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@sadolite
If it wasn't for courts being idiotic insurance companies would have no problem distinguishing houses on the sides of hills with ones built on flood plains.
You're right that a situation has developed where they just rebuild the same crappy structures and it disgusts me.
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@Savant
If the goal is to minimize Israeli casualties, should Israel avoid reallocating its funds in a more efficient way solely to avoid escalation? Aggressive measures are more escalatory than defensive measures anyway.
When someone is waging war on your nation, the net minimization of causalities is always to win that war... unless you're willing to surrender and Israel is not.
Thus winning the war is the umbrella category under which spending can be efficient. Anything that does not win the war cannot be the most efficient use.
Hamas and some of their supporters are insane, but not everyone supporting them necessarily is.
Debatable. When people accuse me of being a rapist I say "no I am not".
When you accuse Hamas supporters of supporting rapists they say "you left them no choice" (paraphrasing).
They may transition to sanity in other areas of their life but whatever mode of thinking they are in when they answer that way, it is insane.
Has Israel been concerned with the "right" to attack up to this point? Seems like they've been making their own rules regardless of what the UN has to say about it.
lol, it almost sounded like you were implying that the right to defend yourself is a privilege granted at the whims of the UN. Funny.
It could be argued that Israel already has the right to attack Iran. I am not saying international opinion is meaningless, I am saying the Israel haters wouldn't have a leg to stand on nor would the internal nutjobs in Israel who can't seem to learn from sixty years of recent history.
You don't need to drop bombs when you occupy the region.So given either of our plans, Israel doesn't need to keep dropping bombs.
Israel does not occupy the land they are dropping bombs on.
And a D-day invasion scenario is much easier said than done. "Just do an invasion" is a much riskier plan than missile defense.
D day was a meticulously planned attack informed by years of war. I doubt the Israeli military just started thinking up options five minutes ago. They are invading, but they don't occupy it all.
All I am saying is that the death will continue if they fail to push all the way to the recognized national borders of someone with something to lose e.g. Eygpt. It will also all be for nothing if they withdraw.
but even if just half of the support for war against Israel is based in part on Israel's counterattacks, Hamas losing support from that half would flip the majority of the population against them.
lol, turn the other cheek on a national scale. What could go wrong? Oh wait 10/7, after turn the cheek number #500.
Shall we put together a list of acts of war that Israel did not kill anyone innocent over? It's a long list.
Wars are won when there is nothing but despair in the hearts of the enemy and the enemy is everyone who voted for HamasYou're assuming that Hamas' supporters are afraid of death, which they aren't really. It makes them mad, not scared.
I am not assuming anything. There are always some who are willing to die as opposed to merely risk death in war, those people die in war and that is one of the reasons you need to fight when attacked because there are people who will simply not stop until they're dead and if their own people aren't going to stop them you have to.
The Cold War was won without striking fear into the hearts of the enemy
The cold war is an imagined victory. The fallacies at the foundation of the communist worldview destroyed the soviet union.
and proxy wars are another example.
Another example of what?
Even then, it doesn't matter how the enemy feels if you counter all of their attacks.
and it wouldn't be a problem if Israel terraformed Mars and transported their entire nation there continental crust and all... but why talk about impossible solutions?
The idea that you can defend anything against a well planned attack much less let your enemy sit unmolested indefinitely while they import whatever they need to execute any new plan they or anyone in the world can come up with, and that somehow you're going to be able to always be able to counter them to the point of losing no property or lives?
You suggest an unending dance where one side always has to be smarter, always has to spend more, but only needs to make a mistake once to lose.
"Israel is committing genocide" is a widely held opinion in Palestine.
and elsewhere, as was "Jan 6 was an insurrection".
What are they going to escalate their rhetoric to, "No it's actually a genocide now"
the point is that waging war comes with risks
Being slaughtered comes with 'risks' too.
that's probably the best deal Israel is going to get.
Life isn't fair, history isn't fair, people are not being fair in their judgements of Israel. I haven't made comments about just how unfair those judgements might be, I have related my judgement.
I don't know who Israel is "making a deal with" in this sentence, but they can get a much better deal with me and there is no chance of a deal with Hamas.
Wars don't need to end in a deal, that's where the phrase "unconditional surrender" comes from.
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@Savant
They don't need to destroy every terrorist in the middle east. They just need to destroy every active terrorist in Gaza, the West Bank, and anywhere else that the world seems to think doesn't count as a nation that can commit acts of war.If they succeed, I'll reevaluate my position
If they don't, that neither means they didn't have a right to try nor does it mean any other particular strategy would have succeeded given the same investment of resources and/or sacrifice of civility.
I see little reason to believe that Israel is willing to invest enough resources to take over and govern the West Bank (if they don't, there will be more terrorists).
Yes you are certainly correct that if they do not there will be more terrorists. They will simply slip out into barely governed territory (the deserts of Iraq, Syria, Egypt, etc...), wait for things to calm down, come back in, and launch more attacks.
It is the territory itself that is the problem. It's like the high-seas were 16th to 19th centuries, a place where privateers can just attack people and the country that built the ship shrugs. The solution then was to patrol the seas and deny them any port, and that is the solution here. Occupation is absolute necessity.
Counter-bombing didn't stop the attacks, it infuriated the enemyIsrael is counter-bombing right now, that's where most of the criticism against them is coming from.
Criticism is coming from irrational hatred combined with naive and blind support of any Muslim agenda. Every other country does the same or worse for far lesser offenses. The United States built tomahawk missile has long been obsolete weapon in fighting major conventional enemies and exist and is used solely as a means of precisely bombing people who piss off the deep state.
Where are the critics there? Oh right they're warmongers so long as their side is the one doing the bombing, or to be more accurate they're war mongers when the puppet press tells them bad guys are being bombed.
D-day made Britain safe again and it was the only permanent solution.So Israel should draft and sacrifice a huge portion of its own population? That would be the equivalent of D-day.
If necessary, but it isn't necessary.
Hamas is easier to defend against but too spread out to completely destroy.
The liars say that Gaza is 'an open air prison' because Israel tries to keep advanced weapons out of the hands of Hamas by monitoring the borders. That lie is used to justify raping people.
That is not a solution.
And even if they were completely eliminated, there's no guarantee we wouldn't see an equivalent terrorist group rise up.
If that terrorist group doesn't have the international legal magic of the psuedonations to launch unprovoked and unavenged attacks from they can sit and stew.
Stopping terrorists from sneaking in to commit terrorist attacks is a problem that all nations especially Israel already have to deal with. The reason children are starving in Gaza is because that is not the only thing Israel has to deal with. They have to deal with terrorists launching artillery from heavily populated urban centers.
So maybe if you are decades ahead and spend a 100 times more than your enemy you can keep them from harming you without killing them, but what a ridiculous idea that a nation ought or must commit to that?Israel is already spending a huge amount, and missile defense is a tiny fraction of its budget.
It will never be cheaper to intercept a missile than it is to build a missile. You either need a missile with superior maneuverability, sensors, and guidance or you need a very accurate very powerful laser weapon that will cost more than tens of thousands of missiles and once you invest in all that they will simply switch to another very cheap form of attack. Such as digging tunnels and planting mines. Such as the 10/7 invasion.
What if they switch from rocket artillery to gun artillery? Now make it a high velocity gun at a shallow angle. Then neither interceptor missiles nor laser weapons will be enough.
If they haven't invested a huge amount into anti-missile systems that only means they understand war better than you appear to. It would be a wasted investment soon enough and if the enemy can force you to keep wasting a 100 times more eventually you will run out of resources.
Again: The idea of a perfect defense has always been fundamentally flawed and the only reason an imperfect facsimile appears feasible in the context is the vast economic and technological difference between Israel and the terrorists.
What happens when someone a little richer starts helping the terrorists? Actually that is apparently already happening with Iran.So we get a bloodless Cold War instead of a bloodbath.
What is bloodless about constant attacks on Israel, many of which succeeded at killing people and would succeed more without the rapid counterattacks?
It would be a bloodless cold war between Israel and Iran IF Israel occupies the attack vectors so that Iran can't attack without giving Israel the right to strike at their homeland infrastructure.
What is making it a very bloody spending war is that Iran can have their weapons and blood money used without watching their civilization crumble.
Not to mention that aggressive measures give more countries reason to oppose Israel,
Appeasing the insane is impossible so there is no reason to factor in hopeless attempts to do so.
You can throw lives at the problem or money at the problem, and only one of those makes the world go round.
You can waste both if you refuse to win the war or use a failing strategy.
Spending becomes tit-for-tat, though. If Iran spends money on missiles and all of them get shot down, why would they keep spending money on missiles?
If their missiles cost $1000 and the Israelis have to spend $100,000 for every missile shot down they would keep building those missiles because Israel will run out of money first.
That translates to loss of quality of life BTW.
Or Iran could make better missiles, and maybe a $10,000 missile can still get through a $100,000/missile defense screen from time to time. Still winning economically but now also killing people.
The allied bombing campaign over nazi germany would never have defeated germany alone but it forced, at least politically, a huge investment of resources in air defense. It was not wasted money even if it didn't work as well as some would have hoped.
multiple Muslim nations descended on Israel with conventional armiesThis is way more likely to happen if Israel continues shooting missiles that result in civilian casualties.
Then rip off the bandaid. You don't need to drop bombs when you occupy the region.
Hamas barely won more seats than Fatah in 2006, and it was widely known that Hamas was a terrorist organization. In other words, there would be no October 7th if just 10% more of the population in Palestine has opposed Hamas in 2006.
Do you think that the general population supports Hamas more now than they did?
Logically one would say that Hamas started a war (via very immoral means) and that war cost much suffering so that was the wrong choice, but humans aren't exactly rational; especially around war.
Humans get angry, want revenge; but voting for Hamas is voting to genocide Israel so if they are going to attack you anyway there is no avoiding making them angry. You have to go all the way. Win the war. Wars are won when there is nothing but despair in the hearts of the enemy and the enemy is everyone who voted for Hamas.
It's the first case I can think of where a government could reliably protect many of its citizens without the uncertainty of war.
With respect to you as a person, that is a delusional statement.
People launching warhead tipped missiles at your country IS by definition WAR.
I don't know what kind of twisted propaganda has led you to a thought process where you thought random artillery strikes was a state of peace, lacking the uncertainty of war, but it's a frightening thing to see a person believe.
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@Savant
End the war quickly, occupy the regionOne can only hope Israel actually has feasible plans to fully occupy the region and destroy every terrorist in the Middle East, despite multiple world superpowers trying and failing to do just that. Otherwise, the war won't end, and most of this will be for nothing.
They don't need to destroy every terrorist in the middle east. They just need to destroy every active terrorist in Gaza, the West Bank, and anywhere else that the world seems to think doesn't count as a nation that can commit acts of war.
If Egypt starts lobbing artillery at Israel or Greece or any other country that is a clear act of war. One would hope that counter attacks would not be condemned but regardless real nations have a lot to lose. You cut their power grid, blow their dams, mine their ports and they self-destruct.
The unique quality of the terrorists is that they don't care if civilization falls so long as they hurt who they hate. Egyptians may hate Israel but they don't hate Israel more than they love their children. Something that cannot be said for too many of the inhabitants of Gaza and the West Bank.
Not winning this is not an option.It might be the only option, depending on what you consider "winning."
Let me define winning: people stop launching coordinated attacks on your population like an active volcano that goes off every 10 years.
If that isn't one of the non-negotiable reasons for governments to exist I don't know what is.
If winning means a long-term peace where terrorists no longer fire rockets at Israel, then it's probably a pipe dream for the foreseeable future.
Killing everyone in Gaza would pretty much do it. The global alliance of loonies who hate Israel basically act like that's what's happening anyway.
In less civilized times that would have been done on unprovoked attack #3 (who knows what the current count is). I have done some light reading on the various crusades and in general both sides were more civil than what we have seen Israel endure. If a crusader king's army had set out to rape and murder people and mutilate murdered babies there would be zero quarter and the same is true of jihadists. If they repeatedly agreed to truces and broke them there would be no further truces. They didn't act that way because they had moral code and because they damn well knew their enemy would escalate all the way to the top.
I am stunned at how many people think Israel's restraint is anything but absolutely unprecedented in human history. It's a macroscopic example of "never been punched" syndrome. In case it isn't clear, there is so much more I would have failed to condemn from Israel than what they have apparently done (which is building by building destruction with warnings when they knew there were civilians).
Israel's only consistently successful measures to protect their people have been missile defense systems.
The United Kingdom's only successful defense against the Luftwaffe was the RAF when there was nothing else they could do, but nobody at that time was insane enough to believe that any nation could survive or should tolerate constant attack.
Counter-bombing didn't stop the attacks, it infuriated the enemy.
D-day made Britain safe again and it was the only permanent solution.
If either side wanted to greatly reduce Israeli and Palestinian casualties in the long term, they could.
The terrorists are the only ones who can end the fighting without simply shifting the casualties to civilians. When Israel winds down military presence 10/7 happens. This isn't a misunderstanding, this is hate, and it will not end so long as the people who can't let go of hate draw breath.
It's a bit more difficult for Israel, but still doable if they have an interest in doing so (not saying they necessarily do). Pouring funding into those is probably the best they're going to get, but maybe I'm a pessimist.
The idea of a perfect defense has always been fundamentally flawed and the only reason an imperfect facsimile appears feasible in the context is the vast economic and technological difference between Israel and the terrorists.
So maybe if you are decades ahead and spend a 100 times more than your enemy you can keep them from harming you without killing them, but what a ridiculous idea that a nation ought or must commit to that?
What happens when someone a little richer starts helping the terrorists? Actually that is apparently already happening with Iran.
What happened when multiple Muslim nations descended on Israel with conventional armies? Did Israel have some secret wonder-weapon that put an energy shield around the country?
No, they fought a pitched decisive battle with modern offensive weapons and when the enemy could no longer respond to being out maneuvered they were driven back. Israel can force wars to fall into that category again by annexing these pseudo-nations that it gave back in (what history has proven) to be the first of many naive acts of good faith.
there is no nation and no household on Earth that wouldn't respond to rocket artillery (to say the least) with warThere's no nation that hasn't paid a huge price for waging war either.
Yet they always pay because if you do nothing you lose everything. There may be examples where a government is so loose and pathetic that it didn't even bother to surrender but those must be counted as total failures.
At least in surrender there is one final responsible act.
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@WyIted
Some of the criticism of Israel is that they are doing things quick and dirty instead of trying to engage in a war that lasts 100 years but looks less ugly.
... but war is always ugly.
I would argue that the net minimum damage to utility heavily favors a shorter war when it can be controlled. There is a balance here since "shorten the war" can be used to excuse anything (see nuking two city centers when you had the sea-lanes blockaded and they had no uranium or oil).
In Gaza what is going on in exact detail is very hard for an American or European internet surfer to know, but in general what is happening is pretty clear: People are starving and being crushed by buildings because there are bunch of terrorists running around preventing the normal operation of civilization and using the normal structures of civilization as bunkers.
The balance of utility in this case is absolutely clear: End the war quickly, occupy the region. The suffering will only end when there are no more corners to hide in.
That it's gone on this long is already suboptimal. They already do drop leaflets and broadcast intentions, but what they need to be saying is that "this is our front line, if you aren't a terrorist get on our side or your life is forfeit."
Then they need to carry through and obliterate any structure that they receive fire from. It's a "preliminary investment", there is no point sending food and building apartment buildings while there are still terrorists intercepting the food and using apartment buildings as bunkers. Not winning this is not an option. Anyone who thinks it is an option is either a pacifist or a hypocrite because there is no nation and no household on Earth that wouldn't respond to rocket artillery (to say the least) with war.
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@Owen_T
I think it would be funny if they added the ten commandments ontop of the racial pride flag and put that in classrooms (because they already put the racial pride flag in classroom, there are photos).Louisiana now requires the ten commandments on a small poster in each classroom. What do you all think about this?
That way you can get all the religion out of the way with a single print job.
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@Greyparrot
@Sidewalker
you can't reason with the cult.
No you cannot.
Cult:
nazi's were rioting. When asked to condemn the nazi's, he would only say there was very fine people on both sides.
Reason:
This video proves beyond reasonable doubt that he condemned nazis.
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@Greyparrot
Go read some history on Rome instead of porn.
It's not his fault they haven't made a pornographic historically accurate video game about Rome, where every woman looks identical to Melania Trump.
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@Greyparrot
lol the framing of this question is ridiculous.
Translation: Why would I address reality when I have a fantasy I could talk about?
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@Greyparrot
You [HistoryBuff] of all people should know better than to support arbitrary subsidies that lead to crony capitalism.
I haven't seen any indication that he knows anything better than anyone.
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@HistoryBuff
When you're willing to ignore obvious facts being precise doesn't help much.
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@HistoryBuff
how can I know what i'm talking about
Can't help you there.
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@HistoryBuff
from thievesElon wants to protect his own little fief
no idea what you're even talking about.
You have no idea what you're talking about either.
When asked to condemn the nazi's, he would only say there was very fine people on both sides.
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@HistoryBuff
I saw this. It's very honorable on his part and the way real capitalists are supposed to be.honorable? What about that was honorable?
Refusing to accept stolen goods is honorable.
His views are anti-competitive.
Nothing quite as fair and competitive as stealing and giving the money to "competitors", surely an economy based on that practice will bring prosperity to all. *looks out window, sees everything burning* right...
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@Greyparrot
I saw it. Awkwardly channeling John Galt.
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@WyIted
I will send the video and reserve the right to say "It's treason then?"BTW. Anyone who routinely sees this from ramaswamy and does not vote for him in 2028 is a traitor to the country
To which they may respond "the senate will decide your fate", which means stalemate, but any other response means I win.
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@WyIted
For example it [QM] says future choices can effect past events
That is neither implied nor required by any experiment or theory of QM.
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@WyIted
It is unnerving but the good thing is that it makes murder and rape ethical
It makes murder and rape probably ethical, for all you know through enormous coincidence your victim made the 'right' choices to be in your universe at the time of the crime.
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@Best.Korea
Me being run by my brain = me having no control over what brain I have or what is brain programmed to choose, thus no ability to choose.
You being the program.
The computer does not determine the software, the computer executes the software. If you identify as the software, you are the physical determinant. Hence free will.
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@WyIted
...but can turn into an NPC at any moment?I would think that individual universes could overlap so it isn't necessarily true that everyone is an NPC
Somehow that's worse.
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@WyIted
An infinite number of philosophical zombies, what a comforting thought. Wouldn't that imply that the people you interact with are also philosophical zombies and every person is alone in their constantly shifting universe?
You should write sci-fi horror, but hey free will is apparently still in play for some reason.
FYI I consider this definition of free will as "that which determines outcome but which is neither predictable nor random" to be useless (self-contradictory). You are something, be it spirit or flesh and that something must either be predictable or random or some hybrid of the two.
If I have to choose between being a random algorithm and a predictable algorithm of course I choose predictable. There is beauty to be found in order.
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@Best.Korea
When you accept that you are a program being run by your brain, it is not a contradiction to say your free will is part of that program.
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@WyIted
You've got a lot of distinct concepts melding with each other in this post. I attempt to clarify, this is not me saying you are saying this, I'm saying this:
Nature vs Nurture, personal responsibility vs environmental responsibility, the infinite dimensions of comparison each with its own equality of outcome vs opportunity.
Tabula rasa does mean 'blank slate', it doesn't mean "equal" it means "empty, unbound, not-predetermined" and it refers specifically to conceptual frameworks and related instincts.
It's been pretty much proven false as an absolute statement and it would be a very surprising state of affairs if it was absolutely true given our evolutionary past is full of hard coded biological responses.
That does not make it a useless concept though, it is substantially true when compared to other animals and as a concept it leads to insight because the vast majority of human cultures have presumed the opposite and have been wrong as evidenced by the range of "human nature" shown by the total set of humanity.
In other words cultures, especially isolated ones, tend to think that the way they see the world and themselves is the only way, that it's natural, instinctual, permanent, reliable, and insusceptible to improvement or degradation. They are wrong. There are inbuilt behaviors but they are not nearly as strong or as specific as people want to think. No matter how many times they say "that's just the way things are", or "this is a transcendental truth" that doesn't make it so.
Now there is an equality in the idea that babies are all empty vessels, but the concept of tabula rasa does not make any claims about what fills the container, so if males go around beating each other senseless because of instinct that belief does not directly contradict tabula rasa even if it seems counter-intuitive that biology strongly biases the lessons that are learned.
Nature vs nurture is a different but related metric. Saying "100% environmental" is making a claim about nature vs nurture, specifically that it's all nurture. 100% genetic would be claiming that it's all nature.
The negation of tabula rasa is definitely claiming that nature is >= 0%. That is the factor of nature cannot be less than the inbuilt perceptions and concepts we are all born with.
Nature vs nurture as a concept precludes the will or absorbs it into one side or the other. When 'conservatives' say "pull yourself up by the bootstraps" they are defying the dichotomy entirely by invoking the will.
i.e. there is nature, there is nurture, and then there is what you choose. Those who insist on the dichotomy for the purposes of statistical analysis would call that idea a form of nurture.
Regardless people seeking to absolve themselves of responsibility are very comfortable with the dichotomy because they think it means there never really was such a thing as a choice.
The modern left-tribe is a conceptual mess with tons of contradictions, but they do occasionally throw back to previous assertions and one which they certainly do like is the rejection of genetic determinism. Genetic determinism was the foundation of the racist fallacy and the left-tribe sees themselves as the white knight that defeated racism. (again they can't keep any story straight these days so they don't mind saying melanin makes you compassionate)
Under the 100% rejection of genetic determinism comes the 100% rejection of nature as a factor. It can only be environmental.
Within that scope they also tend to reject the will (or personal responsibility).
That leaves "Born equal, no concepts, all taught to you, nothing is your fault"
So your conclusion is correct, but as I said at the start; it's at least three different concepts working together to get there.
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@ebuc
You are insane and you are using sabotaging scientific literacy by randomly combining concepts you do not understand and which in no way relate to any possible interpretation of your conclusions.
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@Best.Korea
Its not an entirely different conversation. Its literally the topic. But I guess trying to change the topic when you cant attack it in other way is a popular strategy on this forum site.
He didn't change the topic, he picked one way in which you were wrong without addressing the others. A subtopic.
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@WyIted
The imperfections of mankind in general are a constant theme in the bibleYeah but this guy really pisses me off for some reason. Part of it is because God seems to prefer him over his brother, and his brother is forgiving and honorable and hard working and it's just like WTF?
The idea pisses you off or do you actually believe in god and actually believe god was unjust?
I don't believe in that god or any other unprovable but disprovable and disproven god, there are contradictions; but as long as you believe in heaven it's easy to say "well that was just earthly injustice, things worked out in the end".
It's almost like God showing off. I am going to take the biggest pieces of shits I can find and just turn them into tools for my purposes.
Well, you're glossing over all the virtues of these characters.
You're also ignoring the possibility that these people lived in really nasty cultures and maybe they weren't even below average for morality. In the other thread you have Swagnarok straight faced excommunicating the entire Russian orthodox church because it refuses to admit Putin is the antichrist and should be tortured to death already.
Paul didn't kill people for pleasure, he was a zealot; which in my opinion isn't that much worse than a soldier fighting for the wrong cause. Moses's homicide was a little more than simple murder.
One day, after Moses had grown up, he went out to his people and saw their forced labor. He saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his kinsfolk. 12 He looked this way and that, and seeing no one he killed the Egyptian and hid him in the sand. 13 When he went out the next day, he saw two Hebrews fighting; and he said to the one who was in the wrong, “Why do you strike your fellow Hebrew?” 14 He answered, “Who made you a ruler and judge over us? Do you mean to kill me as you killed the Egyptian?” Then Moses was afraid and thought, “Surely the thing is known.” 15 When Pharaoh heard of it, he sought to kill Moses.
But Moses fled from Pharaoh. He settled in the land of Midian, and sat down by a well.
Being infuriated at a cruel slaver isn't the height of depravity.
It's not that I'm condoning any of it. I'm saying the average person is far less noble than you seem to imply by placing these people far below them. It's more like most people are too lazy or cowardly to even take up a misguided mission.
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@ebuc
Maybe I've been looking at this all the wrong way. Maybe I should be compiling all this so that I can cause physicists head to explode, a form of blackmail.
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@WyIted
I am not going to lie. It is kind of inspirational. To think you can be a terrible person but God can still bless you if you are part of his plan.
It was a little baitey to say "the first Jew".
The imperfections of mankind in general are a constant theme in the bible. I've seen many stories that are more preachy than the bible (which is funny to think about).
There are two great mistakes in literature: To have perfect characters and the opposite extreme of having no heroic elements in any characters.
Man cannot see himself in a flawless being or a hopeless being.
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@Best.Korea
Try this on X, I think you will get a lot more attention.
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@Best.Korea
No, I cant really imagine what animal species would it be justified to use violence and cruelty against.
Malaria parasites.
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@WyIted
Thoughts on my expert economic analysis of some of the motivations behind champagne socialists
I think it's not wrong but it's off target.
Yes it's about controlling the whole society, but their enemy isn't the working class; they know they need only own the press to control them. Those "new money" people are their only real fear. They pursue policies of government control for the same reason cancer patients are given deadly radiation: the bulk of the cells can survive, the cancer has less of a chance.
So Lockheed Martin or Boeing which have thousands of people dedicated to managing government regulations and doing the rain dance for government contracts are slightly hurt by all of that but a startup with a 100 employees can't survive it at all. Even with much better quality product, much more loyal (and well paid) employees, the startup will still eventually fail because of the overhead.
This is true in any heavily regulated industry and doubly true in a heavily regulated industry in which government is a major consumer.
Now "old money" is a generalization, some old money still exists from the age of the self-made inventor/owner and they just did well at maintaining their wealth through stock and bank choices. The vast majority of "champagne socialists" I believe are actively engaged in the thought process I describe and would gladly give "the poor" what "the poor" think they want if they were to retain their choke-hold on competition.
After all they own the means of production. As long as that is true government programs come and get bigger and it doesn't matter because they will always have the biggest faucet.
What they find threatening in the libertarian or new populist right isn't that it attracts working class people it's that it threatens their income sources via deregulation and reduction of government racketeering (big pharma, big military, big aerospace, big education, etc...)
The Laissez Faire Libertarian types really don't care or don't realize that without the social safety nets and with new players to compete with old money, you have a destabilizing effect on society.
Social safety nets have nothing to do with stability. Prosperity makes nations stable. Social safety nets are about individual compassion.
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@Greyparrot
A big problem with Ubi and poverty in general is that it fails to account for the varying levels of budgeting mismanagement and poor lifestyle choices. While it seems romantic to believe all poverty is a simple income calculus, failing to address these factors simply means poverty is never alleviated. Comparing the amount of money spent on the war on poverty since 1965 and the corresponding poverty rate should be evidence enough to confirm this. Delayed gratification is a major source of wealth generation and wealth security at all income levels. That's a cultural value that Ubi can never provide. In fact, it may well be an incentive against developing it.
I agree with all of that. I've known poor people and several homeless people (which I think we can agree is severe poverty when it's not by choice).
They were all homeless/very poor for a reason. I paid one guy $4000 to do a job. He did it well, he worked hard, but in two months he was asking to borrow $20 again. Some people just don't know how to invest, and I don't mean invest in stocks, just something as simple as buying a beat up car and some clothes so they can look for jobs farther than they can walk.
At the same time the line between poverty and just getting by is shifted severely by government theft and threats. I'm sure the large majority of people currently homeless would have somewhere to live without it. I am not saying they'd be rich or comfortable, it it wouldn't be nearly the crisis it is.
You can't separate UBI from the policy of theft which makes it possible (in any extant society). The question of whether it hurts more than it helps was always a decided "yes" in my opinion but I am surprised that these studies couldn't even find an average improvement in net worth. I expected at least a small positive feedback.
If true this reinforces my belief that the only real way to help these people is to get them the hell out of the culture and environment they've been raised in. Get away from cities and dense populations where it's all about favors, enemies, and allies. I know many would not take it, they are not people who have a lot of ambition or self-control; but I would at least try and offer individual farms (plots where enough food could be grown for themselves, not for profit) and then give them a minimal UBI.
Of course I am not talking about the mentally disabled, they've always been a problem and always will be; at least until a true medical cure is found.
Of course I am not talking about the mentally disabled, they've always been a problem and always will be; at least until a true medical cure is found.
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@zedvictor4
Time has a beginning, space has a point of origin.This is an opinion.
Those are oxymorons, or to use a more specific term that Rand liked: contradictions in terms.
"beginning" is a concept that presumes time.
"point" is a concept that presumes space.
Saying there is a "beginning of time" is no different from saying there is a "distance from meters"
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@Best.Korea
I reject the terminology because it aims to seize a definition which already has bad connotations for no reason.
Anarchy has a lot of baggage with it, it invokes the idea of roaming bands of thugs, of the immediate collapse of a civilization. Just as it invoked that image in the first poster (zed).
If you have a moral system and you intend to create a system to enforce it, that is not what people call anarchy. If you refuse to call it government at least call it civilization.
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@WyIted
So you think those studies weren't conclusive?
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No deep dive from me, just an interesting 'mystery' and wondered if this makes sense to anyone.
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@Best.Korea
hey google...Time has a beginning, space has a point of origin.Property doesnt have beginning, as all property was obtained by stealing things which dont belong to you.
Yes?
What is the definition of "oxymoron"?
....
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@Best.Korea
Time has a beginning, space has a point of origin.Yes. Property is theft.
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@ebuc
Which side of the bisected torus is this god in?A vote for Trumpet is a vote for the evangelical God
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@n8nrgim
how did trump as president help the average person?
Governments hurt people. Trump's actions, but primarily inactions, as POTUS hurt people less. People help themselves, unless something like the government prevents them.
do you guys remember this thread?
No
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@Best.Korea
Free to me, not to you, and if to you then not to someone else.For those who aren't: nothing is free but the sun and skyIf I give you a banana and you dont pay for it, then you got a banana for free since you didnt pay for it.
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You are insane.
For those who aren't: nothing is free but the sun and sky
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@Double_R
Wow, a man who's greatest asset is his ability to con people
rofl, he was secret hitler all along, COMEON MANNN!
hold on, oh there it comes: rofl
I guess you can add me to the deep state list of yours then.
I don't doubt that you would participate.
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@Swagnarok
It brings to mind Srebrenica or Bucha, or the Einsatzgruppen going from village to village in Eastern Europe shooting unarmed Jews and Gypsies.
Yes... something that had to be proven to the public. Not just "look what uniform you are wearing, 40 years for what I think you probably did"
It's worth saying that the Russians do indiscriminately bomb Ukrainian cities, and Ukrainian civilians do die in these attacks.
Even if I believed that, if area bombing made a soldier a war criminal then what do you call RAF bomber command?
Do you have pilots as prisoners? Artillery crew? No you have paratroopers and infantry. So now the war crime is to be in the same army as people who commit war-crimes (that didn't use to be warcrimes).
But morally speaking, anyone who kills a Ukrainian soldier who didn't want to fight and would've rathered live in peace is a murderer.
Almost all soldiers would rather live in peace. When you can see through every piece of propaganda and escape a draft you'd be in a better position to judge.
Given how dogmatic you seem about the rest I have more than a little doubt about the mechanism by which you know (as opposed to have been told) there was no provocation.Given that Russia started this war, the burden was on them to prove that a provocation happened.
I've seen more evidence that neo-nazis armed and condoned by the Ukrainian government attacked people on the Donbas than I've seen evidence of nuclear or biological weapons in Iraq.
The question is, do you care about proof?
Russia itself has a few neo-Nazi paramilitaries, but like in Ukraine they don't control the government
Does the government (of Russia) accidentally post photos of them with their nazi symbology? (because the government of Ukraine did) That would be interesting. This is all extra hilarious when you contrast it to people in the US desperately trying to call any right-tribe milita nazi and pointing to a symbol like the gadsden flag.
Did the government of Russia send an original nazi to the Canadian parliament to promote support for their war effort?
All Iraq needed to do was be mean and apparently fail to track down terrorists in its territory and that counts as "provocation".Or, you know, be led by a bloodthirsty megalomanic who already tried to annex Kuwait, who used chemical weapons on his own people, who led his country down a disastrous path of international isolation that saw half a million Iraqis starve to death,
Like I said, he was mean. If the target is evil the attack is justified. I actually agree with that, but there is no such international law and I am certainly not convinced that Russia didn't see evil in what was happening in Kiev and the Donbas.
and who (as confirmed by the US government post-2003) tried to maintain the infrastructure to rebuild his WMD stockpile after sanctions were lifted.
Those "WMDs" were chemical. Calling mustard gas a "WMD" is bordering on absurdity. Tabun is worse but half as toxic as sarin which I would consider the weakest possible weapon that could be classed a "WMD".
"infrastructure" So the provocation was "He had roads and buildings and stuff"
I don't know about you, but to me this sounds like the polar opposite of a Christian church.
So you're not christian if you aren't moral according to Swagnarok. A better argument would be that you aren't christian unless you're a pacifist, of course then that would mean there are barely any Christians.
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@Double_R
correction: people creating unprecedented circumstances.Right, Trump is just such a normal guy.
Better than normal before opposing the deep state: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCFtiqzFCLg
"[he has] A will to risk to make things better" - Jessie Jackson
"He's a serious person, who is an effective builder" - Jessie Jackson
"He should run for president" - Oprah Winfrey
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@Swagnarok
They took part in an illegal, unprovoked war of aggression. I'm using moral language here, not legal.
Well "illegal" isn't really moral language.
Given how dogmatic you seem about the rest I have more than a little doubt about the mechanism by which you know (as opposed to have been told) there was no provocation.
All Iraq needed to do was be mean and apparently fail to track down terrorists in its territory and that counts as "provocation".
This is legal for them to do; for example, Canada slapped the Proud Boys with this label a few years ago despite a lack of actual terrorist acts or plots by this group.
"this is legal for them to do, look at when they didn't care about the facts". I'm all about the golden rule but the ROC is not the one who designated the proud boys terrorists.
All properties of the ROC in Europe and Canada should be seized and handed over to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU). Ideally, the OCU would assign priests, bishops, and abbots who are against Russia's war in Ukraine.
Why not the USA? Something about one of those pesky rules and regulations in the bill of freaking rights?
ROC is not a Christian church in any sense of the word.
You have really been taking a bath in that propaganda. Have they renounced Jesus Christ as the son of god and savior of the world? Or is the issue that they have political commentary you disagree with?
Finally, pursuant to the above, the West should grant asylum to top officials of the OCU should Ukraine fall to the Russian invaders
It would be hilarious if after letting in a millions of people fleeing from poverty, a few priests couldn't get in.
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