constantius

Going from "I'm not a historian" to "it might even be the norm historically" made me chuckle.

It wasn't the norm historically. Depends on what period of history you're talking about, but indeed not all groups attempted to expand, though it'd be equally true that most of these were because the group was not able to.

In terms of assimilation, it happened often that a cultural victory would still lead to military confrontation (before the fall of the Roman empire, many of their neighbours were, or considered themselves, romanised yet still either fought against Roman expansion or attempted to take territory from them for example). For as long as we have history, all the times I know of where a "group" assimilated into another group willingly, it was because the other group was militarily much more powerful and saw any peace as temporary: for example, Armenian kings giving away their kingdoms to Byzantium, to avoid uphill battles of resistance and to make sure their dynasty remained in power. And those times were very rare in history.

Of course, this might have been more common in pre-history (99% of our existence), but then again we have a lot of evidence to the contrary.

Weord position to defend. So: modern wars are not about resources because there's enough food to feed everybody, those wars that are widely understood to be about resources (oil, land) are "distribution problems" and not about resources, and the only way to prove that they are is to show a country-wide economic benefit to the victor directly related to the war...

Confidently dismissing others based on your own weird definitions and shifting goalposts does not make you seem as knowledgeable as you think.

Technically you're right, because of your use of "only", but it is a fact that a minority of males reproduced, vs a majority of females, with historic ratios of 2:1 to 4:1.

The skew is weaker nowadays, but still more men are childless than women, and it is correlated with wealth to some extent.

I understand some people only have Emacs for magit, and I think it's very much justified: probably 95% of the use cases described here are straightforward (and flexible) operations in magit.

Israel is bombing Lebanon. How many of the 254 dead yesterday were civilians? And of the 1700 dead to date?

Edit: I notice now that you didn't fail to understand this distinction in the very next sentence, but that wasn't about Israel...

You're very very off on the timing: the first year of the genocide (and the majority of the official casualties) was under the previous administration. The bias on Gaza was observed across the board from the start (and arguably for the last 70 years).

Genuine question for Americans: donyou not think that a Democrat today would be leading the same war? We're talking about a party that facilitated, and took part in, 1 year of genocide.

In what world could you imagine Israel's planned war against Iran not being automatically supported by whatever US party was in power?

Your assumption here is that, since sanctions strengthen the regime, not having sanctions weakens the regime, which is not logical.

Not having sanctions potentially strengthens a regime more than sanctions do, embeds them in the global geopolitical/cultural/economic stage, normalises their behaviour, and goes against a lot of people's deontology.

Look at Israel: no sanctions, strong Zio regime, majority of US/German pop supported the "self-defense" argument for decades, complete normalisation of Palestinian genocide until the horror reached an unbearable threshold. Etc., etc.

Yes, sanctions are far from perfect, but I strongly believe that a world with Israel santioned would have been a much better place for everyone, including the Israelis (from having to contend with their ideology).

Edit: I'm also aware that my argument is not perfect either. For example, I wouldn't qualify what Cuba has or what Iraq had as sanctions in the sense that I'm talking about: these are to my eyes an economic war of aggression by the US/West. What I'm defending is sanctions on fascist and ethonationalist global/regional superpowers that are engaging in large-scale horror. But I'm aware how leaky my definition is.

You're doing it again, conflating antisemitism and criticism of Israel, I flagged your comments.

The strain(s) of Christianity we have today are in large part the result of chance and power plays, it's a fascinating history.

More to your point: the Old and New Testaments are so different that a significant proportion of Christian apologetics consists in finding ever more convoluted mental hoops to explain this away.

A few centuries after JC, one of the dominant interpretations, Gnosticism, held that the two Testaments were about two different gods. The old god was angry, cruel, capricious, sadistic, while the new god, as described by Jesus, was the exact opposite. One ordered populations to be killed for nothing, the other turned the other cheek. The Gnostics thought that the first god was the demiurge, the god of matter (like Morgoth), while the second god was the supreme god (like Iluvatar).

A much simpler solution to this dilemma. Unfortunately, the non-Gnostics were better at organised religion/politics, and the rest is history.

[flagged]

A controversial take unfortunately.

Americans are under the delusion that Democrats are the second coming of Christ, even after it enabled and took part in genocide. To anyone outside of the West, the differences between the two parties are inexistent.

The memoryholing of all Democrats' failures, corruption, and horror is painful to watch. But they do it with a different kind of posturing, and this seems to be sufficient to most.

I think that it is what you know of the history of animal domestication and of pets that makes you think that there is an acceptable and low amount of suffering.

I think most people are aware of animal cruelty in factory farms (the chicken in cages, the pigs in cages, etc.), which represents 90% of all farm animals globally (https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/global-animal-farming-est...).

For pets, I don't think you understood what GP was saying: pet breeding involves massive amounts of death of puppies/kittens that aren't pretty enough or don't manage to survive infancy, the female breeders are basically confined to cages and "producing" all their life, some short-nosed breeds of dogs and cats are even illegal in some countries because they spend their life unable to breathe properly, pets are abandoned and killed, etc. The happy pets you see in the street are not representative of what it is to be a pet. But yes, these ones are not suffering.

As for long and harmonious, as much as we tend to see anything in the distant past as innocent, I'd remind you that the systematic killing of male chicks, the killing of veals to avoid them drinking all the milk, the killing of all animals as soon as productivity drops beyond a threshold, are not new practices. No animal wants to be enslaved. Same as no human wants to be enslaved.

I'm not attacking you, just attempting to give you an idea of why other commenters believe animal domestication is not ethical.

As I started reading through the report (published in the Telegraph, almost entirely about bias in BBC Arabic coverage), I found it rather humorous: the incidents mentioned are undeniably instances of bias, but the few cases the author of the report was able to painstakingly find over 2 years of coverage were a rounding error in comparison to the daily pro-Israel bias in every major Western publication.

It stands to reason that it'd be a rounding error, both because of the overwhelming, omnipresent pro-Israel bias displayed by the mainstream media and almost every government, in full opposition to the popular sentiment and the communications of NGOs or humanitarian law institutions, and because of the complete disconnect between the casualties on the Israeli side versus the many tens of thousands of dead in Gaza...

Then I got to the section of the report that questioned the casualty numbers from the Gaza Ministry of Health... This has been a consistent target for criticism by Israel, but the criticism has repeatedly failed to find any purchase: the MoH methodology is widely understood to be a (severe) undercount of the dead, there has been no reasonable deconstruction of the methodology, there has been no estimates (outside of genocide apologists) that have been below the MoH numbers. At this point, criticism of the MoH methodology is about as credible as descriptions of Gaza protests as "pro-Hamas protests".

So when I got to this section, I just stopped reading, because every other claim, which had already been laughably limited in scope, became outright questionable.

Just posting this here to avoid someone seeing 2 links (including "honest reporting"...) and believing that the "pro-Hamas bias" accusations against the BBC are in any way robust.

I'm an avid reader of history books (antiquity, middle ages), and I'd say I'm very picky, trawling through reviews and recommendations from trusted sources before deciding on a book.

I have already come across books that were a slog to read because of the author's simplistic worldview or obvious contrarian agenda (so I can definitely relate), but I've also read some masterpieces (for example, Kaldellis I believe is solid).

Unfortunately I don't count any historians among my friends, so I'd welcome any recs from you for authors that are the least bad, or a teardown of main antiquity/middle ages historians.

I'm not going to dispute what you're saying, but the causal relation (between BBC and the attack, or especially their faith and the attack) and the overall context seem murky and very ambiguous.

By general audience, do you mean any book that's not intended for academics?

> I simply reject the premise that anti-immigration policies and the people who support them do anything to help curb the housing crisis or improve working conditions.

I think you're again fighting a right-wing anti-immigration stance. I'm talking about the opposite of that.

> Immigration can be a net positive [...] if it goes hand-in-hand with worker and tenant protections

I'm certain you can see that this is a huge if. In practice, limiting immigration can indeed avoid worsening the housing crisis or decreasing wages, which can indeed help the relevant unions/charities campaign more effectively.

Reasoning by extreme: would you agree that importing 2M people per year to the UK would make the housing market and wages worse, independent of any ifs? Then you agree that there is a threshold where there is too much immigration, even with perfect conditions.

> right is very much anti-immigration

The Tories were very much anti-immigration, if you looked at their talking points. They were very much pro-working class, and Labour is very-much pro-human rights and pro-democracy. What they do is different.

I don't know whether I'd call myself anti-immigration, but I'm as left as they come and I don't think that being pro-immigration is a left/right value. You can be on the left and have objections to immigration, you can be on the right and welcome immigration.

I invite you to read the book [How Migration Really Works](https://goodreads.com/book/show/82005192-how-migration-reall...).

Most people think that being anti-immigration equals being racist and wanting refugees to be turned away. And given your comment, that is also what you seem to believe. However, the large majority of immigration is state-sanctioned (so work visas, etc.), is not the immigration you hear about in the news or that racists talk about, and it's neither a left nor a right issue.

Immigration does have economic benefits, but I'm certain you'll agree nothing in the world is only good or only bad. Immigration does lead to larger competition on housing (more people = more demand), and generally this happens in the cities where the housing crisis is the worst. So more immigration undoubtedly benefits landlords.

Immigration also means more competition for jobs, which leads in practice to lower wages. So it also benefits capital-owners.

So you can be leftist, campaign to increase intake of refugees, campaign against the housing crisis and wealth inequality, and be against immigration.

As an example that might change your opinion (beyond talking to a leftist who does not think immigration is nothing but good): when the Tories came to power after Brexit, they implemented policies that greatly facilitated immigration (2-4 times yearly intake to what it was before Brexit) [0]. Corporations and the right are very much pro-immigration. Would you have expected that?

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_immigration_to_the_Unit...

Can people stop flagging dham's comment when they simply disagree?

FWIW, I think what you're saying here and in another comment, about this burning a century of good will, is true.

People turn it into a liberal vs right partisan issue, but that's a convenient simplification.

The people protesting the lockdowns, mandatory vaccination, ID checks everywhere were not politically homogenous: if you looked at who was vocal about it, there were people on the right, but the other half were wokes, hippies, liberals, leftists, socialists, antifascists.

What burned goodwill is the authoritarian measures, the weak arguments, the demonisation of those against it for political gain and status (Trudeau and Biden would routinely accuse those opposed to mandatory vaccination and lockdowns of various -isms in public speeches).

The pandemic was indeed a major public health issue, but the way this was managed made it about a fight against the erosion of rights and societal polarisation.

I wrote about one such case in another discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46901003

My friend, since you were able to produce the Save the Children post, I can only assume that you're also aware of the methodology of the MoH, which means that you're just lying now...

That methodology is not secret or subject to interpretation: their numbers do not include the deaths I've mentioned. Not even the deaths of people buried under the rubble!

I'm feeding a troll here, but for the benefit of those reading along:

The official numbers are a subset of all deaths: only deaths from direct military action are counted.

In most wars, excepting the shortest conflicts, those deaths are a minority of all deaths.

Even taking the numbers of Save the Children (and I'll let everyone decide whether they're likely an overestimate or an underestimate), it's difficult to think that for every 4 people killed in this slaughter, only 1 person died of hunger, disease, chronic illness, childbirth, age, etc., etc., etc.

Over 2 years.

It seems like it won't be a popular opinion given the comments, but: a three-letter-agency, especially the CIA, maintaining a "factbook" always seemed like an oxymoron to me. Indeed it was an oft-cited source in research and school essays, and for the most part it was certainly accurate, but, as many tools of propaganda, that veneer of accuracy could be a useful cover for the small portions of reality where truth was inconvenient.

As an example in recent memory: the World Factbook has been heavily cited lately to argue against the idea of a genocide in Gaza. Maybe a year or so ago, the Factbook was updated, and it claimed that the population in Gaza had grown: no decrease, no inflection point in growth, nothing to see... That claim was in heavy rotation, as soon as it was published.

That the espionage agency of the main weapons supplier to Israel would publish such a claim felt grotesque, and the claim itself seemed ridiculous, impossible, based on even evidenced peripheral information (the 90+% of people displaced, the destruction of all hospitals, the deaths of so many aid workers, the levels of starvation), but... the Factbook claimed it, so it became true to many.

It would be impossible to quantify the effect of this, how many days of horror it added, how many more debates those trying to stop the killing had to do, how much fewer donations were sent to aid workers. But an effect it certainly had.

I don't understand the downvotes to your comment (and the few replies are grotesque...), but I definitely support the sentiment. If dropping the NYT over Iraq is not justified, then the concept of red lines loses its meaning.

You didn't lose much by the way, their handling of Gaza was equally despicable.

Yes... I should have come up with jokes about deconstructing the power dynamics inherent to lunch, but I don't know many egregious examples of retracted sociology studies, so I chose to not only disregard HN rules but also to do so lazily...

Will do better when I reply to your anthropology-fueled rant.

I probably don't understand your point, but if the result of having the prevention of balkanisation as the overriding goal is a "horrible and inefficient" government, why is it a good goal? If India had fractured into its component states (and you seem to imply that this has often been a strong threat), would the people have been poorer? It's rare that independent states ever want to rejoin their historical country of origin.

Genuine question, not a judgment.

> how it could contribute to destabilizing democracies as the "economic losers" in rich countries started to demand more political power

Far from me to defend globalisation, but what would have been the alternative here? Is the idea that authoritarian governments have less hurdles in a more globalised world?

Arguably, we'd have fared worse: we'd be starting our days by taking a power stance while listening to the TV broadcast of lists of positive words to prime ourselves into greatness, then we'd go out and salute people with "Most people in your neighbourhood are having a great day". All exams would be not-eating-marshmallows exams. Only upshot I can think of is HN would be called PHackerNews.

No, if there's one social science we should have picked, it's anthropology I tell you.

Thanks, I'll read through those (and Citogenesis was one of the two that I stumbled upon!). I find a lot of value in observing out-of-the-box/second-order reasoning, your blog fits the bill!