Tophattingson
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User ID: 1078
Tophattingson
10mo 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
10mo 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
10mo 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
11mo 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.
Tophattingson
1yr ago
Real explosions don't look like movie explosions. The layman perception of what big explosions look like comes largely from fuel fires for special effects.
Tophattingson
1yr ago
MMT does not fit with the other two, because it was explicitly arguing against the economic consensus, and the economic consensus ended up being correct.
Tophattingson
1yr ago
The UK imprisoned tens of millions of people indefinitely and without trial through 2020-2021. The UK does not have state governments because it's not a federation. However, the executive was granted power to pass laws without the approval of MPs, which was rule by fiat, and could have been used to overrule or forcibly dissolve any sub-national elected positions. It just wasn't used because there was no meaningful elected opposition at the time, and there couldn't be any because elections which could have brought such people in were cancelled.
Indira Gandhi was a tyrant. But so are current Western leaders, so I don't know how western democracy could be regarded as stronger than India's. They're both weak.
Tophattingson
1yr ago
It also seems strange to me that Indian democracy should be considered stronger than most Western states when in living memory, an Indian prime minister suspended the constitution, canceled elections, jailed her opposition and ruled by fiat. And just three years after she was removed from office, she was reelected by the Indian public in a landslide. Is it supposed to be a knock against Canada that nothing of the sort ever happened in Ottawa?
I don't think the divide is as big as you think it is. Three years ago the UK Prime Minister loopholed the unwritten constitution into irrelevancy, cancelled elections, jailed opposition, imprisoned the entire population and ruled by fiat under the fraudulent guise of an emergency. It was called lockdowns.I believe some of these also apply to the Trudeau regime but I wouldn't be confident on the specifics. Regardless neither India, the UK or Canada have robust claims to being liberal democracies.
Tophattingson
1yr ago
When the arbitrary and unconstitutional "public health orders" for things like mask mandates and business closures started coming down, many argued that it was a slippery slope towards the Government making up any orders they felt like any time they felt like it and successfully enforcing them.
It wasn't a slippery slope. It already was the Government making up any orders they felt like at any time they felt like and successfully enforcing them. There's no need to make a slippery slope argument when you've already hit the jagged spikes at the bottom.
Tophattingson
1yr ago
Medical ethicists continue talking because doctors and hospitals listen.
The events of the past few years would suggest otherwise.
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.
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?
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