coffee_enjoyer
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User ID: 541
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
A preteen can easily be a child soldier
That Hamas is utilizing 8 year old child soldiers to lob grenades is a level of propaganda that the IDF hasn’t even reached yet. There has been no information coming out of Israel that Hamas is using preteen child soldiers in their operations, neither is there drone or other footage which would immediately shift public opinion in favor of Israel. This isn’t happening.
the doctors who have the internal medicine specialty to be spending time on children shot in the head are, by the nature of their specialty, not going to be the medical experts handling walking-wounded children who got shot in the arm or non-critical parts of the leg but who don't rise to their need
This is not true. Emergency nurses will deal with children shot in all places. As would surgeons, parademics, and critical care doctors. Any child shot is going to see these professionals. There’s not some “child shot in the head super-specialist” at these clinics. I mean, maybe neurosurgeon, but that’s not even a listed specialty in the article. Who do you believe is the lower specialty on whom they drop off the children only merely shot in the abdomen or thigh?
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
If you want to assist people in gaza under the administrative control of Hamas, your access to Gaza depends on your public statements aligning with their interests
Here are the problems with that: I don’t see evidence of that happening in the past; Hamas would like to maintain access to top medical care, which would be jeopardized if they began to threaten medical providers; Most of the volunteer doctors are not making a career in the Gaza Strip, so there is no reason for them to cowtow to the ideology of Hamas; the very same survey we are talking about has 20% of the doctors say they didn’t see shot children — so why did this 20% say that? Where’s the evidence that 20% were harassed or asked to leave?
What you presented is a story but the story has nothing evidencing it. The rest of your comment is just trying to obfuscate the fact that innocent Palestinian children ought to obtain medical care.
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1mo ago
It is very unlikely to be a sanctioned tactic. I hope no one read my post as implying such. What’s more likely, IMO, is that an extremist element of Israeli society has entered the military and is committing atrocities unpunished. This already occurred with the craven sexual torture of Hamas prisoners of war, tacitly approved by leading “far right” Israeli politicians who lobbied for the perpetrators to go unpunished. And the calls for these extremist actions have been made by a Rabbi who specifically trains up orthodox Jewish soldiers.
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
A hilarious way to phrase it, but of course. Normal, mainstream, reputable medical organizations issued calls for doctors to volunteer in Gaza. Some accepted. That’s because they care about innocent human lives. Innocent life is not devalued because of the hegemonic political force in power.
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
There’s a reason why I trust the NYT on this specific topic. If the NYT tells me that Assad used poison gas against civilians, I doubt it pending further evidence because it is aligned with American geopolitical interests and the interests of the NYT’s Democrat + wealthy bent. Same with the hilariously biased title reporting on Kamala’s plagiarism today. This is par for the course of NYT. But NYT has no compelling reason to post anti-Israel falsehoods. It doesn’t help Democrats, it doesn’t help their financial status, and it goes against the values of some of the execs who have ties to the Jewish community (CEO and chief editor). Why would the NYT be particularly critical of Israel? I think because the truth actually compels them here. There’s no financial, status, or political reason for them to criticize Israel. Now in this particular article, there is also an element of objective reporting, not pure subjective storymaking. No, it’s not perfectly objective, but polling a good sample of doctors is better than your usual Israel-Gaza coverage.
Re: your point that the doctors are forced to testify like this, they can simply abstain from answering if that were so, or they could answer anonymously. Is Hamas forcing them to answer with a gun to their head? I don’t recall reading this from previous medical workers. One of them is bound to spill the beans.
already ignored a pile of contradictions to even your most specious claims (e.g., that the Israeli military is mostly made up of religious extremists)
See: “Israel’s army, for much of its seven decades the country’s pre-eminent secular institution, is increasingly coming under the sway of a national religious movement that has made bold moves across Israeli society in recent years. About 40% of those graduating from the army’s infantry officer schools now come from a national religious community that accounts for 12 to 14% of Jewish Israeli society and is politically more aligned with Israel’s right and far-right political parties and the settler movement. Critics charge that its growing influence – including from the more orthodox portion known as Hardalim – is pursuing its own agenda within the army. Two-fifths of infantry graduate officer cadets now come from section of Israeli society aligned with far-right parties and settler movement” […] “In 1990, 2.5% of the graduate officer cadets of the infantry came form the national religious,” Shaul said. “By 2014 it is 40%. That is three times the representation of the national religious in Jewish Israeli society.” […] “Already we have seen discipline issues [related to national religious ideology] become almost unenforceable, and that has consequences elsewhere, including on issues like the rules of engagement.”
It's only plausible that Israelis think sniping children is fine if one accepts your premise that Jews (all Jews!) literally Other gentiles into a "not human" category
No, it is sufficient to show that there is an extremist section of Jewish Israeli society which is so radical that it would kill enemy children. And that such a section serves in the military at a higher rate. I think I proved this. I also made a general point about how this is a unique vulnerability of the Jewish religion.
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
Found more information. Posting it as a reply instead of editing the already-long OP. The NYT issued a reply to critics today:
Times Opinion rigorously edited this guest essay before publication, verifying the accounts and imagery through supporting photographic and video evidence and file metadata. We also vetted the doctors and nurses’ credentials, including that they had traveled to and worked in Gaza as claimed. When questions arose about the veracity of images included in the essay, we did additional work to review our previous findings. We presented the scans to a new round of multiple, independent experts in gunshot wounds, radiology and pediatric trauma, who attested to the images’ credibility. In addition, we again examined the images’ digital metadata and compared the images to video footage of their corresponding CT scans as well as photographs of the wounds of the three young children.
While our editors have photographs to corroborate the CT scan images, because of their graphic nature, we decided these photos — of children with gunshot wounds to the head or neck — were too horrific for publication. We made a similar decision for the additional 40-plus photographs and videos supplied by the doctors and nurses surveyed that depicted young children with similar gunshot wounds.
This is related to some of the issues brought up ITT as well. Eg, regarding the quality and legitimacy of the photos (@netstack , @jeroboam , @The_Nybbler, @NelsonRushton).
Regarding the point by @sarker that the doctors were brought to Israel by PAMA, the author of the piece writes on Twitter that
I learned of the existence of PAMA when the Society for Critical Care Medicine sent out a call for volunteers to work with the World Health Organization in Gaza, which went through PAMA. I've literally never spoken to anyone at PAMA about the public advocacy work I do, they're not involved in it in any way whatsoever
This also answers the criticism by @Quantumfreakonomics that anyone who would help Gazans medically must be a Hamas supporter. The Society of Critical Care Medicine and the World Health Organization are top authorities who disagree with that.
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
Her official policy release on the plan is wild. It’s specifically only for black men. “Black men” occurs 70 times in nine pages. “Black women” occurs zero.
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
High quality evidence would look like what the NYT did. They polled an assortment of doctors working in Gaza and asked them how often they saw children killed in such a way that would indicate intent. 80% said yes. Some said that it was a daily occurrence. This is high quality evidence. Perhaps 80% of the doctors are liars and the NYT team is lying. Or perhaps extremists who promote and condone war crimes are doing war crimes. Which is more likely?
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1mo ago
Do you believe that Times Opinion only interviewed pro-Hamas doctors? The Times Opinion team oversaw the whole questionnaire and polling process. Are Nina Ng and Dr. Mark Perlmutter die-hard anti-Israel extremists? Even if we ignore the bias that would lead one to conclude that every Arab and Muslim working as a doctor is a sympathizer to Hamas (of course, we would never say this about Jews who have associations to Israel), this conclusion doesn’t make sense in light of the testimony from the Vietnamese American and the white midwesterner. Due to language barriers, most doctors working or volunteering in Gaza are going to Arabic speakers.
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1mo ago
The NYT proposes an interesting metric to gauge Israeli misconduct in Gaza: the amount of one-shotted Palestinian children.
65 Doctors, Nurses and Paramedics: What We Saw in Gaza
I worked as a trauma surgeon in Gaza from March 25 to April 8. I’ve volunteered in Ukraine and Haiti, and I grew up in Flint, Mich. I’ve seen violence and worked in conflict zones. But of the many things that stood out about working in a hospital in Gaza, one got to me: Nearly every day I was there, I saw a new young child who had been shot in the head or the chest, virtually all of whom went on to die. Thirteen in total. At the time, I assumed this had to be the work of a particularly sadistic soldier located nearby. But after returning home, I met an emergency medicine physician who had worked in a different hospital in Gaza two months before me. “I couldn’t believe the number of kids I saw shot in the head,” I told him. To my surprise, he responded: “Yeah, me, too. Every single day.”
Using questions based on my own observations and my conversations with fellow doctors and nurses, I worked with Times Opinion to poll 65 health care workers about what they had seen in Gaza. Fifty-seven, including myself, were willing to share their experiences on the record. The other eight participated anonymously, either because they have family in Gaza or the West Bank, or because they fear workplace retaliation.
44 health care workers saw multiple cases of preteen children who had been shot in the head or chest in Gaza. 9 did not. 12 did not regularly treat children in an emergency context.
Quotes from the doctors:
“One night in the emergency department, over the course of four hours, I saw six children between the ages of 5 and 12, all with single gunshot wounds to the skull.”
“I saw several children shot with high velocity bullet wounds, in both the head and chest.”
“Our team cared for about four or five children, ages 5 to 8 years old, that were all shot with single shots to the head. They all presented to the emergency room at the same time. They all died.”
“One day, while in the E.R., I saw a 3-year-old and 5-year-old, each with a single bullet hole to their head. When asked what happened, their father and brother said they had been told that Israel was backing out of Khan Younis. So they returned to see if anything was left of their house. There was, they said, a sniper waiting who shot both children.”
I think this is a brilliant bit of journalism. First, they specify preteen children who are killed, a hugely important qualifier for a conflict which may see 16-year-old boys plant IEDS. Second, they queried a range of doctors, some of whom have no association with Palestinians or even Arabs (or even Muslims for that matter). Third, the data uniquely sheds light on possible Israeli misconduct. Blankly informing us about the number of dead Palestinian children tells us very little: are these combatant-aged? Did they die because of a nearby explosion targeting a combatant? The metric they chose is as beautiful as Abraham Wald’s famous WWII survivorship bias statistical work.
Looking specifically at the number of one-shotted children relative to the number of total shot children is an amazing way to determine intent on behalf of the Israeli soldiers. We should expect that, if these children are shot because they have caught stray bullets aimed elsewhere, that most of the children would be shot in places other than their head and chest. We should similarly expect a higher number of cases of multiple bullet wounds, as in the case of their being shot due to crossfire fighting. In gang-related shootings in America, we don’t see a high number of one-shotted adolescents, but wounds on arms and legs, abdomens, and multiple punctures. (Think 50 cent). Note that any Palestinian child shot or grazed by a bullet is going to be sent to the hospital, so there is no survivorship bias in the presentation of children to the hospital. These doctors have been presented with all bullet-wounded preteen Palestinians, and they are shocked at the high rate of one-shot critical hits — including the author who “volunteered in Ukraine and Haiti and grew up in Flint, Michigan.”
So, why are Israeli soldiers one-shotting children in Gaza? IMO, the most likely answer is that they want to. Israeli culture is not Western culture, neither is Israeli military culture identical to Israeli culture at large. There is an undercurrent of supremacism and extremism in Israeli military culture. When Israeli soldiers were found to be sexually torturing Hamas prisoners, extremists gathered to protest the soldiers’ arrests. These extremists included an Israeli politician, and the current national security minister publicly condemned the arrest of the soldiers. A Rabbi who specifically teaches orthodox military recruits alongside Talmud studied has specifically advocated for the killing of women and children in Gaza.
There is also a religious component to the Jewish extremism of the Israeli military, which I think is difficult for a naive Westerner to wrap their head around. When a Christian or post-Christian Westerner thinks about Judaism in Israel, they assume they must be worshipping something that is approximately the moral equivalent of Christ. “Sure, they don’t have our Jesus dude, but they recognize the same attributes and moral conduct in other ways”. But this is really not the case. With the same attention that Christians allot to Christ, Judaism allots to the practice of ritual rule-following. When Christians look at their God being tortured by sinners like themselves, Jews look solipstically at their own torturous history by outside threats. The attentional focus of the religion is different, and the moral focus is different. These are qualitative differences. When you combine this phenomenon with the independence of Rabbinical academies, you are going to see some extremist branches rise up in some Jewish academies, especially among the conservative and non-ultra orthodox. These extremist branches are most likely to pour out students onto the Israeli military. In other words, the Israeli military selects for the extremists which are raised up within the de-centralized schools of Israel. Don’t forget that it’s Israel under attack, not “secular country I happen to be citizen of”. They pray to Israel daily, it is their Christ, so for a Zionist extremism it is as if their deepest value is being terrorized.
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
If we are being pedantic, Vance answered a specific question about whether he would certify the vote. That’s not the same question as the related previous questions. He explained why he may not certify the vote, or why he would protest the certification of the vote. You can criticize him for the previous interview questions which were not the subject of the OP, though. But “neither is it what Vance was asked about” is incorrect.
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
The question
Senator, would you have certified the election in 2020, yes or no?
was answered in his own unique away. Journalists aren’t some honorbound, virtue-trained caste of monks whose purehearted questioning must be answered like Job in the face of Jehovah. They would be a little bit below prostitutes in Dante’s inferno. They are disreputable and untrustworthy according to citizens. The American public is interested in “who is harming democracy”, and Vance answered that concern. Vance’s answer isn’t Trump’s, but Vance is clearly a more sophisticated thinker / propagandist than Trump.
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
Vance made an excellent point. I’ve made a similar point on this forum. There’s nothing bonkers about his argument.
(A) Democracy requires informed voters and free exchange of political ideas.
(B) It’s probable that 99% of all political idea exchange in America occurs on major social media companies. It may be as high as 99.99%.
(C) Default social media companies conspiring to hide essential political information in order to sway voters breaks the substance of democracy, which is related to [A] above.
(D) When one party breaks the substance of democracy, it’s a perfectly legitimate and moral reply to break it to your own advantage as well. This is mere self-defense.
Can you imagine Ben Franklin […]
Ben lived in a time where 99% of political idea exchange occurred in bars, coffee shops, and town halls. If he were prevented from talking politics in these places then he would have revolted. Nowadays that political activity occurs on a handful of websites. If Ben were alive today he would agree with Vance. He revolted for less significant reason in fact, involving representation and taxes, which was surely illegal according to the letter of the law (but not the spirit of liberty). Ben’s friends would agree with me on (A), in all of their writings on democracy they assume an informed populace.
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
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Pitchfork music. Due to cosmic chance, I had an obsession with obscure music in preteen & teen years. Pitchfork collected and reviewed this music. Racial politics didn’t come up in the early days of indie music, and it definitely wasn’t central to music reviews. Pitchfork changed ownership in ~2011 and suddenly they were talking about race and politics in more of their reviews. Bands I liked were smeared for being white. Black music was reviewed considerably more. Pop music was taken seriously (disgusting). This is probably the number one thing that radicalized me. Indie rock music was, just generally speaking, a majority white culture created by majority white musicians, largely from middle to upper middle class families, and wholesome as far as youth music goes. Pitchfork started bashing the culture that created and valued indie music, while boosting pop and rap with a side of LGBT.
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Reddit in its earlier years. There was actually a time where it had a diversity of political views and some interesting discussions. Obviously, not any more.
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
Propaganda associates Trump with powerful threats and interests. So Trump comes to represent the thing which most compels a person to be passionately opinionated. We can call these “plots” and different episodes air to different audiences. In Pennsylvania, Obama will call Trump a “generational billionaire” who wouldn’t know how to fix a car. On MSNBC, Trump is criticized precisely for his semblance to the populace of White Pennsylvania — he’s the “hillbilly billionaire” or the spokesman for the racist white crass majority or whatever. In one case he’s a populist and will say whatever the majority wants, in another case he’s a threat to democracy itself and ignores the will of the people. In one case he’s someone alienated from everyday interests of Americans, in another case he watches too much TV and likes McDonald’s too much and was a reality tv star who likes porn stars and telling tall tales. Politics is consequence-oriented, so if something works it will used. Telling different cohorts what makes them most impassioned works, so they do this.
For the “threat to democracy” plot, I there’s a few things going on. (1) It helps to recruit boomer undecideds in key states, because caring about democracy portrays Dems as saviors of American tradition; (2) it makes Dems the clear moral victor, because democracy has connotations of importance in America — people want to be the good guys; (3) Trump being the threat is essential, because Dems represent him as the cause of middle class grievances and an economic oppressor — you don’t want your “leader” to be the archetype of every bad personality trait and financial issue.
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1mo ago
Do you begrudge their success in the sense that it increases sensitivity to your own lack of success, or in the sense that you value your friends less? If it is only the former, I think that’s a good feeling to have
”Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little”
I think a healthy human becomes upset when their friends succeed far ahead of them, as it means that they are falling behind their peers, and identity is created through comparison to peers. Totally normal feeling. I think Pascal wrote about this and it was the subject of that book “A Separate Peace”. But the envy should propel you to do productive things rather than ruminate.
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
How bad do you think Milton will actually be?
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
Isn’t the clearer explanation that she enjoys a part of the organizing the party, and doesn’t enjoy a different part, and when she is satisfied from the enjoyable part then the displeasing part becomes salient? She enjoys socializing and leading, then is satisfied; she doesn’t enjoy stress, and so when post-party fatigue hits all she thinks about is the stress. No different than a marathon runner swearing off running when they are exhausted, but in a few days when recharged they want to run again.
A Freud-ish leap to the conclusion that “when someone keeps doing the same thing over and over, the most parsimonious explanation is that they're doing it because they want to”, seems dangerous. We can say that there is some aspect of the thing that they like. A drug abuser enjoys the relief from the drug, but wants to find relief in a better way. He doesn’t enjoy every part of the experience of doing drugs.
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
But you don’t need to keep it secret among thousands of people. You would sign up anonymously, convey some form of proof or likelihood of employment to a handful of die-hard administrators, and then simply don’t go to work when the administrator tells you. Only the administrator would need to know how many strikers work at z company. The financial damage caused by this couldn’t be made up by hiring new people, and if you’ve persuaded a sufficient number of the low wage employee base to do this, a corporation has no choice but to negotiate because otherwise they simply don’t have workers.
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
Marcuse reads like typical Freudian mythmaking. It is an interesting read if you assent to his implied assumptions, but worthless if you don’t. Is it actually the case that being sexually “rebellious” outside of norms leads to political revolutionary interests? I don’t think so; female thot-leaders online who parade themselves as sex workers often have the most boring political ideology, and that is still “impermissible” today, whereas the typical incel online has insane and sometimes truly revolutionary beliefs. Is it actually the case that sex outside of norms is freeing to an individual? Probably not. I can just as well argue, with the same amount of empirical evidence as the Freudian, that Freudian thinking is an elaborate psy-op to confuse a generation of Westerners, and my explanation is more parsimonious.
Regarding the naughtiness of sex, a new take: every human has an evolutionary predisposition to have “naughty” sex, where naughtiness is the feeling of secrecy and haste and aggression. In our evolutionary environment there were copious opportunities to copulate outside the view of other competing humans (don’t copulate in view of the woman you previously copulated with, or in view of another interested party, or another potential mate, or just in view of other humans generally). So humans have an instinct to want to have sex covertly. And they also want to have sex with haste, which increases the probability of pregnancy and permits more opportunities. And lastly they want to have sex with aggression, explained by men stealing women from other tribes or members and all of the historical evidences of that (founding myth of Rome, the tradition of fake “wife-kidnapping” as a marital rite in certain cultures).
If you can introduce the vibes of secrecy and haste and aggression — which describes so many fetishes and deviant communities and role-play and erotica — then the sex is more enjoyable. The liberalization of sex has taken away these features: sex itself is no longer a “secret” thing that polite company doesn’t talk about, something that maybe a married couple doesn’t talk about bluntly. It is no longer something you do hastily because of all the relatives who share your humble abode. And it is no longer intrinsically tied to male aggression because of the paranoia regarding consent culture and spousal rape and etc. Notice that all of these features could apply to vanilla, married sex! The more puritanical your culture is, the greater the vanilla sex. Making sex itself taboo actually cements its pleasure.
An aside: men also have an instinct to have sex with lots of novel women. This is the one thing that vanilla married sex cannot satisfy. But many tens of thousands of years ago, enterprising young women learned that if they changed their hair style, changed their hair color, changed their perfume, and wore new clothes, they could trick their mate into thinking she’s a whole other woman. Behold! The invention of make-up and deception. The women with an instinct to play dress up gained an enormous fertility advantage.
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
There are easy ways to structure the platform so that an employer is not aware of organizing plans. If the users have signed up under the promise that they will strike when announced, then only a small number of administrators behind the platform have to know how many employees at x company are ready to strike. When a strike is announced, the members stop working. If this occurs during an important time period for the company (like: holidays for Amazon), then the costs associated are far greater than the mere cost of hiring new workers. This would force the hand of employers to negotiate for no other reason than it is less costly to do so. This can be repeatedly infinitely, because low wage workers who are fired can work at a new company. Plausibly, employers may create a list of employees who have engaged in union activity and publicly release it, but the plausible deniability of the platform could lead them to be sued. There are ways to strengthen such a platform against trolls, like by requiring the employee to identify themselves to an administrator only.
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1mo ago
Why hasn’t an online secretive / semi-anonymous labor union movement developed? The biggest problem with forming a union is that your employer finds out before you have the potential to disrupt operations. But if a sufficient number of employees are organizing clandestinely online through a semi-anonymous community, then they can declare days of disruption without the risk of being fired. This would wildly increase the ability of employers to negotiate for higher wages, because for many businesses a disruption that occurs at the right time would spell ruin for their business. Low-wage employees have an easier time finding another job, whereas the employer might suffer disastrous losses if the labor activity becomes a regular occurrence. This seems like the most expedient way to increase worker’s rights and conditions in America if you’re into that kind of stuff. We could see Amazon drivers increase their wages like Dockworkers.
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1mo ago
Intentional or coincidental, you’ve hinted at a plot point of the parable:
Now his older son was in the field, and as he came and drew near to the house, he heard music and dancing. And he called one of the servants and asked what these things meant. And he said to him, ‘Your brother has come, and your father has killed the fattened calf, because he has received him back safe and sound.’ But he was angry and refused to go in. His father came out and entreated him, but he answered his father, ‘Look, these many years I have served you, and I never disobeyed your command, yet you never gave me a young goat, that I might celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours came, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fattened calf for him!’
In our parable-world, the obedient brother never receives a celebration like this, but he did receive other things: the constant connection to his father, the share in his ousia (interpreted either as wealth to inherit or, spiritually, his nature), and lastly the return of his lost brother (and he gets to eat the calf too). Your experiences are somewhat different as you’re describing an over-strictness to the good sibling and an under-strictness to the bad sibling. But, it’s probable that our parable-patriarch was a loving father to his obedient son, advising him and hyping him on many matters. And it is probable also that if the layabout had stayed in his father’s estate (as opposed to defecting away from his whole “kingdom” so to speak) that he would be criticized or at least advised regarding his errors, in a loving fashion. Our layabout son had instead alienated himself from paternal authority altogether: true defection and true sin. And the celebration upon his return shows us the community’s greatest value: not in industry and correctness but in saving the lost and raising the dead (metaphorically), something better for the communal whole and better for emotional wellness. A spiritual social safety net. [you could, plausibly, tie this discussion to the “slack” topic you find in SSC and elsewhere… and how miserable a place like South Korea is, with their emphasis on industry and rank and not spending money lavishly on genuine welfare — competition of brother, not love].
But I don’t think that the parabolic celebration actually confers status on the profligate. It is a costly signal of the love they have for him as a human (and brother) despite his transgressions. And that love is best for him to have, and best for him to associate in his heart with his family, so that he can resume brotherly duties without shame or ill-will. After this celebration, he is not going to take over the estate of his father, and he has no more inheritance. So his status is effectively permanently lower in re wealth and role, but restored completely in re humanness. Today with our homeless crisis, how many profligates refuse to get help because there is no loving paternal figure to meet them halfway and memorably celebrate their return? Instead there’s efficiency bureaucracies, and competition, and status and status and status and status… cultures which promote family over everything have much lower rates of homelessness and drug addiction.
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
This is an interesting question. It’s complicated in subtle ways. You can see the Satiated Sinner Question as a balancing act between justice and mercy. Justice says that errors deserves punishment and righteousness deserves reward. Mercy says that each person must be lovingly motivated to pursue the good regardless of their past, and rewarded in doing so. If you choose justice at the expense of mercy, then a longterm sinner has no motivation to pursue righteousness. The mercy-starved sinner’s future outlook would lack any appetizing reward, and they would be unmotivated in their journey toward betterment. But if you lack justice, then everyone (sinner included) has reduced motivation to pursue the prescribed righteous conduct. Being justice-heavy means that the repentant sinner never obtains the status they otherwise would have had. Being mercy-abundant means that the repentant sinner can easily make up the status they have lost with little effort. The balance is that we must optimally motivate a lifelong sinner to pursue righteousness, and yet optimally motivate the righteous person to pursue even more righteousness!
We can consider a classroom. A justice-heavy teacher allows for no assignment to be made up except for serious and valid reasons. A mercy-abundant teacher allows for poor-performing students to make up an assignment to get them back on track and reinvested in the work. What’s interesting to consider is that the focus with the most utility depends on which student you are dealing with. I can easily imagine a student with a bad home life, dealing with personal issues, who is on the verge of giving up on his class because of how far behind he is. Emphasizing justice does not help him, neither will he “learn” from failure, as his issue stems from motivation and emotional distress. Lovingly allowing him to hand in something simpler, and reducing the standard for him particularly, can result in new motivation in the class, and more importantly a new attachment to the teacher and school generally. A school that cares about him as a particular human with particular issues is a school he can love, which is clearly better for his particular development.
On the other hand, we can imagine a student who ought to have more justice and not more mercy. This is for a student who is lazy and uncaring without excuse, and especially for a student who violates important rules in a selfish deceptive manner. The failure is important so that he learns his behavior is truly punished, so that hopefully he doesn’t repeat it again. Showing him mercy would be counterproductive, whereas in the distressed student it may be productive. My intuition is that this difference is deeply tied to an individual’s health, IQ, spirit and status.
So how do we solve this universal problem?
One solution is to know them, in that “subjective” sense of having a long conversation and trying to determine whether they are an earnest repentant or a satiated sinner. I do believe that human intuition can tell us this. LLMs and AI show us that the most sophisticated technology available to us is often no match to human intuition. While judging someone is a subjective judgement, it’s probably the closest we can get to an objective judgment, because everything else can be gamed, but human intuition is hard to game. Do we give our significant other a test if they violated our trust, or do we instead trust our intuition? Intuition rules over everything here. If it is impossible to fake, then the motivation to be a satisfied sinner is reduced: “what if I can’t fake it when I’m done?”
Another solution is to reduce the reward for their lifestyle and also love them mercifully. This is actually a crucial part of the Parable of the Prodigal Son. The prodigal son did not recover the full status of what he previously lost! After his profligate spending and ruin, he aimed to become a servant in his father’s household. He remembered that even the servants were well-fed with bread (not exquisite meats). The father embraced his prodigal son with fatherly love (mercifully wishing for his good and loving him), and he celebrated his return with splendor. But the son no longer had a share in his father’s wealth. To his well-behaved son he says “Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours”, meaning that the remainder of his wealth goes to the good son — the prodigal son does not deserve to recover the wealth which he wasted. (The word used when the prodigal son demanded his share of the “wealth” is actually “ousia”, which means property or being, and is used in the mysterious epi-ousia, the “super-substantial” or “above-being” bread of the Lord’s Prayer, translated somewhat retardedly as “daily bread”. How many of God’s hired servants have more than enough bread?).
I think this trusty old parable actually sheds a lot of light on this problem. Sinning should always reduce status; the righteous should be greater status than the recently-forgiven. But the return of every sinner onto a Godly path should be greatly celebrated, almost absurdly celebratory. They should be maximally hyped up about it, because that’s for their good. Because “it is fitting to celebrate and be glad, for this your brother was dead, and is alive; he was lost, and is found.” But, hyping up and loving a homeless person who cleaned himself up is a lot different from seeing the formerly homeless person as equal in status to some longstanding community member who lived well. The longstanding community member must be respected and honored more in day to day life. (If the former vagabond lives very well for years, then his status should be greatly increased, but never to the height of what his status would be had he not vagabonded. But maybe close to it. I think that’s correct).
The deeper meta pattern of how to socially-prescribe reinforcement for previous defectors comes up a lot, I think. Someone used to say the N word? OnlyFans girl goes trad? Amber Rose speaking at the RNC? I think there’s an instrumental case for quickly rehabilitating defectors, but I think America screws up in how it valorizes and honors the returning defector. If you were a druggie profligate and then became an evangelical pastor, your previous life as a sinner should not be used to enhance your reputation. You can still be a pastor if there is no one better, but speaking about your past should make you feel nauseous, not excited and nostalgic (what it seems like for these people sometimes).
This isn’t how it works. You’re asserting that there’s a normalized phenomenon of Hamas threatening or pressuring the testimony of temporary Western medical workers. There have been hundreds, perhaps more than a thousand Western medic workers who have volunteered in Gaza over the years.
As per a previous comment, it was the WHO and a major American medical association which called for doctors willing to go to Gaza. Now you are alleging that the WHO is controlled by Hamas? Or are you alleging that Hamas is interviewing every doctor who passes into the territory? This also needs evidence. If this occurred, we would know about it, per above.
Again, you are making a claim that is empirical. Are you saying Hamas has a hand in selecting doctors? We need a source on that. Are you saying that doctors would only work in Gaza because they are pro-Hamas? This is disputed by major medical organizations wishing to send doctors into Gaza. You are also conflating sympathy to the Palestinian people with the wilingness to publicly lie about the health of children to benefit Hamas. You have to imagine all of the doctors who are not radical pro-Israel supporters, but instead focused on mitigating the harm affecting children. That’s going to be a lot of doctors. Doctors willing to volunteer are predisposed to care about the plight of children, rather than the ideology of political organizations in obscure parts of the world.
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