I still dig his art style, but he jumped a tiny little bit to far into the deep end. Anti-Vaxx-Conspiracies, Pedo-Biden ordering pizzas, trans-activists conspiring to destroy everything decent in the world. It is quite something:
Blueberry
1yr ago
I can't link every comic in the last two month, but this point is hammered obsessively. While there is a deafening silence about the attack from 7th October, it is comically (ha!) one sided.
Maybe you know (from back when the web was still young) the comic Sinfest by Japanese-American artist Tatsuya Ishida. His turn from fun webcomic to ultra-anti-woke/anti-porn/pro-maga wingnut is maybe the most surprising heel turn in history.
What confuses me though is his unashamed hamas-freedom fighter sentiment and Jews-are-the-villains narrative:
https://sinfest.xyz/view.php?date=2023-11-13
https://sinfest.xyz/view.php?date=2023-11-11
https://sinfest.xyz/view.php?date=2023-11-01
Similar to Stonetoss anti-Jew/Israel comics:
https://stonetoss.com/comic/the-great-pumpkin/
I find it surprising because they align their politics suddenly with the woke blue-haired decolonization genderfluid hipsters they are normally opposed to. Instead my guess would have been, now that israelic comedians make fun of such US-student (https://youtube.com/watch?v=rbfccVBo9tE), that right wingist would latch onto that and try to flip Jews to their side. Is it just being contrarian and being opposed to whatever the mainstream media is for? Do they secretly have a hard on for homophobic/antifeminist Islam? Or maybe, as a non-American, I simply underestimated the strong JewishWorldConspiracy-Nazism-undercurrent in some right wing circles?
Blueberry
1yr ago
Regarding "Those who Walk Away from Omelas": The older I get the more I suspect the people who walk away are in the wrong.
For example the map in this old article which became a meme:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-462091/How-children-lost-right-roam-generations.html
Great-Grandfather: Allowed at age 8 to walk six miles to go fishing.
Grandfather: Allowed to roam in the woods.
Mother: Allowed to walk by herself to the swimming bath.
Zoomer Kid: Only allowed to walk to the family house street.
In a sense past generations larger freedom was bought by Omelas-sacrificing of children lives.
Blueberry
1yr ago
Looking at successful religions, dietary restrictions and the conspicuous observance of them seems ritualistically important in binding people together
I think this is also part of it. There is the "Veganuary" in January which is even tried by flexitarians/carnivores and sort of like Ramadan or catholic lent. And the dietary restrictions by the more fanatic minority have outsized influence on the more tolerant/flexible majority, which pushes culture in one direction.
It is a bit of virtue signaling (the vegan has bragging rights over the vegetarian), a bit atonment for our sins (at least eating vegan Pizza with fake cheese feels that way), good old market capitalism (aside from fake cheese many products got crazy goods. I don't care if I eat real chicken nuggets or plant based nuggets), but it is also development of a shared culture and being part of something bigger (which is universally regarded as good or at least not bad, which is nice). Also the small talk aspect, one can share recipes and cooking tricks.
At least in Europe (or maybe just Germany) there is increasing demand for vegan food and the main advertized advantage is that it is more eco friendly. Animal welfare is a bonus, but is more used as an argument by organic farmers pushing their animal products, eg one should drink bio milk and bio cheese from happy cows from the idyllic small family farm in your region, instead of buying from the gruesome big business factory farm industry.
German food culture is changing. The number of vegans is growing, and more than half of the population wants to reduce meat consumption, considering themselves flexitarian. This makes Germany one of the most important markets for plant-based food
A common explanation for the rise of flexitarians in Germany is that young people are driving the change and taking their parents with them. Germans are generally very eco-conscious and young people are very much aware of the environmental effects of meat consumption. For example, Germany’s Fridays for Future Movement demands halving meat consumption by 2035. By comparison, the Fridays for Future Movement website in the United States does not say anything about meat.
Of course it sorts itself into a little bit of culture war issue here, as vegan products are more coded left/young/urban/educated/female and eating meat is more rightwing/boomer/rural/workingclass/male, and politicians pander to certain voter segments with the food they post at instagram …
https://www-derwesten-de.translate.goog/panorama/promi-tv/markus-lanz-markus-soeder-zdf-mediathek-gaeste-id300507832.html?_x_tr_sl=de&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=de&_x_tr_pto=wapp
… but I see at family gatherings the resigned acceptance that a vegan alternative has to be served.
Zoophilia and meat eating are made comparable by Singer because he frames it as such. He illustrates that himself as "Imagine that you are an animal etc". But if one rejects this framework, if I imagine myself as a human, than it is effective to cut short engagement by having a simplified emotional response, eg by being shocked or mocking the idea. Taboos (an old fashioned word, you can also describe this category as "infohazard" or maladaptive training data which derails your brain software) are best preserved not by studying them in ever increasing detail, but by making them unthinkable.
For example a different framework could be: "Moral is that which makes my village survive the winter and makes my tribe/family/progenity thrive". A diverse diet does that. Romantic/Erotic attachment to animals does not and triggers disgust (maybe even genetically encoded?). It is noteworthy that the recent rise in veganism was not caused by the old arguments against animal harm like "imagine being an animal", but by new egoistic pro-human arguments like "veganism is more healthy" or "red meat causes more colon cancer" or "vegan calories can feed the world cheaper" or "western diet produces too much CO2, destroys the rainforest for cattles and we should switch to something more sustainable".
Blueberry
1yr ago
Did you know Israel has anti-miscegenation laws? There are probably others on the planet but Israel is literally the only one I know of that exists in the modern day.
Is it legally possible for a muslim to marry a non-muslim without the partner/offspring converting to Islam? I don't think so:
The hardest flex of him is in the comments:
I've never understood why people think English is bad for dactyls. I really like them and wrote a piece entirely in dactyls once to see what would happen: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/08/17/the-goddess-of-everything-else-2/
WOW this has made me think of that post in a new light. Read it at least four times and had no clue.
Many people have said this! I'm torn between "I guess I wasted my time doing this" and "people seemed to find it beautiful, and I wonder if it's because subconsciously they noticed it was poetry even if they couldn't exactly put their finger on why."
A dactyl is a long syllable followed by two short syllables.
Blueberry
1yr ago
This cuts both ways: Imagine being so inferior to the IDF that your brave warriors are killed by women
https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/defense-news/article-769134
Squad of female IDF combat troops eliminated nearly 100 Hamas terrorists
Lt.-Col. Or Ben Yehuda, Caracal Battalion, praises her troops' bravery against Hamas, silencing doubts about female combat soldiers with their training, heroism, and life-saving actions.
Of course because of the fog of war the article is propaganda and scant with information about casualties.
Blueberry
1yr ago
Presumably a rocket just fired is still full of fuel. The aftermath pictures don't show much blast damage, instead it burned out.
Blueberry
1yr ago
Kirsten Roupenian says she learned about Alexi Nowicki "from social media". (Good old online stalking.) But I don't believe it, it seems like she said it to distance herself while the details are too intimate, my bet is that Roupenian must have read through Charles phone or knew him more. Doesn't have to be romantic, maybe she was just a friend to which he poured his heart out in a vulnerable moment. Frustrating that the "encounter" is not clarified.
Anyway, I found this poignant:
We are all unreliable narrators. Sometimes, to my own disappointment, I find myself inclined to trust Roupenian over myself. Had Charles actually been pathetic and exploitative, and I simply hadn’t understood it because I, like Margot, was young and naïve? Had he become vengeful and possessive after we broke up, but I’d just blocked it out in order to move on with my life? The story is so confident and sure, helping the reader to see things Margot herself does not. In December, David told me that Charles kept his old iPhone even after he got a new one so that he could look back at his old messages with Kristen from time to time to see whether he had actually been an asshole. Sometimes it feels easier to believe the story that everyone knows than the one they don’t.
Blueberry
1yr ago
Paul Morphy, the best player ever, has said:
"The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life."
Interesting, the Samaritans are the closest (virtually identical because of endogamous marriage) to the ancient bronze age Canaanites:
Blueberry
1yr ago
Along those lines, if IPGs truly are an effective tactic that's hard to stop, I gotta wonder where we're gonna see it next. Ukraine maybe?
The paragliders were like out of Mad Max. Like the cheap NOD buggies from command & conquer.
But:
I can't find the source video on Youtube, so sorry for the Twitter links. This is the fast-paced propaganda video from Hamas "rehearsing their deadly Israel attack". This is how they want to be seen:
https://twitter.com/Aryan_warlord/status/1710846439776297120
And from the ground it looked like this:
https://youtube.com/shorts/_UPSU2dEJbM https://twitter.com/OSINTNic/status/1712058746266849658
It is terrifying, but only if you don't have a gun. The gliders are slow moving, they are loud, they have zero cover. It is like shooting ducks. If you have a gun, which the festival people didn't.
One hot take a few days ago by Eetan was that the Israelis need gun rights:
https://www.themotte.org/post/705/israelgaza-megathread-1/146562?context=8#context
I wouldn't be so quick for this American solution. But I don't expect to see glider soldiers in the heavily armed Ukraine war and in principle it should be easy for the IDF to detect and defend against them.
There is a flip side to the Nabka, because after Israeli independence a million Jews left or were expelled from the Muslim world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_exodus_from_the_Muslim_world
There are differences: It was not sudden, but the migration took years, and many were able to sell their property, but still you don't do that out of a whim. Jewish organizations calculate the property loss into astronomical sums of hundred of billions (of course) and "also estimated Jewish-owned real-estate left behind in Arab lands at 100,000 square kilometers (four times the size of the state of Israel)".
The official position of the Israeli government is that Jews from Arab countries are considered refugees, and it considers their rights to property left in countries of origin as valid and existent. In 2009, Israeli lawmakers introduced a bill into the Knesset to make compensation for Jews from Arab and Muslim countries an integral part of any future peace negotiations by requiring compensation on behalf of current Jewish Israeli citizens, who were expelled from Arab countries after Israel was established in 1948 and leaving behind a significant amount of valuable property.
As these people and their descendants are probably richer now in Israel than if they would have stayed in Morocco and Iraq (I guess?) it is not a real issue aside as a tit-for-tat argument countering Palestinian demands, but taking historical grievances earnestly is that a valid argument?
Blueberry
1yr ago
The question by CrashedPsychonaut was why the UN were in any way justified to authorize a partition and the simple answer is that they were and are not. But if you deny this „top-down imposition“, and you can’t rely on a hegemon to keep the status quo as the British are leaving, you will instead have a bottom-up solution: civil war.
Blueberry
1yr ago
why does the UN have the right to just impose that on them?
Because the alternative was what happened: The right of conquest.
Blueberry
1yr ago
And not just this, but what man can overlook his personal harem of over 500 women, through which he sired over 800 confirmed children
By the way, the question if that is true won the Ig Nobel prize:
https://www.thelocal.at/20150918/austrian-wins-ig-nobel-for-sexual-prowess-study
They worked out that it was theoretically possible, if the leader had sex once a day for 32 years without a break. “It’s a lot of work it turns out,” Oberzaucher said. “Moulay had to have had sex once or twice a day, which you might actually regard as a low number, but if you think this is every single day for an entire life, this is quite a lot.” She added that it would have been especially hard work for Ismail as he was often off fighting wars.
The paper:
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0085292
The algorithm is based on three different models of conception and different social and biological constraints. In the first model we used a random mating pool with unrestricted access to females. In the second model we used a restricted harem pool. The results indicate that Moulay Ismael could have achieved this high reproductive success.
Blueberry
1yr ago
Mel Brooks before him:
“We’re Jews up in space.
We’re zooming along
protecting the Hebrew race
We're Jews out in space
If trouble appears
we put it right back in its place
When goyim attack us
We give 'em a smack
we'll slap them right back in the face
We’re Jews up in space.
We’re zooming along
protecting the Hebrew race"
The past is a strange country. Not only did the Zionists reject the offer (but Herzl was for it!):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_a_Jewish_state
After receiving this report, [World Zionist] Congress decided in 1905 to politely decline the British offer. Some Jews, who viewed this as a mistake, formed the Jewish Territorial Organization with the aim of establishing a Jewish state anywhere.
But the British seem to have rescinded their offer later because of opposition of white settlers?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uganda_Scheme
The Zionists' proposal was met with equal controversy in the British colony.[6][7] The white British settlers were openly hostile toward the offer and formed the "Anti-Zionist Immigration Committee," which rejected the proposal through the African Standard. They believed that British poor people deserved the land more than the Jews and expressed concerns about how the black natives would react to the Jewish immigrants. Furthermore, there were worries about granting a special territory to an alien community after the troubles in Canada with the Doukhobors, and doubts about Jews' ability to engage in profitable farming. The British media also joined in the objection, amplifying these concerns.
In December 1904, the Zionist Organization dispatched a special commission to Guas Ngishu to assess if the conditions were suitable for Jewish settlement. The commission was composed of Major Alfred St Hill Gibbons, a British veteran of the Boer War and a well-known explorer; Alfred Kaiser, a Swiss orientalist and advisor for the Northwest Cameroon Company; and Nachum Wilbush, a Zionist engineer.[7][8] Although there were disparities in their final reports, with the climate used to argue for and against the Jewish settlement, the main reason for the rejection of the Plan in 1905 was partly due to the opposition by the former high commissioner of East Africa and the white settlers in the area. This led the British to withdraw the offer.
Edit: The mentioned "Doukhobors" were a pacifist christian sect from Russia. They first tried to unsuccessfully settle in Cyprus:
… after Quaker supporters both made assurances of the Doukhobors' political inoffensiveness and provided financial guarantees against their potential indigency, officials permitted over 1,000 Doukhobors to establish farming settlements in several locations on the island beginning in the second half of 1898. However, the Cyprus experiment soon proved to be disastrous: beset by disease (made worse by insufficient food that met the Doukhobors' religious requirements) as well as internal disagreements over community organization, nearly ten percent of the colony died by early 1899.[citation needed]
In Canada their customs were peculiar (Google "Doukhobors nude protest march") and they were distrusted:
Verigin [the religious leader] persuaded his followers to free their animals, and pull their wagons and plows themselves. … Canadians, politicians, and the media were deeply suspicious of the Doukhobors. Their communal lifestyle seemed suspicious, their refusal to send children to school was considered deeply troubling, while pacifism caused anger during the First World War. … Due to the community's aversion to private ownership of land, Verigin had the land registered in the name of the community. By 1906, the Canadian Government's new Minister of the Interior Frank Oliver started requiring the registration of land in the name of individual owners. Many Doukhobors refused to comply, resulting in 1907 in the reverting of more than a third (258,880 acres (1,047.7 km2)) of Doukhobor lands back to the Crown. The loss of legal title to their land became a major grievance.
Why this skewed representation? Thinking about it: Most cult leaders I can think of are male, are conversely most followers women? Why is that? But how skews that the leader structure? I looked up Jonestown and two third who drank the cool-aid were female. Leader Jim Jones was of course male, but there is a documentary about his helping „all-female inner circle“.
Downvoted Reddit comment about the twin flames documentary:
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