Tophattingson
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User ID: 1078
You already have some material on this theme, so here's another potential lead. On the basis that owning books was the basis for this spurious imprisonment of a non-terrorist under terrorism offences in the UK, looking up what books he was imprisoned for owning (in addition to the Anarchist Cookbook, which is already listed) should contribute a few new additions.
For LGBT rights and "gay extremism", I suggest something tangentially related in Larry Kramer. Celebrated at the time and yet also wildly controversial, and probably something that LGBT rights groups would rather be forgotten now due to his scathing criticism of gay promiscuity. However, I am not sure if anything he written counts as a banned book. Faggots was alledgedly banned from a gay bookstore, but I haven't been able to follow the source for that.
As for near-future bannings, I wonder if Giorgio Agamben's works will end up on the chopping block after he dared to apply Foucault's ideas of Biopower to the sacred cow of covid restrictions.
Tophattingson
10mo ago
This depends massively on where in the world you are. In the UK, most of our beef is domestic, and most of our domestic production is fed via grass forage. Now, I suppose you could consider pastures to be industrially farmed grass, but I don't think that's what most people would think of it as. Humans cannot extract meaningful nutrition from eating the grass instead.
Tophattingson
11mo ago
A big problem with this strategy is that there's no way a state of insecurity could be placed exclusively on Israel without inspiring global copycats. The choice won't be insecurity in Israel vs security Elsewhere. It will be a government willing to defend you in Israel vs governments unwilling to defend you elsewhere, which is basically the same equation that drew countless Jewish migrants to Israel in the first place.
Tophattingson
11mo ago
if as you say, their policy program was omnicide directed at the Cambodian population (which is untrue given they were pro-peasant, grossly incompetent, weird and self-serving but still pro-peasant)?
Killing a quarter of Cambodia's population in about 3 years isn't oops. You can't achieve that unless it's your goal. The Cambodian genocide was deliberate, and definitely not pro-peasant.
Johnny Cambodian the illiterate peasant doesn't know much about the fine details of Marxism, Maoism or Pol Potism. But he's against being bombed.
Johnny Cambodian the illiterate peasant doesn't smash infants against trees because he dislikes being bombed.
but they got a lot weirder after the war - see the Korean axe murder incident
The weirdness of North Korea is more clearly indicated in their political system and continued use of concentration camps, not an incident in which North Korean soldiers killed two American ones, which is frankly a footnote in comparison.
Anyway, South Korea didn't get hit as hard as North Korea.
If it didn't, the differences are fairly slim. At one point, almost all of South Korea was occupied by North Korea. Many hundreds of thousands of South Korean civilians were killed, often in deliberate massacres.
As North Korean troops advanced into South Korea during the Korean War and were followed by communist officials, they systematically massacred former South Korean government officials, anti-communists, and others deemed hostile to the communists; and such killing was intensified as North Koreans retreated from the South. We do have some estimates of the dead, as for Taejon (lines 103 to 105) and Wonju (lines 106 to 107). There is one overall estimate of the minimum number of South Koreans that were murdered, which is from the South Korean Overseas Information Agency (line 111).
How many Republic of Korea (ROK) POWs were killed by the North Koreans is difficult to pin down. This is because the communists claimed that they had captured 70,000 soldiers overall but they only returned near 8,000 of them.1 We do know they killed near 5,500 ROK POWs and may have impressed into their military another 50,000.2 From this it seems that North Koreans killed from 5,000 to 12,000 ROK POWs (line 121), which is consistent with their murder of 5,000 to 6,000 American POWs (line 141).
Besides illegally impressing POWs, the North also forced 400,000 South Koreans into their army. They are therefore responsible for their deaths. Given that the army often ordered these people to do the most dangerous tasks or combat and that the North Korean army suffered around 350,000 killed throughout the war (line 13), almost two-and-a-half times the army's original strength (lines 3 to 4), a range of one-third to two-thirds of the impressed/conscripted killed in battle seems conservative. This means a North Korean democide of around 225,000 (line 128).
Altogether, during the war the North Korean communists probably killed near 500,000 Koreans (excluding at least 6,000 killed by the South-line 152), including their own citizens (line 95). With a probable 1,500,000 civilians killed in the war (line 81), this democide seems, if anything, an underestimate and the true figure may be closer to the high democide calculation of almost 775,000 dead (line 95).
Unless you're suggesting some weird response curve where killing 700,000 civilians is okay but the moment you cross the 800,000 mark everyone goes insane, the differences in the North and South Korean political systems cannot be explained by bombing.
Tophattingson
11mo ago
Claiming that the Khmer Rouge were radicalized by and against the US does not square with their actual behaviour, which was omnicide primarily directed at Cambodians but generally against everyone.
At least with Hamas you can point to them being interested mostly in killing an external opponent they have a grievance against, rather than everyone especially themselves.
As for South Korea, who were invaded and almost destroyed by the North, why did they not then become radicalized in the same way? North Korea's radicalization clearly predates the Korean War because it's visible in them starting the war in the first place.
Tophattingson
11mo ago
Operation Menu, which targetted North Vietnamese incursions into Cambodia, was incredibly limited in scope and number of bombs dropped. Operation Freedom Deal, the far larger campaign, focused its bombing on the Khmer Rouge.
And once the Khmer Rouge came to power the US was pretty hands-off toward it,
Perhaps the problem is that the US didn't bomb them hard enough, then? The US stopped when there was no longer any alternative government left to defend because the Khmer Rouge had seized the capital and started slaughtering its occupants. Another oddity - why is the Khmer Rouge strengthened by being bombed but their opponents are not strengthened when the Khmer Rouge massacres them? And why were they not strengthened when Vietnam conquered them either?
Tophattingson
11mo ago
The US did not decline to properly install an occupation government. They lost. Their ally fell to the Khmer Rouge after a lengthy siege of the capital.
And regardless with your example, do you think the Earth's militaries would be made stronger if aliens bombed us into the stone age? How? Will our jagged rocks and clubs become magic?
Tophattingson
11mo ago
I have seen this idea advanced by centrist or right-wing figures sometimes, but with two differences:
- Usually it's done with direct reference it to what leftists believe about other conflicts, not in isolation.
- Sometimes it's paired with a hypothesis that Fascism uniquely revels in street violence and thus street violence against Fascists still strengthens them.
Tophattingson
11mo ago
An argument I've regularly encountered from more honest advocates on the pro-Palestinian side is they first acknowledge the concerns over Palestinian violence as legitimate, but then they claim that Israeli's intrusive security measures are ultimately counterproductive because they provoke further radicalization and thus further violence. This strikes me as a naive argument, but I admit I have no way of falsifying it except through hypotheticals.
I feel there's an ommitted piece of the puzzle in this discussion. Even Hanania's broader discussion of it has that ommission even though he gets very close to it. There's an idea common in leftist (for lack of a better word) political spaces that military action provokes a counter-response that results in the target being strengthened, not weakened:
When they say “Israel can’t win by military means alone” what they’re really saying is “we don’t want them to,” because they don’t think it is worth it. Yet they feel a need to appeal to the self-interest of Israelis and make arguments that are convincing to Westerners who support Israel and don’t care that much about the Palestinians.
What's missing? This idea isn't exclusively applied to Israeli military action against Hamas. It's applied in a very ad-hoc way to all "oppressed" targets of military action from the perspective of leftists. Punching fascists doesn't make them stronger, bombing Nazi Germany didn't make it stronger, bombing Japan didn't make it stronger. Killing Russian conscripts doesn't make Russia stronger. But bombing Hamas strengthens them. Bombing Iraqi Insurgents strenghen them. Even the Khmer Rouge, where the US is oft blamed for their rise to power because the US... Bombed them in a desperate attempt to stop Cambodia from falling to a bunch of omnicidal maniacs? In all likelihood this is just the 70s Cold War Left trying to defect from their vocal support for Southeast Asian Communism in the aftermath of it's atrocities, but it's part of the same pattern where some bombs are mysteriously disobeying Lanchester's laws.
Now maybe there's some advanced theoretical reason why certain targets get stronger when you smash their shit up, but I don't see this articulated, nor do those same leftists sincerely act upon those beliefs. Why would they simultaneously chant "Palestine Will Be Free" and "Ceasefire Now" if they believe that bombing Hamas will only strengthen them? "Bomb Me, Almighty Bomber!" would surely be a better slogan.
Tophattingson
1yr ago
How many people actually have the will power to resist their sexual urges
Is your suggestion that the majority, or even a large minority of people have failed to resist their sexual urges and are rapists?
And, I note that you provide no evidence for any of your claims.
Here's a source on the difference in how crimes are rationalised between rapists and child predators.
Child sexual abusers display deficits in information-processing skills and maintain cognitive distortions to deny the impact of their offenses (e.g., having sex with a child is normative; Hayashino, Wurtele & Klebe, 1995; Whitaker et al., 2008). In contrast, rapists display distorted perceptions of women and sex roles, and often blame the victim for their offense (O Ciardha, 2011; Polaschek, Ward & Hudson, 1997). With respect to affect, child sexual abusers assault to alleviate anxiety, loneliness and depression. Rapists typically assault as a result of anger, hostility and vindictiveness (Polaschek, Ward & Hudson, 1997). Many of these characteristics have been incorporated into the typologies of rapists and child sexual abusers (Camilleri & Quinsey, 2008; Groth, 1979; Knight & Prentky, 1990).
I think you're right to be deeply skeptical of any "support" groups, but I think the problem is worse than any specific support group but would instead be inherent to them.
The average dangerous criminal knows that the crime they committed is morally wrong, but rationalise their crime to themselves due to some circumstance or exception that 'permits' them to commit that crime. The fancy term for this is Techniques of Neutralization. For instance, the average murderer is not a cold-blooded killer. They know murder is wrong. They'll repeatedly reiterate that they know murder is wrong. But there will be this one guy, this one exception, who absolutely deserved what he got, for whatever rationale they either had beforehand or constructed in the aftermath. So the average murderer commits only one murder, and usually do so in a fairly reckless way with minimal effort to avoid being caught.
Child predators do not behave like this. The typical profile of a child predator is someone who knows that the law regards their actions as wrong, that almost all of society regards their actions as wrong, but personally does not regard their own actions as wrong. This makes them an unusual combination of extremely opportunistic, far more apt at preparing and covering up their crimes than any equivalent, and also far more likely to be a serial criminal.
How to tell if you're not at risk of predating on children? The same way everyone else manages to not commit violent crime. The average human is attracted to adult men or women in some combination, yet can easily go their entire life without committing rape primarily because they believe rape to be wrong. A pedophile who seriously believes that molesting children harms them is unlikely to act on that impulse and unlikely to need or care about support, and hypothetically this is the majority in much the same way that the majority of people don't commit rape and don't need support groups to tell them not to rape. The real dangerous individuals are those who do not genuinely believe that their potential crime would harm children, though they may certainly make a good act of claiming to hold that belief. Nyberg's statements fit that profile.
I don’t recall any of them being focused on the potential harm actually molesting a child would cause, or any type of moral repugnance against molestation by people who claimed this condition.
And that's exactly the dangerous circumstance.
For this reason I don't think any self-created "support" group could ever be useful. If you join a such a group, then you believe yourself to be sufficiently at risk of committing such an act, which in the first place requires you don't think it to be morally repugnant. So these support groups end up self-selecting for people who don't think it's morally repugnant and will soon start constructing elaborate justifications of it for each other to use. Any actually productive support would need to be imposed externally and in a fairly hostile way, with the express intent of distilling the same sense of moral repugnance anyone else gets in such a circumstance.
Tophattingson
1yr ago
The article doesn't make it clear what mitochondrial disease is responsible, but the UK is probably the world leader in treating it. The caveat: It has to be done via in-vitro fertilization.
Tophattingson
1yr ago
Here's Suella Braverman's actual article.
Is there anything in Braverman's comments that would make them exclusively a reference to orange order parades? Drawing parallels to dissident republicans, particularly Saoradh, seems fairly apt, given that their attacks have been more recent and that they held parades shortly after murdering Lyra Mckee. Killing someone and then gloating about it via marches seems as applicable (or even moreso) to this as to the Orange Order.
This seems like scraping the barrel to find some reason to "debunk" Braverman when, broadly, her comments about the two-tier policing of protest in London are correct. Critics of lockdowns got beaten in the streets while advocates of Islamist terrorism are not. I agree with Braverman on almost nothing, but I do on this. The institutions of this country, antisemitic and anarcho-tyrannic as they are, seem deeply embaressed about being called out by a minister for this. Media, civil service, police, all would quite like to be rid of someone who's willing to challenge them and their racism.
Tophattingson
1yr ago
The only major point I think you fail to address, that would make your argument even stronger, is the unique status of Palestinian refugees under UNRWA vs all other refugees under UNHCR. "Palestinian refugee" does not mean what many people assume it means as a result. It's a status you can inherit, and it's a status you can never get rid of except by returning to land currently held by Israel, hence "right of return". You can be the grandchild of a Palestinian who moved to Detroit in 1948, be a full US Citizen, and still count as a Palestinian refugee as far as the UN is concerned.
Suppose someone is unjustly jailed and destined for execution. He's exhausted all legal avenues for reprieve. He discovers a way to escape, but it means murdering his jailors, who are innocent blokes just trying to make a living. So he performs his plan, leading to suffering of both his victims and their families. Is he worthy of condemnation? My gut instinct says pretty clearly no.
This is not a good analogy because Hamas members aren't unjustly jailed and Hamas directed it's attacks at random civilians, not prospective jailers. Nor did they need to kill civilians as part of their escape. And even if you're using jailers in the loose sense of people who are responsible for infringing on the liberties of Gazans, so politicians, police, military, maybe some bueraucrats and civil servants (which still doesn't fit who Hamas attacked), then there's all sorts of wider implications for where else you'd find similar attacks to be acceptable. The elephant in the room is the mass false imprisonments associated with lockdowns, but there are plenty of other causes you could find where some individual group was plausibly unjustly prosecuted and now supposedly have justification to murder 1,000+ civilians?
To put it another way, this justification for Hamas's actions would apply far better to actions that are far more universally condemned.
So is this a consistent gut instinct or no?
To break even the lock down needed to save the lives of one million frail old people. It is not remotely plausible that it did so.
Yes, this is my main criticism of lockdowns from the perspective of health, and why I was deeply skeptical of them from day 1. There's no possible way for anything but short lockdowns that inexplicably eradicate covid forever to be a net QALY gain. You don't even need to look at long-term second and third order effects to determine that. Just the immediete acute loss in QALY from being put under lockdown restrictions already does more damage than covid could possibly do.
As for how big the effect on quality of life is, EQ-5D-5L puts a moderate reduction in ability to do usual activities (work, study, school, all sorts of things lockdowns prohibit) as a 12% reduction in quality of life. Severe as a 22% reduction. Severe + slight anxiety or depression as a 28% reduction. Severe in both is a 47% reduction. So the actual answer for lockdown's median effect on QALY probably is somewhere between 10% and 50%. This is a question that absolutely could be answered by chucking some money into getting a randomly sampled survey done.
But how did it happen? The experts were socialized into an "identified cause" model of morbidity. If something specific kills you, that counts. If something makes you a year older, that counts zero. Since zero times anything is still zero, it doesn't matter how many people are affected. Basically expertise here was so narrow in scope that the fact that people grow old and die lay outside of its scope and was neglected.
As much as simple ignorance would be a comforting explanation, prior to lockdowns, experts in public health were perfectly happy to use QALY thinking for decisionmaking. They only abandoned such cost/benefit analysis specifically when doing lockdowns, which suggests more ideological or malicious intentions.
Tophattingson
1yr ago
it depends on whether you are considering the initial claims of CFR in the first few months, or the more reasonable values that emerged later down the line.
We already had reasonable values by late Feburary 2020 due to the diamond princess outbreak. They just weren't widely advertised.
Tophattingson
1yr ago
If I had told you ahead of time that we can't trust the experts on an upcoming pandemic, would you see me as going too far?
No, because that lesson was already available from the Swine Flu pandemic. What would be less believable is just how far beyond the pale that so-called experts would go. That countries would forcibly imprison their entire populations over a spicy cough and get away with it (with their reputations intact, no less) would have seemed like bad satire in 2019.
Tophattingson
1yr ago
Experts being wrong isn't just about bias. It's about the limits of what expertise can even apply to. Expertise relies on repeatable events that give prompt, clear, indisputable feedback. Performing music is something you can acquire expertise in because you can practice repeatedly and get immediete feedback for whether you played correctly. Mathematics, same. Programming? Definitely. Physics, engineering, the feedback can be slower but still comes. But as you get further away from having repeatable events and from recieving feedback as to whether you made the correct or wrong decision, the possibility of acquiring expertise becomes weaker.
All the way down at the bottom of this tier list of plausible expertise, you can indeed find "Epidemiologist" or "Middle East Correspondant", where there are few repeatable events and when feedback is given it is ignored or epicycled away. Expert epidemiologists do not exist, or at least, they don't exist like they would for engineering, because you can't acquire expertise in epidemiology as it's currently practiced. There is no reason to put more weight on their arguments than you would the same argument from a random individual. They may well be right sometimes, they may well have a good argument to give, but they don't have expertise and can't get it either.
Tophattingson
1yr ago
Also the isolationist right will say similar about left-wing anti-war positions.
It's not necessarily about a public apology, but rather admitting where the 'new' idea you are bringing in comes from. Something akin to "This is an idea that's been popular in right wing circles for a long time, and I think there's something we can learn from those ideas." There's a difference to suddenly saying you believe that college students have been indoctrinated to hate Israel as if it's an idea that came out of the void, and saying while also noting that some right-wing commentators have been banging that drum for years.
The right wing seems much more willing to take ideas from the left while acknowledging the origin of them, whereas left wing will take the ideas sometimes but without acknowledging the origin of them. Not that I have stats on it, of course.
From my own political experience, this topic does cut across partisan lines. Seeing antisemitism firsthand when I went to university was a moment of "mugging by reality" that made me pull out of the reflexively in, hip, progressive left-wing whatever you want to call it that most people of that age group in higher education automatically gravitated towards. It's one of the three major experiences that formulated my political beliefs.
Tophattingson
1yr ago
And they seem to be saying this without any reflection on the past, where conservatives they hate, like Ben Shapiro and others, have been warning everyone of the same trend for basically two decades, at least since the early years of Bush Jr’s presidency.
I've previously commented on this pattern where even relatively moderate left-wing commentators will refuse to acknowledge when conservatives have been right about something even while they agree with them. It's strange. I don't know how to describe being so overwhelmingly certain in your own beliefs that you refuse to consider the possibility you were wrong about conservatives on a topic even as you simultaneously switch to agreeing with them. The only guess I have is that young, politically active progressives have a uniformity of political views that simply doesn't exist in any other large political group within society, which there is some weak evidence for in the UK.
Tophattingson
1yr ago
To use the UK as a parallel example, provided this source is correct (the link to the paper it cites is broken) Jews here voted 31% for Labour and 30% for Conservatives. Remove don't knows and it's 36% to 35%. The actual election result was 29% to 36%, so they were somewhat more likely to vote Labour than the general population.
Then Corbyn became the leader of Labour after their 2015 election loss and, to massively simplify, falls firmly on the pro-Hamas wing of progressivism, and arguably doesn't even care about domestic progressive policymaking at all because he's a foreign policy wonk. So at the next election, Jews voted 63% for Conservative to 26% for Labour, the latter likely holding up somewhat only because the third party left-wing option had collapsed. The actual election results were 42% and 40% respectively.
Note, Jews supporting the Conservatives was used by some as a deflection for Corbyn's antisemitism on the basis that they'd be politically motivated to smear opposition candidates, but prior to him showing up, Jews did not align with the Conservatives, or any other party, in any particular way.
Tophattingson
1yr ago
I don't think the mirror image argmument of supporting the Confederacy's aims of independence but objecting to the Davis administration would hold much water anywhere.
I don't see how woke meaningfully threatens that equilibrium. More well-paid white collar jobs in the form of DEI officials. Cheap blue collar labour from mass immigration. To the extent that they have a position on the issue, they seem to not mind firing up the money printers and not doing anything to counter it with interest rates, so cheap borrowing and rising asset prices.
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