shakenvac
1yr ago
It won't last. Israel does not want mountains of people dying of thirst on newspaper front pages, it makes them look callous. They will turn the water back on in a few days and the food maybe a few weeks after that, possibly in exchange for hostages. Any gap will be bridged by humanitarian aid coming in through Egypt.
Genius move to cut them off though. Few people will have appreciated that Gaza received water etc from Israel in the first place. Really makes it look like a 'biting the hand that feeds you' type of situation.
shakenvac
1yr ago
The taliban defeated NATO after NATO spent 2 trillion dollars fighting them.
Eh. The Taliban 'defeated' NATO by being a thorn in their side until NATO decided the juice wasnt worth the squeeze and bailed. That would not work for Palestinians. Suppressing an agressive Palestine isn't a side project for Israel, it's existential. You'd better believe that if Afghanistan were in the middle of the Mohave desert and rocketed Phoenix every decade or so the US would still be there.
Israel can no longer control the narrative when so much of the public's view comes from the internet and not pro Israel media organizations.
That might have been true yesterday but a few viral videos of Israelis getting executed and lynched by Palestinians will turn global perception of the Israeli-Palestine conflict around right quick.
shakenvac
1yr ago
shakenvac
1yr ago
I also find this a very strange comment indeed. I guess 80 seems a long way away when you're 30? I suspect the number of 80 year olds who would turn down a second youth and another 80+ years (and more besides) is near zero, especially if you could bring along your spouse etc. Culture shock is hardly such a terrible condition.
The Laws of War really aren’t that detrimental to the effectiveness of modern armies in waging a conventional war. Like, at all. The Laws of War don't stop armies from rolling over their enemies with ruthless efficiency. They don't stop you from launching a surprise attack on sleeping solders, blowing their food and water supplies to kingdom come and letting them die of exposure, nor gunning them down as they flee. They didn’t stop Schwarzkopf from massacring retreating Iraqi columns with impunity, nor Thatcher from sinking an Argentine cruiser outside of the 'exclusion zone', and then leaving the surviving sailors to fend for themselves, just because she thought it was looking a bit sus. The Americans basically wrote the Laws of War, you can be sure they didn’t write them in such a way that they would intentionally hamstring themselves.
On the counter side, Japanese war crimes against both civilian population and enemy soldiers did nothing to aid them in the war. The Japanese were unable to break the morale of their enemies, their vicious tactics won them no strategic advantage, the Americans simply returned inhumanity for inhumanity, and hundreds of thousands of Allied and Japanese and Chinese soldiers and civillians died hideously and unnecessarily and to no net benefit. Meanwhile the treatment that they inflicted upon the Chinese (among others) has created an enmity that is still going strong one hundred years later. Hardly a strategic win.
Terror bombing simply doesn’t work, and that includes bombing of civilian infrastructure that the military typically doesn't need anyway. We didn't really know that in 1940 but we do now. In WW2 neither the British, nor the Japanese, nor the Germans rose up against their masters as the proponents of such bombing hoped. When bombed, civilians become outraged at their enemies. When bombed terribly, they become deeply despondent. Attacks on factories, rail hubs etc are at least somewhat effective, but of course those are all legitimate targets anyway. The only exception I can think of is the atomic bomb, and that was less about the number of people killed and more about being a demonstration of an unbeatable weapon.
You could argue that modern legal norms have made occupations more difficult, and while that is a far more defensible position (though one I would still argue), it really has nothing to do with the Laws of War. Occupations are not wars. But anyway, the enmity that the rapes of Nanking and Belgium created were not at all worth whatever trifling military advantage they bestowed, even before taking into account the propaganda wins they gave their enemies, and inevitable reactions they invoked from other nations.
shakenvac
1yr ago
The study, (...) found that voter ID laws don’t decrease voter turnout, including that of minority voters. Nor do they have a detectable effect on voter fraud
I will admit I'm surprised at the results of that study, But if anything it backs up my point, or at least doesn't contradict it. Voter supression is more than just ID requirements, it's the general inconvenience of voting. Any compromise that the Reds could offer the Blues along the lines of "everyone needs voter ID but we'll make election day a day off" would be a massive win for the Blues. The Reds stand to gain nothing (as per your study) but the Blues get to defang a major Red talking point while gaining no votes at worst and a boatload of them at best.
shakenvac
1yr ago
The more hoops you make people jump through, the more advance thinking and organisation that is required to vote (i.e. to get a photo ID months prior to the election), the fewer people will clear those hoops and actually vote. That's hardly a stretch.
Mandatory ID would solve this problem handily and is common in other developed countries but that would of course be a non-starter in America.
shakenvac
1yr ago
I mean, surely from the left's point of view the compromise of 'we'll make it easy to vote if you agree to ID checks' is a massive win? Soft voter suppression is a real issue wheras election security is a nothing-burger. "we'll solve this issue that loses you blues a fuckton of votes if we can also solve this issue that loses us reds basically no votes"? Ka-ching!
Of course, the left could always argue that even free and easy-to-get ID is still suppression as it might be too high of a hurdle for some of their voters (and they'd probably be right) but I don't see why they'd be opposed to the deal in principle.
shakenvac
1yr ago
and the counter-counter point is that most other developed democracies on earth don't have hours long queues to vote so if you want the level of security measures they have you should be willing to accept the accessibility standards that they have also.
shakenvac
1yr ago
The truth always matters.
I never said it didn't. I said it makes little difference. If you'll forgive the invoking of Godwin's law, we could have a spirited debate over whether it was 2000 or 4000 jews were shot in some nameless polish town in 1940. While the truth of that question would matter in some sense, the conclusion wouldn't change the nature of the Holocaust, nor the guilt of the Nazis. Same principle.
but claiming that the people who ran the schools were literally mass-murdering children is a crime of much greater enormity.
Not something that I ever claimed.
"The Church conspired to commit genocide out of sheer evilness."
Also not something that I ever claimed.
Even if we accept, for the sake of argument, that the death rates in the Residential Schools were no worse than in tribal communities, and the abuse meted out in these Schools was hugely overstated, and that the Church only had the best interests of these poor ignorant savages in their hearts, and every single death was dutifully recorded with a heavy heart and a good Christian burial... Even if we accept all that, the Church was still instrumental in stealing these children away from their parents and expunging their culture and destroying their identities and burying them hundreds of miles from their homes when they died. That alone makes me have zero sympathy for the Church having a handful of cases of arson on their hands.
I'm not saying the arson justified per se, grievance resolution by arson is no way to run a society. I'm just saying I get it. If Scientologists had spirited away my great uncle when he was 6 and buried him in one of their godforsaken compounds I'd probably want to burn down a few buildings too.
shakenvac
1yr ago
Perfection is never an option nor a reasonable standard.
'better' is always an option. 'better than shit' is certainly a reasonable standard.
shakenvac
1yr ago
If you want to argue it's all lies, then do so. You are arguing that the 200 graves are lies. Those 200 graves are not "all". they are ~1% of the enormity of the Residential Schools System, for which the church bears serious responsibility, and you have at no point indicated that you dispute the other 99%.
Either Dispute the evils of the Residential Schools, or admit that the Church fucked up.
shakenvac
1yr ago
The deaths honestly just sound like poor people deaths.
They weren't Poor People deaths though were they? They were Ward of the Church deaths. When you steal children away from their parents you get to take responsibility for what happens to them.
I have no issue with teaching poor people higher culture.
it was hardly """just""" that. If they had managed to do so without kidnapping, abuse, beatings, and deaths by neglect they'd have far less of a case to answer today, eh?
Whether the conditions were particularly bad I don’t know
Bad compared to conditions back at the tribe? Probably unknowable. They were certainly worse than they could have been. And like I said, when you steal children away from their parents you get to take responsibility for what happens to them. If you find that too burdensome feel free to not do it. Or engage in apologism for those that did.
shakenvac
1yr ago
some are saying that it's not evidence, it's blips on ground-penetrating radar which could be any kind of anomaly
Some are wrong. Evidence is "a sign or indication of something". Grave-sized GPR returns 6ft under the ground is evidence of graves. Is it strong evidence? not really. You want more certainty? I don't blame you. But fundamentally, the truth of those 200 graves makes little difference, because...
Suppose Dave breaks Andy's nose because Tom said "Hey, Andy insulted your wife" but Tom is lying because he wants to get Andy in trouble.
It doesnt really matter if Andy insulted Dave's wife on the 13th October 2022 when we know he has done so every other day for the last 3 years. We know what we need to about Andy's big mouth.
It doesn't really matter if Sir Cliff sexually assaulted man X if it's already proven that he assaulted 24 other men*. We know what we need to about Sir Cliff's perversions.
It doesnt really matter if you accuse me of being a swindler with little basis if I am known and proven to have swindled 50 people. We know what we need to about my swindling tendancies.
And it doesnt really matter whether it was 50 or 200 children died in Kamloops if it is already known that thousands of children were kidnapped, abused, had their identity erased, and ultimately died of neglect by the Church. We know what we need to about the crimes of the Church.
*I know this isn't true, I'm making a point.
shakenvac
1yr ago
Complicit in the abduction of children by the Canadian Government, subjected them to emotional and physical abuse, often looked after them pretty poorly, and as a result many children died of preventable diseases. and of course, the whole point of the exercise was to expunge their culture from them. Which is, uh, bad.
I mean, is it really that difficult to see where the natives are coming from?
I think if I kidnapped your child, took him half a world away to learn Swahili and African culture and have that dumb Christianity beaten out of him, and then sent you a letter saying 'Sorry, young Mswati (that was his new name) died of malaria.' I think you'd probably feel a tad aggrieved.
shakenvac
1yr ago
I think you're being uncharitable by calling this a 'lie'. Evidence for 200 child graves in Kamloops has been found. It's not great evidence, It could easily be incorrect, it is being treated as proof when it absolutely isn't. But it is evidence, it hasn't been invented, and the underlying atrocity to which this evidence refers is (to a greater or lesser extent) certainly true.
And let's make your analogy more representative of what has happened. If someone found a cave full of suspicious looking bone shards and says "hey we just found evidence of 200 babies that were killed in ritualistic sacrifice" and the Catholic Church says "nuh-uh, Thiose shards are probably from a goat or something, we only raped, impregnated, and sacrificed the babies of 50 indigenous women at that site. And besides everyone was doing it back then, it was really trendy." Well in that scenario I'm less bothered about the veracity of the find and more about the underlying atrocity. And if a group of indigenous people want to take mortal offense at what happened I think that's pretty fair. And if they burn down a church or two, well I don't advocate for that (I genuinely, honestly do not think it is a good thing that churches were destroyed over this), but it's hard for me to feel any indignation on behalf of the Church.
By way of example, let's say Andy viciously insults David's wife in an argument and David breaks his nose in response. I don't think that’s a good or right thing to do - you shouldn't be going around breaking people's noses because they upset you. David should probably be arrested. But at the same time it's a completely understandable and predictable response, and I have zero sympathy for Andy. Now replace Andy with the Catholic Church and David with Indigenous people.
shakenvac
1yr ago
Broadly correct, but I would quibble with parts of the framing.
It's certainly true that the 'bodies' found at Kamloops have never been anything more than anomalies found on ground penetrating radar, and that media and activists have never really made any attempt to communicate this to their audiences. The vast majority of people would never realise that these bodies are entirely theoretical and could easily just not be there. Chalk another one up to the media being bullshitters.
However, what I would disagree with in SecureSignals post is the implication that this stuff therefore didn't happen, or that the backlash against the Catholic Church is unjustified. I personally see the 'graves' at Kamloops as a catalyst for action, rather than the substance of the grievance itself. It is undeniable that the Canadian government in association with the Catholic Church basically kidnapped tens of thousands of native children and stuffed them into places like Kamloops, where the conditions were pretty awful (though perhaps not so awful by the standards of the time). Many deaths resulted. Official records from Kamloops say 50 children died there; the true total is likely higher. Though I admit I have little sympathy for the Church to begin with, I don't see the arson of a couple dozen churches to be an outsize reaction to the Church's involvement in residential schools. You reap what you sow.
shakenvac
1yr ago
I would say slightly more likely than the Sun rising in the west tomorrow. But only slightly.
shakenvac
1yr ago
Overall, I'm drawing a bit of a blank as to why they'd be compromised beyond TDS or groupthink.
Folk who consider themselves my betters want to insulate me from a truth* that they don't think I can handle, and so deceive me 'for my own good.' Many such cases. The authors of that paper must have felt so vindicated when the first Sinophobic hate crimes started occurring. How much worse might that have been, they must have thought, had we not strangled the lab leak hypothesis in the crib.
Many of my normie friends refused to even discuss COVID origins. The lab-leak hypothesis was a thought crime to them; the sort of thing that conspiritards and racist loons spouted, little different to "Jews did 9/11". That's the environment deliberately created by Andersen et al and the rest of team science. They knew exactly what they were doing, and they also knew how to arse cover if and when the charade fell over. The strenuous denials that they 'ackchually never said that the lab leak hypothesis was off the table' are backed up by a lifetime of practice hedging in the small print.
*The truth being, not that COVID was a lab leak, but that there was a good chance that COVID was a lab leak. Far too subtle a point to expect the plebs to understand.
shakenvac
1yr ago
Appreciate the post thanks man. So let me see if I've understood this correctly:
Day traders as depicted in Margin Call do/did perform some modest (probably very modest) service to society in that all the jiggery-pokery and complicated financial instruments have the effect of making investments more appealing, which in turn would reduce the downstream cost of credit to borrowers which is good because all other things being equal cheap credit is better than expensive credit.
It's also not completely fair to lay blame for the financial crisis at the feet of traders/investment banks, at least no more than any other bankers, because they weren't fundamentally responsible for the rotten mortgages that were the root cause of the crisis. At worst they simply didnt look too hard at the numbers because they were making money quite handily from the status quo.
But it certainly isn't true that credit traders etc. give 'Joe Everyman' a big advantage over his global competitors.
shakenvac
1yr ago
Got an economics question:
I was watching 'Margin Call' the other day, and there is a scene where two day traders are lamenting the (then incipient) 2008 financial crisis. The senior of the two gives his justification for existing to the other:
the only reason they [normal people] all get to keep living like this is because We've got our fingers on the scale in their favour. I take it off, then the whole world gets really fucking fair really fucking quickly and nobody actually wants that.
Is there anything to this? if so, how does that work? I always assumed that day traders basically created no value and just shuffled wealth around to nobody's benefit.
shakenvac
1yr ago
our continual pressure and influence in Ukraine has destroyed the country, probably forever (given fertility rates),
Very possible this will happen, but history will not see America as the one holding the knife, but rather the country that attacked a democracy unprovoked and during the war literally kidnapped tens of thousands of Ukrainian children.
has cost enormous sums of money,
Literally the best bang-for-buck the US Military has ever had. Less than 10% of the annual US DOD budget to thoroughly emasculate the old enemy, weaken China, zero lives lost, massive increase in US soft power for finally being on the right side of a war. Plus the true cost is probably less than half of the sticker price.
has wasted American influence in Ukraine,
What?
has pressured Russia into developing better drone technology,
Oh no we can never stand up to bullies like Russia they might -checks notes- develop better drone technology!! Who cares. Besides at this point I wouldn't trust the Russians to develop a microwave. And, more to the point, neither would the half of the planet that (used to) use Russia as their weapons dealer.
has finalized the alienation of Russia from the West,
It has been obvious to anyone paying attention for the last 20-ish years that Russia was never on any kind of course to peaceful integration with the West. The Russian kleptocracy was just fundamentally incompatible.
has influenced Arab nations into cozying with Russia,
Okay so 1) Arab nations don't give a hoot about Russia their relationship is purely mercenary, and 2) this sentence implies that we don't want Arab nations cozying with Russia which implies that their influence is a negative for the US. So then surely -from a purely realpolitik POV- it is good for the US to diminish them? you can't simultaneously hold that Russia is an irrelevant backwater and also that it is a malign influence on American interests.
What will we gain in five years from it all?
A hundred things. but if you want to put blinkers on and care about literally nothing else than the American rival du jour then invasion of Taiwan looks substantially less likely now than it did at the start of the war.
shakenvac
1yr ago
I'll agree that if what he did was legal, he shouldn't have been indicted. I'm not at all convinced by your argument that what he did was legal, and even if you're correct, people sometimes get indicted for doing legal things; it's just a thing that happens sometimes.
Maybe if you start by admitting that this whole prosecution is made-up double standards over nonsense no one really cares about
He cared about it. That's what really gets my back up. 'Crooked Hillary's emails' was like his #1 talking point back in 2016. The man is the king of double standards.
As for unfairness, I think if Trump had done what any other politician would have done, and just handed over the documents when they asked instead of being deceitful, then this whole saga ends with Trump getting a sternly worded letter and a half-dozen news articles written about him. The way Trump acted makes this a very different situation. Of course, I'll admit it's possible that in my counterfactual he gets prosecuted anyway. But then your unfairness argument would be far easier to make, wouldn't it?
Victory on Palestinian terms? Outbreed the Israelis, keep their grudges alive for as many generations as possible, and wait for a paradigm shift in international relations/Israeli politics/military technology to create an opportunity. It could take 200 years.
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