1131 Comments

I wrote up my thoughts on Minicircle as a recipient of the therapy, having it turned on, and then turned off (and soon turned on again), and a friend of both Max & the minicircle team who thinks highly of them all: https://x.com/patrissimo/status/1794493623947403750

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I just went through the fiction portion of my library and separated the books I've read from the books I haven't read. I ended up with almost exactly the same number in each category. It turns out I have far more unread books than I expected.

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In 2018, Males were 7.6 times as likely to be murder offenders as females, while blacks were 8.2 times as likely to be murder offenders as nonblacks: https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-2018/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-3.xls

Why, exactly, is it alright for women to be categorically afraid of men, have separate women's spaces, talk about how violent and evil men are, but having any kind of problem with insane rates of violence from black people is completely unacceptable?

Even if most people blacks kill are other blacks, and putting aside the black on white homicide rate is still *higher* than the white on white homicide rate, this fact is the way it is precisely because white people have to go to enormous lengths to avoid being around black people, something which is considered horribly, unforgivably racist. If women were willing/able to segregate themselves from men to the same extents whites are from blacks, then we should expect that male of female violence to be dramatically lower.

And no, for the umpteenth time, economic factors do not explain black violence, nor are these factors entirely or even mostly exogenous in the first place.

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Of course, women are so catastrophically bad at statistics that they think bears are safer than men, so obviously none of this is based on any kind of statistical understanding whatsoever.

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More on the protest drama on US campuses. Both pro- and anti-demonstration parents — as well as parents who've paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for their kid's education — are all hopping mad at college presidents and administrators (paywalled WSJ article below) You'd think that universities would have developed a playbook for demonstrations by now. I thought they were pretty common, but Kevin Drum says otherwise — and the cops are usually called when the demonstrators occupy buildings (second link)...

https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/college-protests-parents-angry-e93bb2ef?mod=hp_lead_pos7

https://jabberwocking.com/when-you-occupy-university-buildings-cops-are-called/

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A major issue here is that right now society doesn't have a broadly accepted -- or, at least, accepted by the elites and others with actual power -- way of dealing with things that are antisocial but also technically "non-violent."

We have a weird thing going on in too many places where people believe you can do literally anything to someone as long as you don't physically touch them with your hands first. You can menace them, threaten them, throw things at them, set up a tent or even build fortifications, invade their homes, confiscate or destroy their property, scream at them, use bright lights and loud sounds 24/7, block entry to public spaces, form a human wall to push them out, trap them in a location for hours, the list goes on... as long as you don't touch them first (or, rather, you aren't seen to touch them first, which is different in subtle but important ways.)

This can in theory be claimed to be "non-violent" in so far as no one is actually throwing a punch, but a society where this happens on the regular cannot function, and it can't be dealt with except through either surrender, which also effectively means society cannot function as it puts everyone's existence at the whims of whoever can whip up a mob with nothing better to do... or through violence.

The correct answer, of course, is that democratically accountable agents of the state should responsibly use violence to immediately disperse and punish those who do this sort of thing. The bad answer is for an angry counter-mob to irresponsibly use violence, as seen at UCLA. The unacceptable answer is what's going on right now.

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This comment applies just as well in the context of homeless encampments as it does in the context of protestor encampments.

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I think Kevin Drum's examples are almost irrelevant, and that the primary point of comparison is going to be BLM from 4 years ago. Not just because these are young people with no perspective, but also because we all seem to be losing our collective memory and developing the attention span of gnats.

On the left, I think it's a matter of not having the administration look the other way and treat them with kid gloves, the way that happened 4 years ago. They expected to play by the same unwritten set of rules as back then, and are squawking loudly as they find out that they no longer have privilege. Alternatively, compare to the paradigmatic case of an upper-middle class black man from a good neighborhood who never had a problem with police, but then gets pulled over while driving through a bad neighborhood, and is treated like a resident of the bad neighborhood. "Galvanizing" might be the word. It's going to be interesting to see whether this generation of leftists will develop a distrust of "official" power structures, now that they've viscerally experienced how their interests are not always the same.

On the right, I think a lot of people had been used to never succeeding, and are now emboldened to push for everything that they saw the other side get. Sadly, it seems that a bunch of them are abandoning free speech principles and embracing "who, whom", but that appears to be the normal state of humanity. :-(

And I think the universities are stuck, because they alternate between claiming to enforce the rules as written (as when testifying before Congress) and relaxing the rules for their favorite sides, and now they're being forced to make choices while under the public eye. I'm surprised that more aren't acting like Northwestern, or simply tolerating the protests as is ("as are"?). That probably means my mental model of university administrators was inaccurate.

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>On the left, I think it's a matter of not having the administration look the other way and treat them with kid gloves, the way that happened 4 years ago. They expected to play by the same unwritten set of rules as back then, and are squawking loudly as they find out that they no longer have privilege.

It all boils down to the fact that hating white people is cool and doesn't threaten people in power, but hating jews does

No different with Kanye, there's virtually nothing he couldn't have gotten away with saying about white people, but once he started talking about jews it was game over

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Oh my. Nvidia should start naming its chips after tulip varietals. "In a presentation earlier this month, the venture-capital firm Sequoia estimated that the AI industry spent $50 billion on the Nvidia chips used to train advanced AI models last year, but brought in only $3 billion in revenue." *

* From behind the WSJ paywall: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/a-peter-thiel-backed-ai-startup-cognition-labs-seeks-2-billion-valuation-998fa39d

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Could you use a little highly intellectual distraction from one thing or another?

If my reaction is typical, it's impossible to think about anything else while trying to understand the section about Hegel.

Why Marx was not a cabalist.

The Communist Manifesto considered as classic Gothic fiction. Vampires and specters and all that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n48uX6jjGlY&ab_channel=ESOTERICA

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I just watched that. Brilliant!

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Anyone else enjoying the new Velma? Can't wait for season 3!

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Is this a joke?

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No one ever jokes on the internet, Hammond.

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OC ACXLW Sat May 4 The Hipster Effect and AI Self-Alignment

Hello Folks! We are excited to announce the 64th Orange County ACX/LW meetup, happening this Saturday and most Saturdays after that.

Host: Michael Michalchik Email: michaelmichalchik@gmail.com (For questions or requests) Location: 1970 Port Laurent Place (949) 375-2045 Date: Saturday, May 4 2024 Time 2 pm

Conversation Starters:

The Hipster Effect: Why Anti-Conformists Always End Up Looking the Same: A study examines how the desire to be different can paradoxically lead to conformity among anti-conformists. Using a mathematical model, the author shows how, under certain conditions, efforts by individuals to oppose the mainstream result in a synchronized and homogeneous population.

Text and audio link: https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/02/28/136854/the-hipster-effect-why-anti-conformists-always-end-up-looking-the-same/ Full paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1410.8001

Questions for discussion: a) How might the "hipster effect" described in the paper relate to other examples of emergent synchronization in complex systems, such as financial markets or neuronal networks? b) The paper discusses several conditions that give rise to the hipster effect, such as a preference for non-conformity and the presence of delay in recognizing trends. What other social or psychological factors might contribute to this phenomenon? c) Can insights from the study of the hipster effect be applied to understanding political polarization and the dynamics of contrarian movements? What strategies might help maintain diversity of opinions in these contexts?

Self-Regulating Artificial General Intelligence: This paper examines the "paperclip apocalypse" concern that a superintelligent AI, even one with a seemingly innocuous goal, could pose an existential threat by monopolizing resources. The author argues that, under certain assumptions about recursive self-improvement, an AI may refrain from enabling the development of more powerful "offspring" AIs to avoid the same control problem that humans face with AIs.

Text link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1k0wulhBo0syW9n-qNqcFE_gYgh_L54TH/view?usp=sharing

Questions for discussion: a) The paper assumes that an AI can only self-improve by employing specialist "offspring" AIs with targeted goals. How plausible is this assumption, and what implications would a more integrated model of AI self-improvement have for the argument? b) The author suggests that the key to controlling potential negative impacts of AI is to limit their ability to appropriate resources. What legal, economic, or technical mechanisms might be used to enforce such limitations? c) If advanced AIs are indeed "self-regulating" in the manner described, what are the potential benefits and risks of relying on this property as a safety measure? How might we verify and validate an AI's self-regulation capabilities?

Walk & Talk: We usually have an hour-long walk and talk after the meeting starts. Two mini-malls with hot takeout food are readily accessible nearby. Search for Gelson's or Pavilions in the zip code 92660. Share a Surprise: Tell the group about something unexpected that changed your perspective on the universe. Future Direction Ideas: Contribute ideas for the group's future direction, including topics, meeting types, activities, etc.

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I haven't posted a high-ranking Israeli government member declaring genocidal things for a long time, but quite amusingly, just right after I see a bunch of comments down thread arguing that what Israel is doing and will continue to do in Gaza is totally not a Genocide, I open Haaretz [1] and see this:

> Israel's Far-right Minister Smotrich Calls for 'No Half Measures' in the 'Total Annihilation' of Gaza

Mmm, interesting. Smotrich is the Finance Minister of Israel, and a member of the security cabinet that have formed after October 7th to oversee the war. His latest news is bitching about Moody's downgrading Israel's rating in early April, and before that attending a conference about resettling Gaza in late January.

Let's see what he has to say, perhaps those who say what's happening in Gaza is an early-stage Genocide will all the usual writing on the walls are really silly and hysterical and nothing of that sort is ever happening.

> Bezalel Smotrich called on Monday for annihilating Israel's enemies, saying "There are no half measures. [The Gazan cities of] Rafah, Deir al-Balah, Nuseirat – total annihilation. 'You will blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven' – there's no place under heaven."

Huh.

[1] https://archive.ph/2CeDm

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Congratulations, you've just proven that Hamas is a genocidal organization!

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Yeah, this guy seems like a genocidal monster.

I will point out, though, that based on the article, he is so genocidal that he criticizes Netanyahu for not being genocidal enough. His opinions are not representative of even the government of the state of Israel. I don't know much about Israeli internal politics, but I did know that one of the big criticisms of Netanyahu was that he was willing to be in a coalition government with extremists who had views so abhorrent that other Israeli politicians considered them to be anathema. I can only hope that Smotrich is one of the people they meant.

He's the sort of person I don't trust Wikipedia to be unbiased about, but if you have an uncontrollable urge to stoke your rage for a few minutes, take a look, I think there's some worse stuff there:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bezalel_Smotrich

I can condemn Netanyahu for associating with Smotrich, but I don't think Smotrich's public statements are an accurate description of Israeli policy toward Gaza. (Although it's bad enough reading about some of the policies that Smotrich does control.)

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Well, there are always extremists to the extreme side of the extremists. I bet that there were those in a certain Austrian Painter's government who were also mad that Jews were being forced to labor in camps and given food first before the chambers, and not dealt with right away using the Sturmgewehr 44. Those people didn't represent Austrian Painter's government, and that's entirely irrelevant.

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Right. Looking at the views of an extreme member of a group is not a shortcut to determining what the group's overall policy is. It doesn't matter if it's extreme in a way that we don't like, or extreme in a way that we do like.

Especially when it comes to things like coalition governments. If you remember the UK's Tory/LibDem coalition government from 2010-2015, it wouldn't be accurate to look at the most "extreme" Liberal Democrat, and judge the coalition's overall policy based on that.

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I'm honestly just surprised that more pro-Israel people haven't switched their rhetoric from "this isn't genocide" to "genocide is justifiable in this scenario." The latter would at least be immune to people pointing out facts to the contrary.

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Huh, sounds pretty bad for the Palestinians if that's the case. Don't you think Hamas should surrender and save those lives, then?

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Facts being one guy who is mad that the government isn't doing what he wants?

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Ah, the glories of the modern world where AI makes our lives so much easier, by automating our work it reduces workload, makes us more productive, and means we get more money *and* leisure time!

If you're an email scammer, that is 😀

An old, rarely-used,. and we *know* it's compromised work email address got the usual "pay up or else" blackmail attempt (as an aside, if I was ever tempted to use Bitcoin or other crypto, the fact that it's mainly touted by these scummy little extortionists would put me right off; goodness, whyever do ordinary people think Decentralised Blockchain Libertarian No Mo' Fiat is criminal trash?)

But this one is keeping up with the times:

"You've heard that the Internet is a dangerous place, infested with malicious links and hackers like me?

Of course, you've heard, but what's the point in it if you are so dismissive of your internet security and don't care what websites you visit?

Times have changed. You read about AI, judging by your browser history, and still didn't understand anything?

Technologies have stepped far forward, and now hackers like me use artificial intelligence.

Thanks to it, I can get not only access to your webcam and record your fun with highly controversial video (I recorded it also, but now that's not the point), but also to all your devices and not only yours.

And I saved a special sauce for this dish. I went further and sent malicious links to all your contacts from your account."

Needless to say, nobody was engaging in naughty no-no fun with this account, but that of course doesn't stop these criminals. Though I almost admire the sheer brass neck of the sign-off:

"Hasta La Vista, Baby!

P.S. Almost forgot. Finally learn what incognito tabs, two-factor authentication, and the TOR browser are, for God's sake!"

*This* is the real safety risk AI proponents should be worrying about - that it gets the same tainted reputation as crypto due to scammers and scandals like this.

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When AI starts pulling vast amounts of wealth from the ether, in a way the blockchain can't, I think this type of comment will start to look quite anemic.

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When magic AI performs the magic trick of producing magic money from nowhere, and I'll get pie in the sky when I die.

Some people are going to get rich out of AI, the guys sitting on the boards of the companies getting places on the new AI advisory committee for the US government. Not you and not me, though.

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I kinda think Marx was about 150 years too early. Assuming AGI doesn't kill us all, collective ownership seems like the only ethical way to handle a magic wealth fountain.

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Someone still has to decide who gets to tell the AI to build them a beautiful Malibu beach house or San Francisco luxury apartment, and tell the AI killbots to keep the hoi polloi out. All the nice dachas in the old Soviet Union, and their North Korean equivalents today, are "collectively owned", but some people are more collective than others.

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Yes, it's a problem. Humanity has a bad track-record of deciding how to make collective decisions. The market can't handle this. And turning the decisions over to the AIs brings in another set of risks.

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Ethics and making money have little to do with one another. Everyone is jumping aboard the gravy train as early as they can (see Sam Altman) because whoever gets there first and gets established as "you license your AI from this company" is going to be the one with their mouth to the spigot of the money fountain. They all know it, that's why principles are going out the window in the pursuit of "Us, pick us! Us first!"

Collective ownership can go whistle for itself, it's what makes the shareholders (who are often large institutions so they have the power) happy. See recent story about our telecoms provider Eir (long story, they used to be government owned way back but have been privatised and sold on several times since):

https://www.rte.ie/news/business/2024/0420/1444575-what-companies-can-learn-from-customer-complaints/

"The first thing they need to do, according to Michael Killeen of the CX Academy, is stop focusing on shareholders' needs over customer needs.

"When we look at the bottom five performing brands in our CX table, they are brands known to be fixated with shareholder value, while the top ten companies are genuinely committed to helping their customers every day."

He believes a customer focused approach is the reason why credit unions have come first in the CX report each year over the past 9 years.

The second thing the telco sector needs to do is to focus on existing customers rather than continually chasing more new customers.

"Unfortunately, this is linked to the shareholder issue, as the drive for new customer is partially driven by stock exchange valuations that place a higher value on annual figures for new customer acquisition rather than the longevity of existing customers who stay with brands over the years," Mr Killeen said."

Stock market that sets your share price, which is how your company lives or dies, doesn't care that you are lovey-dovey with your workers and collective ownership and worker representation on the board; it cares about "line go up?". If you're giving away shares of the profit to everyone, why would an investor sink their capital into your company? Return the value only to the shareholders, and maximise that value, and you get investment. More investment, more growth. More growth, the economy thrives.

Not *you* the ordinary guy, necessarily, the *economy*. That's the measure.

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Conveniently for me, I can maintain an ironic detachment, because I'm a Doomer. :-)

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I think the whole AI bubble is going to burst soon. We won't have to worry about the extinction of humanity. Instead, we're going to see the bottom drop of NVIDIA and the companies in its tech ecosystem similar to the Dot Com bust.

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I don't believe in post-scarcity (I mean, we're already living in post-scarcity if you like to look at it, since the mantra about 'ordinary people are richer than ever and can live better than a mediaeval emperor' often gets trotted out) or dystopia or utopia.

Basically "more of the same, only in new configurations".

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Are average people richer than they were 250 years ago? If so, why?

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https://cepr.shorthandstories.com/history-poverty/

NB. I don't know how they calculated the GINI coefficient of pre-industrialized societies. Maybe they explain somewhere in the report, though. I just skimmed it.

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In terms of PPP, heck yes, there's no way I could buy a smartphone even 50 years ago, not with all the wealth in the world. Not that it would have been useful without cell networks and the Internet, but the level of functionality was barely even imaginable.

Globally, averaging all 8 billion of us now, vs. the ~0.8 billion around 1774, probably, maybe? It depends a lot on China and India.

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I guess I'm a bit late for this Open Thread, but let's try anyway.

Is there anyone expert on nuclear energy who has an opinion on this company https://www.newcleo.com/ and their reactor design? As a scientist working in another field the website seems a bit too oriented towards marketing than explaining the science...

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Here is a brief overview of the LFR design (which they are using) along with some links to papers on the topic: https://www.gen-4.org/gif/jcms/c_9358/lfr

Their plan is to have a reactor ready for sale in 2031, and I suspect we just have to wait and see whether they can overcome the engineering challenges required to make that happen. They plan to generate the fuel used by their reactors, which is another project that could run into problems.

In addition to the technical issues, there are also political challenges to deploying nuclear power. They need to convince regulators that their product is safe, and then convince power companies to buy in quantity in order to achieve the economies of scale they predict will occur. Perhaps this won’t be much of an issue; by 2031 concerns about global warming may overwhelm the concerns that the public has traditionally had about nuclear power.

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If there's anything good that has come of the Tentefada -- and there hasn't -- it's that the insincerity of the past decade's calls for safe spaces and inclusion and #bekind have been made obvious enough that even the densest, most inattentive onlooker can see it. A year or two ago, someone using a racial slur when they were fifteen or wearing an insensitive Halloween costume or committing any other kind of "microaggression" was grounds to be kicked out of the university; today, those exact same universities grovel and cower before masked mobs of students and faculty chanting racist and genocidal slogans, occupying buildings, and fighting with police.

From day one social justice was never anything but who, whom, but now it's out in the open and regardless of their feelings on the actual Israeli-Palestinian conflict it's impossible for a good-faith observer to deny it any longer.

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1- "Tentifada" has to be the cringiest and most unimaginative portmanteau I have ever heard of for a long time.

2- Which multiple of 100 is the index of this instance when the American progressive camp has done something that violates the most obvious interpretation of their stated principles, and people against them then naively jumped up and down and said "Ah huh!1!1! I have proven that your principles are set-theoretically inconsistent, the God of Logic will now send his prophets Euclid and Godel to torture you for an eternity in Contradiction Hell !1!1!", but actually nothing happened, because in actual reality people don't give a shit about logic, and their graph of beliefs contains metric tons of inconsistencies from the roots to the leaves that still manage to co-exist?

3- To notice how truly universal and widespread (2) is, observe how countless parties whining about "FrEe SpEeCh" as a cover for their bitterness about losing the culture war suddenly find it so morally satisfactory that people voicing opinions they don't like have their names published on a giant van-mounted-screen list, or jubilant that people are being fired from their jobs because they posted a tweet or an Instagram post. The long list is left as an exercise for the reader to compile, but 2 very prominent list elements are Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro.

4- No instance of students fighting with police or security were ever reported since the moral panic about the university encampments began.

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>To notice how truly universal and widespread (2) is, observe how countless parties whining about "FrEe SpEeCh" as a cover for their bitterness about losing the culture war

They're "losing the culture war" in the sense that governments and their cronies in academia and corporations have conspired to silence dissent, not because everyone was convinced that all this woke nonsense is correct - they weren't, most hate these college communists and their insane beliefs.

Also, gloating about "winning the culture war" with the help of the most powerful institutions in the country, and then hysterically crying the instant these institutions gently slap you down for stepping out of line is absolute pathetic.

>find it so morally satisfactory that people voicing opinions they don't like have their names published on a giant van-mounted-screen list, or jubilant that people are being fired from their jobs because they posted a tweet or an Instagram post.

Why the fuck shouldn't they?

The left never condemned this.

This wasn't some thing that happened in the past and everyone moved on for and condemned.

This tactics were never stopped, they were never disowned.

The people at these tent protests are bloodthirsty communists who would happily kill anyone who disagrees with them if they could get away with it, and they sure as hell would have no problem destroying their livelihoods.

Why the fuck shouldn't they fight fire with fire to an unrepentant leftist hoard?

There's no inconsistency because the left never agreed to stop doing this, so the right have no obligation to stop it.

>The long list is left as an exercise for the reader to compile, but 2 very prominent list elements are Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro.

For fuck's sake! These are people who literally cannot walk onto elite university campuses without the risk of them and their followers being assaulted, and whom these leftist dorks will do anything to stop from being allowed to give a single speech.

Why shouldn't these men revel in their enemies facing 1% of this themselves (for actually, in many cases, breaking the law and not merely holding a speech)?

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> in the sense that governments and their cronies in academia and corporations have conspired to silence dissent

Not to mention the Illuminati and their mind-control rays!

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Would you prefer "Mein Camp"?

But snark aside you're right, it's not a magic button that ends the culture war. People who have invested their whole being in this somehow being gentle, non-racist, and non-violent, like Black Lives Matter supporters, will ride it out to the bitter end even if it ends in deaths CHAZ-style. But this has all played out in real time, all the evidence is archived, and there are a lot of newly embittered people (and self-interested people, of course) with the motivation to use it; it's impossible to hide it and it will be thrown back in the faces of anyone who uses the word "microaggression" from now until the end of time.

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I thought "Tentifada" was funny, but I really laughed at "Mein Camp."

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I would prefer "Moral Panic", not as witty and original as Godwin's Law applications, I admit, but I prefer it because that's what it is. A very silly and shallow and embarrassing moral panic over a bunch of kids misbehaving.

Instead of taking this as a launch point from which to explore how universities that pink wash themselves naked in June and blabber incessantly about Affirmative Action and Inclusion invest in states being tried in the ICJ on charges of genocide, instead of noting the absurdity of a "University" even having "investments" and business-like assets and being led by half-CEO-half-bureaucrat creatures, most approaching this from the Pro-Israel perspective have consistently looked at it in the most shallow and twitter-worthy way possible. "Oh My Gooosh look, the University's president merely called the police on her students, this fucking antisemite is too much of a pussy to properly signal for the IDF to come bomb the lawn like any self-respecting university president would do in her place. LOOK AT WHAT OUTGROUP DOES."

Which is funny: from my point of view, it's the Jedi who are evil. Colombia and Co. administration are so **Pro-Israel** that they're willing to sit and play with themselves for 3 weeks and counting - every moment a PR nightmare for them and for their university, and a chance for the Pro-Israel puppies in the Congress to pounce - just so that they don't have to pledge to never support Israel in public right now then very quietly do it again anyway when the war is over and those students start 9-to-5 jobs and no longer have the time to protest. They can have everything, but they're not willing to be seen saying the ultimate heresy: that BDS is an acceptable and takeable position, that it's firmly in the current overtone window. So they will rather leave their half-mature late teenager students eat each other and mutter non-committal grunts about nothing in particular than actually responding to what their Pro-Palestinian students are protesting about, which is nothing more and nothing less than investment in Israel, which is how much again as a percentage against the university's actual bottom line? Unclear, they are not fans of transparency.

This had a chance to be good, and the stupidity of everyone involved made it shit. Why am I not surprised.

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I gotta say that these students are doing a fantastic job distracting our national media from the humanitarian crisis in Gaza by grabbing all the headlines. Granted our national media is like a bunch of five-year-olds chasing a soccer ball, but what reporter worth their salt wants to risk their skin in Gaza when they can hang out in the University quad and interview passionate undergrads? ("Let me get your number, so I can follow up if I have any questions, and maybe we can go clubbing after the teargas settles?")

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Why should anyone here care about what a bunch of vicious, bloodthirsty anti-white communists have to say about anything? You want to fucking sit here and morally lecture me while hating me for my race, religion and sex, and you expect me to care?

I didn't previously care about this conflict, but these white hating scumbags actually make me sad the total is only 35,000 - so much more work to be done.

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Wait. I thought the vicious, bloodthirsty anti-white communists were the woke university administrators. But now you say they're the protestors? I guess I'm confused about who you're hating on.

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Just to make sure I'm understanding your comment properly, you're upset the Palestinian casualties have not been higher, and you're hoping the Israelis will kill as many Palestinians as possible because that might upset pro-Palestinian protestors in the U.S.?

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Or, rather than get into a massive years-long political and legal fight with hostile governments and donors over a war in a distant foreign land that's been going on since Joe Biden was in kindergarten, they could just expel and/or fire the troublemakers. People are lined up around the block to apply to these universities and they're lined up around the block five times for jobs there, and likely everyone in those lines would be more pleasant and productive to have around than the ones currently unslinging "intifada" banners from occupied buildings.

As a plus, this would also benefit _your_ point of view because it would no longer be primarily associated in the public mind with widely despised weirdos, lunatics, and foreign agitators.

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Excellently phrased. Agree 100%.

I too am glad that this fact--that every single moral principle espoused by the woke left comes with an implied (and entirely conscious) "only when it personally benefits us"--has been made so blindingly obvious that no one will ever be able to deny it again.

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Berliner pulled the curtain back on the Wizard when he outed National Public Radio regarding inclusion and diversity. When self-proclaimed 'progressives' declare 'diversity', their openness only extends to those who look and think exactly like they do.

We haven't seen such a breathless embrace of conformity since the early 1950s (although the San Francisco cliche of a headband with a matching sash around a man's waist came close in 1966).

I doubt an analysis of Public Broadcasting Service would yield a more broad-minded result. Gwen Ifill would be shocked and disappointed, and would likely agree with Bill Maher.

After their promotion of gender ideology and a whole panoply of woke nonsense, we shouldn't be surprised that the new badge of virtue among regressive progressives is Palestinian Hamas's terrorism.

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Ah Gwen Ifill, I miss her. She died much too young.

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She was an old-school pro. I doubt she'd be pleased with the current narrow-mindedness of public media.

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Or, alternately, bad things are bad and good things are good; and you are imagining racism and genocide that doesn't exist to paper over the current existing racism and genocide?

I mean, it's bad that hammas killed a bunch of randos in Israel, but it's at least 30-ish times worse (at the current count) when Israel kills a bunch more in Palestine.

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>it's bad that hammas killed a bunch of randos in Israel, but it's at least 30-ish times worse (at the current count) when Israel kills a bunch more in Palestine

The most bizarre thing about all this discourse is how many people think "it's sometimes acceptable to fight a defensive war, but you are morally obligated to lose" is a compelling argument.

"We're not saying you have to lose, just that you should do less damage than the other side does to you" -- right, that's what the word "lose" means.

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George Floyd's death was the end of the world to these pro-palestine people, but somehow 5,000 white people being murdered by black people in the US over the past decade isn't even worth talking about (well, actually, I know first hand that many of these pro-palestine scumbags think its a GOOD thing).

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I'm not sure where you're getting that factoid from, but according to the USDoJ's 2022 criminal victimization report (Table 13), 56% of the violent crimes perpetrated on whites were by whites, and only 14% were by blacks. On the flip side, 60% percent of the violent crimes perpetrated on blacks were by blacks, and 13% by whites.

https://bjs.ojp.gov/document/cv22.pdf

When it comes to homicides, the last data I can find is this report from 2018.

80.7% of the murders of white people were committed by whites, while 15.5% of the murders of white people were committed by blacks. On the flip side, 88.9% of the reported murders of black people were committed by blacks and 8% by whites.

This supports my personal belief that I'm in more danger as a white person by being around white people than I am around black people. If I were black, it would be the other way around.

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-2018/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-6.xls

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>I'm not sure where you're getting that factoid from, but according to the USDoJ's 2022 criminal victimization report (Table 13), 56% of the violent crimes perpetrated on whites were by whites, and only 14% were by blacks.

Hey, did you stop and think about the fact that it's called BLACK LIVES MATTER, which means the entire premise is faulty because almost all black murder victims were killed by black people?

The left ONLY cares about black people being killed when its white people doing the killing, which means all your statistics of who kills who are completely irrelevant

If black people and their communist allies were free to riot across the country because one of one black guy being killed by the outgroup, why shouldn't white people riot on a daily basis over the vastly bigger issue of black on white violence?

Also, YOU COMPLETELY IGNORED HISPANICS

At least 803 of those white murders were committed by hispanics, which get counted as 'white' for their race. So taking that away, only 56% of of whites were murdered by whites, compared with 15.5% of blacks. Which means black on white homicide is more common per capita than white on white homicide!

And then of course, there's 1,019, many of whom were almost certainly not white but counted as white, meaning the true value for % white offender is even lower still!

And if you want to claim that hispanics are white, this is what passes as "white" as far as the government is concerned: https://images.dailycaller.com/image/width=960,height=411,fit=cover,f=auto/https://cdn01.dailycaller.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Screen-Shot-2016-07-13-at-10.29.14-AM-1-e1468421112806.jpg

Looking at the 2019 data, non-hispanic white % was 56% again but black had risen to 17%, so even more overrepresented than in 2018.

So you're essentially wrong about your entire point.

>This supports my personal belief that I'm in more danger as a white person by being around white people than I am around black people. If I were black, it would be the other way around.

How the hell have you made it this far in life without encountering the concept of PER CAPITA?

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I didn't bring Hispanics into the mix — nor Asians and Pacific Islanders — because I didn't want to muddy the waters. But you seem to have the same irrational fear of hispanics as you do blacks. But let me get this straight. You say Hispanics from Spain are not white? What about Italians and Greeks? They've all got relatively the same skin tones.

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Oopsie. I see you're banned. Never mind.

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See also white people killed by police under dubious circumstances. It's inconvenient to think of that as indicating a problem.

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Most of these types of people think 'per capita' is some sort of racist conspiracy to make black people look more violent - this quickly disappears when you point out that more white people in total are killed by the police than black people.

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>I mean, it's bad that hammas killed a bunch of randos in Israel, but it's at least 30-ish times worse (at the current count) when Israel kills a bunch more in Palestine.

Being weak and stupid doesn't give you the right to not face consequences for your actions. Hamas would butcher every last Israeli if given the chance - the domination of gaza by the israelis has nothing to do with hamas showing restraint.

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Or maybe complex things are not simple.

Hamas invaded Israel and killed ~1200 random people there, violating most rules of war in acts of horrific barbarism.

This is an obvious act of war and gives Israel the right to fight back by both international law and the moral standards agreed to by almost everyone.

When you fight a war against an enemy hiding among a civilian population in cities, many civilians will inevitably die. This one of many unfortunate realities of war.

Last I heard numbers Hamas claimed 31k dead and Israel claimed to have killed 13k Hamas soldiers. Taken at face value, that is a normal outcome of urban warfare.

If Israel was conducting a genocide, they could kill most of the 2 million Gazans in an afternoon. This is a war, not a genocide.

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> This is a war, not a genocide.

Uh huh, maybe you would be interested in tracking down Raz Segal [1], the Israeli professor of Holocaust and Genocide studies, and telling him the difference between war and genocide, he seems to not have gotten the memo. I'm sure he would appreciate your expertise.

While you're at it, maybe also shoot Craig Mokhiber [2], the former director of the New York office of the UN high commissioner for human rights, an email. That silly guy, who probably doesn't know the difference between war and genocide, resigned in 28th of October over American and European support for the war, and called it a genocide and explicitly compared it to Rwanda.

[1] A Textbook Case of Genocide, Raz Segal, October 13, 2023: https://jewishcurrents.org/a-textbook-case-of-genocide

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/31/un-official-resigns-israel-hamas-war-palestine-new-york

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>maybe you would be interested in tracking down Raz Segal [1], the Israeli professor of Holocaust and Genocide studies, and telling him the difference between war and genocide, he seems to not have gotten the memo.

I can tell you're being sarcastic, but I don't know why. You're right, he clearly hasn't gotten the memo; everything cited in the article as evidence of "genocide" is completely typical of countries at war.

If you want to argue that the UN standard allows almost all standard wartime tactics to be considered as technically genocidal... well, I see John Schilling already addressed that.

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You, and the UN, can define "genocide" any way you want. But defining it this way means many of us no longer hear "Genocide!" and think that maybe the IDF (or whomever) are a bunch of evil monsters. Instead, we hear "Genocide" and think that, yawn, someone is waging a war and civilians are dying like they always do, and someone else wants to short-circuit my brain with emotional power words so I'll support their side in the war.

"Genocide" used to be a useful word. Now it goes on the same scrap heap as "Nazi", "fascist", "racist", "white supremacist", "rapist", and far too many others. Want me to stop taking you seriously? Just accuse someone of "genocide", or any of those other words. Want to communicate the idea those words *used* to convey? You'll need to spell it out using other, less powerful words.

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> the UN, can define "genocide" any way [they] want

The sheer irony and complete lack of self-awareness of saying this while the treaty that defines the very term Genocide is a UN treaty, and the court that rules whether any particular instance of a suspected genocide is actually a genocide is a UN court.

It's Genocide as long as it's not Israel doing it, otherwise, "Yawn".

> You'll need to spell it out using other, less powerful words.

Ok. I will spell it out for you:

Israel and its governments are collective murderers, a murderer is someone who takes the life of another for gain or for fun. Israel's mass murderers dropped the TNT equivalent of 2 Hiroshima bombs on an area the size of 1/2 of Newyork, according to an estimate done in **November**. The supporters of those mass murderers are cheering on or minimizing this collective crime while pretending that Genocide is a big scary word that is unwarranted to describe what's happening.

Simple enough?

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You say "UN Treaty" and "UN Court" as if those terms convey broad respect and legitimacy. They don't. The UN is slightly more relevant than was the League of Nations, but not by much, and many of it treaties are as dead as Kellog-Briand.

Approximately nobody who matters ever says "I used to believe [X], but the UN says that's wrong so I guess I'm wrong". Or even "...so I guess I better not do it or the UN will come after me". They just cite the UN as an authority when it happens to say something they already agreed with.

It didn't have to be that way. The UN could have limited its membership to democracies, or at least not let the dictatorships have a veto on the Security Council. But here we are.

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"Simple enough?"

No, because neither you nor anyone else in this thread seems to have defined the difference between war and genocide. Please don't link to someone else's polemic, just state what definition you are using that includes the Gaza war and excludes most other wars. Then some logical discussion is actually possible.

On the other hand, even if you have a coherent definition, most people screaming genocide are literally just referencing people being killed. Over and over just a repeat of the current death toll and the word "genocide". So they like John Schilling says, really do just mean war.

This is what I hate more than anything else about the anti-Israel movement. If you think all war is evil then say *that*. Condemn all wars consistently not just the ones Israel does. If you think all ethnic or religious states are evil then say that, and condemn all the Muslim states *at the same time* as condemning the sole Jewish one. And so on and so on. I can't tell if Israel is doing any things that other states aren't. It's certainly possible they are, but close-to-literally every opponent of Israel has absolutely no interest in whether they are or not, and makes entirely clear that the sole relevant consideration for them is whether it's Israel doing it.

("You" in the above paragraph is the generic you.)

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International law isn't defined by the ICJ and ICC either, because international law doesn't exist.

I have absolutely had it with this consensus fiction. Especially one that by definition only ever binds the states that least need to be bound by it--i.e. democracies with some concern for human rights.

When the ICC can declare that Islamic countries persecuting Christians or stoning rape victims to death is illegal, and those things actually *stop*--or if they don't stop, the World Police makes them stop and arrests everyone involved--then we can talk about international law.

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>International law isn’t defined by you. The ICJ and possibly the ICC will decide here.

The ICJ and what fucking army

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Israel is targeting terrorists who use human shields, but looking at opinion polls, a large % of Gazans are supportive of terrorism anyway.

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So hiding behind children means you can do whatever you want and face no consequences?

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Morality and ethics are based upon constellations of factors beyond mere mindless body count. Two deaths are not inherently twice as bad as one death. It depends entirely on who's dying, and why. And that says nothing about the moral culpability of those doing the killing. It is arguably more immoral on the part of the actor for a 17 year old girl to get raped and killed by a bloodthirsty savage than two children getting blown apart by a bomb because they're being used as human shields by the cousin of the aforementioned bloodthirsty savage.

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> Two deaths are not inherently twice as bad as one death.

Classic. You can't make this shit up.

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Regardless of what you think about Israel or Palestine, that quote at least is just obviously correct.

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Wow. Just...wow, are you *actually* saying calling a rapist-murderer a bloodthirsty savage is...unfairly dehumanising? The poor rapist, he's a victim, just like colonised peoples. It's not like he could have, you know, *not* committed the rape. It's not like he's a human being with any control over his violent animal impulses. How "dehumanising" to treat a Gazan like a human being!

I've read and re-read your comment, and the only logical possibilities are that you literally are saying the above, or that you didn't read the comment you're replying to and quoting.

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No, that's not what Peter is saying, Peter's comment is so blindingly obvious that I can find no explanation for not getting it other than bad faith.

What Peter is saying is that the very enlightenment principles that Israel endlessly and tirelessly claims it's representing holds that Collective Punishment is not a thing that civilized people do, a rapist is punished by being caught and tried, then being found guilty, then being given a sentence. He (or she) is not punished by indiscriminately bombing the approximate 365 KM^2 he's living in and extracting a death toll of 10K-15K children, among others.

The ubiquitous "Human Shields" apologia is just a general purpose argument against any military being in the midst of its civilian population at all. I can equally well say that nuking an entire US state is moral and justifiable because the US puts airbases next to population centers, thus using them as human shields. Or, for that matter, Hezbollah bombing of North Israel is entirely justified: After all, there are IDF bases there, so the IDF was using northern Israelis as human shields, therefore any Israeli civilian casualties are entirely on Israel. (I don't believe this, of course, I'm just illustrating the kind of madness you will get if you were completely honest about the "Human Shield" style of thinking".)

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Skull's comment made two claims:

(1) The archetypal October 7th rapist is a bloodthirsty savage.

(2) It is (*arguably*) less immoral to bomb two children in order to kill the cousin of that bloodthirsty savage.

Note only the rapist was called a savage; his "cousin" was not.

My reply to Peter takes no position on (2) because Peter's comment didn't either; he solely objected to the use of the phrase "bloodthirsty savage". The only possible interpretations of this, as far as I can see, are

(A) He didn't properly read Skull's comment, and misread Skull as calling the relatives of the rapist themselves savages.

(B) He is objecting to calling a rapist a savage.

Can you explain the flaw (let alone the bad faith) in this logic, because as far as I can tell it's airtight?

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Hamas are trivially bloodthirsty savages and deserve to be exterminated

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Would you like to engage with the point I was making, or nah?

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Coming back late: Why should I, when I think you weren't making a point other than "Rah rah outgroup bad, 15000 murdered children ok!"

Your world view is so divorced reality as I see it and that can be seen on hundreds of thousands of videos, photos, and reports that I can't really say much to it. I could listen and nod at your post all I want, but then I can go on twitter and watch a video of IDF troops in a van on the west bank pull up to a bus stop, open the door, and point blank shoot a 12 year old and two 15 year olds in the head, then drive away.

I can read the ISREALIE reports on the rapes perpetrated on Palestinian detainees, the majority of which were never punished and never even investigated.

This is the reality of the situation as recognized by Israel and Palestine and anyone with eyes to see.

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So, no, then.

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These groups LITERALY and explicitly endorsed the October 7 attacks

They support acts of war then cry hysterically the moment anyone takes offense to this enough to put them in their place

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Ehhh, I dislike the moral panic about Colombia and other universities as much as the next Pro-Palestinian, and I think the heavy-handed treatment of a bunch of early 20s kids is insane, but English Haaretz (which I trust more than any source on this war) reports people standing next to Pro-Israeli counter-protestors and holding a sign that reads "Al-Qassam's next target" with an arrow pointing to the Pro-Israeli protestors, that is quite clearly, if not outright antisemitic, then beyond the pale and an explicit call for violence that is completely unnecessary. Haaretz also reports chants to the tunes of "Destroy Tel Aviv" or "Bomb Tel Aviv" (which, despite being okay by the same supposed standards of those arguing that the destruction in Gaza is totally okay because "iTs WaR", is not okay by me).

It's hard to evaluate the truth value of claims containing "most" and "a lot" and "few", but I'm assuming that the kind of environment where a protestors feel safe enough to do things this unhinged is overall very readily accepting of antisemitic chants. Yes, the Jewish protestors and Passover chants are very interesting counterexamples, but Naturi Karta are known to attend Holocaust skepticism conferences in Iran, so the presence of Jews in an event accused of antisemitism is not necessarily a smoking gun either way. I advise against throwing "False Flags" into the mix, it makes it harder to really evaluate responsibility and accountability.

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And it's reasonable to assume that there are more of this from where that came from, or is it not?

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I don't think it's enlightening or interesting to point to the Pro-Israel media (especially Times of Israel, who are a Bibi-ist idea of what a centrist is: A slightly less bigoted rightist. Every third comment section on this newspaper is slurs against Arabs and dehumanization of Palestinians), and then say: "See? They're lying. That's why our side are angels".

The Pro-Palestinian side are not angels, and that's entirely normal and ok. Haaretz - a completely different thing than Times of Israel or any newspaper I have seen covering the war - reported what I said. It also reported many other instances of calling for Tel Aviv to be bombed, chants in support of Hamas, support for the Black Saturday, etc....

Even if the particular instance you're skeptical of is actually a false flag, what about all the others? You can't possibly explain away every chant and every instance of people saying dumb outrageous extra-overtone-window things as "Zionists in our midst".

As someone who has real-life contact with dozens of Pro-Palestinians and is being bombarded daily (against my wishes) by Pro-Palestinian TikTok, I do think we have a Pro-Hamas problem, and I think this problem stems from insufficient sympathy for Israelis. We're not going to solve this by pretending it doesn't exist, and not acknowledging it is a form of pretending it doesn't exist.

(The fact that the Pro-Israeli side happens to have a pro-genocide problem is not our concern, we're not pro-Israeli, if anything it hurts Israel's image more, which is good. Not that supporting genocide or Hamas is only bad insofar as it hurts the public image, it's bad in a myriad of ways, but I'm just pointing out that one practical consequence of massive numbers of Pro-Israel advocates being pro genocide is the sheer amount of legitimacy and support that Israel is hemorrhaging since the black 7th, and this is good from a Pro-Palestinian perspective. Now if only we can get our side to abide by the same standards that we ask for.)

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Dude, Columbia protesters literally just hung a giant "intifada" banner from that building they stormed and took over last night. Don't you get tired of simping for people who instantly humiliate you every time you defend them? Reminds me of Republicans defending Trump, frankly.

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I'm as pro-Israeli as it gets--you can search for my comments on this blog--but even I don't think supporting intifada is necessary anti-Semitic. I consider it a morally abhorrent call for terrorism against Israel, not necessarily an attack on Jews.

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Oh for fuck's sake! We wouldn't even be having this conversation if they were all the same race. People Israelis because Israeli equals jewish equals white european colonizers. This is a trivially racial conflict and Hamas (whose actions these protesters have explicitly endorsed) is trivially anti-jew.

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So if Palestinians aren't white, are they Africans or Asians?

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They're arabs. They're trivially not white. The psychotic anti-white left definitely doesn't consider them white, which is the most important thing anyway. The left views them as oppressed brown PEE OH SEE.

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It's the exact same religion-into-nationality trick that Trump used to make his "Muslim Ban" pass Constitutional muster. It doesn't fool anyone; maybe that's the point.

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I'm assuming most of the people killed in the intifada were Jews. This doesn't mean I'm in clear and present danger in Philadelphia, but I think being pro-intifada shows a certain lack of sympathy for Jews.

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Are Jewish people entitled to a 'certain sympathy' that others are not? Genuinely - I'm not condoning the intifadas. But this seems to be an underlying assumption in US-based discourse, and I don't understand it.

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Not a fan of jubilant calls for Intifada, especially coming from people who seem they didn't do the due homework* on what the 1st and the 2nd Intifadas actually entailed as actual matter of facts, but stretching "a certain lack of sympathy for Jews" into "antisemitism" is taking a non-central example of something bad and calling it the word used for the central example (e.g. harassing Jews, calling them slurs). This is the same fallacy that is used when calling fetus selection "Eugenics".

Just imagine if we can freely invert this, then we can say something like: Most people in favor of Israel's war in Gaza are Anti-Arab racists, that doesn't mean the Arabs around them are in a clear and present danger, but it does betray a certain lack of empathy for a nearly 330-million-numerous ethno-linguistic identity to support a war where no less than 20K innocents of them died, not counting the likely double this number dead under the rubble or dying of famine.

* : and the biggest sign of this is the unqualified call for "Intifada" itself, there was a first one and a second one, 2 radically different things and separated by 13 years.

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They endorse Hamas. Hamas is trivially, genocially anti-Semitic. Stop playing dumb.

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Late to the party again, but hopefully a few of you find this. My second Long Forum post is up, summarising the most nourishing and thought provoking long form content that I stumbled upon over the previous month. Lots of biology, economics and culture to feast upon.

https://open.substack.com/pub/haldanebdoyle/p/the-long-forum-april-2024?r=f45kp&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

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Do Jews have Jewish privilege? If not, how are they so much more successful than most other groups in the US?

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Because the unsuccessful Jews die?

Any group can become more successful on average by simply removing all the below-average members. Few groups jump at the chance. Some groups, like the Jews, have no choice.

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OK I'll answer seriously if nobody else will.

Being part of any group has certain advantages and certain disadvantages relative to being a part of certain other groups. There are certainly privileges idiosyncratic to being Jewish, there's also disadvantages.

In terms of why they are more successful than most other groups, a combination of (statistically) higher intelligence and ingroup bias which leads them to receive preferential treatment from other members of the same group.

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"OK I'll answer seriously if nobody else will."

Why would you do such a thing? *Never* feed a troll. Before or after midnight.

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I don't think he's a troll, I think he's intelligently probing the concept of "privilege" as it is used in current-year discourse.

I think it might be done more effectively on another forum where people have less pre-existing skepticism to the "privilege" idea. But he'd be banned immediately on those sorts of forums, so maybe this is the most reasonable forum.

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Do you feel that's broadly true of the many, many provocative throwaway comments he makes on multiple topics on every Open Thread? He's a troll even if, just this once, he made you think about something.

And you don't feed trolls. If they happen to be talking about something you want to discuss, there will be other opportunities to have that discussion.

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I dunno man. I'd never noticed this particular commenter before this thread, so I searched for all his comments in the thread and didn't think they were particularly bad.

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