The author also doesn’t really even attempt to explain why the Sea Peoples hypothesis, one pretty well substantiated by a lot of independent evidence, and one which the current consensus theory among experts, is wrong.
191,127 karma · joined May 31, 2011
How is that going for us in the west?
Like, I believe in these rights. But I also think we should be open to questioning them when we’ve got anti-vaxxers and Holocaust deniers finding popular purchase among an increasingly and proudly illiterate population.
I never said to stop attacking. I said not to target civilians.
Forward looking, for Hamas to credibly swear off civilian violence, it would have to hold its leaders who ordered those attacks who remain accountable. I don’t see that. I do, however, see such an action pretty aggressively shifting attitudes in Europe and Asia, potentially also America, potentially even in Israel given they’re in an election where Netanyahu is on the back foot.
> Israel deposed the PLO and put Hamas in power instead
This was a concerted effort between Israel, America and Iran. (Hamas is pretty decently modeled as an Iranian occupying force. This analogy extends to Hezbollah.)
Right. Modern agriculture with minor modifications (atmosphere-derived fertilizer) can yield more on less land with less water input more or less indefinitely, i.e. sustainably. To get the same yield with organic methods you need more resource inputs. It’s more resource intensive.
By the way! I like shopping at my farmer’s market. I do think the eggs and vegetables are fresher and taste better. But I don’t pretend it’s more sustainable. If everyone did what I do, we’d need to divert even more land and water and energy to farming.
I've started taking my Dad's Tesla in to get tires rotated when I'm in town because he flat refuses to do it because of this nonsense.
/s? There isn’t an incentive to be a war refugee either.
Ex ante, sure. Right now, the existing batteries are a sunk cost the utility didn’t have to pay capital costs for. The right answer is to do both.
But it doesn’t. It hardens resolve on the other side that you are actually monsters. It’s the same reason “strategic” air bombing campaigns like the London Blitz, designed to wear down a population, systematically fail.
> Read your own comment back to yourself and imagine it's about the Jews in Germany
German Jews weren’t systematically targeting German civilians in attacks. If they had been, it would have probably backfired. (They didn’t have a military to “strike” the Nazis in any conventional sense. The Poles in Warsaw did. Guess what they, too, didn’t do.)
I’m not saying I don’t understand the impulse. If I were occupied and facing extinction, I’d probably lash out. What I’m saying is I hope I’d stop and realize, not necessarily that it’s wrong and mis-targeted, but that it’s ineffective and likely counterproductive.
Aim at military targets. People can tell when you’re trying and missing versus conducting a terror campaign. And degrading the adversary’s military will save more of your lives than pissing off its civilians.
No. Never of the magnitude you suggested. The population pyramid simply doesn’t have the shape required for a population bomb the likes of which we’re seeing in e.g. Korea.
Given current and projected fertility, it never blows out the way you suggest. It gently curves. If Indians, tomorrow, suddenly stop having kids that would be the problem you suggest. But they aren’t. And it isn’t.
Not normal. Not encouraged. Not the trend line. You’re projecting a problem from other countries onto a demographic context within which it doesn’t exist. Unfortunately this is a topic where one has to actually look at the numbers.
This is deeply unsupported by the evidence I’ve seen. Organic farming tends to look far more resource intensive than modern methods. Often for little discernible gain in flavor and nutrition.
> You can get the number by just halving our population
I agree with your conclusion given the data, particularly around mineral exhaustion. (Though there is also the issue of severe mismatches. Lots of lithium, for example, yet no battery industry to speak of.)
That makes sense. When I lose a bit the boredom accelerates and I just want to leave. I’ve “spent” the money on an experience and it was boring.
The only exception to this is card games. But I don’t like those at casinos or on my phone. And I’d be happier playing a board game with most of the folks I play poker with.
Every personality has something, it seems, that it tends to get addicted to if given the chance. Gambling has never been that to me. I get bored with most of the games and upset at losing money—even if I net win, I’m irritated about the incremental losses.
On the other hand, I have to manually keep track of how many days in a month I drink because if I don’t I’ll happily have half a bottle of wine every evening, and I think I know where that leads. (When I lose money in a casino I almost always translate that into a nice dinner. Which I will, invariably, enjoy far more than winning imaginary numbers.)
We need a better way of responding to journalism evidencing what was previously suspected and accepted.
Source for this carrying capacity?
Then don't raise them! Also, don't raise problems that are easily disproven with real numbers! Demographics is a terrible domain to vibe your way through.
> Knowing you are headed for bad times isn't something to live with, it's something to fix
I literally just showed you that demographic projections for India give realistic scenarios for the number of under-18 year olds being equal to the number of over-80 year olds by 2100. The worst case is a 5:1 ratio.
Sure. You know what, I don't know enough about it to argue if it is. What I can say is it isn't toothless. International treaties can create robust judicial systems.
Prioritize a cease fire. If you can’t target you probably can’t run much of a modern economy either. Which raises the question of what you’re actually fighting for.
ICJ and ECJ seem fine. I agree that the ICC is toothless (unless it’s investigating Africa for some reason). But if countries agree to its jurisdiction that’s basically glorified arbitration. The Philippine with Duterte show the benefits to a population to submitting to jurisdiction. I bet a lot of Americans being abused by ICE wish we had a check on our political leaders outside our own legal system.
I’m personally critical of the notion of the ICC, and I can’t come up with a legitimate reason we’d sanction them. America isn’t party to the Rome Statute. And the ICC has never even remotely threatened to do anything to any American.
Your ratios are all wrong. There are about 500mm Indians aged 6 to 26 today who will be over 80 (and under 100) by 2100. Even if nobody dies, India isn’t hitting 1.2bn 80-year olds. As for under-18s in that timeline, it ranges from 100 to 500 million depending on fertility.
Put another way, there is no deterministic population collapse in India the way there almost must be in Korea and Germany.
It's incredibly ambiguous. There are very few sets of people who agree on the list of ongoing genocides, much less historic ones. The only places where there is even a semblance of agreement is in Europe and urban America, and that's largely due to deferral to our institutions.
> There's no ambiguity as to what Israel is doing
I agree. That doesn't mean it's beyond discussion or debate. I think it's a genocide. I also think that term has been mangled, particularly online, to the point that it's virtually meaningless. (One of the problems with the term is it's grammatically odd. A homicide is a completed murder. Attempted murder is different. A genocide, completed, is an extermination or annihilation. But we give the ongoing project the same grammar as, in other cases, an act.)
No. At that point, whether it's a genocide or not is kind of irrelevant. They're being killed. War doesn't need extra bits attached to it to be horrible.
> would you turn to them and say “ackchyually
What is this.
Robots. These things can be cleared. Particularly if the population isn't there.
Nobody said that. OP asked why this is being debated. That's why. It's not clear what generally constitutes a genocide in a way that is separate from warfare in general. (Gaza and Ukraine are simpler, to me, because Russia and Israel explicitly message genocidal intent in a way New Delhi, Beijing and Washington do not.)
Because there are lots of wars burning all over the planet. We tried to carve an exception into international law, after WWII, about it being permissible to intervene in the internal affairs of another sovereign state if they're doing genocide. So this is a real debate that should be had. The problem is by practically every definition, there are at least a handful of active genocides happening in multiple theaters around the world.
The abhorrence of genocide is one that needs to be refreshed with action if we're to restore the norm that it's not okay. But to do that, you have to set the new threshold.
Most war is unjustified. Violent resistance is almost never unjustified if one lacks access to elections.
But violent resistance that targets civilians robs itself and its cause of justice until that rot is removed and regretted. It's not only morally wrong. It's strategically stupid. Terrorist tactics do not work–they radicalize the enemy and unfavorably polarize the alliance space.
Remember the videos Ukraine circulated of sharing tea with Russian POWs? Imagine if Hamas had only targeted military outposts and then shared images like that one from its bunkers under Gaza City?
A cause can be fundamentally justified but still piss away its advantages with poor strategy. At the end of the day, Hamas has acted in Iran's interests. Not the Palestinians'. (Same with Hezbollah. Same with the Houthis, though to a marginally lesser degree.)
In absolutely does [1].
> What happened on the Ukrainian frontlines is a war of position
If Gaza is a genocide then Ukraine almost certainly is too. The same messaging about exterminating a culture that doesn't "actually" exist from senior leadership. The same attacks on children. The same destruction and systematic razing of civilian settlements.
The tunnel entrances and exits are tremendously hard to find. Some of them were located in private residences.
But Israel has an oil & gas industry. They have equipment that can look underneath a quiet city. If tunnel elimination were truly the goal, temporarily displacing the population while clearing operations took place should have been sufficient. As it stands, simply bulldozing over the entrances probably doesn't actually destroy the tunnels. It just hides their entrances.