Open Mic for the week of 10/23/2023
There’s a phenomenon where someone writes an essay about this or that but someone else wants to discuss something that has not yet made it to the front page.
This is unfair to everybody involved. It’s unfair to the guy who wrote the original essay because, presumably, he wants to talk about his original essay. It’s unfair to the guy who wants to talk about his link because it looks like he’s trying to change the subject. It’s unfair to the people who go to the comments to read up on the thoughts of the commentariat for the original essay and now we’re talking about some other guy’s links.
So!
The intention is to have a new one of these every week. If you want to talk about a link, post it here! Or, heck, use it as an open thread.
And, if it rolls off, we’ll make a new one. With a preamble just like this one.
Over the last couple of weeks, there have been a number of people fired for being filmed ripping down posters of Israeli kidnapping victims. (Or alleged kidnapping victims, I guess. Those could be pictures from “this person does not exist”, I guess.)
Not limited to the guy who works in the library on campus, there have been, like, *MEDICAL PROFESSIONALS* who have been fired for ripping these things down.
I suppose we could steelman a pro-ripping things down position… the posters are political propaganda putting a face on the victims of only one side of the conflict. It’s not like the posters will be particularly helpful for people in Boston to maybe see one of these folks when they’re at Burger King. So they’re propaganda for one side and they’ve got this weird halo around them that screams “YOU CAN’T TEAR ME DOWN DESPITE BEING PROPAGANDA!”
That said, we don’t need to wander down to the steelman when there are actual people being filmed doing this and yelling things into the cameras of people filming them and, unsurprisingly, the people being filmed are not giving the steelman position but something vaguely incoherent.
Anyway, people are getting fired over this.Report
I mean, I think we should probably ask ourselves: What happens to people who put up posters of Palestinians unjustly killed by the IDF?
It seems rather more reasonable to get angry about propaganda if only the other side is allowed to do it, and not your side. We always heard ‘the solution to bad speech is more speech’, but…people really aren’t allowed to speak freely on this topic, and I don’t mean ‘they aren’t allowed to praise murderers’, I mean speak in ways that normally would be entirely within bounds, like just criticizing a government that killed someone.
You put up a picture of, I dunno, some of the protestors that the Peruvian policed killed at the start of this year, calling them out for the senseless killing, nothing happens. You put up a picture of a Palestinian protestor that Israel killed in 2021, calling them out for the senseless killing, you get a very different response, and risk your entire career.
There’s an entire organization, called Canary Mission, that goes after people who are anti-Israel or pro-Palestine and gets them blacklisted from jobs and, if you’re actually Palestinian, means you can’t ever go home because Israeli immigration might stop you. And that’s just the one we know about, because it runs a public website.
https://forward.com/news/407279/canary-missions-threat-grows-from-us-campuses-to-the-israeli-border/
And I think a lot of the reaction to what just happened we are seeing is that Palestinian activists in the US have been living in that environment for a long time. That is not to say that cheering for civilian casualties and kidnappings is good, but…all that stuff that conservatives _pretend_ is happening for conservatives on college campuses, when in reality everyone just kinda thinks they’re jerks and there are maybe some snide remarks? Well, it’s _actually_ happening for Palestinian activists, and has been for decades.
It’s good to say ‘Certain speech, like praising the recent actions of Hamas, is obviously bad and outside of bounds in civilized society’, but maybe we should also be asking ‘Is this just a response to people finally feeling they can say something on a topic they have generally been barred from discussing _at all_, even quite reasonable positions? And thus saying things they wouldn’t normally say?’.Report
Rachel Corrie stepped in front of a IDF bulldozer, died from that, and we’ve never heard the end of it. They’ve even made a Play of it with her as hero and not idiot.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Corrie
I would expect you could post things about the various documentaries and other artistic events without problems.
I would expect you could post things about others also without problems. 1stAM applies.Report
They made a play about Rachel Corrie? I sure hope the guy who played the villain in Die Hard didn’t have anything to do with it!!!Report
You can always talk about _Americans_ getting killed. By anyone. Even the IDF.
I said you can’t talk about _Palestinians_ getting killed by the IDF.
Maybe ask yourself why Rachel Corrie, an AMERICAN, ended up being a minor poster child for IDF brutality, to the point her actions resulted in documentaries and plays.
It’s because she, despite being a dumbass, can’t really be painted as a terrorist or an antisemite, and thus supporting her is not supporting either of those things.Report
She was young, pretty, and female. This is hardly the first time the media has treated them special.
RE: can’t really be painted as a terrorist
You’re right, but I can’t tell the difference between the IDF behaving badly and Hamas behaving normally.
Hamas does stuff that will get it’s civilians killed by Israel. Worse, they do that deliberately because it helps their war effort. This current situation is a good example.
So if you point to dead civilians, you need a lot of evidence to overcome the whole “Hamas was successful”.Report
What happens to people who put up posters of Palestinians unjustly killed by the IDF?
I dunno. What happens to them? Surely there’s a college campus that had this happen in the last half-dozen years.
If not… man. Students are slipping. No wonder they’re doing the paraglider thing.
Is this just a response to people finally feeling they can say something on a topic they have generally been barred from discussing _at all_, even quite reasonable positions? And thus saying things they wouldn’t normally say?
This is why it’s important to allow discussions, I guess.
We should look into that.Report
What do you mean, college? The people you talked about weren’t in college.
And not poster, but tweets: https://www.inquirer.com/news/agnes-irwin-fires-pro-palestine-employee-20220823.htmlReport
Political positions that can keep you from getting hired? Heaven forfend!
Man, that sounds really dishonest on their part.
We should have a much more compartmentalized attitude toward life in general. This “bring your whole self to work” bullshit just is *NOT* working out.Report
(I will also say that putting up posters of Palestinians with a short paragraph of the bad things done to them by Israel is completely different from tweeting stuff like “Israel has no right to exist”.)Report
Canary Mission listed a 2016 tweet from Abulhawa that said, “Israel doesn’t have the right to exist.”
There’s a bit of Motte-and-bailey there.
The Motte is, “Palestinians are being mistreated and should have rights”.
The Bailey is, “Israel and the Jews shouldn’t exist in the ME”.
Piers Morgan is getting various Pro-Palestinians on his show to present their view. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlIg09t0Ui4
Some of them very clearly think Hamas are the good guys, the war of 1949 should be undone, and so on. Piers will press them on what they think about Hamas and it’s attack. They either condemn it (backing the two state solution), or they won’t (and will also hold views that come down to the Bailey).
Abulhawa’s problem is she got caught in the Bailey and she really wants to describe herself as being in the Motte.
Maybe she even thinks of herself that way and doesn’t want to face up that “Israel not existing” amounts to “The Bailey”Report
That’s the problem with the bailey. Sometimes you will get challeged on “From the River to the Sea!” and you might not have the rhetorical skill required to explain that you were talking about all of the places you wanted to take your kid fishing.Report
Getting challenged on your own magical thinking is really hard and most people don’t understand what they actually believe.
They haven’t faced, much less resolved any internal contradictions.
Some of the “From the River to the Sea” people have not thought about what that would actually mean in real life to the Jews.
They don’t want to understand that they’re basically backing a second Holocaust. It’s a package deal.Report
The United States still has at-will employment in all states except Montana. There are varying degrees of limitation on this through Federal Law (the Civil Rights Act as an example), some common law (unlawful discharge in violation of public policy), and state laws (blue states usually have more protection than red states surprise surprise). Some states have prohibitions against firing someone for lawful out of work activity especially if it is “political.” I’m not sure what the limits of the last category are. They probably vary by state.
I suppose the issue for the people who found their employment offers rescinded for Big Law is that they kind of want to have it both ways. On the one hand, they want to make strident, even radical statements, and some of them took a vanguard approach to it. Ms. Workman did not consult with the rest of the Student Bar Association or any other student. She took it on her own accord to speak for NYU law students from her position. Surprise surprise, NYU Law has a lot of Jewish students who were offended by this. David Polk and Winston & Strawn probably have workforces that are 20 percent or so Jewish and many clients where the the employment body is substantially Jewish and/or their client contact is Jewish.
So it shouldn’t be a shocking surprise that having someone state “All the blood is on Israel’s hands” is going to make them second-guess their decisions.Report
Do you have links?Report
Maybe? It depends on which point you want substantiated.Report
If you want examples of people having gotten fired, there’s this dentist, this endodontist, and this investment guy.
That’s not all of the examples I have, that’s just where I shrugged and guessed that that’d be enough examples of people getting fired after pulling down posters.Report
Some of the Hamas resistance militant freedom fighters wore GoPro cameras as they were engaging in kinetic decolonialism on October 7th. These GoPros were confiscated and some of the raw footage is being made available to the press. Unherd’s David Patrikarakos is screening the footage and you can read his report here. (Content Warning: This is some seriously awful stuff.)Report
Thank you.Report
I think the fact they were recording things helps confirm the ‘They were deliberately trying to get an reaction from Israel’ theory, cause filming yourself commit crimes is…stupid. Good thing Israel has seen through that ploy and…uh…wait.
Now, if you didn’t know what was going on here, you’d find Israel’s behavior somewhat incomprehensible, because getting that footage out there is clearly what Hamas wants to do. That’s why they made it! So it’s weird to do exactly that. (1)
Okay, this is a somewhat off-topic rant to your comment, Jaybird, so I hope you’ll excuse it, but…I think it needs to be said.
People need to understand a pretty important fact I don’t think most people do: Authoritarian far-right movements need enemies. The specific classification of ‘fascism’ requires _inventing_ enemies, but you can do something much easier, without inventing enemies, _if you have real enemies_.
And both Hamas and Israel are…those things. To each other. They are symbiotic. The current leadership of Israel is supported by enough citizens (and the international community) to behave as it wants because it can point at Hamas as an enemy trying to destroy it, and Hamas is generally supported by its people (and an entirely different international community) because it can point at Israel as an enemy trying to destroy it. (And, yes, Americans, I know you never hear that side of the story, but the masks have been off there for over a decade, and the current Israeli political leadership has spoken repeatedly about making Palestine cease to exist.)
That’s why it’s so hard to actually fix anything, because neither side (By which I mean ‘The current Israeli government’ and ‘Hamas’, not Israel and Palestine) has any incentive to do so, as fixing things would destroy the entire reason it is currently in charge!
And I think everyone sees that with Hamas, and after this recent attack, it’s very hard not to see it, because…as a military objective, that attack was very stupid(2). But somehow keep missing it with Israel.
But it’s true. It’s why the Netanyahu kept allowing Qatari to prop up Hamas, which has entirely failed as ‘a government’, instead of helping the Palestinian Authority step in and run elections. Because if Palestine is being operated by the ‘very friendly to Israel’ Palestinian Authority, Israel doesn’t have rockets being fired at Israel, and he can’t be in charge or try to dismantle the judiciary. It’s why West Bank settlements keep happening so that Palestinians get pissed off, it’s why there were deliberately provocative things that happened on Temple Mount (Although there they have to be careful not piss off other Muslin countries), etc, etc.
If you do not understand this, that the current Israeli government wants to keep Palestinians in a constant state of anger at Israel (Although not too much anger) so it can justify things it does, both to Palestine and its own people, literally none of Israel’s actions make sense.
Again, this is not technically fascism because _the enemies are real_, they don’t have to invent internal enemies, or even narratives that justify things…both sides can point at legitimate grievances and an enemy that is trying to erase them from existence, and justify _any action_ in response to that.
1) They don’t seem to have fully made the footage available to the public _yet_, so it’s possible that some saner minds in the Israeli government have prevailed, but…there seems to be an implication they will in the future, with ‘Devices were banned from the initial session.’. But Israel’s government is still contained by other factors, other factions, unlike Hamas.
2) Even if they were deadset on ‘kidnapping civilians to trade for Palestinians that Israel locked up’, they were just…absurdly over-the-top violent in a deliberately offensive way. There’s a difference between bank robbers pulling a gun and saying ‘Everyone on the floor’ and bank robbers sweeping assault weapons across the crowd outside. You can take hostages without causing mass deaths. You’ll always risk some incidental ones, but…that is not what happened.Report
“They were trying to get a reaction!”
Well. They succeeded.
Does this sort of thing scale? Like, does it make sense to talk about Oklahoma City following the David Koresh thing like this? Fort Sumpter! Pearl Harbor! Trayvon Martin!
Plenty of opportunities out there. I’m not sure how we ought to measure it, though. Nor am I sure that we’ve got a limiting principle anywhere.Report
It’s the 9/11 trick again. Hamas, like al Qaeda, wants a country in endless wars that cause outrage amounts the people they can recruit among. That’s the only way they can keep operating.
The US fell for it. Was that a good thing, ultimately? Looking back, I think a lot of us think it was actually somewhat stupid for us to invade two different countries when we probably could have just…threatened the Taliban slightly more until they gave in, or just ignored them, done a surgical attack on al Qaeda’s caves, and left, and not gotten involved in a war anywhere.
But instead, two wars. And tallying up the result is…the Taliban back in Afghanistan (Never really left.), and ethnic cleansing of Christians and Jews in Iraq along with an incredibly corrupt government that…I mean, it’s possibly better than Saddam (If you ignore the ethnic cleansing that happened along the way), but that’s a pretty low bar. They seem to have mostly functional elections, at least.
But…did we win? Or, at least, win in Iraq and tie in Afghanistan? No, because…those actions also gave us ISIS. Because it turns out, bin Laden was 100% correct…getting us involved in the Middle East makes more people he can recruit…or, rather, other organizations can recruit, that works just as well.
What is going to come out of _this_ reaction? Who knows.
Maybe as a matter of principle, people should…stop falling for tricks of terrorist organizations? Whenever they do something horrific that is clearly intended to get people to react without thinking, maybe people should at least _hesitate_ and go ‘Wait. Is this a trick to get me to lash out in anger? Why would they _want_ me to do that? Am I missing something? Is there something else I could do instead?’Report
Well, going out of their way to show freedom fighters killing children is a great trick to get people to want revenge, that’s for sure.
One of the stupid, stupid things about our response to 9/11 was the invasion of Iraq instead of, oh, some of the places that might have been responsible for funding groups like Al-Qaeda. Regime change in Iraq? What the heck! I understand the argument that it was very important that we leap to our feet and beat the ever-living crap out of *SOMEBODY* sniggering in the bar, but it’d have made more sense to beat up the guy who hit us.
I understand overthrowing the Taliban, but we could have left immediately afterwards. And periodically killed a few from a drone.
One of the things that might indicate that Israel is less stupid is the whole question of “who did the attack?” thing. Oh, the elected government of Gaza? Well, I sure hope they don’t bomb the crap out of Cyprus! Oh, they’re not? They’re attacking Gaza? Huh.
I mean, that’s completely different than Iraq right there.
Are they likely to “win”?
Nope. They aren’t. Seems to me like they’re going to commit some light ethnic cleansing. And when there’s going to be a *REAL* atrocity on the par of bombing a hospital and killing 500 civilians… well. Nobody will really notice.
And at the end of it, the Palestinians will be slaughtered, Israel will have done a good job of further tarnishing its own “Intersectionality” score, and we’ll be back to where we were when they signed the ceasefire with Gaza in May.
And goodness only knows what Hamas will do next time.
“It’s a trick!”, we can yell again. “They’re trying to provoke you!”Report
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/12/israel-cripples-syrias-two-main-airports-in-attacks-syrian-state-media
Unlike Lebanon, which has also been bombed but at least has the excuse of both sides ramping up tension (Hey, everyone remember when I pointed out there might be other people involved in this war? Lebanon is coming in at some point if this thing continues.), there really wasn’t any excuse to bomb Syria.
Syria did technically shell Israel a few days earlier, but it was targeted in the middle of nowhere…Israel and Syria have apparently been doing this back and forth for decades, firing a few symbolic weapons into empty areas just across the border, apparently just to remind themselves they are still technically at war. Half the time the weapons don’t even seem to make it into the other territory. It’s a continuation of the norm, and certainly didn’t warrant blowing up two airports in response, although Western media dutiful repeated it as a ‘response to an attack by Syria’.Report
These words were right next to each other.
there really wasn’t any excuse to bomb Syria.
They were followed by
Syria did technically shell Israel a few days earlierReport
Acts of war and even war crimes against Israel are expected and normal, it’s not supposed to exist.Report
Of course Syria is committing acts of war against Israel, and vis versa, they are literally declared at war and have been ever since 1948. They have both been theoretically constantly been firing at each other over the border forever, although in practice neither side are not actually trying to hit anything. (Especially since Syria has been in a civil war for the past decade.)
As DensityDuck pointed out, Israel sometimes attempts to dial up this conflict, and hits an airport, usually without any observable reason, and Syria doesn’t really take the bait. I hadn’t actually realized Israel was still doing that, but it doesn’t change my point.
I was just pointing out that Israel has decided that _this_ is a good time to do that, so asserting that Israel is being ‘smart’ about their targets is silly. If Syria had wanted to enter this war, Israel just literally handed them justification to do so.
And, yes, they don’t technically need it, being in an already-declared state of war, but they could spin things as a response to Israel’s completely random bombing. Just point to the bombed airports and say ‘Look at what Israel just decided to do for no reason’.Report
(literally five minutes after that story hit Twitter it was pointed out that Israel fairly regularly bombs airports in Syria)Report
This is not dealing with reality. The President said he’d use everything we have to destroy them short of nukes. “Slightly more” means “nukes”.
The people in charge of Afghanistan did not personally do well. Saying that “The Taliban is still there” is true but they’re not the same crew. It’s fighting an idea.
Similarly Hamas probably can’t be destroyed because even if every member is killed we’ll see Hamas-v2 in a year. Hamas-v2 will also want to kill Jews, refight the wars they’ve lost, and establish an Islamic Republic.
I think we don’t get peace there in my lifetime. Either side is even close to giving up.Report
It was not the threat, it was the _time_.
I don’t really want to go digging up articles from a decade ago, but, here’s Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_invasion_of_Afghanistan#Diplomatic_and_political_activity
Basically, the guy in charge, Umar, said he didn’t think bin Laden had done it publicly, but privately he sent his deputy Osmani to talk to the CIA to try to figure out a way to turn him over. The first meeting between them was Sept 15, so _four day_ after the attacks, if you want to know how fast this was happening. (And, yes, there was legitimate confusion as to whether bin Laden was behind behind the attacks the first few days. Umar was probably using motivated reasoning, but it wasn’t 100% definitive.)
The CIA futzed around at that Sept 15 meeting, and instead tried to get Osmani to do a coup against Umar (Seriously, CIA? You can’t keep it in your pants for five minutes?), and then met with him again on Oct 2.
And then on Oct 4, the British government released a report linking bin Laden to the attack. So now there actually was pretty trusted evidence.
But we’ll never know if that would have done anything or if any other meeting would have helped, because the invasion began _on October 7_.
This is an insane amount of time for any government to make any decision, much less ‘Can another country put armed forces inside of my own to capture some guy?’. And it still _almost_ happened…the Taliban literally was in negotiations with the CIA, trying to figure out a way to do this…probably trying to figure out a way that the Americans wouldn’t take them out also, and set a timeline, etc.
We’ll never know how close they were to make a real, but there had only been _two meetings_, and it appears Umar was thinking ‘Yes, I publicly say I won’t hand him over, and Americans publicly say I have to or they invade, and we negotiate some compromise in a backroom.’.
Instead, we got in the longest war in US history, somehow managed to beat both Vietnam for length and pointlessness, because apparently we couldn’t wait a couple more weeks to talk to the Taliban again with evidence in hand.Report
OBL was their equiv of George Washington. Very famous, very loved, with very strong support.
We were very, very public about what we were going to do and why.
A month later, we’re still getting “it’s complicated and we can’t hand him over publicly”?
Screw that. They didn’t want to be invaded but they were not (or maybe could not, he had his own army) hand him over.
That’s over and above the issue that they’d been telling us for years that he was “under control” so it wasn’t going to be a problem.
If a dog on a leash kills someone without darn good reason, you shoot the dog and you punish the person holding the leash. This even happens if the leash is broken.
Big picture, we had to go in and clean up their mess. The correct way to handle this would have been for them to deal with their super-terrorist before he pulls them and us into a war were we kill 6 digits of their people.Report
…no he wasn’t. At all. He was the guy who supplied some outside troops, not some military general.
The Taliban was rather infamous for basically being a bunch of local warlords, just with a religious twist. None of them cared about anything happened to areas not under their control. Not even all of Afghanistan.
OBL helps them win a war to get into power, they still owed him some money for that, so they let him stay. They don’t care about what he’s doing in the rest of the world.
And then, after the attacks, all those local leaders got together with the government of Afghanistan and issued a statement asking OBL to leave. Yes, they didn’t set a deadline, and it also said ‘The US is not allowed to come in and get him’, but he certainly wasn’t beloved at that point…he had just caused massive problems for their country. They wanted him gone, their concern were ‘How does it look if we say they can come in?’ and ‘What else is the US going to do if we say they can come in?’
An ideal world would just have him vanish, along with the debts they owed him…you know, the sort of thing the CIA could make happen.
No, their last statement, like their first, was still ‘We will hand him over when there is evidence he was behind that horrible attack.’
The statement to the UN: “Our position on this is that if America has proof, we are ready for the trial of Osama bin Laden in light of the evidence.”
And, again, while America had proof, it was proof they weren’t really showing the world. It was the British who finally stepped up and said ‘Look, here is real evidence, we tracked down enough of the terrorists to show they were working for al Qaeda.’ Which the Taliban did not have time to response to.
Meanwhile, here was Bush’s demand: “Mr. Bush demanded in his speech before members of Congress that the Taliban surrender bin Laden, release imprisoned Americans, and give the United States full access to terrorist training camps.”
You might notice it wasn’t just OBL that America wanted. We demanded the release of imprisoned Americans, which…I mean, it sucks that another country had imprisoned them, but that seems completely unrelated to 911. We can’t go around threatening war with every country that we think has unjustly locked up American visitors, we work that out via the State Department. But the real cause of concern would be ‘full access to terrorist training camps’…what exactly does the US mean by that, and, importantly, for how long?
You know, the stuff you’d negotiate beforehand. Same with a prisoner release…they possibly had some prisoners they wanted back.Report
Various countries have weaponized their court systems. “Working it out with the State Department” assumes good faith on the other side which is a bad assumption in the context of people taking hostages.
RE: Evidence
And again you’re assuming good faith.
OBL was known for his money, his terror org, his faith, and his charisma. He had the talent of describing mass murder as a holy duty.
His group was the spiritual brother of the Taliban. 911 wasn’t the first time he’d attacked the US and it wasn’t the first time they’d covered for him.
It wasn’t even the first time he’d targeted those buildings.
Even if they wanted to pretend to make the assumption that it must have been some other groups of Islamic Terrorists (nudge nudge wink wink), the US clearly thought AQ was responsible and was mobilizing for war.
The Taliban’s choice was to deal with him or go to war with us. That choice was not only after 911, but it was before 911 too.
They were harboring a terror organization which was waging war on the US. OBL and AQ were committing acts of war and the Taliban was enabling them.Report
Um, no. It’s countries that have fair justice systems we don’t try to work things out with. You get arrested for murder in the UK, you’re getting a UK trial, and serving your UK sentence. The State Department will help a bit, but not try to override things.
You get detained in Afghanistan for spreading Christianity, you’re…going to have the State Department trying to get you out, at least at some level. Next time the US cuts some deal with them, you’re probably out if not much is demanded in exchange.
No, I’m not, actually. I said it wasn’t good faith. I said specifically ‘Umar was probably using motivated reasoning, but it wasn’t 100% definitive.’. Umar was, very clearly, trying to stall having to say what he would or would not do.
In fact, we know why he was stalling. Because he had contacted the CIA and was trying to work something out.
Absolutely nothing that the Taliban did after 9/11 but before the invasion could be considered ‘enabling him’. They literally publicly asked him to leave and started working with the CIA for a way to remove him.
They just didn’t do it ‘fast enough’ for the warmongers.
Hell, they couldn’t have even accomplished what the US had demanded they do. They did not have the ability to go in and get him, and certainly not in the time they were apparently allocated.Report
Agreed. OBL was a big man and their spiritual brother. Killing Americans wasn’t that big a difference from killing Jews.
The situation had been going on for years and they didn’t have a problem with it.
More stalling. Don’t invade and he’ll pretend in public to ask OBL to maybe leave while privately telling him that it’s for show.
Other than not handing him over and pretending that there was some doubt on who did it.
Exactly. OBL was *that* popular and *that* powerful.
Even with the alternative us coming in and killing 100k people, he either could not or would not do it.
That’s on him and his country. He and his spent years setting this up. We weren’t the ones being unreasonable.Report
…you really have been brainwashed into thinking Muslims and Jews have been at war forever, and Muslims consider Jews mortal enemies, haven’t you?
By trying to put this logic together, I assume you somehow think the Taliban killed Jews, just like al Qaeda killed Americans? Well, it didn’t. Almost all Jews in Afghanistan had left by 1978, because it turns out living under Soviet occupation is bad. The Taliban didn’t even exist until 92, in the power vacuum left by the Soviets when they collapsed.
The Taliban does not care about Jews, at least not any more than they care about other religious groups that are mostly not in there. Were they nice to the very few Jews remaining in Afghanistan? No. Did they kill them? Also no. Kick them out? No. Burn down their houses? No.
Again, the Taliban’s vision is extremely myopic and barely manages to encompass their entire country, much less extend any outside of it. (Well, they also seem to think part of Pakistan should be included in it, but that is not relevant to anyone.) They literally do not care.
Hell, they won’t even encourage what Hamas is doing. The Taliban has offered incredibly tepid statements of support for _Palestine_ (No mention of Hamas or Jews or Israel, just support for the ‘defense and resistance of the people of Palestine’) and has indicated they will not providing any aid or fighters or anything.
Which is, incidentally, also why they didn’t care about OBL. Because they don’t care about anything, because they are extremely local isolationists, and were even moreso back then.
Uh, no. They could not hand him over because al Qaeda had a much more functional army than they did. As evidence by the invasion, where Afghanistan’s army instantly collapsed and al Qaeda kept functioning long enough to get OBL over the border into Pakistan. Incidentally, that reminds me: There have actually been _two_ US attempts to capture/kill OBL.
One of them had about two weeks of secret backchannel negotiations with CIA, before that got cut short by a bunch of neocon warmongers who demanded WAR NOW, resulting in a 20 years war that killed 2,402 US servicemen and countless Afghanis, cost trillions of dollars, inflamed anti-US sentiment in the area and resulted in a lot of the people who were our local supporters either dead of having fled, put in the exact same people back in charge, and didn’t get bin Laden.
The other had probably more secret backchannel work (We’ll never know, but I’m sure it was longer than two weeks.), resulted in no American deaths, a couple of civilians deaths who…frankly were living in his house anyway and thus are hardly innocents and we don’t really care about, cost almost nothing, and, oh yeah, actually worked.
Why are you defending the first one of those? We have, right in front of us, the alternative version of history where the US actually talks to the Taliban for a little bit longer…it’s what actually solved the problem when we did it in Pakistan!Report
You are arguing both that the Taliban were so dysfunctional that they literally couldn’t hand over OBL and that they would have handed him over if we’d just waited.
There’s a flaw in there somewhere.Report
No, I’m arguing that if we had allowed them to continue their secret negotiations with the CIA, in a month or two a Spec-Ops team would have descended from the sky outside of OBL’s hole in the ground in Afghanistan and yanked his now-dead body out, and the Taliban would have been ‘Wow! We certainly didn’t give them permission for that to happen! The fact no Afghanistan forces noticed or tried to stop them is a giant security failure we will be looking into. We condemn the American Devil’s unlawful action in strongest possible terms! …oh well, nothing to do about it now.” and then send a text to the US making sure we burned all those records of money they owed him, as agreed upon.
And 2,402 American servicemen would be alive. Along with uncountable Afghanistan civilians.
You know, pretty much exactly like we did in Pakistan, except that government didn’t deny they allowed it quite as much as the Taliban would have been.Report
Or OBL would have vanished because someone would have told him. Which is why we didn’t tell Pakistan.
In theory they didn’t know he was there… in the middle of a town where they really couldn’t help but know.
That’s over and above the problem that we wanted not only him dead but his terror camps closed.
I think your plan would not have worked. It also wouldn’t have been enough. It’s like saying Israel should stop after killing Hamas’ leader.Report
Luckily, we instead announced loudly we were doing an invasion, and then did an invasion, so he _didn’t_ know we were coming for him.
The. Other. Plan. Did. Not. Work. Either.Report
“release imprisoned Americans”
Some of those Americans were aid relief workers who signed a document that they would not try to convert locals to Christianity, but did so anyway. It was 2 or 3 women IIRC. We should have left them to rot there.Report
Maybe. Part of the problem is Afghanistan doesn’t have a justice system by our standards and views taking hostages as fair play.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/04/05/taliban-afghanistan-hostage-diplomacy-western-prisoners/Report
Can’t say for everyone, but I remember this on the news. That’s what they did. They were interviewed. That admitted it on camera/to the newspapers.
“Afghanistan doesn’t have a justice system by our standards” Then they should have never even gone there should they?Report
Also…it’s pretty clear Bush mentioning them was just warmongering. That’s literally the only reason they were brought up in Bush’s speech, to make it sound like the Taliban were just locking up random Americans, instead of just dumbass religious fanatics who don’t seem to understand that God will not magically stop bad things from happening to you just because you think you’re doing what He asked.
And from this example, it sounds like they have a perfectly functional justice system, if the women literally confessed afterward they had been guilty of what they were imprisoned for. The problem from our POV was the laws, not the justice system.Report
Yeah, I wasn’t arguing whether or not Afghanistan had a function legal system. My point was that it was likely that those Americans in prison in Afghanistan were there because they omitted crimes, and as I pointed out, those Americana kids admitted it. Just as i have no sympathy for that Americana athlete who got caught with edibles in Russia, I have no sympathy for people who knowingly lie and violate the law to preach Christianity in a Muslim country, especially in countries that are not “enlightened western countries”. I mean really, who the f is that stupid.Report
I have mixed feelings.
Those two hit the radar as not being very smart and deciding god would protect them.
For Russia, she was guilty… but how often do they arrest people for that? Was this something that they always stop or did they decide to pick her up and then look to see what they’re going to hold her on?
The Russian legal system is known for “Show me the man, I’ll find you the crime”.Report
Well, as you might expect, my feelings are “less mixed”.
“Those two hit the radar as not being very smart and deciding god would protect them.” As I’ve said to others when they invoke God to prevent/make something happen “god helps those who help themselves”. Don’t relay on his mercy when you pull a stupid.
As for the Russia person, who cares how often do they arrest a person for it. What matters is it’s illegal and you are NOT in the US, so why would you even think about doing something that could land you in jail. No need to get caught up in something when you don’t have to by playing by the rules of where you are.Report
With Russia, they can find something illegal on or about you no matter what you do.Report
All the better to never go there then.Report
“Hamas, like al Qaeda, wants a country in endless wars that cause outrage amounts the people they can recruit among.”
lol
so you gave up on the whole thing about “yeah sure Hamas is bad but there’s a moral imperative to hold oneself to the standard one expects to see“? now it’s “this is eleven-dimensional chess and the way to win is to not do the thing your enemies seem to expect”?Report
…no?
You realizing there can be _two_ reasons not to do something, right?
People are required to follow the laws of war and it’s bad even they don’t, even if they other side also isn’t following them. Neither the laws of war, nor morality in general, allows things like, for example, ‘They harmed third parties that I liked, so now I will harm third parties they like’, which is the justification a lot the defenders of Israel’s behavior toward Palestinian civilian are using.
And it is _also_ somewhat dumb to do things that your enemies are clearly trying to get you to do, especially if they are trying to goad you into it by making you extremely angry so you do not think about it.
It’s especially dumb to let them goad you into _illegal_ and immoral things. The end result of this could be that Israel utterly destroys Hamas and Palestine, killing all the Palestinians, and then finds itself a global pariah for genocide…and you know who who they are surrounded by and cannot defend against without global support? Or, hell, someone captures Israeli leaders and put them on trial in the ICC. I don’t know if we should consider Hamas the winner there, but it sure as hell wouldn’t be Israel either.
Hamas could have accomplished the same amount of hostage taking with a lot more sanity, but not only were their actions deliberately horrific, they _recorded them_. Which implies that making Israel extremely angry was a _goal_, a goal Hamas thought was worth making _even their allies_ upset.
And I didn’t say anything about ‘the way to win’. Often, the only thing that can be done is the thing expected, that’s how good plans works, there is only one response, that further boxes someone in.
I said the Israeli government did not actually seem to consider their response, and has lashed out rather indiscriminately, which has lost it a lot of support, both outside and inside Israel.
As for showing the videos…maybe it is worth doing that, to further distance Hamas from the countries still supporting it. But…we have to at least pause and say ‘This is what they want…why?’Report
My expectation is they’re virtue signaling.
Israel has been threatening to take back Gaza and kill Hamas for years, so they’ll threaten to do it again but no big.
However their allies and supporters will know that they really did kill Jews. Ergo it’s possible to strike back and Israel will do nothing.Report
I think there’s a lot of truth to everything you put here.
The problem is I think it doesn’t make a difference.
Israel has occasionally had the peace wing get enough control to make peace offers. We might see that again since the “manage the conflict” wing has so beclowned themselves.
If and when that happens, we’ll find out that the Palestinians can’t accept what we’d view as a reasonable offer. The demands I’ve heard from them typically include “a robust Right to Return for the millions of refugees”. That would destroy Israel.
Which means no deal. Which means the conflict and terrorism is going to continue. Which means Israel will defend itself. Which means it will try to kill terrorists before they kill civilians. Which means turning Gaza into a prison camp.
The Settlers profit from this and make things worse. Israel’s Right wing baiting the Palestinians also makes things worse. However the starting position is two sides with irreconcilable positions.Report
Yes. Israel is still enough of a functioning democracy (Although going downhill fast.) to back away from this, which is why I, and a lot of others, keep screaming at the US to apply _literally any pressure at all_.
Palestinians may _want_ that (Who even knows at this point?), but a deal can happen without it. A lot of the problem is Israel _refusing to acknowledge what happened_ or compensate people or, hell, the fact they are _continuing to do it_: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_tag_attack_policy
Israel needs to step forward, say ‘We are sorry about a lot of this, and we are making sure it will never happen again’. People can’t pretend it’s ancient history when Netanyahu is showing slides of an Israel without Palestine existing at the UN and the government is full of demagogues yelling for ethnic cleansing. (And, while we’re at it, Israel needs to stop discriminating against Arab-Israelis.)
People think this is somehow analogous to, say Native Americans, and ask if we’re willing to give all their land back…but it’s not. We’ve apologized to breaking treaties, we’ve respected their borders, we’ve treated them as sovereign entities within this country. We don’t have some political movement in this country that we treat seriously, and occasionally hand the country over to, that is still urging war against them.
Meanwhile, Israel is still electing people promising to steal land. You sorta have to stop doing the bad things before people will trust you, and Palestine _cannot_ stop…there’s not even a meaning for way to them to stop, they can’t get rid of Hamas. Literally, there is not a path forward that _anyone_ in Palestine can take.
Once Israel does stop, there are reasonable ways out of this, ones that do not involve meeting _every_ demand of Palestine. You can blame Arafat for insisting on right of return all you want, but…you can’t keep blaming his miscalculation forever, and it’s worth pointing out that Israel doesn’t even _have_ a peace treaty on the table currently. There is no path forward, because Israel keeps doing things they will have to undo.
And I know it’s hard to believe, but there are rational actors in Palestine. The Palestinian Authority, right now, has been _fairly_ reasonable for decades!
Granted, they aren’t exactly legitimate either, as they aren’t holding elections either, and what the hell is it with all the parliamentary governments that can just _choose_ not to hold elections?
And every problem doesn’t have to be solved right away. The first step is literally ‘Israel agrees to stop doing dumbass things, grants some sort of actual autonomy, which in turn would reduce a ton of the anger’, details come later.
Hell, Israel could solve a hell of a lot of problems by LETTING PEOPLE LEAVE GAZA FOR THE WEST BANK. Let them move out from under Hamas. But they won’t do that because they are propped up by the settler movement, which certainly does not want more Palestinians in the West Bank. (Or, possibly, any.)Report
Means and ends provide a good framework for understanding actions that don’t have an immediate payoff or seem to be contrary to the actors’ goals. You don’t have to apply means and ends to understand Hamas’s actions. Fanatical Muslims kill non-Muslims because that’s their end. If Israel was gone, they’d be killing Jews in Paris. You don’t have to ask what Hamas was after; they got what they were after. The Israeli right may use the ongoing conflict for their political advantage, but Hamas only seeks political advantage in order to continue the conflict.Report
I think if Israel were gone they’d focus more on killing homosexuals (which they’ve outlawed and I’ve seen claims that they already do) or something else that’s local.
We’d see something like the Taliban.Report
I think these hypothetical have forgotten the rest of Palestine.
If Israel somehow vanished tomorrow, Hamas and the PA would immediately have a civil war (again), and the Palestinian Authority would pretty easily win, considering the territory and people they’d control. (And that’s not even getting into foreign support, which should immediately be thrown at the PA.)
But, yes, if Hamas ended up in charge, we’d see something like the Taliban, Hamas has absolutely no aims for the rest of the world…well, I say that, but I can imagine them going after Jordon, I guess? That is sorta vaguely the same area, historically. Unlikely, but hypothetically possible.
But nowhere outside of the British Mandate.
However…Hamas isn’t actually as…fundamentalist as the Taliban. Remember when we talk about Hamas, we often sorta accidentally include things like Islamic Jihad in it, who are _also_ fighting there in exactly the same way, and often working together. Islamic Jihad are complete religious lunatics.
Hamas is not. It is Islamist, having origins in the Muslim Brotherhood, framing the struggle in terms of religion and thinks Islam should be the law of the land, but there are…different levels of thinking that.
…honestly, it’s rather hard to tell the difference between things Hamas officially does, things Hamas unofficially does, things Hamas tolerates, and things that just happen. Gaza is…not governed as much as there are small groups of Hamas government people occasionally manage to do things. People who get killed due to homosexuality tend to get killed in extralegal ways, but ‘extralegal ways’ sorta describes half of things there anyway. And maybe a Hamas soldier is there watching, maybe not.
Also, technically, Hamas did not outlaw homosexuality. The British did. It’s just no one ever repealed it on the Gaza side. (It was repealed in the West Bank, when Jordon, who controlled that area at the time, repealed it in general in the 1950s.) I’m not saying Hamas wouldn’t pass those laws, but they didn’t actually have to.Report
The other shoe dropped in the Kim Davis case. The plaintiffs’ attorneys have submitted a fee request for roughly $260,000. I don’t know prevailing market rates in Kentucky, but given all the procedural wrangling and multiple appeals, the number looks reasonable to me. Judges do like to put on their green eyeshades and trim the requests some, but there probably isn’t a lot of fat in the request.Report
Forgot to paste the link:
https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/payment-260-000-sought-former-152756913.html?guccounter=1Report
One of the things that has surprised a lot of people, even me, regarding the October 7th attack is how much Jews across the world are taking it personally and seriously. We have all seen terrorism against Israelis before but the response against October 7th is something that has not been seen in a long time. Dara Horn covers it: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/22/opinion/hamas-israel-jews-massacre.htmlReport
Newscaster voice: Meanwhile, in other ‘relics of British imperialism and colonialism’, the British navy is *rereads* No, seriously, that’s not real, what’s the real story…oh…that is real. *deep sigh*
The British Navy is ceasing the use of ‘Chinese laundrymen’ on warship.
And…it is, and I have tripled checked this date, 2023. Not, like, 1923, which would be an easy assumption to make, but 2023. You can tell because we have computers we are talking about this over.
And the British Navy is just now ending this incredibly weird and distasteful idea that, uh, they should hire Chinese people to do laundry on their ships. I mean, I guess…Chinese people, good at laundry, am I right?
I mean, it’s good that they have stopped *touched earpiece* Oh.
So, they apparently are not stopping because it’s an incredibly weird and outdated and really racist sounding practice, but because their xenophoba about China has them worried that China could be using them to spy on the British. And from now on they will be using…Nepali Gurkhas.
Sometime the news literally does not feel real. This cannot be the actual real world.Report
Sorry, that was such an absurd story I forgot to paste the link: https://www.firstpost.com/world/british-navy-replacing-chinese-laundrymen-with-nepali-gurkhas-to-prevent-spying-13285432.html
And I had a crazy thought: Warships have people on them. People employed by the government, as part of the Navy.
Have they checked if any of _them_ can do the laundry? I mean, the high-trained British probably won’t be as good at such menial tasks as _foreigners_, but I think some of those lads could make a pretty good showing at it.Report
BTW, if you know anything about Nepali Gurkhas, it feels incredibly offensive for a military force to say they are going to use them to do _laundry_. They have a reputation as some of the best fighters on the planet, a reputation that started when they forced the entire British Empire to stay out of Nepal, and the British said ‘Yes, but also…can we hire you?’.
I mean, I know it’s not going to be the same people, they won’t be picking trained military fighters and assigning them to laundry duty, but what the hell?Report
For reasons that will likely become apparent in a day or so, I was talking with GPT-4 about Baldur’s Gate III.
After I hammered out that its opinions on Baldur’s Gate III are dumb, I asked it this question:
And, to be honest, I expected two (maybe three) sentences in response.
That is not what happened. I got an *ESSAY*.
Report
Someone has asked that question before. The answer has clearly been polished by the admins.
Bet the original answer was “interesting”.Report
I’m sure that it has but I don’t know that they would polish certain answers (at least certain dorky answers) anywhere near to that degree.Report
This is a more popular question than you’d think.
Having the AI announce it’s Chaotic Neutral (or worse yet, Neutral Evil) would be bad.Report
Well if it actually *is* Neutral Evil, then it would be overall preferable to us for it to reveal that. But then a Neutral Evil *human* probably wouldn’t just announce that they’re Neutral Evil either, so I guess it’s hitting the mark there.Report
How can a computer, controlled by algorithms, be anything but Lawful? It might be Good, Neutral, or Evil, but it is inherently subject to and controlled by pre-programmed codes from which it literally cannot deviate. Seems like the very definition of Lawful.Report
Node based AI isn’t understandable, predictable, and it can totally restructure it’s personality on every question.
For “node” think “brain cells”. Me telling you what the connections + weightings are doesn’t do a darn thing to tell you what it does.
This is one of the problems with AI, we lose the ability to lift up the hood and see what’s going on.Report
So we’ve figured out that it’s lying.
Now we just have to wonder whether it’s been programmed to lie to itself, whether it’s organically lying to itself, or whether it’s lying to us.Report
Never heard of self-modifying code, Burt? Some of the models that incorporate their “experience” into the training data, so that’s constantly changing? Stochastic gradient descent, where the optimization algorithm periodically tosses in some random numbers — or as close to random as the technology supports — to keep from falling into local minima? With the side effect that given a training algorithm and a training data set, the actual coefficients arrived at for the model may be quite different on different runs.Report
That’s fascinating! I wonder if you could maybe explain that in English, though.Report
Commenters on this site can fall into ruts if they don’t challenge their intellectual habits every once in a while. So can computers.Report
DNA can be thought of as computer code (mutation and adaption over generations). So can human brain neurons (neural nets). The hardware is very different but whatever.
We can have algorithms “learn” and “grow” using somewhat equiv methods.
There’s a very high level of randomness in what results.
If you build a neural net to do “X” then while it might do it you’re going to be hard pressed to explain exactly why and how. Let’s say you have two hundred input variables and you end up with a net that combines them all in various weightings. So Y% of one variable in combo with 7 others (but only in some situations) results in…
We’re in “explain how the human brain works in detail” territory, or “explain how one creature evolves into another”.
Your partner is pregnant, predict what your kid’s job will be in 40 years.
The level of complexity and uncertainty in the outcome is *that* high. So I lean towards putting this technology in the “chaotic” rather than “lawful” end of the spectrum.Report
Okay, I think I get it. Bear with me while I rephrase to see if I have successfully understood.
What it seems like is going on is a randomizer is inserted somewhere into the algorithm and the AI makes decisions about what to do based in part on that randomization. This is perhaps analagous to non-rational impulses in a wet human brain, things like emotions or spiritual experiences (which may be the same thing but that’s a different debate) or evanescent states of experience like hunger or sleepiness — so that just as I might decide to do X when well-rested and emotionally content, given the same decision when deprived of adequate sleep and emotionally agitated from some recent but unrelated experience, I might do Y.
And given that like the human brain, an algorithm can be made heuristic, such that it adapts its future decision-making criteria in response to the accumulation of past experiences somehow identified as similar, the algorithm effectively re-writes itself over time and with the accumulation of experience, with the different experiences having been created through the influence of the random number generator carefully placed somewhere in the original programming.
At least, I hope I’ve got understanding of self-programming algorithms right. It’s not my area of specialty but I appreciate the breakdown.
So like Two-Face in the Batman comics, the flip of a coin rather than the use of a rule or the application of reason governs decisions and resulting actions. The chaos, then, ultimately comes from that random number generator.Report
Yet another Trump lawyer has pled guilty.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/10/24/trump-2020-lawyer-jenna-ellis-pleads-guilty-in-georgia-election-case-the-latest-to-flip.html
Article says she’s the fourth person to pled out. I assume every one who does this makes it harder for the other RICO members.Report
I believe that’s the point.Report
Yeah the ratchet just slowly turns click…click…click.Report
They’re all pretty pathetic, but they always were. And that should have been obvious to anyone who watched them in real time. But they got platforms, and not just on friendly networks, to spew their pathetic nonsense as if they were serious people worth taking seriously. Maybe now they’ll all skulk away and nobody will feel obliged to put them on TV and ask them to talk.Report
Sami Hamdi (“Who?” “Dude, I don’t know. Some guy who knows Arabic, I guess.”) is reporting:
If true, performative allyship is no longer being performed.Report
“Where’s Bibi’s boy? Israeli soldiers blast Benjamin Netanyahu’s son Yair, 32, for ‘abandoning’ them by staying in Miami while 360,000 reservists are called up to fight against Hamas”
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12664565/yair-netanyahu-benjamin-son-idf-reservists-miami.htmlReport
Hanna Flint is reporting:
Report
Mark Meadows appears to be turning state’s evidenceReport
This is my favorite military analyst with a lot of harsh things to say. He’s an expert in this and basically saying DavidTC is correct about a lot of things in Gaza.
Israel’s Gaza Invasion is Going to Be A Failure!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XTV3AGywHQReport
I mean, no. He’s completely right that what the IDF is about to do will be completely useless in stopping Hamas, just like airstrikes previously have been.
But the assumption he seems to have, where I disagree, is that that is their objective, instead of just…taking most of Gaza for Israel, and causing massive devastation as they go, so even if they leave, there’s nowhere for Palestinians to return to. So his conclusion that ‘This is going to be a disaster’ is not…quite true from Israel’s POV. It’s going to be ‘disaster’, but exactly what they want. All it requires is everyone ignoring the humanitarian things.
Here’s the actual truth: Fighting any sort of war in a location that is 100% against you doing so, where you vaguely try to avoid committing war crimes, doesn’t work.
You can take over places that are mostly against you. (Although it doesn’t always work, see Russia and their attempts to take over a location that has moderate pro-Russian factions.) You can maybe do it as long as, let’s say, I dunno, 20% of the population (I say, wildly guessing) is willing to work with you. They’ll help you, they’ll inform on others,and you can sway more and more.
But if the people are _completely_ against you, you cannot win. Unless there is some base of support you can build for you being there, or some other competing local government you can put in, you cannot win.
We know this. We’ve lost wars before because of this, eg, Vietnam, where we never had any local support in the north. Or really in the south. The only reason we didn’t lose as quickly as we should have is that we did have the south we could keep falling back to…a fake country we had basically created by propping up French colonizers. The north had actual local support, they were the government that people wanted, and…they won. (And you might notice that we _also_ started doing random airstrikes in crazed attempts to root out guerrilla fighters and deny them places to hide, although we did them against forests to defoliate them.)
It’s why we desperately tried to get local assets in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and it took us a long time to figure out how, and we were really bad at it. We at least tried, and we even publicly lied about it, how we would be ‘greeted as liberators’, because even the American public understand you can’t take over a country where the people actually completely reject you.
And…that is what is going to happen in Gaza, complete rejection. Israel is going to have literally 0 local support in Gaza. 0% of the population will work with Israel. Absolutely zero. No Gazans are on board with what Israel is going, and the weeks of airstrikes has, uh, not helped.
So Israel has three choices…not do that war, badly lose that war, or just…have as their objective destroying the entire place and leaving, which they can do without any local support.Report
That. Ignoring that I think they’re not thinking rationally, they want to show that killing Jews, or supporting people who do, is a bad idea. The people are already 100% against them so there’s no point in trying to swing them. Maybe Gaza will decide they want peace.
If you think Hamas are basically Naz.is and they have popular support (both largely true), then all the squeaking about “collective punishment” ignores they have collective responsibility.
That doesn’t mean anything from a legal standpoint, but it’s where Israel’s head is at. Thus the first week(?) of restricting water and food, which are clearly war crimes.
As for gas and power, unfortunately those are dual-use. Israel isn’t going to supply Hamas’ military with supplies.
If Israel gets it’s head back in a good place this would still be an ugly horror of a sh*t show and a massive humanitarian mess. If it doesn’t get it’s head back then it’s going to be worse… but I’m not sure we’ll be able to tell the difference.
Interestingly, I hear lots of calls for a cease fire. I don’t much hear calls for Hamas to surrender or to release the hostages.Report
Emmer bows out alreadyReport
At what point do we start taking bets on it there will be another speaker before the next election?Report
Now. It looks like it is Mike Johnson’s turn to be the sacrificial lamb.Report
The latest Republican nominee for Speaker is Mike Johnson. Vote is tomorrow at noon I believe. He did not do great to get a majority but he seems to be the only kind of guy who can get past the finish line. He is a far right election denier and involved with “Alliance Defending Freedom.” (I refuse to take their name at face value). But he is a semi-backbencher type who hasn’t antagonized people like Jordan and Gaetz.Report
Against the backdrop of a small minority kidnapping the GOP in the House, it appears acceptance of political violence is rising in the US. That does not bode well for democracy:
https://www.npr.org/2023/10/25/1208373493/political-violence-democracy-2024-presidential-election-extremismReport
Republicans are Israel.
The American People are the Palestinians.
We need the Democrats to be Hamas!
“From Sea to Shining Sea, America Will Be Free!”Report
Swing and a huge miss.Report
Well, tactically, I can’t imagine a worse time to release this particular poll than after the last couple of weeks.
Seriously, if you wanted to make the people who were calling for revolution look bad, being able to point somewhere and say “this is what that would look like” is a great deterrent.
Or it should be.Report
Seriously, if you wanted to make the people who were calling for Flight 93 situation look bad, being able to point somewhere and say “this is what that would look like” is a great deterrent.Report
Flight 93… let me look that up…
Huh.
So the Republicans are the Islamic Terrorists in this situation?
Would you say that political violence would be an appropriate response to Islamic Terrorists?Report
We should treat Islamic Terrorists the same way we treat Jan 6 Terrorists, by giving them a fair trial and lengthy prison sentences if convicted.Report
I sure hope violence isn’t involved in any of the steps you’re eliding!Report
This works if law enforcement can capture them or if they’re law abiding enough to submit to law enforcement.
If it requires the army to deal with them then that doesn’t work.
Our laws were written with the idea that law enforcement has control over the area and people involved. Trying to apply those laws to the military is a mess. Geneva doesn’t really supply a solution.
Obama’s way to deal with the conflict was to never take prisoners.Report
Agreed. if it takes another Ruby Ridge to deal with the Proud Boys I won’t object.Report
So you endorse the killing of innocent civilians? Good to know. RR was a demonstration of terrible rules of engagement, federal over reach, and a shitshow of poor communication. This is from Wikipedia, not exactly the hard right.
“During a surveillance operation, officer Art Roderick shot Weaver’s dog, leading Weaver’s son Sammy to fire at the team. Sammy was then shot and killed, causing an exchange of fire in which Weaver’s friend Kevin Harris shot and killed Deputy Marshal William Francis Degan.”
“FBI sniper Lon Horiuchi shot Weaver’s wife Vicki while she was holding her baby daughter ”
So, two civilians were killed as a direct result of Art Roderick killing a dog. Yeah, that’s some professional grade work there. Read the whole page. It’s a nice example, and the Fed’s paid up.
“Randy Weaver and his daughters filed a wrongful death suit for $200 million which was related to the killing of his wife and son. In an out-of-court settlement in August 1995, the federal government awarded Randy Weaver $100,000 and it also awarded $1 million to each of his three daughters. The government did not admit that it had committed any wrongdoing in relation to the deaths of Sammy and Vicki.[128][129] On the condition of anonymity, a DOJ official told The Washington Post that he believed that the Weavers would have probably won the full amount if the case had gone to trial”
Yeah, let’s have more of the please.Report
Hmm… the Weaver’s dog was shot while retreating.
The whole thing was a massive cluster from beginning to end. Well worth reading the wiki.Report
He was no angel, the taillight was broken, there was a gun in the glovebox and the officer felt afraid.
Just need one more for the “Justified Shooting” bingo.Report
You forgot ‘law enforcement randomly deciding to take the word of a bunch of informants with no judgement as to their accuracy’.Report
The polls are all over the place and so a lot of people are a damn mess. There was a poll from Quinnipac that got Biden favorable results when people were asked “Do you support Biden’s foreign policy” on specific issues but if asked the general “Do you support Biden’s foreign policy?” Most people voted negative. Young people have apparently absorbed the Biden is old attacks and dislike him even though he has governed to the left of Obama and done really well all things considered.
Apparently a lot of Americans including impatient young people really do want the President to be some kind of Bronze Age King-Emperor that solves all the problems with a snap of the fingers.
I’m not sure how this will reflect in 2024. Elections tend to focus things It seems fairly clear that a lot of people do not want a Biden and Trump rematch in 2024 but that is what they are going to get almost certainly.Report
The fantasy includes a lot of magic thinking including that the King is a member of my tribe who shares my values. Given how common this is it might be an instinct.Report
Looks like we’ve got that appointment in Samarra…
Report
Michael Tracy seems to think that this is a reference to Isaiah 66:8 which reads (oh… let’s use the RSV):
“Who has heard such a thing? Who has seen such things? Shall a land be born in one day? Shall a nation be brought forth in one moment? For as soon as Zion was in labor she brought forth her sons.”
Now, if you ask me, that’s a bad guess as to what he’s referring to.
Going with what the translator said: “There will no longer be stealing at your borders and your gates will be of Glory.”
That sounds more to me like Isaiah 60:18. “Violence shall no more be heard in your land, devastation or destruction within your borders; you shall call your walls Salvation, and your gates Praise.”
(“Hey, Jaybird. What does Isaiah 60:10-14 say?” “I’m not talking about that part.”)Report
Of all the crises facing the new Speaker of the House, the growing climate crisis may be the one he most studiously ignores. Doing so carries more, and more measurbale peril:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/25/weather/hurricane-otis-rapid-intensification-climate/index.htmlReport
Mostly off topic… I see this morning that the GFS has a large hurricane striking south Florida on Nov 10. Many (most?) of the storms the GFS predicts that far out never materialize. If it does, wonder how that changes the chances of an Israel/Ukraine/disaster bill passing?Report
One hopes those bills are done before Nov 10th.
And speaking as a member of South Florida, I have yet to feel a drop of rain from any of the hurricanes predicted to cause me problems.Report
As it’s an Invest (meaning we are just starting to look at it) I’m skeptical. But it would definitely focus the discussion.Report
I’ve started my first 9-5 job and the schedule is so crazy – I don’t have the energy to cook dinner or see friends
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-12669703/Ive-started-9-5-job-schedule-crazy-dont-energy-cook-dinner-friends.html
Yeah, like living in NJ is the only option for not affording NYC rents…
Suck it up buttercup. I once spent a year driving from north of Baltimore city MD to Chantilly VA. In the rain and rush hour traffic, that was 4 hours.Report
The Biden economy continues to grow but the vibes are keeping people in a sour mood: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/26/business/economy/gdp-economy-q3.htmlReport
We had covid, the aftermath of covid, the Boomers are retiring which is a massive thing, China is collapsing, and Russia has gone full evil empire.
There’s a lot to dislike in the economy just from those 5 disruptions.
Personally I was forced to move to Florida and the movers lost my furniture for months.Report
One of the side effects of inflation is that it makes it hard to recognize if income gains are real.Report
Ezra Klein on the reactionary core of the techno futurists: (Bolding mine)
We are used to thinking of our ideological divide as cleaving conservatives from liberals. I think the Republican Party’s collapse into incoherence reflects the fact that much of the modern right is reactionary, not conservative. This is what connects figures as disparate as Jordan Peterson and J.D. Vance and Peter Thiel and Donald Trump. These are the ideas that unite both the mainstream and the weirder figures of the so-called postliberal right, from Patrick Deneen to the writer Bronze Age Pervert.
This is not a coalition that cares about tax cuts. It’s a coalition obsessed with where we went wrong: the weakness, the political correctness, the liberalism, the trigger warnings, the smug elites. It’s a coalition that believes we were once hard and have become soft; worse, we have come to lionize softness and punish hardness.
The story of the reactionary follows a template across time and place. It “begins with a happy, well-ordered state where people who know their place live in harmony and submit to tradition and their God,” Mark Lilla writes in his 2016 book, “The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction.” He continues:
Then alien ideas promoted by intellectuals — writers, journalists, professors — challenge this harmony, and the will to maintain order weakens at the top. (The betrayal of elites is the linchpin of every reactionary story.) A false consciousness soon descends on the society as a whole as it willingly, even joyfully, heads for destruction. Only those who have preserved memories of the old ways see what is happening. Whether the society reverses direction or rushes to its doom depends entirely on their resistance.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/26/opinion/marc-andreessen-reactionary-futurism.html
These are our revolutionaries, who reject the legitimacy of established order; The established order isn’t something to be reformed and bargained with, but burned down entirely.Report
While I disagree with much of the thinking in Ezra’s post, this part: ” It’s a coalition that believes we were once hard and have become soft; worse, we have come to lionize softness and punish hardness.” is, I think, generally true. It’s been almost 80 years since America had any real exposure to danger, and real hardship that impacted the majority. That was WW2. America is overflowing with almost anything compared to back then. The poorest American of us all, live in relative luxury compared to 90+% of the rest of the world. The WEST is the global 1%. No one, except immigrants perhaps, has any understanding of what it’s like to have a hard life.Report
much of the modern right is reactionary, not conservative
Remember when you started hearing people say stuff like “What have conservatives *CONSERVED*, exactly?”
Well, as it turns out, an inability to answer that question is probably a good indicator for reactionaries on the horizon.Report
Eh I think that goes too far in letting conservatives off the hook. The reality is they took what was probably some necessary economic corrections in the late 70s and early 80s and turned them into a religion without appreciating how it would hollow out nearly every institution in the country. They basically liquidated the load bearing columns of small-c conservativism for a few bucks but instead of making another correction to save what they could decided to die on the dumbest culture war hills possible. Now all they’ve got is a bunch of cynical media operatives posing as political leaders that can never deliver what they promise and an allergy to ever considering that just maybe they are at least a little bit to blame for the situation they find themselves in.
Now I feel I’ve expressed enough disdain for progressive victim culture that I can comfortably say nothing is sadder than the version of it embraced by conservatives. At a certain point they need to be the change they say they want, but they will never be able to do that as long as they are addicted to pointing fingers at the bad behavior of others to justify their own.Report
I was letting them off the hook?
I thought I was saying that they failed so completely that much of the modern right is now reactionary rather than conservative.Report
I guess I misinterpreted!Report
If you want a fun mental exercise, look at the question “what have conservatives *CONSERVED*?” and come up with as vigorous a defense as you can.
But you know the game we play with so-called “conservative” television shows where someone comes up with a “conservative” value and someone else comes along and points out that, no, that’s a universal value?
Come up with a list of answers for “what have conservatives *CONSERVED*?” that can dodge that second question.Report
Even more fun, play the game of “Who goes reactionary?”
Followed by “What is the common thread?”Report
Nah. I am deliberately doing a deep dive into *WHY* “much of the modern right is reactionary, not conservative”.
And, to that end, seriously wrestling with the question “what have conservatives *CONSERVED*?” and coming up with as rigorous an answer as possible, like it was an intellectual exercise and you could prove a point by accomplishing it.Report
Answer “Who” and “What is the common thread” and you will arrive at “Why”
Start with some of the Who’s: the people Klein mentioned: what is the common thread linking them together?
C’mon, lets do a deep dive!Report
Nah. Have fun.Report
If a “soft” culture is one where our poorest live in luxury, then hip hip hooray for softness!
This is the stupidity inherent in reactionary culture. They dream of being Spartans in some epic drama but choose to live lives of softness and comfort. They lounge in idleness and give lectures on industriousness.
For Chrissake, Peterson, Vance, Thiel, Trump…these guys are the most pampered and coddled manbabies any age has ever produced.
It isn’t that they are hypocrites- even taken at face value, their ideas are absurd and childish and contradicted by their internal logic.
The reason we live in luxurious softness is because it works; Thiel and the Silicon Valley techlords only created things because they lived in a society that offered young men like them free room and board and education and allowed them to be indolent dreamers on the chance that a few might create something worthwhile.
This is why there isn’t a lot of innovation coming out of Congo or Gaza, because the hardened, toughened people there spend all their time getting enough food to eat.Report
Yes, living in luxury is far better than scratching out a meager existence. But I was referring to the mental aspects. You see people throwing temper tantrums over the smallest things. I’d expect a lot of it is how kids are raised, ie never being told no, or such. I’d even go so far as to complain about “participation trophies”.Report
How do you know how things “used to be”?
You have no memory of the generation before you, and your memories of your own childhood are distorted because you were seeing them with a child’s eyes.
And if you turn to records like books and newspapers you will find copious amounts of data showing older people describing your generation exactly as you are doing here.Report
Well, I remember being told “no”.
I remember that I had a number of chores to do growing up. I started at least at 13 and probably earlier:
1) split the wood and stack it on the deck (as needed) so there was wood to heat the house.
2) Rototill the garden in the spring.
3) Feed the quail daily.
4) Dig up the septic tank so it could be pumped.
5) Do my own laundry.
6) Cut the grass
7) Go with the family to cut the logs thinned by Boise Cascade, pile them in the pickup, and stack them to be aged on the woodpile.
8) Helping Mom can fruit, venison, tuna, etc. that we killed, bought, caught, picked, etc. And with misc. cleaning, etc. of the house/garage.
9) I remember my dad telling me “you need a part time job, find one or I will find one for you.”. He did that twice, at about 16 and 18. He found both of these jobs for me. The first job was stacking bales of wheat riding behind a bailer for 12 hours a day 6 days a week—midnight to noon. The second was working on the assembly line making cars for 10 hours a day, 6 days a week, and every other Sunday. I got the “opportunity” with that last job, to help him pay for my college tuition, my car insurance, and the loan on my car that I used to go to the jobs.
I remember talking to my now ex-wife and her sister about our respective childhoods. They told me they played all summer in the alley behind the house in the city and that my parents “treated me like a slave”.
This was all in addition to going to school: Middle, High and College. Grade expectations were 3.5 GPA or higher and I had to take 4 years of math, science, history, and English in high school. Once when I had a trimester where the schedule didn’t allow for the above, I had to take a correspondence course to achieve the requirement.
Yes, my own memories are distorted because I was seeing it through a child’s eyes. Here’s another distorted memory. I was coming back from that wheat farm job, driving along a gravel road in a pickup truck (the one we hauled wood in). The road was in the middle of the side of a canyon (about 50-foot drop). I was speeding and lost control, started fishtailing with the rear tires off the road hanging above the cliff. I managed to gain control, but was lucky. It would have taken days to find my corpse.
Yes, my experience may be different that most, but for the majority of my peers in high school, I had it easy. Most of them worked on the ranches, farms, etc. because they were family operated.Report
You assume today’s kids are not treated as you were. Which is not true.
You assume your upbringing had more positives then negatives and thus us the model to be followed. Which is not ture.
You assume that hard physical labor which you performed creates a certain kind of person who is “better” able to navigate issues, crises and other things. Which isn’t true.Report
Hardness and softness – especially as defined by the likes of Peterson (who wears custom tailored suits and has not, so far as I know, actually done manual labor for any appreciable time in his life) – are poor concepts to use to measure society or progress or much of anything beyond pillows and the mineral content of water. Lifting people out of poverty by breaking generational cycles of lack of education and opportunity is hard work. Educating citizens to be productive in a technology drive century is hard work. As it turns out, protecting democracy is hard work. We, as a nation, still do hard things.
They just aren’t physical things. They don’t require the maintenance of a hierarchy. They are egalitarian. a nd they need both a long time horizon forward to complete, and a long time horizon of backward looking analysis to understand. And the alluring beauty of being reactionaries is you can willfully discard all that in favor of flailing around to preserve a hierarchy so that you can do manual labor and grunt a lot while you do or something.Report
It appears the Biden Administration is eavesdropping on all our conversations about converting empty office buildings to housing:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/27/politics/biden-administration-converting-commercial-properties-residential-use/index.htmlReport
The Traitor Lee meets his fate: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/27/opinion/robert-e-lee-confederate-statues.htmlReport
Sam Bankman-Fried has taken the stand.Report
He gives 20 minutes of word salad when he gets a question he doesn’t like.
How this is supposed to make him look less guilty I don’t understand. He can be clear when he wants to.Report
Like Steve Bannon, he hopes to bury his opponents in an avalanche of sh!t so they give up.Report
“His opponents” will be “everyone listening to him” which includes the jury. That seems unwise.Report
Hen Mazzig is reporting:
There are computer graphics and everything.
Accordingly: There is currently an edit war going on the wikipedia page for the Al-Shifa Hospital. (Full disclosure, my essay on the conflict linked to this wikipedia page as it existed on October 13th.)Report
Has this been corroborated by other sources?Report
The Wikipedia entry links to several in their second paragraph:
Report
I actually believe there is a strong probability that Hamas did use the hospital for military operations, but I am not willing to go so far as to say it is “confirmed” since all the sources for that are by the IDF or outfits affiliated with it.
Right now there is very little information coming out of Gaza that isn’t by one or the other governments. It will probably be a while before we can confirm much of anything.Report
Door to door, block by block?
This feels more like a months or years sort of thing rather than hours or days.Report
From AI, “Abuse” probably means “torture”.Report
Do you like ironic punishment?
If so, have a donut:
Report
the, uh, reference-appropriate comeback would be for her to buy another six laptops and just *hand* them to peopleReport
The Harbor UCLA Family Medicine Residency Program has put out an official statement on the recent goings-on in the Middle East:
Report
The twitter bio says the account is “resident-run” – probably not too significant in terms of institutional engagement.Report
It’s the residency program, though. Who else would run it?Report
The people who run the residency program? As opposed to the people who are in it.
Though from a look at the org’s website, advocacy seems to be baked in, so maybe my objection doesn’t have much merit after all.Report
Well, it looks like they deleted it. Or one of the grown-ups did.Report
I’m in no position to demand justice for the people of Palestine, but I’ll be happy to see it start.Report
The Black Hebrew Israelites and the Pro-Palestinians have started having, erm, “altercations” at the various protests.
We have not yet begun to get really weird.Report
Apparently, the one in Chicago was due to a misunderstanding. The Black Israelites wanted to join with the Pro-Palestinians, but the Pro-Palestinians took the “Israelite” thing at face value and the altercation began.
It will not only get weirder, it will get dumber.Report
Dumber than Black Hebrew Israelites? That’s a faster-than-light or colder-than-absolute-zero kind of thing.Report