Supah_Schmendrick
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User ID: 618
Supah_Schmendrick
16d ago
An Augury! An Augury!
Supah_Schmendrick
17d ago
It's an election, though, not a bloody melee.
Elections are, in no small part, symbolic melees. We do things memetically and through balloting as a slightly-more-symbolic version of the "stand on opposing hill-tops outside of spear range and ineffectually chuck things at each other while yelling to establish bravery and dominance" paradigm that prevailed throughout most of human history, and a much-more-symbolic version of the "line up in two opposing phalanxes and grind against each other until someone breaks and runs away" that got more common in Europe during recorded history.
Either way they're still contests with dominance and submission on the line; we've just decided to accept proxy battles for the real thing.
Hopefully we're just doing the exhortation thing because our psychology evolved through far less history with elections than with bloody melees (100s of years vs 100s of millennia?)
Exactly.
Supah_Schmendrick
17d ago
I would appreciate any links you have to hand on this; I'm trying to keep a better library of supporting evidence for my beliefs.
Supah_Schmendrick
17d ago
What's the point of all of this? This isn't a football game where scoring points confers an obvious advantage. If Trump is up by 5 points in June or Harris is up by 5 points in July, it has absolutely no effect on the actual election.
No, it's a referendum on whose tribe is larger, better organized, and has seized the moral high-ground of the culture. Pumping up your own supporters through exhortation (we're winning - one more great surge of effort, comrades, and we shall triumph!) or demoralizing the enemy through propaganda (your puny candidate is weak and is failing! Abandon hope and don't waste your efforts and resources in what is obviously a doomed cause!) are valid tactics.
Supah_Schmendrick
17d ago
I mean, it may well be that women over all are more likely to be nosy busybodies, or to go drunk with petty power. The old stereotypes of the gossiping shrew and harridan didn't come from nowhere, just like the male stereotypes of the sex-obsessed brute and violent thug didn't come from nowhere. But I don't know if the effect translates to the modern day, or if so how big it is.
Supah_Schmendrick
17d ago
With Peanut, a lady in Texas presumably sent the complaint to a lady in New York who sent the city services to take the squirrel out back and shoot it. Clearly that's just a coincidence...right? Or is there something darker in here. Like....is the Karen meme deserved and legitimate?
My day job involves handling a lot of regulatory compliance matters and fighting administrative accusations not entirely dissimilar to the P'Nut saga. In my experience while women appear to be slightly overrepresented among the public complainants that I ultimately find out about (which is a small minority of all complaints - my state regards the identities of complainants to public agencies as privileged), there's no particular trend when it comes to which bureaucrats are particularly censorious and which are more lenient. The culture of the particular district office or subunit appears to matter a lot more.
Supah_Schmendrick
17d ago
Unfortunately "society" has little oversight over how government actually functions on a day to day basis, as things are currently constituted. I wish it were different, but I feel that it's important to recognize where incentives and structures pull actual day-to-day functions away from their idealized/theorized function.
Supah_Schmendrick
17d ago
Who do you think will win, Trump or Harris?
I do not know.
Relatedly, do you think there will be issues certifying the election results?
If Trump wins, I place an 75% probability that Rep. Jamie Raskin carries through on his implied threat to not certify the election results, as he tried to do in 2016. I doubt that he can get a critical mass of democrats to join up with the effort, however.
do you think we'll see outright political violence?
I would not be surprised if there were extensive protests which degenerated into limited looting sprees in major cities in the event of a Trump victory. I would be surprised if more than 5 people nationwide were killed.
Overall, how was your experience of this election? Did it seem noticeably different from any recent elections in any particular way?
The media bias was cranked up to 11, and the candidate quality (with the pleasing exception of JD Vance) was through the floor.
Supah_Schmendrick
17d ago
Given that the government doesn't have the ability to enforce all the laws all the time, it makes sense to deliberately ignore inconsequential violations and focus on consequential ones.
No, this isn't how it works. Given that the government doesn't have the ability to enforce all the laws all the time, it makes sense to deliberately ignore violations which will take a lot of time and resources to remedy and focus instead on easy ones. This is why we get anarcho-tyranny - people trying to get away with laziness and justifying it with moneyball-esque "efficiency" metrics.
Supah_Schmendrick
17d ago
An addition:
The government hires people to do various jobs. Government jobs do not tend to pay as well as similar jobs in the private sector, but are known to have better work/life balance, better job security, and great retirement benefits. Thus, government jobs tend to select for a more ... relaxed ... type of person than the private sector.
One of the functions of government workers, especially in animal control functions, is to respond to public complaints. This involves a lot of work and disruptions to normal in-office routines, and thus is disfavored by the type of people who tend to take government jobs. However, because public anger is one of the few things that can get government workers in real trouble, such complaints must be visibly and aggressively addressed. On the other hand, the person being complained about has nothing to offer the government workers.
Therefore, when the state agency got multiple anonymous complaints about P'Nut, they were incentivized to take serious action to (1) demonstrate that they took the public complaint seriously, (2) generate as little additional work on their end as possible, and (3) avoid receiving any further complaints on this subject. They had no incentive whatsoever to give a damn about P'Nut or his owner, and likely negatively predisposed towards them because they're the reason there was a complaint in the first place.
Easiest way to solve the problem is to find some pretext to seize and dispose of the subject of the complaint - P'Nut.
Supah_Schmendrick
18d ago
Are happily married women with children being mobilized by abortion?
That phrase describes an increasingly-shrinking minority of women these days. And ones with teenage and older female children may well vote on vicarious fears/worries about abortion access.
Are sexless 20-somethings with nose rings shitting themselves over having to carry a purely hypothetical baby to term?
Young people are low-propensity voters, and overwhelmingly progressive for other reasons. The abortion talk is aimed at 35+ women, who are much higher-propensity voters.
Does anyone have an actual model for what's going on for this issue?
Sure, women find the idea of not being able to even have the option of terminating a pregnancy intolerable, even if they might otherwise want to keep the kid. Also, our culture denigrates devotion to family and unpaid child-raising as a life-style.
Are the Democrats really out here convincing every single woman that it's perfectly normal to find yourself needing an abortion, and it will kill you to give birth?
More like, "it's perfectly normal to find yourself needing an abortion, and banning "normal" abortion care will kill you." Of course, these stories are complete and total BS, not attributable to abortion restrictions. But most people don't look behind the screaming media spin.
Supah_Schmendrick
18d ago
Which demographics is she pulling in 2024 that Biden DIDN'T pull in 2020?
The argument I've heard (I'm not a polling or campaigning expert, so I can't really gauge how true it is) is that Kamala is relying upon a massive swing among women, of a similar magnitude of the increases in turnout that the Obama candidacy relied upon among black voters. This isn't related to her own sex, but instead a combo of abortion fears and disproportionate female distaste for Trump and concern about potential authoritarianism. That kind of reasoning is the only way that ads like this make sense to me. It also explains why Kamala prefers to go on SNL (demographic overwhelmingly elderly) than Rogan (demographic primarily young and male).
Supah_Schmendrick
19d ago
This isn't padding, though? What's the difference between asking Claude for a technical answer as done here, or summarizing one's own inexpert googling?
Supah_Schmendrick
21d ago
W wasn't even a neocon.
Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Doug Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, and Condi Rice were, though. Even W's speechwriters like David Frum were.
Supah_Schmendrick
22d ago
Swaying votes isn't the point - it's all about voter activation and turnout now.
Supah_Schmendrick
23d ago
You are the one who started talking about scale, implicitly suggesting that the scale of the Oct 7th attack was what made it sufficient as a justification for Israel killing 43k Palestinians.
You're right, I allowed myself to be distracted by you - after all, the original discussion was over whether or not some heated statements made by a random Israeli after 10/7 meant the entire post-10/7 conflict in Gaza was a sinister plot for Israelis to expropriate Gazan land. So good job; I got snookered.
But even here you're wrong; the unprovoked nature of the 10/7 attack, as well as its breadth and premeditated objectives to deliberately harm Israeli civilians who had done nothing to Gazans, are what justify the Israeli response and anger. It's not some cold math over how many deaths can be dealt out tit-for-tat, which again is not used by ANYONE in any other conflict because it's manifestly silly and has nothing to do with the actual objectives of either party to the conflict.
I'm sure the objective of Hamas could also be described by them as the destruction of the armed terrorist group that attacked Palestinians - the Israeli state
Nope. Words have meanings.
If you think it's unfair to demand that Israel restrict itself to surgical operations against Hamas militants
This is what they are actually doing, probably to their detriment. See, e.g. the analysis of John Spencer, an instructor in urban warfare at West Point.
it's also unfair to demand that Hamas restrict itself to surgical operations against the IDF that would probably result in them just getting gunned down ineffectually.
"Obeying basic laws and norms of war" is not a demand for "surgical" precision. If Hamas can't measure up to the IDF conventionally, perhaps that's a big sign that armed combat is counterproductive to their political aims.
The 2021 article starts with a description of Israeli police sabotaging a religious observance so that it would not disturb a political speech of their PM
Not a valid basis to wage war or attack random civilians.
then later of Israel seizing the homes of some Palestinians
Interesting way to describe the outcome of a lawsuit, but even taking the Palestinian argument at face value it's still not a valid reason to wage war or attack random civilians.
You (and partially Wikipedia) are doing the same thing here again at smaller scale,
Then you should probably have used a source that actually supported what you're claiming, instead of one that does not.
Supah_Schmendrick
23d ago
Settlement expansion, supported by the Israeli state, is essentially enough for me to conclude Israelis were never serious about peace with Palestinians.
So the Palestinians get to demand to live in a judenrein society? When did that become a reasonable demand?
Supah_Schmendrick
23d ago
If we just want to go one step back, that's easy. Per the first Google hit, Israel killed something like 43k Palestinians since Oct 7 attack, establishing that the alleged appropriate revenge ratio is somewhere around 40:1. So we just need to find ~1000/40=25 Palestinians that Israel killed before Oct 7
That's not how any of this works, and a clear isolated demand for rigor. No-one ever analyzes any other armed conflict using this framework. The objective is not "revenge killings of undifferentiated Palestinians," but the destruction of the armed terrorist group that attacked Israelis - Hamas - either through elimination or forcing them to surrender and disperse, with a secondary objective of recovering the individuals who Hamas kidnapped on 10/7.
More were killed by Israel just in 2022
From your own source:
PIJ has a strong presence in West Bank cities like Jenin and Nablus. During the period between March and May, attacks by Israeli Arabs and Palestinians killed 17 Israelis, most of them civilians, and two Ukrainians. As a result, the IDF increased its raids against armed Palestinian factions throughout the West Bank. By July, at least 30 Palestinians were killed, including journalist Shireen Abu Akleh and 3 of those responsible for killings in Israel. On 1 August, Israeli forces arrested the PIJ West Bank leader Bassem al-Saadi. In the aftermath of that operation, amid heightened tensions, roads were closed in the south of Israel by the Israeli-Gaza border wall and reinforcements were sent south after threats of attack were made by PIJ sources in Gaza. The same day, Israeli communities in southern Israel were placed in lockdown by the military as a security precaution against potential attacks from Gaza, as, according to Israel, the PIJ had positioned anti-tank missiles and snipers at the border to kill Israeli civilians and soldiers.
Haaretz reported on 2 August that Egyptian intelligence officials "are holding talks with the leaders of the factions in Gaza in order to prevent escalation" and that "all parties told Cairo they aren't looking for escalation." On 3 August, Khaled al-Batsh, head of the politburo of the PIJ in Gaza said: "We have every right to bomb Israel with our most advanced weapons, and make the occupier pay a heavy price. We will not settle for attacking around Gaza, but we will bomb the center of the so-called State of Israel."
and many more in 2021
Again, from your own source:
Hamas delivered an ultimatum to Israel to remove all its police and military personnel from both the Haram al Sharif mosque site and Sheikh Jarrah by 10 May 6 p.m. If it failed to do so, they announced that the combined militias of the Gaza Strip ("joint operations room") would strike Israel. Minutes after the deadline passed, Hamas fired more than 150 rockets into Israel from Gaza.
In each of these incidents, Hamas started the violence. FAFO.
Supah_Schmendrick
23d ago
Right; the Geneva Conventions aren't meant to turn men into angels. They're supposed to be clear rules of the road so that everyone knows what to expect if they behave in a particular way. If people elect not to behave in the specified ways, they don't get the benefit of those clear rules. It's really simple at root.
Supah_Schmendrick
23d ago
why does the same reasoning not work to justify the Palestinian Oct 7 attack?
What was the inciting incident demanding recompense on the scale of kidnapping, raping, and murdering partiers at a disco festival?
Israelis and Palestinians are locked into a multigenerational civil war/blood feud that can only end by one side being wiped out
Israel has offered peace multiple times, and when its offers were accepted it honored those agreements. Meanwhile the Palestinians continue to refuse to take "yes" for an answer and insist on further fighting. That's not the recipe for "a pox on both their houses."
NB, there's provisions in the Geneva Convention, IIRC, for spontaneous resistance to an occupying force.
Right, that provision provides as follows:
ART. 4. — A. Prisoners of war, in the sense of the present Convention, are persons belonging to one of the following categories, who have fallen into the power of the enemy:
...
6) Inhabitants of a non-occupied territory who, on the approach of the enemy, spontaneously take up arms to resist the invading forces, without having had time to form themselves into regular armed units, provided they carry arms openly and respect the laws and customs of war.
Hamas and Hezbollah emphatically do not qualify under this paragraph, as they are pre-existing organizations which do organize themselves into regular units, e.g. Hamas's "Qassam Brigades" and Hezbollah's various specialized units such as the "Radwan Force," yet still engage in combat without uniforms or otherwise making themselves distinct from civilians, among other violations. Also, they aren't spontaneously taking up arms because they're drawing from long-established and disguised central arms depots, in a conflict they started.
Supah_Schmendrick
23d ago
I'm talking about in like the 60's-90's.
Supah_Schmendrick
23d ago
African Americans, Latinos and Asians are all shifting right, and increasingly voting Republican.
Specifically the men in these demographics. The gender gap is turning reciprocal.
Supah_Schmendrick
23d ago
Gee, it's almost like the Israelis were angry or something after over a thousand of their countrymen were killed or abducted. Next you're going to tell us U.S. Marines landing on Okinawa had some off-color things to say about Japanese people.
One interesting thing is that IIRC the Federalist Papers contemplated that Cabinet Secretaries would need Senate advice and consent to be replaced, and generally serve across administrations. That might be a reasonable blend of longevity in office but with rapid accountability for particular screwups.
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