should we screencap great posts here over to other hellsites?
i feel like there's a counterproductive asymmetry: we tend to see really clever their-stuff (which, besides the really clever, is a reminder we are segregated away from interesting action), while they tend not to (and so can presume they live in the metropole and are missing nothing that matters).
(ceci n'est pas un post du 1er avril.)
some people celebrate today like it’s special, but i am a fool every day of the year.
@jik correctly or incorrectly, what the piece seems to me to claim is that under the current status quo mass starvation won't happen in southern Gaza, though it will in northern Gaza unless one of the three changes you point to occurs.
@jik i don't think there's any dispute that there's a starvation crisis. its scale is what's at issue. i was under the (mis?)impression that trucks were entering at such a trickle that mass famine, under which a substantial fraction of the population would die, is already inevitable. i think it worth understanding whether that's right or not.
even if it's not, that doesn't imply more aid (esp to N Gaza) isn't urgent. if people take the piece as apology for Israel's actions that's bad.
@Alon Whether it's Israeli military or sub-rosa PA, Israel has to take responsibility for ensuring aid gets through.
@SteveRoth #KevinDrum counts (correctly? reliably? i don't know) how many do get in, not just the number trying.
@jik I guess what I find hopeful in the piece is simply the suggestion that roughly sufficient (to prevent outright death by mass starvation) aid is in fact getting into Southern Gaza at least, where the vast majority of the population now is. I don't know whether that's accurate, but it's better than the impression I had before reading the piece. That doesn't justify any other atrocity, and my view is that Israel is making catastrophic moral and political decisions, for itself and others.
@redoPop @sqrtminusone@emacs.ch They are, but there's a systemic question there: Should they be? Private charity make sense when donors are situated such they they have information outside parties cannot. (A local food bank may be quite different in that way than MSF.) 1/
@redoPop @sqrtminusone@emacs.ch "Institutional charity" is a name we give formal organizations that take on role we think government should take on, but take on inadequately. In that sense, they become quasigovernments. You can argue it is more a forfeit by the state than a usurpation by NGOs, but in any case we end up with many of what ought to be public functions managed by institutions whose incentives and control structure is necessarily plutocratic. 2/
@redoPop @sqrtminusone@emacs.ch The Gates Foundation, on the one hand, does a great deal for public health. On the other hand, it has a pro-intellectual-property agenda and insists upon doing that on terms that reinforce rather than undermine a regime that is arguably (arguably not too) a root cause of the ills its ostensible mission is to fight. 3/
@redoPop @sqrtminusone@emacs.ch What is right and what is wrong on these questions is hard to adjudicate, but what's clear is it's wrong to have wealthy donors decide them (and its wrong that wealthy donors can use philanthropy as indulgences to tidy up all the ill they do to become so wealthy). 4/
@redoPop @sqrtminusone@emacs.ch Institutional charity sets near-term, urgent concerns, where they can absolutely do some good, against longer-term, systemic concerns, where arguably they contribute to, enable, serve as a crutch to, very great evils. 5/
@redoPop @sqrtminusone@emacs.ch This is me making a critique I think broader than the piece we're discussing makes. But if you think that following the piece's critiques to its logical conclusion brings you somewhere near here, I don't disagree. It's where I am for sure. /fin
a useful antidote to the broadbrush narrative that Israel is simply insisting Gaza starve.
i hope #KevinDrum's empirics and moderation are broadly right, but i have very little confidence, the information environment surrounding Israel/Palestine is too thick to cut through.
This post has been taken out of context.
@redoPop @sqrtminusone@emacs.ch I don't think you are reading charitably. I also don't think he's saying that the general idea of optimizing <something> is correct. I read him as very skeptical of outside-wise-third-party as rational optimizer.
Perhaps the most telling bit of the essay is how it concludes, with a plain description of virtuous assistance as mediated through parties socially and informationally integrated with, accountable to, affected by, the people they mean to assist.
@redoPop i don’t read it as a broad argument against charitable giving, but i would make such an argument. in specific instances, charitable giving can be plainly virtuous, but often the “side effects” — both to the putative beneficiaries, but also to third parties — far outweigh the benefits. i favor dramatically curtailing oue current (extraordinarily regressive) subsidy to philanthropy, capping tax deductibility at about $10K per person, 20K per married filing jointly.
@redoPop Has the benefit Effective Altruism done by virtue of bednets distributed etc outweighed the harm it has done by taking a generation of elite-educateds and persuading them that participating in and expanding predatory institutions in order to have fortunes both to give and enjoy is better than trying to reform away the predatory institutions? I can’t in any evidence-based way say, but I do have a view on the question.
@mcc every path meanders. but to fascinating places!
@LouisIngenthron maybe! i’m not worried about it in either case. i don’t think there’s anything inherently horrible if we find we like new ways of interacting with one another more than old ways. i’d be a bit more worried, and sad, if it turns out we prefer to interact with synthetic people optimized to please us than with all-too-human one anothers.
@TURBORETARD9000 @admitsWrongIfProven none of us consented to being born into this often hellhole of a world. postmodern capitalistic oligarchy is a shitty place to live. unfortunately there is no higher power which enforces any right to suffer only the arrangements we consent to. we can be enslaved. many humans have been. the proverbial they can all fuck off, but they don’t. here we are. maybe we can find ways together to make it a bit less awful.
@travisfw is think “nature to us now” is a great metaphor for what in-person interaction might become, is already becoming.
@TURBORETARD9000 @admitsWrongIfProven i guess i think that’s very mistaken. unless you do live entirely self-sufficiently in the woods, the world affects you. and even if you do, if modern supply chains collapse and hundreds of millions are hungry, the woods capable of gently supporting you would quickly become populated and contested. we are all in this together, and the horribly imperfect ways we try to make it work are the only starting point we have.
@TURBORETARD9000 @admitsWrongIfProven we can’t know that, because we can’t know the counterfactuals. but i think your conclusion is way too incautious. the post-war period, first of dual hegemony, then of soke hegemony, for all its real atrocities, many committed by the US, was nevertheless much much safer and more peaceful than the prior half century. 1/
@TURBORETARD9000 @admitsWrongIfProven unmanaged decline in perceived US power and willingness to punish territorial aggression is likely to invite more adventures like Ukraine that undo that remarkable achievement. 2/
@TURBORETARD9000 @admitsWrongIfProven things have gone badly for the US and with the US the last few decades, no doubt. i’d like to find a more multilateral way of enforcing a principled norm against territorial aggression, and suspect that must involve some partnership with China on this one very limited principle to which both powers ostensibly subscribe. 3/
@TURBORETARD9000 @admitsWrongIfProven unfortunately, while the current crises run as hot as they are and the Taiwan status quo is unstable, it will be hard to negotiate that kind of partnership. /fin
money buys petulance. ht @socialsciences https://mastodon.world/@dsrabbithole/112191164974828442
