JulianRota
1yr ago
A wider middle eastern war means Israel will fall unless christian troops enter the fray.
Why would it mean that though? There have already been at least 3 wars (48, 67, 73) involving full-scale armies from multiple Arab nations attacking Israel, and they haven't fallen yet.
On paper, the Arab nations would appear to have ample forces to do the job. But historically, they've had trouble actually coordinating and committing to attacks. I see no reason to presume that that has changed. Syria and Egypt seem to have enough internal problems these days that it's hard to see them pulling off a large-scale offensive action.
JulianRota
1yr ago
Point of curiosity - how many people do not carry some sort of smartphone with them basically everywhere they go? Trying to focus on either you personally or somebody you personally know, not just speculating.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I think it's a pretty low-quality over-the-top hysterical take. Nukes flying is pretty unlikely even if America does nothing at all. Israel made it through several other full-scale wars with multiple larger countries with proper militaries without any direct foreign intervention and without nuking anybody. It's pretty unlikely they get pushed to the point of feeling the need to do that no matter what happens here.
Granted a substantial American carrier force standing by probably makes it less likely for anyone to get too carried away even without them actually doing anything, which I guess is a good thing.
JulianRota
1yr ago
Ditto from me on basically everything you said.
Under the theories that power Keto, most of the food that's easily available in the Western world is completely terrible for you. Eating food that's terrible for you and also taking a drug that probably makes it have less of an effect for life seems like a worse idea than just eating better food.
I advocate a gradual approach to moving onto Keto. Start by making a list of everything you eat. One at a time, replace each thing with something more Keto, ideally starting with the worst. Keep going until you notice positive effects. The usual standard of 20g of carbs a day is probably not necessary to get down to if you're not trying to lose hundreds of pounds of weight. If you can stay under 100g or so of carbs a day and not notice at least some positive effects, then it's probably not going to work for you.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I think I would dispute that part actually. Actual paratroopers seem to be similarly vulnerable - also slow moving, without cover, and very big and obvious. Not as loud, but also no ability to maneuver. But they were dropped anyways. In the era when large-scale parachute drops were more common, they seemed to be considered not too vulnerable. It's probably harder than it might seem to hit a moving airborne target with a small number of rifles. Presuming neither one drops directly onto a large formation of highly alert troops, they're usually pretty survivable.
I don't expect to see America or China going that way. It may not be terribly likely to be used in the Ukraine war either. But it seems plausible that the kind of low-budget forces that field things like technicals might try this too.
Incidentally, I would also argue for better Israeli gun rights. I doubt it would have had all that big of an effect on this attack though. Maybe some of the villages that were attacked would have fared somewhat better. I doubt a giant rave is ever going to be heavily armed though. And the military bases were surely armed, but didn't seem to be alert or organized to repel this sort of attack.
JulianRota
1yr ago
Reading more about it, it is indeed sounding like their real force multiplier was not so much the IPGs, but the much better than expected intelligence, planning, and execution on the part of the militants, and how they managed to keep it completely secret from the vaunted Israeli intelligence services. Which suggests we should expect over-reaction on the part of the Israeli security forces and decision-makers due to not so much due to the sheer outrageousness of the brutality against civilians but instead how many people must have been asleep at the switch for this to be possible.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I think this is one of those things where the devil is in the details. I like the idea, but I think it would be impossible to decide on any particular exact amount of time for it. No matter what the exact amount of time was, there would always be one group whose claims were just barely within the limit and another whose were just barely outside of it. Then both sides of both of those conflicts would get angry / happy that it wasn't just a little bit off in another direction. And everybody would be throwing every possible kind of influence at whatever organization was responsible for deciding exactly what the timeframe was, etc.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I've been thinking about the bigger implications of the Improvised ParaGliders that Hamas apparently used as part of their Oct 7 attack (I'll call them IPGs for short). I don't think we've gotten much hard information about them yet, so I'm going to be making some guesses.
What was the security plan for Gaza before Oct 7? I don't have access to the full one, and it's probably too long anyways, but for some suppositions, the basic idea was, a relatively light but carefully watched fence all around Gaza, no IDF personnel inside Gaza under normal conditions, Hamas is responsible for all internal security, and decently equipped quick-reaction forces on bases near the fence to respond to any observed breaches. Careful checks of all items coming through the border to stop actual weapons and anything that could reasonably turned into a weapon from coming in. It's probably impossible to keep order among 2.1ish million people without at least some weapons, and would be impossible to strip them out completely given the history of the region, so we accept that Hamas has some number of infantry weapons including handguns and rifles, and probably some machine guns, RPGs, grenades, etc. They would be decisively prevented from having anything bigger like artillery, proper armored vehicles, and aircraft, plus precision stuff like guided anti-armor and anti-air rockets, though perhaps with somewhat less success.
What was Hamas's attack plan for Oct 7? As far as I know, no proper military strategist / historian has actually assembled enough info to put it together yet. But I gather it looked something like, send in a wave of lightly armed IPG troops first, aimed at all known QRF bases and a few other juicy targets, like the rave and some towns. They may not win all of the battles with the QRF bases, but the goal is to cause enough chaos, confusion, and distraction to allow several substantial convoys of more heavily armed ground troops to storm through the fences faster than anything strong enough can be organized to stop them. The plan after that seems rather fuzzy and less relevant to the point, so I'll leave it aside here.
It appears this IPG tactic was novel and effective enough to substantially disrupt the normal response to this sort of thing. So then, what is the new security plan for a future Gaza strip to prevent this sort of thing from being effective? I believe this is an important question - if we want a future for the Gaza Strip that resembles the pre-Oct 7 status quo of ~millions of people living there in a peaceful-ish way, we need to have a practical and effective security plan. Can we hope to prevent enough construction supplies from getting in there to build these things? Banning I guess small gas engines, tarps, and cords? Can we hope to build some sort of system to track and shoot down these things? How detectable are they on radar? Antiaircraft rockets are probably too big, expensive, and more firepower than needed. Maybe we need smallish drones with regular machine guns on them? It feels like it's a sticky problem.
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? They have at least some actual helicopters, but probably not as many as they'd like. Maybe Yemen or Sudan? The Israel-Gaza war and Russia-Ukraine wars seem to be sucking up most of the energy on war reporting, I'm actually not that sure offhand what else is going on around the world.
I do know that, but I don't think it changes anything regarding what I said. They did win the last election, regardless of it being kind of a while ago and however much the Israeli government might have helped. As far as I know, Hamas didn't make any secret of what they believed when those elections were being held; everyone who voted for them must have known what they were all about. There aren't any free opinion polls there, so all we really know is that nobody has managed to successfully overthrow them yet.
I'd honestly love it if the residents of Gaza truly were 80% Jeffersonian classical liberals whose demands for peace and prosperity are not being heard solely due to the brutal oppression of Hamas - that means there is a possible peaceful solution to all this. Sadly, regardless of how much you or I would like for that to be the case, we just don't have any proof of it, and all of the indirect signs suggest it's not.
What if it truly is the case that upwards of 80% of Gazans really do hate the idea of Israel existing at all so much that they don't mind giving up things like running water to hit back at them somehow? What evidence would you accept that that's the case?
For me, a lot of this comes from the, I guess you would call it hangover or backlash from the Iraq war. We were told the same things during the runup to that. Hey, the only reason this place is a mess is because Saddam Hussein is a big fat jerk. If we just bump him off, it'll be a nice stable Democracy in a snap. The Bush admin said it. I remember reading all of the blogs saying it at the time. I probably said it to a few people myself. I wanted to believe it. Then, reality hit us all in the face. Saddam was actually keeping a lid on a lot of beefs that promptly blew up in our faces as soon as his regime was out of the picture. Through a tremendous effort in both blood and treasure by the most powerful military in the world, we eventually managed to get it sort of kind of under control. At least until ISIS gobbled up a good chunk of it. But let's not get too far into recent Middle East happenings. Bottom line is that it is a nice and seductive idea that there's all a bunch of nice kind peaceful people in these places who are being oppressed by a minority of nutcases, but it's just not the case. We've had our faces rubbed into it good and hard by now.
I think often of this old-ish, since deleted article I read a while back during the Iraq war and Arab Spring. A Western blogger / journalist meets an Egyptian political blogger for a little tour of Cairo and a few conversations. In one, he asks this Egyptian guy, a classical liberal there, "How many people here think like you do?". The answer was "Few, very few. Less than ten percent probably." Also note how the Taliban took over Afghanistan about 20 minutes after the US Military left. The way I see it, it's just a fact that a majority of people in that region really do think this way. Nothing we try to do in the region will work right if we continue to refuse to accept this even when it's staring us in the face.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I actually agree with most of what he said. It's more what he hasn't said that's the problem.
Please also remember this: Hamas is still an extremist group. The Palestinian people do not have a government or leaders who legitimately represent their interests, and it sure as hell isn't Hamas.
I'm gonna say, source on this? (not necessarily to you Pasha) Hamas is the legitimately elected government of Gaza. So Mr. Isaac Saul does not believe they "legitimately represent their interests", but who is he to say? They won the last election, how does he know better? Perhaps he is personally friends with a number of reasonable Palestinians in Gaza, but there's no solid indication that they represent a majority. So why isn't it him and whoever he is friends with who do not legitimately represent the actual interests of the majority of Gaza residents? For better or worse, if they are free people, their opinions are what they actually are and what they have proven them to be, not what we would like them to be.
Israel is forever stuffing these people into tinier and tinier boxes with fewer and fewer resources.
So this is technically true, but it misses the why. They're not doing it because they're great big jerks who just wanna smash some Palestinians (or at least, they weren't before this most recent spate). They're doing it because the Gaza residents have consistently prioritized hurting Israelis any way they can over everything else. They've displayed pretty remarkable levels of cleverness in turning what we would think of as ordinary objects into weapons. If you legitimately try to stop anything that could possibly be turned into some sort of weapon from coming in, you're not left with much. What materials do you think they used to make those para-glider things to drop basically paratroopers into a music festival, and would you block all of those from going into Gaza?
Ultimately, I have no idea what to do with a people who refuse to accept any sort of peace and bend all their efforts towards destroying you no matter what you do to them. Maybe sitting on them hard enough to mostly stop them from attacking you just makes them angrier, but then exactly what are you supposed to do?
JulianRota
1yr ago
Taking civilian hostages is also a war crime. As is murdering civilians, and raping them. All of which Hamas, the legitimate government of Gaza, did to kick off this little war. Exactly what remedy would you propose for these war crimes?
Also note that the Geneva conventions explicitly do not apply unless both nations either have signed them or have agreed to abide by them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_Conventions#Common_Article_2_relating_to_international_armed_conflict_(IAC)
JulianRota
1yr ago
I think this one needs the asterisk that it's the Law school, and the company that dropped their job offer is a law firm. Law is probably one of the most Jewish careers out there. It's entirely plausible that the law firm has enough Jewish associates that they would have major problems if a bunch of them quit, or threatened to, because they hired a Hamas-supporter as a new junior associate. That's gotta be the easiest decision in the world for that firm.
It's also very plausible that if this individual happened to be starting in a substantially less Jewish career, this would have been brushed under the rug.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I have a habit instead of only ever putting down my keys and wallet in one place in my home. Thus, I never lose them.
I use Melatonin as well. I think that, without it, my natural sleep cycle is like a 26 hour day or so. If I went on without that or an alarm just going to sleep and waking up whenever felt natural, my cycle tends to drift later and later. Melatonin, taken a couple of hours before bed, seems to keep my sleep cycle synchronized with the actual daily cycle.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I've read a fair amount about the IRA's guerrilla war / terrorism campaign. One of the things I noted is that quite a lot of the violence they carried out was not executed with a great deal of care - things like, making sure you're killing the right person, making sure there aren't any bystanders who you would also have to kill in addition to the planned target, making sure it's done at a time and place without too much witnesses or evidence, etc. There was only a relatively small number of hardcore members who were capable of carrying out savage violence with careful planning. I concluded from this that it's genuinely hard to find people who are both prepared to carry out gruesome acts against innocent-seeming targets and also sane and rational enough to be intelligent and careful about it.
JulianRota
1yr ago
Can we do the same for everyone in all those foreign nations that we allegedly don't know anything about who cries out for American intervention every time they pick a fight with their neighbors and get in over their heads? I'd be more than happy for us to pull out of NATO, the Pacific, etc, and best of luck to all of the nations there dealing with China and Russia without us.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I always wonder, why do we only get this sort of pushback on comments about warfare? I can advocate for fires being fought without somebody talking about how I might not be a very good firefighter. I can advocate for goods being delivered quickly and reliably without being a good truck driver myself. I can say putting a bridge over a river seems like a good idea without being a civil engineer. So how come it's only if I think war is necessary or suggest fighting it in a particular way that somebody will come by and claim that I'm not a good enough warrior myself? What does it matter? Can I say the reverse, that you aren't allowed to advocate for peace until you've actually watched your children be brutally murdered before your eyes by your neighbor and still advocate for peace with them?
JulianRota
1yr ago
A couple points around this that I don't think have been covered well enough yet:
The surrounding Arab countries never did really support Palestine or hate Israel that much, or trust each other that much. A big part of the reason Israel won their large-scale wars is that the Arab countries never did really unite. They were always scheming against each other, trying to ensure that one of the others did most of the fighting and took most of the losses. Yeah they don't like Israel, but they have not proved willing to put their own regimes at risk by committing sufficiently large forces to combat that they could be vulnerable to coups or counter-invasions if they suffered large losses.
Also, for anyone who looks at a map of the area, the surrounding Arab countries have hundreds of times more land area than Israel does. If any of them really cared about the Palestinians, they could easily offer to let them move into their countries. But none of them has ever offered that, even on a small scale. It seems they like the Palestinians more as a thorn in Israel's side and maybe as martyrs than they do as possible neighbors. (Jordan hasn't accepted any since 1967).
Given those realities, I don't think there's any way any action by Israel could lead to a united Arab world deciding to work together to raise large militaries and commit them to joint action against Israel, even leaving the nuclear angle out of the picture. If that was anywhere near being in the cards, why wouldn't they do the much cheaper and simpler option of offering the Palestinian people refuge in their countries first?
Of course, that also means I have no clue what Hamas is actually going for here besides a quick and briefly satisfying spasm of horrific violence mostly against civilians followed rapidly by an inevitable crushing by the IDF.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I don't think Israel has any meaningful capability to attack Iran. I wouldn't go so far as to call them a paper tiger, but their ability to project and sustain forces significantly beyond their borders is slim. Iran is pretty far away with numerous countries hostile to Israel in between them. Even a single airstrike seems unlikely to succeed - the combat range of the strike aircraft in their inventory barely reaches the closest border of Iran over the shortest possible route, which overflies a lot of hostile territory. Hitting any actual targets inside Iran would probably require aerial refueling in hostile airspace. I expect they want to keep what forces they have close to home to protect the country from direct threats rather than risk them on super-long-range missions.
They would need to use medium range ballistic missiles or cruise missiles to attack Iran, which they probably don't have, aside from nuclear-tipped ones.
JulianRota
1yr ago
Look at the expressions of the people who did get it - they were really skeptical and thought they were being set up for something. The one guy who was into it was a Mr. Beast subscriber and fan himself. It's probably like 1,000x more common for a random person trying to get your attention in public to be trying to get something from you or harass you somehow than to actually give you $500 for a trivial low-risk task.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I initially thought the temp ban for that top level post was a little excessive. But it does appear to be the case that it generated a lot of low-quality noise and very little good discussion. And I'm not super thrilled to have a lot of top-level posts that are basically, somebody please tell me more details about interesting happening X.
I'm not sure what really happened. Maybe the original SSC sub had an audience that was smaller and more connected to Scott's vibe, so low-quality posts were more likely to lead to high-quality discussion. But that doesn't appear to be the case here and now.
There's always the "be the change you want to see" option - try to post higher quality responses ourselves even if the original post or thread parent is bad.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I'd say that ToaKraka's post is a good example of actual high-quality journalism. All of the relevant facts presented clearly and concisely with minimal spin and links to relevant sources. It's more of a wonder that some person on the internet does it for free far better than the entire legacy media with their salaries, experience, and degrees.
JulianRota
1yr ago
This gives me a thought - maybe there's a time-energy thing to it too.
So let's say that IQ is an expression of how much intelligence you are applying at the moment. Maybe it's at the maximum when you're doing some hard thing, but it probably isn't that high all the time. Most of the time, you're using much less intelligence. Even smart people do pretty dumb things once in a while. So then for every person, there is a "peak IQ", which is the maximum amount of intelligence you can ever conjure up. And there's also a measure for maybe "IQ minutes" for how long you can apply that level of intelligence and what level of intelligence you are capable of applying at other times throughout the day.
If you take an IQ test, presuming that you want to take it and want to score well, then you do what's needed to ensure you're at peak IQ, so that it measures your actual peak IQ. It is still a useful measure, but it's harder to measure how much you can actually apply that and how much intelligence you display when you aren't being tested.
Maybe the average smart person is really smart for like 3-4 hours total at work, and maybe 1-2 in their personal life. This is plenty to have a good job and make a good living and have an interesting hobby or two.
Maybe what Elon Musk really has is extraordinarily high IQ minutes. Thus, his peak IQ is generously high but not out of the league of smart people worldwide. But if he can apply all of that intelligence for, say, 18 hours a day, versus 6 max for the average person of that IQ, well then he can get quite a lot done. Like start and run a revolutionary electric car company and also a revolutionary rocket company, and like 4 other companies for things that seem a little wacky but could be revolutionary someday, and then I guess buy and run Twitter too just for kicks.
JulianRota
1yr ago
The new top-level post has better in-depth discussion on the relative merits of TK vs Ellul and their ideas, so I'll leave further discussion of that point there.
I do think a necessary point here is that TK explicitly advocated for the violent overthrow of technological society worldwide. I'm not an expert on Ellul, I've only skimmed his Wikipedia article, but he doesn't seem to go that way. He makes some of the same arguments, but he seems to push for broader awareness and acceptance of his viewpoint and possibly setting up some independent communities that implement them as much as possible on a voluntary basis. I think that's a critical distinction, and a good reason why Ellul deserves tolerant consideration and discussion while TK deserves much harsher criticism.
I'm perfectly fine with the Amish and other such societies because 1. They walk the walk, actually setting up long-lasting communities to practice their lifestyle that are about as non-dependent on mainstream society as you can reasonably be while living in a first-world industrialized nation, and 2. They don't seek to impose anything on anyone - they just want to live their way, and don't care at all how anybody outside their community lives. Rumspringa is proof that even their own children are encouraged to get a real and fair view of the world outside so that they can make a legitimate, free, and fully-informed choice on whether to stay within the community or leave it. TK did the opposite - he advocated for and actively tried to force everyone else to live in the way he thought was best while not doing so himself.
JulianRota
1yr ago
The parent I responded to there had written a longer response with more detail that I was meaning to respond to now, but I guess he deleted it. (It was pretty long but reasonably charitable and clear IMO, so I thought it deserved a reasonably high-effort response). Oh well, I guess I'll say most of the same stuff here.
I was actually biased to think moderately positively of TK before I read his piece, as most of the areas I read seem at least modestly biased towards him. I wrote about it a bit on this site. I wrote in that thread what actually changed my mind. I had basically presumed that his ideas were too censored and too difficult to get out there such that it drove him to terrorism. But he actually wrote himself in that very essay in P96 that he did violence because he did have opportunities to put it out there, but not to be distributed to his satisfaction. As I wrote there, I reject the idea that you get to do violence because nobody thinks your ideas are interesting. If nobody thinks your ideas are interesting enough to pay attention to, you should work on improving them and presenting them better, not blow people up.
That Mr. Ellul wrote similar things I think more proves my point than refutes it (I believe you both that he wrote similar things, but I'm not sure to what extent he rejected or endorsed violence to spread his ideas) - it's perfectly possible to have such views and advocate for them in normal and peaceful ways. I think that, considering the public image TK has gained from his bombing campaign (since we're all talking about him), it's perfectly reasonable to point out the holes in his ideas and remind people that he did make the decision that his ideas were important enough to justify aggressive violence - not even towards specific people responsible for opposing him or rejecting his ideas, but people he felt were part of the industrial system that he wanted to tear down.
I also believe that part of the generous interpretation many have given to his work is due to the re-definition of freedom that he used. A casual reading of many of his sections with the implicit belief among the general public in the western world that "freedom" refers to basically classical liberalism, things like free speech, free press, rule of law, etc leads many of his ideas to sound significantly more insightful and reasonable. But once you know that he redefined it to mean the "right"/need of individuals to go through the "Power Process" of doing substantial work for their basic needs, it all sounds rather different. Whether Industrial Society is inherently destructive of "classical liberalism" freedom is yet to be determined - that could be a complex and interesting discussion. But Industrial Society being inherently destructive to "power process" freedom is trivially obvious. I have a feeling that this may have been done on purpose. An honest writer simply looking to promote his ideas rather than mislead people would pick a different word, rather than one so loaded with pre-existing cultural baggage in the West.
Parent post also seems to be accusing me of not knowing enough about nature, hunter-gatherer lifestyles, etc. Presumably this is meant to lead to an argument that such lifestyles are actually much better than I had presented them as. At least, that's the most charitable interpretation IMO, part of my issue there is that he didn't actually make an argument for whatever it is he believed, just implied that I was ignorant. If I am, please go ahead and let me know what facts you know that make the arguments less valid, don't just imply that they're there.
I could counter-argue that while I am no expert on such lifestyles, he in turn may not know much about just how complex the logistical chain is that makes available all of the modern goods that we take for granted and exactly what life may be like when they are completely impossible to obtain. I specifically mean the "safety net" concept that I mention elsewhere in this thread. It may not be terribly hard to live a lifestyle superficially similar to what is described by TK, presumably Ellul, and others - I wouldn't be surprised if the number of people in the continental US voluntarily living like that is in the hundreds of thousands. But it's only superficial if you still have the grocery store to solve any food production problems that come up, the hospital to solve any medical problems, the hardware store for any tools you can't fabricate, etc. Even if you never actually go to any of those, the mere fact that it's possible tends to change peoples' behavior. How many people volunteer to put all of those perpetually out of reach for their entire extended family for all eternity?
I understood them to only involve state power indirectly - a pogrom may be directly the action of independent individuals, but is only really possible if the proper state powers ignore them.
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