Amadan
I will be here longer than you
No bio...
User ID: 297
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
30d ago
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
1mo ago
I agree that human actors still do a better job, but even commercial TTS is way better than the robotic Kindle voice of a few years ago, and lots of people were happy to use that. They've got commercial software now for choosing voices and adding tone, emphasis, etc. wtih markup.
It's not quite human-level yet, but voice actors are right to be scared.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
1mo ago
Yes, it's called in-painting, and Stable Diffusion even has a sketch mode that will turn stick figures into paintings.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
1mo ago
I have noticed. A lot of hobby spaces have actually banned AI art, and if it's not banned, it's treated with extreme disdain. Any boardgame publisher caught using AI art, for example, gets a social media pile-on. It's a big deal in RPG and self-publishing (where authors and publishers operating on a shoestring obviously find it very tempting to cut costs with AI art). A few traditional publishers have caught flak for using AI art on their covers.
As a bit of an AI enthusiast (I even bought a chunkier GPU for Stable Diffusion), I obviously do not buy the "unethical" argument, but this has become kind of like "Actually, I think racial IQ differences might be real" - not something I can talk about openly with a lot of my circle.
There are a lot of anti-AI arguments, and the ethical/copyright issues are ambiguous, but the bottom line is that artists are, rightfully, afraid of being replaced by a machine. When they complain about how AIs were trained "unethically", ask them if the algorithms improve so much that an AI can be trained entirely on open source or public domain artwork (there have been some efforts to create so-called "ethical" AI models) and produce equivalent results, if they'd be okay with that? They will usually hem and haw and hope that doesn't happen.
I do feel a little bad for artists. I mean, if you had a decent side hustle charging $50 to draw D&D characters, or a more lucrative side hustle drawing furry porn, AI is going to replace you. High end artists will still have jobs, and AI can't really do competent composition or graphic design or a series of pictures with a consistent theme (yet), but the DeviantArt and ArtStation kids are getting hungry and desperate.
It ultimately boils down to money, and they are trying to make it a moral crusade to preserve their livelihood. It is only the threat of being dragged on social media that's preventing more publishers and companies from using AI art, and as AI art gets better and less easily detectable, and more widely accepted, that will change.
I will say that a lot of AI art is just lazy. Like, if you just give a prompt, run 50 iterations, take the best one, and slap it on your cover, it's still probably not going to look very good and it will look like obvious AI generation. Even for my hobby art I do some photoshopping and have learned enough composition to blend elements together - it might still be detectable, but it doesn't just scream "AI." (Then again, I'm not generating anime waifus or furry porn, which is like 90% of AI art as far as I can tell.)
This is coming to other industries as well. Audiobooks, for example, are now pretty lucrative for most authors, and AI voices are becoming nearly as good as human voice actors - and human voice actors are expensive. For self-published authors, it's a no-brainer economically, so narrators and readers are doing their best to make it morally unacceptable to use AI. If the disapprobation fails to kill sales, that entire niche is going to be dead.
It will be some time before AI can replace a lot of other industries, but low-end software development, customer service, and other industries are already being affected. This is what the artists are fighting - not subjective esoteric notions of whether AI art has "soul" or qualifies as "good art."
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
1mo ago
I don't hate the federal government as much as most people here do, and I think we could live without the DoE. To the degree they do anything useful, it's what your sister described: managing funds, financial aid, etc. That doesn't require an entire department of the government.
GS 13-14 isn't particularly "high level," btw. It's relatively late career (lots of people retire as a 13 or 14), but it's not someone with significant decision-makiing or policy-shaping authority. That starts at 15 and the real high level people are those who make it to the Senior Executive Services.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
1mo ago
"Directionally correct" is fine. "Expressed in an unfavorable" (meaning uncharitable and inflammatory and weakmanned) way is not. Just saying "Progressives believe all crime is caused by poverty and oppression" would be okay. (Though most progressives don't literally believe there would be zero criminals without poverty and oppression.) But the OP said a lot more than that.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
1mo ago
I feel like one of us must be WILDLY failing the ideological Turing test, for you to call this a 'zombie idiot' view.
It's you. I know lots of progressives. Exactly zero of them believe that literally no minorities would ever commit crimes if not for oppression, or that crime doesn't exist.
I'm not going to debate progressive criminal theory because I don't subscribe to it, but I'm pretty sure even AOC would not say there would be zero crime if the economy were better. If you cannot steelman their perspective in a way they themselves would agree is what they believe (not "this is what your beliefs lead to" but "this is what you literally believe") then you are weak manning, and the OP was being obnoxious about it and has a long history of being obnoxious.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
1mo ago
Everyone loves a nice hot dump on progressives. It's practically the easy-mode for scoring upvotes.
You still need to actually be making an argument or saying something factual and defensible. This post is just pure boo-lighting with a bunch of uncharitable straw men. Do you think any progressive would agree with your characterization of what they believe and what their real motives are? It's one thing to argue that "This is the end result of their policies," it's another to argue "Actually, progressives are all zombie idiots with a worldview that says crime doesn't exist and minorities only ever do bad things because they are oppressed."
If this was a one-off, I'd chide you for weakmanning and ask you to put more effort into your inveighing against progressives in the future. But this isn't a one-off. You have a long, bad history of this sort of post, and being told to stop it.
You actually have a couple of notes to the effect of "last warning, permaban next time." Somehow you skated in the past, and then you went and earned a couple of AAQCs.
You seem to be able to post interesting things when you aren't choking on bile about your outgroup. We would like you to focus on your strengths. By that I do not mean "entertaining rants about how your outgroup is pure stupid evil."
Banned for 2 weeks, and next time will be a permaban.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
1mo ago
Her climbing through the patronage of Willie Brown is well known. The rest may be hearsay, but she was certainly part of the celebrity/politician axis in California.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
1mo ago
I'm surprised no one has commented on the racial angle. The target audience is specifically black women, who are being urged to pressure black men to vote (for Harris, obviously).
Harris is having trouble getting support from black men - she will obviously still get the majority of their votes, but her polling is relatively low for that demographic. A lot of black men seem to be actively turned off by her. Not being a black man, I can only speculate, but I suspect a lot of black men, even liberal ones, find the combination of resembling their wine mom auntie who tells them to pull their pants up, being a woman whose career seems to have mostly advanced by blowing the right men, and being a former prosecutor, is making her a hard sell when her campaign naturally assumed that black men would prefer a black woman to Donald Trump. (There is also the fact that her "blackness" has a bit of an asterisk.)
I remain actually shocked at the tone-deafness of the Harris campaign ads, though. Do they not have any heterosexual men on staff?
Even aside from the laughable cringe of "full-throated endorsement" from guys who "eat carburetors" and... give bear hugs, and fat black women turning down a 6-figure, 3-6s black Chad (as if), it just screams weakness. "Vote for her! No, really, vote for her! Vote for her.... please? VOTE FOR HER GODDAMIT!"
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
1mo ago
From what I recall of American history, no major candidate for President has ever gone through the election process more than three times, except for FDR
Henry Clay. He never quite grabbed the brass ring, but he was a major candidate for much of the first half of the 19th century.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
1mo ago
I got 34 out of 50. I figured out most of the human-created ones, but a few of the AI ones fooled me. The human ones that I mislabeled AI had some weird features that I'm still not sure why a human would paint.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
1mo ago
I've seen Trump look sharp and alert, and I've seen him ramble and spew word salad. Maybe, like Biden, he has good days and bad days.
Harris, after watching her Fox interview, I think really is just dumb as a post. And yes, it's ridiculous that she's the "young" candidate.
But I remain of the opinion that Trump at 82 will not be in any shape to run for president, let alone to perform.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
1mo ago
Contra the people who say he is senile (a sure sign of TDS by the way)
I don't think he's senile. I think he's showing signs of decline. Clearly not as bad as Biden, but come on. It's not TDS to recognize the man is old and shows it.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
1mo ago
He's 78. He'll be 82 in 2028. He's already showing signs of fatigue and cognitive decline. I wouldn't put it past him to still think he can make a run (I don't think he's capable of admitting he was beaten), but I can't see it being a realistic possibility.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
1mo ago
I don’t think it’s a given that these humanitarian doctors sympathize with Palestinians especially rather than humankind generally.
Most of them are probably not literally Hamas agents or Jew-haters. If you asked them, the average doctor would probably say "I want peace for everyone in the Middle East." However, if you asked them "Who do you think is to blame?" I suspect the great majority of doctors in Gaza would say "The Israelis," and if you asked them (outside of Gaza, where presumably they could answer truthfully), "Do you think Hamas is to blame?" they'd give you answers similar to what we hear from American leftists, that Hamas is a justified/expected reaction to oppression and occupation, October 7 was horrible but the Israelis brought it on themselves, etc. So yes, they are probably mostly humanitarians, but they are humanitarians who would have strong incentives and ideological motivations to be willing to endorse a narrative that the IDF is targeting Palestinian children.
I would wager (total conjecture here) that volunteering in Gaza is actually a coveted position for young medical school graduates. Maybe 1% are accepted. It will probably shift to Arabic-speakers for practical reasons, so maybe that’s a small selection bias.
How many videos from Gaza have you actually watched? I've watched quite a few. Some in Arabic, as I said.
I can't say how "coveted" medical positions there are, but I doubt they are actually that competitive - if you are a medical school graduate who contacts an aid organization and says "I want to volunteer to work in Gaza," I doubt you'd have much trouble being accepted. From what I have seen, the majority of doctors working there are either Palestinians, or European or American doctors who have some Arab/Palestinian ancestry. Not all, but most. I have seen a few who are white or Asian; they mostly seem to come from fairly leftist charity organizations. Something like Save the Children - which does not directly employ medical workers (their thing is mostly providing food and education to children in poor countries). Save the Children doesn't explicitly take a political position on the Gaza war, but they are among those demanding an immediate cease fire. I suspect that the average Save the Children aid worker in Gaza does not hate Jews or support Hamas, but if you asked them "Do you think the IDF is deliberately shooting children?" would say "Yes" because they've heard of it happening and are willing to embrace any narrative that engenders horror and makes a cease fire more likely. I think this is typical of all aid organizations in Gaza. Look at Medicins Sans Frontieres. Are they explicitly anti-Israeli? No, but it's pretty clear who they think are the victims and who are the responsible parties.
You are clearly impassioned in this particular topic.
That's a tell too. You're right that it's tiresome. Insisting that someone is "impassioned" because they have a point of view is just a windy way of saying "You mad bro?" or "Why so serious?" If I used less words my posts would be too low effort to rebuke your voluminous walls of text; when I use more words: "Wow, why do you care so much? Must be because you're a Jeeeew!"
I don't particularly have a passion for Israel - I have stated before that I actually don't like Israel that much, I just dislike their enemies more. I do think the plague of Joo-posters is corrosive to reasonable discourse, because they are (without exception) disingenuous both about the facts and about their motives for posting. So it is one of the topics where I'll weigh in, because while I don't want to ban shitty points of views, I don't want to let them dominate the discussion and claim the field.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
1mo ago
I don’t know why you would include the line “the NYT didn’t interview every doctor” if you weren’t insinuating that the sample was biased by the NYT. But okay, if you’re not alleging that, then you’re alleging that the doctors were under some pressure by Hamas to testify in a certain way?
I've already explained this several times. What I believe is that every doctor in Gaza is obviously someone who sympathizes with Palestinians and has seen a lot of dead children. They aren't out in the field, so they see kids coming in with bullet wounds, and they probably aren't doing forensics to determine if it looks like a direct shot or a ricochet. If people tell them "IDF soldiers are shooting children," how skeptical will they be? Are they really seeing a lot of direct "kill shots" (e.g. to the head and chest, as opposed to various other random wounds like you'd expect of civilians caught in crossfire?) If they see one or two, how much convincing do they need? If you have one or two doctors willing to go along with a fabrication or an embellishment (such as doctoring an X-ray scan), and then disseminates them, who is going to call bullshit on them? How much evidence would the NYT need?
What I believe, and have explained, is that the truth is probably much messier than either "Yes, the IDF is now sniping children as SOP" or "Every doctor in Gaza is now making up stories of children being sniped." It's going to be a combination - a soldier here or there who said "Fuck 'em all" and is willing to shoot children, a few credulous doctors, a very active Hamas PR campaign (with no small amount of help from people like you). The fact that the NYT is willing to signal-boost any hint of Israelis misdeeds and spin a narrative of Jews being child-killing monsters, on the thinnest of evidence, helps make the extreme version of the story more plausible to people like you, who hate Israel and/or Jews.
Please notice the italics. My assertion would wholly explain why the children are shot in the head. There are 20k-30k Israeli soldiers in Gaza. How many deprave, genuinely evil Jewish extremist soldiers do you need in order to see too many killed children? Not most. Not half. Mere percents in combat roles. Yet this is not excusable; the failure of Israel to check or punish its extremists is inexcusable.
If you just want me to agree that shooting children is bad and anyone who does so intentionally should be prosecuted, I agree. That Israel is allowing it is your claim; I suspect Israel is "allowing" it in the same sense that the US "allowed" atrocities in Viet Nam, and Iraq, and Afghanistan. Some people got away with shit, sometimes the brass were willing to look the other way, but sometimes people got caught and were prosecuted, and the American public was definitely not "okay" with it. Only people with a deep ideological hatred of America would say we committed war crimes out of sheer American evilness.
Jews are not a monolithic group. I hate the extremists, and I do not hate the others. I probably have positive valence toward secular Jews. While I hate aspects of progressivism, I do not see it as Jewish-driven like some commenters here.
Okay. That is genuinely surprising to me, though I am not sure I believe you. But I'll take your word for it--
I can’t help but ask: have you invested your identity into Israel in some way? Are you yourself a religious zionist? Your posts come off as biased, to say the least.
Oops. There's the tell. Gotta admit, I was waiting for that.
As I have told the other Joo-posters who eventually pulled that on me (and not that it is your business or should matter): nope. No Jewish or Israeli affiliations whatsoever. Well, I do have Jews in my family tree. Which according to some Joo-posters would make me a Jew genetically, so maybe my Jew-genes "bias" me. But given that my entire family is Protestant and I have literally never set foot in a synagogue in my life, that would have to be some deep DNA-programming.
Why do you believe that their sample of doctors is flawed? There’s not an enormous amount of Western doctors in Gaza. There is no reason to believe that the NYT Time only picked doctors willing to lie.
Reread what I posted. I did not say the NYT only picked doctors willing to lie, and I specifically addressed the "lying doctors" theory. Stop trying to use these slippery tactics and moving goalposts.
The doctors had the option to answer anonymously. There is no evidence of Hamas threatening doctors. Many of these doctors have already returned home permanently. So your theory here is wrong.
My theory is that the doctors are some combination of lying, credulous, and sympathetic enough not to question too much. "Your theory is wrong" is based on nothing but your belief that if you state something confidently enough it should be taken seriously.
Infantry officer is an influential role. It is a relevant role if we are looking at shot children.
Again, slippery goalpost-moving.
You mistakenly thought that there was not a high level of extremism in the Israeli military.
Again, stop being slippery. The specific claim (by you) was that "most Israeli soldiers are religious extremists." Do we need to go through this word by word? I never claimed that "there is not a high level of extremism in the Israeli military," because we didn't even discuss what "a high level" would be. I would consider 40% of infantry military officers to be a high level by some measures, but not by the measures you were claiming, when you used the word "most" and asserted that it was a sufficiently large majority of all soldiers to make it likely that head-shotting children has become SOP.
Your screed called this “specious”
Debunking you point by point and line by line, while tedious, does not make a screed. What I called "specious" was, again, your claim that most Israeli soldiers are religious extremists. You've retreated to "a lot of their infantry officers are from right-wing religious communities" but are now pretending that that's what was in dispute.
— are you willing to concede you were empirically wrong?
No, because I am not. You are provably and demonstrably so, right here, and I won't bother asking if you are willing to admit it.
There are, factually, a lot of extremists in the Israeli military.
"A lot" is a much slippier and unquantifiable number than "most." Again, moving goal posts.
We both know that is not my argument.
No, we do not both know that. I genuinely believe that you hate Jews and your, ah, "screed" of an OP is motivated by hatred of Jews. Are you willing to clearly state this is false and you do not hate Jews?
Let’s ask these questions: in what capacity is the religious practice different?
Why should I care? Every religion has different religious practices. This is only relevant if you're trying to argue there is something uniquely pernicious about Judaism.
Which type of cognition is increased by the different practices? Where is the moral concern located?
Those might be interesting philosophical questions, but nothing you've posted so far (in your many posts under this topic, under your many alts) has ever supported the conclusion you keep reaching for that "Jews are hostile aliens."
ETA: My apologies, I will retract one thing: I reread your post and you didn't say "Most soldiers." However, I will stand by my claim that this is the central thesis of your claim, that Israelis are now adopting tactics of shooting children because (some number of them which we can argue about whether it literally constitutes "most" or not) are sufficiently extremist that this is now commonplace in the IDF and widely accepted among Israelis because of their Jewishness.
"In other words, the Israeli military selects for the extremists which are raised up within the de-centralized schools of Israel" would be the primary quote here. I was mistaken, in that you used more weasel-wording than I remembered, but let's say it's 20% or 40% or 80%. It's still quite an extraordinary claim that the IDF is deliberately targeting children in Gaza, and they're doing this because.... Jews are monstrous and believe they are fighting a holy war against an evil enemy. You think if there were really Hamas militants in Gaza hospitals, or that doctors were advancing false Hamas narratives and faking bullets embedded in kids' skulls, "someone would tell." Yet you don't think if the IDF was being told "Shoot children," no one would tell?
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
1mo ago
Low-effort comments lead to low-effort responses. Knock it off, all of you.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
1mo ago
Okay, @stuckinbathroom's "Source?" is obnoxious, but so is this.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
1mo ago
I don't think the skeptics (hi) doubt that Israelis sometimes do awful things, including shooting children. Or that we believe Israel is noble and innocent.
I do tend to believe that their enemies are among the worst in a generally shitty part of the world. And that people who bring up cherry-picked and carefully described incidents taking anything critical of Israel at face value, and then extrapolate to generalizations about how this is just typical Jewish behavior, do not, in fact, actually care in the slightest about alleged dead Palestinian children, but are happy to invoke dead children if it presents another opportunity to talk about how Jews are lizard-people.
There are plenty of legitimate criticisms of Israel, but it's hard to take them seriously from someone known to hate Jews. I mean, if suddenly you're willing to call interviews by the NYT asking people in Gaza if the Israelis are committing war crimes "high quality evidence" you can surely see why this prompts some see skepticism.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
1mo ago
I know you have not missed the last year of media coverage, therefore I do not believe your conviction that the NYT would not criticize Israel unless they really had the goods and were compelled by a sense of commitment to accuracy to report it.
The NYT does have a wealthy Jewish constituency. It also has a very large and very woke constituency that has been criticizing Israel and signal-boosting the Palestinian narrative since October 8. (Well before that, actually.)
You know this. The NYT is not some bastion of Jewiness that was suddenly forced to admit to Israeli atrocities because they had no choice. Now to be clear, I doubt any NYT reporters are deliberately reporting falsehoods. They might or might not really believe that Israeli soldiers are now routinely and intentionally shooting 5-year-olds. Maybe they think the doctors in Gaza who are claiming this believe it and deserve to be reported, because it's "close enough" to the truth. But they are certainly being as willingly credulous as you in accepting a narrative at face value that tells a story they want to tell.
Re: your point that the doctors are forced to testify like this, they can simply abstain from answering if that were so, or they could answer anonymously. Is Hamas forcing them to answer with a gun to their head? I don’t recall reading this from previous medical workers. One of them is bound to spill the beans.
This isn't what I said, and you know this isn't what I said.
I don't suggest Hamas is holding guns to doctors' heads to force them to make up stories. The NYT clearly did not interview every doctor in Gaza. Do you think any doctor in Gaza would say "No, that definitely isn't happening"? At most, they might say "I haven't seen this."
I do expect at some point we'll hear stories from people who were in Gaza who will be more honest about the Hamas militants in hospitals (I mean, these stories have already gotten out), but (a) they will have to have left Gaza, as will their families; (b) they will have to be people who don't want to cover for Hamas. Which is not a lot of people.
Most medical workers in Gaza, asked "Have you heard of the IDF shooting children?" will probably say "Yes, I've heard that's happening." Some will also have seen children brought to the hospital who've been shot.Were they shot deliberately? The family might say so. Is the medical worker going to disbelieve them?
Take a handful of actual incidents, a large proportion of sympathetic and biased medical workers, and a heavily censored reporting environment, and unsurprisingly it's easy to get a story like "Yes, everyone agrees the IDF is sniping children." Every war produces these kinds of atrocity stories; many turn out to be untrue. We already have a lot of conflicting narratives about October 7, and about what has happened in Gaza so far.
I cannot resist pointing out the obvious: the evidence for the Holocaust is far more voluminous and convincing, and yet strangely your skepticism comes out in full force on that subject. Why, one wonders, are stories of atrocities committed by Jews so believable, and stories of atrocities committed against Jews so hard to believe? Could you possibly suffer from bias?
See: “Israel’s army, for much of its seven decades the country’s pre-eminent secular institution, is increasingly coming under the sway of a national religious movement that has made bold moves across Israeli society in recent years. About 40% of those graduating from the army’s infantry officer schools now come from a national religious community that accounts for 12 to 14% of Jewish Israeli society and is politically more aligned with Israel’s right and far-right political parties and the settler movement.
That's still 40% and it's their infantry officer schools - a subset of a subset. So you tried to quietly move the goalposts from "Most Israeli soldiers are religious extremists" to "40% of infantry officers are from right-leaning religious communities." While this might be cause for concern within Israel, it still does not follow that even these 40% believe the things you claim, that murdering children is totally moral.
No, it is sufficient to show that there is an extremist section of Jewish Israeli society which is so radical that it would kill enemy children.
This is not sufficient when your claim is that the IDF is now routinely sniping children and Israelis are okay with it. There is an extremist section of every society radical enough to say "Kill the enemy, including their children." We have no shortage of them here in the US, and they come in right, left, secular and religious, woke and Dissident Right.
And that such a section serves in the military at a higher rate. I think I proved this.
The number of people in the Israeli military who believe it's fine to shoot children is greater than the number of people in the general Israeli population? Yes, I am confident you could say the same thing about the US military (or nearly any military) as well.
I also made a general point about how this is a unique vulnerability of the Jewish religion.
Yes, and your point was weak and poorly argued; it amounted to "Jews are awful and they are different from Christians, therefore it's easy to believe awful things about what they believe." There are plenty of Christian extremists with awful views and some of them join the military. A while ago there was a spate of stories about white nationalists infiltrating the Special Forces. I suspect you would be both more skeptical about the threat and protest about the unfair characterization of so-called white nationalists.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
1mo ago
I have actually been following news from Gaza, not just the bits you might catch now and then on CNN, but by watching Western, Israeli, and Arab news channels ( including in Arabic). So I have a pretty good sense for how it's covered, including the biases most frequently exhibited by each side.
Bluntly, I do not trust anything reported directly from Gaza, especially from the people on the ground there. This is not to say I think Israelis or the IDF are always trustworthy (they are not), but no journalist is in Gaza without explicit permission from Hamas. That is just how things work there. There are literally Hamas soldiers in Gaza hospitals, but you will never see them shown by the journalists walking the halls to show you how terrible conditions are there. You will never see them criticizing Hamas, interviewing someone who criticizes Hamas, or presenting anything other than a Palestinian-sympathetic point of view. There are two reasons for this: (1) Most of them are sympathetic to Hamas, if not actually affiliated with them. (2) Even the ones who aren't know they will be expelled (at best) or disappeared (at worst) if they don't observe the ground rules. The ground rules are "Hamas is in charge here and Hamas controls the narrative."
High quality evidence would look like what the NYT did. They polled an assortment of doctors working in Gaza and asked them how often they saw children killed in such a way that would indicate intent. 80% said yes. Some said that it was a daily occurrence. This is high quality evidence. Perhaps 80% of the doctors are liars and the NYT team is lying. Or perhaps extremists who promote and condone war crimes are doing war crimes. Which is more likely?
This is a level of credulousness, and confidence, that I know for a certainty you would not display - especially from the NYT - on any other subject. This is not "high quality evidence." This is evidence that pleasures your priors. You took a sketchy story and from it wrote a carefully written polemic that argues, essentially, that Jews are taught by their religion that shooting children for fun is fine. You have already ignored a pile of contradictions to even your most specious claims (e.g., that the Israeli military is mostly made up of religious extremists), and ignored any sort of logical analysis. So let's take a few points in order:
Why would the doctors lie? Most aid workers in Gaza, unsurprisingly, are sympathetic to Palestinians and believe the "genocide" narrative. Some, like the journalists, are actually Hamas supporters. That doesn't mean they would all be willing to make up stories about children regularly being shot by Israeli snipers, but many of them would. Many others, if told this was happening, would be willing to believe it and/or at least not publicly display any skepticism. And if Hamas says "The narrative is now that the IDF is sniping children," doctors still working in Gaza are certainly not going to say "No, that isn't happening." Especially since they probably have seen a lot of children killed, a few might have actually been targeted, and so they're going to be willing to go along with "The IDF is now doing this regularly" – even if they know it's not really true, maybe the outrage will result in fewer children dying.
You have made it clear often enough in the past that you despise Jews and consider them a kind of invidious predatory species, so a story that portrays them as moral mutants clearly appeals to you and is easy for you to believe, but let's try starting from an assumption that Jews aren't monsters. Contrary to your careful argument above that Judaism is an alien and inhumane ethical system completely divorced from Western thought, Israeli cultural norms are mostly Western ones, especially considering how many of them came from the West. The IDF mostly behaves like Western armies, which is to say: they have rules and they follow the Geneva Convention. There are definitely breaches, as happens in all wars, but they aren't monsters who are given a doctrine of "preteen children are legitimate targets." Most people would not do that. It's only plausible that Israelis think sniping children is fine if one accepts your premise that Jews (all Jews!) literally Other gentiles into a "not human" category. You might believe this, but it's not actually accurate.
Do I believe that here and there, some fucked up soldiers have done fucked up things, like sniping children? Yes. Shit happens in war. Do I believe this is either explicitly or implicitly endorsed by the IDF? No. They might not spend a lot of time investigating claims by Al-Jazeera or looking too deeply into an accusation that Sergeant Steiner shot a kid, but they haven't been given the go-ahead to individually target civilians.
People have already talked a lot about the unlikelihood of military rounds (whether 7.62 or 5.56) entering a child's head and staying there, rather than turning it into an exploding pumpkin as it exits. Ballistics can be weird and unlikely things can happen, so one or two X-rays of kids with 7.62 shells in them? Maybe. Happening on a daily basis? A rash of children with 7.62 rounds in their skulls who are still alive? Come on now.
Basically, this story does not pass the sniff test on any level, and the NYT writing outrage porn with heavily biased sources is something you would normally readily pick apart.
I guess I'll just use this thread to say: I fucking hate this election.
I hate my choices. I hate having to choose which shitty option might taste slightly less like shit. I hate choosing from two stupid, bumbling mediocre embarrassments and knowing one of them is going to be the fucking President of the United States of America. "Vote for the lesser of two evils" has been a motto representing resigned acceptance of political reality my entire life (I have the Cthulhu for President t-shirt and everything), but never have I felt it so keenly. They're both bad and repulsive, and I honestly don't know which of them will actually be worse for the country because I expect either of them to be terrible. I have said before I probably won't even vote, for the first time since I turned 18. (At least for president; I'll still probably vote for local/state candidates.)
And it's entirely the fault of both parties for putting us here. The Republicans, for letting MAGA cultists take over the party and drive all serious grown-ups out, and the Democrats, for letting bad faith woke identity politics take over everything. And both of them, for turning us into a gerontocracy that very effectively shuts younger candidates out before they can even sniff a primary.
If you held a gun to my head and forced me to choose, I guess it would be Kamala. But I might take the bullet instead.
I think Trump will be more damaging to the economy, and I think he will epically fuck up what's left of America's standing in the world. I think he will be an embarrassment who fails to accomplish any of the things his followers think he will (just like last time) and what he does accomplish he will fuck up. I think Harris will continue our inflationary money-isn't-real spiral into economic doom, hand out more gobs of cash to whatever identity group is most effective at yelling and screaming, and I think Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping will roll her like a floured chicken breast. She's a midwit mediocrity who should never have come within line of sight of the Presidency, and I cannot believe how quickly I watched people in real time shift vibes to Kamala-enthusiasm, Kamalanation, Kamala is brat (W. T. F????) and pretend they had always been enthusiastic about her. Way back in 2019, when she was being floated as a Democratic candidate and I knew little about her, I admit I was tepidly favorable towards her because she seemed like maybe the least bad of a mediocre lot, but nothing she's done since has impressed, and she seems like Generic Extruded Political Product.
But, you know, Trump. I do not have TDS, I do not think he is Literally Hitler, but I do think he's a con, a huckster, an embarrassing buffoon who I believe actually loves America as much as I believe he goes to church on Sunday and has ever read the Bible in his life. I think he totally would become an absolute dictator if he could manage it, but it would require too much effort and political acumen and cunning, which he does not have. He has a huge personality and charisma, and some people think that translates into him being a skilled politician. He's not. He's got performer's instincts and a gift for graft. This doesn't really make him unique among American presidents, but it makes him uniquely bad in this time and place.
This sucks.
So I will repeat what I said a few weeks ago: my only consolation is going to be breaking out the popcorn and watching the wailing and gnashing of teeth post-election night. If Kamala wins, I will read the Motte and other places for the rage, the futile fist-waving, the impotent Internet tough-guy promises to Res1st and Retrn and start a civil war or some shit. If Trump wins, I will read Twitter for the wailing, the gnashing of teeth, and the hordes of smug, self-righteous fucks driven to existential despair, and I will drink their tears.
This is not nice, it is not charitable, it is not noble. It is petty and mean and beneath me. It is my coping mechanism, because this election sucks.
More options
Context Copy link