domain:arjunpanickssery.substack.com
quiet_NaN
2hr ago
I think that any method of warfare comes down to statistics. Just about any attack has a risk of collateral damage.
For some attacks (such as targeting a wedding reception with a hellfire missile, which I am generally against), you know the exact amount of dead civilians beforehand. For some, you only have an estimate of the distribution beforehand.
I would argue that the correct thing to worry about is the expected count of civilians killed (or QALY lost, if you are into that). 'The pager blows up a crowded gas station' is on the far tail, high body count but also unlikely.
It helps that the pagers were extraordinary weak explosives, not enough to kill the person holding them in their hands in most cases. If instead they had the deadliness of a fragmentation grenade, obliterating any unarmored target within a six meter radius, then the calculation would be quite different.
The context of the attack is that the IDF is fighting Hezbollah's sister organisation Hamas in Gaza, and the collateral damage there is abysmal (because IDF killing Palestinian kids are a great outcome for Hamas). In one case the IDF killed a high-ranking Hamas commander and 50 bystanders in a refugee camp (which was a bad call to make, IMO).
I will assume that out of the nine killed by the pagers, only the girl is an obvious civilian -- if there were more dead kids, Hezbollah would be sure to tell the world. Likely they were the intended targets. Let us say that the tail risks of vehicular accidents and causing larger explosions amount to another expected civilian death.
An enemy:civilian ratio of 4:1 is not bad for an enemy who is likely to fight an asymmetrical style of war a la Hamas. It is sad that civilians were killed and injured, but if you need to kill your enemies, you can do a lot worse.
Of course, one can debate if Hezbollah needs killing, or if they were in the middle of deradicalization, building hospitals and slowly forgetting that there was something about destroying Israel in their mission statement. Extrapolating from Hamas, I think it is likely they need killing, though.
DradisPing
2hr ago
The big red flag is that the crimes seem to take place in Miami and LA, but the indictment was filed in SDNY. SDNY is where they like to do their politicized prosecutions. Charges filed there with a dubious connection to NYC implies that this is about him pissing someone off. Twitter is just a guess.
gattsuru
2hr ago
The New York Times reports:
Vice President Kamala Harris will give remarks in Atlanta on Friday focused on the stories of two Georgia mothers whose deaths she has argued show the consequences of the strict abortion bans passed by Republicans after Roe v. Wade was overturned.
The speech is part of an effort by the Harris campaign to push reproductive rights to the center of the presidential election, according to a person with knowledge of the event who insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the plans.
The deaths, reported this week by ProPublica, occurred in the months after Georgia passed a law banning abortion at six weeks. Amber Thurman died of sepsis resulting from an incomplete medication abortion after waiting 20 hours in a suburban Atlanta hospital for medical care. A second woman, Candi Miller, died after declining to seek medical care for complications from abortion medication.
Tactically, this is the sorta thing that's obvious logical: Harris is trailing Trump in Georgia in recent polls, it's a major state for many of her success paths to the Presidency, and abortion is one of strongest spaces Harris has. There's basically zero chance of the ProPublica article leaving the "There may be alternative explanations for that delay other than legal concerns. But I trust that the reporter on this asked those questions, and so far no one has offered any" zone before the election is over, if it ever happens, and even if final report drops and embarrasses ProPublica, there's minimal chance anyone going to a Harris rally will ever hear about it.
But I remember when a federal candidate repeating rumors under the aegis that they weren't disproved yet was a bad thing. Scroll up in that twitter thread, and you'll find that a ProPublica writer brought it up as a counterexample in response to a conservative comparing fearmongering over ectopic pregnancies to the "eating cats" thing.
...
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the sorta people who were found it atrocious when Trump squirmed to mock a disabled man but couldn't care about Biden calling an innocent guy a white supremacist are going to find their gumption here. I'll post one if I can find it.
haroldbkny
2hr ago
I guess I propose that they might mean close to nothing, when there's still 10 to 30 million other species that remain that easily fill the gap left.
gorge
2hr ago
Other times, I am frustrated by her lack of brutal drive to self improvement. Shes objectively achieved enough that her intelligence is not up for question, but other times Im dissastisfied with the lack of sharp off the cuff retorts that ive come to expect from my male friends.
Honestly, sounds like you have been mind-killed by modern media. Real, actually living women are like this. From this comment and other comments sounds like you have a great catch.
practical_romantic
2hr ago
I don't see them as people beneath me. There are some people who get to enjoy the company of various women in a short duration of time in their youth and I wish to be one of them. If I meet a girl who I find attractive and wish to engage with, I try to do so in a respectful manner that's playful and not at all leech like or creepy.
I like women. I like meeting them, seeing them smile, make jokes and the entire experience. At a point in my life I was certainly someone who did see them in a wrong way but I'm different now.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
2hr ago
No, no, we agree on the basics. It’s just not what I’m used to.
yofuckreddit
3hr ago
I use this same framework for a lot of my policy reasoning. It works for:
- Guns (Children killed/mass shootings)
- Crime
- Abortions (Late-term elective)
- Government Spending (Fraud/Efficiency of Programs)
- War (American Citizens in danger)
@faceh mentions this is useless because of second-order effects. I disagree strongly. The algebra problem gets slightly more complex, that's all. The rate of children killed by guns needs to be balanced against the value I ascribe (.99) to potentially having better weapons to kill criminals (probability X) or the National Guard (probability Y).
You can't make the equation too complex to where the changing variables are difficult to find in your mind. But using the gun control scenario as an example: Probability X and Y increased as race riots ran rampant across the country and the left began to flex their lawfare power. This, in turn, increased the acceptable amount of dead children I'm willing to accept to keep my semi-autos. This is what people mean by the gun control debate being over.
And Trump as a salesman is a lot like a car salesman, Obama is more like a startup founder pitching to angel investors.
I don't recall seeing it formulated close to that before saying that but I absolutely could have, I don't think of it as any kind of personal insight, I see it as trivially derived from other insights I took elsewhere (taking Trump seriously not literally, him talking like New Yorker, being directionally if not literally correct, etc...)
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
3hr ago
Who could have imagined 20 years ago that the Teamsters would be a Republican stronghold
The Teamsters have never been a reliable left-wing force - per Wikipedia they endorsed Nixon, Reagan and Bush Sr.
For a shift that large in internal polling within a union that isn't consistent with nationwide trends (which show a very small shift in favour of Dems after the obviously senile candidate is switched out), I would assume that there is a Teamsters-specific issue that the rest of us are not aware of - probably related to how trucking is regulated. Some of it will be youth sex polarisation, but not much given the average age of the Teamsters membership.
there342
3hr ago
Natural beauty is eroded, and the world is less interesting. No, these species did not make number go up, but that doesn't mean they meant nothing. What are the negative implication of humans living in a pod and not knowing what a tree is?
zeke5123a
3hr ago
The democrats also just straight up lie a lot. When Harris kept saying “Trump’s Project 2025” that isn’t “technically true but misleading.” That was straight up lying.
I’m not sure it is really fair to say Trump is unique in lying. Where he is probably unique is that when he doesn’t need to lie he exaggerates.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
3hr ago
The Democrats offer them nothing but scorn.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
3hr ago
Ideally we wouldn't know even if the answer was greater than zero, to avoid inspiring copy-cats.
We're not in that situation, though, so it's irrelevant to the question.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
3hr ago
To accuse an ethnic group of eating our pets is explicitly setting them up to be the targets of violence.
By analogy you've just placed responsibility for the assassination attempts against Trump on those Democratic politicians who called him an existential threat, just like the Trump campaign itself has. However, even granting that arguendo, it's STILL not dehumanizing them.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
3hr ago
The MV incident to me, showed just how bubbled the elites are. I’m not sure whether or not it ever occurred to the elites of those enclaves that importing people with no resources has a negative effect on community. They interact with the world through news media whilst living in gated exurbs where the only interactions they have with the rest of the world are transactional. They don’t talk with the lower clases, they order their services and when no longer paying for that service, they kind of forget they exist. I’m not sure it’s even contempt, it’s summoning a workman or servant, hiring their services and banishing them back into the ether where they don’t think about them until they need the air conditioning fixed or order door dash.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
4hr ago
It sounds like you just have a very unhealthy view towards women, friend. You see them as beneath you and objects to use for sex.
I know that this is a common leftist talking point, and I'm generally more conservative, but they have a point. Women are to be cherished and loved, not used and gamed for physical pleasure. They can smell your intentions.
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
4hr ago
Culpability shouldn’t be a binary thing, where if you throw the first punch I get to burn your family alive and that’s on you. Britain make a last-second alliance with Poland which failed to deter German expansionism, and after Germany beat France the capacity of Britain to win a direct conflict against Germany dropped to zero. The whole of Churchill’s maneuverings were to provoke Germany into committing an atrocity that would bring the US into the war, which he did by targeting civilian German populations. Germany was culpable for starting the conflict, absolutely, but Britain was responsible for escalating the conflict to a total war.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
4hr ago
Yeah I'd say just go for it man. Moving in will make a lot of things clearer.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
4hr ago
Hah I'm in the same place except... definitely some problems/red flags. But they came up after I proposed.
FiveHourMarathon
c’è aria di frociaggine
4hr ago
Who would have imagined 20 years ago that a Republican candidate would be running on a platform that promised to upend the entire American economic system in order to protect union manufacturing jobs?
What we're seeing here is consistently the UAW votes for the candidate with a dumber economic platform, that wants to avoid free markets and engage in protectionism and subsidy to preserve high paying union jobs.
Trump, in the last few months, has pushed his promises of tariffs to ever more absurd heights. Vance has publicly said that there's no price for a toaster that is so high it is worth even one American factory job to lower tariffs.
I buy a lot of MiUSA stuff whenever I can, but there's no question that a shift to MiUSA stuff is going to represent a massive increase in consumer prices for most goods, especially if it happens all at once as a result of tariffs.
MaximumCuddles
4hr ago
Your average democrat might lie less often than Donald Trump but they are much, much more dishonest in my opinion. It’s not even close.
SSCReader
4hr ago
His political positions on most things except Trump aren't really compatible with Democrats. And he was part of the Republican party since the 80s. He is just a Republican who really hates Trump.
FiveHourMarathon
c’è aria di frociaggine
4hr ago
Excellent point but I'm going to quibble about what is tradition, what is virtue, and what we're returning to...
Chastity was held in esteem because it signaled a lot of valuable, pro-social, and pro-evolutionary traits and conditions.
But, come on, confront the issue; is smoking and drinking every day a good thing to do? No. Is hopping into bed with someone you've known for a matter of hours a good thing to do again and again in your 20s and 30s ... often with alcohol involved? No. It isn't. Even if "no one gets hurt."
I recently had a drink with a friend of mine. She was upset because her second grade son, together with his second grade boy gaggle of friends, had convinced a retarded kid in their class to make a "naughty" hand gesture. The retarded kid got into trouble, but under interrogation, it became apparent that he had been baited and hoodwinked. Parents were called. She was almost in tears worried she was raising a "bully."
I said that the optimal amount of bullying for a kid to engage in isn't zero. A kid who never does anything bad is probably a herbivorous, smarmy, teacher's pet of a goody-two-shoes. Bullying isn't good in and of itself, picking on retarded kids isn't a good hobby to get into, and certainly she should discipline him for it. But at eight years old, this is a good sign of development in many ways. He's clever, he has a group of friends that have espirit together, he's spirited and engaging in mischief to amuse himself, he's getting along with people and landing towards the top of the hierarchy rather than at the bottom of it. Those are all good things! Discipline him, make sure he isn't growing up to be cruel and take advantage of others; but the alternatives to him growing through this phase probably weren't "he's perfect and would never say anything mean to anyone" but "he's such a teacher's pet that he never has an independent thought or the courage to pursue his own desires" or "he's such a loser that he has no friends that would want to do mischief with him" or "he's at the bottom of the pile getting bullied."
Chastity is a virtue, it shows discipline to make good decisions. But it can also, particularly when taken to extremes, be a result of and indicative of character flaws. It's a pretty frequent problem in evangelical communities that you have the teenagers who are really good at chastity, and then they never grow out of it. It turns out the good chaste boy who never hit on girls was just gay, or that the good chaste girl who never snuck out of the house at night to see her boyfriend is frigid and doesn't "snap out of it" the moment she gets married in a church. The dropping partner counts for young people don't represent good trendlines for society, and certainly not for traditional values.
Similarly, sexual incontinence is mostly a character flaw, and whoring leads to all kinds of bad outcomes. But it can also indicate virtues vs the control group. Seeing something you want and making the moves to get it requires courage and risk taking. Someone who is attractive, who has potential paramours drooling to get with them, is going to require more discipline to achieve chastity than someone who is unattractive; hence why I think celebrity marriages are simply a different animal than ordinary folk.
Truth and virtue exist in conflict, in tension which creates balance. We need to be seeking to set up a tension that produces the virtues we want to see.
I got hurt before and have acted like a wuss. The Pua stuff helped me avoid those tendencies.
I had to mention the fact that I couldn't sleep with her because for the first time in a while, I felt something for a girl without having even been physical. Rather, first time I felt anything and that too despite not having done anything physical.
I do agree with a lot of what you wrote. I am just lost and I don't know how to move forward. Pickup helped me a lot but I can't see my own internal contradictions which is why I post.
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