"Press reports that US air drops resulted in civilian casualties on the ground are false, as we've confirmed that all of our aid bundles landed safely on the ground,” Ryder said during a press briefing.
...Emphasis on *US* air drops. There were five other countries sending supplies. U.S. Central Command didn't deny that there were deaths, they only claimed they weren't responsible. https://twitter.com/CENTCOM/status/1766258494447956386
This whole war just makes me so sad. All of the propaganda that "Jews are white and Palestinians are brown" is ridiculous, Jews and Palestinians are cousins. Whenever I see pictures of Palestinian children, they look just like many Jewish children I've met. And when I read stories about the Israeli hostages in Gaza, they mention Palestinians thinking the hostages are just one of them.
I hate that Iran can so easily pay for cousins to kill each other as part of its proxy war.
I hope in the long term we can achieve some kind of peace settlement that looks like the EU, two states with freedom of movement, and the ability to become a citizen of the other state if you live there a while, learn some Arabic/Hebrew and pass a cultural knowledge test.
I just don't know what the path to that looks like when there is so much animosity. Deprogramming everyone from hating the other side is so difficult. And every civilian killed makes it harder.
But we are cousins. And when our cousins bleed, we bleed too. We must never forget that.
"White" and "brown" in socjus lingo have nothing to do with the actual color of skin. Those are code words for "oppressor" and "oppressed", and in reference to the Israel/Palestine clusterfuck these terms make more sense than usual. Of course, they don't help a bit with getting closer to a resolution, but at this point it doesn't seem like anything can.
Which also explains phrasing you see sometimes like "the black face of white supremacy" about a Republican/conservative black man. It's just another place where words are used in some kind of academic way instead of the way that most people will hear it - often, in my opinion, as a type of propaganda. It's a propaganda that is intended for an internal audience, so the people using the terms seem to genuinely see the world that way. It's not false by intention, but as you note, it can be confusing. So "white" doesn't actually have much to do with skin color, but is instead an alternate word for "oppressor class" and can therefore apply to any number of dark skinned individuals and doesn't have to apply to people who have white skin.
I disagree that such propaganda is only intended internally. Publicly using obscure redefinitions of common words is very much a conscious strategy, which pursues a twin aim - to facilitate motte-and-bailey gambits and to demonstrate the power of your ideology/movement through enforced control of language.
I would agree that it's not *only* used internally, and don't know that I could argue how much I think it's meant for internal (and potentially honestly) verses externally and implicitly as a dirty tactic. There are definitely cases, especially in online arguments, where it's used as you're saying.
It is the same all over the world. We Anatolian Turks once knew the Armenians as millet-i sadıka, the loyal nation. Some of our greatest government officials were Ottoman Armenians. Our food is similar*, our music is similar, our culture is similar.
You cannot physically distinguish us. We Turks like to say that we originated in Central Asia, but that's not completely true. We're also the last remnants of old Anatolian civilizations that were successively Hellenized, Romanized and Islamized (in Armenia's case Russified) before striking out on our own.
Our languages are intertwined. My favorite example is the cymbal company Zildjian: zil is potentially derived from the Persian زیر, -dji is the old Turkish suffix for professions (-ci is the modern orthography), and -ian is the Armenian -յան.
Yet once the Balkans broke off we reasoned that Armenians could too, and to prevent that possibilty we massacred them by the million. Brother killing brother is what it is, and still it incenses me to see my fellow Turks say that Armenians deserved it.
(Turks remaining in the Balkans faced a similar tragedy, and that too was brother killing brother. These Turks were not the Porte men that took Christian sons as janissaries and daughters as odalisques, they were ordinary villagers who looked and spoke and lived like everyone else. Did they deserve it too?)
*except narnumru. That culinary monstrosity belongs to Azerbaijan alone, since nobody else wants anything to do with it.
It is instructive to contrast the near-complete silence of the world on the 2023 ethnic cleansing of Nagorno-Karabakh with the uproar about Palestine. I think the war on Nagorno-Karabakh was a much clearer example of the sort of thing that the people protesting the war on Palestine pretend to be against, yet obviously are not.
It *is* instructive, just not in the way that you think.
There's a reason we talk about the *Second* Nagorno-Karabakh War. Because Armenia only conquered the area 20 years before, with massacres and pogroms on both sides. And the area was internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan all along.
In terms of territorial recognition, one major difference is that Israel pursued a two state solution up until the 2000s and continued paying lip service to it even after that, while Azerbaijan never treated Nagorno-Karabakh as anything other than a part of Azerbaijan that had temporarily been seized by rebels.
In terms of humanitarian concerns, it's not exactly great that they expelled the Armenian population, but at least they had a nearby country to flee to, which is not true of the Palestinians. I'm sure Israel wishes they could just expel all the Palestinians and formally annex Gaza and the West Bank once and for all, but there's no Armenia for them.
One other significant difference is that Azerbaijan is an autocratic petrostate while Israel is a "Western" democracy and close ally of the US, which means we expect a lot better of them. It's sort of like how the various constant wars in Africa are a lot worse on a numerical level, but people don't pay much attention because there's no way to stop them other than invading, which would likely make things worse (c.f. Afghanistan). Whereas there's a chance Israel might actually listen to what the US says.
There are similarities between Karabakh and Gaza (foremost, stark ethnic animosity and history of violence), but there are too many things that are different, so they make parallels somewhat inadequate. For example,
- Azerbaijan operated with surgical precision in 2020 (about 100 civilian death on each side, which is very little when contrasted with 3000 and 4000 military deaths). Contrast the ratio of civilian-to-military deaths to that in Israel/Palestine or Ukraine.
- Azerbaijan iterated multiple times that it considers the Armenian population of Karabakh its citizens and laid the framework for gradual reintegration. This fell through because for the 3 years after the 2020 war the Karabakh Armenians continued to refuse to lay down the arms which was part of the Trilateral agreement.
- The departure of the Armenian population from Karabakh cannot be qualified as ethnic cleansing because when we talk about ethnic cleansing we typically mean both brutalization of the population and prevention of return. International observers didn't record brutalization of the civilian population as they were arriving into Armenia, and the Armenian population refuses to return to live as Azerbaijani citizens. "Exodus" or "flight" is a more precise term.
Imagine biting into a handful of pomegranates, except instead of the familiar, refreshing crunchiness of Kishimojin's aborted fetuses, you receive the taste and consistency of sweetcorn instead.
Sure, your smell and taste cortices give the "no poison, well-cooked, this is delicious" signal, but the prediction engine part of your brain is having what is known in the literature as a bruh moment.
Admirable. What I wouldn't give for only 25% of people who have opinions on the conflict to have this specific set of opinions.
> "Jews are white and Palestinians are brown"
I agree it's inflammatory and race-baity in a conflict where people really really do NOT need any more reasons to hate each other, but I think that it's fair to mention that some Israelis/pro-Israel commenters do their own fair share of race-baiting, the most obvious elephant in the room being "chosen people".
> Iran can so easily pay for cousins to kill each other as part of its proxy war.
I have no interest in exonerating Iran's regime, but again I think it's in the interest of balance to say that lots of people pay cousins to kill each other, and that some cousins like it. Insert the long string of statements by Netanyahu and officials from his government or party saying things along the lines of "Hamas is an asset". There is probably no state that has spent more to prolong this conflict than the USA.
> I just don't know what the path to that looks like when there is so much animosity.
Same. Chicken and egg feedback loop: they hate each other because they kill each other, and they kill each other because they hate each other, and each think that they didn't start it.
On the one hand, people have to resist the urge to think that they're important. People are not important, people already created Super-Savant intelligence and it's called nation states and/or corporations, those are what drive human history, they are "Savant" because they're incredibly dumb in things that a human finds trivial, and super-intelligent in others, but always lethal and more powerful than any human or a group of human that can be voluntarily organized. States and Corporations are going to continue to kill people and there is nothing anyone can do about it for a long time, except organize other States and Corporations (which is going to kill other people, sooner or later).
On the other hand, there is *something* a person can do, no guarantee that it will solve anything, but it won't - on the face of it - make anything worse. Those things include learning the 2 languages, talking to people (preferably in their own language) in whatever form (personal, academic, exchange, works of art, ...), and pushing back against the violence piranhas in one's "own side".
I never really understood this line of argument, but maybe you could explain it to me. Surely, Hamas would know to stockpile food and water before the attacks, since they alone knew what was coming. Even if their stockpiles run out, they're still the guys with guns and in positions of authority, and would thus be the last to go hungry, thirsty, cold or with wounds unbandaged.
Thus the implication becomes that Israel and their allies should let hundreds of thousands of women and more than a million children starve until nothing is left.
Well, apparently Hamas succeeded beyond their wildest dreams in the initial attack, they didn't expect the Israeli to be this incompetent. So it's possible that they didn't anticipate this magnitude of response.
The attack was planned to be as provocative as possible. That's usually what terror attacks are for. It would display an uncharacteristic lack of competence on the part of Hamas not to prepare for this contingency.
Iran's other allies (principally Hezbollah in Lebanon) have also been remarkably restrained during Israel's response, which indicates that they aren't really worried about Israel actually succeeding in eliminating one of their most important strategic collaborators.
If you want a city to surrender, you should not provide it with food. Otherwise, the enemy may use the food and aid against you (as Hamas did with all the money, concrete, and other supplies to launch a deadly attack on Israel and to hide themselves in endless tunnels). Providing food and oxygen to the aggressor prolongs the war and suffering, and causes more people to be harmed. If you allow Hamas to win this war by simply surviving (which is all it wants for now), the implications for the region and for millions of lives will be devastating. How do you make this calculus in geopolitics?
Just to be clear, you are describing a war crime. It is not permissible under humanitarian law to use starvation as a weapon. Despite its strategic usefulness.
Fair enough. Although frankly the only reason I mentioned strategic usefulness was to highlight the obscenity of defending war crimes by their strategic usefulness.
You are absolutely right. I mentioned the lack of strategic usefulness because there seems to be a general impression, at least in the US, that committing war crimes and atrocities are often an effective way to achieve strategic objectives. This is very rarely the case. For that reason I want to push back on the strategic usefulness aspect everytime it comes up.
Honestly, I think that banning sieges is not a great idea, and it's not like we didn't do siege in WWII. It's not something to do lightly, but this is one of the ones I look askance at, like the people trying to claim nukes are always a war crime for reasons. Making shit like that war crimes dilutes the word.
I'll preface this by saying that this genuinely isn't a concern troll or what about ism, but what do you think of the blockade of the South in the Civil War, combined with Sherman's March to the sea as part of the US strategy to starve the South? The sense I get from most Americans who are aware of this is that most think it was justifiable to accelerate the end of the war.
Are you so certain that this standard (treating starvation as a war crime) is good for humanity that you're willing to try to shame people out of exploring the possibility that, as a norm, it might actually make matters worse?
Is there some reason to think that our discussion here is changing anything that's happening in Gaza today? If not, this is, indeed an academic discussion.
> It is not permissible under humanitarian law to use starvation as a weapon.
[[citation needed]].
I would argue that belligerents are under no obligation to allow the enemy to provide food to their soldiers. After all, they are free to surrender at any time and become POWs, at which point their captors will have to provide them with nutrition.
On the other side, deploying starvation purely against a civilian population is clearly a war crime.
Any real case falls in between these two extremes. If you have a besieged castle with 200 soldiers and five civilians in it, it would be unreasonable to force the besieger to let through 205 rations a day. If you have ten terrorists hiding in a city, starving the city would not be an acceptable side effect of starving the terrorists.
For example, the 1994 San Remo Manual has the following to say on sea blockades:
> 150. Goods not on the belligerent's contraband list are 'free goods', that is, not subject to capture. As a minimum, 'free goods' shall include the following:
> [...]
> (c) clothing, bedding, essential foodstuffs, and means of shelter for the civilian population in general, and women and children in particular, provided there is not serious reason to believe that such goods will be diverted to other purpose, or that a definite military advantage would accrue to the enemy by their substitution for enemy goods that would thereby become available for military purposes;
Note all the caveats. If you reasonably believe that most of the food surplus from the aid would ultimately feed enemy soldiers, you can confiscate it.
In terms of strategic usefulness, I would guess that starvation is likely more effective than indiscriminate "morale bombings", but less effective than means which specifically target combatants. After all, deaths from bombing are sudden and statistical, no soldier knows in advance "if the conflict goes on, my family will die in a bombing in a month", while they can very well know "my family will starve to death in a month".
Of course, this largely depends on what the enemy can stomach, which is often more than one would expect. Leningrad held out despite a significant part of the population starving. Given that the civilian population is not part of Hamas' utility function, I would expect them to go full Suiyang if starvation impeded their combat effectiveness.
Under these circumstances, deploying starvation is not strategically effective.
I assume that you mean that I forgot to add "civilian population". If so, I find that an obviously disingenuous response to that omission. I have no interest in having a discussion like that. So I will just leave it at a brief reply for other readers. Yes, I meant that weaponisation of starvation of the civilian population is not permissible under humanitarian law. This is not an ambiguous point. There is also no ambiguity of whether the civilian population is facing starvation in Gaza. According to the IPC report from 21 December 2023 (the latest I can find, unfortunately) "[b]etween 24 November and 7 December, over 90% of the population in the Gaza Strip (about 2.08 million people) was estimated to face high levels of acute food insecurity, classified in IPC Phase 3 or above (Crisis or worse). Among these, over 40% of the population (939,000 people) was in Emergency (IPC Phase 4) and over 15% (378,000 people) was in Catastrophe (IPC Phase 5)."
I will concede that as of 1977, starvation is a war crime and not try to nitpick the status of Protocol I.
If Israel acted with the intent to starve Gaza, that is a war crime. The situation would be more complex if they simply insisted to sieve through every sack of grain in search for weapons meant for Hamas, which might be acceptable depending on the observed weapons to grain ratio.
I think the laws of armed conflict tend to ban behaviors which are often not the best military strategy. Before railways, food logistics were a large constraint on the operational capability of land armies. An army was like a locust plague, leaving starving civilians in its path as a natural consequence. In sieges, the question was who would run out of food first. With railways, the ability to supply food is not a bottleneck in most cases. (Still, Protocol I came quite late, the siege of Leningrad was not considered a war crime at the time.) Likewise, the ban on chemical weapons coincided with the third system of warfare, which disfavors such attacks.
Siege in the sense of "no food goes in, no civilians come out, surrender or starve" is a war crime under current law. "No food goes in, civilians are free to leave" is somewhat more ambiguous depending on how realistic the provisions for taking care of departing civilians are.
Superficially, the Israelis have declared evacuation zones and transit routes, and are allowing some food shipments to the evacuation zones. Done right, that should be legal, I think, but there's lots of ways to do it wrong and it's hard to tell from the outside.
From my understanding, Hamas has kept itself well supplied, and so it's only the civilians who are starving. There's certainly an issue with Hamas taking control of aid trucks, but it's not like they're filling rockets up with flour. Besides, Palestinian civilian deaths are bad for Israel on the strategic level, and sacrificing strategy for tactical advantages is how you lose in war.
Even that "let a million children starve" description feels a little bloodless as a response to Mr Gershuni's poem.
Like, what the fuck? His message isn't "providing food to Gaza civilians is a bad trade-off because some of it also goes to Hamas which prolongs the suffering". His message is "any food that reach Gaza is inherently bad because it reaches the enemy", and civilians aren't a consideration. Every single human being in Gaza, whether a twenty year old militant or a five year old child or a pregnant woman is lumped under the "Hamas" label, or "the city" in his other answer. This is textbook dehumanization.
> Every single human being in Gaza, whether a twenty year old militant or a five year old child or a pregnant woman is lumped under the "Hamas" label, or "the city" in his other answer. This is textbook dehumanization.
Hamas is the elected government of Gaza. I thought the whole premise of the international order was that the population of a country can be held accountable for the actions of its leaders. That was certainly the justification for all the Japanese and German civilians who got killed by Allied bombs in the 1940s. Do you have a counterfactual in which Hirohito and Hitler could have been deposed without harming any civilians?
Perhaps the lesson for Palestinians who care about their five year old children and pregnant women is “don’t support leaders who place a zero, or even negative, value on your life”. Which is clearly true of Hamas: they actively engineer the deaths of Palestinian civilians. And they continue to enjoy broad support from the Palestinian people.
If the USA elected a President tomorrow whose platform was, “I am going to have the Army execute one in three American citizens, chosen by lottery”, what would the moral duty of the international community be? Particularly if this President also promised to retaliate against any international interference, and to step up the executions? It is not possible to protect people against their leaders. Did the war hawks not learn that lesson in Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya?
Israel is going to do what it feels it needs to do to protect itself against further hostilities from Hamas. I doubt it will be effective. It will certainly result in horrendous civilian casualties, as we’re already seeing. But what is the alternative you’re proposing? How do you fight against a death cult while somehow preventing its members from dying? People are not gods. They have a right to defend themselves that supersedes any obligation to save a population that has chosen to commit suicide.
I am not Israeli. I am not morally accountable for the actions of their government. And I cannot find a moral justification for condemning their chosen course of action, not that my condemnation would make any difference. I think the Palestinians would do well to reject Hamas and embrace peace with Israel, yes, even in the face of Israeli slaughter of their families. That is what you’re asking the Israelis to do; it’s no more or less absurd to ask the same of the Palestinians. And as between the strong and the weak, the strong can choose love or hatred as they wish, but the weak are much better off embracing the course of love than the course of hatred.
> Hamas is the elected government of Gaza. I thought the whole premise of the international order was that the population of a country can be held accountable for the actions of its leaders.
Most of the population of Gaza were not even *born* when that election happened, yet alone of voting age, and the polling at the time made clear that even the people who voted Hamas into power didn't agree with their hardline stance on Israel and had voted for them only because of Fatah corruption.
Furthermore, much of the reason there hasn't been an election since is that *Israel has prevented one*, as part of Netanyahu's strategy of keeping power split between Hamas and Fatah so nobody has the authority to negotiate for a two-state solution on behalf of the Palestinians. That prevention of an election has gone as far as *literally threatening war against Fatah in 2014* to get an election cancelled. I think it's usually unfair to blame the population for the actions of its government even in a functioning democracy, but it's even worse when most of that population has never had the opportunity to vote in their life, even worse than that when the government they're being blamed for has been imposed on them by a foreign power with the threat of military force, and an utter farce if you are Israel blaming Gazans and you literally ARE the foreign power that has imposed the government on them whose actions you now want to blame them for.
But anyway, if we DO accept that being killed for the actions of your elected leaders is just, then October 7th is just as easily justified as the Israeli response to it is. We end up with a moral system where both sides killing civilians on the other side is morally right. Something has gone deeply wrong there, I think.
> But what is the alternative you’re proposing?
I can't speak for Oliver, but I can answer for myself: allow Palestinians meaningful statehood in exchange for dismantling Hamas. (The offer in 2000 doesn't count. I mean an offer where Palestine: gets a contiguous West Bank territory rather than having cantons surrounded by Israel; gets control of its own airspace; has no Israeli restrictions on goods and people crossing borders with Egypt or Jordan; is not subject to permanent Israeli military occupation; and owns the water that falls on its own territory, rather than having to negotiate a fee with Israeli management companies for its citizens' right to drink water that lands on its own territory.)
As far as I can see it's been an option as long as I've been alive and remains an option now. Israel has just never had a government interested in peace for long enough for it to happen.
From a practical standpoint, if North Korea decided to invade the US, the US would probably destroy the NK government, which would involve a lot of civilian deaths. North Koreans never elected their government, and I don't think it's fair to say that they should be held accountable for the actions of its leader. I think the same is true of Gazans - I don't think *they* should be held accountable for the actions of their leaders, whether they voted for them or not.
It's just that, like in North Korea, from a practical standpoint, there's no way to stop their leaders without killing a lot of civilians. That's always been the situation with wars. It's tragic, but I'm not sure what the alternative is if you buy into the idea that Hamas needs to be dismantled. (I think they do, though I'm less sure that it's *possible*.)
> allow Palestinians meaningful statehood in exchange for dismantling Hamas
Is that something that you think can work *today*? Because, as far as I can tell, Hamas won't even negotiate a temporary ceasefire right now for their own political reasons, and I don't really see them giving up control of Gaza.
> The offer in 2000 doesn't count. [...]
I don't think this is entirely fair. You make it seem as if Israel just gave an empty meaningless offer, which is certainly not the Israeli view of this, but also doesn't appear to be the consensus among outsiders who were part of this process.
As far as I can tell, Israel has multiple times negotiated in good faith to try and reach an agreement, and the Palestinians have never given a counterproposal that represents what *they* want to achieve, and have instead walked away from negotiations. They've also simultaneously started terror attacks that have effectively killed support for a peace process.
> has no Israeli restrictions on goods and people crossing borders with Egypt or Jordan;
The people living in the West Bank don't have restrictions right now on travel to Jordan afaik. From Jordan they can go to anywhere else. The restrictions are on Gaza, because they elected Hamas and started firing rockets at Israel.
> As far as I can see it's been an option as long as I've been alive and remains an option now. Israel has just never had a government interested in peace for long enough for it to happen.
And again you place all the blame on Israel, which is just... not historically accurate. In the 90s and early 2000s, Israel did try to reach a deal, but the Palestinians walked away from it. Israel ended the military occupation of Gaza. The Palestinians started terror attacks and then elected Hamas.
> It's just that, like in North Korea, from a practical standpoint, there's no way to stop their leaders without killing a lot of civilians. That's always been the situation with wars. It's tragic, but I'm not sure what the alternative is
We have no disagreement on principle here, then (even if we disagree on specifics about the Israel/Palestine conflict). I agree with you that a war with good objectives can be justified even though it will kill civilians. That's a different argument - IMO, a very very different one - to the one explicitly expressed by the post I was replying to: that civilians of a country with an evil government are culpable for the government's actions and therefore their deaths in war are not merely justified as a necessary evil for a greater good but rather as a form of holding the civilians "accountable" for their government's actions.
> Is that something that you think can work *today*? Because, as far as I can tell, Hamas won't even negotiate a temporary ceasefire right now
I am not an expert but in my fairly uninformed opinion, yes, surely it would still work? I imagine many Hamas fighters would stop fighting if such a deal were signed with the PA, and you'd surely have plenty of Fatah members and other Palestinians happy to take on the role of policing Gaza and mopping up the remaining Hamas forces if they knew it would mean lasting peace and statehood.
(It's also nonobvious to me how true the characterisation of Hamas as unwilling to negotiate a ceasefire is. The negotiations have happened behind closed doors and we don't really know what the sticking points are.)
> I don't think this is entirely fair. You make it seem as if Israel just gave an empty meaningless offer, but also doesn't appear to be the consensus among outsiders who were part of this process.
I don't think it was entirely empty and meaningless; as far as I can see it amounted to agreeing to preserve the status quo. No more Israeli annexation of land or displacing of Palestinians, but no freedom of movement or trade, no control of their own water supply, and a permanent Israeli military presence on their territory. That might be better than nothing for the Palestinians, if the alternative is that over this century their territory will get eroded away to a fraction of what it was in 2000. But I don't think it's really statehood in the ordinary sense, even if the negotiators used that word for it.
> The people living in the West Bank don't have restrictions right now on travel to Jordan afaik.
That might be true - I don't really know what the status quo is. (https://www.nrc.no/globalassets/pdf/legal-opinions/legal_memo_travelling_abroad.pdf suggests otherwise; it says that Palestinians need Israeli exit permits to leave the West Bank and there's also a secret list of people banned from travelling for security reasons, and that border guards arbitrarily lie to people that they're on the list and turn them back just to fuck with them. But it's from 2016, so might well not be an accurate representation of the situation in 2000 *or* the situation today.)
I'm not sure it matters how liberal the status quo is, though. The point is that Israel insisted on retaining sovereignty over the West Bank's border with Jordan and its airspace as part of the deal, and that they could exploit this in future. Even if they are genuinely liberal about Palestinians travelling today, they were retaining the right to, say, charge $10k per exit permit if Palestinians became wealthy enough for such exploitation to be profitable, or to use import and export tariffs to tap the profits of any successful Palestinian industry. The demand that Israel retain ownership of Palestine's water is similar; it's again a case of the enemy state demanding terms that effectively permit it to arbitrarily tax your citizens in future, meaning a Palestine formed on these terms would not be entitled to the fruits of its own economic growth. Even all that would still be fine if the Israelis didn't ALSO insist that this be a permanent settlement and that Palestine would be bound by the terms to never seek any future improvement of the deal; WITH that clause insisted on, I don't see how Arafat could possibly agree to the terms without it amounting to his consent to the permanent Israeli subjugation of the Palestinian people and throwing away any hope of them achieving meaningful statehood.
> the Palestinians have never given a counterproposal that represents what *they* want to achieve, and have instead walked away from negotiations. They've also simultaneously started terror attacks that have effectively killed support for a peace process.
This is entirely reasonable criticism of the other side and I agree with it. The Palestinians might have a chance of political victory if they had political leaders with moral authority who could outline, publicly, a clear and reasonable set of demands. Alas, this does not seem to be the case.
> Israel did try to reach a deal, but the Palestinians walked away from it
I mean, the Israeli side says this, and the Palestinian side says the Israelis walked away from it. Is there a meaningful sense in which one narrative is more true than the other? What distinguishes the two descriptions of what happened, if anything?
> I think it's usually unfair to blame the population for the actions of its government
I'm not "blaming" anyone. I'm saying this is how the international order works. Most Japanese subjects and German citizens in the 40s were not in any position to choose or even influence the wartime policies of their leaders. Many of them actively opposed such policies. But it is the job the leaders of a people to protect those people. And it is the job of the leaders of a different people to protect those different people. It was not Churchill's job to protect German citizens from the choices made by their own government and the foreseeable consequences of those choices. England was being mercilessly bombed by the Germans, and once it had the opportunity, it responded in kind, and then some. Dresden was a massacre. Tokyo was a massacre. Whose job was it to prevent those massacres? I know my answer: the leaders of the German and Japanese people. They failed, and their people suffered. Oopsy-doopsy. Maybe they'll make better choices next time and fewer of their children will be killed.
I've never had a whole lot of sympathy for the argument that Israel is being held to a higher standard than any other country on earth. But this time, that seems to be exactly what is happening in lefty spaces in the west. How much time have you guys spent complaining online about the actions of the Ethiopians in the Tigray war or the Saudis against Yemen? Yes, this is whataboutism. But I'm not arguing that the Israelis are morally justified. I'm just arguing that I care about what the Israelis do about as much as I care about what the Saudis or Ethiopians or Palestinians do.
The thing is, all this veiled "Oh I'm **merely** saying that's what happens in reality" defenses of Israel are - if we take them at face value - utterly uninteresting.
Nobody here is dumb enough to expect any better from states. The thread is about how to react given that the genocidal state is already doing what it's doing. So yeah, Israel is gonna Israel, but - and this is the important part - if US citizens want their nation-state to not give 4 billion dollars every year in "peace time" or 50+ billions or so in war times, they have every right to. Especially if they - like the very author of the post and the blog - belong to groups like Effective Altruism, which advocate that people should calculate their effect on the world and strive to increase the positive part and decrease the negative part.
"States.... use violence guys", why would you waste the kinetic energy in your fingers to even type this on a keyboard?
> allow Palestinians meaningful statehood in exchange for dismantling Hamas
I think that responding to atrocities with rewards is bad policy.
I would argue that in the Hamas attacks, the Gazans have forfeited their rights to self-determination for at least a generation. After a generation of occupation and deradicalization, with Hamas militants being treated as common criminals (i.e. not as POWs), we can perhaps discuss some degree of self-determination again.
Also, why do you think that would work? Hamas will not accept a peace where they do not control all of what is currently Israel. Few people in Gaza seem to be willing to fight Hamas.
Even if you could convince the Gazans to officially dissolve Hamas, do you really think that they would extradite all Hamas members? If not, they would form Hamas 2.0 soon.
The defeat of Nazi Germany was also a defeat of Nazi Herrenmenschen ideology. And West Germany offered Nazi scumbags good incentives to defect to the CDU and live out their lives without committing further atrocities instead of fighting for a German Empire which seemed plausible to many in 1940 but totally absurd in 1955.
By contrast, Hamas members do not have an ideology which can be empirically disproved on the battlefield -- they were always the underdog. Their goal to eradicate Israel from the map was just as batshit insane when they were founded as it is today.
As long as this ideology festers, Israel would be foolish to give the Gazans more autonomy which they will plausibly use to commit further atrocities.
"I think that responding to atrocities with rewards is bad policy."
You put forward this principle as a reason it's necessary to punish Palestinian civilians for October 7th, but it's also the very same principle that, when applied by the other side, requires committing October 7th in the first place. Even if there's some merit in this principle, at some point it needs to be bent or broken to achieve peace - otherwise you just have two sides both morally obligated to keep killing each other, forever.
According to the "most Palestinians weren't even born" argument, a country could literally do anything that is in their power to do and not face retaliation as long as most of their population isn't allowed/is too young to vote. They just have to make sure that any retaliation would disproportionately (I don't know if that's even a criteria) affect the population, and they're good.
Which is the PR strategy of the Hamas and has been for quite some years.
Great point! Hmm, a snarky implication of the most-of-the-population-didn't-vote-for-this is that the current USA is absolutely blameless for its wars with Native Americans, considering that the wars preceded the right of most of the population to vote, numerically most notably the nineteenth amendment in 1920. Anyone with any grievance with the USA older than that can be declared automatically SOL. :-)
Yes, intentionally targeting civilians is a war crime. If Israel is doing that, they’re committing a war crime.
I’ll bet Israel is committing some war crimes, as happens in every war. I doubt that the war crimes are being ordered from the top as such.
My opinion about all of this is not going to make a difference. I’m having a hard time getting too exercised about it. Powerless groups should not taunt more powerful groups by committing atrocities against innocent civilians from the powerful group. It’s not wise.
But we're not talking about what's wise, we're talking about what's moral. Pro-Israel commenters keep forgetting the is-ought distinction and I'm not sure it's completely unintentional at this point.
You keep saying "war crimes," but why do you think it matters what some organization arbitrarily decided that people aren't allowed to do in war? Especially when the most powerful country in the world has already threatened force if their personnel ever gets prosecuted. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_Protection_Act
The only "justice" that is ultimately upheld is that might makes right. If anyone gets prosecuted for this, it'll be either because they'll be used as a scapegoat and/or the US uses the situation to increase the leverage they have on Israel.
>You keep saying "war crimes," but why do you think it matters what some organization arbitrarily decided that people aren't allowed to do in war?
Seconded!
I've always found it very weird that some diplomats got together and said:
"Killing people with machine guns: GOOD! :-)"
"Killing people with poison gas: BAD! :-("
WTF???
>The only "justice" that is ultimately upheld is that might makes right.
_Almost_ completely agreed. I normally see international law as a farce. The exception is that e.g. Apple and Samsung settled their IP dispute in court, catapulting lawyers at each other, and no one got killed. Under certain restricted circumstances some international disputes get resolved without turning to violence.
Even if one would accept that the death of the Gazan civilian population is an acceptable price to defeat Hamas, starvation is not on the Pareto-frontier to accomplish that questionable goal.
> His message isn't "providing food to Gaza civilians is a bad trade-off because some of it also goes to Hamas which prolongs the suffering"
That does seem to be his message. He explains in another comment: "Providing food and oxygen to the aggressor prolongs the war and suffering, and causes more people to be harmed."
And yeah, I think the mass starvation he's proposing would be probably the most terrible thing done by a first world country in my lifetime, and would not cause less harm than the alternatives like he suggests. But his reasoning, at least as written, is to cause less long-term suffering.
In the medium term at best. Hamas was never an existential threat to Israel. But a hostile Saudi Arabia might be. The treatment of civilians in Gaza is turning public opinion in the Arab world from exhaustion and indifference with the Palestinian cause back to visceral hatred of Israel. While the current crop of Arab leaders are still tacitly supporting Israel against the wishes of their population, it is likely that future, less well-established leaders will take action against Israel to shore up their domestic position.
Civilian suffering has also created, for the first time, a strong America constituency that is opposed to any security assistance to Israel. Losing the american security guarantee would be deeply problematic for Israel. I am not sure that Hezbollah in Lebanon would be so restrained if there wasn't an American aircraft carrier right next door.
I think the most interesting historical analogy for this situation is the Rape of Belgium during WW1. Graphic stories about German atrocities in Belgium were critical to building British and later American public support for entering the war. It has been argued by some historians that Britain entering the war in 1914 is what turned what looked to be a short conflict into, well, World War 1, such in turn set the stage for World War 2. Thus, pointless war crimes on the part of the Germans in Belgium set their country on a path that would see millions of their own civilians raped and murdered, as well as successive dismemberments of the German state.
You missed a distinction here. I was deliberately presenting a steelman of his argument in that other comment, and pointing out he wasn't using that steelman.
"Providing food and oxygen to the aggressor" deliberately lumps all Gaza residents as "the aggressor". Saying that it "causes more people to be harmed" is weasel wording. It doesn't make a specific claim about who gets harmed, because if we get outside of vague generalities and examine the specific claim of "less Gaza civilians will die if we starve them to death until Hamas surrenders", we quickly see how absurd that claim would be.
I'm saying that Mr Gershuni's explicit message is that if you allow any relief to Gaza civilians, "the implications for the region and for millions of lives will be devastating". The message is that "the region" (if I'm being uncharitable, Israel)'s lives matter, but the lives of people in Gaza don't, and in fact are a net negative.
My point is *this is not innocent*. Mr Gershuni uses words that evoke violence and certainty to describe the harm caused by the Hamas ("launch rockets en masse", "launch a deadly attack on Israel", "millions of lives"), but to describe the harm inflicted on the Gaza populace he uses words like "you want a city to surrender", "provide it with food", "provide food and oxygen to the aggressor", words that evoke calculus and vagueness. This is the language of dehumanization.
You see his reasoning as trying to minimize suffering, because he gives himself just enough plausible deniability to fit that explanation and this is a forum that loves steelmanning, but the message is clearly that we shouldn't give a shit about one side's suffering. He explicitly says his preferred policy would be to let everyone in Gaza starve to death until they surrender. This is disgusting, and you shouldn't give him the benefit of the doubt when he barely gives lip service to the kinder interpretation.
Nothing in his answer suggests he doesn't think this will help the people of Gaza in the long term compared to a drawn out conflict with Hamas. Perhaps he thinks the war would end quickly when Hamas is faced with the prospect of starvation.
More to the point though, you're claiming he didn't say something he said and claiming he said something he didn't.
"providing food to Gaza civilians is a bad trade-off because some of it also goes to Hamas which prolongs the suffering" _is_ the claim he made. He did not say that Gazan civilians are the enemy or that food reaching the civilians is bad. You're assuming that what he wrote is dishonest and he secretly believes the lives of Gazan civilians are worthless. That's possible. But you don't get to assume that when arguing with strangers on the internet. You can't just disregard his stated beliefs and claim he believes something different without evidence.
I'm not steelmanning his argument. My objection is not about the contents of any argument related to Israel or Gaza. It's about assuming another commenters words are dishonest and they have secret sinister motives.
One strategic goal is to get the Gazan people to reconsider their support for Hamas. Hamas is not some sort of external agent that is holding the Gazan people hostage, they generally support Hamas. I think the Israelis want the people there to understand that Hamas is not a long term benefit to the people so that they will choose other leaders.
Whether this is a realistic goal or whether the bombing campaign is more likely to lead to further support for Hamas or Hamas-like alternatives is a good question.
Israel is strongly signaling that they will never again permit the buildup of weapons that could be used in an attack like October 7, so the Gazans have two options - fight a continually losing war or give up fighting. The Gazans/Hamas are trying to open a third option of international pressure to get out of the no-win situation Israel wants them in. It's too hard to say how this goes, and who breaks first. With US support that seems solid I don't think Israel will be the one to give up, but we don't have much vision into the inner workings of Israeli leadership.
I'm no expert, but as I understand it, Hamas is *neither* holding the Gazan people hostage *nor* generally supported by them. Polls I've seen show support for Hamas ranging from ~20% to ~50%; admittedly Fatah is not well-regarded either but there's still a good chance an election at any point since Hamas gained power 18 years ago would've removed them. Of course, no such election has occurred. But nonetheless I don't think it's fair to characterise this state of affairs as Hamas holding the Gazan people hostage, because it's not *Hamas* who have refused an election and insisted that they remain in power, but *Israel*. Netanyahu even went as far as threatening a retaliatory war on the West Bank when Hamas and Fatah agreed to Gaza elections in 2014, on the (to my eyes, absurd) grounds that agreeing to cooperate with Hamas in a peaceful transfer of power would constitute "peace with Hamas" and that this is incompatible with "peace with Israel". Fatah dutifully cancelled the election and left Hamas in power to keep killing Israelis, just as the Israeli government demanded.
Given the above, I doubt the objective (at least at the senior political level) is to make the Gazans choose other leaders. Israel could've achieved that objective at any point in the last 18 years by simply *not forbidding it*, but didn't do so because Netanyahu actively *wanted* Hamas in power to prevent a single unified government of Gaza and the West Bank from forming and thus weaken Palestinian political efforts towards a two-state solution (a strategy he infamously stated out loud at a Likud party conference).
“Despite the devastation, 57% of respondents in Gaza and 82% in the West Bank believe Hamas was correct in launching the October attack, the poll indicated.”
Not just supporting Hamas, but supporting the October 7 attacks specifically. 57 to 82%.
I’m sorry, but I cannot read these numbers as anything but the Palestinian people, in Gaza and elsewhere, declaring themselves accountable and responsible for the atrocities committed against Israeli civilians on October 7.
If support is responsibility, does that mean Israelis supporting the war crimes in Gaza should be held accountable? Up to and including Boycotts Divestment Sanctions and ICC trials?
So I should be asking not just “what is my moral responsibility to save the members of a suicide cult from themselves” but “what is my moral responsibility to save the deluded members of a suicide cult from themselves”. Duly noted.
I am fairly certain that Hamas does not control the media in the West Bank, where their rival Fatah rules.
Indeed, I think it is curious that (from the same article) Hamas is polling at 42-44%. This leaves a significant fraction which only likes Hamas when they are killing Jews.
Also, Hamas was fucking filming their atrocities. Are you asking me to believe that they were even slightly invested in hiding their crimes from the Gazans?
>“Despite the devastation, 57% of respondents in Gaza and 82% in the West Bank believe Hamas was correct in launching the October attack, the poll indicated.”
Yes, that was the biggest shock to me in the post-October 7th events. Prior to seeing those polls, I had thought that civilians in Gaza would be peace-loving and that Hamas was an aberration. I was wrong. I'd stepped right into the "typical mind" fallacy. :-(
There are no good solutions here.
As it happens, I have relatives in Israel and no analogous links to Gaza, so my _personal_ view is to support the IDF in whatever they judge as best protecting Israelis from another Oct 7th attack. I'm on the other side of the ocean, while the IDF is both tasked with protecting Israelis and has to live with the consequences so I bow to their judgement. I presume that someone with opposite personal links would have the opposite preferences.
If one of the Mexican drug cartels invaded the U.S.border and committed the atrocities the Palestinians' Hamas inflicted on Israel on October 7, they would get a lot more than groceries dropped on their head.
As much as I would like to see a two-state 'solution', one can't bargain with terrorists, and one certainly can't have a terrorist state within the borders of one's own country.
As difficult a task Netanyahu has, Israel is fortunate to have him in charge at this time. Palestinians placed terrorists in charge of their government, and they are living with the consequences of that fact.
Yes, one of the factors that makes all of this pro-Palestinian sentiment hard for me to swallow is remembering how Americans reacted after 9/11. When America gets hurt, it lashes out with extremely disproportionate violence, and most Americans support this disproportionate response. Yet Israel is now being told to temper its anger and its response in a way Americans would never dream of doing if it were their daughters being raped and their sons being butchered by terrorists.
The relatively meagre pre-7-Oct poll numbers in favour of hamas are partially explained by equally high numbers in favour of Islamic Jihad. Hamas holds the reigns in Gaza, but they're not the only game in town (Hamas and IJ are the big dogs, and there are 2 or 3 minor factions, mostly arab-nationalist or vaguely socialist-insurrectionist flavoured remnants of decades past). Hamas was seen (at least by those who lean toward IJ) as being on the road toward accomodation, like the PLO/PA before them. Gaza public opinion ist certainly not moderate.
I am not aware of the 2014 situation, so I'll moderate my views on that specifically. I do know, as SubstackCommenter noted, that the Palestinians generally do support the goals and tactics of Hamas, and have not taken steps to remove Hamas. If that's partially or mostly Israel's fault, then I am less sympathetic to Israel's goals, but I don't know enough to evaluate that. If the Palestinians would seek to attack Israel like on October 7 with or without Hamas, I don't think it changes much.
They have food, clean water and medical supplies in any case. So under this framework you have the option of starving only the non-combattants or starving everyone. The latter option seriously degrades your standing in the international community with little or no tactical benefit. It just seems like a very bad strategy to me, which is why I'm wondering if I'm missing some critical consideration or information.
"It just seems like a very bad strategy to me, which is why I'm wondering if I'm missing some critical consideration or information."
Current political events tend to be emotionally charged and one strategy I have is to try to find either (a) a sports analogy [best] or (b) a historical analogy that is further away then "now".
So (maybe): Would it have made sense for the US to supply food to Japan during the last year or so of World War 2?
From the US Parks service: "U.S. subs based on Guam and Saipan imposed a virtual blockade against Japan. Few ships entered or left Japanese waters without being attacked or sunk by submarines. Japan ran out of oil for her naval armada, gasoline for aircraft and tanks, steel and aluminum for industry, and food for her people."
Would it have been better (strategically or morally I suppose) for the US to send food to Japan (though not steel and aluminum) during this blockade?
I expect the analogy is flawed, as most analogies are, but maybe the answer to the WW2 Japan blockade can shed light on the current situation.
Your example is interesting, because of course the US did provide massive aid to the Japanese civilian population every time they occupied a new island. This effort culminated in the immediate postwar period, and was an important factor in establishing the cordial postwar relations.
Another perhaps more analogous example is the american relief effort in Belgium during WW1. Here, the important British decisionmakers thought that the Americans were prolonging the war by putting pressure off of the Germans to feed the belgians themselves. Nevertheless, this effort was a key factor in shaping American soft power in the coming decades.
But these analogies break down when we consider that both the Germans in WW1 and Japanese in WW2 were industrial state actors, while Hamas is not. It is abundantly clear on both cases that the naval blockades strongly inhibited the ability of these powers to pursue their war effort by depleting the supply of key raw materials. In the case of Hamas, I haven't seen reasonable arguments for why a steady supply of food and water would prolong the war. Conversely, the increasingly desparate situation in Gaza and the accompanying souring of public opinion against Israel is causing real damage to Israel's strategic position.
AFAIK, the US provided massive aid to Japan *after* Japan surrendered. That's commendable, but it's not really an argument against why blocking aid to an enemy would encourage them to surrender.
I agree with the rest, like that starvation in Gaza will hurt Israel strategically, with one minor caveat: support for Hamas in Gaza may be falling due to the aftermath of the attack, even though support for Hamas rose in the West Bank. There are news reports that Gazans blame Hamas for provoking this situation, even if they also hate Israel and believe the attack was righteous. You can believe the bear living next door is evil and still get mad when someone pokes the bear, to disastrous results.
Agreed. Belligerents have a long history of fighting with means which have little effect on the outcome of a war while harming the civilian population.
Hitlers Blitz on the UK, Harris bombing of German cities and the Nagasaki bomb all did not achieve any strategic objective, beyond making the people in charge feel better.
Hmm... I'm skeptical, particularly about your three WWII examples. How well is it really known on whether they affected the course of the war? Even simply terrifying the population that includes a subset who work in munitions factories seems like it would have _some_ effect. How well is that ruled out?
acoup [0] talks about it at length about morale bombings, which would cover the blitz and Harris.
I think it mostly comes around to indiscriminate bombing having a larger effect in unifying the population.
Suppose that some fraction of the population are 'meh' about the war as long as the front is not anywhere near them. Now you kill one in thirty of them in a morale bombing campaign. Individually, they might react by becoming more enthusiastic about the war or less enthusiastic, but they are not living in a vacuum. Chances are that that country you bombed will have a much better access to feed them their viewpoint than you do. So in aggregate, you get a lot of buy-in towards total war.
In Japan, it was the leadership who surrendered, not pressure from the population. I am personally doubtful that Nagasaki was required to convince them.
The Harris bombing was a clear failure, but I don't think it's correct to say that Nagasaki bomb "did not achieve any strategic objective". At worst it's debatable.
Even in our own timeline, the Japanese surrender was a very close thing, and the hardliners *even attempted a coup* to prevent surrender. And that's *with* both bombs as well as the Soviet invasion of Manchuria and so on.
From the Wikipedia article, I agree that it is debatable. There were a multitude of reasons to drop the second bomb, some were in pursuit of strategic objectives (which does not mean that we would consider them unproblematic in 2024) with some success, others were completely orthogonal to any military outcomes. The main one here would be the desire to test the effects of the second type of bomb on a real city.
Personally, I think that the morality of Nagasaki depends on the conventional casualties between the two bombings. If they were only a 1000 per day, then it probably would have been worthwhile to wait more than three days. On the other hand, if the fighting was so fierce that 50k died per day, then a quick succession of bombings might minimize the total casualties.
I think the main *strategic* idea is that it will cause the people to rise up against Hamas. I also think among Israelis, it truly is born out of grief and vengence.
Personally I reject both of these justifications completely - there is no moral justification for causing starvation.
According to the Associated Press, a poll in December showed ( https://apnews.com/article/israel-hamas-palestinians-opinion-poll-wartime-views-a0baade915619cd070b5393844bc4514 ) that "57% of respondents in Gaza and 82% in the West Bank believe Hamas was correct in launching the October attack". Given that most of the population of Gaza is in favor of the indiscriminate killing of all Israelis until none are left, I don't see what other option Israel has. If you want to blame someone, blame Egypt, which would be far better able to let the Palestinians out of Gaza.
So you're insinuating that the airdrops are to deliberately help Hamas, and your calculus is apparently that the total eradication of Hamas is worth every civilian casualty of this war as long as they're Palestinian? Do I have that right, yes or no..
Do you want to hear something funny? this conflict has one of the strangest and most unsettling horseshoe effect I have ever experienced. Nearly every single thing I hear from Pro-Israeli commenters here and elsewhere is mirrored point-by-point by things Pro-Palestinian commenters say to me in real life, and what I see them say online. Everything. No exceptions. It got to the point where I can look at a comment and imagine what its analog on the other side is going to look like effortlessly, without really trying.
Take your comment as an example. I call it the "Let God Sort His Own" [1] attitude. It goes something like this: "Yes, my actions have unfortunate and immoral consequences, I acknowledge that, but it's not me who should be held accountable, it's actually X, they forced my hand. I wouldn't have done those actions if X didn't do <bad things>. Therefore, I'm still on the side of Good.". It's present with abundance on the pro-Palestinian side too, everything from unarmed settlers being attacked or killed to Northern victims of Hezbollah's rockets to the victims of October 7th, "Yes, it's unfortunate what happened, but Israel bears total responsibility for what happened, and you can't believe them anyway." Someone pro-Hamas have literally said to me " Why are you so harsh on Hamas? Why do you expect them to be angels? When the conflict is over with victory you can trial Hamas as much as you want, just not now".
What's ever funnier is that both sides can recognize it in the other side: Pro-Israelis were *enraged* by the open letters signed after October 7th saying that Israel bears all the responsibility for the attack, and Pro-Palestinians are similarly enraged by the ubiquitous Israeli propaganda point "Hamas uses civilians as human shields so they're the one to blame for all the casualties". *Somewhere* in the brain of every Pro-Palestinian commenter, there is the recognition that blaming others for your crimes is bad, and that 2 wrongs don't make a right. It's just that this part is blinded by the tribe juice, when flinging shit at the other tribe becomes a priority.
What's interesting about this way of thinking is how it masterfully evades a need for common ground and ties everything back the most controversial question. "Killing children is bad" is about the most un-controversial thing you can say, it can act as a regulator/de-escalator for the feedback loop of hate and violence. In a sane world, invoking the crimes of the other side should go something like this:
[Pro-Israel]: Can you agree that whatever Israel did, killing and raping is bad?
[Pro-Palestinian]: Of course, and can you agree that whatever Hamas/PLO/Arabs did, starving civilians and sexually abusing Palestinian women in prisons is bad?
[Pro-Israel]: Of course.
Here, 75 years of argument-and-counterargument short-circuited by the advanced technology of **checks notes** remembering there are innocents on both sides. However this conversation proceeds, both parties at least know that are some common goal somewhere in there, the Pro-Palestinian agrees that innocent Israelis shouldn't be killed/raped/etc..., and that Pro-Israeli agrees that innocent Palestinians (and no just Gazans, as any report on the West Bank since October 7th would show) shouldn't be killed/sexually abused/starved/stripped naked in December.
But instead, the "Let God Sort His Own" rhetorical trick is a tool to convert the above potential conversation into the actual following conversation, one which I saw so many times that I can predict every single branching possibility coming out of it:
[Pro-Israeli]: Do you agree that whatever Israel did, killing and raping is bad?
[Pro-Palestinian]: What about the occupation? And what about what's happening in Gaza? And what about <Incredibly racist thing said by some Likud scum>?
[Pro-Israeli]: Oh but what about the fact that Israel gave Palestinians 5 peace offers and they all refused? Did you forget "We will drive Jews into the sea"? Are you really sure that what's happening in Gaza is indeed happening in Gaza? Hamas Hamas Hamas Hamas Hamas.
If it wasn't so depressing, it would have made a good 2-panel Wojak meme.
But there is one major difference between the sides. Only one of them has a good chance of surviving this conflict. That's ultimately the only thing that matters in the end: not who is right, but who is left.
It didn't happen because Israel was fine with letting Hamas exist at the time. As long as they existed, the Palestinian opposistion would be divided and lose public sympathy. Unfortunately, Hamas has made it impossible for Israel to tolerate their existence. Fortunately, this created the perfect justification for a full-scale invasion of Gaza. And that brings us to the present.
I really don't know why you think Hamas has a fighting chance here. They existed because they were allowed to exist. They are against a wealthy, well-armed nation backed by the most powerful country in the world. Gaza is surrounded on all sides by opposition, and could easily be blockaded if necessary. The only way they can "win" is if US actually threatens to stop supporting Israel, which is... unlikely.
It's not clear why Israel invaded in 2014 then if the goal was never to destroy Hamas. Ground invasions are famously Israel's Achilles' Heel, and air campaigns are a much cheaper and less PR-disastrous for them.
> They are against a wealthy, well-armed nation backed by the most powerful country in the world
Just like the Viet Cong in 1960s. Or for that matter Al-Qaeda since 2000. How did that work out for the USA?
And regardless of anything, Hamas didn't come down from the sky fully formed, it was created by Israel's actions. As long as Israel remains Israel and Palestinians are not genocided to the last baby, another Hamas will rise up. Because the fundamental truth is that you can't treat people like animals indefinitely.
I've been experimenting with AI music recently and I have a hunch that music generators like this one would be better at poetry reading than your typical AI voice generator.
If humanity as a whole has enough time left, I think we should be able to navigate this, since we value being able to express ourselves (and copyright holders might want to prevent AI from being trained on their music).
It could be like self driving cars - they seemed poised to take over 10 years ago, now it's like they're stalled at "capable but worse than most human drivers". Maybe the difference between average and good is bigger than it looks
The general type of AI being used produces the most-typical completions to prompts. This is an advantage in logical thinking, as there is generally a small number of correct completions and many incorrect ones; but a disadvantage in producing interesting music, in which the most-likely continuations are the most-boring.
This is awesome - noticeably better than anything I've done with AI music. Could you share a bit more about your process? Two hours suggests it wasn't just "give the lyrics as prompt and done", but I'm not familiar with how one iteratively tunes AI music.
Well, what passes for popular human music today is so atrocious that it's hard to imagine that AI can do worse. What I have actually heard though is AI-made "covers" of hit songs by a famous performer, and those are impressively good/believable.
I agree about popular music, and yet thanks to the spread of the Internet I find it easy today to discover obscure music I like both old and new, much easier today than in the year 2000. I would never have imagined such abundance back then, back when finding musicians I liked was very hard.
That is why as a lover of human artistic creativity (though not much of an artist myself) who's not very young (in between gen X and millennials) I was very happy about the current technological era, up until AI art appeared to herald the apocalypse.
Oh, I agree with all of that. But since most actually good music nowadays is driven by smallish scenes, I don't think that they are in much danger from AI, however good it gets. People are in those for human connection, e.g. in how most of the profits are made not from record sales/streams but live performances.
I play music as a hobby on a fairly advanced level. Maybe if my livelihood depended on it I'd see it differently, but for now all I can say - bring it on!
I play music because it gives me pleasure, and the more tools I have to work with to make it more fun, the better. I don't feel threatened by these AI advances, I want more of them.
This reminds me of the photography invention and development. Rather than making artists extinct, it likely played a role in expanding artistic styles.
Photos can be told apart from human art. Not so with AI art.
Photography did in fact make realistic art decline. But photography can only create art in that style, a realistic stye, therefore it couldn't have destroyed all art. Whereas AI art can create in every conceivable style.
The most important difference however, the very heart of the difference, is that with photography, there is always a human artist involved, the photographer.
With AI art, you can never know how much of what you see comes form a human being, therefore we will soon get to the point we must assume none of it comes from any human artist, and the human merely commissioned the work (paint me some Bible scenes on this ceiling, says the Pope to Michelangelo, does that make the Pope an artist?), or even just told the robot "just make something pretty, come up with the details yourself".
Apply the same logic to music.
Sure, we will always be able to *play* music, if that is all we are interested in. Just like we will always be able to draw, write...
But art is communication not masturbation.
How will you be able to touch people with your music, when the day comes that there is no way of proving any of it is yours, as opposed to a soulless machine's output?
I say these things mainly as a consumer of art, not a creator.
I don’t think photography only creates realistic art, but I kind of don’t want to debate this one. Music is where my heart is. So:
You will not be able to tell if a recording were created by a human or machine. In fact, you can’t now. I’m working on a piece right now where I want a grand piano to play a part. I neither have one, nor am any good at it. It took me 10 minutes yesterday to ask a machine to play one for me. So that ship has long sailed.
I think it’s good. For a short blip of time, about one human life’s length, we had this weird situation where musicians could become rich superstars by recording music and selling records. This is now gone too. We’re back to pre-phonograph age: if you want to listen to music performed by real people, go see it live. In a bar, in a hall, stadium - scales vary. But that’s what musicians’ lives are going to be like now: earn your living by playing live.
Oh, I think I understand your concern now: you would open Spotify and have no idea if this new “band” is actually all AI, correct? And that AI projects will completely drown out music created by humans?
So there’s good and bad news: the bad news is that I indeed “composed” the melody and some guitar parts, and only used robots for drums and piano, but I could have easily asked the robots to create a new piece for me, and then distribute it as my own to Spotify et.al.
The good news is that I - the person behind the silly screen name - still have to publish it. There’s no mechanism for robots to take over, every distribution company abides by KYC laws and regulations, you have to be a physical person to distribute your music, and to register copyright. So I may choose to flood Spotify with AI-generated dreck, but… why would I do this? Music distribution isn’t free, chances of me earning anything from crap are minuscule, so the incentive just isn’t there.
Where I see this going, and it’s been going there for awhile now, is that the flood of human-created music (with a lot of help from robots in most cases) will continue. You don’t need to worry about not having access to wonderful music from everywhere. Almost no one will make any money from streaming. Musicians will use streaming to break through, get known, get an audience who will come to see them play live and buy merch. The music will keep getting wilder and wonderfuller because robots will help human creativity and remove barriers.
I think you are being too pessimistic. I think there will be ways of telling human from AI music apart. You can use AI today to find the likelihood of something else (text f.ex.) being created by other AI, and a service like spotify would probably have incentives to verify human music. Also, from my experience with text and art generation this far (GPTs, stable diffusion, midjourney, dall-e) I think we will be somewhat able to tell AI and human art appart - after experimenting with these a while you start seeing patterns. I'm not claiming I would be able to spot art generated by an AI every time, but I could look at something and think this is probably generated by dall-e or midjourney f.ex., in the same way that I could recognize the style of a familiar artist.
Fair enough. It's not obvious to me that the counterfactual is better if you are counting in utils. But there were certainly things that Kipling regretted.
At the beginning of WW1 his son John tried to get in the British Army but was initially denied because of poor eyesight. Rudyard pulled some string and John was sent as an officer to the Western Front where he soon died in combat. I'm sure Kipling had plenty regrets over that but he remained one of the most preeminent propagandists for the war.
"Kipling had done his time in the army, he knew what was up."
Google searching keeps coming up with results such as "Although not a soldier himself, Kipling wrote ..." and "Never a soldier himself, Kipling spent a great deal of time around other soldiers..."
I don't see any claim for his being in the military in the Wikipedia article.
And I don't think any experiences Kipling would have heard of from former soldiers would have led him to expect WW1 to be as full of carnage as it turned out to be.
You're right, Rudyard Kipling didn't serve in the military. This is interesting on two counts: (1) his poems and prose are ubiquitous in Commonwealth army culture (2) his work shows a deep empathy for its subjects, which I (falsely) assumed came from experience.
That aside, given all the propaganda work Kipling did for British, I think it's more likely that he took a principled stance on the virtue of military service. His Epitaphs of the War throw a few jabs at politicians and shirkers and lionizes the fallen. A man of Kipling's station would likely have seen military service as inherited duty. He grieved his son though, and wrote about it. Short article here: https://blog.oup.com/2015/12/rudyard-kipling-war-poet/
What's odious about "The White Man's Burden" isn't the idea that rich white Westerners have a responsibility toward poor black Africans and ought to try to help them.
It's that Kipling called the not-white peoples "half devil and half child". It's that the "White Man's Burden" was not the obligation to _help_ but the obligation to _conquer and rule_. It's that Kipling evidently felt that it was terribly unfair how the "silent sullen peoples" didn't appreciate what a noble thing the White Man was doing in conquering and ruling them for their own greater good.
None of that is implied by sending food to places that don't have enough food, or mosquito nets to places that have too much malaria.
So whether "malaria nets = White Man's Burden" is meant to support "so much the worse for malaria nets" or "so much the better for the White Man's Burden", I _very strongly_ disagree.
Another thing that's missed about the poem is that it's written somewhere between the apogee and the twilight of the British empire. It is a bad argument on its own terms, but it's also a post hoc justification for British imperialism, which was driven by a haphazard mix of profit motive and geostrategic ambition.
Of course the verbiage is different from 100 years ago but the dynamic is the same between peoples that fail at state building and westerners who like to play the White Saviour.
As far as I can tell, the doctrine of the White Man's Burden is pretty similar to contemporary identity politics, which is driven by rich people from elite Western colleges gaining more wealth and power by telling everyone what's good for "colored people", whether those people want it or not.
When Kipling wrote "The White Man's Burden", colonialism was justified on similar humanitarian grounds: the British were to liberate the slaves (which they did), abolish the caste system (which they tried to do), stop atrocities like the practice of sati (which they did), and save the eternal souls of those colonized (which they sincerely thought they were doing). If you literally believed in Christian doctrine, as nearly everyone did in those days, then colonialism was completely justified. If there was a failure, it wasn't a failure of ethical judgement, but of factual judgement.
The White Man's Burden is sarcastic. He's sarcastically claiming that it's glorious to fight and die to make other people profit while nobody cares about you.
It's just not thought of as sarcastic nowadays because 1) people read everything like clickbait news headlines and 2) although he's saying that colonialism is bad, he's saying that it's bad for reasons that would be unacceptable today.
>Take up the White Man's burden—
> And reap his old reward:
>The blame of those ye better,
> The hate of those ye guard—
Do you really think that's seriously claiming that the white man's burden is *good*?
That doesn't sound like he's saying Colonialism is bad, necessarily. He's just doing the "It's a thankless job and I do it because I'm a good guy" schtick. Like many hawk Americans today would say something along the lines of "Yes America is the world's policeman and yes the locals don't love it, but that's because they're dumb and evil, America is taking risks and casualties preserving peace and they're being ungrateful, America is doing that solely for the common good."
Considering you don't have access to his facial expression or tone, my interpretation looks just as valid as yours.
>Considering you don't have access to his facial expression or tone, my interpretation looks just as valid as yours.
Agreed! Sarcasm rarely comes through unambiguously in just text, even in contemporary writing, let alone after a century. I lean closer to your interpretation of "thankless job" than to Jiro's interpretation, but I just don't actually know.
Yes. He's saying that, as is all too often the case, doing the right thing will *cost* you. Doing the right thing is hard, and dangerous. And there are an awful lot of right things that no one will thank you for doing, that you will be hated for doing. But they're still the Right Thing to Do, and you should do them.
With the dawn of the 20th century, Kipling seems to have thought it was time for Britain to take a break, and America's turn to be the Doer of Right Things. People will of course disagree about what the right thing is, but the US went ahead and did some Kiplingesque stuff.
Surely there is a difference between "Ah, those poor foreigners who can't feed themselves, let's govern them by force if necessary" and "Ah, those poor foreigners who can't feed themselves, let's give them some food"?
Surely whatever common problems is in the shared prefix of both, the first one adds whole new classes of problems in the continuation that the second one doesn't have?
I disagree with OP, but I actually think the second construction is far weirder in a lot of ways. In lots of developing countries the government is simply corrupt and incompetent, and replacing them with a better government would be a sea change for the better. Instead we are wary about regime change and decide to set up what can come close to a "shadow state" of NGOs often just doing what a competent government would. It get why we've ended up here, but it's sort of weird that we've ruled out the obvious fix.
Also anyone who knows anything about power dynamics. If you punch a guy who has cauliflower ear, wtf do you expect to happen? For him to pull out his calculator and determine exactly how much force he should put into his return punch to be "fair?"
What a splendid analogy. So yeah, after you get sucker punched you're instantly filled with rage and fury and you fight back with everything you've got. Your pain has become pleasure as you pummel your attacker into a shapeless mass of oozing, quivering flesh, but you can't stop kicking his head in. Eventually, your adrenalin exhausted, you begin to be aware that a crowd has gathered around you. You stop kicking and look around and say, "What? You all saw it. That mf hit me first, I was just defending myself."
Let’s begin by the crowd not denying that much of the “sucker punching” (which, in the analogy, includes mass rape and mutilation, to name just one thing) ever happened. Or the crowd not chanting that you should be punched many more times. While the other guy never stops talking about his intention to also punch the crowd, for extra absurdity.
ETA: for some context on the crowd behavior here, the UN leadership (and associated women’s rights organizations) still hasn’t issued a clear statement even admitting there was mass rape. China’s reaction to the events was to erase Israel from its official maps while calling for a balanced approach. As for the atmosphere on US campuses- Swastikas and calls for destroying Israel are commonplace.
All analogies eventually breakdown when taken far enough. If you want to get pedantic about it, Israel is not really "punching" (i.e. dropping 2000 lb. dumb bombs on) the guy that "punched" Israelis on October Sheva, it's punching his 2 years old and 6 year old who just so happened to be on site, all while claiming that it's not really **trying** to, and that the guy want the children to be punched.
Yes, you think this is an unfair analogy. That's why analogies are unhelpful. Let's just call it what it is: it's a war where ~10000-13000 children were killed and the killer still wants international sympathy. *That* is not an analogy.
Or it’s a war where the aggressor (Hamas, to remind you. Aggressor is the one who initiates the war.) does everything in its power to maximize the number of children hurt, not as a side effect but as a goal. Have you never wondered why, with all these tunnels, the only kids there are kidnapped? Or why so many explosives are around kids?
If you never wondered that, why not?
As for sympathy- let’s agree on having the same response as when others slaughtered Palestinians and the ones who risked their life helping them were Israelis? That is, basically crickets? Or were you protesting in the streets in 2015 when the Yarmouk massacre was happening? If not, why not?
Quite apart from the main response, whence the certainty about the number of children and the definition of children in the numbers above?
I don’t think the horror is non-existent or that many of your arguments change if it’s, say, 8000. Nor do I doubt the order of magnitude. But forgetting that 10 year-olds were participating in the massacres on 10/7 or about the indoctrination of children for violence as their life goal (frequently by the UN!) is not at all helpful for any future resolution.
As for the accuracy of Palestinian reports- the number of official victims of that hospital being struck by the Islamic Jihad moved from 500 to 750 to 150 as it became clearer Israel wasn’t to blame. And these and many other deaths are also part of the toll that you’re quoting. As is the case for when Hamas was firing on people evacuating from
Replace “sucker punched” by “chopped your kids gleefully before your eyes” and add “and is credibly swearing to do it again and again” and “is making sure that nothing but extreme aggression gets to him at the expense of everyone around him”, and “and also you cured him personally of cancer after he killed members of your family” and “and for some reason every friend of his punched him just as hard” (Jordan 1970, Syria 2016) and you might be getting a more accurate analogy.
Prefacing that Netanyahu is a bad faith actor and all the collective punishment rhetoric is bad, I'm not really sure what Israel is supposed to do different on the strategy level. Hamas has said it wants to commit more attacks against civilians, and is willing to commit all its resources to do so. If Israel wants to end the cycle of violence its in with Hamas, Hamas has to go. A limited attack that didn't change the long term players would be worse in that it would be pointless.
The only way to get rid of them is war, so war it is.
Civilians die in wars, which is sad but does not mean that you should never go to war. (You should judge military effectiveness against collateral damage, though.)
If Israel decided on a policy to rape Palestinians as reprisal for Oct 7 rapes, that would be evil "eye for an eye" collective punishment. But that is not what is happening.
I fear that Hamas have entrenched themselves and their ideology so strongly that the only way to eliminate them is genocide, and even then there's the "I'm Spartacus" problem.
It didn't take genocide to make Berlin approximately 100% Nazi-free by the end of 1945, and keep it that way for almost eighty years thereafter. Similar methods should work in Gaza.
I highly doubt that. In the case of Germany, it took the government launching an unprovoked conventional war against the rest of Europe and then losing *twice* in order to discredit the government. But there's no analog in the Israel situation. Everyone in Gaza already *knows* they can't win a conventional war against Israel, so Israel marching tanks through the capital for the umpteenth time won't change anything.
We aren't talking about "discrediting" Hamas; we are talking about destroying it. And, I don't know if you've seen pictures of Berlin when the Russians were through with it, or heard the tales of the survivors, but they did a whole lot more than marching tanks through the capital and declaring victory. What they did do, *worked*.
Technically, I think I might disagree, although this is beside the point. Reading "Eichmann in Jerusalem", one of the complaints Arendt makes about post-WWII Germany is the number of mid-rank Nazis who were given a slap on the wrist and declared "de-Nazified", as opposed to other countries where they were often hanged. My sense of the political situation of the time is that the US was trying to set up a West German government as quickly as possible, to counter the USSR's East German government, and so was more lenient toward the defeated opponents of the previous war, in order to better counter the opponents of the current (cold) war.
But I think this does point to a big difference, which is that a) Germany was under military occupation for decades afterward, and b) it was blatantly obvious that the choices were Stalin or the US, and so there wasn't much resistance on either side (for different reasons). If Israel occupies Gaza for decades, I predict that there will be far more grass-roots violence than there was to American occupation of West Germany. I see no realistic possibility of Gaza turning out like West Germany.
First, proportionality is not really a thing in most legal systems, and even less of a thing in international conflicts. If one country sinks another one's ship, there could be several reactions depending on the circumstances, none of which is to sink one ship back and call it a day.
Second, even the semblance of proportionality requires the cooperation of the other side. If you get fined and instead of paying it or appealing you ignore it, the fine is going to grow, until you get summoned to court and even arrested. Continuing to be uncooperative might land you in prison, and trying to act in self defence against cops might cost you your life. This could be reductively summarized as "man executed for littering", but the key component of the chain of events is the man's decision to excalate the situation.
In a marginally less bleak world, Hamas is a Palestinian Authority-like figure who, despite hating Israel, still can cooperate with it to thwart the more radical elements in the Strip. In that world, whenever the Islamic Jihad starts firing rockets on Ashkelon, the Israeli PM could call the head of Hamas and demand from them to investigate the event and persecute the culprits in return for refraining from bombing runs.
In this world, Hamas sticks religiously to the "always defect" strategy in the proverbial prisoner dilemma and sees it as a source of pride. It's the starkest example of nominating oneself to the short end of the trade off that I know of.
I don't think Israel is blameless. You can't solve the moral dilemma of human shields simply by ignoring it. But the sin here, of caring more about your own citizens than the enemies', is far lesser than the one that comes across if you simply compare the causalty rates of both sides.
To add onto that, proportionality doesn't mean that you can only do as much damage to the other side as it did to you. It means that your means must be proportional to the legitimate military goal you are trying to achieve.
In this case, Hamas committed an outrageous act of war during a ceasefire, and it promised a thousand more 10/7s. If the goal of removing Hamas is legitimate, and/or fighting it to an unconditional surrender, then the question is whether Israel's means are proportionate to that goal.
> AI is marked by ridiculous dissonance in the level of quality across different parts of the work. Its creations are well within the capabilities of people who simply would not choose to make them. It makes errors in taste or composition that no human with the level of skill or experience needed to produce the thing would ever accept.
Four useful bullet points. And Scott is a man of many talents, no doubt about that.
Perhaps there is a fifth bullet point also, becoming clearer as you age further:
• To realize that although the world may need to be saved, it does not want to be saved. At least, it does not want to be saved by you.
The best you can do, if you live outside Israel, might be to follow the advice of Wilhelm of Baskerville, the Franciscan scholar in Umberto Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose: Rather than to jump in with answers or advice, perhaps we should just look as closely as we can on what is going on. Not because it helps speed up change, but so we at least know why change is slow, or if it is unlikely to happen at all.
Related to that, Jacobin has a long and learned interview with Shaul Magid on the innumerable ins and outs of Zionism all the way from Leo Pinsker’s Auto-Emancipation pamphlet (1882) till the present day. Very learned, very well-informed, very detailed. A vast mountain of intellectual knowledge leading to a very small predictive-applied mouse:
"When all is said and done, when the smoke clears, when people start to rebuild their lives, the same problems that existed before October 7 are going to exist after October 7. I don’t think structurally the country will have changed in any significant way.
…we’re just going around the carousel, and we’re going to come back to this moment again."
Ok, there’s a little more, but not much more. But definitely worth reading:
I haven't read this article so can't comment on it, but the day after October 7th I said more-or-less the same thing - none of the incentives of any of the parties have *fundamentally* changed, so why would anything change?
I think I only half-believe this now. The main reason is that if Israel is successful in destroying Hamas, and manages to get *some* form of new people in place there, that really *can* make a difference. Likewise, October 7th will hopefully cause the downfall of the Netanyahu government, which effectively takes out one of the two parties keeping in place this status quo.
Nothing may have changed in Israel/Palestine, but in the US it looks like unconditional support for Israel is no longer an unpolarized proposition. It remains to be seen whether such dissent would amount to more than hot air, once the issue is no longer front-page news.
A coalition that includes Jewish Voices for Peace have launched the first campaign against AIPAC. I don't know/remember what will this campaign involve, but they are spending above-million money on it. The media describes this as a first in AIPAC's history.
This has kind of been true, or at least talked about, for the last 20 years. Mostly as a reaction to Israel becoming more and more right-wing, and to Netanyahu making Israel a somewhat-partisan issue, there's a general decline of support among younger Americans that has been there for a while.
Depending on who you ask, this hasn't translated into *much* in terms of actual US politics, but there's definitely something there.
I agree, which is why the "what happens the day after" is such an important and controversial topic (and one which the current Israeli government is characteristically being bad at addressing).
I assume the most realistic scenario is either a renewed military occupation in Gaza, or finding *some* partner that is willing to help run Gaza on an interim basis. I *really* hope there are some good plans for this that are being worked on behind the scenes.
To follow up on your new half-belief: It can be discussed if it was clever of Netanyahu to invade Gaza rather than to build a much stronger fence and leave it at that. But now that the dice has been cast, Netanyahu would be stupid to stop before Hamas is eliminated as a military force within Gaza.
If the Israelis get the nerves and stop now, Hamas’ leadership has every reason to open the champagne bottles. Since then they will have achieved more than they could have hoped for in their wildest dreams: Israel seen by the international community as the butcher of thousands of Gaza women and children, the relationship with the US seriously weakened, and still being in a position to rebuild their military force – with tens of thousands of new, young, and (not difficult to understand) boiling-mad-at-Israel fresh Gaza recruits.
Quite frankly, though, I doubt Israel’s military ability to totally take out Hamas, given the intense hatred that the very young population in Gaza must feel now.
…which in its turn means that - if Israel does not succeed in quelching Hamas completely -– things may then instead change in a different direction: leading to the long-run destabilizing of Israel. In short: Netanyahu and Hamas both play an extremely high stakes zero-sum game against each other at the moment.
To prevent the last scenario (a longer-term stronger Hamas), let me make a longer-term prediction: I suspect Israel will try to neutralize Hamas not by trying to make Gazans friends (fat chance!) but by “perforating Gaza” the way the West Bank has been perforated by settlements. Not by using settlements this time, but by constructing Israeli-controlled roads criss-crossing Gaza that enables rapid military responses to any threats from smaller Gaza “islets” between the roads. The idea will be to make Gazans – as West Bank Palestinians – live so atomized within these territories that they cannot coordinate new, massive attacks.
It will be sort-of a Bantustan existence for all Palestinians who do not already hold Israeli passports. But hopefully Gazans will at least be able to travel and work in Israel again as “foreign workers” at some point, and (hopefully) live not too unpleasant lives.
Actually, it might - after Gaza is rebuilt - be materially and socially somewhat better than what they have had before the attack - because it has not been pleasant for everybody to live under Hamas' rule. Hamas abolished elections after they won the last election (almost 20 years ago), and their brand of fundamentalist Islam is not particularly nice to live under for women and sexual minorities, among others.
Oh well. The carousel goes round and round. And then comes round again.
> It can be discussed if it was clever of Netanyahu to invade Gaza rather than to build a much stronger fence and leave it at that
Fwiw, while this is something a lot of people say, I think this is a massive misunderstanding of the situation on October 7th. Hamas launched thousands of rockets at Israelis, invaded Israel, and the IDF took two days to find all the militants who had infiltrated. Hamas continued to shoot thousands of rockets at Israel every day for months.
Life in Israel ground to a halt, completely and absolutely. Schools were shut down for weeks. The economy took a massive hit. A hundred thousand Israelis fled their homes. This was a full-on invasion, that succeeded massively beyond what they probably planned, though wasn't very successful as invasion go (their expectations of success were correctly low).
This is not the kind of situation that can be solved by slowly setting up a bigger fence.
More importantly, there's no reason to think that Hamas couldn't find a *new* way of invading that would be even more successful. They could spend another 10 years planning, getting more funding from Iran, and eventually could launch a far more deadly campaign.
The rest of your post is also good and I'll try to respond later, but this specifically caught my eye as a common misunderstanding of the situation on the ground.
Well, I see your points, but notice that I only say it can be discussed if it was clever (not that it was not clever). And only if seen from the point of view of Israel.
If one should instead consider the rationality of the decision from Netanyahu's personal point of view, it was undoubtedly clever to invade. Since any weaker response from him would highly likely have resulted in his fall from power, followed by criminal charges. Netanyahu has been riding a tiger since October 7th - and if you ride a tiger, it is not clever to get off.
Be that as it may, I think we both agree that today it is only of academic interest if it was clever to invade or not. The dice has been cast, water under the bridge, etc. The interesting question now is instead: What is clever to do next? (Where one may, if one wants to, consider the decision problem both from Netanyahu's point of view, Hamas' point of view, Fatah's point of view, HaAvoda/Labor's point of view, and so on.)
I think any PM in his position would've attacked, for the same reasons. I also didn't mention the very real possibility that a "weak" response would've caused Hezbollah to open a second front, something the US clearly took *very* seriously since it sent backup to make sure that didn't happen.
But yes, the interesting question is what happens next. I worry that with Netanyahu in charge, there is no real reason to try and end the war. And of course there's definitely no reason to think he'll be a champion for peace, though I don't know if *anyone* could get elected today that would be able to achieve peace. And that's on the Israeli side - I have very little faith the Palestinians will try to get peace given all of history, but I hope I'm wrong (on both counts).
The politics around the hostages is a bit complicated, with some thinking the Gaza offensive doesn't actually help get hostages released. I don't think that's accurate, but it's complicated.
At the risk of sounding uncaring, it is arguably a benefit for Israel if Hamas kills the hostages in cold blood. Because if they do, the perception of Hamas as utter barbarians will be solidified, and sympathy for Israel will reel back to the days immediately after October 7th.
Hamas knows this, and the Israeli government knows that Hamas knows this. Therefore Israel could invade Gaza without being overly concerned that the hostages would suffer.
It also works the other way. Each time Israel kills a child in Gaza, Hamas – if they are rational people – celebrate. Because each time a child is killed, Israel loses some moral credibility in the eyes of the world, and (particularly important from Hamas’ perspective) in the eyes of US public opinion. Hamas’ main hope is that the US at some point seizes to see it in their realpolitik-interest to support Israel.
(Which in my mind, it isn’t. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran are all more important from a realpolitik-perspective that the dry little sliver of Mediterranean land that is Israel. It is only the US public opinion support for Israel that is the “problem” from a US realpolitik-perspective; and Hamas, if they are clever people, knows this.)
It follows that a seize-fire will not shield Gaza women and children from Israeli attacks. On the contrary. Again, if Hamas is rational, they should use a seize-fire to expose ever-more women and children to Israeli firepower. So that even more women and children may die at the barrels of Israeli guns or bombs when the seize-fire ends.
You may call it a case of mutual perverse incentives.
These are all interesting points. And indeed as I argued elsewhere Hamas does much to maximize the number of dead Gazan children, and indeed Israel realizes that avoiding deaths to the extent possible while achieving its goals is in its interests, as oppose to "committing genocide" and similar nonsense.
And yet many hostages are already dead. How do we square this with the arguments above? A. Hamas, and more broadly whoever holds the hostages (not at all always Hamas), are not a monolithic body. Local agents may have their own view of reality and their own goals and their own irrationalities. B. Time itself is a well-known killer. Time spent in terrible conditions in captivity doubly so. C. Hamas has terror and heartbreak within Israel as secondary goals in and of themselves. Hence the videos of some of hostages getting executed being sent out, and hence the decision in Israel to not air them publicly.
As a little aside, it doesn't matter whether Iran and Egypt are "more important" to the US than Israel as long as they're filled with people really hating the US. Also Egypt *leadership* doesn't care about Palestinians in the slightest (to say the least). To some extent the same goes for Saudi Arabia. The US sacrifices almost nothing in terms of its relationship with these two countries as a "trade-off for Israel". Iraq is a non-factor, as a state, but in any case the invasion into Iraq had little to do with Israel. Iran is literally a military ally of China. Might as well not let it and its proxies run wild. The "dry sliver of land" being the one with the highest GDP among the countries you've mentioned, and a great source of intelligence and tech, doesn't hurt.
Hamas can literally rape kids and elderly and set fire to them and people will cry that they don't deserve the consequences.
Israel hadn't launched any operation immediately after the massacre, but people were already saying the massacre was deserved and Israel shouldn't be allowed to respond.
People have no sympathy, but even if they did, allowing the hostages to be massacred for it and not be able to strike back because then we would lose it doesn't do anything for Israel and the Israelis.
Is Hamas really the devil that made Adam eat the apple? Hamas earliest date of founding goes to the first Intifada in 1987, Hezbollah's earliest goes back to the first Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1980. Keep in mind that in the first few years of founding, the organization in question is not really the organization that we know today, but rather it's a newborn trying to find itself and its position in the conflict.
This means there were anywhere from 15+ years to 20+ years (from 1967 to each date of founding) where there was no Hamas and no Hezbollah, and a peace process that Israel could initiate and solidify anytime by withdrawing from the occupied territories.
As far as I understand the history, the idea of Palestinian statehood as it exists today was far less clear in 1967. The Palestinians in Jordan had been given Jordanian citizenship, and the Arab states that controlled the WB and Gaza could *also* have given them the land to build a state. The thing was, they didn't *want* a separate state - they wanted to retake all of Israel.
As for withdrawing from the occupied territories - Israel was attacked via that land. It was surrounded by enemies. It felt it needed that land for strategic depth. As in, Jordan, which sits on that border, is about half an hour away, and could send troops to cut Israel in half in. The border runs through Israel's capital. Back then, Israel wasn't the most powerful nation in the region, and all of its neighbors were enemies (this was before the peace with Egypt and Jordan).
So yes, Israel theoretically could've retreated from that land, but it was justifiably afraid that it would be impossible to defend Israel from an attack without it. Israel did eventually give back the Sinai in order to sign a peace with Egypt.
Of course, there's also the religious angle - many people in Israel feel that because that land is part of the historic land of the Jews, Israel needs to keep it. This is not my POV and not most people's, even today, but it is a part of the reasoning of the most motivated people.
Oh also worth mentioning, you say there was no Hamas and no Hezbollah, but remember that the PLO existed since 1964, and they *explicitly* called for violent overthrow of Israel, and were the de-facto face of the Palestinians. Only in 1993, as part of the Oslo accords, did they recognize Israel and theoretically renounce armed struggle.
It's not clear then that this conflict will change anytime soon, then. Israel is afraid, or so it claims, well I don't see that changing. Life is scary. The fallacy appears to be in assuming that when you're scared, others don't have the right to live, a fallacy that Israel and Israeli politicians and sizable sectors of the public appear to be quite fond of making. It's not a shame at all to be afraid, all the shame is in reacting like complete barbarians when you're afraid.
Before Hamas there was the PLO. Before the PLO there was Gamal Abd Al Nasser. Before Gamal there was Al Mufti Amin. Why would Hamas be the end?
> not most people's, even today
Oh I'm not sure about that, not at all. Here's a poll https://www.timesofisrael.com/63-of-israeli-jews-oppose-west-bank-pullout-poll-finds/ from 2013 about a 63% majority opposing a withdrawal from the West Bank, and thinking that Arab Israelis shouldn't have a vote on any referendum involving peace (also see the comments, they would be instructive.). On the other hand here's another poll https://www.timesofisrael.com/more-israelis-oppose-west-bank-annexation-than-support-it-survey/ from 2020 where an only a slim 52% majority oppose annexing the West Bank, but "annexing" could very well mean "giving the Palestinians there Israeli citizenship", so they're opposed to annexing but not occupying. And the poll contradicts another poll done shortly before it anyway.
> It's not clear then that this conflict will change anytime soon, then.
Yes, probably.
> The fallacy appears to be in assuming that when you're scared, others don't have the right to live
Put the current war aside, Israeli wasn't denying the Palestinians the right to live. Palestinians lived in not-amazing but also not-terrible circumstances in the WB and Gaza.
> It's not a shame at all to be afraid, all the shame is in reacting like complete barbarians when you're afraid.
This is a weird take. This isn't some irrational fear that we just need to confront. Israel stopped the military occupation of Gaza, a positive step in the direction that Palestinians wanted. (This was mostly done for internal political reasons, but it was still done.) This was done despite many people fearing that Gaza would be used as a base to attack Israel. Despite the fear, Israel acted in an ostensibly better manner.
Gazans then elected Hamas, who proceeded to fire rockets at Israel for years, and eventually launched an invasion that killed 1200 people.
If Mexicans elected a government that said it will annihilate the US and take all the land, and then shot rockets at Texas, and then invaded the US... what should the response be?
As for the polls, while disheartening, they don't contradict what I said. I said a minority want that land for religious reasons - the majority out of safety concerns.
Why would Israelis ever feel safe to end the occupation of the West Bank, when ending the occupation of Gaza led to such terrible slaughter?
Aren't Hamas a terror group according to Israel? How is the comparison to Mexico not fallacious? Being a terror group means it's not a government, and can't be treated like a government, namely as being representative of the people.
I also can't "put the current war aside".
> This was mostly done for internal political reasons
The Wikipedia page about the topic suggests that it was done to freeze the Oslo process and distract from any talks about Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank.
I don't necessarily oppose that both sides here - both sides since 1948 and before - bear a blame for what's happening. I was specifically objecting to your original post that Hamas is in and of itself the problem. Hamas is just a symptom in a long list of symptoms. There was countless symptoms before it and there will probably be countless symptoms after it.
Hamas is much more explicitly murdery than any of its predecessors; I believe Hamas killed an order of magnitude more Israeli civilians in one day last October than Hezbollah did over its entire existence to date. Only the Arab armies in the 1948 war exceeded that toll, and that was mostly collateral damage in a conventional war that lead to a conventional cease-fire.
Also, just about everyone else who has been in the killing-Israelis business over the past fifty years has been killing Israelis as part of a military strategy that could plausibly (though not likely) end with Israel making concessions that wouldn't pose an existential crisis for Israel. Along with for the most part good-faith negotiations to end the conflict on whatever terms can reasonably be achieved by military force.
Hamas, really doesn't seem to have a plan that can possibly lead to any other outcome than lots of dead civilians to no good end. And when they talk about their intended outcome (which they cannot plausibly achieve), it pretty much always amounts to the de facto elimination of Israel as a nation. And I haven't ever heard them advance a negotiating position that would have them give up on the whole "murder lots of Israelis until there is no more Israel"" thing.
So, yeah, Hamas is different. Hamas Delenda Est; all else is commentary.
"Hamas, really doesn't seem to have a plan that can possibly lead to any other outcome than lots of dead civilians to no good end."
One can discuss what represents a good end (the important question here is: for whom?) But if one is willing (for the sake of argument & for intellectual clarity) to place oneself in their shoes, I believe Hamas' October 7th murders can make sense. Meaning only that October 7th can be interpreted as an instance of rational, rather than irrational, murderous behavior.
The point is that Hamas does not attempt to kill all 8 million Israeli Jews (this is likely to be impossible, and therefore irrational). They only attempt to kill a sufficient number to trigger a mass exodus of Jews to countries that will accept Jewish immigrants. The underlying premise is that, unlike 1936-45, there are lots of countries today that together would be willing to take in 8 million Jewish refugees.
To be more specific, Hamas' playbook is probably the Algerian fight for independence (1954-62). Algerian nationalists did not have to kill all pied noirs (Algerian-born French), since there was a country willing to accept such refugees from Algeria (namely France). The nationalists only had to kill a sufficient number of pied noirs to make the rest flee (to France). Which they did.
Hamas arguably tries to make something similar happen in Israel.
A "Mass exodus of Jews" does not mean eight million Jews packing up and moving out of Israel. It means four million Jews packing up and moving out of Israel, leaving the most fanatical four million behind. Leaving them behind with all the kit of the IDF. Leaving them behind with the 100+ thermonuclear missiles. And, given that they are the most fanatical four million, with the literal belief that the unnameable War God of Israel is on their side so long as their faith is true.
At that point, evaporative cooling will have shifted the Israeli Overton window to the point where Benjamin Netanyahu looks like a pansy-ass liberal and *real* genocide is on the table. This will not lead to a happy ending for Hamas, or for the Palestinian people that Hamas sometimes pretends it is fighting for. Except, possibly, insofar as in the last moments of their lives, a few million soon-to-be-dead Palestinians happily imagine themselves ascending to Heaven as martyrs; I'm not sure how deep that belief really runs.
ETA: Algeria is not a plausible model, because Algeria didn't have four million fanatical Pied Noirs with a modern army. The Pied Noirs weren't being asked to leave Metropolitan France for a life as refugees in exile, but to move from one part of Metropolitan France to another. And they weren't being handed control of the French Army in Algeria, once De Gaul put the smackdown on the Four Generals.
Your scenario is a quite likely scenario for the future. Young, secular Jews are the first Hamas and like-minded organisations will succeed to make leave. Creating a longer-term selection effect making Israel increasingly dominated by the most fanatical (perhaps a somewhat negative label, but ok).
I also agree with you on the difference with Algeria in this respect: the ones remaining will have powerful weapons.
It might to some extent be portrayed as a case where individual rationality on all sides leads to collective longer-term irrationality. This scenario is a main reason why I am not an optimist on the long-term future in this part of the world.
I would phrase the point about saving the world as: The world needs to be saved, and it needs a savior, a savior is a thankless job that you don't have the qualifications for. You don't have aircraft carriers, you don't have missile batteries, you don't have secret files about Netanyahu's scandals that would incontrovertibly put him in jail, you have nothing except good intentions, and if good intentions were all what it took to save the world, someone would have done it a long time ago.
+1 for staring as long and as hard your eyes can withstand at the mess, I call it the "Info-Gathering mode", drop your soldier gear and become a scout. Thanks for the link.
There are no Netanyahu sexual scandals as the words are usually understood. A truly surprising scarcity of those given all the other scandals. It’s even not uncommon among Bibi critics to begin by gesturing at fairness by pointing something like this out.
Do you mean perhaps the 1993 story about the affair he had?.. The one over thirty years ago where he openly said he had one, there was zero insinuation of lack of consent, an attempt to blackmail him backfired and basically nobody talks about ever? That doesn’t match my definition of Netanyahu having sexual scandals.
Not saying this as a Netanyahu fan, at all.
(Maybe there’s some story going on in non-Israeli media? If so, then it failed to be noticed by any source I’ve ever seen in Israel or elsewhere, however critical of Netanyahu.)
I know. I wrote "Netanyahu's sexual scandals" expecting to find one like any other politician, but I went searching before I posted the comment and indeed found nothing. I left it in the comment anyway because "You don't have X" can be understood as either "X exists and you don't have it" or "X doesn't exist", like writing "You don't have a magic wand that solves unsolvable conflicts".
Umm. You could have just said “scandals” or “corruption” instead of going in the one direction you in fact knew to be unsupported by facts. In a comment about careful gathering of information, it’s just a weird thing to do.
His life has been subject to constant scrutiny for decades. There was a scandal about $1k worth of bottle returns his wife was involved with. Yet literally no sex scandals.
As a final nitpick- “scandal” implies public awareness and attention; “ an action or event regarded as morally or legally wrong and causing general public outrage”. So there aren’t any by definition!
(Just to clarify again. I’m very much not pro-Netanyahu. One reason I might be overly sensitive about this is that he routinely benefits from weak-sauce accusations supporting his narrative of media persecution.)
Most people consider "kind" to mean "warm and fuzzy feelings and corresponding actions toward people near you," not "dispassionately calculating the greatest good for the greatest number and then acting on that." In that sense, Hufflepuffs are a better fit for 2 than for 4. Ravenclaws are brainy nerds, they could totally fit in at an EA gathering.
Very nicely done. And a pretty good tongue-in-cheek defence of utilitarianism, even demonstrating self-deprecation and the ability to laugh at yourself, which is all too rare in these debates.
But of course I wouldn’t be doing my job as Some Asshole On The Internet if I didn’t point out that the creeping accountants, in their serpent cunning, sometimes come to the conclusion that any atrocity, any suffering, any diminishment of human potential in the present day can be justified if it makes the sci-fi apocalypse 1% less likely to happen 3000 years from now, or it it results in a 1% increase in the likelihood that humanity will travel to the stars one golden day after becoming gods.
So perhaps an addendum to option 4 is in order.
The premises of Bentham’s way
Can lead you to a trap:
Accountants, snakes and bankers
Don’t read much sci-fi crap.
(I tried to get ChatGPT to write that for me and it was absolutely awful. It doesn’t know what free verse is, or even syllables or iambs. I ended up having to write it myself. Perhaps AI is bad after all.)
Now, if it turns out all examples in your mind do not fulfill those three criteria, I believe *all* moral systems have an injunction against lying in the comments section for no reason.
I didn't even realize I was making any factual claims that could be falsified.
Does it not follow from utilitarian principles, however, that mitigating long-term existential risks justifies a generous amount of torture, murder, etc. in the present day?
You seem to have claimed that "creeping accountants" which, in the metaphor of the original poem would be the utilitarians, "sometimes come to the conclusion"...
Which does seem like a claim about what the stances of that group are. And if indeed you weren't referring to anything real, 1/10 effort at writing blogpost moral fanfiction, couldn't you at least get the prompting correct?
Anyway while we're at it, I'd like to write a short story about a certain character named superheapposter, who, under the right circumstances, would condemn their mother to having intercourse with *rolls dice* a corpse, because that follows from being an asshole. Observe the magic of my logic:
1. Being an asshole involves doing asshole things
2. The above is an asshole thing.
I am eagerly awaiting offers from Harper Collins. Also from all the moral systems congratulating me for my virtue.
Or, instead of symbolic gestures of trying to feed the starving Palestinians, the US could stop feeding the arms to Israel until they allow the aid in.
I don't see this option offered. The four listed ones seem to imply the US is an innocent bystander with no connection to either side.
Or the US could stop de-facto protecting the Hamas leaders living right next to its largest base in the Middle East in Qatar. Or even simply saying that it will stop. This would be not unlikely to get those leaders to accept a hostage deal and enable a ceasefire. Connection to either side indeed.
To be fair, there are some indications that it’s at least beginning to consider this line of action. But then it’s also beginning to talk of limiting some of the supply deliveries to Israel.
There’s also an option 6.5 where the whole world stops pretending there aren’t vast food and fuel stockpiles in Gaza, in the hands of Gaza’s elected government, and holds that government accountable for its complete refusal to even stop looting the aid, let alone share food with anyone else.
Then again, why on Earth would the US be neutral? There’s no symmetry in the sides’ attitude towards the US, nor in their major allies.
If the US stops feeding arms to Israel, Israel still won't let the aid in until they've accomplished their present objectives. They probably will kill more innocent bystanders in the process, e.g. using dumb artillery rounds rather than PGMs.
I think people vastly overestimate the degree to which Israel *depends* on US military assistance, particularly in the short term. They *benefit* from it, which gives us a certain amount of leverage, but Israel is not a US puppet no matter how much easier that would make things for some people.
I'm confused at the inclusion of Kipling in that particular sublist, as he seems to have nothing in common, intellectually or spiritually, with the other four. As for Midgley, is that Mary Midgley the philosopher, and if so, was there any reason for putting her with Marx and Mao beyond simple alliteration? I'm not seeing that any coherent proposition is being advanced in those stanzas.
Considering the verses and the poet’s practical conclusion, namely, that dropping food, despite its risks, is likely to do more good by alleviating hunger than not dropping it at all, one might view the situation from another perspective. Reports from Gaza indicate that a significant portion of the food, especially that delivered by convoys, is seized by Hamas. It seems no organization on the ground can realistically ensure a fairer distribution. This, in turn, prolongs Hamas’s resistance, leading to further deaths and destruction. Few would dispute that Hamas’s surrender would immediately halt the cycle of death and starvation. Therefore, could a complete blockade be the “optimal” solution in terms of reducing overall suffering? Assuming that starved fighters are more likely to surrender than those who are well-fed, how much more likely is this? To what extent would it shorten the war? What is the median number of lives saved across 10,000 computer-generated scenarios that vary the intensity and duration of the conflict, among other factors? Political decisions are seldom made based on such calculations, as the immediate pressures are overwhelming, but isn’t this the essence of what the “poem” is discussing?
I fucking swear 90% of these responses here are AI. People are just going to stop reading. The Internet really is being killed before our eyes. Signed a real fat fuck laying in bed at 5am.
I am quite certain that Hamas will not starve before most civilians will have starved to death. (I am uncertain if Hamas would eat the Gazan population if it meant they could kill a few more Jews.)
Any proposal to starve Hamas out will accept that the civilian population will die. If this is a price you are willing to pay, then a superior option would be to kill everyone in Gaza using bombs. (Personally, I would rather die in a bomb blast than starve to death.)
This would of course also be a war crime, and is also not favorable for Israel as a long-term strategy.
The correct way to defeat Hamas is with ground troops, supported by other arms which will act when the expected value of enemies killed to total deaths is above a suitable threshold.
aid packages is already the cautious, apolitical, fabian, "accountant" like option, as opposed to the US reigning Israel in by threatening to withhold aid, weapons, carrier groups
Sadly beautiful. It reminded me a lot of my favorite poem, "Hymn of Breaking Strain" (Kipling). I think he'd have thought it unfair to be listed alongside much of his company in the verses here, but he'd at least have admitted "to fail and know we fail".
His version of eugenics was encouraging smart people to marry and have kids. I do not believe he ever proposed preventing dumb people from having kids.
That's one interpretation, 4 merely shields you from criticism, I think Scott is suggesting that from 4 one can both be less vulnerable and do more. Personally I feel they're all terrible and we should probably look for an option 5, like just spitballing here: bolster the well established humanitarian infrastructure to deliver as much aid as possible and let our problematic bestie know that any interference will have clear and severe consequences. But like, in poetry
Maybe I’m being completely dense, but how is what you describe an option 5? If you do it thoughtlessly and impulsively because “omg people are starving we MUST DO SOMETHING,” it’s option 3. If you do it carefully, considering all snags and unintended consequences, that’s just option 4.
Regardless of how well thought out the plan is I don't think this falls into any of the categories.
Option 3:
"To rush in bright and glorious 'Neath the golden flag of Good"
Ensuring that UNRWA and the like can do their thing and maybe helping them out a bit, well that's something we could have done from day 1, but we did not. And it would be a major course reversal, it would require serious pressure on the Israeli government where before there was unconditional support. Whether you think it's correct or not, doing this now would be an admission of wrongdoing, no flag of good of any color it's a red flag of "we think we fucked up majorly, in more than one way, we kinda suck". It's the most boring option, the least complicated to implement, and it can't be seen as our idea since activists have been asking for this for months. Everyone who was already mad at the US govt will still be mad, and a bunch of people who weren't mad before will become so. So certainly no glory.
Option 4:
This is rather nebulous, but I read this ("Or to creep in like accountants
Using gain and loss as anchors") as kinda saying, we'll use our cleverness to arrange things so that if everyone just follows their incentive gradients like they always do the good thing will happen, they won't even know we've done anything! If this is anything like the intended meaning it should be clear that my option 5 doesn't fit the bill. It is not cunning or clever, see above, and it requires a very obvious show of force, a threat, to make it happen. It's not some elegant, tai chi or judo, requiring meticulous practice to pull off properly, it's swinging a big sledge hammer.
>Ensuring that UNRWA and the like can do their thing and maybe helping them out a bit, well that's something we could have done from day 1
Sorry, but UNRWA? Really? The same UNRWA that employs hundreds of Hamas members? Whose employees participated in the Oct. 8 massacre? The UNRWA whose textbooks have been pouring anti-Semitic hatred into kids' brains in Gaza? The UNRWA which carefully looks the other way when Hamas steals relief supplies? The UNRWA which _literally had Hamas's data center located underneath its headquarters_???????
The four options are meta level, not object-level. "Bolster the well established humanitarian infrastructure to deliver as much aid as possible" is an object-level policy, which will fit into one of the four meta-options depending on how it is implemented. But from the "as much as possible" phrasing, probably option #3.
Yeah so they're clearly categories, Scott has defined the first three by giving a sort of ideal example around which various members will cluster, but the last one he defines in a different way, paraphrasing: "like the things that wall street bankers do" and so on. Anyway what I'm trying to ask is, are they good ones? I would say yes they are good but also they don't form a partition, they don't cover that which they mean to illuminate. But if they are so broad as to include my "example 5" then would want to claim that they are particularly meaningful, their borders do not fall at any joints of reality that we should care about. I don't think the author would agree with me that my example is in the universe he's trying to describe, if he did the poem would have been rather different in tone and probably not a poem at all
The problem with altruistic efforts, especially those like foreign aid, is *not* weird, unpredictable side effects on the analogy of people being killed by falling packages. Those are flukes, and it's quite fair to discount them.
The problem is regularly occurring and therefore predictable negative effects, however unintended. For example, the problem of aid being captured and diverted by local leaders is so common that it makes no sense to think of it as a "side effect." No, it's a predictable pattern, and you the donor are responsible if you don't understand it.
And the further effect of making control of the government of a poor country more profitable, hence increasing what people are willing to do to get control.
Perhaps the god of aftershocks, known and feared by first responders in seismic zones, had a claw in this accident, with its twisted sense of humor, and its taste for combining aid with crush fatalities?
These verses are unpleasant to me in a way few things in this blog are. 5 deaths by falling aid are a rounding error on the number of people killed intentionally in an effort to kill their elected leaders, crush their institutions, and destroy any possibility of the kind of successful war of independence most of us have in our democracy's distant history and celebrate as a righteous and sacred achievement. I'm not sure if there's any affirmative obligation to see what's actually happening to Palestine and talk about it; my starting point is that everyone is free to see and talk about what they want. But it is hard for me personally to not read this as a dramatic misreading of the cause of Palestinians' suffering followed by an unkindly-lighthearted take based on that misreading.
Also, I would propose that instead of hiring a new head of communications, the center for effective altruism should just keep Scott on retainer and let him write such a poem when they get bad press for their actions having unlikely bad consequences.
For people wanting to make a tangible difference for Palestinians, this organization allows you to donate e-sims which have helped countless people keep contact with their loved ones and document the constant slew of war crimes they've faced.
So your claim is that EA is basically a scam which claims to decide based on math while actually deciding on vibes, like non-EA charities.
I do not think that this claim is actually true. Given my priors, if an EA org does something which seems totally weird and random, like buying a castle, this is not the result of a vibe-based decision, like some boss saying "I really want to own a castle, make it happen" or "we buy a castle because that is a good representation of who we are". I fully expect that someone sat down and did the math on a wide variety of options, they found out that the castle option came out ahead of "buy a cruise ship", "just rent a hotel", "build from the scratch", "just use teleconferencing", "build a lair in a volcano", "develop 'The Matrix' and host conferences there" in their metrics.
HPMOR requires a bit more justification because I would expect that HPMOR is a lot more popular in the EA community than castles are. But even there, I am sure that they were ranking interventions to get new people into the movement and found that distributing HPMOR is more effective than distributing books by Peter Singer or having TV ads or producing an EA-themed movie or whatever other ideas they had.
I am also rather sure that most of the EA money is put into projects which are less controversial than castles, HPMOR or OpenAI.
Of course, Scott is here defending food drops which occasionally kill a few people when a parachute fails to open.
>I do find it irritating that, after 80 hours of discussion, the two intelligent! groups still wound up with numerical estimates more than an order of magnitude apart. If this were a values/preferences question, this would be understandable, but it is a numerical probability question. Given the sum of available evidence, there should be a best estimate.
I think the stanza you quoted could also refer to Newtonian Altruism [0]. And of course there is a whole can of worms regarding the existence of morality beyond altruism, and the moral difference between an act and an omission.
Regarding p(doom), I think that it is not quite a scenario to invoke Aumann's agreement theorem. The evidence is certainly not overwhelming in either direction, so priors matter. If we were part of a game where the rules stated "without alignment efforts, p(doom) is x", then the priors would be much closer. We do not have a good reference class to do reference class forecasting.
Multicellular life on earth being ended by a meteor is something we can halfway quantify. Apart from Theia (which was probably a planet from within the early solar system, and thus is not a concern any more), there have been plenty of impacts big and small. We can extrapolate that distribution, especially as we have some idea about the distribution of objects which could hit earth at some point. I would be surprised if there was significant disagreement over the probabilities.
By contrast, AI risk is full of Knightian uncertainty, which can not easily be captured in objective probabilities.
>I think the stanza you quoted could also refer to Newtonian Altruism [0].
Or an equivalent with the Yukawa potential, that drops exponentially? :-)
I talk with 5 people regularly, have about a dozen additional people that I also care about, maybe a hundred in the grimace-I-guess-I-sort-of-have-an-obligation-to category, and then there are 8 billion strangers that I only count as tie-breakers.
>Multicellular life on earth being ended by a meteor is something we can halfway quantify.
Yes, possibly more than halfway. This is indeed something where we have decent information
>about the distribution of objects which could hit earth at some point.
Yes,
>By contrast, AI risk is full of Knightian uncertainty, which can not easily be captured in objective probabilities.
but - more than an order of magnitude? After 80 hours of going over each others' evidence? It seems at least discouraging. I'm in the process of digesting the Allyn-Feuer and Sanders paper, which is an amazing effort to try to quantify as much of the questions in as transparent a framework as possible. I have to admit that I'd be terrified to stick my neck out so far in trying to nail down the factors involved, so I applaud their work. It at least seems like a framework where all of the participants could have pointed to various factors and said "agree here, disagree here, and here is why".
Does it ever make you wonder? Wonder what is really going on here?
Demographic warfare. A state that never intended for the aid to be used to better their people, only to better their war. A state run by a party who's stated goal is the extermination of their neighbors, who in the last election held there ran against another party whose goal was the same.
Life is a lot harder in this world. In the world where you "controlled all of their imports" yet somehow they built extensive tunnel systems and have massive weapons stockpiles and rockets. In a world where the Aid agencies supposedly helping the poor starving Gazan's are actively aiding and abetting people committing terrorist acts (literally data cables going down from HQ to the tunnels? Come on).
Plus signs added as double line breaks because I can't format, lol.
You got me to do verse for the first time since grade school, so thats pretty good.
Don't quite like the first section, but I didn't wasnt to edit or think too hard about it; wanted do it all in one take so to speak. I think going from 4 lines to five in the middle is fun.
When Robespierre and his pals took power, they turned around the war France was losing. They saved France from the many vicious predators circling for the kill. That doesn't justify their cruelties, but it's a bit of context that is often left out. The Terror killed 15,000 and that was egregious, but it pales in comparison to the crimes of the ancien regime.p
"Press reports that US air drops resulted in civilian casualties on the ground are false, as we've confirmed that all of our aid bundles landed safely on the ground,” Ryder said during a press briefing.
...Emphasis on *US* air drops. There were five other countries sending supplies. U.S. Central Command didn't deny that there were deaths, they only claimed they weren't responsible. https://twitter.com/CENTCOM/status/1766258494447956386
Thank you.
This whole war just makes me so sad. All of the propaganda that "Jews are white and Palestinians are brown" is ridiculous, Jews and Palestinians are cousins. Whenever I see pictures of Palestinian children, they look just like many Jewish children I've met. And when I read stories about the Israeli hostages in Gaza, they mention Palestinians thinking the hostages are just one of them.
I hate that Iran can so easily pay for cousins to kill each other as part of its proxy war.
I hope in the long term we can achieve some kind of peace settlement that looks like the EU, two states with freedom of movement, and the ability to become a citizen of the other state if you live there a while, learn some Arabic/Hebrew and pass a cultural knowledge test.
I just don't know what the path to that looks like when there is so much animosity. Deprogramming everyone from hating the other side is so difficult. And every civilian killed makes it harder.
But we are cousins. And when our cousins bleed, we bleed too. We must never forget that.
"White" and "brown" in socjus lingo have nothing to do with the actual color of skin. Those are code words for "oppressor" and "oppressed", and in reference to the Israel/Palestine clusterfuck these terms make more sense than usual. Of course, they don't help a bit with getting closer to a resolution, but at this point it doesn't seem like anything can.
Which also explains phrasing you see sometimes like "the black face of white supremacy" about a Republican/conservative black man. It's just another place where words are used in some kind of academic way instead of the way that most people will hear it - often, in my opinion, as a type of propaganda. It's a propaganda that is intended for an internal audience, so the people using the terms seem to genuinely see the world that way. It's not false by intention, but as you note, it can be confusing. So "white" doesn't actually have much to do with skin color, but is instead an alternate word for "oppressor class" and can therefore apply to any number of dark skinned individuals and doesn't have to apply to people who have white skin.
I disagree that such propaganda is only intended internally. Publicly using obscure redefinitions of common words is very much a conscious strategy, which pursues a twin aim - to facilitate motte-and-bailey gambits and to demonstrate the power of your ideology/movement through enforced control of language.
I would agree that it's not *only* used internally, and don't know that I could argue how much I think it's meant for internal (and potentially honestly) verses externally and implicitly as a dirty tactic. There are definitely cases, especially in online arguments, where it's used as you're saying.
It is the same all over the world. We Anatolian Turks once knew the Armenians as millet-i sadıka, the loyal nation. Some of our greatest government officials were Ottoman Armenians. Our food is similar*, our music is similar, our culture is similar.
You cannot physically distinguish us. We Turks like to say that we originated in Central Asia, but that's not completely true. We're also the last remnants of old Anatolian civilizations that were successively Hellenized, Romanized and Islamized (in Armenia's case Russified) before striking out on our own.
Our languages are intertwined. My favorite example is the cymbal company Zildjian: zil is potentially derived from the Persian زیر, -dji is the old Turkish suffix for professions (-ci is the modern orthography), and -ian is the Armenian -յան.
Yet once the Balkans broke off we reasoned that Armenians could too, and to prevent that possibilty we massacred them by the million. Brother killing brother is what it is, and still it incenses me to see my fellow Turks say that Armenians deserved it.
(Turks remaining in the Balkans faced a similar tragedy, and that too was brother killing brother. These Turks were not the Porte men that took Christian sons as janissaries and daughters as odalisques, they were ordinary villagers who looked and spoke and lived like everyone else. Did they deserve it too?)
*except narnumru. That culinary monstrosity belongs to Azerbaijan alone, since nobody else wants anything to do with it.
It is instructive to contrast the near-complete silence of the world on the 2023 ethnic cleansing of Nagorno-Karabakh with the uproar about Palestine. I think the war on Nagorno-Karabakh was a much clearer example of the sort of thing that the people protesting the war on Palestine pretend to be against, yet obviously are not.
It *is* instructive, just not in the way that you think.
There's a reason we talk about the *Second* Nagorno-Karabakh War. Because Armenia only conquered the area 20 years before, with massacres and pogroms on both sides. And the area was internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan all along.
In terms of territorial recognition, one major difference is that Israel pursued a two state solution up until the 2000s and continued paying lip service to it even after that, while Azerbaijan never treated Nagorno-Karabakh as anything other than a part of Azerbaijan that had temporarily been seized by rebels.
In terms of humanitarian concerns, it's not exactly great that they expelled the Armenian population, but at least they had a nearby country to flee to, which is not true of the Palestinians. I'm sure Israel wishes they could just expel all the Palestinians and formally annex Gaza and the West Bank once and for all, but there's no Armenia for them.
One other significant difference is that Azerbaijan is an autocratic petrostate while Israel is a "Western" democracy and close ally of the US, which means we expect a lot better of them. It's sort of like how the various constant wars in Africa are a lot worse on a numerical level, but people don't pay much attention because there's no way to stop them other than invading, which would likely make things worse (c.f. Afghanistan). Whereas there's a chance Israel might actually listen to what the US says.
Thanks. I did not know that.
What's the "Isreal" spelling supposed to mean?
Sorry, it was just a mistake. I didn't mean anything by it. I went ahead and fixed the spelling.
There are similarities between Karabakh and Gaza (foremost, stark ethnic animosity and history of violence), but there are too many things that are different, so they make parallels somewhat inadequate. For example,
- Azerbaijan operated with surgical precision in 2020 (about 100 civilian death on each side, which is very little when contrasted with 3000 and 4000 military deaths). Contrast the ratio of civilian-to-military deaths to that in Israel/Palestine or Ukraine.
- Azerbaijan iterated multiple times that it considers the Armenian population of Karabakh its citizens and laid the framework for gradual reintegration. This fell through because for the 3 years after the 2020 war the Karabakh Armenians continued to refuse to lay down the arms which was part of the Trilateral agreement.
- The departure of the Armenian population from Karabakh cannot be qualified as ethnic cleansing because when we talk about ethnic cleansing we typically mean both brutalization of the population and prevention of return. International observers didn't record brutalization of the civilian population as they were arriving into Armenia, and the Armenian population refuses to return to live as Azerbaijani citizens. "Exodus" or "flight" is a more precise term.
Had to look up what narnumru is. It actually looks very unique, and I just love pomegranates. Have you tried it? What is it like?
Imagine biting into a handful of pomegranates, except instead of the familiar, refreshing crunchiness of Kishimojin's aborted fetuses, you receive the taste and consistency of sweetcorn instead.
Sure, your smell and taste cortices give the "no poison, well-cooked, this is delicious" signal, but the prediction engine part of your brain is having what is known in the literature as a bruh moment.
That's... colorful. :D
Admirable. What I wouldn't give for only 25% of people who have opinions on the conflict to have this specific set of opinions.
> "Jews are white and Palestinians are brown"
I agree it's inflammatory and race-baity in a conflict where people really really do NOT need any more reasons to hate each other, but I think that it's fair to mention that some Israelis/pro-Israel commenters do their own fair share of race-baiting, the most obvious elephant in the room being "chosen people".
> Iran can so easily pay for cousins to kill each other as part of its proxy war.
I have no interest in exonerating Iran's regime, but again I think it's in the interest of balance to say that lots of people pay cousins to kill each other, and that some cousins like it. Insert the long string of statements by Netanyahu and officials from his government or party saying things along the lines of "Hamas is an asset". There is probably no state that has spent more to prolong this conflict than the USA.
> I just don't know what the path to that looks like when there is so much animosity.
Same. Chicken and egg feedback loop: they hate each other because they kill each other, and they kill each other because they hate each other, and each think that they didn't start it.
On the one hand, people have to resist the urge to think that they're important. People are not important, people already created Super-Savant intelligence and it's called nation states and/or corporations, those are what drive human history, they are "Savant" because they're incredibly dumb in things that a human finds trivial, and super-intelligent in others, but always lethal and more powerful than any human or a group of human that can be voluntarily organized. States and Corporations are going to continue to kill people and there is nothing anyone can do about it for a long time, except organize other States and Corporations (which is going to kill other people, sooner or later).
On the other hand, there is *something* a person can do, no guarantee that it will solve anything, but it won't - on the face of it - make anything worse. Those things include learning the 2 languages, talking to people (preferably in their own language) in whatever form (personal, academic, exchange, works of art, ...), and pushing back against the violence piranhas in one's "own side".
I appreciate this and yeah awful for the families.
While two-three units of foreign aid
Crashed five Gazan souls
Many more of them, I'm afraid
Reached their aimed goals
But what if those goals were indeed
Some members of Hamas,
Who, now they able themselves to feed
Can launch rockets en masse?
How can we calculate
All utils, pro and con?
Perhaps instead of articulate
We have to admit we've conned?
I never really understood this line of argument, but maybe you could explain it to me. Surely, Hamas would know to stockpile food and water before the attacks, since they alone knew what was coming. Even if their stockpiles run out, they're still the guys with guns and in positions of authority, and would thus be the last to go hungry, thirsty, cold or with wounds unbandaged.
Thus the implication becomes that Israel and their allies should let hundreds of thousands of women and more than a million children starve until nothing is left.
Am I missing something?
Well, apparently Hamas succeeded beyond their wildest dreams in the initial attack, they didn't expect the Israeli to be this incompetent. So it's possible that they didn't anticipate this magnitude of response.
The attack was planned to be as provocative as possible. That's usually what terror attacks are for. It would display an uncharacteristic lack of competence on the part of Hamas not to prepare for this contingency.
Iran's other allies (principally Hezbollah in Lebanon) have also been remarkably restrained during Israel's response, which indicates that they aren't really worried about Israel actually succeeding in eliminating one of their most important strategic collaborators.
If you want a city to surrender, you should not provide it with food. Otherwise, the enemy may use the food and aid against you (as Hamas did with all the money, concrete, and other supplies to launch a deadly attack on Israel and to hide themselves in endless tunnels). Providing food and oxygen to the aggressor prolongs the war and suffering, and causes more people to be harmed. If you allow Hamas to win this war by simply surviving (which is all it wants for now), the implications for the region and for millions of lives will be devastating. How do you make this calculus in geopolitics?
Just to be clear, you are describing a war crime. It is not permissible under humanitarian law to use starvation as a weapon. Despite its strategic usefulness.
It's not even clear that it is strategically useful in this case. The current operations in Gaza are not at all analogous to an ancient siege.
Fair enough. Although frankly the only reason I mentioned strategic usefulness was to highlight the obscenity of defending war crimes by their strategic usefulness.
You are absolutely right. I mentioned the lack of strategic usefulness because there seems to be a general impression, at least in the US, that committing war crimes and atrocities are often an effective way to achieve strategic objectives. This is very rarely the case. For that reason I want to push back on the strategic usefulness aspect everytime it comes up.
Honestly, I think that banning sieges is not a great idea, and it's not like we didn't do siege in WWII. It's not something to do lightly, but this is one of the ones I look askance at, like the people trying to claim nukes are always a war crime for reasons. Making shit like that war crimes dilutes the word.
Starving a civilian population is a war crime. It does not dilute the word, it is about the worst war crime possible, short of genocide.
I'll preface this by saying that this genuinely isn't a concern troll or what about ism, but what do you think of the blockade of the South in the Civil War, combined with Sherman's March to the sea as part of the US strategy to starve the South? The sense I get from most Americans who are aware of this is that most think it was justifiable to accelerate the end of the war.
I'm not sure how that applies when enemy forces are part of the population.
Are you so certain that this standard (treating starvation as a war crime) is good for humanity that you're willing to try to shame people out of exploring the possibility that, as a norm, it might actually make matters worse?
If this was an academic discussion, you might have a point. The weaponized starvation is ongoing. We are not discussing a hypothetical.
(On a far less important note, if you want to play devil's advocate for war crimes, you should at least be prepared for a heated discussion.)
Is there some reason to think that our discussion here is changing anything that's happening in Gaza today? If not, this is, indeed an academic discussion.
> It is not permissible under humanitarian law to use starvation as a weapon.
[[citation needed]].
I would argue that belligerents are under no obligation to allow the enemy to provide food to their soldiers. After all, they are free to surrender at any time and become POWs, at which point their captors will have to provide them with nutrition.
On the other side, deploying starvation purely against a civilian population is clearly a war crime.
Any real case falls in between these two extremes. If you have a besieged castle with 200 soldiers and five civilians in it, it would be unreasonable to force the besieger to let through 205 rations a day. If you have ten terrorists hiding in a city, starving the city would not be an acceptable side effect of starving the terrorists.
For example, the 1994 San Remo Manual has the following to say on sea blockades:
> 150. Goods not on the belligerent's contraband list are 'free goods', that is, not subject to capture. As a minimum, 'free goods' shall include the following:
> [...]
> (c) clothing, bedding, essential foodstuffs, and means of shelter for the civilian population in general, and women and children in particular, provided there is not serious reason to believe that such goods will be diverted to other purpose, or that a definite military advantage would accrue to the enemy by their substitution for enemy goods that would thereby become available for military purposes;
Note all the caveats. If you reasonably believe that most of the food surplus from the aid would ultimately feed enemy soldiers, you can confiscate it.
In terms of strategic usefulness, I would guess that starvation is likely more effective than indiscriminate "morale bombings", but less effective than means which specifically target combatants. After all, deaths from bombing are sudden and statistical, no soldier knows in advance "if the conflict goes on, my family will die in a bombing in a month", while they can very well know "my family will starve to death in a month".
Of course, this largely depends on what the enemy can stomach, which is often more than one would expect. Leningrad held out despite a significant part of the population starving. Given that the civilian population is not part of Hamas' utility function, I would expect them to go full Suiyang if starvation impeded their combat effectiveness.
Under these circumstances, deploying starvation is not strategically effective.
> > It is not permissible under humanitarian law to use starvation as a weapon.
[[citation needed]].
Ok. https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/ihl-treaties/api-1977/article-54 It's right there.
I assume that you mean that I forgot to add "civilian population". If so, I find that an obviously disingenuous response to that omission. I have no interest in having a discussion like that. So I will just leave it at a brief reply for other readers. Yes, I meant that weaponisation of starvation of the civilian population is not permissible under humanitarian law. This is not an ambiguous point. There is also no ambiguity of whether the civilian population is facing starvation in Gaza. According to the IPC report from 21 December 2023 (the latest I can find, unfortunately) "[b]etween 24 November and 7 December, over 90% of the population in the Gaza Strip (about 2.08 million people) was estimated to face high levels of acute food insecurity, classified in IPC Phase 3 or above (Crisis or worse). Among these, over 40% of the population (939,000 people) was in Emergency (IPC Phase 4) and over 15% (378,000 people) was in Catastrophe (IPC Phase 5)."
I will concede that as of 1977, starvation is a war crime and not try to nitpick the status of Protocol I.
If Israel acted with the intent to starve Gaza, that is a war crime. The situation would be more complex if they simply insisted to sieve through every sack of grain in search for weapons meant for Hamas, which might be acceptable depending on the observed weapons to grain ratio.
I think the laws of armed conflict tend to ban behaviors which are often not the best military strategy. Before railways, food logistics were a large constraint on the operational capability of land armies. An army was like a locust plague, leaving starving civilians in its path as a natural consequence. In sieges, the question was who would run out of food first. With railways, the ability to supply food is not a bottleneck in most cases. (Still, Protocol I came quite late, the siege of Leningrad was not considered a war crime at the time.) Likewise, the ban on chemical weapons coincided with the third system of warfare, which disfavors such attacks.
I'm pretty sure there is no rule saying you have to provide food to your enemy.
Are you sure? I thought seige was not a war crime?
Siege in the sense of "no food goes in, no civilians come out, surrender or starve" is a war crime under current law. "No food goes in, civilians are free to leave" is somewhat more ambiguous depending on how realistic the provisions for taking care of departing civilians are.
Superficially, the Israelis have declared evacuation zones and transit routes, and are allowing some food shipments to the evacuation zones. Done right, that should be legal, I think, but there's lots of ways to do it wrong and it's hard to tell from the outside.
I've answered this question here a few times now, but the comments are getting so unwieldy that it becomes hard to find, so it doesn't hurt to repeat it. Here is a relevant link. https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/ihl-treaties/api-1977/article-54
From my understanding, Hamas has kept itself well supplied, and so it's only the civilians who are starving. There's certainly an issue with Hamas taking control of aid trucks, but it's not like they're filling rockets up with flour. Besides, Palestinian civilian deaths are bad for Israel on the strategic level, and sacrificing strategy for tactical advantages is how you lose in war.
Even that "let a million children starve" description feels a little bloodless as a response to Mr Gershuni's poem.
Like, what the fuck? His message isn't "providing food to Gaza civilians is a bad trade-off because some of it also goes to Hamas which prolongs the suffering". His message is "any food that reach Gaza is inherently bad because it reaches the enemy", and civilians aren't a consideration. Every single human being in Gaza, whether a twenty year old militant or a five year old child or a pregnant woman is lumped under the "Hamas" label, or "the city" in his other answer. This is textbook dehumanization.
Again, what the fuck?
> Every single human being in Gaza, whether a twenty year old militant or a five year old child or a pregnant woman is lumped under the "Hamas" label, or "the city" in his other answer. This is textbook dehumanization.
Hamas is the elected government of Gaza. I thought the whole premise of the international order was that the population of a country can be held accountable for the actions of its leaders. That was certainly the justification for all the Japanese and German civilians who got killed by Allied bombs in the 1940s. Do you have a counterfactual in which Hirohito and Hitler could have been deposed without harming any civilians?
Perhaps the lesson for Palestinians who care about their five year old children and pregnant women is “don’t support leaders who place a zero, or even negative, value on your life”. Which is clearly true of Hamas: they actively engineer the deaths of Palestinian civilians. And they continue to enjoy broad support from the Palestinian people.
If the USA elected a President tomorrow whose platform was, “I am going to have the Army execute one in three American citizens, chosen by lottery”, what would the moral duty of the international community be? Particularly if this President also promised to retaliate against any international interference, and to step up the executions? It is not possible to protect people against their leaders. Did the war hawks not learn that lesson in Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya?
Israel is going to do what it feels it needs to do to protect itself against further hostilities from Hamas. I doubt it will be effective. It will certainly result in horrendous civilian casualties, as we’re already seeing. But what is the alternative you’re proposing? How do you fight against a death cult while somehow preventing its members from dying? People are not gods. They have a right to defend themselves that supersedes any obligation to save a population that has chosen to commit suicide.
I am not Israeli. I am not morally accountable for the actions of their government. And I cannot find a moral justification for condemning their chosen course of action, not that my condemnation would make any difference. I think the Palestinians would do well to reject Hamas and embrace peace with Israel, yes, even in the face of Israeli slaughter of their families. That is what you’re asking the Israelis to do; it’s no more or less absurd to ask the same of the Palestinians. And as between the strong and the weak, the strong can choose love or hatred as they wish, but the weak are much better off embracing the course of love than the course of hatred.
> Hamas is the elected government of Gaza. I thought the whole premise of the international order was that the population of a country can be held accountable for the actions of its leaders.
Most of the population of Gaza were not even *born* when that election happened, yet alone of voting age, and the polling at the time made clear that even the people who voted Hamas into power didn't agree with their hardline stance on Israel and had voted for them only because of Fatah corruption.
Furthermore, much of the reason there hasn't been an election since is that *Israel has prevented one*, as part of Netanyahu's strategy of keeping power split between Hamas and Fatah so nobody has the authority to negotiate for a two-state solution on behalf of the Palestinians. That prevention of an election has gone as far as *literally threatening war against Fatah in 2014* to get an election cancelled. I think it's usually unfair to blame the population for the actions of its government even in a functioning democracy, but it's even worse when most of that population has never had the opportunity to vote in their life, even worse than that when the government they're being blamed for has been imposed on them by a foreign power with the threat of military force, and an utter farce if you are Israel blaming Gazans and you literally ARE the foreign power that has imposed the government on them whose actions you now want to blame them for.
But anyway, if we DO accept that being killed for the actions of your elected leaders is just, then October 7th is just as easily justified as the Israeli response to it is. We end up with a moral system where both sides killing civilians on the other side is morally right. Something has gone deeply wrong there, I think.
> But what is the alternative you’re proposing?
I can't speak for Oliver, but I can answer for myself: allow Palestinians meaningful statehood in exchange for dismantling Hamas. (The offer in 2000 doesn't count. I mean an offer where Palestine: gets a contiguous West Bank territory rather than having cantons surrounded by Israel; gets control of its own airspace; has no Israeli restrictions on goods and people crossing borders with Egypt or Jordan; is not subject to permanent Israeli military occupation; and owns the water that falls on its own territory, rather than having to negotiate a fee with Israeli management companies for its citizens' right to drink water that lands on its own territory.)
As far as I can see it's been an option as long as I've been alive and remains an option now. Israel has just never had a government interested in peace for long enough for it to happen.
From a practical standpoint, if North Korea decided to invade the US, the US would probably destroy the NK government, which would involve a lot of civilian deaths. North Koreans never elected their government, and I don't think it's fair to say that they should be held accountable for the actions of its leader. I think the same is true of Gazans - I don't think *they* should be held accountable for the actions of their leaders, whether they voted for them or not.
It's just that, like in North Korea, from a practical standpoint, there's no way to stop their leaders without killing a lot of civilians. That's always been the situation with wars. It's tragic, but I'm not sure what the alternative is if you buy into the idea that Hamas needs to be dismantled. (I think they do, though I'm less sure that it's *possible*.)
> allow Palestinians meaningful statehood in exchange for dismantling Hamas
Is that something that you think can work *today*? Because, as far as I can tell, Hamas won't even negotiate a temporary ceasefire right now for their own political reasons, and I don't really see them giving up control of Gaza.
> The offer in 2000 doesn't count. [...]
I don't think this is entirely fair. You make it seem as if Israel just gave an empty meaningless offer, which is certainly not the Israeli view of this, but also doesn't appear to be the consensus among outsiders who were part of this process.
As far as I can tell, Israel has multiple times negotiated in good faith to try and reach an agreement, and the Palestinians have never given a counterproposal that represents what *they* want to achieve, and have instead walked away from negotiations. They've also simultaneously started terror attacks that have effectively killed support for a peace process.
> has no Israeli restrictions on goods and people crossing borders with Egypt or Jordan;
The people living in the West Bank don't have restrictions right now on travel to Jordan afaik. From Jordan they can go to anywhere else. The restrictions are on Gaza, because they elected Hamas and started firing rockets at Israel.
> As far as I can see it's been an option as long as I've been alive and remains an option now. Israel has just never had a government interested in peace for long enough for it to happen.
And again you place all the blame on Israel, which is just... not historically accurate. In the 90s and early 2000s, Israel did try to reach a deal, but the Palestinians walked away from it. Israel ended the military occupation of Gaza. The Palestinians started terror attacks and then elected Hamas.
> It's just that, like in North Korea, from a practical standpoint, there's no way to stop their leaders without killing a lot of civilians. That's always been the situation with wars. It's tragic, but I'm not sure what the alternative is
We have no disagreement on principle here, then (even if we disagree on specifics about the Israel/Palestine conflict). I agree with you that a war with good objectives can be justified even though it will kill civilians. That's a different argument - IMO, a very very different one - to the one explicitly expressed by the post I was replying to: that civilians of a country with an evil government are culpable for the government's actions and therefore their deaths in war are not merely justified as a necessary evil for a greater good but rather as a form of holding the civilians "accountable" for their government's actions.
> Is that something that you think can work *today*? Because, as far as I can tell, Hamas won't even negotiate a temporary ceasefire right now
I am not an expert but in my fairly uninformed opinion, yes, surely it would still work? I imagine many Hamas fighters would stop fighting if such a deal were signed with the PA, and you'd surely have plenty of Fatah members and other Palestinians happy to take on the role of policing Gaza and mopping up the remaining Hamas forces if they knew it would mean lasting peace and statehood.
(It's also nonobvious to me how true the characterisation of Hamas as unwilling to negotiate a ceasefire is. The negotiations have happened behind closed doors and we don't really know what the sticking points are.)
> I don't think this is entirely fair. You make it seem as if Israel just gave an empty meaningless offer, but also doesn't appear to be the consensus among outsiders who were part of this process.
I don't think it was entirely empty and meaningless; as far as I can see it amounted to agreeing to preserve the status quo. No more Israeli annexation of land or displacing of Palestinians, but no freedom of movement or trade, no control of their own water supply, and a permanent Israeli military presence on their territory. That might be better than nothing for the Palestinians, if the alternative is that over this century their territory will get eroded away to a fraction of what it was in 2000. But I don't think it's really statehood in the ordinary sense, even if the negotiators used that word for it.
> The people living in the West Bank don't have restrictions right now on travel to Jordan afaik.
That might be true - I don't really know what the status quo is. (https://www.nrc.no/globalassets/pdf/legal-opinions/legal_memo_travelling_abroad.pdf suggests otherwise; it says that Palestinians need Israeli exit permits to leave the West Bank and there's also a secret list of people banned from travelling for security reasons, and that border guards arbitrarily lie to people that they're on the list and turn them back just to fuck with them. But it's from 2016, so might well not be an accurate representation of the situation in 2000 *or* the situation today.)
I'm not sure it matters how liberal the status quo is, though. The point is that Israel insisted on retaining sovereignty over the West Bank's border with Jordan and its airspace as part of the deal, and that they could exploit this in future. Even if they are genuinely liberal about Palestinians travelling today, they were retaining the right to, say, charge $10k per exit permit if Palestinians became wealthy enough for such exploitation to be profitable, or to use import and export tariffs to tap the profits of any successful Palestinian industry. The demand that Israel retain ownership of Palestine's water is similar; it's again a case of the enemy state demanding terms that effectively permit it to arbitrarily tax your citizens in future, meaning a Palestine formed on these terms would not be entitled to the fruits of its own economic growth. Even all that would still be fine if the Israelis didn't ALSO insist that this be a permanent settlement and that Palestine would be bound by the terms to never seek any future improvement of the deal; WITH that clause insisted on, I don't see how Arafat could possibly agree to the terms without it amounting to his consent to the permanent Israeli subjugation of the Palestinian people and throwing away any hope of them achieving meaningful statehood.
> the Palestinians have never given a counterproposal that represents what *they* want to achieve, and have instead walked away from negotiations. They've also simultaneously started terror attacks that have effectively killed support for a peace process.
This is entirely reasonable criticism of the other side and I agree with it. The Palestinians might have a chance of political victory if they had political leaders with moral authority who could outline, publicly, a clear and reasonable set of demands. Alas, this does not seem to be the case.
> Israel did try to reach a deal, but the Palestinians walked away from it
I mean, the Israeli side says this, and the Palestinian side says the Israelis walked away from it. Is there a meaningful sense in which one narrative is more true than the other? What distinguishes the two descriptions of what happened, if anything?
I've been told that Hamas was elected on (possibly true) claims to be much more moderate than Hamas has been.
> I think it's usually unfair to blame the population for the actions of its government
I'm not "blaming" anyone. I'm saying this is how the international order works. Most Japanese subjects and German citizens in the 40s were not in any position to choose or even influence the wartime policies of their leaders. Many of them actively opposed such policies. But it is the job the leaders of a people to protect those people. And it is the job of the leaders of a different people to protect those different people. It was not Churchill's job to protect German citizens from the choices made by their own government and the foreseeable consequences of those choices. England was being mercilessly bombed by the Germans, and once it had the opportunity, it responded in kind, and then some. Dresden was a massacre. Tokyo was a massacre. Whose job was it to prevent those massacres? I know my answer: the leaders of the German and Japanese people. They failed, and their people suffered. Oopsy-doopsy. Maybe they'll make better choices next time and fewer of their children will be killed.
I've never had a whole lot of sympathy for the argument that Israel is being held to a higher standard than any other country on earth. But this time, that seems to be exactly what is happening in lefty spaces in the west. How much time have you guys spent complaining online about the actions of the Ethiopians in the Tigray war or the Saudis against Yemen? Yes, this is whataboutism. But I'm not arguing that the Israelis are morally justified. I'm just arguing that I care about what the Israelis do about as much as I care about what the Saudis or Ethiopians or Palestinians do.
The thing is, all this veiled "Oh I'm **merely** saying that's what happens in reality" defenses of Israel are - if we take them at face value - utterly uninteresting.
Nobody here is dumb enough to expect any better from states. The thread is about how to react given that the genocidal state is already doing what it's doing. So yeah, Israel is gonna Israel, but - and this is the important part - if US citizens want their nation-state to not give 4 billion dollars every year in "peace time" or 50+ billions or so in war times, they have every right to. Especially if they - like the very author of the post and the blog - belong to groups like Effective Altruism, which advocate that people should calculate their effect on the world and strive to increase the positive part and decrease the negative part.
"States.... use violence guys", why would you waste the kinetic energy in your fingers to even type this on a keyboard?
> allow Palestinians meaningful statehood in exchange for dismantling Hamas
I think that responding to atrocities with rewards is bad policy.
I would argue that in the Hamas attacks, the Gazans have forfeited their rights to self-determination for at least a generation. After a generation of occupation and deradicalization, with Hamas militants being treated as common criminals (i.e. not as POWs), we can perhaps discuss some degree of self-determination again.
Also, why do you think that would work? Hamas will not accept a peace where they do not control all of what is currently Israel. Few people in Gaza seem to be willing to fight Hamas.
Even if you could convince the Gazans to officially dissolve Hamas, do you really think that they would extradite all Hamas members? If not, they would form Hamas 2.0 soon.
The defeat of Nazi Germany was also a defeat of Nazi Herrenmenschen ideology. And West Germany offered Nazi scumbags good incentives to defect to the CDU and live out their lives without committing further atrocities instead of fighting for a German Empire which seemed plausible to many in 1940 but totally absurd in 1955.
By contrast, Hamas members do not have an ideology which can be empirically disproved on the battlefield -- they were always the underdog. Their goal to eradicate Israel from the map was just as batshit insane when they were founded as it is today.
As long as this ideology festers, Israel would be foolish to give the Gazans more autonomy which they will plausibly use to commit further atrocities.
> I think that responding to atrocities with rewards is bad policy.
Wait until you hear about responding to atrocities with 10x more brutal atrocities.
>I would argue that in the Hamas attacks, the Gazans have forfeited their rights to self-determination for at least a generation.
How does this forfeiting happen?
Is there some number of civilian victims that, in your opinion, would cause Israelis to lose *their* rights of self-determination?
"I think that responding to atrocities with rewards is bad policy."
You put forward this principle as a reason it's necessary to punish Palestinian civilians for October 7th, but it's also the very same principle that, when applied by the other side, requires committing October 7th in the first place. Even if there's some merit in this principle, at some point it needs to be bent or broken to achieve peace - otherwise you just have two sides both morally obligated to keep killing each other, forever.
According to the "most Palestinians weren't even born" argument, a country could literally do anything that is in their power to do and not face retaliation as long as most of their population isn't allowed/is too young to vote. They just have to make sure that any retaliation would disproportionately (I don't know if that's even a criteria) affect the population, and they're good.
Which is the PR strategy of the Hamas and has been for quite some years.
Great point! Hmm, a snarky implication of the most-of-the-population-didn't-vote-for-this is that the current USA is absolutely blameless for its wars with Native Americans, considering that the wars preceded the right of most of the population to vote, numerically most notably the nineteenth amendment in 1920. Anyone with any grievance with the USA older than that can be declared automatically SOL. :-)
> I thought the whole premise of the international order was that the population of a country can be held accountable for the actions of its leaders.
This is called "collective punishment," and it's considered a war crime under the Geneva Conventions.
Yes, intentionally targeting civilians is a war crime. If Israel is doing that, they’re committing a war crime.
I’ll bet Israel is committing some war crimes, as happens in every war. I doubt that the war crimes are being ordered from the top as such.
My opinion about all of this is not going to make a difference. I’m having a hard time getting too exercised about it. Powerless groups should not taunt more powerful groups by committing atrocities against innocent civilians from the powerful group. It’s not wise.
But we're not talking about what's wise, we're talking about what's moral. Pro-Israel commenters keep forgetting the is-ought distinction and I'm not sure it's completely unintentional at this point.
You keep saying "war crimes," but why do you think it matters what some organization arbitrarily decided that people aren't allowed to do in war? Especially when the most powerful country in the world has already threatened force if their personnel ever gets prosecuted. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_Protection_Act
The only "justice" that is ultimately upheld is that might makes right. If anyone gets prosecuted for this, it'll be either because they'll be used as a scapegoat and/or the US uses the situation to increase the leverage they have on Israel.
>You keep saying "war crimes," but why do you think it matters what some organization arbitrarily decided that people aren't allowed to do in war?
Seconded!
I've always found it very weird that some diplomats got together and said:
"Killing people with machine guns: GOOD! :-)"
"Killing people with poison gas: BAD! :-("
WTF???
>The only "justice" that is ultimately upheld is that might makes right.
_Almost_ completely agreed. I normally see international law as a farce. The exception is that e.g. Apple and Samsung settled their IP dispute in court, catapulting lawyers at each other, and no one got killed. Under certain restricted circumstances some international disputes get resolved without turning to violence.
I agree with you.
Even if one would accept that the death of the Gazan civilian population is an acceptable price to defeat Hamas, starvation is not on the Pareto-frontier to accomplish that questionable goal.
> His message isn't "providing food to Gaza civilians is a bad trade-off because some of it also goes to Hamas which prolongs the suffering"
That does seem to be his message. He explains in another comment: "Providing food and oxygen to the aggressor prolongs the war and suffering, and causes more people to be harmed."
And yeah, I think the mass starvation he's proposing would be probably the most terrible thing done by a first world country in my lifetime, and would not cause less harm than the alternatives like he suggests. But his reasoning, at least as written, is to cause less long-term suffering.
In the medium term at best. Hamas was never an existential threat to Israel. But a hostile Saudi Arabia might be. The treatment of civilians in Gaza is turning public opinion in the Arab world from exhaustion and indifference with the Palestinian cause back to visceral hatred of Israel. While the current crop of Arab leaders are still tacitly supporting Israel against the wishes of their population, it is likely that future, less well-established leaders will take action against Israel to shore up their domestic position.
Civilian suffering has also created, for the first time, a strong America constituency that is opposed to any security assistance to Israel. Losing the american security guarantee would be deeply problematic for Israel. I am not sure that Hezbollah in Lebanon would be so restrained if there wasn't an American aircraft carrier right next door.
I think the most interesting historical analogy for this situation is the Rape of Belgium during WW1. Graphic stories about German atrocities in Belgium were critical to building British and later American public support for entering the war. It has been argued by some historians that Britain entering the war in 1914 is what turned what looked to be a short conflict into, well, World War 1, such in turn set the stage for World War 2. Thus, pointless war crimes on the part of the Germans in Belgium set their country on a path that would see millions of their own civilians raped and murdered, as well as successive dismemberments of the German state.
You missed a distinction here. I was deliberately presenting a steelman of his argument in that other comment, and pointing out he wasn't using that steelman.
"Providing food and oxygen to the aggressor" deliberately lumps all Gaza residents as "the aggressor". Saying that it "causes more people to be harmed" is weasel wording. It doesn't make a specific claim about who gets harmed, because if we get outside of vague generalities and examine the specific claim of "less Gaza civilians will die if we starve them to death until Hamas surrenders", we quickly see how absurd that claim would be.
I'm saying that Mr Gershuni's explicit message is that if you allow any relief to Gaza civilians, "the implications for the region and for millions of lives will be devastating". The message is that "the region" (if I'm being uncharitable, Israel)'s lives matter, but the lives of people in Gaza don't, and in fact are a net negative.
My point is *this is not innocent*. Mr Gershuni uses words that evoke violence and certainty to describe the harm caused by the Hamas ("launch rockets en masse", "launch a deadly attack on Israel", "millions of lives"), but to describe the harm inflicted on the Gaza populace he uses words like "you want a city to surrender", "provide it with food", "provide food and oxygen to the aggressor", words that evoke calculus and vagueness. This is the language of dehumanization.
You see his reasoning as trying to minimize suffering, because he gives himself just enough plausible deniability to fit that explanation and this is a forum that loves steelmanning, but the message is clearly that we shouldn't give a shit about one side's suffering. He explicitly says his preferred policy would be to let everyone in Gaza starve to death until they surrender. This is disgusting, and you shouldn't give him the benefit of the doubt when he barely gives lip service to the kinder interpretation.
Nothing in his answer suggests he doesn't think this will help the people of Gaza in the long term compared to a drawn out conflict with Hamas. Perhaps he thinks the war would end quickly when Hamas is faced with the prospect of starvation.
More to the point though, you're claiming he didn't say something he said and claiming he said something he didn't.
"providing food to Gaza civilians is a bad trade-off because some of it also goes to Hamas which prolongs the suffering" _is_ the claim he made. He did not say that Gazan civilians are the enemy or that food reaching the civilians is bad. You're assuming that what he wrote is dishonest and he secretly believes the lives of Gazan civilians are worthless. That's possible. But you don't get to assume that when arguing with strangers on the internet. You can't just disregard his stated beliefs and claim he believes something different without evidence.
I'm not steelmanning his argument. My objection is not about the contents of any argument related to Israel or Gaza. It's about assuming another commenters words are dishonest and they have secret sinister motives.
One strategic goal is to get the Gazan people to reconsider their support for Hamas. Hamas is not some sort of external agent that is holding the Gazan people hostage, they generally support Hamas. I think the Israelis want the people there to understand that Hamas is not a long term benefit to the people so that they will choose other leaders.
Whether this is a realistic goal or whether the bombing campaign is more likely to lead to further support for Hamas or Hamas-like alternatives is a good question.
Israel is strongly signaling that they will never again permit the buildup of weapons that could be used in an attack like October 7, so the Gazans have two options - fight a continually losing war or give up fighting. The Gazans/Hamas are trying to open a third option of international pressure to get out of the no-win situation Israel wants them in. It's too hard to say how this goes, and who breaks first. With US support that seems solid I don't think Israel will be the one to give up, but we don't have much vision into the inner workings of Israeli leadership.
I'm no expert, but as I understand it, Hamas is *neither* holding the Gazan people hostage *nor* generally supported by them. Polls I've seen show support for Hamas ranging from ~20% to ~50%; admittedly Fatah is not well-regarded either but there's still a good chance an election at any point since Hamas gained power 18 years ago would've removed them. Of course, no such election has occurred. But nonetheless I don't think it's fair to characterise this state of affairs as Hamas holding the Gazan people hostage, because it's not *Hamas* who have refused an election and insisted that they remain in power, but *Israel*. Netanyahu even went as far as threatening a retaliatory war on the West Bank when Hamas and Fatah agreed to Gaza elections in 2014, on the (to my eyes, absurd) grounds that agreeing to cooperate with Hamas in a peaceful transfer of power would constitute "peace with Hamas" and that this is incompatible with "peace with Israel". Fatah dutifully cancelled the election and left Hamas in power to keep killing Israelis, just as the Israeli government demanded.
Given the above, I doubt the objective (at least at the senior political level) is to make the Gazans choose other leaders. Israel could've achieved that objective at any point in the last 18 years by simply *not forbidding it*, but didn't do so because Netanyahu actively *wanted* Hamas in power to prevent a single unified government of Gaza and the West Bank from forming and thus weaken Palestinian political efforts towards a two-state solution (a strategy he infamously stated out loud at a Likud party conference).
> Polls I've seen show support for Hamas ranging from ~20% to ~50%
First hit on Google:
https://apnews.com/article/israel-hamas-palestinians-opinion-poll-wartime-views-a0baade915619cd070b5393844bc4514
“Despite the devastation, 57% of respondents in Gaza and 82% in the West Bank believe Hamas was correct in launching the October attack, the poll indicated.”
Not just supporting Hamas, but supporting the October 7 attacks specifically. 57 to 82%.
I’m sorry, but I cannot read these numbers as anything but the Palestinian people, in Gaza and elsewhere, declaring themselves accountable and responsible for the atrocities committed against Israeli civilians on October 7.
If support is responsibility, does that mean Israelis supporting the war crimes in Gaza should be held accountable? Up to and including Boycotts Divestment Sanctions and ICC trials?
Don’t know! I bet you have an opinion though.
How accurate do you think the average Gazan's perception of what happened on October 7th is? From 0% accurate to 100% accurate?
So I should be asking not just “what is my moral responsibility to save the members of a suicide cult from themselves” but “what is my moral responsibility to save the deluded members of a suicide cult from themselves”. Duly noted.
I am fairly certain that Hamas does not control the media in the West Bank, where their rival Fatah rules.
Indeed, I think it is curious that (from the same article) Hamas is polling at 42-44%. This leaves a significant fraction which only likes Hamas when they are killing Jews.
Also, Hamas was fucking filming their atrocities. Are you asking me to believe that they were even slightly invested in hiding their crimes from the Gazans?
>“Despite the devastation, 57% of respondents in Gaza and 82% in the West Bank believe Hamas was correct in launching the October attack, the poll indicated.”
Yes, that was the biggest shock to me in the post-October 7th events. Prior to seeing those polls, I had thought that civilians in Gaza would be peace-loving and that Hamas was an aberration. I was wrong. I'd stepped right into the "typical mind" fallacy. :-(
There are no good solutions here.
As it happens, I have relatives in Israel and no analogous links to Gaza, so my _personal_ view is to support the IDF in whatever they judge as best protecting Israelis from another Oct 7th attack. I'm on the other side of the ocean, while the IDF is both tasked with protecting Israelis and has to live with the consequences so I bow to their judgement. I presume that someone with opposite personal links would have the opposite preferences.
If one of the Mexican drug cartels invaded the U.S.border and committed the atrocities the Palestinians' Hamas inflicted on Israel on October 7, they would get a lot more than groceries dropped on their head.
As much as I would like to see a two-state 'solution', one can't bargain with terrorists, and one certainly can't have a terrorist state within the borders of one's own country.
As difficult a task Netanyahu has, Israel is fortunate to have him in charge at this time. Palestinians placed terrorists in charge of their government, and they are living with the consequences of that fact.
Yes, one of the factors that makes all of this pro-Palestinian sentiment hard for me to swallow is remembering how Americans reacted after 9/11. When America gets hurt, it lashes out with extremely disproportionate violence, and most Americans support this disproportionate response. Yet Israel is now being told to temper its anger and its response in a way Americans would never dream of doing if it were their daughters being raped and their sons being butchered by terrorists.
The relatively meagre pre-7-Oct poll numbers in favour of hamas are partially explained by equally high numbers in favour of Islamic Jihad. Hamas holds the reigns in Gaza, but they're not the only game in town (Hamas and IJ are the big dogs, and there are 2 or 3 minor factions, mostly arab-nationalist or vaguely socialist-insurrectionist flavoured remnants of decades past). Hamas was seen (at least by those who lean toward IJ) as being on the road toward accomodation, like the PLO/PA before them. Gaza public opinion ist certainly not moderate.
I am not aware of the 2014 situation, so I'll moderate my views on that specifically. I do know, as SubstackCommenter noted, that the Palestinians generally do support the goals and tactics of Hamas, and have not taken steps to remove Hamas. If that's partially or mostly Israel's fault, then I am less sympathetic to Israel's goals, but I don't know enough to evaluate that. If the Palestinians would seek to attack Israel like on October 7 with or without Hamas, I don't think it changes much.
So they stockpiled food for the men and left none for the women and children?
Then if we send food, they'll stockpile it for the men and leave none for the women and children.
They have food, clean water and medical supplies in any case. So under this framework you have the option of starving only the non-combattants or starving everyone. The latter option seriously degrades your standing in the international community with little or no tactical benefit. It just seems like a very bad strategy to me, which is why I'm wondering if I'm missing some critical consideration or information.
"It just seems like a very bad strategy to me, which is why I'm wondering if I'm missing some critical consideration or information."
Current political events tend to be emotionally charged and one strategy I have is to try to find either (a) a sports analogy [best] or (b) a historical analogy that is further away then "now".
So (maybe): Would it have made sense for the US to supply food to Japan during the last year or so of World War 2?
From the US Parks service: "U.S. subs based on Guam and Saipan imposed a virtual blockade against Japan. Few ships entered or left Japanese waters without being attacked or sunk by submarines. Japan ran out of oil for her naval armada, gasoline for aircraft and tanks, steel and aluminum for industry, and food for her people."
Would it have been better (strategically or morally I suppose) for the US to send food to Japan (though not steel and aluminum) during this blockade?
I expect the analogy is flawed, as most analogies are, but maybe the answer to the WW2 Japan blockade can shed light on the current situation.
Your example is interesting, because of course the US did provide massive aid to the Japanese civilian population every time they occupied a new island. This effort culminated in the immediate postwar period, and was an important factor in establishing the cordial postwar relations.
Another perhaps more analogous example is the american relief effort in Belgium during WW1. Here, the important British decisionmakers thought that the Americans were prolonging the war by putting pressure off of the Germans to feed the belgians themselves. Nevertheless, this effort was a key factor in shaping American soft power in the coming decades.
But these analogies break down when we consider that both the Germans in WW1 and Japanese in WW2 were industrial state actors, while Hamas is not. It is abundantly clear on both cases that the naval blockades strongly inhibited the ability of these powers to pursue their war effort by depleting the supply of key raw materials. In the case of Hamas, I haven't seen reasonable arguments for why a steady supply of food and water would prolong the war. Conversely, the increasingly desparate situation in Gaza and the accompanying souring of public opinion against Israel is causing real damage to Israel's strategic position.
AFAIK, the US provided massive aid to Japan *after* Japan surrendered. That's commendable, but it's not really an argument against why blocking aid to an enemy would encourage them to surrender.
I agree with the rest, like that starvation in Gaza will hurt Israel strategically, with one minor caveat: support for Hamas in Gaza may be falling due to the aftermath of the attack, even though support for Hamas rose in the West Bank. There are news reports that Gazans blame Hamas for provoking this situation, even if they also hate Israel and believe the attack was righteous. You can believe the bear living next door is evil and still get mad when someone pokes the bear, to disastrous results.
Agreed. Belligerents have a long history of fighting with means which have little effect on the outcome of a war while harming the civilian population.
Hitlers Blitz on the UK, Harris bombing of German cities and the Nagasaki bomb all did not achieve any strategic objective, beyond making the people in charge feel better.
Hmm... I'm skeptical, particularly about your three WWII examples. How well is it really known on whether they affected the course of the war? Even simply terrifying the population that includes a subset who work in munitions factories seems like it would have _some_ effect. How well is that ruled out?
acoup [0] talks about it at length about morale bombings, which would cover the blitz and Harris.
I think it mostly comes around to indiscriminate bombing having a larger effect in unifying the population.
Suppose that some fraction of the population are 'meh' about the war as long as the front is not anywhere near them. Now you kill one in thirty of them in a morale bombing campaign. Individually, they might react by becoming more enthusiastic about the war or less enthusiastic, but they are not living in a vacuum. Chances are that that country you bombed will have a much better access to feed them their viewpoint than you do. So in aggregate, you get a lot of buy-in towards total war.
In Japan, it was the leadership who surrendered, not pressure from the population. I am personally doubtful that Nagasaki was required to convince them.
[0] https://acoup.blog/2022/10/21/collections-strategic-airpower-101/
(ctrl-F resist)
The Harris bombing was a clear failure, but I don't think it's correct to say that Nagasaki bomb "did not achieve any strategic objective". At worst it's debatable.
Even in our own timeline, the Japanese surrender was a very close thing, and the hardliners *even attempted a coup* to prevent surrender. And that's *with* both bombs as well as the Soviet invasion of Manchuria and so on.
From the Wikipedia article, I agree that it is debatable. There were a multitude of reasons to drop the second bomb, some were in pursuit of strategic objectives (which does not mean that we would consider them unproblematic in 2024) with some success, others were completely orthogonal to any military outcomes. The main one here would be the desire to test the effects of the second type of bomb on a real city.
Personally, I think that the morality of Nagasaki depends on the conventional casualties between the two bombings. If they were only a 1000 per day, then it probably would have been worthwhile to wait more than three days. On the other hand, if the fighting was so fierce that 50k died per day, then a quick succession of bombings might minimize the total casualties.
I think the main *strategic* idea is that it will cause the people to rise up against Hamas. I also think among Israelis, it truly is born out of grief and vengence.
Personally I reject both of these justifications completely - there is no moral justification for causing starvation.
According to the Associated Press, a poll in December showed ( https://apnews.com/article/israel-hamas-palestinians-opinion-poll-wartime-views-a0baade915619cd070b5393844bc4514 ) that "57% of respondents in Gaza and 82% in the West Bank believe Hamas was correct in launching the October attack". Given that most of the population of Gaza is in favor of the indiscriminate killing of all Israelis until none are left, I don't see what other option Israel has. If you want to blame someone, blame Egypt, which would be far better able to let the Palestinians out of Gaza.
So you're insinuating that the airdrops are to deliberately help Hamas, and your calculus is apparently that the total eradication of Hamas is worth every civilian casualty of this war as long as they're Palestinian? Do I have that right, yes or no..
Mathematics difficult has never been
Reason to relent from stacking stats
You would starve the hurt and hungry
to avoid doing some maths
the formulaes for arithmetic attrition are banned by law
your stance? Bespeaks of lacking schooling
An easy manner and a mind with no manners for matters
it matters: your calc's are solved by caring tooling
Not every hungry hand is all the same
We might between fists and shakes differentiate
And given the conditions of radical transmission
It is seems better for divided areas to try to integrate
You yearn for punishment, collective
This math would be amiss
But let's use this chance to school us too!
Can you show your work for proving your premiss?
Do you want to hear something funny? this conflict has one of the strangest and most unsettling horseshoe effect I have ever experienced. Nearly every single thing I hear from Pro-Israeli commenters here and elsewhere is mirrored point-by-point by things Pro-Palestinian commenters say to me in real life, and what I see them say online. Everything. No exceptions. It got to the point where I can look at a comment and imagine what its analog on the other side is going to look like effortlessly, without really trying.
Take your comment as an example. I call it the "Let God Sort His Own" [1] attitude. It goes something like this: "Yes, my actions have unfortunate and immoral consequences, I acknowledge that, but it's not me who should be held accountable, it's actually X, they forced my hand. I wouldn't have done those actions if X didn't do <bad things>. Therefore, I'm still on the side of Good.". It's present with abundance on the pro-Palestinian side too, everything from unarmed settlers being attacked or killed to Northern victims of Hezbollah's rockets to the victims of October 7th, "Yes, it's unfortunate what happened, but Israel bears total responsibility for what happened, and you can't believe them anyway." Someone pro-Hamas have literally said to me " Why are you so harsh on Hamas? Why do you expect them to be angels? When the conflict is over with victory you can trial Hamas as much as you want, just not now".
What's ever funnier is that both sides can recognize it in the other side: Pro-Israelis were *enraged* by the open letters signed after October 7th saying that Israel bears all the responsibility for the attack, and Pro-Palestinians are similarly enraged by the ubiquitous Israeli propaganda point "Hamas uses civilians as human shields so they're the one to blame for all the casualties". *Somewhere* in the brain of every Pro-Palestinian commenter, there is the recognition that blaming others for your crimes is bad, and that 2 wrongs don't make a right. It's just that this part is blinded by the tribe juice, when flinging shit at the other tribe becomes a priority.
Fittingly enough, my first comment on ACX under this identity was born out of frustration and bewilderment at this way of thinking https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-297/comment/41664444?utm_campaign=comment&utm_medium=email&utm_source=substack&utm_content=comment. Ah, the good old days of October 11th, when the Palestinians killed were "merely" a thousand or two and not 30K. When I didn't imagine I would read "**ALL** 2.3 million Gazans are now refugees." in even the most hysterical and unhinged anti-Israel propaganda.
What's interesting about this way of thinking is how it masterfully evades a need for common ground and ties everything back the most controversial question. "Killing children is bad" is about the most un-controversial thing you can say, it can act as a regulator/de-escalator for the feedback loop of hate and violence. In a sane world, invoking the crimes of the other side should go something like this:
[Pro-Israel]: Can you agree that whatever Israel did, killing and raping is bad?
[Pro-Palestinian]: Of course, and can you agree that whatever Hamas/PLO/Arabs did, starving civilians and sexually abusing Palestinian women in prisons is bad?
[Pro-Israel]: Of course.
Here, 75 years of argument-and-counterargument short-circuited by the advanced technology of **checks notes** remembering there are innocents on both sides. However this conversation proceeds, both parties at least know that are some common goal somewhere in there, the Pro-Palestinian agrees that innocent Israelis shouldn't be killed/raped/etc..., and that Pro-Israeli agrees that innocent Palestinians (and no just Gazans, as any report on the West Bank since October 7th would show) shouldn't be killed/sexually abused/starved/stripped naked in December.
But instead, the "Let God Sort His Own" rhetorical trick is a tool to convert the above potential conversation into the actual following conversation, one which I saw so many times that I can predict every single branching possibility coming out of it:
[Pro-Israeli]: Do you agree that whatever Israel did, killing and raping is bad?
[Pro-Palestinian]: What about the occupation? And what about what's happening in Gaza? And what about <Incredibly racist thing said by some Likud scum>?
[Pro-Israeli]: Oh but what about the fact that Israel gave Palestinians 5 peace offers and they all refused? Did you forget "We will drive Jews into the sea"? Are you really sure that what's happening in Gaza is indeed happening in Gaza? Hamas Hamas Hamas Hamas Hamas.
If it wasn't so depressing, it would have made a good 2-panel Wojak meme.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caedite_eos._Novit_enim_Dominus_qui_sunt_eius.
But there is one major difference between the sides. Only one of them has a good chance of surviving this conflict. That's ultimately the only thing that matters in the end: not who is right, but who is left.
Which one?
By the way Hamas was much weaker in 2014, and Israel also invaded in 2014, with the same exact rhetoric about "destroying Hamas". It didn't happen.
It didn't happen because Israel was fine with letting Hamas exist at the time. As long as they existed, the Palestinian opposistion would be divided and lose public sympathy. Unfortunately, Hamas has made it impossible for Israel to tolerate their existence. Fortunately, this created the perfect justification for a full-scale invasion of Gaza. And that brings us to the present.
I really don't know why you think Hamas has a fighting chance here. They existed because they were allowed to exist. They are against a wealthy, well-armed nation backed by the most powerful country in the world. Gaza is surrounded on all sides by opposition, and could easily be blockaded if necessary. The only way they can "win" is if US actually threatens to stop supporting Israel, which is... unlikely.
It's not clear why Israel invaded in 2014 then if the goal was never to destroy Hamas. Ground invasions are famously Israel's Achilles' Heel, and air campaigns are a much cheaper and less PR-disastrous for them.
> They are against a wealthy, well-armed nation backed by the most powerful country in the world
Just like the Viet Cong in 1960s. Or for that matter Al-Qaeda since 2000. How did that work out for the USA?
And regardless of anything, Hamas didn't come down from the sky fully formed, it was created by Israel's actions. As long as Israel remains Israel and Palestinians are not genocided to the last baby, another Hamas will rise up. Because the fundamental truth is that you can't treat people like animals indefinitely.
There is a West Bank, you know. I'm sure it serves as a model for Israel's plans in Gaza.
כי בנים ובנות ואנחנו איתם
מי בפועל ומי בלחישת הסכמה
נדחקים במלמול של הכרח ונקם
לתחומם של פשעי מלחמה
...
תמוגר השלווה הלוחשת אכן
ויראה את פניה בראי
יעמוד החייל העברי יתגונן
מקהות הציבור העברי
Hamas rhymes with en masse now?
I hope you don't mind me sharing the AI-voiced version of this work.
https://app.suno.ai/song/d9072826-e813-4cff-8bae-f5b2b97278ba/
I've been experimenting with AI music recently and I have a hunch that music generators like this one would be better at poetry reading than your typical AI voice generator.
Probably right, your hunch. The voicing was kinda creepy and thundering, still: impressive 'talent'. Can it do old Johnny Cash?
Maybe you should credit the original author and link to this post in your version?
How good is AI music? Can it replace musicians and composers already? How far is it from replacing them? Is it like with pictures?
Is it already the case that, when I hear instrumental music, I must suspect it has been entirely composed and played by a robot?
I find this stuff terrifying, since I fear I will no longer be able to tell apart human artists from AI, as is already the case with pictures.
Spent two hours (didn't expect it to take that long!) on making AI music out of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7F_XSa2O_4Q
This is terrifying. I feel suicidal now.
It is not good, but knowing how fast things are improving, I don't think human music has much time left.
Sorry.
If humanity as a whole has enough time left, I think we should be able to navigate this, since we value being able to express ourselves (and copyright holders might want to prevent AI from being trained on their music).
Don't apologize, on the contrary I thank you for letting me know.
It could be like self driving cars - they seemed poised to take over 10 years ago, now it's like they're stalled at "capable but worse than most human drivers". Maybe the difference between average and good is bigger than it looks
The general type of AI being used produces the most-typical completions to prompts. This is an advantage in logical thinking, as there is generally a small number of correct completions and many incorrect ones; but a disadvantage in producing interesting music, in which the most-likely continuations are the most-boring.
Suicide is never productive. Bombing a data center could be.
Why did it take two hours? How much human input is in that video?
This is awesome - noticeably better than anything I've done with AI music. Could you share a bit more about your process? Two hours suggests it wasn't just "give the lyrics as prompt and done", but I'm not familiar with how one iteratively tunes AI music.
Well, what passes for popular human music today is so atrocious that it's hard to imagine that AI can do worse. What I have actually heard though is AI-made "covers" of hit songs by a famous performer, and those are impressively good/believable.
I agree about popular music, and yet thanks to the spread of the Internet I find it easy today to discover obscure music I like both old and new, much easier today than in the year 2000. I would never have imagined such abundance back then, back when finding musicians I liked was very hard.
That is why as a lover of human artistic creativity (though not much of an artist myself) who's not very young (in between gen X and millennials) I was very happy about the current technological era, up until AI art appeared to herald the apocalypse.
Oh, I agree with all of that. But since most actually good music nowadays is driven by smallish scenes, I don't think that they are in much danger from AI, however good it gets. People are in those for human connection, e.g. in how most of the profits are made not from record sales/streams but live performances.
I play music as a hobby on a fairly advanced level. Maybe if my livelihood depended on it I'd see it differently, but for now all I can say - bring it on!
I play music because it gives me pleasure, and the more tools I have to work with to make it more fun, the better. I don't feel threatened by these AI advances, I want more of them.
This reminds me of the photography invention and development. Rather than making artists extinct, it likely played a role in expanding artistic styles.
Photos can be told apart from human art. Not so with AI art.
Photography did in fact make realistic art decline. But photography can only create art in that style, a realistic stye, therefore it couldn't have destroyed all art. Whereas AI art can create in every conceivable style.
The most important difference however, the very heart of the difference, is that with photography, there is always a human artist involved, the photographer.
With AI art, you can never know how much of what you see comes form a human being, therefore we will soon get to the point we must assume none of it comes from any human artist, and the human merely commissioned the work (paint me some Bible scenes on this ceiling, says the Pope to Michelangelo, does that make the Pope an artist?), or even just told the robot "just make something pretty, come up with the details yourself".
Apply the same logic to music.
Sure, we will always be able to *play* music, if that is all we are interested in. Just like we will always be able to draw, write...
But art is communication not masturbation.
How will you be able to touch people with your music, when the day comes that there is no way of proving any of it is yours, as opposed to a soulless machine's output?
I say these things mainly as a consumer of art, not a creator.
I don’t think photography only creates realistic art, but I kind of don’t want to debate this one. Music is where my heart is. So:
You will not be able to tell if a recording were created by a human or machine. In fact, you can’t now. I’m working on a piece right now where I want a grand piano to play a part. I neither have one, nor am any good at it. It took me 10 minutes yesterday to ask a machine to play one for me. So that ship has long sailed.
I think it’s good. For a short blip of time, about one human life’s length, we had this weird situation where musicians could become rich superstars by recording music and selling records. This is now gone too. We’re back to pre-phonograph age: if you want to listen to music performed by real people, go see it live. In a bar, in a hall, stadium - scales vary. But that’s what musicians’ lives are going to be like now: earn your living by playing live.
But you at least composed the piece, right?
I'm saying that very soon, you won't be able to do that, because nobody will have any way of knowing that a human being *composed* a piece.
Composers have been famous for centuries before the phonograph existed.
So did painters and sculptors, and writers of all kind, without having to perform live.
Non-live art has always existed, ever since cave paintings. If all non-live art is lost, humanity will lose a lot.
I for one love the fact that a musician on the other side of the world can reach me, and will be extremely sad if that is lost.
Oh, I think I understand your concern now: you would open Spotify and have no idea if this new “band” is actually all AI, correct? And that AI projects will completely drown out music created by humans?
So there’s good and bad news: the bad news is that I indeed “composed” the melody and some guitar parts, and only used robots for drums and piano, but I could have easily asked the robots to create a new piece for me, and then distribute it as my own to Spotify et.al.
The good news is that I - the person behind the silly screen name - still have to publish it. There’s no mechanism for robots to take over, every distribution company abides by KYC laws and regulations, you have to be a physical person to distribute your music, and to register copyright. So I may choose to flood Spotify with AI-generated dreck, but… why would I do this? Music distribution isn’t free, chances of me earning anything from crap are minuscule, so the incentive just isn’t there.
Where I see this going, and it’s been going there for awhile now, is that the flood of human-created music (with a lot of help from robots in most cases) will continue. You don’t need to worry about not having access to wonderful music from everywhere. Almost no one will make any money from streaming. Musicians will use streaming to break through, get known, get an audience who will come to see them play live and buy merch. The music will keep getting wilder and wonderfuller because robots will help human creativity and remove barriers.
I think you are being too pessimistic. I think there will be ways of telling human from AI music apart. You can use AI today to find the likelihood of something else (text f.ex.) being created by other AI, and a service like spotify would probably have incentives to verify human music. Also, from my experience with text and art generation this far (GPTs, stable diffusion, midjourney, dall-e) I think we will be somewhat able to tell AI and human art appart - after experimenting with these a while you start seeing patterns. I'm not claiming I would be able to spot art generated by an AI every time, but I could look at something and think this is probably generated by dall-e or midjourney f.ex., in the same way that I could recognize the style of a familiar artist.
America's very best: five months of throwing coins into the despot's jar.
In a fair world, this would win the noble prize. But it is not a fair world, for in a fair world, this wouldn't exist.
Excellent though I was hoping for a trolley problem reference.
In any largish project, the trolley lurks unseen
(For all attempts to look at it will make us feel unclean)
The unintended consequences multiply like rats -
To continue the analogy, the safety rules are cats.
But safety rules are writ in blood, and real life is complex,
And each new project we attempt will find new ways to vex.
Some mishaps may be humorous, some others may be tragic,
We can't foretell which ones are which, our foresight isn't magic.
The snake, the stone, the paladin, the harmless loving dad,
They all can have their good points, philosophers be glad! -
Yet all in their diverging styles can bring their bad points too
And random tragic mishaps, no matter what they do.
If God had wanted us to act without a risk to life,
The world would have been different, and not with pitfalls rife.
At every moment we direct the trolley down the tracks,
Not knowing where the victims are, and there are no take-backs.
Philosophy or poetry may help us find a voice
According to our nature, as we justify our choice
To act, or stay inactive (which is still a moral act),
To balance risky bets we take with safeguards that we lacked.
We mostly try to do our best, to act with competence,
But sometimes fail,, and do great harm - the irony's intense.
We ought to be responsible, to try for greatest good...
But in the end, we shrug and say, "I did the best I could."
oh bravo. bravo.
Eeeeeexcellent.
Fantastic.
This is great.
But are we doing the best we can?
I am worried that Kipling is just in there for rhyming purposes but would be glad to be told otherwise.
He'll never live down the terrible crime of having written "The White Man's Burden".
Fair enough. It's not obvious to me that the counterfactual is better if you are counting in utils. But there were certainly things that Kipling regretted.
At the beginning of WW1 his son John tried to get in the British Army but was initially denied because of poor eyesight. Rudyard pulled some string and John was sent as an officer to the Western Front where he soon died in combat. I'm sure Kipling had plenty regrets over that but he remained one of the most preeminent propagandists for the war.
"I knew my son was mortal."
Kipling had done his time in the army, he knew what was up.
"Kipling had done his time in the army, he knew what was up."
Google searching keeps coming up with results such as "Although not a soldier himself, Kipling wrote ..." and "Never a soldier himself, Kipling spent a great deal of time around other soldiers..."
I don't see any claim for his being in the military in the Wikipedia article.
And I don't think any experiences Kipling would have heard of from former soldiers would have led him to expect WW1 to be as full of carnage as it turned out to be.
You're right, Rudyard Kipling didn't serve in the military. This is interesting on two counts: (1) his poems and prose are ubiquitous in Commonwealth army culture (2) his work shows a deep empathy for its subjects, which I (falsely) assumed came from experience.
That aside, given all the propaganda work Kipling did for British, I think it's more likely that he took a principled stance on the virtue of military service. His Epitaphs of the War throw a few jabs at politicians and shirkers and lionizes the fallen. A man of Kipling's station would likely have seen military service as inherited duty. He grieved his son though, and wrote about it. Short article here: https://blog.oup.com/2015/12/rudyard-kipling-war-poet/
Dropping food or mosquito nets in some dusty country is just a contemporary take on "The White Man's Burden"
What's odious about "The White Man's Burden" isn't the idea that rich white Westerners have a responsibility toward poor black Africans and ought to try to help them.
It's that Kipling called the not-white peoples "half devil and half child". It's that the "White Man's Burden" was not the obligation to _help_ but the obligation to _conquer and rule_. It's that Kipling evidently felt that it was terribly unfair how the "silent sullen peoples" didn't appreciate what a noble thing the White Man was doing in conquering and ruling them for their own greater good.
None of that is implied by sending food to places that don't have enough food, or mosquito nets to places that have too much malaria.
So whether "malaria nets = White Man's Burden" is meant to support "so much the worse for malaria nets" or "so much the better for the White Man's Burden", I _very strongly_ disagree.
Another thing that's missed about the poem is that it's written somewhere between the apogee and the twilight of the British empire. It is a bad argument on its own terms, but it's also a post hoc justification for British imperialism, which was driven by a haphazard mix of profit motive and geostrategic ambition.
Of course the verbiage is different from 100 years ago but the dynamic is the same between peoples that fail at state building and westerners who like to play the White Saviour.
As far as I can tell, the doctrine of the White Man's Burden is pretty similar to contemporary identity politics, which is driven by rich people from elite Western colleges gaining more wealth and power by telling everyone what's good for "colored people", whether those people want it or not.
When Kipling wrote "The White Man's Burden", colonialism was justified on similar humanitarian grounds: the British were to liberate the slaves (which they did), abolish the caste system (which they tried to do), stop atrocities like the practice of sati (which they did), and save the eternal souls of those colonized (which they sincerely thought they were doing). If you literally believed in Christian doctrine, as nearly everyone did in those days, then colonialism was completely justified. If there was a failure, it wasn't a failure of ethical judgement, but of factual judgement.
The White Man's Burden is sarcastic. He's sarcastically claiming that it's glorious to fight and die to make other people profit while nobody cares about you.
It's just not thought of as sarcastic nowadays because 1) people read everything like clickbait news headlines and 2) although he's saying that colonialism is bad, he's saying that it's bad for reasons that would be unacceptable today.
>Take up the White Man's burden—
> And reap his old reward:
>The blame of those ye better,
> The hate of those ye guard—
Do you really think that's seriously claiming that the white man's burden is *good*?
That doesn't sound like he's saying Colonialism is bad, necessarily. He's just doing the "It's a thankless job and I do it because I'm a good guy" schtick. Like many hawk Americans today would say something along the lines of "Yes America is the world's policeman and yes the locals don't love it, but that's because they're dumb and evil, America is taking risks and casualties preserving peace and they're being ungrateful, America is doing that solely for the common good."
Considering you don't have access to his facial expression or tone, my interpretation looks just as valid as yours.
>Considering you don't have access to his facial expression or tone, my interpretation looks just as valid as yours.
Agreed! Sarcasm rarely comes through unambiguously in just text, even in contemporary writing, let alone after a century. I lean closer to your interpretation of "thankless job" than to Jiro's interpretation, but I just don't actually know.
Yes. He's saying that, as is all too often the case, doing the right thing will *cost* you. Doing the right thing is hard, and dangerous. And there are an awful lot of right things that no one will thank you for doing, that you will be hated for doing. But they're still the Right Thing to Do, and you should do them.
With the dawn of the 20th century, Kipling seems to have thought it was time for Britain to take a break, and America's turn to be the Doer of Right Things. People will of course disagree about what the right thing is, but the US went ahead and did some Kiplingesque stuff.
To summarize the discourse on White Man's Burden, it seems to me like this:
"We need to enslave the darker-skinned people, take their resources, convert them to Christianity, and give them malaria nets."
"No, that's horrible!"
"You heard him, malaria nets are horrible."
Surely there is a difference between "Ah, those poor foreigners who can't feed themselves, let's govern them by force if necessary" and "Ah, those poor foreigners who can't feed themselves, let's give them some food"?
Surely whatever common problems is in the shared prefix of both, the first one adds whole new classes of problems in the continuation that the second one doesn't have?
I disagree with OP, but I actually think the second construction is far weirder in a lot of ways. In lots of developing countries the government is simply corrupt and incompetent, and replacing them with a better government would be a sea change for the better. Instead we are wary about regime change and decide to set up what can come close to a "shadow state" of NGOs often just doing what a competent government would. It get why we've ended up here, but it's sort of weird that we've ruled out the obvious fix.
From https://docs.google.com/document/d/1BgJLfNN3rr6up__EnSyme5so27tpjYq14sWCKYih8uA/edit , by another occasional poster here:
Take up the Fat Man's burden –
Send forth the biggest breed.
Proselytize your lifestyle
And teach the world to feed.
Go wait in heavy harness
While scrawny folk grow wide.
Erect the golden arches,
And herd the world inside.
Take up the Fat Man's burden -
Get Europe to play nice.
Convince them war is pointless
(and teach the Germans twice).
Crush their armies with more stuff
Than in their wildest dreams;
Prove our path the wiser way
Then sell them all blue jeans.
Take up the Fat Man's burden –
Keep fighters in the sky
To wield the threat of bombing
And make aggressors cry.
For freedom plain and simple
Ship Javelins far and wide.
Go seek another’s safety;
In trade take nought but pride.
Take up the Fat Man's burden –
No tawdry rule of kings.
Push votes for Han and Uyghur;
Cause nightmares in Beijing.
Conquest is not required,
Just send the burger clown.
And like in Berlin before
Great walls will tumble down!
Take up the Fat Man's burden –
And reap his old reward,
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard –
The cry of hosts ye humor
(Ah slowly!) towards the light:-
"Why brought ye us from bondage,
Our loved Iraqi night?"
Take up the Fat Man's burden –
Ye dare not stoop – ye can’t –
Nor call too loud for Freedom
While cultures you supplant.
Sweep clear their native folly
To boost their GDP
Spread free trade and commerce ‘til
They’re rich as you and me.
Take up the Fat Man's burden –
Cure blindness and limp dicks
With pills you sell for pennies
(Once you’ve explained they’re sick.)
Unfurl star spangled banners
On every street and road.
You must not heed the whining:
You’re shouldering the load
That's pretty good
Not my work, alas, but good indeed.
I can understand why Kipling. But why Corbusier?
Just excellent. Now do it in Alexandrine.
...which one?
And if a Palestinian cause a blemish to an Israeli, so shall it be done to him;
10,000 blows for each blow, 10,000 eyes for each eye, 10,000 teeth for each tooth. This spake Netanyahu and his kind.
Also anyone who knows anything about power dynamics. If you punch a guy who has cauliflower ear, wtf do you expect to happen? For him to pull out his calculator and determine exactly how much force he should put into his return punch to be "fair?"
What a splendid analogy. So yeah, after you get sucker punched you're instantly filled with rage and fury and you fight back with everything you've got. Your pain has become pleasure as you pummel your attacker into a shapeless mass of oozing, quivering flesh, but you can't stop kicking his head in. Eventually, your adrenalin exhausted, you begin to be aware that a crowd has gathered around you. You stop kicking and look around and say, "What? You all saw it. That mf hit me first, I was just defending myself."
And then be mad that crowd doesn't see you as a victim.
Let’s begin by the crowd not denying that much of the “sucker punching” (which, in the analogy, includes mass rape and mutilation, to name just one thing) ever happened. Or the crowd not chanting that you should be punched many more times. While the other guy never stops talking about his intention to also punch the crowd, for extra absurdity.
ETA: for some context on the crowd behavior here, the UN leadership (and associated women’s rights organizations) still hasn’t issued a clear statement even admitting there was mass rape. China’s reaction to the events was to erase Israel from its official maps while calling for a balanced approach. As for the atmosphere on US campuses- Swastikas and calls for destroying Israel are commonplace.
All analogies eventually breakdown when taken far enough. If you want to get pedantic about it, Israel is not really "punching" (i.e. dropping 2000 lb. dumb bombs on) the guy that "punched" Israelis on October Sheva, it's punching his 2 years old and 6 year old who just so happened to be on site, all while claiming that it's not really **trying** to, and that the guy want the children to be punched.
Yes, you think this is an unfair analogy. That's why analogies are unhelpful. Let's just call it what it is: it's a war where ~10000-13000 children were killed and the killer still wants international sympathy. *That* is not an analogy.
Or it’s a war where the aggressor (Hamas, to remind you. Aggressor is the one who initiates the war.) does everything in its power to maximize the number of children hurt, not as a side effect but as a goal. Have you never wondered why, with all these tunnels, the only kids there are kidnapped? Or why so many explosives are around kids?
If you never wondered that, why not?
As for sympathy- let’s agree on having the same response as when others slaughtered Palestinians and the ones who risked their life helping them were Israelis? That is, basically crickets? Or were you protesting in the streets in 2015 when the Yarmouk massacre was happening? If not, why not?
Quite apart from the main response, whence the certainty about the number of children and the definition of children in the numbers above?
I don’t think the horror is non-existent or that many of your arguments change if it’s, say, 8000. Nor do I doubt the order of magnitude. But forgetting that 10 year-olds were participating in the massacres on 10/7 or about the indoctrination of children for violence as their life goal (frequently by the UN!) is not at all helpful for any future resolution.
As for the accuracy of Palestinian reports- the number of official victims of that hospital being struck by the Islamic Jihad moved from 500 to 750 to 150 as it became clearer Israel wasn’t to blame. And these and many other deaths are also part of the toll that you’re quoting. As is the case for when Hamas was firing on people evacuating from
North Gaza to prevent them from leaving.
Also, hostages. Return them today and it’s likely that the war ends today.
The mass-rapists who continue the sexual abuse of the hostages right now want international sympathy and get it. *That* is not an analogy.
Replace “sucker punched” by “chopped your kids gleefully before your eyes” and add “and is credibly swearing to do it again and again” and “is making sure that nothing but extreme aggression gets to him at the expense of everyone around him”, and “and also you cured him personally of cancer after he killed members of your family” and “and for some reason every friend of his punched him just as hard” (Jordan 1970, Syria 2016) and you might be getting a more accurate analogy.
But all such arguments from all sides suck a lot.
Prefacing that Netanyahu is a bad faith actor and all the collective punishment rhetoric is bad, I'm not really sure what Israel is supposed to do different on the strategy level. Hamas has said it wants to commit more attacks against civilians, and is willing to commit all its resources to do so. If Israel wants to end the cycle of violence its in with Hamas, Hamas has to go. A limited attack that didn't change the long term players would be worse in that it would be pointless.
This.
Hamas has to go.
The only way to get rid of them is war, so war it is.
Civilians die in wars, which is sad but does not mean that you should never go to war. (You should judge military effectiveness against collateral damage, though.)
If Israel decided on a policy to rape Palestinians as reprisal for Oct 7 rapes, that would be evil "eye for an eye" collective punishment. But that is not what is happening.
> The only way to get rid of them is war
How, exactly, is that going to work?
I fear that Hamas have entrenched themselves and their ideology so strongly that the only way to eliminate them is genocide, and even then there's the "I'm Spartacus" problem.
It didn't take genocide to make Berlin approximately 100% Nazi-free by the end of 1945, and keep it that way for almost eighty years thereafter. Similar methods should work in Gaza.
I highly doubt that. In the case of Germany, it took the government launching an unprovoked conventional war against the rest of Europe and then losing *twice* in order to discredit the government. But there's no analog in the Israel situation. Everyone in Gaza already *knows* they can't win a conventional war against Israel, so Israel marching tanks through the capital for the umpteenth time won't change anything.
We aren't talking about "discrediting" Hamas; we are talking about destroying it. And, I don't know if you've seen pictures of Berlin when the Russians were through with it, or heard the tales of the survivors, but they did a whole lot more than marching tanks through the capital and declaring victory. What they did do, *worked*.
Technically, I think I might disagree, although this is beside the point. Reading "Eichmann in Jerusalem", one of the complaints Arendt makes about post-WWII Germany is the number of mid-rank Nazis who were given a slap on the wrist and declared "de-Nazified", as opposed to other countries where they were often hanged. My sense of the political situation of the time is that the US was trying to set up a West German government as quickly as possible, to counter the USSR's East German government, and so was more lenient toward the defeated opponents of the previous war, in order to better counter the opponents of the current (cold) war.
But I think this does point to a big difference, which is that a) Germany was under military occupation for decades afterward, and b) it was blatantly obvious that the choices were Stalin or the US, and so there wasn't much resistance on either side (for different reasons). If Israel occupies Gaza for decades, I predict that there will be far more grass-roots violence than there was to American occupation of West Germany. I see no realistic possibility of Gaza turning out like West Germany.
First, proportionality is not really a thing in most legal systems, and even less of a thing in international conflicts. If one country sinks another one's ship, there could be several reactions depending on the circumstances, none of which is to sink one ship back and call it a day.
Second, even the semblance of proportionality requires the cooperation of the other side. If you get fined and instead of paying it or appealing you ignore it, the fine is going to grow, until you get summoned to court and even arrested. Continuing to be uncooperative might land you in prison, and trying to act in self defence against cops might cost you your life. This could be reductively summarized as "man executed for littering", but the key component of the chain of events is the man's decision to excalate the situation.
In a marginally less bleak world, Hamas is a Palestinian Authority-like figure who, despite hating Israel, still can cooperate with it to thwart the more radical elements in the Strip. In that world, whenever the Islamic Jihad starts firing rockets on Ashkelon, the Israeli PM could call the head of Hamas and demand from them to investigate the event and persecute the culprits in return for refraining from bombing runs.
In this world, Hamas sticks religiously to the "always defect" strategy in the proverbial prisoner dilemma and sees it as a source of pride. It's the starkest example of nominating oneself to the short end of the trade off that I know of.
I don't think Israel is blameless. You can't solve the moral dilemma of human shields simply by ignoring it. But the sin here, of caring more about your own citizens than the enemies', is far lesser than the one that comes across if you simply compare the causalty rates of both sides.
To add onto that, proportionality doesn't mean that you can only do as much damage to the other side as it did to you. It means that your means must be proportional to the legitimate military goal you are trying to achieve.
In this case, Hamas committed an outrageous act of war during a ceasefire, and it promised a thousand more 10/7s. If the goal of removing Hamas is legitimate, and/or fighting it to an unconditional surrender, then the question is whether Israel's means are proportionate to that goal.
Really beautiful
Made a music version of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7F_XSa2O_4Q
Amusingly, some people don't like Scott's poem when it's presented in the context of AI: https://www.reddit.com/r/MediaSynthesis/comments/1bemixy/verses_on_five_people_being_killed_by_a_falling/
> AI is marked by ridiculous dissonance in the level of quality across different parts of the work. Its creations are well within the capabilities of people who simply would not choose to make them. It makes errors in taste or composition that no human with the level of skill or experience needed to produce the thing would ever accept.
>
> Even in verse it uses bullet lists.
It's here. As was foretold, the problem of the future is not deepfakes believed to be real, but real people accused of being deepfakes.
Four useful bullet points. And Scott is a man of many talents, no doubt about that.
Perhaps there is a fifth bullet point also, becoming clearer as you age further:
• To realize that although the world may need to be saved, it does not want to be saved. At least, it does not want to be saved by you.
The best you can do, if you live outside Israel, might be to follow the advice of Wilhelm of Baskerville, the Franciscan scholar in Umberto Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose: Rather than to jump in with answers or advice, perhaps we should just look as closely as we can on what is going on. Not because it helps speed up change, but so we at least know why change is slow, or if it is unlikely to happen at all.
Related to that, Jacobin has a long and learned interview with Shaul Magid on the innumerable ins and outs of Zionism all the way from Leo Pinsker’s Auto-Emancipation pamphlet (1882) till the present day. Very learned, very well-informed, very detailed. A vast mountain of intellectual knowledge leading to a very small predictive-applied mouse:
"When all is said and done, when the smoke clears, when people start to rebuild their lives, the same problems that existed before October 7 are going to exist after October 7. I don’t think structurally the country will have changed in any significant way.
…we’re just going around the carousel, and we’re going to come back to this moment again."
Ok, there’s a little more, but not much more. But definitely worth reading:
https://jacobin.com/2024/01/shaul-magid-interview-zionism-anti-zionism-judaism-history
I haven't read this article so can't comment on it, but the day after October 7th I said more-or-less the same thing - none of the incentives of any of the parties have *fundamentally* changed, so why would anything change?
I think I only half-believe this now. The main reason is that if Israel is successful in destroying Hamas, and manages to get *some* form of new people in place there, that really *can* make a difference. Likewise, October 7th will hopefully cause the downfall of the Netanyahu government, which effectively takes out one of the two parties keeping in place this status quo.
Nothing may have changed in Israel/Palestine, but in the US it looks like unconditional support for Israel is no longer an unpolarized proposition. It remains to be seen whether such dissent would amount to more than hot air, once the issue is no longer front-page news.
A coalition that includes Jewish Voices for Peace have launched the first campaign against AIPAC. I don't know/remember what will this campaign involve, but they are spending above-million money on it. The media describes this as a first in AIPAC's history.
https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/2024-03-11/ty-article/.premium/u-s-progressive-groups-launch-first-of-its-kind-campaign-against-aipacs-dark-money/0000018e-2d68-d468-a9ff-2ff9fa510000, no paywall: https://archive.ph/n5wd6
This has kind of been true, or at least talked about, for the last 20 years. Mostly as a reaction to Israel becoming more and more right-wing, and to Netanyahu making Israel a somewhat-partisan issue, there's a general decline of support among younger Americans that has been there for a while.
Depending on who you ask, this hasn't translated into *much* in terms of actual US politics, but there's definitely something there.
I assume that if Hamas is destroyed and nothing else changes, there will be a very silmilar successor organization.
I agree, which is why the "what happens the day after" is such an important and controversial topic (and one which the current Israeli government is characteristically being bad at addressing).
I assume the most realistic scenario is either a renewed military occupation in Gaza, or finding *some* partner that is willing to help run Gaza on an interim basis. I *really* hope there are some good plans for this that are being worked on behind the scenes.
Hard to form an organization when there aren't any people left to join it.
Agreed, unfortunately. Particularly since more than half the Gazans endorse the Oct 7th atrocity.
You have a point.
To follow up on your new half-belief: It can be discussed if it was clever of Netanyahu to invade Gaza rather than to build a much stronger fence and leave it at that. But now that the dice has been cast, Netanyahu would be stupid to stop before Hamas is eliminated as a military force within Gaza.
If the Israelis get the nerves and stop now, Hamas’ leadership has every reason to open the champagne bottles. Since then they will have achieved more than they could have hoped for in their wildest dreams: Israel seen by the international community as the butcher of thousands of Gaza women and children, the relationship with the US seriously weakened, and still being in a position to rebuild their military force – with tens of thousands of new, young, and (not difficult to understand) boiling-mad-at-Israel fresh Gaza recruits.
Quite frankly, though, I doubt Israel’s military ability to totally take out Hamas, given the intense hatred that the very young population in Gaza must feel now.
…which in its turn means that - if Israel does not succeed in quelching Hamas completely -– things may then instead change in a different direction: leading to the long-run destabilizing of Israel. In short: Netanyahu and Hamas both play an extremely high stakes zero-sum game against each other at the moment.
To prevent the last scenario (a longer-term stronger Hamas), let me make a longer-term prediction: I suspect Israel will try to neutralize Hamas not by trying to make Gazans friends (fat chance!) but by “perforating Gaza” the way the West Bank has been perforated by settlements. Not by using settlements this time, but by constructing Israeli-controlled roads criss-crossing Gaza that enables rapid military responses to any threats from smaller Gaza “islets” between the roads. The idea will be to make Gazans – as West Bank Palestinians – live so atomized within these territories that they cannot coordinate new, massive attacks.
It will be sort-of a Bantustan existence for all Palestinians who do not already hold Israeli passports. But hopefully Gazans will at least be able to travel and work in Israel again as “foreign workers” at some point, and (hopefully) live not too unpleasant lives.
Actually, it might - after Gaza is rebuilt - be materially and socially somewhat better than what they have had before the attack - because it has not been pleasant for everybody to live under Hamas' rule. Hamas abolished elections after they won the last election (almost 20 years ago), and their brand of fundamentalist Islam is not particularly nice to live under for women and sexual minorities, among others.
Oh well. The carousel goes round and round. And then comes round again.
> It can be discussed if it was clever of Netanyahu to invade Gaza rather than to build a much stronger fence and leave it at that
Fwiw, while this is something a lot of people say, I think this is a massive misunderstanding of the situation on October 7th. Hamas launched thousands of rockets at Israelis, invaded Israel, and the IDF took two days to find all the militants who had infiltrated. Hamas continued to shoot thousands of rockets at Israel every day for months.
Life in Israel ground to a halt, completely and absolutely. Schools were shut down for weeks. The economy took a massive hit. A hundred thousand Israelis fled their homes. This was a full-on invasion, that succeeded massively beyond what they probably planned, though wasn't very successful as invasion go (their expectations of success were correctly low).
This is not the kind of situation that can be solved by slowly setting up a bigger fence.
More importantly, there's no reason to think that Hamas couldn't find a *new* way of invading that would be even more successful. They could spend another 10 years planning, getting more funding from Iran, and eventually could launch a far more deadly campaign.
The rest of your post is also good and I'll try to respond later, but this specifically caught my eye as a common misunderstanding of the situation on the ground.
Well, I see your points, but notice that I only say it can be discussed if it was clever (not that it was not clever). And only if seen from the point of view of Israel.
If one should instead consider the rationality of the decision from Netanyahu's personal point of view, it was undoubtedly clever to invade. Since any weaker response from him would highly likely have resulted in his fall from power, followed by criminal charges. Netanyahu has been riding a tiger since October 7th - and if you ride a tiger, it is not clever to get off.
Be that as it may, I think we both agree that today it is only of academic interest if it was clever to invade or not. The dice has been cast, water under the bridge, etc. The interesting question now is instead: What is clever to do next? (Where one may, if one wants to, consider the decision problem both from Netanyahu's point of view, Hamas' point of view, Fatah's point of view, HaAvoda/Labor's point of view, and so on.)
I think any PM in his position would've attacked, for the same reasons. I also didn't mention the very real possibility that a "weak" response would've caused Hezbollah to open a second front, something the US clearly took *very* seriously since it sent backup to make sure that didn't happen.
But yes, the interesting question is what happens next. I worry that with Netanyahu in charge, there is no real reason to try and end the war. And of course there's definitely no reason to think he'll be a champion for peace, though I don't know if *anyone* could get elected today that would be able to achieve peace. And that's on the Israeli side - I have very little faith the Palestinians will try to get peace given all of history, but I hope I'm wrong (on both counts).
I agree.
To add to this, there were also the hostages to think of.
Yes, of course, thank you.
The politics around the hostages is a bit complicated, with some thinking the Gaza offensive doesn't actually help get hostages released. I don't think that's accurate, but it's complicated.
At the risk of sounding uncaring, it is arguably a benefit for Israel if Hamas kills the hostages in cold blood. Because if they do, the perception of Hamas as utter barbarians will be solidified, and sympathy for Israel will reel back to the days immediately after October 7th.
Hamas knows this, and the Israeli government knows that Hamas knows this. Therefore Israel could invade Gaza without being overly concerned that the hostages would suffer.
It also works the other way. Each time Israel kills a child in Gaza, Hamas – if they are rational people – celebrate. Because each time a child is killed, Israel loses some moral credibility in the eyes of the world, and (particularly important from Hamas’ perspective) in the eyes of US public opinion. Hamas’ main hope is that the US at some point seizes to see it in their realpolitik-interest to support Israel.
(Which in my mind, it isn’t. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran are all more important from a realpolitik-perspective that the dry little sliver of Mediterranean land that is Israel. It is only the US public opinion support for Israel that is the “problem” from a US realpolitik-perspective; and Hamas, if they are clever people, knows this.)
It follows that a seize-fire will not shield Gaza women and children from Israeli attacks. On the contrary. Again, if Hamas is rational, they should use a seize-fire to expose ever-more women and children to Israeli firepower. So that even more women and children may die at the barrels of Israeli guns or bombs when the seize-fire ends.
You may call it a case of mutual perverse incentives.
These are all interesting points. And indeed as I argued elsewhere Hamas does much to maximize the number of dead Gazan children, and indeed Israel realizes that avoiding deaths to the extent possible while achieving its goals is in its interests, as oppose to "committing genocide" and similar nonsense.
And yet many hostages are already dead. How do we square this with the arguments above? A. Hamas, and more broadly whoever holds the hostages (not at all always Hamas), are not a monolithic body. Local agents may have their own view of reality and their own goals and their own irrationalities. B. Time itself is a well-known killer. Time spent in terrible conditions in captivity doubly so. C. Hamas has terror and heartbreak within Israel as secondary goals in and of themselves. Hence the videos of some of hostages getting executed being sent out, and hence the decision in Israel to not air them publicly.
As a little aside, it doesn't matter whether Iran and Egypt are "more important" to the US than Israel as long as they're filled with people really hating the US. Also Egypt *leadership* doesn't care about Palestinians in the slightest (to say the least). To some extent the same goes for Saudi Arabia. The US sacrifices almost nothing in terms of its relationship with these two countries as a "trade-off for Israel". Iraq is a non-factor, as a state, but in any case the invasion into Iraq had little to do with Israel. Iran is literally a military ally of China. Might as well not let it and its proxies run wild. The "dry sliver of land" being the one with the highest GDP among the countries you've mentioned, and a great source of intelligence and tech, doesn't hurt.
Hamas can literally rape kids and elderly and set fire to them and people will cry that they don't deserve the consequences.
Israel hadn't launched any operation immediately after the massacre, but people were already saying the massacre was deserved and Israel shouldn't be allowed to respond.
People have no sympathy, but even if they did, allowing the hostages to be massacred for it and not be able to strike back because then we would lose it doesn't do anything for Israel and the Israelis.
Is Hamas really the devil that made Adam eat the apple? Hamas earliest date of founding goes to the first Intifada in 1987, Hezbollah's earliest goes back to the first Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1980. Keep in mind that in the first few years of founding, the organization in question is not really the organization that we know today, but rather it's a newborn trying to find itself and its position in the conflict.
This means there were anywhere from 15+ years to 20+ years (from 1967 to each date of founding) where there was no Hamas and no Hezbollah, and a peace process that Israel could initiate and solidify anytime by withdrawing from the occupied territories.
As far as I understand the history, the idea of Palestinian statehood as it exists today was far less clear in 1967. The Palestinians in Jordan had been given Jordanian citizenship, and the Arab states that controlled the WB and Gaza could *also* have given them the land to build a state. The thing was, they didn't *want* a separate state - they wanted to retake all of Israel.
As for withdrawing from the occupied territories - Israel was attacked via that land. It was surrounded by enemies. It felt it needed that land for strategic depth. As in, Jordan, which sits on that border, is about half an hour away, and could send troops to cut Israel in half in. The border runs through Israel's capital. Back then, Israel wasn't the most powerful nation in the region, and all of its neighbors were enemies (this was before the peace with Egypt and Jordan).
So yes, Israel theoretically could've retreated from that land, but it was justifiably afraid that it would be impossible to defend Israel from an attack without it. Israel did eventually give back the Sinai in order to sign a peace with Egypt.
Of course, there's also the religious angle - many people in Israel feel that because that land is part of the historic land of the Jews, Israel needs to keep it. This is not my POV and not most people's, even today, but it is a part of the reasoning of the most motivated people.
Oh also worth mentioning, you say there was no Hamas and no Hezbollah, but remember that the PLO existed since 1964, and they *explicitly* called for violent overthrow of Israel, and were the de-facto face of the Palestinians. Only in 1993, as part of the Oslo accords, did they recognize Israel and theoretically renounce armed struggle.
It's not clear then that this conflict will change anytime soon, then. Israel is afraid, or so it claims, well I don't see that changing. Life is scary. The fallacy appears to be in assuming that when you're scared, others don't have the right to live, a fallacy that Israel and Israeli politicians and sizable sectors of the public appear to be quite fond of making. It's not a shame at all to be afraid, all the shame is in reacting like complete barbarians when you're afraid.
Before Hamas there was the PLO. Before the PLO there was Gamal Abd Al Nasser. Before Gamal there was Al Mufti Amin. Why would Hamas be the end?
> not most people's, even today
Oh I'm not sure about that, not at all. Here's a poll https://www.timesofisrael.com/63-of-israeli-jews-oppose-west-bank-pullout-poll-finds/ from 2013 about a 63% majority opposing a withdrawal from the West Bank, and thinking that Arab Israelis shouldn't have a vote on any referendum involving peace (also see the comments, they would be instructive.). On the other hand here's another poll https://www.timesofisrael.com/more-israelis-oppose-west-bank-annexation-than-support-it-survey/ from 2020 where an only a slim 52% majority oppose annexing the West Bank, but "annexing" could very well mean "giving the Palestinians there Israeli citizenship", so they're opposed to annexing but not occupying. And the poll contradicts another poll done shortly before it anyway.
> It's not clear then that this conflict will change anytime soon, then.
Yes, probably.
> The fallacy appears to be in assuming that when you're scared, others don't have the right to live
Put the current war aside, Israeli wasn't denying the Palestinians the right to live. Palestinians lived in not-amazing but also not-terrible circumstances in the WB and Gaza.
> It's not a shame at all to be afraid, all the shame is in reacting like complete barbarians when you're afraid.
This is a weird take. This isn't some irrational fear that we just need to confront. Israel stopped the military occupation of Gaza, a positive step in the direction that Palestinians wanted. (This was mostly done for internal political reasons, but it was still done.) This was done despite many people fearing that Gaza would be used as a base to attack Israel. Despite the fear, Israel acted in an ostensibly better manner.
Gazans then elected Hamas, who proceeded to fire rockets at Israel for years, and eventually launched an invasion that killed 1200 people.
If Mexicans elected a government that said it will annihilate the US and take all the land, and then shot rockets at Texas, and then invaded the US... what should the response be?
As for the polls, while disheartening, they don't contradict what I said. I said a minority want that land for religious reasons - the majority out of safety concerns.
Why would Israelis ever feel safe to end the occupation of the West Bank, when ending the occupation of Gaza led to such terrible slaughter?
Aren't Hamas a terror group according to Israel? How is the comparison to Mexico not fallacious? Being a terror group means it's not a government, and can't be treated like a government, namely as being representative of the people.
I also can't "put the current war aside".
> This was mostly done for internal political reasons
The Wikipedia page about the topic suggests that it was done to freeze the Oslo process and distract from any talks about Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank.
I don't necessarily oppose that both sides here - both sides since 1948 and before - bear a blame for what's happening. I was specifically objecting to your original post that Hamas is in and of itself the problem. Hamas is just a symptom in a long list of symptoms. There was countless symptoms before it and there will probably be countless symptoms after it.
Hamas is much more explicitly murdery than any of its predecessors; I believe Hamas killed an order of magnitude more Israeli civilians in one day last October than Hezbollah did over its entire existence to date. Only the Arab armies in the 1948 war exceeded that toll, and that was mostly collateral damage in a conventional war that lead to a conventional cease-fire.
Also, just about everyone else who has been in the killing-Israelis business over the past fifty years has been killing Israelis as part of a military strategy that could plausibly (though not likely) end with Israel making concessions that wouldn't pose an existential crisis for Israel. Along with for the most part good-faith negotiations to end the conflict on whatever terms can reasonably be achieved by military force.
Hamas, really doesn't seem to have a plan that can possibly lead to any other outcome than lots of dead civilians to no good end. And when they talk about their intended outcome (which they cannot plausibly achieve), it pretty much always amounts to the de facto elimination of Israel as a nation. And I haven't ever heard them advance a negotiating position that would have them give up on the whole "murder lots of Israelis until there is no more Israel"" thing.
So, yeah, Hamas is different. Hamas Delenda Est; all else is commentary.
"Hamas, really doesn't seem to have a plan that can possibly lead to any other outcome than lots of dead civilians to no good end."
One can discuss what represents a good end (the important question here is: for whom?) But if one is willing (for the sake of argument & for intellectual clarity) to place oneself in their shoes, I believe Hamas' October 7th murders can make sense. Meaning only that October 7th can be interpreted as an instance of rational, rather than irrational, murderous behavior.
The point is that Hamas does not attempt to kill all 8 million Israeli Jews (this is likely to be impossible, and therefore irrational). They only attempt to kill a sufficient number to trigger a mass exodus of Jews to countries that will accept Jewish immigrants. The underlying premise is that, unlike 1936-45, there are lots of countries today that together would be willing to take in 8 million Jewish refugees.
To be more specific, Hamas' playbook is probably the Algerian fight for independence (1954-62). Algerian nationalists did not have to kill all pied noirs (Algerian-born French), since there was a country willing to accept such refugees from Algeria (namely France). The nationalists only had to kill a sufficient number of pied noirs to make the rest flee (to France). Which they did.
Hamas arguably tries to make something similar happen in Israel.
A "Mass exodus of Jews" does not mean eight million Jews packing up and moving out of Israel. It means four million Jews packing up and moving out of Israel, leaving the most fanatical four million behind. Leaving them behind with all the kit of the IDF. Leaving them behind with the 100+ thermonuclear missiles. And, given that they are the most fanatical four million, with the literal belief that the unnameable War God of Israel is on their side so long as their faith is true.
At that point, evaporative cooling will have shifted the Israeli Overton window to the point where Benjamin Netanyahu looks like a pansy-ass liberal and *real* genocide is on the table. This will not lead to a happy ending for Hamas, or for the Palestinian people that Hamas sometimes pretends it is fighting for. Except, possibly, insofar as in the last moments of their lives, a few million soon-to-be-dead Palestinians happily imagine themselves ascending to Heaven as martyrs; I'm not sure how deep that belief really runs.
ETA: Algeria is not a plausible model, because Algeria didn't have four million fanatical Pied Noirs with a modern army. The Pied Noirs weren't being asked to leave Metropolitan France for a life as refugees in exile, but to move from one part of Metropolitan France to another. And they weren't being handed control of the French Army in Algeria, once De Gaul put the smackdown on the Four Generals.
Yup, well said!
Your scenario is a quite likely scenario for the future. Young, secular Jews are the first Hamas and like-minded organisations will succeed to make leave. Creating a longer-term selection effect making Israel increasingly dominated by the most fanatical (perhaps a somewhat negative label, but ok).
I also agree with you on the difference with Algeria in this respect: the ones remaining will have powerful weapons.
It might to some extent be portrayed as a case where individual rationality on all sides leads to collective longer-term irrationality. This scenario is a main reason why I am not an optimist on the long-term future in this part of the world.
I would phrase the point about saving the world as: The world needs to be saved, and it needs a savior, a savior is a thankless job that you don't have the qualifications for. You don't have aircraft carriers, you don't have missile batteries, you don't have secret files about Netanyahu's scandals that would incontrovertibly put him in jail, you have nothing except good intentions, and if good intentions were all what it took to save the world, someone would have done it a long time ago.
+1 for staring as long and as hard your eyes can withstand at the mess, I call it the "Info-Gathering mode", drop your soldier gear and become a scout. Thanks for the link.
There are no Netanyahu sexual scandals as the words are usually understood. A truly surprising scarcity of those given all the other scandals. It’s even not uncommon among Bibi critics to begin by gesturing at fairness by pointing something like this out.
Do you mean perhaps the 1993 story about the affair he had?.. The one over thirty years ago where he openly said he had one, there was zero insinuation of lack of consent, an attempt to blackmail him backfired and basically nobody talks about ever? That doesn’t match my definition of Netanyahu having sexual scandals.
Not saying this as a Netanyahu fan, at all.
(Maybe there’s some story going on in non-Israeli media? If so, then it failed to be noticed by any source I’ve ever seen in Israel or elsewhere, however critical of Netanyahu.)
I know. I wrote "Netanyahu's sexual scandals" expecting to find one like any other politician, but I went searching before I posted the comment and indeed found nothing. I left it in the comment anyway because "You don't have X" can be understood as either "X exists and you don't have it" or "X doesn't exist", like writing "You don't have a magic wand that solves unsolvable conflicts".
Umm. You could have just said “scandals” or “corruption” instead of going in the one direction you in fact knew to be unsupported by facts. In a comment about careful gathering of information, it’s just a weird thing to do.
His life has been subject to constant scrutiny for decades. There was a scandal about $1k worth of bottle returns his wife was involved with. Yet literally no sex scandals.
As a final nitpick- “scandal” implies public awareness and attention; “ an action or event regarded as morally or legally wrong and causing general public outrage”. So there aren’t any by definition!
(Just to clarify again. I’m very much not pro-Netanyahu. One reason I might be overly sensitive about this is that he routinely benefits from weak-sauce accusations supporting his narrative of media persecution.)
Ok, you're right. Edited.
Thank you.
This is beautiful.
Is there a deliberate Hogwarts houses reference or is this a natural attractor when classifying people or strategies into four categories?
https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/12/03/book-review-evolutionary-psychopathology/
Are we making Ravenclaw out to be the first, passive, "clean hands" option? I can see the other parallels.
My first thought would be:
1. IDGAF about anyone else, I've got mine = Slytherin
2. I love my family/friends and that's good enough = Hufflepuff
3. I'm gonna go in, guns blazing, and save the day, damn the consequences = Gryffindor
4. I'm going to do a dispassionate CBA and act on that = Ravenclaw
This isn't a perfect system, in particular I think it's unfair to Hufflepuff, but it's the best I can do on the spur of the moment.
Agreed about Hufflepuff and Gryffindor.
I connected the fourth option to Slytherin due to the express reference to serpents (though I know that line is also Biblical; Matthew 10:16).
I was thinking of this too, but I admit it's not perfect
The Hufflepuff distinction mainly relies on what we mean by "being kind"
Most people consider "kind" to mean "warm and fuzzy feelings and corresponding actions toward people near you," not "dispassionately calculating the greatest good for the greatest number and then acting on that." In that sense, Hufflepuffs are a better fit for 2 than for 4. Ravenclaws are brainy nerds, they could totally fit in at an EA gathering.
The phrase “golden flag of Good” made me involuntarily think of HPMOR.
Very nicely done. And a pretty good tongue-in-cheek defence of utilitarianism, even demonstrating self-deprecation and the ability to laugh at yourself, which is all too rare in these debates.
But of course I wouldn’t be doing my job as Some Asshole On The Internet if I didn’t point out that the creeping accountants, in their serpent cunning, sometimes come to the conclusion that any atrocity, any suffering, any diminishment of human potential in the present day can be justified if it makes the sci-fi apocalypse 1% less likely to happen 3000 years from now, or it it results in a 1% increase in the likelihood that humanity will travel to the stars one golden day after becoming gods.
So perhaps an addendum to option 4 is in order.
The premises of Bentham’s way
Can lead you to a trap:
Accountants, snakes and bankers
Don’t read much sci-fi crap.
(I tried to get ChatGPT to write that for me and it was absolutely awful. It doesn’t know what free verse is, or even syllables or iambs. I ended up having to write it myself. Perhaps AI is bad after all.)
Oh yeah? Name three instances of this.
Typically when I see this example it's
1. Not pro atrocity
2. Not far in the future
3. Not a small chance
Or sometimes it's all three.
Now, if it turns out all examples in your mind do not fulfill those three criteria, I believe *all* moral systems have an injunction against lying in the comments section for no reason.
I didn't even realize I was making any factual claims that could be falsified.
Does it not follow from utilitarian principles, however, that mitigating long-term existential risks justifies a generous amount of torture, murder, etc. in the present day?
You seem to have claimed that "creeping accountants" which, in the metaphor of the original poem would be the utilitarians, "sometimes come to the conclusion"...
Which does seem like a claim about what the stances of that group are. And if indeed you weren't referring to anything real, 1/10 effort at writing blogpost moral fanfiction, couldn't you at least get the prompting correct?
Anyway while we're at it, I'd like to write a short story about a certain character named superheapposter, who, under the right circumstances, would condemn their mother to having intercourse with *rolls dice* a corpse, because that follows from being an asshole. Observe the magic of my logic:
1. Being an asshole involves doing asshole things
2. The above is an asshole thing.
I am eagerly awaiting offers from Harper Collins. Also from all the moral systems congratulating me for my virtue.
Or, instead of symbolic gestures of trying to feed the starving Palestinians, the US could stop feeding the arms to Israel until they allow the aid in.
I don't see this option offered. The four listed ones seem to imply the US is an innocent bystander with no connection to either side.
https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2024/03/08/pretending-the-us-cant-just-drive-aid-into-gaza/
Or the US could stop de-facto protecting the Hamas leaders living right next to its largest base in the Middle East in Qatar. Or even simply saying that it will stop. This would be not unlikely to get those leaders to accept a hostage deal and enable a ceasefire. Connection to either side indeed.
To be fair, there are some indications that it’s at least beginning to consider this line of action. But then it’s also beginning to talk of limiting some of the supply deliveries to Israel.
There’s also an option 6.5 where the whole world stops pretending there aren’t vast food and fuel stockpiles in Gaza, in the hands of Gaza’s elected government, and holds that government accountable for its complete refusal to even stop looting the aid, let alone share food with anyone else.
Then again, why on Earth would the US be neutral? There’s no symmetry in the sides’ attitude towards the US, nor in their major allies.
If the US stops feeding arms to Israel, Israel still won't let the aid in until they've accomplished their present objectives. They probably will kill more innocent bystanders in the process, e.g. using dumb artillery rounds rather than PGMs.
I think people vastly overestimate the degree to which Israel *depends* on US military assistance, particularly in the short term. They *benefit* from it, which gives us a certain amount of leverage, but Israel is not a US puppet no matter how much easier that would make things for some people.
Ahh, so very very nice
I read it twice
Please don't think any less of me
As I kiss my kids and pet the dog.
I'm confused at the inclusion of Kipling in that particular sublist, as he seems to have nothing in common, intellectually or spiritually, with the other four. As for Midgley, is that Mary Midgley the philosopher, and if so, was there any reason for putting her with Marx and Mao beyond simple alliteration? I'm not seeing that any coherent proposition is being advanced in those stanzas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.
Midgley is Thomas Midgley Jr., who invented CFCs and leaded gasoline
> So Midgley
I tried to look up who that was, but there are too many with that name
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midgley_(surname)
None of them seem obviously similar to Marx & Mao
Ah, OK. Not a bit of history I was familiar with. I was looking for some sort of political ideologue, to fit with the other two . . .
While poetry inspires
And rhyme schemes can't be beat-er
Unless you want your words to sound like screeching highway tires
Try learning feet and meter
It's iambic tetrameter alternating with iambic trimeter, like ballads.
I didn't mean you, Scott, but your many imitators here in the thread (excepting Chris Phoenix).
Considering the verses and the poet’s practical conclusion, namely, that dropping food, despite its risks, is likely to do more good by alleviating hunger than not dropping it at all, one might view the situation from another perspective. Reports from Gaza indicate that a significant portion of the food, especially that delivered by convoys, is seized by Hamas. It seems no organization on the ground can realistically ensure a fairer distribution. This, in turn, prolongs Hamas’s resistance, leading to further deaths and destruction. Few would dispute that Hamas’s surrender would immediately halt the cycle of death and starvation. Therefore, could a complete blockade be the “optimal” solution in terms of reducing overall suffering? Assuming that starved fighters are more likely to surrender than those who are well-fed, how much more likely is this? To what extent would it shorten the war? What is the median number of lives saved across 10,000 computer-generated scenarios that vary the intensity and duration of the conflict, among other factors? Political decisions are seldom made based on such calculations, as the immediate pressures are overwhelming, but isn’t this the essence of what the “poem” is discussing?
I fucking swear 90% of these responses here are AI. People are just going to stop reading. The Internet really is being killed before our eyes. Signed a real fat fuck laying in bed at 5am.
I am quite certain that Hamas will not starve before most civilians will have starved to death. (I am uncertain if Hamas would eat the Gazan population if it meant they could kill a few more Jews.)
Any proposal to starve Hamas out will accept that the civilian population will die. If this is a price you are willing to pay, then a superior option would be to kill everyone in Gaza using bombs. (Personally, I would rather die in a bomb blast than starve to death.)
This would of course also be a war crime, and is also not favorable for Israel as a long-term strategy.
The correct way to defeat Hamas is with ground troops, supported by other arms which will act when the expected value of enemies killed to total deaths is above a suitable threshold.
I like the 4 categories, but if the only argument against is 5 accidental deaths, I think we did the math differently.
aid packages is already the cautious, apolitical, fabian, "accountant" like option, as opposed to the US reigning Israel in by threatening to withhold aid, weapons, carrier groups
Sadly beautiful. It reminded me a lot of my favorite poem, "Hymn of Breaking Strain" (Kipling). I think he'd have thought it unfair to be listed alongside much of his company in the verses here, but he'd at least have admitted "to fail and know we fail".
We estimate, and round things up,
And round things down, and guess.
We get the best intelligence
On what is still a mess.
We know we cannot get things right;
We hope to be less wrong;
While one by one our worries come
To whisper in sing-song:
Our principled are buttressed
By impassive stats and charts,
But doggerel must supplement
To salve our troubled hearts.
Love this. Nice job, Scott.
Why Galton?
He was the forefather of eugenics, which had some horrific consequences in the 20th century.
His version of eugenics was encouraging smart people to marry and have kids. I do not believe he ever proposed preventing dumb people from having kids.
1+2 are the same option in outcome, only difference is in the headspace of the actor.
3+4 are the same option in outcome, only difference is in the headspace of the actor.
Cool headspace though. Pretty sure Mao would have placed himself in 4 as well, different utils aside.
That's one interpretation, 4 merely shields you from criticism, I think Scott is suggesting that from 4 one can both be less vulnerable and do more. Personally I feel they're all terrible and we should probably look for an option 5, like just spitballing here: bolster the well established humanitarian infrastructure to deliver as much aid as possible and let our problematic bestie know that any interference will have clear and severe consequences. But like, in poetry
Maybe I’m being completely dense, but how is what you describe an option 5? If you do it thoughtlessly and impulsively because “omg people are starving we MUST DO SOMETHING,” it’s option 3. If you do it carefully, considering all snags and unintended consequences, that’s just option 4.
Regardless of how well thought out the plan is I don't think this falls into any of the categories.
Option 3:
"To rush in bright and glorious 'Neath the golden flag of Good"
Ensuring that UNRWA and the like can do their thing and maybe helping them out a bit, well that's something we could have done from day 1, but we did not. And it would be a major course reversal, it would require serious pressure on the Israeli government where before there was unconditional support. Whether you think it's correct or not, doing this now would be an admission of wrongdoing, no flag of good of any color it's a red flag of "we think we fucked up majorly, in more than one way, we kinda suck". It's the most boring option, the least complicated to implement, and it can't be seen as our idea since activists have been asking for this for months. Everyone who was already mad at the US govt will still be mad, and a bunch of people who weren't mad before will become so. So certainly no glory.
Option 4:
This is rather nebulous, but I read this ("Or to creep in like accountants
Using gain and loss as anchors") as kinda saying, we'll use our cleverness to arrange things so that if everyone just follows their incentive gradients like they always do the good thing will happen, they won't even know we've done anything! If this is anything like the intended meaning it should be clear that my option 5 doesn't fit the bill. It is not cunning or clever, see above, and it requires a very obvious show of force, a threat, to make it happen. It's not some elegant, tai chi or judo, requiring meticulous practice to pull off properly, it's swinging a big sledge hammer.
>Ensuring that UNRWA and the like can do their thing and maybe helping them out a bit, well that's something we could have done from day 1
Sorry, but UNRWA? Really? The same UNRWA that employs hundreds of Hamas members? Whose employees participated in the Oct. 8 massacre? The UNRWA whose textbooks have been pouring anti-Semitic hatred into kids' brains in Gaza? The UNRWA which carefully looks the other way when Hamas steals relief supplies? The UNRWA which _literally had Hamas's data center located underneath its headquarters_???????
The four options are meta level, not object-level. "Bolster the well established humanitarian infrastructure to deliver as much aid as possible" is an object-level policy, which will fit into one of the four meta-options depending on how it is implemented. But from the "as much as possible" phrasing, probably option #3.
Yeah so they're clearly categories, Scott has defined the first three by giving a sort of ideal example around which various members will cluster, but the last one he defines in a different way, paraphrasing: "like the things that wall street bankers do" and so on. Anyway what I'm trying to ask is, are they good ones? I would say yes they are good but also they don't form a partition, they don't cover that which they mean to illuminate. But if they are so broad as to include my "example 5" then would want to claim that they are particularly meaningful, their borders do not fall at any joints of reality that we should care about. I don't think the author would agree with me that my example is in the universe he's trying to describe, if he did the poem would have been rather different in tone and probably not a poem at all
The problem with altruistic efforts, especially those like foreign aid, is *not* weird, unpredictable side effects on the analogy of people being killed by falling packages. Those are flukes, and it's quite fair to discount them.
The problem is regularly occurring and therefore predictable negative effects, however unintended. For example, the problem of aid being captured and diverted by local leaders is so common that it makes no sense to think of it as a "side effect." No, it's a predictable pattern, and you the donor are responsible if you don't understand it.
And the further effect of making control of the government of a poor country more profitable, hence increasing what people are willing to do to get control.
Good point!
"We did what we had to do. If the good Lord disagrees with me, I will be happy to point out His tactical errors.”
But, but, but, "food" doesn't rhyme with "good!"
Kipling-rippling, on the other hand, beautiful.
It does, if you say "good" with a Palpatine accent.
"Gooooood Anakin, Gooood. Now kill him. Kill him now."
We name this accent "Palpatinglish".
Well written!
<grisly humor>
Perhaps the god of aftershocks, known and feared by first responders in seismic zones, had a claw in this accident, with its twisted sense of humor, and its taste for combining aid with crush fatalities?
</grisly humor>
( I, personally, am (metaphorically) with the
>To pet your dog and kiss your kid
>And call your duty done
group )
These verses are unpleasant to me in a way few things in this blog are. 5 deaths by falling aid are a rounding error on the number of people killed intentionally in an effort to kill their elected leaders, crush their institutions, and destroy any possibility of the kind of successful war of independence most of us have in our democracy's distant history and celebrate as a righteous and sacred achievement. I'm not sure if there's any affirmative obligation to see what's actually happening to Palestine and talk about it; my starting point is that everyone is free to see and talk about what they want. But it is hard for me personally to not read this as a dramatic misreading of the cause of Palestinians' suffering followed by an unkindly-lighthearted take based on that misreading.
Great poem, agree 100%.
Also, I would propose that instead of hiring a new head of communications, the center for effective altruism should just keep Scott on retainer and let him write such a poem when they get bad press for their actions having unlikely bad consequences.
For people wanting to make a tangible difference for Palestinians, this organization allows you to donate e-sims which have helped countless people keep contact with their loved ones and document the constant slew of war crimes they've faced.
https://gazaesims.com/
Scott, I’m impressed that you can write such a witty and thoughtful poem while sleep-deprived from caring for infant twins. Respect.
To do the math is very good
accounting gives virtue
To say you did the math, I fear
does not make this claim true.
Where is the math for printing books
of Harry Potter tales?
If PowerPoints exist for clinch
of castles, give details!
"We think it would be difficult
to indicate our thought"
said Holden; then put $30 mil
in OpenAI's pot.
(Say what you will of grants like this --
and "doom," some say in wrath --
what you cannot say, facing God
is "hey, I just did math".)
EA, like HPMOR
says "experiments rock!"
but open up the book: you'll find
near none, despite much talk.
"Shut up and multiply" you cry,
but when we turn our backs
you give by vibes, with next to no
numbers behind your acts.
So your claim is that EA is basically a scam which claims to decide based on math while actually deciding on vibes, like non-EA charities.
I do not think that this claim is actually true. Given my priors, if an EA org does something which seems totally weird and random, like buying a castle, this is not the result of a vibe-based decision, like some boss saying "I really want to own a castle, make it happen" or "we buy a castle because that is a good representation of who we are". I fully expect that someone sat down and did the math on a wide variety of options, they found out that the castle option came out ahead of "buy a cruise ship", "just rent a hotel", "build from the scratch", "just use teleconferencing", "build a lair in a volcano", "develop 'The Matrix' and host conferences there" in their metrics.
HPMOR requires a bit more justification because I would expect that HPMOR is a lot more popular in the EA community than castles are. But even there, I am sure that they were ranking interventions to get new people into the movement and found that distributing HPMOR is more effective than distributing books by Peter Singer or having TV ads or producing an EA-themed movie or whatever other ideas they had.
I am also rather sure that most of the EA money is put into projects which are less controversial than castles, HPMOR or OpenAI.
Of course, Scott is here defending food drops which occasionally kill a few people when a parachute fails to open.
Hmm...
( I, personally, am unapologetically in the
>To pet your dog and kiss your kid
>And call your duty done
>While far away, the Gazan girls
>Are dropping one by one
group. Not an altruist. )
I don't think EA is a scam. I _do_ think, however, that properly calculating odds is damned hard. In the last posting, https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/mantic-monday-31124 , I commented in https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/mantic-monday-31124/comment/51532346
>I do find it irritating that, after 80 hours of discussion, the two intelligent! groups still wound up with numerical estimates more than an order of magnitude apart. If this were a values/preferences question, this would be understandable, but it is a numerical probability question. Given the sum of available evidence, there should be a best estimate.
I think the stanza you quoted could also refer to Newtonian Altruism [0]. And of course there is a whole can of worms regarding the existence of morality beyond altruism, and the moral difference between an act and an omission.
Regarding p(doom), I think that it is not quite a scenario to invoke Aumann's agreement theorem. The evidence is certainly not overwhelming in either direction, so priors matter. If we were part of a game where the rules stated "without alignment efforts, p(doom) is x", then the priors would be much closer. We do not have a good reference class to do reference class forecasting.
Multicellular life on earth being ended by a meteor is something we can halfway quantify. Apart from Theia (which was probably a planet from within the early solar system, and thus is not a concern any more), there have been plenty of impacts big and small. We can extrapolate that distribution, especially as we have some idea about the distribution of objects which could hit earth at some point. I would be surprised if there was significant disagreement over the probabilities.
By contrast, AI risk is full of Knightian uncertainty, which can not easily be captured in objective probabilities.
[0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/17/newtonian-ethics/
Many Thanks!
>I think the stanza you quoted could also refer to Newtonian Altruism [0].
Or an equivalent with the Yukawa potential, that drops exponentially? :-)
I talk with 5 people regularly, have about a dozen additional people that I also care about, maybe a hundred in the grimace-I-guess-I-sort-of-have-an-obligation-to category, and then there are 8 billion strangers that I only count as tie-breakers.
>Multicellular life on earth being ended by a meteor is something we can halfway quantify.
Yes, possibly more than halfway. This is indeed something where we have decent information
>about the distribution of objects which could hit earth at some point.
Yes,
>By contrast, AI risk is full of Knightian uncertainty, which can not easily be captured in objective probabilities.
but - more than an order of magnitude? After 80 hours of going over each others' evidence? It seems at least discouraging. I'm in the process of digesting the Allyn-Feuer and Sanders paper, which is an amazing effort to try to quantify as much of the questions in as transparent a framework as possible. I have to admit that I'd be terrified to stick my neck out so far in trying to nail down the factors involved, so I applaud their work. It at least seems like a framework where all of the participants could have pointed to various factors and said "agree here, disagree here, and here is why".
I find it interesting how both sides agree that a country that didn't have election since 2006 is fairly represented by its elected government.
It’s sings to me echos of Blake
https://palestine.beehiiv.com/p/ceasefire-oct-6th-2023
If the Isreali government has "genocidal intent", or too many people with real power in it have that intent, they're atrocious at it.
https://datacommons.org/place/country/PSE?utm_medium=explore&mprop=count&popt=Person&hl=en#
As everyone knows, people in an "open air prison" under the thumb of a "genocidal regime" regularly triple in population.
The world has really "abandoned" them, which is why they are richer on average than someone from India, home to 1.4 billion people who I guess are even more "abandoned". https://countryeconomy.com/countries/compare/india/palestine
Does it ever make you wonder? Wonder what is really going on here?
Demographic warfare. A state that never intended for the aid to be used to better their people, only to better their war. A state run by a party who's stated goal is the extermination of their neighbors, who in the last election held there ran against another party whose goal was the same.
Life is a lot harder in this world. In the world where you "controlled all of their imports" yet somehow they built extensive tunnel systems and have massive weapons stockpiles and rockets. In a world where the Aid agencies supposedly helping the poor starving Gazan's are actively aiding and abetting people committing terrorist acts (literally data cables going down from HQ to the tunnels? Come on).
Well said! BTW, did my "like" get through? I saw the "heart" symbol fill in, and the counter increment, but this part of the code seems flaky...
Better to do the math
than throw up your hands and cry
but the path trod by the multiplier
leads cynics to question why
+++
when the calculations are finished,
the mathematician and them on the side
both can register predictions,
Before the ink has chance to dry,
+++
The mathematician might say,
"It's better to weigh these things carefully"
"A decision has to be made"
"And if we are gonna do something,
"It's better to give the best aid"
+++
The cynic might give their reply,
"Why do you weigh and what are weighing?"
"I think you just go off the vibe"
"You know the result before asking,"
"You just need an excuse to decide"
+++
And then both inscribe their predictions,
and they are different but restate the same case,
"Turns out it was what's best for the whole human race,"
"Turns out it was what's best for my tribe"
+++
Who gives what prediction? Why are you asking me? Figure it out.
Plus signs added as double line breaks because I can't format, lol.
You got me to do verse for the first time since grade school, so thats pretty good.
Don't quite like the first section, but I didn't wasnt to edit or think too hard about it; wanted do it all in one take so to speak. I think going from 4 lines to five in the middle is fun.
Scott, your poem is incredible. Thanks.
When Robespierre and his pals took power, they turned around the war France was losing. They saved France from the many vicious predators circling for the kill. That doesn't justify their cruelties, but it's a bit of context that is often left out. The Terror killed 15,000 and that was egregious, but it pales in comparison to the crimes of the ancien regime.p