fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
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User ID: 2896
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
5mo ago
As long as there's a null option, which I hope would be called "Barabbas".
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
5mo ago
Not only is this Gell-Mann amnesia, it's the literal ur example of it
Nope. Want me to explain why not?
Aside from that, you are making a fully general argument against trusting any sort of institutional reporting, ever. I wouldn't blame you for not reading the article - it's long - but I don't see how you can be this critical in good faith without having read it.
As for the NYT, it gets plenty of details wrong, but it's better than most other American institutional media, and most of its bias comes from selective omission and overt editorializing. If the NYT says that Trump was convicted of 34 felonies, I'll believe them. If NYT says that Trump fell down the steps and hit his head and died, I'll believe them. If they print a quote saying "Trump will take the vote away from women", I'll believe them that someone said those words, although the person might have been reading from a script provided by the reporter.
why do you trust them with the equivalent reporting on another country
Why do you think they said that? I certainly didn't say that, and I don't recall them saying it either. But again, it's a long article, maybe it's in there somewhere. Someone would have to read it again to find out.
it would take actually living here to get it.
Again a fully general counterargument with no reference to any details.
Israeli politics is tribal, and foreigners don’t understand the tribal landscape. The religious right gets most of its power from the “zionist religious” portion of the population, which is mostly a religious caste. There’s competition over who gets to wield this power, but it’s basically a constant portion of the population that they get to “represent”. That’s with a small caveat, that Likud also has representation from the religious right these days so they’ve also started siphoning those votes a bit.
This isn't new, or unique to Israel. It has a history in America, although it's harder to see with our FPTP system incentivizing 2 parties, and the increasing nationalization of politics is destroying it, but I remember people who lived in it. It didn't always have the religious angle, but most were close enough. There've been political machines, one-party counties, locally dominant religious groups, political dynasties, and in general, groups of people who vote one way because that's just what people like them do. The ones I'm most familiar with are varieties of "yellow dog Democrat" types in the South. They voted for a particular type of person, for particular reasons. Some of those reasons were more innocent ("I don't like my home being burnt to the ground") and some were not.
And a relevant similarity is that some people categorized as this group were also associated with low-grade terrorism against a disenfranchised population. That is, the various incarnations of the KKK, other similar groups, and independent actors. You can think of it as concentric circles. The circle of people who actually went out and did terrorist stuff was small. The circle of people who provided support and aid was larger. The circle who did neither, but approved of the results of the terrorism, was larger still. And largest was the circle of people who didn't participate, didn't help, didn't even approve, but still provided cover and stonewalled any attempt to stop the terrorism. Because they were still members of the group, and loyalty to the group is a high virtue, and you don't betray members of the group to outsiders.
And that's exactly what the article reminds me of. (Notice I didn't say that the article said that?)
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
5mo ago
OK. Perhaps you could try to explain? That's one of the things I was asking for. Just a few paragraphs would help; there's no need for a 5,000 word essay.
Yeah, I don't completely trust the NYT regarding coverage of the Gaza war, but they're not as bad as on some other issues. It's not so much that they're unbiased, but that they seem to have several conflicting biases which sometimes cancel out but sometimes produce divergent biased narratives. This particular article seemed much better than average, maybe because of its historical focus, on a particular issue, that in a certain sense doesn't have anything directly to do with the Gazan conflict.
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
5mo ago
But they seem incapable. The article looks at how the Shin Bet (Israeli FBI?) is systematically hampered in investigating crimes by settlers against Palestinians, at all levels, and can't even trust its own members.
In my city, there's been a massive increase in gun violence since the BLM protests in 2020. It doesn't seem gang-related, it seems like people feuding, independent drug dealers warring over turf, that sort of thing. The police, in addition to being demoralized, are largely incapable of doing anything about it because the surrounding community won't talk to them, and at least in some cases actively works to hide evidence. Are those police complicit?
We've also had a wave of petty crime because a city attorney refused to prosecute certain types of crime. Eventually this meant that the police stopped making arrests, and then people stopped reporting the crime (and then the crime rate statistics went down, but not because crime stopped happening). That was from just one guy in government making a stand, backed by enough political support that he couldn't be easily replaced. It sounds like Israel has many more people like that.
I suppose the boring answer is to, in whatever order possible, a) get those parties out of government, b) reform government agencies at all levels to enforce the law even-handedly, and c) actually go after anyone and everyone involved in the crimes and cover-ups. Hopefully with a side order of d) removing the settlements completely. But I literally cannot recall an instance of a modern state pulling something like this off. That might well be on me, though - if you've got some examples, I'm all ears.
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
5mo ago
I don't really care about the settlements, as buildings on pieces of land. It's more the faction of the population that acts in these ways, and said faction happens to be associated with the settlements, and the existence of the settlements puts the faction in proximity to West Bank Palestinians (who have their own set of problems).
If the settlements were razed today, and all the people in them were pulled back deep into Israeli territory, those people wouldn't instantly change their views. They'd still vote, and would still be in the IDF and the police and all other branches of the government. They'd still have access to Israeli Palestinians. And anything going on in Gaza that's attributable to them, would still be happening. Or at least, that's what it seems like to me?
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
5mo ago
A couple of weeks ago, the NYT Magazine had a long in-depth article about certain factions of Israeli society who tend toward violence against Palestinians. If you ignore the click-baity title of the article, the body seems mostly descriptive, and like the sort of investigative journalism I want to see more of. It's not an overview of the entire conflict, not about the Palestinians, and mostly not about the many Israelis who don't do this. It focuses on groups connected to Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, and their respective Mafdal-Religioius Zionism and Jewish Power parties, which together have 11.67% (14/120) of seats in the Knesset and got 10.84% of the votes in the last election back in November 2022. (Ignoring the existence of Noam for simplicity.)
The upshot seems to be that there's an active minority of Israelis who are intentionally engaging in hostilities against Palestinians, and who are subverting attempts to mitigate those hostilities. The only comparisons that come to mind are areas where gangs and mafia have hollowed out the state, and the example of the US South after the Civil War, working around Reconstruction. Since the number is at least 10%, we have to assume that they're present at most levels of civil society and the military.
Then there were these tweets from Haaretz, about the IDF command losing control over some units. It didn't sound like full "Apocalypse Now" donkey-slaughtering, but still worrisome.
(And there was the IDF reservist who posted a video which effectively threatened mutiny. Of course, it would be wrong to judge an entire group based on the most extreme thing one of them posted online.)
I've got questions in two main areas.
First, how accurate is all this? This stuff passes my "bounded distrust" filter: it seems plausible from what I know of human nature and society, matches what information I have about conditions in Israel and the settlements, and makes sense of some contradictions I'd been seeing regarding the Gazan war. But I'm hoping that people who know more (@Dean seems like one) will chime in. Maybe I'm suffering from Gell-Mann amnesia.
Second, assuming this is roughly accurate, what the heck does Israel do about it? More generally, how can a state recover when a substantial minority refuses to go along with its orders? As anarchists delight in telling anyone who'll listen, a lot of what we think of as "government" is a consensual hallucination. There's fiction about what happens when people say "I won't" or "mind your own business" or "fuck off", but how often does it happen in real life? If we're supposed to "never give an order that won't be obeyed", where does that leave legitimacy when 10% won't obey certain types of orders? Maybe an Israeli Eliot Ness could put together a modern day group of Untouchables, but (going by vote totals) there's over 500,000 Israelis who at least nominally support this agenda. And the political factions that represent them are in the government coalition.
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
5mo ago
I hate video info-dumps, but it depends on the video. I could swear that some videos are designed for play at higher speeds, because the people on them talk so slowly and enunciate so well. Others, I can't understand if it's faster than 1.25x or 1.5x. And then there's also the matter of content: if my mind has to engage with what's being presented, that's the limiting factor.
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
5mo ago
And all it took was 1200 dead Israelis!
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
5mo ago
As a counterpoint to the other response, if it weren't for your first clause, I'd think you were talking about the 2016 election. #NotMyPresident #TheResistance
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
5mo ago
No, this is like Hillary Clinton (and the rest of the like-minded Democratic establishment) wanting Trump as her opposition because he looked like such a doofus to her. Seemed like a great idea, up until he won, and now the majority of the Republican party is behind him, and his attitude is becoming more and more dominant on the right. This is the future she (and her people) made.
Smotrich could go on saying "it's good that our opposition is terrorist", right up until they raped, killed, and kidnapped a bunch of Israelis. It's the fable of the scorpion and the frog - what did he think terrorists do, occupy campuses and chant slogans? But maybe Smotrich thinks that sacrificing a small number of his own people will help him in the long run. Just like Hamas thinks that sacrificing a small number of their own people will help them in the long run.
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
5mo ago
Doesn't the US also have a much bigger problem with violence? I seem to recall lots of complaints about high gun violence rates. The correlation we want is between crime and prison.
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
5mo ago
Thank you! I think I partially buy that. The group I knew that became "radicalized" was partially deeply unhappy people who finally found something that they didn't have to ( = weren't told to) be unhappy for feeling good about, and partially people whose ethics had atrophied from disuse and chose instead to maintain social ties by mimicking whatever was in fashion. I'd only worry about violence from the more unstable members of the first part.
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
5mo ago
I have a bit of hope, which I don't expect most other people to share, because I think these sorts of events can snap people out of their otherwise-fixed mindsets. It can be shocking to find out that people you believed and trusted turn out to be lying monsters, and likewise when people that you hated and feared turn out to be completely normal.
It's kinda why I'm here.
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
5mo ago
I do not know whether criminals are doing this. But I do know that homeowners believe that this happens, and in my area they have been trying to stop or slow down the expansion of mass transit into wealthier and quieter areas, for this exact reason, sometimes explicitly so. The dynamic still works based on fear alone.
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
5mo ago
garbage person thesis
I'm familiar with the person, but not the thesis; do you have an explanation or a link handy?
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
5mo ago
A sentiment which I endorse 100%.
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
5mo ago
Abstractly, there are plenty of grounds for Gazans to hate Hamas.
In practice, there are quotes from exceptionally brave dissidents, and people who have escaped. That's only a small number of people, though, and it's hard to tell how representative they are. Which is why the videos are useful, because they demonstrate that Hamas is being brutal toward Gazans, and in general I'd expect that type of brutality to make Gazans hate Hamas more than in a counterfactual world where Hamas treated Gazans better.
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
5mo ago
One of the more "hopeful" things I've seen is videos of Hamas fighters beating and shooting Gazans. Which is horrible. But it implies that Gazan support for Hamas might not be as great as we out here think. From a certain point of view, asking Gazans whether they support Hamas and hate Israel is like asking people in Soviet Russia whether they support the Communist Party and hate capitalism. We know that journalists in Gaza had to toe the Hamas party line; that surely applies to residents as well. We have no idea how much is informed belief, how much is brainwashing, and how much is an outright lie to avoid being killed by their own government.
It's probably too much to hope that Gazans don't hate Israel by this point, but maybe if Hamas is fatally weakened (somehow), and then if Israel stops killing so many of them, then maybe enough Gazans would choose to try something different in the future. I wouldn't bet on this happening, but it doesn't seem as impossible as most paths to peace. (Or at least, most paths that don't involve genocide or ethnic cleansing.)
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
5mo ago
In terms of "adopting a strategy that sacrifices one's own people for the greater good", it's quite in line with Hamas' thinking.
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
5mo ago
That's a good point, although I'm not sure how much to put on NATO's current escalation, and how much to put on the Russian military's surprising weakness. I'd been solidly in the "Putin won't invade, but if he does it would be over fast" camp, so that's two big things I was wrong about, which shows you how much I knew.
I think Hamas are religious fanatics, and have found a coordination mechanism that's strong enough to allow for suicide attacks, and which justifies "holding their own people hostage" as being in those people's long-term best interest (72 virgins for martyrs and all that). I'm still on the fence as to whether that attitude is a new category of "hostis humani generis", or whether "give me liberty or give me death" is a useful bulwark against oppression. It's hard to draw the line.
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
5mo ago
Bezalel Smotrich infamously had that 2015 quote about Hamas being an asset:
“The Palestinian Authority is a burden and Hamas is an asset. On the same international field, in this game of delegitimization, and think about it for a moment: the Palestinian Authority is a burden, and Hamas is an asset. It is a terrorist organization. No one will recognize it. No one will give it status at the ICC. No one will let it put forth a resolution at the U.N. Security Council. ...”
That's some galaxy-brained thinking, right there.
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
5mo ago
Wasn't that about France wanting deniability, so they used their spies instead of their military?
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
5mo ago
Isn't this what a game of "chicken" looks like from the losing side? If we're unable or unwilling to escalate far enough to deter Putin (or Hamas), then we're stuck dealing with their actions. So naive people who "don't have a side" and "just want the killing to stop" have all their brains' capacity for rationalization being applied to finding reasons why the other side should give up. Which makes them indistinguishable from people who actively want the defeat of the other side, but who have enough social skills to lie about their motivations.
Yes, this is huge. My aunt was a programmer back in the 1970s, and debugged programs by staring at raw core dumps until they made sense. I will never develop that skill, because I have access to tools that are much better for over 99% of cases I will ever deal with. Similarly, I use her old punchcards as bookmarks.
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