FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
"makes me sad/makes me happy" is a separate axis from "good/evil" and a very separate axis from "ugly/pretty."
...Though I don't begrudge the Sagrada Familias of the world their status, it is no sin to build in styles more dour than rococo.
Do either of these points seem, to you, salient to what I've written above?
Take the six cell images in the OP, and assume that we are specifically designing a prison so that the environment experienced by the prisoner captures the general emotional and psychological feel that each encapsulates. Would it be evil, in your view, to intentionally design a prisoner's environment to maximize "ugly/makes me sad"? If not, do you consider the money and effort we expend making our prisons look more like cells 1-3 rather than 4-6 a needless waste, or perhaps actively counterproductive? Perhaps you believe convicts would also benefit from styles more dour than rococo?
I wouldn't really call it within Eisenman's style, it's much more contemporary than that.
Would "generally representative of Eisenman's philosophy" be a better description?
It also bears little resemblance to any of the prison cell pictures, which increase in unpleasantness largely with the cheapness and decay of the fixtures, and the dirt and squalor of their upkeep.
Why are cheapness, decay, dirt, and squalor unpleasant? Where is the emotional effect coming from? As I mentioned to another answer, imagine that these environments have been made this way on purpose, that the corrosion and the dirt had been applied through painstaking labor to achieve this effect on purpose. Would that make it better for the occupants?
Then too, consider #5. Is it actually dirty or decayed or squalid, or is it only conveying a sense of dirtiness and decay while actually being fairly clean? The latter seems more accurate, does it not?
The gymnasium is very carefully done and very clean, at least in these photos.
If you had to rank the photos of the Nikken Sekkei building and its various interior and environments in terms of general goodness, how would you rank them? For me, I'd say Kendo Room > Gymnasium Interior > Pillared underpass > Interior walls > Building Exterior > Hallways >>> Stairwell > Classroom. The classroom in particular is so bad that it is actively offensive that someone built a room like that specifically to put children in. By contrast, some of the shots of the gymnasium interior look legitimately grand, with the strong natural light spilling down the pseudonatural detail of the wall.
The gymnasium interior and the kendo room look reasonably clean in the photos, aided greatly by the polished simplicity of the flooring. The rest of the shots, particularly the classroom, stairwell and hallway shots, look grimy and decaying even though I'm entirely certain they're in perfect condition and clean enough to eat off.
I'm not immune to the appeal here. Some of the shots of the Gymnasium interior actually look quite good. But a lot of the other shots look straightforwardly hideous, and I think that we should consider this a bad thing, for the same reasons that we should prefer our prison cell designs to conform to cell 1 rather than cell 6, and for the same reasons that we should continue to paint our prison cells rather than leaving them bare concrete.
I think it would be morally wrong to choose, for aesthetic reasons rather than practical ones, to inflict the style of the Nikken Sekkei gymnasium on actual prisoners. Would you disagree, or would you argue that prison life would be enriched by such design choices as we see in those photos? And if you agree that it would be wrong to do this to prisoners, why is it better to do it to innocent children?
The materiality and texture of the wooden formwork is trying to emphasise the cavernous qualities of the inner volume.
Combined with the natural color and texture of the concrete, it creates a strong impression of filth, decay and squalor. It's immortalizing trash in stone. Why do that? Of all the textures available, why those?
They also realise that these textures perform best under lighting conditions that play light across the surfaces instead of directly onto them.
I'd agree, but then why use the textures in places where they will not be lit to their advantage?
At the end of the day, though, if I was a teenager playing basketball, I'd vastly prefer to play here than in your replacement-level rec centre.
I would certainly prefer that gymnasium interior to the standard white box. But would you rather spend an hour a day in that classroom, rather than a replacement-level classroom? Would you rather trade the hallways and stairwells for their replacement-level equivalents? I would vastly prefer accepting the standard white box gymnasium to not have the rest of that structure inflicted on me. Then too, any gymnasium with a open balcony would be a strict improvement, just for the novel perspective.
If you have time, I'd be interested in your thoughts on the rest of the questions.
Not doing your series of questions justice, but briefly, the prison cells are awful because they are made so carelessly and cheaply and not looked after.
Suppose #2 were brand-new, and what you saw was exactly as the designer intended it, to the point of intentionally and carefully corroding the steel where the toilet meets the sink with meticulously-collected and -applied urine. Would that make it better?
It seems to me that the series displays cleanliness, simplicity, and order on one end, and filth, complexity and chaos on the other. What's notable to me is how the design of the gym intentionally recapitulates similar impressions of filth, complexity and chaos, particularly in the cement castings, and particularly in the classroom, hallway and stairwell shots. If I had to slot the gymnasium shots into the cell sequence, it would be somewhere around #5.
I'm an artist. Intentionally designed filth, complexity and chaos are a basic part of my day-to-day job, because I need to use these things to induce particular emotions in my audience. What I'm perplexed by is why someone would use these techniques in a public space that people are, to a considerable degree, compelled to interact with.
...Out of curiosity, which of the gymnasium shots do you find most pleasing, and which least? For me, the kendo room and the gymnasium itself are head and shoulders better than the rest of the shots, spaces designed for competition and struggle. Does it seem that way to you also?
Below, in the discussion of Architectural philosophies, @Primaprimaprima provides an admirably concrete statement:
There's no cognitive dissonance because there's no evil here, anywhere.
Eisenman's buildings range from "fine" to "pretty darn cool" in my view. "...Architecture that similarly alludes to a deeper or alternate view of reality" in a Lovecraftian fashion is also cool. Rad, even. I want more of that. Sign me up. This isn't even some complex "well we have to understand the dialectical nature of suffering and how even negative emotions can be valuable" shit. This is just very straightforwardly an architect who makes cool buildings that he thinks are cool and other people think are cool. There's no malfeasance here, no shenanigans.
To me, your question sounds akin to someone saying "how exactly can you support Harry Potter books pushing Satanic propaganda on our children?" It's hard to provide an answer because I disagree with the entire framing.
If the framing is the issue, perhaps it would help to examine that framing from the ground up, as it were. Is there such a thing as "evil" architecture? Should we recognize this as a thing that exists?
Here are a half-dozen variations on the theme of "prison cell": 1 2 3 4 5 6
Considering the above six images:
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would you expect that the ordering of the above images was random? If the ordering was not random, how would you describe the ordering principles?
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What details of the environments seem emotionally salient to you? What colors, textures, contrasts, symmetries or asymmetries, rhythms, etc stand out?
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This question is a bit awkward to phrase, so bear with me: If we ordered these images by the most prominent mental and emotional effects we expect them to induce on their occupants, would you expect the given order to change? What are the antipodes of the strongest gradient you recognize, and does that gradient require a re-ordering of the images to convey continuously?
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Would the ranking change if you ordered them by which "looks cool"? For example, if you were picking prison cell designs for a movie set or a video game level, do you think the ordering would change? Note that we can actually make this question strictly empirical by looking at actual prison cells in actual movies and video games.
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Would the ordering change if you ranked them by which you would rather be a prisoner in?
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Would the order change if you ranked them by which you would rather actual convicts be housed in?
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Suppose a person prefers the given ranking if they were a prisoner, and prefers the reverse ranking for convicts, would you describe this as a morally-neutral preference?
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Assuming that the emotional gradient you perceive is relatively positive-to-negative, suppose that a person prefers the max-negative antipode for both themselves and for convicts. Does this show that the max-negative antipode would actually be "good" for convicts? Why or why not?
Elsewhere in the thread, we are provided with a link to this Japanese highschool gymnasium as a positive example of Eisenman's general style of architecture.
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If you ordered the various shots of the exterior and interiors of the gymnasium, which do you consider the best, and which the worst? What principles seem most salient to this ordering? What patterns emerge?
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If we compare and contrast the gymnasium interiors to our original six cells, what commonalities emerge in environmental detail and in expected mood? Which of the six do these interior shots seem to naturally group with? at which end of the various gradients do they fall?
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The gymnasium is, clearly, not a prison. Despite this, are there relevant principles identified in your analysis of the cell variations that you think should carry over to analysis of the gymnasium?
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leaving cell interiors unpainted would obviously be cheaper than painting them. Would it be better to leave cell interiors unpainted, similar to the gymnasium interiors? Is the preference to paint or not paint cell interiors morally neutral?
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More generally, presuming the design of the Gymnasium is a good one, should similar principles be applied to the design of prisons? It's hard to deny that prisons could certainly look cooler than they do. Perhaps we could even make them look Rad. Presuming that this would not compromise first-order expenses or impose first-order security concerns, would it be a good idea to do this?
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Among the gymnasium images, there's a shot of a classroom. Why do you suppose the designer has chosen to make the back wall of the classroom, facing the teacher, smooth and relatively low-detail compared to the front wall of the classroom, facing the students? What would you expect the results of this design choice to be on the intended function of the room?
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Do you consider the preceding question to be a reasonable one?
Bonus Round:
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Consider hostile architecture. How might we apply principles gleaned from the above questions to this separate branch of architecture and design?
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Do you think hostile architecture is morally neutral? Morally positive? Morally negative? Why?
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If someone believes that hostile architecture "looks cool", do you think that should be a persuasive argument in its favor?
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Do you expect that those who enjoy and support the sort of architecture typified by the nikken sekkei gymnasium also support and enjoy hostile architecture? What about those who oppose it?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2mo ago
Alternatively, the same log can be used as either a pillar or a battering ram, depending on the context in which the user is located. Neither Soviet architects nor Soviet officials were interested in inducing alienation in their home population, because their revolution was complete.
Here's a simple alternative hypothesis.
Almost no one actually saw that debate live. Anyone who didn't see it live can't update their thinking and behavior unless the information contained in the debate was transferred to them. In 1983, a large supermajority of the people in a position to transfer that information to the public at large either directly agreed with or were at a minimum ideologically allied with the supervillain, understood that the ideas expressed in the debate would disadvantage their interests if they were clearly understood and widely disseminated, and so declined to disseminate them to the broad public in such an unvarnished form. Either they kept the ideas from getting a public hearing, or they made sure they were spun sufficiently to actually sound attractive to enough of the populace to not be a strategic own-goal.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2mo ago
But, big picture, you paint a convincing view of the future. If we look at the set of “drones under $1000” rather than literal converted iPhones, I think it’s a rather larger space of possibilities. Scary to imagine.
I can say with a high degree of confidence that the above is significantly underestimating the scope of the problem.
But all that proves is at least one person supports both communism and BLM.
Would you expect American Communists, or indeed communists generally, to not support BLM?
At any rate, I do not draw conclusions about the ideologies of entire movements supported by millions of people from individual graffitos.
If you were persuaded that hammers and sickles were a common addition to BLM-riot graffiti, would this be weak evidence of a connection between the two movements? To be clear, the best I can do after a brief search is two instances, and the vague memories of seeing many more at the time. I'm more curious about your reasoning process.
More generally, do you think the examples linked in this comment are likewise lacking a "developed political platform"? Are those people Marxists, in your view?
On the statue of Christopher Columbus, they scrawled “George Floyd” and “BLM,” as well as rudimentary Soviet hammer and sickle images (now sometimes representing a union of social classes), and stencilled raised fists, often viewed as an emblem of Black liberation and solidarity.
...Could it be that you were mistaken, and the hammer and sickle in that first example only represented "a union of social classes"? Maybe that guy wasn't a communist at all?
Mm.
So in your opinion, when some guy spraypaints #BLM, multiple hammers and sickles, and the publication date of the Communist Manifesto on a public structure, what do you think is going on in that guy's head? Would you expect the misconception he's suffering from to be common or rare?
Suppose there is a person who is very concerned with social justice. They believe that racism and sexism are among the most serious problems facing our society, they are deeply committed to battling the kyriarchy hydra. They are interested in cultural critique, in sociopolitical theory, and have educated themselves extensively on these subjects. In my experience, such people are not particularly rare, and probably most people commenting here will have encountered several of them.
Based on you experience, how likely is such a person to be familiar with and use the term "late stage capitalism"? My experience would be that it is very likely; does yours differ?
If they do use that term, what do they mean by it?
Why does the kyriarchy hydra in the linked comic have a "class" head, and why is that head resolved into "economics" in the last panel? What sort of economics do you suppose the author intended?
That comic is from the website everydayfeminism. If I search that website for references to "capitalism", I get many, many hits. How many of those hits do you suppose involve discussion of Capitalism as a positive force in the world, versus a negative force? Why should that be?
....I've just searched "Patriarchy and late stage capitalism".
Having previously identified the socialization and naturalization of inequalities, we now look at the influence of capitalism. Although patriarchy pre-existed it - many societies were already characterized by a sexual division of labour, gender-based violence, or gender norms often privileging the male - the specific contribution of capitalism was undoubtedly the institutionalization of the devaluation of women and their work. The devalued or even unpaid domestic work, the concept of the “housewife” that accompanies it, as well as professional segregation, have their origins in the era when capitalism gradually replaced the medieval feudal system. They are thus not, as we often hear, the remnants of a dark and barbaric medieval era, but rather constitutive of the first phase of capitalist accumulation which, as we shall see, led to a phenomenal regression in the status of women.
Judging by this excerpt (or the article as a whole, I'm not your dad), what general branch of political philosophy do you think has formed the author's worldview?
The dominance approach to feminist theory arises out of a Marxian background that models gender difference on class relations. The relation between manager and worker is not just one of “difference.” The manager and worker are situated within a system of social relations that unequally distributes money, power, status, etc. Likewise, men and women aren’t just “different,” but are categories of persons – like manager and worker – that are defined in terms of social relations that position them in a complex class/race/sex hierarchy. Given this background to the dominance approach, it is useful to consider a bit of the history of the relation between Marxism and feminism.
What do you think the author means when she says that "the dominance approach to feminist theory arises out of a Marxian background"? What does it mean to "model gender differences on class relations?" Why do you suppose the author spends so much of their paper discussing Marx? Why does she believe that "Socialist feminism involves a commitment to “the practical unity of the struggle against capitalism and the struggle for women’s liberation." Why is she interested in a struggle against Capitalism, and where does Marx come in to this struggle?
This article argues that modern imagery of the Black female body exists in opposition to sexual health and sexual rights by focusing on existing representations of Black female eroticism as a legacy of colonialism. It addresses Black feminist thought on the history and contemporary use of the Black female body and offers a human rights perspective on uses of the Black female body within patriarchal capitalism.
Where is this idea of "Patriarchal Capitalism" coming from? Do you think the author developed it herself? If not, how did she come by it?
Contemporary feminism is currently at a crossroads, facing a concerted onslaught from both neoliberal and neoconservative ideologies. While these ideologies are inherently different—neoliberalism often appropriates feminist language to serve capitalist ends, and neoconservatism typically attacks feminist principles—they similarly reinforce the traditional role of families as providers of welfare. This crisis of alienation in feminism is characterized by three key factors: the gender divisions brought about by feminism’s shift to identity politics, the obscuring of feminist critique of capitalism by the spread of commercialization, and the instrumentalization of feminism in politics. These challenges have resulted in increased class antagonism and the further marginalization of lower-income women, reinforcing one another. To address this multifaceted crisis, a return to Marxist thought is deemed necessary for women’s liberation.
How can Feminism "return" to Marxism, when it never had anything to do with Marxism in the first place?
Anxiety disorders are one of the most prevalent mental disorders globally, and 63% of those diagnoses are of women. Although widely acknowledged across health disciplines and news and social media outlets, the majority of attention has left assumptions underlying women's anxiety in the twenty-first century unquestioned. Drawing on my own experiences of anxiety, I will the explore both concept and diagnosis in the Western world. Reflecting on my own experiences through a critical feminist lens, I will investigate the construction of anxiety as mental disorder in the context of neoliberal late-stage capitalism, heteropatriarchy, and biomedical psychiatry.
Where does the idea of "Late-stage Capitalism" come from? What are the other stages?
The term “late capitalism” regained relevance in 1991 when Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson published Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Drawing on Mandel’s idea that capitalism has sped up and gone global, Jameson expanded his analysis to the cultural realm. His argument was that late capitalist societies have lost their connection with history and are defined by a fascination with the present. In Jameson’s account, late capitalism is characterized by a globalized, post-industrial economy, where everything – not just material resources and products but also immaterial dimensions, such as the arts and lifestyle activities – becomes commodified and consumable. In this capitalist stage, we see innovation for the sake of innovation, a superficial projected image of self via celebrities or “influencers” channeled through social media, and so on. In this time, whatever societal changes that emerge are quickly transformed into products for exchange. Unlike those who celebrate postmodernism as replete with irony and transgression, Jameson considers it to be a non-threatening feature of the capitalist system in contemporary societies.
How can Marxist analysis "expand into the cultural realm"? If the term "late stage capitalism" were related to attempts to expand Marxist analysis in this fashion, would the prevalence of the term be some level of evidence for the memetic spread of this expansion?
...In my younger days, this is the point where I would drink several cups of coffee and spend the next twelve hours pasting the first paragraph and a few pertinent questions for every one of the first five hundred search results in the fifteenth tab in my brave window and then wrap it up with six solid pages-worth of compact, four-letter obscenities, but I'm older and I have kids now and my back hurts, so let's not do that.
It seems obvious to me that the various branches of Social Justice theory are, to a first approximation, direct descendants of Marxism. It seems obvious to me that a supermajority of the people promulgating Social Justice theory believe that they are performing some combination of extending, expanding, or (for the truly arrogant) correcting Marxism, quite explicitly. I think the above position can be defended unassailably by looking at the academic output that constitutes the headwaters of the Social Justice movement. I think that those who argue that the obvious, inescapable ties between Social Justice theory and Marxism are some sort of hallucination or sloppy categorization are either woefully uninformed or actively dishonest. To those who have advanced such arguments in the thread on the subject below, I offer an invitation: assuming the above examples are insufficient, what level of evidence would satisfy you? How many papers from how many journals do you need to see? How many quotes from how many prominent figures within the modern social justice movement, and the people who taught them, and the people who taught them, and so on? How far back do we need to go to satisfy you? How deep do we need to dig to bring this question to a conclusion?
Or maybe I'm totally wrong. Let's run with that. If I'm wrong, if the above is the wrong approach, why is it wrong and what would be better?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2mo ago
Realistically, I think it's just because to conservatives of a certain generation, 'Marxism' is the scariest and most evil word available, so calling everything they don't like Marxist is just a habit. It's equivalent to the way people on the left call everything 'fascism'.
Would you classify Black Lives Matter as a Marxist movement, or no?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2mo ago
that thing doesn't care about pollution. it uses a new system of territory, and only goes hostile if you build in its area. Pretty sure the lava planet doesn't have pollution at all, since the air is already a toxic stew.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2mo ago
And they were wrong that such chaos wasn't worth it, and indeed that it could even potentially be avoided in any case.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2mo ago
Would looking at statistics of which party the journalists employed at the networks donate to make it less nebulous?
Let's say that reference to "the Cathedral" or "the Elites" is not a good way to approach this conversation. What would be a better approach? Reference to Blue Tribe?
The post two levels up adds the word "forcefully" to a description of such a coalition that did not previously contain it. How did that insertion add to the conversation?
It seems to me that @sulla's critique is on point and @MotteInTheEye's point is likewise a reasonable attempt at communication. I don't have nearly as much time as I used to for reasoned argumentation, but if you or @mdurak think the thinking here really is fuzzy, I can at least attempt to throw my hat in the ring as an interlocuter.
Creating a fully-automatic helium-powered submachine gun that can push at least one 30-round magazine of 9mm-equivalent-or-better projectiles at lethal speeds is trivial with current materials science
My own experimentation indicates that it's possible to get:
- 32 ~9mm equivalent projectiles travelling at lethal speeds
- With a burst time under 4 seconds
- in a roughly SMG-like form factor
- In a form that is not regulated as a firearm under federal law
- using no commercial ammo
- using no pressure-bearing metal components
- using no advanced tooling
- using no controllable materials
- using a DIY process that the average teenager can easily follow
- for an very conservatively estimated unit cost of $50 per weapon, and likely half that.
- and with a total from-scratch cost for all materials and tooling needed for producing both the weapon and ammo costing less than a poverty pony AR15.
Such a weapon would have a number of tradeoffs, but it illustrates another corner of the possibility space. It's all a question of what you're optimizing for; right now, almost all optimization is happening in a very small area of the possibility space, focused on a very narrow cluster of factors, because the gun culture has not generally been sitting down with a piece of paper and a pencil and really thought about the nature of the problem for five minutes. There's low-hanging fruit absolutely everywhere in terms of legal frameworks, capital-intensive manufacturing, DIY, you name it. The fruit isn't being picked because people in the gun culture, generally, aren't looking at things from the correct perspective to make that fruit visible. They're thinking in terms of incremental shifts from what the current state of things, not about desired end-states and the most efficient route to them.
Even this inefficient search method is probably enough to get us where we need to go, but if the perspective shifts, we could get there a hell of a lot faster.
[EDIT] - I want to elaborate on the subject of optimization.
The gun culture has moved from the standard longarm being a shotgun or bolt-action rifle to the AR15. That was an optimization process driven in large part by political and social conflict, and the route it optimized down was capital-heavy industrial production. One of the tradeoffs it largely accepted was conforming not only to the letter but also the spirit of state and federal firearms legislation, with the goal of getting the highest-quality firearms possible under the constraints they imposed. This has worked really, really well, with the result that we now have arrived on more or less the pinnacle of industrially-produced cartridge-firing autoloading firearms. All longarm designs converge on the AR15, and all handgun designs converge on the Glock, and both designs are well into their grind to the asymptote.
Now that we're chasing the asymptote with capital-heavy industrial production of small arms, the best value comes from expanding out into optimizing other factors. One of these is erosion of existing weapons controls by dropping adherence to the spirit of the rules; we see this with bump stocks, FRT triggers, pistol braces, suppressor paperwork streamlining, all of which are a good start. One of the obvious bits of low-hanging fruit is to do for destructive devices what's been done for SBRs, full-auto and suppressors; there's some small activity visible on this front, but clear potential for much, much more. Another piece of low-hanging fruit is what we might call the Liberator angle pioneered by Defense Distributed: focus on cutting cost and complexity of manufacturing to get the simplest, cheapest, easiest-to-produce firearm possible, and then work back toward effectiveness from there.
And in this factor, it's interesting to note how the logic of crowds flows through the possibility space, and how memetic effects determine the rate and direction of flow. DD established a paradigm of 3d-printing guns, and now the DIY space is focused on optimizing the 3D-printing paradigm, so we get the FGC-9. But while the FGC-9 is a fantastic development, you can already see how people are still thinking in terms of capital-intensive high-quality manufacturing: they're trying to reproduce a commercially-produced pistol-caliber-carbine from the low-cost DIY angle. 3d printers are still relatively expensive and relatively complicated to set up and operate, and the guns they turn out vary significantly in quality. They're working toward "effectiveness", but their definition of "effectiveness" is based on a commercially-produced cartridge firearm. It seems to me that there's more opportunity in defining effectiveness in terms of lethal effect, total input costs, ease of manufacture, and ubiquity of material. The community obviously appreciates this, with their efforts to answer questions like "what about barrels" and "what about ammo", but there's a sense in which they're committing to building a pencil, when they could in fact use clay and a stylus or, indeed, a printing press. Is the goal to have a pencil, or is it to write a text? Is it to write a text, or is it to disseminate ideas as widely as possible? To what extent does commitment to specific forms and factors get in the way, especially in a contested environment where powerful interests are to a lesser or greater degree actively hunting communications infrastructure?
And there's considerably more besides, but that's at least a start.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2mo ago
I still think that overall, mentioning the cat eating thing was a mistake by Trump, because it allowed the Democrats to reframe the debate in a way which is very advantageous for them.
Can you point to a statement offered or an issue raised by a Republican that has not allowed Democrats to reframe the debate in a way that is very advantageous to them?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2mo ago
Entirely true. I'm happy to see evidence either way.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2mo ago
Has the CIA done this in the war on terror? No, it hasn't.
I would vastly prefer that it did. I would much, much rather they attempt to eliminate a terrorist with a half-ounce of high explosive than a twenty-five-pound warhead. I would much rather they deliver that explosive by secreting it into a target's personal items, rather than aiming a hundred-pound supersonic missile at some part of a building from ten miles away through a low-resolution thermal camera.
You are consistently playing language games. These aren't "IEDs" any more than a hand grenade is an IED. This isn't "terrorism" any more than any other state-sanctioned use of force is terrorism. The CIA probably would not have approved of this attack, but that is not to the CIA's credit; they've routinely approved of far, far more objectionable attacks. This is doubtless very inconvenient for the US government, and is a great example of why we should not be involved in any of this, but that doesn't actually make the attack itself objectionable on any fundamental level.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2mo ago
A drone strike also requires a chain of command to strike a certain target at a certain place, an IED does not.
I think it's probable that these bombs were better targeted than the average drone strike. The chain of command observably sucks at identifying and designating targets, and often resulted in significant collateral damage. I care about striking particular people at particular places because I want harm to bystanders minimized. These bombs seem likely to have done a very good job of minimizing harm to bystanders.
So some of these may have been detonated in schools, hospitals, or diplomatic facilities, crowded markets, places which would not be targets for drone strikes following a chain of command.
This would concern me if they had been randomly airdropped by a helicopter. It would concern me if Israel simply put charges in every pager in the country, and then detonated them all. But the story at the moment is that they compromised Hezbollah's pager supply specifically, which means that anyone harmed by one of these pagers is overwhelmingly likely to either be a member of Hezbollah, or was gifted a pager by a member of Hezbollah. Maybe that impression is mistaken, in which case I'll happily agree that my assessment is invalid. But if it is accurate, I think my assessment stands.
I don't particularly think that schools, hospitals, diplomatic facilities, or indeed crowded markets are intrinsically off-limits to war. They are vulnerable and valuable, and efforts should be made to minimize harm to or within them... But if the above holds, then the reason these areas were bombed is because an active member of Hezbollah entered them. Further, the places themselves were not harmed in any significant way. If the Iranian diplomat was injured, it sorta raises the question of how he got within area effect of a bomb this small, likely being held by a Hezbollah operative. My sympathy is limited.
There's no accountability like there would be for a drone strike.
Could you unpack the word "accountability" in this sentence? What "accountability" applied for drone strikes, and how does it differ from the accountability applying here? Some agent of a government did both. If either kills innocents, there's going to be negative consequences, but probably not serious ones. What's your model here?
Obviously a bombing in a market causes the market to suffer the harmful effects? What are you even denying at this point?
That the market structures, contents, or occupants generally were harmed by the physical effects of overpressure or fragmentation, which are the central examples of "harm" caused by a "bomb". Here's some examples of the destruction caused by central examples of "bombs" in a market.
It causes obviously immediate disruption and panic and potential injury to bystanders. In the long term it creates fear and instability.
War tends to cause disruption, panic and potentially injury to bystanders, as well as fear and instability. If you don't want that, avoid war.
If you think the people hit weren't actually Hezbollah, say that. I'm willing to believe it if there's reasonable amounts of evidence.
If you think the people hit were Hezbollah but this method of hitting them was inappropriate, I'm curious as to what a more appropriate method would be better. This method seems on the order of individual bullets from a sniper, which is pretty damn selective.
You think this is closer to a drone strike than it is to an IED?
"Your honor. I spent hours meticulously crafting these. To call them 'improvised' explosives is an insult."
Jokes aside, yes, it is very clearly closer to a drone strike than to an IED, and it is not particularly close to a drone strike.
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You can think of it in terms of energy-in-the-system. IEDs in a middle-east context are generally remote-detonated artillery shells, suicide vests, or vehicle bombs. Drone strikes are usually a hellfire missile. In any of these cases, we're talking about dozens of pounds of high explosive and almost always significant added fragmentation. Recently, the US has been deploying the R9X hellfire, which trades the HE warhead for deployable blades, relying on pure kinetic impact... but even that is less discriminate than these pagers; people standing within arms-length of one of these are extremely likely to be unharmed. These are not "bombs in a market", because that implies that the market, in general, suffers the harmful effects of the bomb. They are literally bombs in someone's pocket. The fact that the person might be in a market when they go off is irrelevant; unlike IEDs or hellfires or even the r9x, the market and the other people in it will almost certainly be fine.
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You can think of it in terms of discrimination in lethal effect. arty-shell bombs, suicide vests and car bombs are all designed to maximize lethal effect across the widest radius possible. Hellfires are not optimized for lethal radius, but their warhead and kinetic energy often deliver a similar effect. The R9X is directly intended to minimize lethal radius, and these pager bombs take it to about the minimum possible value while maintaining effectiveness. This minimization is possible because the attacker delivered these bombs in a way that maximized the chance of intimate contact with the target before detonation. IEDs are "to who it may concern"; these are, again, literally in the targets' pockets. And again, the Israelis did this blind, so they can't guarantee that it's a Hezbollah guy holding the hot potato when it pops. But you can't guarantee that the target of a sniper attack doesn't turn out of the line of fire at the last second, and you hit someone in the background instead. Mistakes happen, but this method seems to be quite optimized for minimizing them.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2mo ago
Drone strikes seems like a reasonable one. I'm not a fan of Israel by any means, but this seems straightforwardly preferable to the classic "hellfire missile into a compound that turns out to be a wedding". As I recall, there were a lot of incidents along those general lines, any one of which was almost certainly much more objectionable than this entire attack.
What exactly is the basis for objection here?
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The targets are Hezbollah agents. I don't see any reasonable objection to Israel targeting Hezbollah agents.
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The method involves explosives, which are not perfectly discriminate, so there's risk of collateral damage. Only, these appear to be very small bombs, such that you need to be either touching them or quite unlucky to be seriously maimed or killed.
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The explosives are delivered "blind", in the sense that when they're detonated, the people detonating them don't know where they are or who actually has them, raising the risk of collateral damage. On the other hand, they were delivered in a way that provides a very high probability that they will, in fact, be in the direct personal possession of legitimate targets, and those not in the personal possession of legitimate targets probably got there by the actions of the legitimate targets, not the attackers.
My distaste for the Israeli state comes from them frequently being indiscriminate in the application of violence, either maiming and killing people who I do not consider legitimate targets. This attack in particular seems orders-of-magnitude better than the average in terms of target discrimination.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2mo ago
Cheney and Romney are the prototypical examples of Blue Tribe Republicans.
It's not in my interest now. It wasn't in my interest when I did factory work either. I've never had a job where I perceived it to be in my interest.
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