Lewis
11mo ago
Board games, card games, dice games, video/computer games, hiking, biking, swimming, kayaking, fishing, having a bonfire, darts, Jarts (even better if you can find the old metal-tipped ones), horseshoes, cornhole, hillbilly golf, bocce ball, shooting, axe throwing, kubb, strolling around town (either downtown or through any parks or trails nearby)…. As Ioper said, there are a million possibilities.
Generally, especially during colder months, I would recommend card games and dice games. Once learnt, most games are usually hard enough to keep your attention but easy enough to allow for plenty of side conversation. I’ve found that most board games require more attention.
Lewis
1yr ago
The big question is whether @greyenlightenment would have posted his comment as a top-level post had Stefferi not started the discussion first.
I could perhaps envision his state of mind as wanting to kill someone and realizing that if he keeps trying this particular method of attack then he might successfully do so and retain plausible deniability.
I’d think it more likely that he kept trying this particular method of attack because up until now, it hadn’t been fatal, so he assumed it wouldn’t be going forward. Most people don’t think “There’s a 5% chance of a bad outcome from my action; therefore, if I do it 20 times, the bad outcome is almost certain.” They think, “I’ve done this 19 times before without a bad outcome; this must be okay to do.”
Lewis
1yr ago
I believe the casualty level necessary to subdue Hamas and occupy Gaza would be unacceptable even to Israel’s closest ally. If Israel had gone in blasting in the first two days after the attack, they might have gotten away with it. By now, though, the moment has passed, and I don’t see any possible path toward occupation.
Lewis
1yr ago
I’d think your best bet might be Christian charitable organizations that were already operating inside of Gaza prior to the conflict. The hospital that famously had something happen to it a few weeks ago (not interested in litigating what happened or by whom) is run by the Anglicans, for example.
Lewis
1yr ago
Does Israel have any reasonable shot at both getting Hamas out of power and preventing the rise of Hamas 2.0? I don’t believe it does. If I’m right about that, the only question that remains is how much vengeance the Israelis should exact on the Gazans for the events of October 7. An order of magnitude more fatalities plus an unknown number of additional casualties doesn’t seem like a ridiculous stopping point. After all, if regime change isn’t possible, is it really moral to continue killing? It certainly violates most people’s idea of a just war.
Lewis
1yr ago
Two thoughts: First, Palestinian casualties since Oct. 7 are close to an order of magnitude higher than Israeli casualties on Oct. 7. Israel has already responded; who’s to say they need to keep it up?
Second, whatever they do, they should do it on their own, without a penny of U.S. aid. Since that doesn’t seem to be on the table, I support a ceasefire, and I hope international pressure succeeds in getting one put in place.
Lewis
1yr ago
insurance that covers transition, has to cover costs of transition
Did you mean to say “detransition” the second time there?
Lewis
1yr ago
A mastectomy specifically? I assume there’s no medical benefit to doing it earlier (though maybe it heals better the younger you do it?). I imagine the proponents of that procedure are solely focused on the psychological benefits—reducing the “trauma” of seeing your body change in ways you don’t want it to. They probably also don’t consider detransitioning to be a real future concern, so why not just get it over with?
That’s the best I can come up with; I’m not actually in favor of such things myself.
Lewis
1yr ago
How is it plausible that a mastectomy works better when you're 14 than when you're 18?
The idea is that it’s far easier for a person who transitions at 14 to pass as the gender of their choice than it is for a person who transitions at 18, especially for MTFs. I don’t think they’re actually wrong about this. At 14, most boys and girls are still fairly androgynous; by 18, most boys are clearly young men: tall, prominent jaw line, Adam’s apple, facial hair, muscular structure, etc. If a gender dysphoric boy wants to transition and pass as a girl, puberty blockers at as young an age as possible are his best shot. The same holds true for girls but in reverse.
Neither are countries restaurants. Between the two analogies, I believe mine is both superior and a better way of framing the question.
That said, I’m not sure you really understood my analogy correctly. Yes, if someone who lives in a different house has different rules and customs, that’s absolutely fine (barring a few exceptions). Under my analogy, those would be different countries. So if I move into a women-wear-veils house/country, it would be just as wrong for me to demand the homeowners make an exception for my wife/daughters as it would be for someone from a wear-shoes-indoors house/country to move into my house and demand I accommodate them.
Also, I don’t see how my analogy asserted that it was a positive good to deny immigrants for arbitrary reasons. I think you’ve misunderstood the analogy, and that’s causing you to overthink the details of the analogy without getting into the ideas the analogy represents.
For example, “taking off your shoes” could represent any number of customs/laws: anything from genital mutilation and honor killings to speaking English and using the correct finger to point with. That’s why I said it would be more enlightening if BurdensomeCount gave concrete examples.
Au contraire. If the rule in my house is “Take your shoes off at the door,” and one of my guests prefers to keep his shoes on, he can either get with the program or gtfo. He doesn’t get to have it both ways.
Having said that, the conversation would be more enlightening if you gave concrete examples.
Lewis
1yr ago
Thanks for the correction. According to this article, 20 states allow for the involuntary commitment of sex offenders, which my previous Google search failed to pull up.
Also, the article I linked to is a bit more up-to-date than the two you quoted from. According to it, 15 inmates have been released completely and 135 transferred to “less secure facilities” over the past several years, following complaints about the program. On the other hand, 6% of the 741 inmates (all men) haven’t even been convicted of a crime, which raises serious red flags in my mind.
I’ll admit to being a bit torn about this. I tentatively support committing some fraction of criminals (both sex offenders and otherwise) whose crimes were particularly gruesome and who seem particularly likely to reoffend. Not knowing exactly what these 741 men did, I can’t say whether they would fit my (nebulous and ill-thought-out) criteria.
Lewis
1yr ago
I don’t believe any state in the union involuntarily institutionalizes sex offenders, even for crimes against children. After being released from prison, such criminals are almost always put on a permanent, publicly-available sex offender registry; is that possibly what you’re thinking of?
Lewis
1yr ago
Isn’t the UK’s sinking of the French fleet pretty well-known in the UK (and presumably also France)? Not that the two situations are comparable anyway. Israel’s attack on the USS Liberty was supposedly an accident; the UK’s attack on the French fleet was open and deliberate. The US, responding to the former, made diplomatic protests but otherwise did nothing. Vichy France, responding to the latter, broke diplomatic ties with the UK and bombed Gibraltar. In addition, my understanding is that the resulting rise in French Anglophobia lingered on for years.
Edit: If we had responded to the attack on the USS Liberty by breaking off diplomatic ties with Israel and bombing the Israeli coast, I don’t think anyone today would be complaining about a conspiracy to cover the whole thing up.
Lewis
1yr ago
It’s not necessarily overkill. If the Israelis were confident that A) committing deliberate war crimes would piss off the Americans and cause them to drop their support, and B) attacking an American spy ship would be chalked up as an accident due to fog of war, resulting in no real change to the status quo, they—or more realistically, a single officer—could have decided the risk was worth it.
Lewis
1yr ago
I think you’re definitely on to something, but I remember there being a lot of pushback when some people began “deadnaming” and “misgendering” the trans kid who shot up his/her former Christian school. I suppose this might just indicate a split between the everyday liberals and the true believers. The true believers happened to get the upper hand on that occasion, but the everyday liberals don’t always go along when it comes to trans rapists.
Lewis
1yr ago
I’m puzzled; what’s the difference between a trans female who was socialized to be male and is therefore more violent, and a non-binary person who was socialized to be male and therefore mansplains and has a “male demeanor”? Doesn’t your sister’s argument in favor of trans people negate her complaints about her non-binary acquaintance?
Lewis
1yr ago
Have you ever read Eichmann in Jerusalem or Scott’s review of it? Both speak to this point.
In Rumania even the S.S. were taken aback, and occasionally frightened, by the horrors of oldfashioned, spontaneous pogroms on a gigantic scale; they often intervened to save Jews from sheer butchery, so that the killing could be done in what, according to them, was a civilized way.
The Romanians started their own concentration camps to supplement the Nazis’, “more elaborate and atrocious affairs than anything we know of in Germany”, but they didn’t always need them – “deportation Rumanian style consisted in herding five thousand people into freight cars and letting them die there of suffocation while the train traveled through the countryside without plan or aim for days on end; a favorite followup to these killing operations was to expose the corpses in Jewish butcher shops.” Things became so bad that the local Nazi representative, German noble Manfred von Killinger, intervened and asked them to stop and defer to the Third Reich’s own efforts. I feel like when a Nazi named “Baron von Killinger” is horrified by your brutality, it’s time to take a step back and evaluate whether you may have crossed a line.
Lewis
1yr ago
Don’t forget 4. described slavery as a “moral and political evil.” Meanwhile Grant and his wife also owned slaves. Part of the problem is that modern people are allergic to nuance. Everyone must be either a hero or a villain. There’s no room in the modern imagination for anything in between.
Lewis
1yr ago
It seems to me that today’s lack of racism could have some explanatory power. One hundred years ago, the smartest, hardest working, and most well-adjusted blacks were not allowed to join the dominant white society, instead becoming businessmen and leaders within their own parallel communities. They preached and modeled the sort of virtuous living that leads to better life outcomes—get an education, get and stay married, hold down a steady job, etc. Then once racial barriers were dismantled in the 1950s–60s, the most educated and high-performing blacks integrated into white society a la Cliff Huxtable, inadvertently leading their former communities to become dysfunctional, crime-ridden ghettos. It’s similar to the brain drain that’s happening in rural America and to the emigration conundrum facing many third world counties. The most capable leave, and the ones left behind aren’t the sort who make functional communities.
Lewis
1yr ago
It may be worth noting that when the NAACP declared “Lift Every Voice and Sing” the “Negro/black national anthem,” the US didn’t even have an official national anthem yet, as the Star-Spangled Banner wasn’t officially adopted until 1931. Since the US didn’t have a national anthem, it probably didn’t seem as anti-American to adopt a second, racial national anthem as it would today. That said, I still find it incredibly distasteful and divisive whenever I hear anyone refer to it as that today.
Lewis
1yr ago
I don't think the statues should be destroyed if someone wants to take them, but I also do not think that it is reasonable to expect black Americans to be ok with there being official statues of people who enslaved their ancestors just 150 years ago.
The history is too recent. It is like expecting Latvians or Poles to not want to destroy statues of Lenin.
In your opinion, should Japanese Americans be allowed to destroy all statues of FDR?
Which will happen? He will be elected, or she will kill herself?
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