constantius

Interesting insight. I can think of some objections, but they don't change your point.

I also checked out your blog and got 2 interesting articles in 2 tries. If you have some personal favourites and listing them is not a bother, I'd be happy to read them.

While de Gaulle being far-right is not a majority opinion (except in some marginal circles), he would undoubtedly be considered far-right if he was governing today, which is what GP seems to have meant.

I think that, for most Western people today, far-right == bad to non-white people, independent of intention (as you demonstrated with your remark about the PS), so de Gaulle's approach to Algeria, whether he's loud about it or not, would qualify him as far-right already.

All this to say, the debate is based on differing definitions of far-right (for example you conflate fascism and far-right and use Eco, while GP and I seem to think it's about extremely authoritarian + capitalist), and has started from an ignorant comment by an idiot who considers Bush (someone who is responsible for the death of around a million Iraqis, the creation of actual torture camps, large-scale surveillance, etc.) not far-right because, I assume, he didn't say anything mean about African-Americans.

Immigration is not a left-right issue, there are reasons to want to limit wanted and unwanted immigration, regardless of who one might vote for.

> If we are honest to ourselves about what they want and openly talk about [...] without visible abuses, these people are unhappy.

You seem to be talking about a subset of all people who do not want immigration: caricaturally-extreme racists. You and GP are not talking about the same people, and GP is not carrying water for anyone.

Yes, as far as I know most criminality follows a Pareto distribution, so consistently removing those who get arrested will indeed affect the stats here.

The 1 % of the population accountable for 63 % of all violent crime convictions: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3969807/

Hi, not into supplements, but really appreciating your approach to building a community and the reasoning behind it (and that you're being so transparent about it!). I'll give this a go too, thanks for the inspiration :).

You might be right. I read the lyrical flourish of the multiple questions (What about hands? What about etc.?) and the "for boys" quip as unnecessarily aggressive and dismissive, but maybe that wasn't the intention.

I'd genuinely want to understand why we have such a different understanding of that comment.

Surely the title can't be taken literally, otherwise the book would be the size of wikipedia, no?

I didn't say the topics left out were obscure, but arbitrarily chosen. Can some book titled "How the world works" that talks about economy be criticised for not talking about effective communication or table manners?

And re the undervaluing, I mentioned that myself, but surely we can't expect every book to include arbitrarily chosen topics that happen to be undervalued? Hawking's book doesn't mention wealth inequality for example.

Not wanting to argue, I just don't understand why I'd see the original comment as out of line while you see mine in the same way.

I don't disagree with your desire to see house/clothes/etc. maintenance covered, but this is such a perplexing comment.

As far as I understand, you take the book's title to be being false advertising, and seem to be upset that it leaves out some subjects.

How does one get upset that an author didn't include handwashing instructions in a book?

You could have made your (very true) point about the devaluation of some maintenance work as a general observation, without shaming the author for omitting some subjects of your choosing. What does it achieve to go into a culture war based on the description of a book you haven't read?

The book is basically one chapter according to the table of contents: Vehicles. On some bookshop, it's even shelved under the automotive category.

What review did you write to Hawking's Theory of everything?

First: before speaking about the Jewish community, go to a protest, you'll find plenty of them there. The Jewish community is not under attack, the tired "antizionism/antigenocide = antisemitism" trope doesn't fly much nowadays. I'd be extremely certain that a lot of those who voted for that mayor, and who campaigned for the football match to be cancelled, and who got ready to bash the fans if need be were Jewish people (haven't been to a single protest without Jews being represented and very vocal about their protest of the genocide).

Second: believe it or not, but for hours after writing that comments, it kept popping up in my head until I realised what I was doing.

I'm arguing with someone who:

- during an ongoing genocide harps on about the great injustice done to genocide-celebrating football fans

- plays the moderate by saying we should all defer to the public authorities (the good ones, those that don't do anything, not the public authorities like Khan, who is a dishonest guy who wouldn't even have gotten elected if there hadn't been a genocide around in the first place)

- mentions that indeed, it's complicated, there are problems on both sides, etc. The sides you're equivocating being a group of pretty much Nazi football fans and the (gasp) the Muslamists!

- jumps into a comment about Muslims being the problem whipping out a Muslim map of Birmingham. Imagine any other discussion about risks of violence and someone helpfully jumping in with a "Jew map" or "Chinese map" and making dark innuendos about the Jewish mayor. And then has the gall to squeak out "and don't you dare be an islamophobe"!

- is all over the discussion, making disingenuous, weaselly arguments.

Again, stop reading opinion pieces on WP and looking at Muslim maps, go to a protest, you'll see you're imagining things.

Don't know what the "wider European context" is, but a public official campaigning to boycott and sanction a country carrying out a genocide is not in any way bad. That the UK authorised that match to happen instead of sanctioning Israel is the shameful part, not Khan's conduct.

And your opinion about there being a "religious sectarian element" is very subjective even though it's presented as fact. People from Arabic/Middle-Eastern countries (who are majority Muslim) are indeed especially sensitive to Israel's apartheid/killings, but that has much more to do with their own marginalisation and history than with their religion I'd wager. As evidence, I'm sure these matches were happily going along before Israel started killing 100 people per day, no?

In short, that a public official did the right thing when his country's government couldn't is, again, laudable.

This is I think the third reply I make to you, not because I follow you around, but because every time I read a post full of "implications" and concern for the innocent citizens having to deal with evil people, it happens to be you posting it...

I will attempt to find a link when I'm not on my phone, but the methodology and results here have been solidly criticised (mainly around survivorship bias, as a sibling notes, as well as about the measures of success).

This study (and the one about 3% of the population being sufficient to enact a change) comes up constantly when you hang around leftists, and I've been known to quote it myself when I was younger, but it always felt too good to be true and uncomfortably aligned with liberal sensibilities.

The sibling comment answered perfectly, but I'll add that your advice sounds reasonable in a vacuum, but in reality this event happened one year after the start of genocide. The community had no reason to believe that the state would do anything, as the state allowed a genocidal country's genocide-celebrating citizens to travel to the community's city for a football match and the police didn't do anything while they were chanting death to arabs, hours before the locals took matters into their own hands.

After a year of international inaction in response to the genocide, the Amsterdam community acted quite reasonably, and to be honest quite commendably, by stomping the lynch mob into the gutter, as the sibling eloquently put.

> their words!

No... This is again the trope that anti-genocide == antisemitism.

Might be the words of one person, but you find crazies everywhere. In this specific case, according to all the foltage I've seen, on one side you had a group celebrating the death of children while their country perpetrates a genocide, on the other you had people by and large talking about punishing that behaviour.

So I'm pretty sure their words were "Free Palestine".

Calm your horses there, mate. The interpretation is fully justified.

Assuming you live in the UK, you're basically saying that losing your job because you criticised the government is a very grave matter indeed, but what happened to Palestine Action is all nice and dandy because jurors.

For those who don't know: Palestine Action is a collective of people protesting the genocide in Gaza, they would occupy/blockade factories of Israeli weapons manufacturers and "vandalise" said weapons. They were recently declared a terrorist group and proscribed, with thousands being arrested for showing support (including by wearing t-shirts) since.

You're right, losing your job because you said something against the government and going to prison because you wore a t-shirt protesting an ongoing genocide are not the same thing.

Speech in the UK's never been better.

Aaaah, I was wondering where you were pulling the claims about free speech in the UK from, but I understand now: it's the speech that aligns with your values is free! Was confused there for a bit.

Well, according to that line of thought, people in the US only face the consequences of going against national security and are free to sue the government for wrongful termination/slander/whatever.

Now we can agree that there's free speech everywhere.

I thought this was someone using satire to make fun of GP, but no, it's GP, being serious.

Independent of the veracity of throw310822's hypothesis, this assertion is ridiculous on its face.

Thanks for linking this article! However, the full description of the incident seems that Namecheap blocked the domain, the CEO got into tweet arguments justifying it (and taking inconsistent positions), and after the backlash said it was a hasty block by the mod team, without an apology.

I generally give NC the benefit of the doubt (because of their principled stance on Ukraine, which to me means they can be principled elsewhere too), but in this case it's very difficult to explain it away.

Reading the book right now, thanks for the rec!

Do me a favour and add some more to the current Ask HN on books thread please:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46391572

Thanks. For context, this is what you're referring to (many entities with that name):

https://p1.dso.mil/

Knives were too, and yet I'm not calling people to use forks instead. There is a difference between military contractors and generic tools.

Edit: sorry, hotheaded reply. I assume you mean that the creator of mIRC was encouraging it (though it's not mentioned anywhere). I still.stand by my analogy, but I see your point given your assumption.

They're now a defense contractor, the copy on their website sounds like military cosplaying.... Probably chasing the stupid profits of Anduril and Palantir, and doing the old open source rugpull in the process.

Zulip (for Slack) and Wekan (for Trello) are good replacements, save yourself the ethical and technical worries.

https://zulip.com/

https://wekan.github.io/

Very interesting papers. However, the last link:

> Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology

> some stereotypes are malevolent and destructive:

> ...

> Jews as grasping hook-nosed Nazis perpetrating genocide on innocent Palestinian babies.

Very underhanded way to paint the widely held accusations of genocide in Gaza as antisemitic...

Looking into it further: the CSPI is a right wing think-tank headed by Richard Hanania (from the website's bio, a thinker on the Right interested in culture wars, who has published vile stuff on Palestine, and has the infantile authoritarian viewpoints on politics that have unfortunately become synonymous with the "new right"). So take some salt with you if you're visiting that website...

One of those comments that let you glimpse the depth behind things and the joys that lie in exploring those depths.

Thanks for taking the time. I will spend tomorrow evening reading.

I originally thought that this was a neat use of AI, but from image 5-10 it becomes obvious that this is a low-effort vibe project.

Someone fed the original images into an AI and posted the output with little to no modification.

The idea is good, but the implementation does not deserve any praise.

So what I meant is: this article is sophistry grounded in US team-style politics, so the bias (or, uncharitably, manipulation attempt) has to be made explicit.

I do frequently see articles/posts criticising the dreadful illusion of US democracy. They come from thinkers and activists who identify as being left (not liberal), mainly, but also anarchist, libertarian, independent, or simply anti-genocide.

Here, I see an article that panders to one side, behind a veneer of sophistication and democratic ideals, and gestures at the ideology that is corrupt to 95% without mentioning once the one corrupt to 90%.

> populism but that term has as many meanings as people talking about it

Agree completely, but think the author reduces it to "bad thing for the unwashed" by not defining it.

The location of the author doesn't really matter though, no? The mentions of non-US politics are about early XXth century pre-fascist European countries, otherwise it only mentions US politicians/personalities (including an obscure, to me, official and Kirk).

I'm not American, not even in a Commonwealth country, but I'd say that managing to mention Kirk while not mentioning the failings of American politics as a whole does indeed play right into the blinkered polarisation, for all intents and purposes.

What did you think of the article?

Very well written, but reads to me like the sophistry it decries.

Part of the modern US trend of "progressive" intellectuals to turn everything into fodder for partisan politics and demonise the Republicans. I know that Republican intellectuals also do this, with equally laughable claims ("Democrats are far-left").

Hence, it's difficult to read this seriously. It even has the intentionally unsubtle implications, the literary equivalent of a knowing eye wink, and the willful misunderstanding of jokes as being some.dark portents... Granted, Democrats (the party that presided over a genocide) are not mentioned or lauded, but the superiority of Democratic persuasion is heavily implied, and this makes the whole argument shaky.

And it's drenched with spite for the people: populism is bad, because look at the masses being too stupid to understand what's good for them. I don't know, leftist populists seem to be on point about where the issues lie.

Long-winded comment to say: this is bottom of the barrel US team politics disguised as something higher, by quoting TS Eliot and using complicated words.

Surely you can see the huge differences between EU and US? The context and outcome of these unions are incomparable.

I assume this is sarcasm, but, for those reading, a unitary state is definitely not what those words meant. If they did, that would mean that 27 countries willingly and fully signed away their sovereignty, without knowledge of the public. The only times where this has happened before in world histoey was either surrender in the face if insurmountable odds, or a decision by the elites in exchange for unimaginable riches. As far as I know, the politicians and bureaucrats who made/signed those treaties didn't become billionaires since.

Interesting analysis, thanks for posting.

How much credence do you give it? I'm not an economist, and my general approach to any government's publications (especially in economics) is one of scepticism. Especially if it aligns with the party line (published in 2018, under May, who was very strongly anti-immigration).

Edit: this isn't made by the government but by a university, so scepticism is lessened slightly.