligent selfishness and I donate blood. My blood bank (the Red Cross) thanks me. That is sufficent motivation for me. If, instead, they were to liken my donations to rags, I would stop.
Verbose but interesting. I'm halfway through this comment thus far and it really is interesting but (thus far) continues to point to potentially suicidal virtues.
I have achieved the mentioned ideals. All of them. And found that as deeply and truly satisfying they have been, they were so very non-selfish as to provide the precise benefits that thukdam provides - truly divine bliss.... briefly.
The talmud tells a story, a parable really but the best parables (think Old Testament stuff) don't introduce themselves with a disclaimer.
In brief, the rabbis capture the evil inclination and debate whether to execute it or not. As they debate they discover that since the evil inclination has been in custody creatures haven't been fucking.
The story continues but I'm not a storyteller. The point of this segment is plain enough. All's fair in live and war.
After all, every man who gained access to a woman's womb did so despite the fact that this meant some other guy would be bereft of that access. Generally speaking he also failed to spend to have spent years in fasting, meditation and unbiased analysis to determine whether in fact his sperm and company was rhe best this woman could do.
Absolute Pacifists werr weeded out of the gene pool long, long, long ago. And whenever some mutational accident or particularly virulent meme should produce another, nature makes quick shrift of him.
Ditto for doing the nasty, getting a family, and making babies.
All's fair in live and war...
It's possible that ¡Jeb! Bush is an alien (from north of the stratospheric border) and it's possible that some dude named Joshua who really really didn't seem to enjoy his crucifixion 1990 years ago is actually ¡Alive! but odds are pretty equally naaah.
Jesus is dead. And his f'n mother killed him.
Every Jewish Woman should be legally required to read 2 books before she gets custody if her first born: Portnoy's Complaint and The Christian Bible.
Sure, the world 50 years later would have less comedy and tear-jerking tales of righteous sufferers but....well, no buts. I don't care. We're over 2,000 years behind schedule for Jewish men to oppose one or both of their mutilating circumcisions.
Dad cutting off part of a baby's penis on the newborn's 8th day of life is Quite The Thing.
Mom spending the rest of her interminable existence circumcising her child's heart however is even worse.
Booyah.
I think part of the problem here is that humility has been tangled up with selfishness which is a different problem; humility and pride are the pairing. Selfishness and charity are that pairing.
'Should you fuck this woman and have a baby?' is not a problem of humility.
The wrong kind of humility is "always think you are terrible" and "never make a target of yourself" and I *think* that may be what is driving your mother in part; the lesson of Jews in Europe was to emulate Uriah Heep and always be so very 'umble before your betters because prominent Jews tended to make very good targets when the wind changed. So there's the ancestral fear there of standing out, like a nail to be hammered flat. But this is just me speculating.
Ah, if ONLY it was the fat targets who caught the stake.
Nay, t'was the religious. The most humble and righteous.
And you're right not to get caught up in the word humility. When a man puts his penis inside of a fertile woman's netheregions he is saying "I want this. Me! "
He is not pondering "Am I absolutely confident that this is what's best for her? Or that I should be the one to get this poontang, company, and baby rather than that any of my brothers should get to?"
Believe me D, the religion of Mary and golden boy can be found in their original pristine condition to this day.
But only smong people who know nothing about them.
Pretty remarkable stuff actually.
(2/2)
The wrong sort of humility is that exemplified by Dickens' Uriah Heep, who comes from a low station in life and poverty, and has been ground down by society that he *ought* to be humble, because the likes of him are worthless. So he weaponises humility, and takes his natural resentment and melds it with spite and makes a horrible mockery of what a 'humble' person should be, in order to dig the knife in between the ribs of the proud and the superior.
"‘I am not fond of professions of humility,’ I returned, ‘or professions of anything else.’
‘There now!’ said Uriah, looking flabby and lead-coloured in the moonlight. ‘Didn’t I know it! But how little you think of the rightful 'umbleness of a person in my station, Master Copperfield! Father and me was both brought up at a foundation school for boys; and mother, she was likewise brought up at a public, sort of charitable, establishment. They taught us all a deal of 'umbleness — not much else that I know of, from morning to night. We was to be 'umble to this person, and 'umble to that; and to pull off our caps here, and to make bows there; and always to know our place, and abase ourselves before our betters. And we had such a lot of betters! Father got the monitor-medal by being 'umble. So did I. Father got made a sexton by being 'umble. He had the character, among the gentlefolks, of being such a well-behaved man, that they were determined to bring him in. “Be 'umble, Uriah,” says father to me, “and you’ll get on. It was what was always being dinned into you and me at school; it’s what goes down best. Be 'umble,” says father, “and you’ll do!” And really it ain’t done bad!’
It was the first time it had ever occurred to me, that this detestable cant of false humility might have originated out of the Heep family. I had seen the harvest, but had never thought of the seed.
‘When I was quite a young boy,’ said Uriah, ‘I got to know what 'umbleness did, and I took to it. I ate 'umble pie with an appetite. I stopped at the 'umble point of my learning, and says I, “Hold hard!” When you offered to teach me Latin, I knew better. “People like to be above you,” says father, “keep yourself down.” I am very 'umble to the present moment, Master Copperfield, but I’ve got a little power!’
And he said all this — I knew, as I saw his face in the moonlight — that I might understand he was resolved to recompense himself by using his power. I had never doubted his meanness, his craft and malice; but I fully comprehended now, for the first time, what a base, unrelenting, and revengeful spirit, must have been engendered by this early, and this long, suppression."
This is tied in with pride, as there is the wrong sort of pride and the right sort of pride. We all know the wrong sort - and indeed folk on here are fond of quoting the pet example of the Dunning-Kruger effect - the vain, cocksure know-it-all who has opinions on everything and thinks they're an instant expert on something they only heard of five minutes ago.
(Damn it, stop holding that mirror up to me!)
Ahem. Well, yes, there's the right kind of pride, too: self-respect, self-esteem. Knowing your true worth. And that is where the balance, or indeed dance, between Humility and Pride comes in - virtue lies in the median way, in between the extremes of Uriah Heep's poisoned and venomous fake humility, and the Luciferian pride.
St Thomas Aquinas on Humility:
https://www.newadvent.org/summa/3161.htm
"Reply to Objection 1. Humility is not set before justice, but before that justice which is coupled with pride, and is no longer a virtue; even so, on the other hand, sin is pardoned through humility: for it is said of the publican (Luke 18:14) that through the merit of his humility "he went down into his house justified." Hence Chrysostom says [De incompr. Nat. Dei, Hom. v]: "Bring me a pair of two-horse chariots: in the one harness pride with justice, in the other sin with humility: and you will see that sin outrunning justice wins not by its own strength, but by that of humility: while you will see the other pair beaten, not by the weakness of justice, but by the weight and size of pride."
And Pride:
https://www.newadvent.org/summa/3162.htm
"Reply to Objection 1. Pride [superbia] may be understood in two ways. First, as overpassing [supergreditur] the rule of reason, and in this sense we say that it is a sin. Secondly, it may simply denominate "super-abundance"; in which sense any super-abundant thing may be called pride: and it is thus that God promises pride as significant of super-abundant good. Hence a gloss of Jerome on the same passage (Isaiah 61:6) says that "there is a good and an evil pride"; or "a sinful pride which God resists, and a pride that denotes the glory which He bestows."
It may also be replied that pride there signifies abundance of those things in which men may take pride."
And then there is the Litany of Humility by Cardinal Merry del Val:
https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/devotions/litany-of-humility-245
There is a certain line of argument employed by Pro-Israeli commenters (elsewhere, not ACX) that goes something like this :
1- Nothing ever excuses the rape and murder of civilians that Hamas did
2- Therefore, we can't really blame the IDF when it bombs Gaza
Which stares Contradiction in the face and then gives him a kiss.
(If **Nothing** can ever justify what Hamas did, not even the amount of murder or rape or pillage which happened to Palestinians from 1948 till October 7th 2023, then, surely, the comparatively tiny amount of murder and rape and pillage that Hamas did in that one day can't ever justify the murder and rape and pillage that the IDF has started in October 8th and that the ground forces amassing on Gaza's perimeter is no doubt planning to finish ?)
Other than
[Implied] 3- Israelis/Jews and Arabs/Muslims should play by different rulebooks because the lives/dignity of the former exceeds those of the latter
, what other implied premises can one append to (1) and (2) to make the argument not contradictory-ish ?
My attempt at this looks something like :
[Implied] 3- Rape and Murder and Pillage are worse when they're done by non-state actors than when they're done by state actors
[3's Justification, good faith] 3-a Because state actors are often better trained, more restrained, and with lots of things to lose if they got too far in the Rape and Murder and Pillage
[3's Justification, bad faith] 3-b Because I have been brain washed into thinking so, there are no meaningful difference in the Rape and Murder and Pillage done by both kinds of actors
[Implied] 4- Hamas is a Jihadi non-state actor that justifies Rape and Murder and Pillage with icky Muslim rhetoric and commits it using icky-looking middle eastern men with overgrown beards
[Implied] 5- Israel is a state actor that justifies Rape and Murder and Pillage with sob stories about the Holocaust, and commits it with an army containing sexy models/conscripts posing on instagram and tiktok
[Implied] 6- Therefore, Israel's RMP is not "really" true RMP, or maybe a less intense style of RMP than the brutal style practiced by Hamas. The RMP mentioned in (1) references only the brutal kind, not the lite kind practiced by Israel.
In other words, a Motte-And-Bailey. (1) and (2) can only hold together if you switch the definition of RMP in the midst, and quietly so.
I don't think anyone on the Israeli side claims rape is justified. I don't know if Hamas does.
The obvious difference between the two cases is that the Israelis at least claim to only kill civilians when they cannot avoid doing so in the process of fighting non-civilians. The Hamas fighters were deliberately killing civilians, as shown in their videos as well as in the instructions their leaders were carrying.
The Hamas fighters were pretty clearly trying to kill or capture as many Israelis as they could. If the Israeli objective was to kill as many Gazans as possible they would kill them all by a siege. I don't know how much water is produced by wells in Gaza but it doesn't feed itself.
> the Israelis at least claim to only kill civilians when they cannot avoid doing so in the process of fighting non-civilians
And the mere claiming of something is enough ? Can every tyrant and aggressor now expect cookies for claiming what their actions are loudly and resoundingly contradict ?
> The Hamas fighters were pretty clearly trying to kill or capture as many Israelis as they could.
Watching the videos of IDF's jets bombing Gaza, I can say the exact same sentence minus the "capture" part.
> If the Israeli objective was to kill as many Gazans as possible they would kill them all by a siege
What is it exactly what they're doing now ?
If, when this is over, most of the Gazans are still alive, will you concede that your view of the conflict was mistaken?
You gave a list of possible justifications for distinguishing the Palestinian raid from the Israeli response, a list that ignored the most obvious difference, the distinction between choosing to kill innocents and being willing to kill innocents in the process of killing not-innocents.
You could argue that the Israelis are lying, that they are deliberately targeting innocents, as your response to my "claim" is presumably intended to imply, but then you have to respond to my point that the Israelis could easily kill many more Palestinians than they do kill, which is evidence that they are not lying. You could argue that earlier acts by Israeli terrorists just before or during the 1948 war were the moral equivalent of the raid, which might be true, but you were specifically talking about the IDF in Gaza.
Deliberately making bad arguments and defending them when you are called on them is demagoguery, not reason.
> If, when this is over, most of the Gazans are still alive, will you concede that your view of the conflict was mistaken?
No. Why would I do that ? After all, most Israelis are still alive, that doesn't prevent people from saying Hamas wants to genocide them.
I'm willing to concede I'm mistaken when I see the breakdown of Israeli bombing victims, how many Hamas vs. Non-Hamas. If the majority or even 40% were Hamas, I'm willing to concede you're right and that the IDF is trying to kill Hamas more than it's trying to kill Palestinian civilians.
Failing that, access to internal communications and plans where air raids that could have killed more Palestinian civilians were discussed and cancelled will convince me.
> a list that ignored the most obvious difference, the distinction between choosing to kill innocents and being willing to kill innocents in the process of killing not-innocents.
I argue that this difference is illusory and performative, and - furthermore - so easy to fake if you have substantial media control and PR department like the Israeli state has.
Unless you can read minds, "Choosing to do X" and "Totally not choosing X, just willing to let it happen in pursuit of Y" are indistinguishable.
> you have to respond to my point that the Israelis could easily kill many more Palestinians than they do kill
Sorry if I didn't, I responded to it so many times in other threads with other people (not saying its your fault).
My short answer is this : They're killing as many as their benefactors will let them. Israel is surrounded by hundreds of millions of Arabs, their oil comes from outside, their tech industry depend on the outside, and of course the jet fighters they kill civilians with are mostly a generous gift from US taxpayers.
Vast majorities of those people that Israel depend on are against murder of Palestinians. Therefore, they can't go too far in their murder of the Palestinians.
This is quite different than saying "Israel doesn't want to kill civilians", the "want" here implies an internal motive, a motive which I claim to be non-existent. It's entirely external, Israel is killing the maximum amount of Palestinians that will not result in their demise.
> Deliberately making bad arguments and defending them when you are called on them is demagoguery, not reason.
Noted. Tell me what you think is a bad argument in my comments, and I will either trace it back to the premises that I believe justifies it or retract it.
Hamas can't kill all the Israelis, so the fact they don't isn't evidence that they don't want to. The Israelis could kill all the Gazans.
You really don't want