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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
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User ID: 355
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
15hr ago
· Edited 15hr ago
No, not quite correctly.
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In the 1940s, the area was populated by a handful of Jews and many Arabs. They owned their respective property; Arabs were presumably in the majority, and in particular sufficiently densely distributed that there was no viable contiguous Jewish state that could be founded on Jewish property.
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Thereupon, Jewish colonists with Anglo-American backing started entering the area and killing and expelling the Arabs. Without these actions, the "war of independence" (which was really a unilateral war of aggression) could not have been won. This created a sort of "original sin" that is so recent that it has not met my statute of limitations.
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Israel continues doing the same thing (killing Arabs, expelling them from their land and settling it). Israel is a democracy (as its supporters are enthusiastic to point out). Therefore, sins analogous to the "original sin" are newly committed by the Israeli state with popular consent with regularity.
I'm not as hung up on hospitals as you seem to be, though I would like to point out that Russia is regularly condemned for attacking Ukrainian dual-use infrastructure (including hospitals) that is likewise used by the Ukrainian military and still manages to have produced a far lower number of civilian casualties in Ukraine than Israel has among its enemies. This seems like pretty strong evidence that Israel is unusually happy to cause civilian casualties.
Either way, nothing about this requires even talking about whether they are justified to blow up hospitals or anyone else is! Even ignoring the tens of thousands of skulls, 1-3 alone amounts to an obvious moral case for returning what was stolen. If Israel relinquishes all land that was not owned by Jews in 1940, we can talk about who and what they are allowed to destroy in defense of what's left.
The only relevance that the "original sin" has to evaluating Israel's other actions (including blowing up hospitals) is that Israel habitually defends its ongoing violence and theft against the Arabs with violence committed by Arabs against them. Commonly, notions of legitimate self-defense are understood to only cover unprovoked actions. You can't attack and rob someone, have them strike you in self-defense, and then justify further aggression against them as self-defense against the preceding act.
Of course I have heard the "tax dollars" argument before. But if this were the reason for the ferocious and relentless criticism of Israel out there, one would expect Europeans to be far less anti-Israel than Americans. That's not the case at all. "Tax dollars" is an excuse, not the actual reason.
This argument is nonsensical. There is no reason to assume that the total volume of possible outrage at atrocities committed elsewhere is the same in every country. If the amount of "tax dollars" has any relevance at all, at most you might argue that it determines the relative scale of our responsibility for Israel's actions, compared to other atrocities being committed with our monetary support - and there, I think there might be a good case that even though US support for Israel is in absolute terms much larger than ours, in relative terms there is comparatively more other immoral behaviour that American money pays for. It could be that 30% of all atrocities funded by EU military budget are Israeli and 10% of all atrocities funded by US military budget are, but the latter quantity is still much larger in monetary terms.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
17hr ago
When you criticize or condemn Israel for something, do you criticize or condemn other countries that behave similarly or worse?
I would, but unlike you I don't get the sense that there are currently other countries who are similar or worse. The country was founded less than 100 years ago on land violently stolen from the previous residents; more land continues to be stolen (settlers) on its periphery; the descendants of the same previous residents are stuck on its territory as an underclass with minimal sociopolitical rights and recently being slaughtered by the tens of thousands in a form of collective punishment for the violent resistance that formed among them. The most recent historical comparisons I can think of are South Africa and perhaps Korea/China under Japanese rule during/before WWII, and even in those cases I get the sense that the lot of the native population was actually better (both in terms of the sheer volume of violence they suffered relative to their total number, and in terms of how much of what was their ancestors' they were they denied the use of). Of course there is the objection that they are different in that the invaders had something like a homeland they could straightforwardly retreat to (this is more clear in the case of Japan than in the case of the white peoples of South Africa), but as someone who is not particularly convinced of a general right to an ethnostate I don't find this so compelling.
Do you care about the treatment of the Palestinian Arabs? If so, how do you feel about the treatment of Palestinian Arabs by Arab countries such as Lebanon?
I somewhat do, but to my best knowledge little of my taxes is spent on supporting whatever other Arab countries do to them, so it's easier to see it as an instance of misery that I have no moral responsibility to stop. Also, per the above angle on Israel, I'm not sure I agree that other Arab countries mistreat them as badly.
Are you aware that the UN condemns Israel far more than any other country by far? Do you think that this is because the UN is biased against Israel or do you believe that Israel genuinely is the worst country in the world in terms of activities which merit condemnation?
See above, I get the sense that it is among the worst. If pressed, I think North Korea might cause (in the counterfactual sense of causation: literally deleting the state of North Korea, including every member of leadership, official document and government building, would make things better) more total undeserved misery per capita, but for better or worse one may argue that the UN's magisterium is to regulate the relations between nations/peoples, so that North Koreans torturing their own is none of its business.
It's a harder question whether various colourful events in Africa (like the recent genocides in Sudan) were worse, and in general I would wish for more UN intervention in those; but to do so properly from my point of view requires a memetic rehabilitation of uplift colonialism, where we may accept that if some peoples keep murdering each other at some point we ought to go in, confiscate their children and put them through a few generations of forced schooling in a different cultural background. At the same time, the current memetic landscape unfortunately does not require this; and either way, in practice the UN has a lot more influence on rich first-world countries than places like Sudan, so it makes sense for it to direct its condemnation energy in a direction where it can actually affect outcomes.
Are you upset about US military support of Israel? If so, how do you feel about US military support of South Korea; Japan; Norway; Turkey; or the UK?
Neither of those is doing things as bad as what I said in my first paragraph! I should say that my citizenship is German, so my tax money is being spent on Israel to a significant extent but not so much on the others. But either way, the problem is not military support being intrinsically bad, but rather military support conveying upon the supporter some responsibility for what the military is then used for. Out of this list, if I were a US citizen, I would also prefer to defund Turkey.
When Israel does things such as attacking hospitals, do you understand and accept that this is because terrorist organizations such as Hamas operate out of hospitals?
I understand that this is a motivation, though I'm not convinced that it isn't simultaneously true that they are happy to have a pretext to flatten a hospital because it serves the longer-term goal of having fewer and less healthy Palestinians in the area.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
22hr ago
Do you really believe that opposition to Israel is (always? in the case of OP specifically? most of the time?) motivated by opposition to Jews, or is it a rhetorical device because you like Israel and want to tar opposition to it? I'm particularly interested in the answer because I am situated in the category whose existence you appear to deny (no issue with Jews as an ethnicity or religion, large issue with the state of Israel in its current form - not even as a theoretical concept, as I've previously argued they should have just taken some land from the Germans and founded it on the Baltic coast back in 1945 instead).
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1d ago
I inhaled Uketsu's latest story, Strange Maps, yesterday, and found it pretty fun. For those who don't know, it's a Japanese mystery/vibes youtuber who made the break as an author with stories that can essentially be compared to golden-age murder mystery fiction (contrived "figure the perp, motive and mode" puzzle tales that try to be fair, optimized for puzzle design and vibes rather than for realism and literary value).
His stories are refreshingly free from the last 60 years' worth of epicycles of ironic self-awareness, and while the premise in this installment (protag investigates an uncanny handdrawn map found on his grandmother's body when she committed suicide) feels less fresh than the ones that gave him his break (real estate listings for houses with weird floor plans, which turn out to be key to unravelling sprawling conspiracies involving murder, scams, mental illness and cults), he got much better at staying grounded and inviting suspension of disbelief until the end. It's also great weeaboo bait for the sheer Japaneseness of the set pieces (Corrupt WWII military-industrial dynasties! Isolated fishing villages with creepy idiosyncratic cults! Women on lifelong quests of revenge! Salarymen who get black-out drunk with their scumbag boss!).
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1d ago
The aesthetics ceiling for MMOs is low, but I was fond of Ragnarok Online back in the days.
As for RPGs - Seiken Densetsu 3 is the pinnacle of obligate pixel art, Hyper Light Drifter for a more modern and stylised one, and for 3D Genshin Impact's environmental art team continues being fantastic.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1d ago
This is the sort of troll response, half a step away from the 4chan practice of dismissing arguments with "YWNBAW", that in a better world would land you a ban (but you and I both know that nothing is going to happen when it's a talking point you basically just copied from a mod). I may have a history of arguments with the rightoid set here where they conclude that I am stupid and evil, and I am fully aware of many cases where I have made dumb arguments and dug myself in too deep, but I don't think I have previously been accused of being dishonest. If I wanted to give up on that streak, it would not be over some poster I barely interacted with before making an overwrought claim about crass Redditors.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1d ago
I meant for (1) and (2) to be an exhaustive list of things that I could reasonably believe here: either I believe that he believes his literal claim X (which I argue is wrong), or I believe that he does not believe X and instead believes some claim Y that is not as neat but correct. The first one is (1); the second one is (2) or a close variant, and counts as Motte-and-Bailey. If you don't believe that I sincerely believed either of those things, could you please explain to me what exactly you do believe I believed?
I guess to logically partition the entire space of possibilities, I would have to also consider (3) he does not believe X and instead believes some correct claim Y that is at least as high-status as X and (4) he does not believe X and instead believes in some other wrong claim Y. If it's (3), then I don't understand what is stopping him from retracting X and saying the Y he meant instead, which would solve this whole frustrating discussion at little cost beyond that of an apology for imprecision (surely a good thing for the discussion culture). If it's (4), his case is hardly helped (and either way I would like to know Y).
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1d ago
I was seriously considering just not answering, in order to not humour what looks like a rhetorical strategy of asking tangential questions meant to discredit the other party's character to the audience rather than reacting to a counterpoint that they made to your argument. This would probably not be good for the discussion. So, sure, the answer: yes, I think that is basically true, at least with respect to the Republican party under Trump. Why does this matter? I think it is off topic, and if you insist on invoking the moral qualities of Iranian leaders in defense of your original post I think it starts entering the territory of Motte-and-Bailey argumentation as I argued in my response to @Amadan.
If you are just willing to step back from your original claim and concede that "celebrating the deaths of people they don’t like" is not a vice that is novel or unique to leftists in your political landscape, I will be perfectly satisfied. If you replace it with something more specific, like "leftists have lost me when it has become mainstream among them to cheer for assassination attempts against our own country's elected leader", I would even agree with the sentiment! I just feel the need to stand in defense of the high-decoupling principles that originally made this community work. You shouldn't be able to get away with imprecision that just so happens to make your thesis less defensible but sound better as a rallying cry.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1d ago
No, I genuinely believed that he meant that, or at least was somewhat deliberate (perhaps not the sense of a premeditated plan, but in the sense that he wrote it out and then it sounded like good polemic that it was satisfying to send) in allowing for that interpretation. Every single time some divisive political figure dies, I see comments celebrating it from one tribe, and comments denouncing the aforementioned ones as an unprecedented breach of norms (which is taken to justify retaliatory escalation) from the other. Having restrictive and universalisable norms, such as "don't celebrate the deaths of people you don't like", is higher status than having contrived norms that are suspect of being designed to favour your ingroup, such as "don't celebrate the deaths of politicians unless they are leaders of nations that my ingroup detests and asserts to be evil", so I have a choice here:
(1) either I assume he really meant exactly what he literally said, or
(2) I assume he meant the latter thing, which would not be as profitable for his team but is more defensible, but said the first thing, which is more profitable. This is a textbook motte-and-bailey argument.
Apart from the question of whether accusing other people of motte-and-baileying on the Motte even meets our charity standards, I did actually give him the benefit of doubt and believed it was (1); and here, you are essentially telling me I should instead have helped him in creating the M&B setup and let him retreat to the bailey.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1d ago
See my response to your parallel response.
It's already a lot of unnecessary work to respond to different people making the same objection in minimally different ways in this subthread. I'd be grateful if you could avoid making it worse by being one person making the same objection in minimally different ways multiple times!
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1d ago
Since you asked for clarification: “they don’t like” clearly means “Trump” here, since it was Trump who this person was trying to kill.
I don't think that was unclear to me.
Your original post said, "leftists completely lost me once they started celebrating the deaths of people they don't like". Is it too much of a leap to read an implied "non-leftists are better, since they don't celebrate the deaths of people they don't like" into this? The alternative is that leftists were the last ones who hadn't "lost you", and now everyone has "lost you"/you are done with humanity or at least both major political blocks in the US.
To this, I objected that rightists have already clearly celebrated the deaths of people they don't like, so if "celebrating the deaths of people they don't like" is the criterion you could only reasonably be in the second class (and in that case, does it make sense to make it a partisan thing at all?). This objection is not overturned by any argument that the rightist dislike of their targets is more justified than the leftist dislike of theirs. You did not discuss whether leftist dislike of Trump might be justified, and did not even write anything like "...lost me once they started celebrating the deaths of people they don't like for flimsy reasons".
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1d ago
If anything that's another argument for my position, no? "Democratically elected" is not the distinguishing factor that determines who would celebrate a leader's death/assassination.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1d ago
· Edited 1d ago
Perhaps Trump should close shipping to California and NYC in retaliation, just like heroic Iran-kun.
Perhaps closing shipping of Mexicans to California and NYC counts as sufficiently similar to closing shipping of commodities to Iran, in which case it's not like he hasn't already tried.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1d ago
As I already pointed out responding to a parallel comment in the same vein, the parent poster specifically said "celebrating the deaths of people they don’t like" with no mention of fellow countrymen (and there would have been examples for that case as well). Maybe, if you agree with his general view, you wish he made a different post, but I don't think you can blame me for responding to the post he actually made.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
2d ago
Whatever happens when a young man is raised to internalize the opposite of the women-are-wonderful effect...
What do you expect to happen?
My sense is that there historically were stable societies with all sorts of different attitudes towards women. In very broad terms, around the end of the 19th century, all "white" countries were already fully committed to a proto-version of their present-day attitude to women; East Asian countries were broadly genuinely committed to something close to the opposite (China's selective abortions are just the tip of an iceberg of attitudes); and Arabic and African countries maybe were neutral. (Note I'm trying to analyse the moral attitude to women orthogonally to their sociopolitical rights and privileges: it's entirely possible (and was common) to think of women as wonderful creatures who need to be coddled and managed, like children, and conceivable to think of them as sociopathic parasites who nevertheless have a natural right to hold the reins, which in a way gets closer to the world of a whipped 1960s Japanese salaryman).
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
2d ago
However, it doesn't seem that far-fetched to think of Trump, the Iranian leadership, Obama and the PM of Denmark as more similar to each other in category than any of them is to your neighbour Fred, either.
Iran holds elections. You may dispute whether the criteria that determine who is even allowed to run, or the details of how the elections are executed, are such that they morally qualify as "democratic", but people can and do dispute the same things about the US.
Either way, the parent poster's criterion for being "lost completely" was "celebrating the deaths of people they don't like", not "celebrating the deaths of democratically elected leaders" or "celebrating the deaths of objectively good people" or even "celebrating the deaths of their countrymen" (for the last one, I think the reactions to Floyd could be cited as an example, anyway; even or especially this forum had no shortage of "the world is better off for his death and I'm tired of pretending otherwise" posting).
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
2d ago
hobonichi setup and fountain pen reviews
Funny enough, this describes my SO and probably about half of the girlfriends in my friend bubble (as in women who I know because I was friends with their male partner first). Is stationerycore the meta for Mottizen types to find well-adjusted gfs?
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
2d ago
· Edited 1d ago
The majority of everyone from the political center rightward was celebrating the repeated assassinations of Iranian leadership a month ago too, so I don't think the other camp gets to claim the moral high ground here.
(...and either way, denouncing assassination attempts against anyone whose job significantly involves dealing out death seems rather comical, in the "Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the war room!" way.)
edit: Please stop with the arguments-as-soldiers responses. I shot down a bad argument; just because you agree with the thesis (that leftists are uniquely bad for celebrating assassination attempts on Trump), this is not sufficient grounds to stake your disagreement, unless you can specifically defend the argument (that it is so because they started celebrating the deaths of "people they don't like").
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
2d ago
This seems like a relatively extraordinary claim, so you should at least present some ordinary evidence like an instance of this claim being made by a believer in some relatively authoritative critical theory venue.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
2d ago
By your logic, the sex recession among men is EVEN WORSE THAN IT SEEMS from this data.
That does not follow. For example, there could be an overreporting recession, rather than a sex recession.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3d ago
· Edited 3d ago
Is this not just the success recipe of Christianity? The modal pastor constantly thunders against fornicators (presumably a good majority of their audience, per the strict definition) and sinners (everyone in their audience).
It turns out "you and I, we are both bad, but I am superior to you because I at least acknowledge it" is actually an appealing meme. Perhaps it allows those who have lingering feelings that they are bad recover a sense of self-worth without having to repress those feelings, or perhaps being able to tell someone else "you are bad" feels so good that it's worth acknowledging the "I am bad" for.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
4d ago
The noise I had to suffer in every single housing unit in the US (whether apartment or free-standing), due to your HVACs routinely sounding like jet engines and fridges like idling trucks, not to mention even wind and rain being loud due to your paper-thin walls and bad windows, is well in excess of anything you hear in a half-decent European apartment in a major city. In Germany it probably would be sufficient grounds to drag your landlord to court and have your rent slashed.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
4d ago
This idea that your existence is in some sense subhuman (or else what is "live in the pod and eat the bugs" supposed to imply?) if you can't leave your housing without passing by other people does seem like a uniquely American hangup. Since we left the whole hunting and gathering thing behind, most people everywhere across the globe have lived in settings where the walls of their housing unit are also the walls of someone else's. Cities existed for some 6000 centuries at least, and within the walls of a typical European city, maybe between zero and ten people would have a residence that meets your criteria. Over in Germany (admittedly relatively far in the direction of people not caring for houses among Western countries), even Chancellor Merkel lived in an apartment, which she could only enter and leave by passing by other neighbours including apparently a politician from the opposing party.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5d ago
They also don't believe that Iran getting a nuclear weapon would be a big problem, either because they have convinced themselves that the Iranian regime are the good guys actually (TDS at its fullest) or they figure Iran would be no worse than North Korea.
I think you might be underestimating the depth of anti-Israel sentiment. Many share the sense that in the present configuration ever-greater Israeli victory (of conquest, expansion and extermination) is basically inevitable: they can always keep fomenting a bit more instability in their periphery, provoke their neighbours and subjects and then use the reaction to slice off a bit more of their land and remaining freedoms, and it's only a question of how they pace it to maximise their comfort along the way, and if all else fails they always have Daddy America's credit card and their nukes to fall back on. A nuclear-armed Iran is one of the few attainable scenarios that could significantly reshape the game tree there, and for those who don't want Israel to prevail in such a fashion this seems like an important enough goal that they would be willing to hold their nose and accept the Mullahs.
There's a "steelman"/less implausible version of the theory that keeps being invoked around terrorism events/public security incidents, which suggests that law enforcement knew in advance and made a deliberate choice to not apprehend/stop the attacker(s) as early as they could. This could serve to reap the PR boons from being targeted (greater support for authoritarian measures and some forms of collective reprisals against groups the attacker is associated with) while ideally still limiting the actual effects of the attack by stopping the attacker in the nick of time. Here, the theories seem to rest on some remark to the effect of "let's wait and see what happens" that Trump supposedly made when first being notified about the presence of a shooter.
Political brainrot notwithstanding, I've never been so convinced that the general pattern being suggested is altogether so implausible that it can't possibly have been true for any of the cases where it's commonly cited (1970s Italy's strategy of tension? 9/11? Oct 7th?). If it works out, the benefits to the goverment targeted are clearly great. One of the main objections is the potential costs if the whole scheme is revealed, but between the Snowden revelations and the realities of the tribalised information space I think the entire "shady conspiracies can't actually exist because someone would just leak it" argument complex is pretty discredited. Of course, there's another objection in that sometimes the "stop the attacker in the nick of time" plan would fail and/or the attack itself is more impactful than the conspirators bargained for. This one is harder to get a grasp of, because it would require an accurate model of how reckless or conversely loss-averse conspiratorial authorities can be, but to build that model we would need to ascertain the truth of alleged past situations which we can't because of our tribalised information space.
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