naraburns
nihil supernum
No bio...
User ID: 100
naraburns
nihil supernum
8mo ago
Hanging out with and going into business with your in laws is trad and Lindy
Well, the Psalmist wrote,
Listen, daughter, and pay careful attention:
Forget your people and your father’s house.
And the New Testament gives similar advice to men:
For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife...
My answer was intentionally lighthearted and broad, as the question seemed lighthearted ("Grillin'? Fishing?") and broad. A more serious answer might be a boring "do whatever you want, either it will work or it won't, you can't force a relationship with anyone, not even with in-laws." Or maybe an even more boring "have you asked your father-in-law?"
But while I am sure that being close with your in-laws is "trad" sometimes, it's at least as often very much not.
naraburns
nihil supernum
8mo ago
Is the goal to know the man better? Assuming you're shtupping his daughter, he may prefer to keep you at a healthy emotional distance. I think "the standard" is avoiding each other whenever possible, and at Thanksgiving watching football in the same room without ever making eye contact.
I recognize that our new, purportedly "emotionally healthy" age would suggest you bond, say, over shared hobbies, or perhaps by sharing your individual hobbies: fishing, shooting, drinking, or for the higher-brow castes having oblique political or religious discussions. This is plausible too, though the closer you are in age to your in-laws the more likely it is to stick. On the other end of the extreme, if you have a poor relationship with your own father, some fathers-in-law seem to enjoy a kind of paternal surrogacy, especially if they have only daughters.
naraburns
nihil supernum
8mo ago
Assuming you're not outright trolling, a glance over your brief post history here suggests that you have not yet really grasped the spirit of the rules.
This is not the place to wage the culture wars; this is the place to discuss them with people who disagree with you. That means making your claims less-than-maximally-inflammatory, furnishing evidence in proportion to how inflammatory they are, speaking about specific rather than general groups, writing in a way that invites everyone to participate in the conversation, not building consensus or recruiting for a cause, and so on. Your post should evidence some measure of asking yourself "why do I believe what I believe" and "what would it take to change my mind?"
Basically, please don't post like this.
naraburns
nihil supernum
8mo ago
Would that have been a better comment?
Yes!
I've been trying to not lean in to the mod hat here, but as that is where I have the most direct experience with this problem... let me put it this way. From a tone-and-phrasing perspective, your original comment is indistinguishable with the black-pilled "rationally the only choice left to us is violence against the outgroup" stuff that we are periodically called upon to moderate. Sure, it might be more rhetorically effective to sneer or saber-rattle in these ways. But thought-terminating cliches are the end of discourse, and discourse is the foundation, the whole reason this site exists. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; rhetoric is the enemy of light, perhaps most especially when it is highly effective. This is more than mere stylistic disagreement, this is a question of whether you are here for discussion with people who disagree with you, or here to wage culture war.
And the thing is--you really have, now, engaged in a lot of discussion with me, here! You seem to be totally capable of it, and if you really hated doing so I can't imagine you would have continued coming back to respond to me for as long as you have. So just, like... lead with that! It doesn't mean you can't express pointed evaluations--the rule is not "no antagonism" it is "be no more antagonistic than necessary for your argument." The rule is not "don't criticize your outgroup," it is "provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be." Blunt language is fine, but there is a meaningful difference between speaking plainly and unapologetically, and simply airing disdain (whether your own, or someone else's). If your post amounts to little more than a "boo" light, then it doesn't meet the standard of discourse here.
naraburns
nihil supernum
8mo ago
Beyond that, the rest of your post seems to be saying, again, that yes there's a perfectly innocent and cogent way of reading what I wrote, yes it's exactly what I have said I was saying since then, no you don't believe that's what I was saying because you'd rather me be just sneering and insulting people because that's already your impression of everyone who disagrees with you on this topic and fits your narrative and makes you the hero of this exchange.
I don't know how many different ways to say what I'm saying but you don't seem to have understood at all.
Your original post was terrible. The most innocent way of reading it, is that you were not personally sneering at Byrne (or me), but you thought it would be appropriate to rhetorically speak from the perspective of others who are sneering at Byrne (or me) instead of engaging with him (or me)--implying that the sneering perspective is totally cool and fine.
My point was that the most innocent reading of your comment is bad, because that perspective is neither cool and fine, nor the kind of perspective we indulge here--so even prosopopoeia makes a thin excuse. Your prosopopoeia was neither innocent nor cogent, it was just voicing a sneer.
You can make the argument that their perspective is totally cool and fine, which task you partially took up in your later comments. That's fine! It's fine to argue that sneering instead of engaging is cool and fine (you'd be wrong, on my view, but you are free to be wrong!). Delving into the substance beyond that was in pursuit of illustrations only, which I regret because it seems to have only further confused you about the nature of my objection to your original comment.
naraburns
nihil supernum
8mo ago
"Here's a bit what I scribbled out" is not a poem.
Well, yes--but what's to delineate "a bit what I scribbled out?" I still think this is a taboo-your-words problem. Is a haiku a poem? Well, whether it is a poem or not, you can still call it a haiku. You could also call a haiku an instance of "blank verse" (metered-but-not-rhymed) though this might be confusing since the tradition of blank verse arose quite separately from the tradition of haiku. "Free verse" is blank verse without the meter. We can describe all these things without the word "poem," if we want. So what words you use will depend a lot on what you're trying to do; the categories were made for man, not man for the categories.
One of my favorite poems is Phyllis McGinley's "The Doll House." She was certainly a poet; she wrote many metered-and-rhymed poems. I think this one is also a poem; I think it is a good poem. It has some rhyme, albeit only limited instances of meter. It would not quite be the same if you just converted it to prose.
After the children left it, after it stood
For a while in the attic,
Along with the badminton set, and the skis too good
To be given away, and the Peerless Automatic
Popcorn Machine that used to fly into rages,
And the Dr. Doolittle books, and the hamsters’ cages,
She brought it down once more
To a bedroom, empty now, on the second floor
And put the furniture in.
There was nothing much
That couldn’t be used again with a bit of repair.
It was all there,
Perfect and little and inviolate.
So, with the delicate touch
A jeweler learns, she mended the rocking chair,
Meticulously laundered
The gossamer parlor curtains, dusted the grate,
Glued the glazed turkey to the flowered plate,
And polished the Lilliput writing desk.
She squandered
One bold October day and half the night
Binding the carpets round with a ribbon border;
Till, to her grave delight
(With the kettle upon the stove, the mirror’s face
Scoured, the formal sofa set in its place),
She saw the dwelling decorous and in order.
It was a good house. It had been artfully built
By an idle carpenter once, when the times were duller.
The windows opened and closed. The knocker was gilt.
And every room was painted a suitable color
Or papered to scale
For the sake of the miniature Adam and Chippendale.
And there were proper hallways,
Closets, lights, and a staircase. (What had always
Pleased her most
Was the tiny, exact, mahogany newel post.)
And always, too, wryly she thought to herself,
Absently pinning
A drapery’s pleat, smoothing a cupboard shelf—
Always, from the beginning,
This outcome had been clear. Ah! She had known
Since the first clapboard was fitted, first rafter hung
(Yet not till now had known that she had known),
This was no daughters’ fortune but her own—
Something cautiously lent to the careless young
To dazzle their cronies with for a handful of years
Till the season came
When their toys diminished to programs and souvenirs,
To tousled orchids, diaries well in arrears,
Anonymous snapshots stuck round a mirror frame,
Or letters locked away.
Now seed of the past
Had fearfully flowered. Wholly her gift at last,
Here was her private estate, a peculiar treasure
Cut to her fancy’s measure.
Now there was none to trespass, no one to mock
The extravagance of her sewing or her spending
(The tablecloth stitched out of lace, the grandfather’s clock,
Stately upon the landing,
With its hands eternally pointing to ten past five).
Now all would thrive.
Over this house, most tranquil and complete,
Where no storm ever beat,
Whose innocent stair
No messenger ever climbed on quickened feet
With tidings either of rapture or despair,
She was sole mistress. Through the panes she was able
To peer at her world reduced to the size of dream
But pure and unaltering.
There stood the dinner table,
Invincibly agleam
With the undisheveled candles, the flowers that bloomed
Forever and forever,
The wine that never
Spilled on the cloth or sickened or was consumed.
The Times lay on the doorsill, but it told
Daily the same unstirring report. The fire
Painted upon the hearth would not turn cold,
Or the constant hour change, or the heart tire
Of what it must pursue,
Or the guest depart, or anything here be old.
“Nor ever,” she whispered, “bid the spring adieu.”
And caught into this web of quietnesses
Where there was neither After nor Before,
She reached her hand to stroke the unwithering grasses
Beside the small and incorruptible door.
naraburns
nihil supernum
8mo ago
I consider meter and rhyme to contribute heavily to the crafting of good poetry. Linguistically, I probably lost that battle before I was born; the word "poetic" is easily ascribed to beautiful prose, after all. But when I taboo the word "poem" I am left wondering how to describe such writings. I conclude approximately this: words that have meter and rhyme are more beautiful than words that do not. But beauty demands effort, and sometimes effort is better spent elsewhere, and other kinds of beauty can also be crafted into words.
If I could spontaneously make all the points I needed to make by singing immaculately metered-and-rhymed improvisations, I would absolutely do so, and it would be a superior way of speaking. I'm just not that smart.
Is "Irish Linen" a poem? Sure, if you like. No one will be confused if you call it that. Some effort has been put into refining its beauty.
Is it a good poem? Eh, it's okay.
naraburns
nihil supernum
8mo ago
When I created this megathread, here is what I posted to the moderator Discord:
A couple users asked for an Israel-Gaza megathread, it's maybe a bit late for that but maybe not so I went ahead and gave them one. I optimistically did not name it "World War III Opens on a Second Front."
My understanding of military decisions is exclusively historical and political, so I can't speak to the nuts and bolts of this, but every conflict like the ones in Ukraine and Israel opens the door a little wider for attacks of opportunity elsewhere. I am skeptical that China will ever invade Taiwan--the economic benefits of just rattling sabers at them for all of eternity seem far better than the ideological benefits of burning the island to cinders. I sometimes wonder if Taiwan is allowed to be what it is because someone in China read Brave New World and decided that an island of malcontent exiles was a pretty good idea, actually.
But their ability to get away with an invasion of Taiwan is certainly increased by contemporaneous conflict elsewhere.
Other contenders for the "next front in World War III" presumably include Iran and North Korea, ye olde Axis of Evil, but there are plenty of other places that could qualify. The flood of migrants arriving in Europe and the United States every day may be driven primarily by economics, but one of the worst things for any economy is armed conflict, and it is at some level armed conflict that almost all such migrants are ultimately fleeing. How much of the world needs be at war, to call it a World War?
naraburns
nihil supernum
8mo ago
Are you asking about the quokka saying "The Motte Needs You?"
This is a kind of meta-moderation that Zorba is using, both to help us moderators do our work and to gather data to eventually make moderation more user-driven. As of right now it shows up in my moderation queue in a simple form--a comment that has been reported will also get a tag with a "Bad" or "Not-Bad" and then a confidence score on that rating. Further refinements are planned!
I've used that word exactly once in this conversation, in a hypothetical example to agree with you that professors would get in trouble for saying transphobic things
This is still rhetoric. When you say "professors would get in trouble for saying transphobic things," you are describing what I would call "professors getting in trouble for saying things that challenge a particular worldview." The very use of the pejorative word "transphobic" is bullying a judgment into your argument. People who doubt gender revisionism are treated as bigots, and called "transphobic," only as a rhetorical silencing tactic. There is no substance to saying that Byrne's arguments are transphobic, there is only hollow condemnation of an outgroup. That is the whole substance of gender revisionism: refusing to engage on substance, expanding influence not through persuasion but more in the manner of a cult, through shaming and ostracism of doubters and coddling of those who send costly ingroup signals--like repeating obvious lies for the movement's good. The whole gender revisionist movement is culture war from top to bottom, and the scholars you have cited to me were all culture warriors to the bone. I am not unfamiliar with any of them, and I doubt Byrne is, either. I appreciate you citing them, though by your own admission you appear to regard them as holy scripture you haven't actually bothered to learn, rather than knowing them to be truly substantive pre-responses to Byrne. Now I am fully comfortable that my initial assessment was correct: you're definitely wrong.
To be clear: my point was that people finding that your ideas don't have enough merit to be worth engaging with, and have been answered so many times already that they don't need to be answered yet again, are sufficient to explain the observations which Byrne instead attributes to fear and weak stomachs.
You didn't say that, though. What you said was:
Nah, man, they just think you're wrong, and have spent thousands of pages explaining why, and don't want you at their parties anymore because you're kind of annoying and mean.
Now, you wrote that post in such a way as to possibly be an indulgence in a sort of prosopopoeia, "I'm not the one sneering, I'm giving voice to the totally understandable sneers of others." But the amphiboly you've left in the identity of the speaker and the addressees barely withstands charitable scrutiny or plausible deniability--in part due to your steadfast failure to steelman Byrne in the slightest. This is often how trolls approach discussion, and those using arugments as soldiers, which is why I made the comment I did about the spirit of this discussion space.
Nor have I failed to engage with Byrne's ideas
I have relatively little objection (beyond obvious points of simple disagreement) with what you've written since your first response to me. The only reason I am still talking to you is because your first post was bad, and if it hadn't been a direct response to me I would have moderated you for trolling and left it at that. You still seem to think this is somehow a conversation where you get to explain why it's okay for scholars to sneer at Byrne. I understand your argument. I just find it to be a lot of empty rhetoric aimed at defending the indefensible: the substitution of patient engagement, however Sisyphean, with mere vapid disdain. And while I recognize that this is probably asking too much of most people, I think that university professors, especially, should be held to a higher standard in this regard (as well as other spaces, like this one, which are explicitly committed to open discussion).
naraburns
nihil supernum
8mo ago
Oh you're a holocaust denier?
Putting words in people's mouths and attributing to them positions they haven't taken is unnecessarily antagonistic and corrosive to discourse generally. Don't do this.
Better to say that writers back then were already writing things that obviated his arguments.
Jesus Christ. Can you name an article that you think does this job? Because as far as I can tell you're still just wrong about this. Gender theory has been infected with postmodernist motte-and-bailey doctrines from its very inception. Even de Beauvoir's foundational cleave of sex and gender is mostly motte-and-bailey, trivial when true but primarily useful to gender radicals when false.
Even calling Byrne's arguments "rhetoric" is doing just exactly what you're accusing Byrne of doing with sex and gender. Using the purely rhetorical word "transphobic" as if it had some kind of clear and agreed-upon meaning is also assuming your conclusions in advance. You're not making arguments, you're just sneering at Byrne for not agreeing with you on the matter already. You decline to take up the substance of his argument because, why? Oh, because someone in the 60s or 70s already did, swear to God, not that you can apparently actually tell me who or where. You say that people laughing at him doesn't make him right--well, no shit! And yet all I've said to that is it doesn't make him wrong, either, and so people who proceed from laughter to avoiding even engaging on the merits (e.g. by cancelling his damn book, or in your case by hand-waving "this was surely handled in the 60s") look pretty fucking shady, from a Bayesian perspective or any other.
The point is not that someone is, or is not, correct because people laugh at them. The point is that the people who hold themselves out as being most committed to engagement with challenging ideas, have refused to engage with these challenging ideas. Your sneering response was "eh, you deserve to be laughed at instead of engaged with." Which is exactly what is being complained of.
You have dragged this conversation onto irrelevant grounds. I don't appear to disagree with you about whether laughter makes someone more or less likely to be right or wrong. Where you and I appear to disagree is that you have shown yourself to think that laughter is an adequate response to ideas you don't like, or don't agree with, or imagine to have been taken care of at some point in the past--and I do not. At minimum, because there are always new people who must learn what others before them came to discover! To refute with the shorthand of laughter is to decline the responsibility of teaching. Which is something I can accept from people whose vocation is not to teach, but when university professors engage in that shit, it is shameful and embarrassing. I pity all students subjected to attitudes like the one you are defending here--to say nothing of the fact that such responses contravene the very spirit of this discussion space.
naraburns
nihil supernum
8mo ago
They have, they just did it in like the 60s and 70s, when academic philosophy was first exploring these issues in a systematic way.
People like Byrne are not a new emerging philosophical ideas, they're just a political backlash to a long-established school of philosophical study emerging into mainstream acceptance and actually affecting our daily lives.
I don't know what to say to this, because as far as I can tell it's just empirically false. Are you an academic philosopher working in these areas? You want to show me some papers written in the 1960s that you think respond "in advance" to Byrne's paper and book?
I work in this area. My direct personal experience is that things in academic philosophy are exactly as Byrne describes. Even outside philosophy, there is a huge chill on faculty speech on anything plausibly "woke." People can and do lose jobs (that are not easy to get!) for saying anything that gets them dragged by the legacy media. You are writing as if this is all very silly, or confused, or overblown, and all that suggests to me is that you have no idea what you're talking about.
naraburns
nihil supernum
8mo ago
99% of the time it goes
Honestly I think almost no one makes it past "first they ignore you." But this is, of course, irrelevant to my point--that laughter is irrelevant to whether the target is actually right or wrong. Far better to be wrong about something, I think, than to never even rise to the level of being wrong. The people who laugh are not even wrong; they are simply mired in irrelevancy.
naraburns
nihil supernum
8mo ago
Or maybe they just think you're an asshole and your ideas are laughably wrong?
That's not an "or." They obviously think that. It's the fact that they only seem to think that when CNN tells them to that is, at best, awfully suspicious.
There's a certain thread of intellectual narcissism that reads 'I am so obviously correct, and yet all the smart people are disagreeing with me. They must be too scared to admit the truth, unlike me who is courageous and bold!'
There's also a certain thread of history that goes "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." Socrates (well, Plato) laid it out in the Republic, when he suggested that men and women could be intellectual peers, and warned his students not to laugh at the idea simply because everyone else did. Many people who believe themselves to be correct are wrong. But laughing at them doesn't make them wrong, and it doesn't make you right. Sneering and laughing are not thoughts, they are thought-terminating clichés--which is all your comment has offered here.
Nah, man, they just think you're wrong, and have spent thousands of pages explaining why, and don't want you at their parties anymore because you're kind of annoying and mean.
They have not spent thousands of pages explaining why Byrne is wrong, they have steadfastly refused to engage, and tried to prevent people like Tuvel from doing so. Part of the impetus behind all of this was the cancellation of Byrne's book. Like, did you even read the article?
There is also an ambiguity in the way you've written your post, where the "you" is arguably general, but could also be directed toward Byrne, but could even be directed toward me. I don't know whether you wrote it that way on purpose, but it sure does come across as an artful bit of trolling, especially since your only point appears to boil down to a sneer-by-proxy.
naraburns
nihil supernum
8mo ago
To be completely clear, you think that absent persecution, a noticeable number of people entitled by law to live in Israel would continue to live in Lebanon?
I have not said that, nor does that seem to me in any way relevant to the conversation. The standard set by the article was:
a world of Israelis and Arabs and Muslims and Jews living side by side with equal rights, fully integrated and defused of their hate
In the first place, "living side by side" connotes a measure of peace, which you acknowledge Lebanon lacks. In the second, the Jews living there clearly do not regard themselves as enjoying equal rights. "But some Christians do!" is not a refutation of any kind.
I do not know what you think to prove. You seem at best trying to pick a nit grounded in my paraphrasing, and yet even then you are doing it badly.
What do you think that gets you?
I'm mystified by this kind of response to my claim, which explicitly cribs the words of the article about "Israelis and Arabs and Muslims and Jews living side by side with equal rights." Suggesting countries that are neither noticeably diverse nor countries that are in any plausible way committed to equal rights does not meet the spirit of the original text. "Not counting expats, we have like, two or three different religious minorities in our country!" is, I grant, a kind of "diversity," but this is still not a cultural (much less jurisprudential) commitment to the kind of broad-spectrum liberal tolerance Westerners have in mind when they talk about diverse peoples living "side by side with equal rights."
"Lebanese Jews are afraid for their lives, but they do have Christians so technically they are a nation of diverse people living side by side" does not meet the standard of "Israelis and Arabs and Muslims and Jews living side by side with equal rights." And that's before addressing stuff like sex, sexuality, political freedom, and related concerns.
naraburns
nihil supernum
8mo ago
...how?
In July of 2020, Nagi Gergi Zeidan wrote, "Today, there are 29 Jews left in Lebanon — and they are all hiding." This does not appear to have changed.
naraburns
nihil supernum
8mo ago
Most human beings are apparently incapable of distinguishing between an empirical issue and a normative issue, and most people who post here are very much not an exception, in my experience.
You are not stuck in traffic, you are traffic. Sweeping, unflattering claims about "people who post here" are toxic to the community, for a variety of reasons; often they're wrong, often they're insulting, often they're subtly consensus-building. If you want to engage in some high-effort demographic-checking, have at it, but low-effort sneers do not meet that threshold.
naraburns
nihil supernum
8mo ago
Quit your lying.
I have not said anything known to me to be untrue, and I find this level of antagonism as surprising as it is unwarranted.
There are no Arabic states in which diverse groups of people live side by side with equal rights.
Oman? I invite you to substantiate this assertion further. And it's not like Israel's doing great at this either.
Oman? This Oman? I see no indication that their country qualifies as a counterexample.
As for Israel, I have nothing to say in defense of Israel's own errors. That they are the sole liberal democracy in the Middle East is not an assertion that they are perfect, or even that they are good. I find none of this relevant to any of the statements I made in my previous post. I think @Pasha makes an interesting counterclaim that the 20% Arab population of Israel is being deliberately limited to that in order to preserve the Jewish state, that seems plausible to me. But it is still substantially more tolerant of Arabs and Muslims, than any sharia-oriented country is of Jews. You mentioned Oman, the first sentence of this Wikipedia page is worth chewing on:
There was a Jewish presence in Oman for many centuries, however, the Jewish community of the country is no longer in existence.
Anyway, I think maybe you've confused me for someone else, or something, because most of what you've written here is entirely beside the point. I am not pro-Israel in any meaningful sense of the words. But I am very, very anti-Hamas, to say nothing of their bloodthirsty paymasters.
I wish a one-state solution felt realistic — a world of Israelis and Arabs and Muslims and Jews living side by side with equal rights, fully integrated and defused of their hate, is a version of Israel that I would adore. But it seems less and less realistic with every new act of violence.
This sentence bothered me a lot, because I think it really hammers home that Ike Saul is drowning in both-sides-ism. There is a world where Israelis and Muslims and Jews live side by side with equal rights, fully integrated and defused of their hate: it's called "Israel." The 20% of Israel's citizens who are Palestinian Arabs are not the problem, here. Those Palestinians who turned their noses up at a single state solution put themselves (and their descendants) in the "box" Saul decries. Hamas does not want a world of Israelis and Arabs and Muslims and Jews living side by side with equal rights. Only the Israelis want that. There are no Arabic states in which diverse groups of people live side by side with equal rights.
Israelis will tell you that if Palestinians put their guns down then the war would end, but if Israel put their guns down they'd be wiped off the planet. I don't have a crystal ball and can’t tell you what is true. But what I am certain of is that every time Israel kills more innocents they engender more rage and hatred and recruit more Palestinians and Arabs to the cause against them. There is no disputing this.
It's amazing to watch people equivocate in their response to this single, incredibly hard truth. The reason Israelis tell you this is because all the evidence points to it being true. To say "there is no disputing" that Israelis killing innocents engenders rage, and yet mumble about crystal balls when it is pointed out that Hamas and their backers are fully committed to the extermination of Israel, is insane to me. Exactly one side of this conflict is openly genocidal, and it's not the Israelis. "Oh I agree that Hamas is evil but it's very important that we blame Israel even for that" is such a mind-boggling take, to me.
naraburns
nihil supernum
8mo ago
I had not previously encountered that meme. It seems like a pretty on-point criticism of "edgy" academics (who are often ensconced in some of the cushiest institutional sinecures available to anyone who is not literal royalty or a token minority).
naraburns
nihil supernum
8mo ago
Presumably raising an army or building nukes is off the table
Why, though?
The Second Amendment was written by people who were accustomed to raising local militia to fight off, essentially, bandits running raids on otherwise-peaceful settlements. They had just fought a war for independence in which not only were freeholders with firearms instrumental, but also in which privately-owned merchant fleets (equipped with naval artillery and no strangers to fighting pirates) were donated to the cause. The difference between armaments used to fight wars, and armaments used to fend off everyday barbarism, was in those days essentially zero. The very idea of nation-states was relatively fledgling, and not understood in most of the world. If the Second Amendment is understood, as the entire Bill of Rights was intended to be understood, as a check on government power, then limiting people from possession of arms sufficient to fight, if necessary, a successful revolutionary war is clearly in violation of the Second Amendment.
Of course that's crazy, nobody (or close enough) wants a world where every billionaire fields a private army and the "family atomics" (a la Dune) become an important part of maintaining one's feudal inheritance. Weapons, war, and politics are so different now that enforcing the fairly clear original meaning of the Second Amendment would very likely be disastrous for all involved. Well, the Constitution is not inflexible, but the mechanism it has provided for change is the Amendment process. As a nation we've apparently decided that's simply not good enough, it's much easier to just persuade five of the nine oligarchs who rule the country in truth to patch things up by pretending there's some legitimate question as to what the Second Amendment could possibly really mean.
And like... maybe that's even for the best? But there's nothing democratic about it, and certainly nothing I would call "constitutional." It's pure ad hoccery, even though it is in many cases (like nukes) pretty obviously a good idea. But implementing what seem like good ideas because they are good ideas, rather than because they have met the previously-agreed-upon process for establishing new laws, is a departure from Rule of Law as an ideal ("and I'm tired of pretending it's not").
This seems like a "debunking" with real "We Did It Reddit!" energy. The video I've seen of the actual crater does not appear in any plausible way the result of an "airstrike."
This strikes me as complete FUD. Every claim I've seen suggesting this was anything other than Hamas weaponry (whether as a false flag or just incompetence, who knows) appears primarily based on "but I want it to have been Israel, so let's imagine the possibilities, shall we?"
The American Press are stenographers for terrorists is a much more parsimonious response to this particular series of events.
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