policy tends to get enacted about 20 years after it really seemed like a good idea.
there was an electron at the lecturn and a chicken in the kitchen. a librarian embraced a libertarian.
@franktaber@mas.to Yes. It is, um, disarming to see how "small" (of course there is no such thing as small, because every human death is a tragedy, not a statistic) Gaza is relative to things we hardly took note of. I'm not sure social media is the discriminator though. We had very vibrant social media under Trump, yet perceived almost not at all the carnage under his administration. It was an era of "peace", as far as the zeitgeist was concerned, though not to those in Raqqa or Mosul.
@franktaber@mas.to I really appreciate the exercise! It is very challenging. Ultimately the US has been in a policing role since World War II, and there are a lot of parallels with the trickiness of judging police violence. On the one hand, it’s primarily facie bad. On the other hand, there may be complex tradeoffs between this form of violence and other violence that would occur under, say, abolition. 1/
@franktaber@mas.to Improving the situation requires disentangling the kind of violence that “pays off” in terms of a greater peace from violence that is unnecessary or even counterproductive to achieving that broader peace. And since we can’t observe the counterfactuals, those distinctions become unanswerably contentious. /fin
@franktaber@mas.to supporting one side of a civil war is defending some party, at cost of potentially greater bloodshed if the other party simply were to win. similar to Ukraine. there’d be less (near-term) bloodshed if the West simply conceded Ukraine to Russia. but thay doesn’t mean that it’d be the right choice. again, it’s very hard to disentangle virtuous vs leas virtuous military behavior.
@franktaber@mas.to I think it’s an admirable exercise, but very challenging! Was Iraq I offsensive or defensive? Defensive only to the original Kuwaiti border? Was Korea defensive until the 38th parallel? Vietnam was in defense of S Vietnam. I think it’s ultimately a set of questions too hard to answer, combat can’t really be divided into offensive vs defensive, it’s ultimately how much death & destruction with US action vs an unobservable counterfactual without.
@franktaber@mas.to what’s the definition of “offensive combat”? why is Yemen included but Ukraine excluded, for example?
do you value integrations?
when i am part of “undisclosed recipients” i feel like i’m a super spy.
it’s okay if you’re not enjoying yourself. AI can do that for you.
hell is gamified.
@artlung i really do think Elmer's should come out with a cookbook.
@Alon (i thought the longer discussion of the role of infrastructure as simultaneously political and antipolitical factional fait accompli, and then dueling, perhaps impractical, infrastructure schemes of let's-call-it-saudi vs iranian blocs might interest you.)
"I sometimes think that 'anti-colonialism,' the sort that breeds leadership from Papa Doc to Yahya Sinwar, is the final poisonous fruit of the European colonial project." #RobertFarley https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2024/05/the-puzzle-of-hispaniola
powerful interests are dependent upon our society’s pathologies and so defend and entrench them.
if the UK can call snap elections why not Israel?
Unlock a free trial.
i feel like the presidential election is a tontine.
irrefutable proof of extraterrestrial life ht @artcollisions https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@jupiter/112491133301956806