P-Necromancer
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User ID: 3278
P-Necromancer
7d ago
If you reduce political polarization, the crazies will just go back to shooting up other targets. ... To stop crazies killing people, you need to stop crazies having access to guns.
This sounds intuitively right to me... but I'm not sure it actually is? There's at least a narrative that shootings (as a form of terrorism directed at the general public) weren't really a thing before Columbine, which was a failed bombing.
(I tried to verify this and was immediately stymied by the fact that, apparently, no one can be bothered to track mass shootings of the public terrorism sort. Both the DOJ and the (anti-gun nonprofit) GVA use definitions that obviously track gang violence, not what most people mean when they say 'mass shooting.' And, anyway, this shooting, while I think similar in intention, wouldn't meet their definition as only one person was shot. Is there better data available anywhere?)
To expand a bit, the narrative is that these sorts of incidents are social contagions of a kind; America before '99 had plenty of guns (more, even, given the Assault Weapons Ban) and plenty of crazies, but the mass shooting meme hadn't yet taken root, so that insanity expressed itself in different, (mostly) less anti-social ways.
Some countries without readily available guns don't have mass killing memes at all, while others (like the UK and I think China?) have much less deadly knife spree memes. On the other hand, truck attacks (France and Germany, primarily) are about as deadly as mass shootings and suicide bombing (much of the Middle East) is substantially worse.
(Bombs are definitely worse than guns, and I understand it's much harder to ban everything that could be used to make a homemade bomb, but actually making a working bomb without blowing yourself up might be beyond most crazies? I understand suicide bombers are rarely lone wolves.)
And so, goes this narrative, there really is a simple solution to these events: stop talking about them. Kill the meme and you kill the behavior. This obviously wouldn't be easy, between press incentives and an open internet, but I'm confident it would be easier than seizing hundreds of millions of guns.
(Separately, I more or less agree that these incidents affect such a small number of people that it's likely not worth taking drastic action to prevent them. But would it work?)
P-Necromancer
7d ago
(This turned into a kind of meandering post on epistemics rather than a direct reply. Feel free to ignore)
A common talking point in this conversation is that "mentally ill people aren't dangerous - in fact, they're far more likely to be the victims of violent crime than the perpetrators" which, though likely true, is rather meaningless: such a small number of people commit violent crimes that the observation "X are more likely to be victims than perpetrators" is true of essentially every demographic, and there's persuasive evidence that, ceteris paribus, mentally ill people are more likely to commit violent crimes than sane people.
Huh. You know, I had this exact thought on first hearing that line a couple months ago. It is a clever little evasion, and one I suspect gets most people. It's a notable entry in the genre of 'The Media [and Officialdom More Generally] Very Rarely Lies...' but very often tries to deceive.
The lesson I took from it was 'be wary of those offering metrics no one asked for.' Obviously the intended question is the one you mention: Do the mentally ill possess a higher propensity for violence? I am actually not sure, prima facia, if they do -- those with some disorders certainly do, but major depressive disorder presumably has the opposite effect, and it's comparatively common -- but the fact the politically correct answer is the above rather than 'no' suggests strongly the answer is 'yes.'
Unfortunately, it turns out in practice getting the obvious metrics is often difficult for some reason, or they don't actually mean what you'd think they do. My attempts to apply the rule ran into a barrage of false positives and a bare handful of likely hits, all of which were political activism which raised much more obvious red flags. Not sure there's really anything to glean here, besides 'carefully consider what you're being told on a case-by-case basis,' which is good advice I'm sure everyone's heard a thousand times before.
P-Necromancer
11d ago
A mission that, judging by nothing serious happening due to its failure, clearly wasn't that important in the first place?
This is a bizarre claim. The goal of the 2019 talks was to come to some agreement with North Korea, and no such agreement was reached. What more profound failure could possibly have resulted from lacking intelligence? Are you seriously contending that being able to listen in on Kim Jung Un's discussions wouldn't have been an advantage at the negotiating table? That's no minor thing. I'm not confident that that information would have led to success, but you haven't done much to justify your confidence it wouldn't have.
The US planting listening devices in proximity with world leaders is a subject with a storied history, by the way. It rarely results in deaths, but I suspect mainly because most nations are sufficiently foolish as to trust US-made infrastructure the NSA can trivially compromise.
(North Korea has gone so far as to develop its own national operating system for this reason, among others.)
It came out in the Snowden leaks that they'd casually tapped the phones of 35 foreign leaders, and that was just the program he knew about. And these were people we had a lot more to lose by offending. This program persisted through both Bush's term and Obama's; I find it hard to believe either would have failed to approve this operation, provided there actually was a meaningful possibility of success. Both certainly did approve operations that killed more foreign nationals for much less potential upside.
P-Necromancer
11d ago
Maybe this is a nitpick, but isn't this exactly what people generally mean by "imported?" In 2021, the US imported an average of around 2.39 million metric tons of steel a month. All of that steel had international sellers that wanted it sold and all of it had US buyers that wanted to buy it. I wouldn't say that Biden imported it (if your annoyance with the framing is merely the centering of Biden's role in the process, I don't have a firm position on that subject) but he certainly 'elected to not use violence to stop them.' Conversely, he did forbid the importation of Chinese cars, knowing that order would be enforced through violence if necessary. Those manufacturers want to sell us their cars, what right had he to infringe on their freedom by stopping them?
Illegal immigrants, with few exceptions, wish to come to America to sell their labor; sell fractions of their own lives. It seems entirely appropriate to describe that as 'importation.'
How could any amount of missing paperwork justify bringing lethal force to bear against a human being?
In many instances this is uncontroversial. A pardon is paperwork, after all, so everyone executed by the state or killed in an altercation with the police dies for lack of (certain) paperwork. I don't think this is an especially tortured analogy; pardons and visas are both official endorsements granted to specific individuals the authorities deem worthy that stay punishment for otherwise illegal behavior.
As a matter of fact, I suspect that the vast majority of otherwise justified lethal force could be prevented (or at least rendered unjustified) via appropriate paperwork, given that by the numbers almost all of it is military in nature. (Crime, obviously, is not otherwise justified. Self defense is, but self defense kills a negligible number of people per year compared to war. Police actions are a bigger slice of the pie, but still far, far less. And while some force exercised in war is not justified, surely defense against an unjustified war is.) And any military action could have been countermanded and it is for the lack of that paperwork that the lethal force is brought to bear.
People accept this because paperwork actually means something. The paper doesn't matter at all -- doesn't even exist in a lot of cases in the digital age, I'd imagine -- and trying to reduce official judgments to paper is just ignoring their actual significance; the oft-repeated observation that 'money is just paper, man' comes to mind. Somehow this realization never actually leads to us throwing off the chains of capitalist oppression.
P-Necromancer
30d ago
If you start with the assumption that the well has run dry and LLMs are never (not any time soon, at least) going be much better or much different than they are now, then yeah, very little about the market makes sense. Everyone willing to put substantial money into the project disagrees.
Inference costs are exaggerated (and the environmental costs of inference are vastly exaggerated). It's certainly a big number in aggregate, but a single large query (30k tokens in, 5k out) for Google's top model, Gemini 2.5 Pro, costs about $0.09 via the API. And further queries on substantially the same material are cheaper due to caching. If it saves your average $50,000 a year office drone 30 seconds, it's more than worth it.
Google ends up losing a lot of money on inference not because it's unaffordable, but because they insist providing inference not only for free, but to search users who didn't even request it. (With a smaller, cheaper model than 2.5 Pro, I'm sure, and I'm sure they do cache output.) Because they think real world feedback and metrics are worth more than their inference spend, because they think that the better models that data will let them build will make it all back and more.
But who knows what those models will even look like? Who wants to blow piles and piles of money on custom silicon that might eventually reduce their inference costs by a bit (though, since they were working with RISC-V, I kind of doubt it'd have ended up being better per-watt; cheaper only after licensing costs are factored in, probably) when a new architecture might render it obsolete at any moment? It's premature optimization.
(Granted, GPUs have remained viable compute platforms since the advent of deep learning, but that's because they're not too specialized. Not sure how much performance per watt they really leave on the table if you want to make something just as flexible. Though I have heard lately that NVidia & AMD have been prioritizing performance over efficiency at the request of their datacenter clients. Which I'd read as evidence they're still in the 'explore' domain rather than 'exploit.')
The common European value system says that basically to a first approximation there should not be a legal way to kill people (and to more detailed approximations we can begrudgingly haggle over exceptions like self-defence against someone who tries to kill you first)
And defensive war, right? The vast majority of Europe maintains a military and they don't arm them with tasers. Indeed, if you listen to their rhetoric regarding, say, a potential Russian invasion, it doesn't seem like that willingness to kill is 'begrudging' in the slightest. If it's truly a matter of value systems rather than practicality (war, you might argue, is more dangerous than random attacks perpetrated by individuals, but that's not an argument from values), what set of values affords nations the right to preemptively arm themselves to facilitate lethal self defense, but denies that right to individuals?
P-Necromancer
1mo ago
Guns and other lethal weapons are a unique confluence of incredibly dangerous and almost completely unnecessary.
It strikes me that there's some tension in this notion. To the extent that guns are incredibly dangerous, it's because others might deliberately use them on you, right? Not that accidents don't happen, but we rarely describe cars as 'incredibly dangerous,' and they're much more dangerous than guns on that score. Cars are certainly more useful, but that doesn't make them any less dangerous. If you mean they're 'inherently' more dangerous... I don't think that's true? A speeding car carries vastly more energy than any bullet, and, if used carelessly, is certain to cause injury while guns are only moderately likely to do so. They're designed to kill while cars are not... But so what? Imagine a dud artillery shell which, through some manufacturing failure, doesn't actually contain any explosive. This object was certainly designed to kill, and in fact to be far more deadly than a normal firearm, but if someone called it 'incredibly dangerous' I'd expect them to be roundly mocked.
If it is about crime: to the extent that it's reasonable to fear others might attack you with lethal weapons, aren't means of self defense necessary? It can't really be both.
Banning guns entirely in a highly criminal society might reduce the level of danger you're subjected to, but not because they're unnecessary -- in fact, you'd be much safer if you acquired a gun illegally and kept it carefully concealed -- but because being denied that necessity is balanced out by degrading the capacity of the others to hurt you. In a minimally criminal society, guns might be almost completely unnecessary, but they're also not all that dangerous.
You read his statement as indicating that the crowd was trying to assault them, which is just wrong, so I provided another source clarifying that the civilians never posed a risk.
Yeah, sure, in the story he tells the crowd wasn't trying to assault him. Did I ever once claim that wasn't a war crime? I'm pretty sure I agreed it was.
If they deliberately shoot civilians who aren't fighting, yeah, that's a war crime. And he's alleging that has happened, fair. But the nature of the rifles is orthogonal to its status as a war crime.
But this is the quote we're talking about:
The equipment, the equipment that we were issued, fully automatic weapons, which, in and of itself, is not a violation of protocol. However, we were issued M855 green-tipped ammunition. That’s important, because green-tipped ammunition is a steel-jacketed copper round that’s designed to — specifically designed to penetrate armor. It’s designed to kill. It’s designed to shoot through reinforced objects, to kill someone on the other side of it. That’s what all the UG Solutions contractors are equipped with right now in country. Everyone carries a standard basic load of 210 rounds of M855 armor-piercing military combat ammunition. Why would anyone need that, even if to defend themselves for their — defend their lives, against an unarmed population? It’s inappropriate. That, in and of itself, that action there, is a war crime.
Why would anyone need that, even if to defend themselves for their — defend their lives, against an unarmed population? It’s inappropriate. That, in and of itself, that action there, is a war crime.
... even if to defend themselves for their — defend their lives, against an unarmed population?
You quoted that yourself. You didn't bold it -- you bolded 'against an unarmed population,' which isn't relevant to the statute. (Being unarmed is not sufficient to claim protection under 8(2)(b)(i), as I explained. Maybe you disagree, but you haven't said so yet.) Was I to assume that meant you disagreed? Presumably not, given you also said, 'Hm, I don’t see a single error in his testimony.' But no, it's not an error, it's just that, taken holistically, his words mean something other than what he said. Fine. The tone of my last message would have been very different if you'd just pointed that out instead of saying:
This, as with any law, will be pursued with litigation and deliberation to work out details. The entire application of law is not based on a single sentence with no rational determination applying to it.
With no effort to clarify that I'd completely misinterpreted what you were calling a crime. I misread things sometimes, I won't lie. But it really doesn't feel like I'm the one who isn't trying to achieve mutual understanding.
But forget what he said. Here's what you said -- not off-the-cuff, not in a video:
We can surmise that this is what he means by war crimes, that using a rifle with live bullets to deal with civilian crowd control is a war crime. This is a war crime under The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, Article 8 (Article 8(2)(b)(i) and 8(2)(e)(i)).
The statute does not say that. It forbids directing any attack whatsoever 'against individual civilians not taking direct part in hostilities.' The fact that attack is performed with a rifle with live bullets is entirely irrelevant. I'm not ignoring your point that the IDF uses rubber bullets in the West Bank, it just has nothing to do with the statute as best as I can tell. And what does 'deal[ing] with civilian crowd control' actually mean? Cause if you don't actually shoot any civilians who aren't taking a direct part in hostilities (or act in one of the other manners I described in my previous comment), it's simply not a war crime. Are you under the impression that civilian crowd control is impossible without attacking civilians who take no hostile action? If so, you believe that civilian crowd control is a war crime per se, since, again, the weapon used in the attack makes no difference. If not, then it's entirely possible to deal with civilian crowd control while armed with a rifle with live bullets and not commit a war crime.
Or am I taking you out of context too? I mean, it's a complete thought. In text. Is the fact you described an example of something else entirely ('starving children getting a little too close or not disseminating as quickly as the group wants, and then being shot with live ammo') afterward meant to clarify that you didn't mean what you said?
It's not like it's not important. Whether Israel is in fact having its forces 'us[e] a rifle with live bullets to deal with civilian crowd control' is trivial to establish; the details of any particular incident are much, much harder. And there's number of violations, and the fact that it is (allegedly) policy; policy in violation of international law is much more damning than bad behavior from individual soldiers.
If I didn't bother to check the cite and replied, 'Oh, wow, and Aguilar says every contractor is using a rifle with live bullets to deal with civilian crowd control! That must be hundreds or maybe thousands of violations of international law right there!' would you have corrected me and clarified the war crime is actually just using those rifles to shoot non-violent civilians? Would you have said, 'Aguilar's remarks were off-the-cuff, you can't take his words at face value?' Or are you just retreating to the motte after I've challenged the bailey?
It does not matter that Israel has not signed on to the first Additional Protocol, because it’s now customary international law, making it binding to Israel (and to everyone).
It's interesting that you accuse me of hostile misreading. Here are the three things I said on this subject:
Israel hasn't signed this statute, but I'll concede the point if the behavior is a war crime by any international standard with substantial support.
and
Especially since this is the infamous ICC which the US and Israel refuse to subject themselves to.
and
But instead of committing to one or offering your own interpretation, you just pushed it aside and baldly asserted that this behavior will be found to violate the statute once it gets to trial (which you know will never happen).
And your response:
Now, again, it doesn’t matter that Israel isn’t a signatory whatsoever, and even their opinion on what constitutes international custom isn’t determinative of anything
I'm pretty sure Israel's opinion on this question matters a great deal for whether the trial is ever going to happen. Or is there a date set for Netanyahu's ICC trial? It's gotta be pretty soon, they put out the warrant for his arrest ages ago. I never said that Israel wasn't subject to the ICC's jurisdiction -- a topic on which I have no strong opinion and am not particularly interested in arguing about, because it doesn't matter when I already said I'd concede if the behavior is a war crime by the Rome Statute regardless. I certainly didn't indicate I thought the ICC (and the ICJ, and the Red Cross, and whoever else) accepted Israel isn't subject to it. It's impossible not to hear them shouting that it is.
I said:
-
That Israel hasn't signed it (True)
-
That the US and Israel refuse to subject themselves to it (Only 98% True! Israel contests that some or all of the First and Second Additional Protocols do not reflect customary law (they name specific articles, but say explicitly the list is non-exhaustive), which does not conclusively rule out the possibility that they accept at least one provision somewhere in the document is customary! They've never surrendered any of their citizens for trial by the ICC, though, and there's no indication that's going to change. Mea culpa.)
-
the trial is never going to happen (True). Well, no, to be fair I said you know the trial will never happen. If you don't know that, I apologize.
So I’m providing you another example, if you’re for some reason intent on disagreeing with Aguilar because he didn’t talk about munitions neurotically enough or something, or if you think he meant the starving children were threatening his life.
I'm intent on saying true things on super important topics and not saying false things, even if those false things holistically contribute to a true impression. I'm not perfect on that score, I know... for which I've apologized and retracted my erroneous claims.
P-Necromancer
1mo ago
This, as with any law, will be pursued with litigation and deliberation to work out details. The entire application of law is not based on a single sentence with no rational determination applying to it.
I mean, it won't be. Israel hasn't signed on to this statute. Apologies if I'm misunderstanding something, but right now it seems to me that:
- Aguilar claimed that M855 is some super special uniquely evil armor-piercing military combat KILLING bullet designed to KILL PEOPLE. He has a whole lengthy paragraph about specifically how bad this particular round is, questions why anyone would need it to defend themselves from an 'unarmed' populace (which is flagrantly untrue, but whatever), and then insists even issuing it is a war crime.
- I point out this is nonsense, that there's nothing remarkable about the round, and that issuing it certainly isn't a war crime.
- You said: 'No, no, obviously what he meant is the scenario in the question, that's what he's calling the war crime. It's not about M855 specifically, any lethal munition would be inappropriate.' Which, OK, is not what I think it says -- If it's not about M855 specifically, why'd he spend so long telling us how terrible it is? If he actually means they should use non-lethal weapons, why didn't he say that? -- but sure, I'll let someone on his side steelman his words. And yeah, it can be hard to speak precisely off-the-cuff, I get that. And you provided a specific cite of a specific document; what more could I ask for?
- ... But in fact the scenario you're calling a war crime -- using lethal weapons in self defense against unarmed civilians -- is not forbidden by that cite; it actually looks a lot like it's explicitly permitted. So I read the rest of the section; maybe you meant some other provision, or it's ruled out by some combination of provisions? Nope, it's not. So out of charity I did my best to come up with interpretations where it would be forbidden -- which was not at all easy, because you just invented the non-lethal-weapon requirement out of whole cloth. I didn't think any of them were particularly plausible, but I did the best I could.
- But instead of committing to one or offering your own interpretation, you just pushed it aside and baldly asserted that this behavior will be found to violate the statute once it gets to trial (which you know will never happen). I don't believe that's true, and, further, if the ICC did actually convict some Israeli for this behavior under this statute, it would do a lot to convince me that the ICC is unserious and deeply compromised and nothing at all to convince me the Israeli is a war criminal. There's room for interpretation and precedent in legal proceedings, sure, but the statute plainly doesn't say that. Even Soviet show trials had sufficient integrity to allege the accused had committed genuine crimes.
The above, along with Additional Protocol I, Article 54, “ Protection of objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population”, which states “Starvation of civilians as a method of warfare is prohibited”, leads one to think that Israel is committing war crimes.
OK? But that's not what we're talking about. I could have provided a lengthy list of Hamas' war crimes per the statute, but I didn't because that wasn't relevant. The starvation charge has nothing to do with the carrying-lethal-weapons charge. It is actually important to get the details right in these matters, isn't it? War crimes aren't fungible, you can't just substitute another one when it turns out your initial accusation (which was at best sanewashing Aguilar's incoherent nonsense) was untrue. It's serious business and allegations, if they are to be taken seriously, ought to made with care and precision.
I feel comfortable saying neither you nor Aguilar meet this minimum standard.
I get you think Israel is really, really bad. And sure, maybe it is. But this defense is not only not convincing, it's providing ammunition to Zionists who say their opponents have no regard for the truth and will say anything at all to make them look bad because they just despise Jews that much. It's exactly the behavior I complained about in my first post: if you have rock-solid complaints, focus on those and don't make up other grievances to drive the point home. (Or defend Aguilar when he does that.) Cause right now I'm thinking you actually don't.
P-Necromancer
1mo ago
Hmm, alright, I can extend some tolerance towards sloppiness in extemporaneous verbal remarks. I still think most of the ammo paragraph is highly misleading nonsense, but I'm willing to file it under verbal diarrhea and take your interpretation at face value. And, sure, the razor wire might be a war crime; like I said, I didn't look into it.
As to the meat of the matter: The Rome Statute you're citing is this one?
Intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population as such or against individual civilians not taking direct part in hostilities;
(If I've somehow gotten the wrong one: Sorry, and don't bother reading the rest of the comment.)
(Both 8(2)(b)(i) and 8(2)(e)(i) have the same text; one is a list of 'other serious violations of the laws and customs applicable in international armed conflict, within the established framework of international law' and the other 'Other serious violations of the laws and customs applicable in armed conflicts not of an international character, within the established framework of international law.' Not wholly clear which applies myself, but the rule is the same.)
(Israel hasn't signed this statute, but I'll concede the point if the behavior is a war crime by any international standard with substantial support.)
This is... not a very strict clause. I, perhaps naively, thought the standard was much higher. Especially since this is the infamous ICC which the US and Israel refuse to subject themselves to.
As best as I can tell, this statute doesn't distinguish between lethal and nonlethal weapons at all. (Not just this clause; I searched the whole thing for 'lethal' and various non-lethal technologies, and read all of 8(2)(b).) It's just as much a war crime to 'direct attacks' with a baton (or .22 LR rubber bullets) against civilians in general or 'against individual civilians not taking direct part in hostilities' as with a machine gun. Conversely, if the individual civilian is taking direct part in hostilities, it doesn't seem that they're entitled to any protection under this clause (other clauses and statutes certainly limit what might be done with them even then, but normal infantry rifles with normal ammunition certainly isn't forbidden by 8(2)(b)(xx)). It also does not distinguish between armed and unarmed civilians who are taking a direct part in hostilities.*
So when he says
Why would anyone need that, even if to defend themselves for their — defend their lives against an unarmed population? It’s inappropriate. That, in and of itself, that action there, is a war crime.
That's not supported by the statute. They might not need those rifles to defend their lives against an unarmed population, but they're not forbidden from doing so. If they're 'defending their lives,' the individuals threatening them are certainly taking a direct part in hostilities -- have blown way past that standard -- and so may be shot. Even if they accidentally hit other civilians in the process of shooting them; that's not 'intentionally directing attacks' at them. That could run afoul of 8(2)(b)(iv):
Intentionally launching an attack in the knowledge that such attack will cause incidental loss of life or injury to civilians or damage to civilian objects or widespread, long-term and severe damage to the natural environment which would be clearly excessive in relation to the concrete and direct overall military advantage anticipated;
But I think it would not in general. The attack must be launched knowing it will cause incidental loss of life or injury, which applies to a missile strike but generally wouldn't to aiming at a particular person and missing. Maybe it'd apply to over penetration? Even then I'm not sure you know it'll happen and that the collateral damage will be clearly excessive.
Concerningly, I'm not even seeing any protections against negligence (except in the narrow sense of 8(2)(b)(iv)) or even deliberately structuring the sites so as to maximize the probability that incidental loss of life that is not clearly excessive will occur. (I suppose this arguably could include issuing standard rifles to soldiers with crowd control responsibilities, provided you could somehow prove that was the intention. Not easy at all, especially if there's any meaningful chance they'll encounter armed, organized opposition.) Perhaps the court would be willing to fill in the gaps there, but it's not in the statute.
If they deliberately shoot civilians who aren't fighting, yeah, that's a war crime. And he's alleging that has happened, fair. But the nature of the rifles is orthogonal to its status as a war crime.
('Not a war crime' is not the same thing as 'morally correct,' or 'tactically wise.' I address only the first, as that's the question at hand.)
* I'm pretty sure? There is 8(2)(b)(vi) that forbids:
Killing or wounding a combatant who, having laid down his arms or having no longer means of defence, has surrendered at discretion;
My read is that someone who is attacking without weapons has not surrendered in any sense, even if laying down one's arms is a sign of surrender in general.
P-Necromancer
1mo ago
Ah, I don't necessarily disagree on any of this. To tell the truth I haven't followed these events closely at all -- my point was very narrow: 'I'm confident these claims are false, which makes it a lot harder to believe your other claims.' Not even saying the pro-Israel side doesn't do the same thing (though I can't immediately recall anything quite so blatant).
Probably best I not make a fool of myself commenting on Israel's internal politics, but sure, I'm not clear on what Israel expects their current actions to accomplish. I certainly don't like some possible answers. Your theory doesn't sound implausible to me.
If that is what's happening, it's a curious mirror of what's going on on the other side: Hamas depends on Israel's misbehavior to gain recruits and garner international sympathy while Netanyahu depends on Hamas's ability to recruit and garner international sympathy to push his voting public right. Not sure if that's actually an insight or just pedestrian inter/intra-group dynamics. (Pretty sure that was one of the reasons for eternal warfare in 1984, so it probably counts as a hackneyed truism by now.)
Yet, the loudest detractors steer the conversation towards the existence of the state of Israel instead of Netanyahu as the leader who oversaw this response. To me, that's the difference between credible detractors (Tech elite, European centrists, American Jews) and antisemites. (Progressive left, Muslim leaders). Antisemites are tempted by maximalist claims and their hate makes up for the lack of due diligence. "All Israelis are evil, always have been. All Gazans are being killed. All kids are being shot in the dick. No one is getting food." No nuance. Only hate.
Yeah, this makes sense. I object to a certain strain of common, virulent opposition with a loose relationship with truth -- certainly doesn't mean Israel's actions are unobjectionable.
I understand that no military ever actually wants transparency into any of their operations, but it doesn't seem like it can do all that much harm to the IDF at this stage; the more national and international pressure mounts to provide that transparency, the more suspicious the failure to do so will be.
P-Necromancer
1mo ago
Indiscriminate means “not marked by careful distinction : deficient in discrimination and discernment”. What definition were you looking at? It does not mean that they fire on everyone they see.
Hmm, OK. I read 'indiscriminately opening fire' as 'making no distinction between combatants and civilians,' and since they surely do fire on enemy combatants, they must also fire on civilians at similar rates. Which is obviously untrue, or no aid would be distributed. Is it your position that they don't discriminate on that basis at all (that is, they're just as likely to return fire at enemy combatants as to fire at random civilians), or that they do, but without sufficient care? (Which would be an opinion, not a fact, but whatever.)
Maybe that's my misread.
M855 ammo passes through soft tissue more readily, meaning in a large crowd there will be more casualties per shot; his point is that this is a terrible choice for crowd control. Police doing crowd control use rubber bullets etc. In fact the IDF specifically uses .22 LR in Ruger 10/22 rifles for riots in the West Bank. You weren’t aware of this? NATO is not supplying these munitions so I don’t know why you’ve mentioned NATO.
He explicitly says the rifles are OK. .22 LR is a different caliber which those rifles can't shoot. So far as I know, there is no widely used 5.56 munition that's less deadly than M855. (Well, there's less reliable/accurate ammo; this makes civilian casualties more likely, not less.) There are rounds which have less penetration, sure: hollow points, the use of which would actually be a war crime. If he wanted to argue 5.56 rifles were inappropriate, he could have done so. Instead he fixated on the bog-standard ammo, emphasizing its spectacular lethality, and, bizarrely, claiming its issue (not even its use!) is a war crime.
I mention NATO because as a rule it can be assumed that using the standard-issue munition of the world's premier military alliance -- the whole thing, not just America, who hasn't signed on to every treaty -- is not a war crime. It's additionally abundant and, due to economies of scale, pretty cheap for its quality. I'm only harping on this because he chose to harp on it.
Who said the rifles are intended exclusively for crowd control? He says repeatedly there's active fighting in these areas -- there's active fighting in all of Gaza, as he acknowledges elsewhere, but he claims these areas are especially bad. If there's serious risk of these sites coming under fire from enemy combatants, these rifles are suitable for engaging them. If there's not, then it sounds like it's actually not an active combat zone.
It was the one confirmed by numerous third party experts who dealt with gunshot wounds. I’m not sure how Israeli pundits responded to it but they may have called them forgeries.
Well, the one I'm talking about was physically impossible. I recall there were a number of 'experts' who swore by it, thereby proving that either they're not experts or they're willing to flagrantly lie to propagandize against Israel. It's perfectly possible some members of the IDF have shot children for sport -- I certainly can't prove otherwise, and there might well be other, real proof -- but they weren't the ones in those pictures.
Hm, I don’t see a single error in his testimony. Which error did you have in mind?
I note you didn't address the claim that issuing M855 is a war crime. Here's what he said:
Everyone carries a standard basic load of 210 rounds of M855 armor-piercing military combat ammunition... That, in and of itself, that action there, is a war crime.
Can you please point me towards the treaty, the case law, anything at all, that makes carrying M855 a war crime in and of itself?
P-Necromancer
1mo ago
It's the constant prevarications that make it so hard for me to take these complaints seriously.
Israelis open fire indiscriminately on civilians seeking aid.
Oh, OK, that sounds really, really bad.
That’s 14 days of meals. So, out of 64 days, we’ve provided 14 days of meals to the entire population in the enclave of Gaza.
Wait, what? If they're firing indiscriminately on civilians seeking aid, how is this number not zero? Is the claim that Palestinians are charging these aid stations under fire, climbing through concertina wire, and some few manage to escape with food? ... Or are they not actually firing indiscriminately on civilians seeking aid? I don't doubt civilians have been shot in these places -- It wouldn't even be hard convince me this is a deliberate strategy to deter Palestinians from accepting food aid! -- but that's not what the word 'indiscriminate' means.
The sites have not only become death traps, they were designed as death traps. All four distribution locations were intentionally, deliberately constructed, planned and built in the middle of an active combat zone. Some may argue, “Well, all of Gaza is a war zone.” That may be true, but there are parts of Gaza that are direct — or, determined to be active, operational combat zones where Israeli Defense Forces are operating. Those sites were built in the middle of those areas intentionally.
The things that I just described are not just opinions, they’re facts.
How is it, exactly, that Aguilar can confidently make statements of fact about others' intentions? Did they tell him that? If they did, I'm pretty sure he'd have said. Is he a mind reader? Actually, I rather doubt he's met whoever decided on the placement of the distribution locations; he can read minds at a distance, I suppose. Again, I'm not even saying that's not the intention! I don't know! But he doesn't either, and presenting this as though it's certain is dishonest.
The equipment, the equipment that we were issued, fully automatic weapons, which, in and of itself, is not a violation of protocol. However, we were issued M855 green-tipped ammunition. That’s important, because green-tipped ammunition is a steel-jacketed copper round that’s designed to — specifically designed to penetrate armor. It’s designed to kill. It’s designed to shoot through reinforced objects, to kill someone on the other side of it. That’s what all the UG Solutions contractors are equipped with right now in country. Everyone carries a standard basic load of 210 rounds of M855 armor-piercing military combat ammunition. Why would anyone need that, even if to defend themselves for their — defend their lives, against an unarmed population? It’s inappropriate. That, in and of itself, that action there, is a war crime.
What nonsense is this? Are the distribution locations in active combat zones or not? Anyway, armor-piercing rounds are, obviously, intended for piercing armor. Against unarmored targets, they're less lethal than hollow points. Unarmed civilians, notably, are unlikely to have armor. As for the capacity to penetrate cover: I thought these locations were designed to be death traps? Why would they leave convenient cover in the killing field? Anyway, I don't see the logic in permitting the individuals guarding the site to have weapons, but only so long as they'll be ineffective against a prepared adversary. (Especially after admitting there are prepared adversaries in the area.) I have to say, it seems very weird to me this would be a war crime. Let me do some reading...
Oh, it's not a war crime.
The M855 green tip (the American version of the SS109) is the standard issue round for all of NATO! It's actually not some super special armor-piercing variant, it's what they give every last grunt. Safe to say, issuing this round is not illegal.
It sure is designed to kill, that's true -- is this former green beret confused about the purpose of firearms and their ammunition? Or is he just so contemptuous of his audience that he believes they are? As I noted, they're less deadly against unarmored civilians than hollow points, but here's something I didn't know until I looked into it: using those is (arguably) a war crime! I'm deeply curious what round Aguilar believes would be appropriate; unfortunately, he doesn't say. Rubber bullets? Taking rubber bullets into a situation where you might well get shot at with real bullets is incredibly dumb, but that's not the real problem with the idea: no one even makes rubber bullets in 5.56. They don't exist. Blanks, perhaps?
Aguilar makes some other points that are harder to contest -- for all I know, they are using concertina wire inappropriately -- but I see very little reason to take anything he says seriously given the obvious errors -- I struggle not to say 'lie,' but unlike him, I'm willing to extend the charity to allow he might just be incorrect -- I found briefly skimming the article.
Maynard also suspects that the IDF is deliberately shooting children for sport, which other doctors have said in the past (I wrote a post on this a year ago or so).
Would that be the thread with several x-ray images of full power rifle rounds, with no deformation whatsoever, in the middle of children's heads? I'm genuinely asking; it might be something else. But that's the one I remember, because it was a transparent hoax.
Once again, I'm perfectly willing to believe the IDF is misbehaving in Gaza -- actually, I'd go so far as to say I do believe it, at least to some extent -- but if there's such overwhelming evidence for it, why do their opponents insist on mixing in obvious falsehoods? Just tactically, I'm certain it does far more damage to their position than just sticking to points that aren't trivially refuted.
P-Necromancer
1mo ago
The labor theory of value is wrong, yes. I think you're missing a step or two between that and the Washington State Divorce Court being the proper way to assess that value. The correct question is 'What rate of pay would Jeff Bezos and his wife have agreed to in return for her assistance?' Which is unfortunately impossible to answer given that no such negotiation took place.
I suppose you could argue that he married her with the understanding that, should they divorce, their assets would be divvied up according to that process? That's technically valid, but it'd be just as valid if that process were anything else, provided those terms wouldn't have prevented their marriage; also impossible to say, I suppose. Still, I think this is the best supported position.
On the other side, one can consider what he'd have had to have paid someone else to fulfill those same responsibilities -- certainly far, far less than he ended up paying her, even if he'd had to take out a loan to do so. It's certainly possible she did something for Amazon no one else could have done, but neither accounts nor packing orders meets that bar. He likely wouldn't have taken out a loan to pay someone else to do those things (at least not very early on), but that's not actually relevant so long as the court would have forced him to pay her for her labor regardless of the success it engendered -- her compensation was guaranteed, so there should be no risk premium. But that's not what the court would do, and they both knew that at the time, so maybe a risk premium is fair.
P-Necromancer
1mo ago
But 'make lots of money' is only imperfectly correlated with 'the company I work for makes lots of money.' And, indeed, the correlations between 'doing my best to make money for my employer' and both 'make lots of money' and 'the company I work for makes lots of money' are very imperfect. In practice, generating maximum value for the company is only really the optimal path for 1. the owners 2. people in roles with very clear metrics (e.g. sales) -- and then only to the extent those metrics can't be more easily gamed, and 3. those with both a great deal of control over the company and a lot of their compensation tied up in stock options/performance bonuses/etc. (i.e. a handful of executives). Some other roles (e.g. security, compliance) have strong incentives not to lose the company an enormous amount of money (in certain specific ways)... Which isn't actually the same thing, as becomes abundantly clear if you ever have to interact with these people: they'd really much rather nothing gets done if it makes the particular sorts of incidents for which they'll be held responsible slightly less likely.
Everyone else is one or more principal-agent problems away from those incentives. Expecting corporations to actually maximize profit is only slightly less naive than expecting command economies to actually optimize for the public good. Their owners want that, but only a tiny minority of the decisions are actually made by the owners, or by executives, or even by directors. The vast majority are made by bottom-level employees and their direct superiors, which, in large companies, are very detached from the company's actual profitability. They'll lose their jobs if it goes under, of course, but it's not like their personal efforts can do a lot to prevent that or bring it about -- there are a lot of these people.
The incentive is to keep your boss happy enough with you and otherwise do as you like, which might mean slacking off, or using your position to push your morality or politics, or maybe even doing a good job for the simple satisfaction of it. But it's a mistake to assume profitability is the overwhelming incentive, or even a particularly strong one, given how difficult it is for the people who really want that to enforce their will over the entire organization.
P-Necromancer
1mo ago
There are cases where "if you give an inch they'll take a mile" but there are also cases where small changes are catastrophized, so at the end of the day you kind of have to take it case by case.
I don't disagree; you've only got so much energy to care about these things. Not every issue is sufficiently important to sufficiently many people to foster this dynamic.
I do not think that a broad assertion that all politics is a maximalist, existential struggle is accurate as a general worldview, nor a common enough viewpoint to be assumed.
Not all politics, sure. I'd even grant that there have been times and places where no political questions were treated that way, or at least not at any scale. But though I take the general point, surely Israel/Palestine meets that bar? That's absolutely how people on both sides describe it.
In politics, victory leading to stalling out is actually more common than you might imagine. It's partially related to the idea of "political capital", where there's actually only so much appetite/time/attention/money for change to go around. Not uncommon is the situation where a major change leaves everyone exhausted and further efforts lose their urgency, or even provoke a counter-reaction in a kind of rubber banding effect.
Sure, this is true. I think I'd categorize it as a 'both sides lose' effect: one side lost the election, the other was failed or betrayed by their chosen representative. Actually accomplishing things is hard, so this is a reasonably common outcome. (Appearing to accomplish things is easier, though, and pissing off the other side is easier still; the Trump approach, which has proven very effective in motivating his base.)
A counter-reaction, though, is entirely in line with my theory. The question is whether it truly behaves like a rubber band (in that the oscillation is damped and will eventually stop), or like a swaying top (where the oscillations will only grow until it inevitably falls one way or the other).
Honestly I think it's more fair to say that societies are generally biased towards the status quo, rather than constantly hopping on runaway trains. This is especially true the more lower-d democratic a society is! So clearly Weimar Germany is a bad example. I think people forget that politics is ultimately downstream of the actual opinions of regular people, not the other way around.
This, though, I don't think I agree with. Well, the problem was bad in the Weimar Republic and the Weimar Republic wasn't particularly democratic, but that just means that democracy isn't a necessary condition. To build out the theory a little further, my contention is that you see this dynamic where disorganized (or poorly organized) groups compete over important goals; political parties in democratic countries are an example of this, but so is gang warfare and Israeli settlers/Palestinian terrorists.
But the cases where politics lacks this dynamic seem to me to be the ones where people are least engaged; single party states, effectively single party states (in that the parties don't really disagree on anything important), local politics (though those can be astonishingly vicious at times). Andrew Jackson made America much more democratic, but he certainly didn't reduce polarization.
I suppose I'm not really sure what you mean by how 'democratic' a society is. That regular people hold moderate views? That definitely helps, but I'm not sure what it has to do with democracy. That important questions are resolved via elections? I think that makes it worse. That people believe that important questions should be resolved via elections? Maybe -- it makes escalating to violence less likely, at least. But that's still more or less true of both major parties in America despite their increasing radicalism. I'll grant it's getting less true over time, though.
A two-state solution is almost by its very nature a compromise, and as they say, the best compromise leaves everybody at least a little angry. And didn't you yourself say that true escalation comes when both sides lose? So at least in my eyes, any two state solution, if actually implemented, is definitionally a détente.
Ah, well, I think it might be assuming the conclusion to call it a 'solution' (which I did as well), because I don't believe it'd actually end the conflict.
Right now, isn't a two-state solution clearly a win for Palestine? It's not everything they want, but it's far better than (apparently) permanent Israeli occupation. It'd count as a loss for both sides if they credibly committed to abandoning their claim on the rest of Israel, which 1. would, so far as I know, be incredibly unpopular and 2. no one in Palestine currently has the legitimacy to credibly commit to anything. (Plausibly a misstep on Israel's part, but plausibly not; not like those leaders were especially willing to negotiate a reasonable settlement before.)
Without that commitment, a two-state solution is just proof that Palestine's tactics are working, which I believe would only lead to renewed enthusiasm for them, coupled with much greater capacity to carry them out.
Again though I would ask the question: would a genuine attempt at a two-state solution, under Israeli-preferred lines, be accomplished via a high degree of force? I think the answer is a clear no, but I'd be interested to hear if you disagree and think it's really a plausible end-state of naked maximalist agenda-seeking by both sides.
Establishing the two-state solution wouldn't require any significant violence; Israel would just need to pull back to the line. I'm not clear on why they'd do that, but they could. If you're asking what it would take, practically speaking, to bring that about, I suppose sufficient international pressure could do it without (first order) violence.
I believe the violence would come after, when Palestine uses its newfound freedom to reorganize and rearm before attacking Israel again. Is there indication Palestine would be satisfied with a two-state solution? There might be, I suppose, but I haven't encountered it.
My position isn't that a two-state solution is the end-state; it's that it's the pendulum swinging the other way; in fact, the middle position is when the pendulum swings the fastest. (Though, given the relative strength of each side, I'm not convinced it is the middle position; Gaza's situation pre-October 7th is probably closer.)
Furthermore, geographic national boundaries in particular are, historically, way more sticky than you might think. Just look how awkwardly persistent the British and European decided lines are in the Middle East overall, despite their in many cases obvious unsuitability to match the facts on the ground!
I think this is 1. a relatively recent development and 2. motivated primarily by technological factors. The obsession with keeping borders exactly where they are was borne out of the incredible destruction of WWI and especially WWII -- it's too high a price, and any would-be conqueror needs to be shut down hard so people don't forget it.
In Europe, at least. I'm honestly not too sure why the taboo has (kind of) held in Africa and the Middle East. I suppose the same factors exist there to a lesser extent (in that they're less densely populated than pre-war Europe, and that military technology has actually mostly turned away from mass destruction towards precision over the past half century), and the First Gulf War probably set an example for anyone thinking about it. But that was relatively late in the period in question.
I suppose the fundamental reason is that the British didn't just draw lines on a map; they established governments for each of these new states, and each of those governments had a vested interest in not losing their territory, however little sense it made for them to have it. Defense is generally easier than offense, so it stuck?
As to the messy intermingling of peoples and the resolution thereof: it's worth noting that, when the game of musical chairs stopped in Western Europe post-WWII and the borders were 'fixed,' the Allies additionally engaged in an absolutely massive campaign of ethnic cleansing; putting everyone back where they belonged, you might say. This largely targeted Germans, but it was far from exclusive to them. The fact that those nations are so neatly sorted today is the result of a deliberate, forceful effort that would absolutely be called genocide today.
Was that actually a good idea in spite of the human cost? In retrospect it hardly seems necessary, but mainly because it's hard to imagine Germans and Frenchmen struggling to peacefully coexist, which I imagine was much less hard to believe at the time. I have more mixed feelings about the similar effort accompanying the separation of India and Pakistan, because it's very easy for me to imagine conflict between Muslims and Hindus. Not that there isn't conflict between the two now; separating populations that hate each other likely makes low-level violence less common and outright war more common. Not sure which end of that tradeoff is better.
P-Necromancer
1mo ago
Yeah, a real organization with rigid, non-democratic decision making processes can avoid this dynamic, at least so long as those processes hold. Japan's surrender in WWII is instructive, here: There was a cabal of officers who tried to prevent the surrender, but discipline held and they were rebuffed. The difference with amorphous groups is that there's just no one who can do the rebuffing; 'leaders' last only so long as the rest of the movement deigns to listen to them.
P-Necromancer
1mo ago
But slopes are slippery! It's the literal, physical nature of a slope (and the relationship between static and kinetic friction) that, once you start to move down one, you tend to continue. The argument is, I suppose, that a lot of things people treat like slopes really aren't... but aren't they? I'm struggling to think of a case where a political movement, having achieved its proximal objective, declares victory and goes home. Actually, I'm not just struggling; the idea is absurd. Individuals can do that; amorphous groups never can.
Victory draws interest because everyone loves a winner, and to divide up the spoils -- power, but mostly cachet -- you get purity tests, which rapidly become purity spirals. The intra-group dynamics drive the inter-group dynamics: if you don't keep pushing for more, you get pushed out. This is what we see in real life: victory only emboldens movements, and a couple decades down the line, they're demanding things their forebears' mocked as slippery slope arguments. They reach and reach until, finally, the public's patience runs out... then their opponents get a turn.
(This is just one mechanism. There are others.)
The civil rights movement, the moral majority, the LGBT movement, anti-communism, progressivism, interventionism; just a handful of the many, many examples from recent history.
To put it in concrete terms: obviously bullet point 2 makes bullet point 3 more likely. Well, I very much doubt it'll follow such a clean progression; there's generally more momentum to these things. Palestinians don't exactly hide the fact that a supermajority want the last point; how could letting them organize and regroup not make it more likely? It might still be unlikely -- not like any of the other Arab nations have proven able to enforce their will on Israel -- but I think it's very hard to argue it would become less likely.
But, you argue, isn't Israeli oppression a slippery slope too? If Palestine just lets Israel establish settlements in the West Bank (or whatever), doesn't that just make more thorough depredations more likely? Yes! Both sides accuse the other of starting down a slippery slope, and both are right!
(You frame this as 'backsliding' from the two state solution; because you think it's more fair, presumably? But why would Palestine see it that way? Backsliding would moving towards an Israeli-controlled single state. A Palestinian-controlled single state would, obviously, be continuing to slide forward down the same slope: Palestine achieving it's goals.)
In Germany, the Nazis rose in large part to oppose the communists, who were, at the time, the dominant political force in the country (not in terms of votes, certainly, but in terms of organization and political violence. Which was, after all, their stated path to victory). Then the Nazis, having achieved power, ruthlessly suppressed the communists; they would do the same to them if they got the chance, they said. Which was thoroughly borne out the moment the communists did get the chance!
So how, in this model, can de-escalation ever occur? Well, one side can wipe the other out, either literally or in terms of group membership; this is how the conflict between slave owners and abolitionists ended, for example. But true de-escalation mainly happens when both sides lose, I think. The Good Friday Agreement was a tacit admission from both sides that neither could achieve their full aims. And sometimes, when the swings are too quick and dramatic, the public can simultaneously lose patience with both.
P-Necromancer
2mo ago
Oh, it's absolutely ubiquitous. Some describe it as a common trademark of fascism... but I think you might actually see it more frequently from the critics of fascism. It's been the narrative on the alt-right since that term went mainstream: they're both incredibly dangerous and total losers. Hell, it's the narrative on the literal Nazis, as can be observed just a little upthread. They were not merely evil but utterly incompetent in all respects. Safe to say, I think, those same people don't believe the allies overcommitted to fighting the Nazis and really didn't have to try that hard.
But... it's not actually a contradiction? One of the more common arguments you see along this line is anti-anti-immigration: 'Nativists believe both that immigrants are lazy welfare parasites and that they steal jobs from hardworking Americans!' But groups have multiple members: there could be some of each. And often the 'strength' and 'weakness' can co-exist. Are guerilla fighters strong or weak? They can't beat their occupiers face-to-face or they wouldn't be guerillas. But guerilla campaigns have driven occupiers out many times. How about terrorists or incarcerated criminals? How about a world-champion MMA fighter... sent to the front lines in Ukraine? How about Harvey Weinstein? How about an IRS auditor? In some contexts these people are very dangerous and in others they're very weak.
I think you see it everywhere because it's often true; it's the complaint that misses the mark by equivocating over definitional boundaries until it looks like there's a contradiction that doesn't really exist.
P-Necromancer
2mo ago
1 million tokens is a lot! (Gemini 2.0 had 2 million, but good luck getting it to function properly when it's that full). That is 750k words. All of Harry Potter is just over a million.
You know, I hadn't really internalized just how big this is. You got me curious about it. I uploaded something I'm working on -- 240k words, which, with Gemini 2.5 Pro, came out to about 400k tokens.
Honestly, I'm impressed that it works at all and very impressed how fast it works. Thought I'd at least have time to get up and get a drink, but it was already responding to my question inside 30 seconds. Just being able to throw compute at (essentially) reading a book feels magical, like nine women making a baby in a month.
Unfortunately, that's where my praise ends. It... has a general idea what happened in the text, certainly. I wouldn't give it much more than that. I'm used to 2.5 being impressively cogent, but this was pretty bad -- stupider than initial release GPT 4, I want to say, though it's been long enough I might be misremembering. If you ask it concrete questions it can generally give you something resembling the answer, complete with quotes, which are only ~30% hallucinations. Kind of like talking to someone who read the book a few months ago whose memory is getting a bit hazy. But if you ask it to do any sort of analysis or synthesis or speculation, I think it'd lose out to the average 10-year-old (who'd need OOMs longer to read it, to be fair).
(Also, the web front end was super laggy; I think it might have been recounting all the tokens as I typed a response? That feels like too stupid an oversight for Google, but I'm not sure what else it could be.)
Not sure where the disconnect is with the medical textbooks you say you tried. Maybe the model has more trained knowledge to fall back on when its grasp on the context falls short? Or you kept to more concrete questions? As of now I think @Amadan's semantic compression approach is a better bet -- whatever you lose in summarization you make up in preserving the model's intelligence at low context.
(Royal Road makes it so you can't export an epub of your own fic without paying, and without that option, I'd be doing a lot of copying and pasting)
FanFicFare can do this for free. It's also available as a calibre plugin, if you want a gui.
Though, bizarrely, Gemini (at least via Google AI Studio) doesn't support epub uploads. Concerns about appearing to facilitate the upload of copyrighted material? Kind of dumb considering epub is an open format and they allow PDF, but I could see how it might be spun in a lawsuit. Anyway, RTF should work, but didn't for me. Eventually got something workable out of pandoc:
pandoc -f epub -t markdown_strict-smart-all_symbols_escapable --wrap=none
Your so-and-so’s heir is the most important thing about you no matter what you do.
This is an odd framing: that heir has a (great great...) grandfather as well as grandmother. There is only one of you and (potentially) many of your progeny, so it's overwhelmingly likely that the most important thing about any given man will be his children too. And a woman (or a man) can trivially escape this 'shadow' by not having children, which is in the modern day very much an option.
I suppose the distinction is meant to be that women invest more in their children? Or that that investment has more of an impact? Or are less likely to be important otherwise?
P-Necromancer
4mo ago
Broadly agreed. I suspect many products are no longer profitable to sell in America at all and many others have a vastly reduced customer base. And, like I said, that's the actual deadweight loss here: preventing transactions that would otherwise have happened. When the tariff is paid there's no actual loss, the government just takes some of the value for itself. But a prevented transaction doesn't merely extract value, it destroys it.
My point was just the technical truth. Pedantic, maybe, but this isn't the sort of information environment where you can't afford nuance and must prioritize being merely directionally correct. I'm certainly not claiming cheap consumer imports secretly have enormous margins -- I don't know if Trump really believes that, but I don't.
P-Necromancer
4mo ago
Actually, I’d say there’s a better case for itemizing tariffs than sales tax, since the latter doesn’t actually give you any choice. The state of Texas is going to get its cut no matter which goods Amazon sells to Texans.
I suppose that's true: the seller's costs don't matter to you, but it could at least signal to you that you might be able to find cheaper options elsewhere, at least in the small niches where there is a vaguely competitive American-made option that isn't itself dragged down by tariffs on part imports.
They don’t think that. They think having to pay a tax is a bad thing. What happens after that is handwaved.
Nor do they really go anywhere. If a traditional tax hike was on the table, they’d flip out about it, too. But Trump is a populist, and has demonstrated less than zero interest in the normal legislative process, so that’s a non-starter.
Would they? I've heard a decent amount of flipping out about Trump's proposed 'tax cuts'-- scare quotes because they're almost all extensions of 2017 cuts. (He is, bizarrely, considering removing the cap on SALT again, though? I'd always considered that his single best policy move; why should the Federal government subsidize rich states' high spending?) In other words, they're complaining about the absence of a hike. Granted, most of them seem to think these cuts just benefit the wealthy (fairly ridiculous; doubling the standard deduction and the child credit disproportionately benefit the middle class) so I suppose they're at least not knowingly advocating for raising their own taxes.
P-Necromancer
4mo ago
Ah, that point was not directly relevant to Amazon's decision here. At least, there's a legible business motive in addition to the presumed political one. Nonetheless, it's a common complaint that misses the mark. Apologies if it wasn't clear that was a digression.
I'm no Republican; at most I'd say they are, perhaps, slightly better on taxation than Democrats on average. Even these tariffs aren't as bad as a tax on unrealized gains would have been, for instance, though I've got no idea how serious that proposal really was; not very, I thought, but I also thought Trump was too market-focused to really move forward with extreme tariffs either. Well, I suspect it would have been harder to pull off via executive fiat, at least. But you're certainly right they're doing their very best to tear up that lead right now.
More generally, it's hardly surprising that both sides are hypocritical on this issue: polarization means they both prioritize opposing the other over any particular principle. This is the default scenario.
This is a truly terrible survey question.
(The entire statement, which is a little better with the context, is "because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country")
This plainly includes e.g. fighting off a Chinese invasion. There might not be a Chinese invasion -- there almost certainly won't, at least of the mainland US -- but the question says 'may.' And if there were, it would likely be 'because things have gotten so far off track' in terms of foreign policy, military readiness, etc. It also includes joining the FBI to fight domestic terrorists, or the secret service to protect leaders from assassination, and a dozen other anodyne activities. I'd go so far to say that answering 'no' implies only a profoundly lacking imagination. (Or perhaps the belief that individuals resorting to violence to save our country aren't necessarily true American patriots?)
But, as you say, the actual answers are probably all signaling. Still, I'm forced to question the motives of whoever wrote that question -- did they really not think at all about what they were asking?
@remzem's YouGov poll is... slightly better?
I'd still say war counts -- it is, after all, the continuation of politics with other means -- but I'd feel like a pedant doing it. It's obvious what this one means where on the other I think I would just go down that line of thought and click 'yes.'
Still, the answer to this one is also obviously 'yes.' '[E]ver justified' is doing a lot of work. Do 83% of conservative believe the American Revolution wasn't justified? Do 55% of the very liberal think the July 20 plot to kill Hitler wasn't justified?
A far, far more useful question would be whether political violence is currently justified in America. Certainly, the numbers would be smaller, but how much smaller? Certainly not zero. Actually, it might be decent measure of how much of this is just signaling, given how much more extreme a position it is.
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