having the power to destroy a government agency that provides aid and actually going through with it is not morally equal to not donating a few dollars of your income
1 - the moral calculus is different if you were already doing so and then suddenly shut it off
2 - i was happy with the arrangement of the government doing it on my behalf, and in doing so making the united states stronger and have allies around the world
3 - elon musk did this illegally
4 - elon musk also caused additional deaths by virtue of supporting trump, rfk, and these other lunatics which he was definitely affirmatively a part of doing
There's nothing supremacist about Zionism, it's just the support of Jewish self-determination. Efforts to twist it into something nefarious are just propaganda with no etymological basis.
Think about what you're saying. Zionism the idea that a particular ethnic group (the Jews) will have the authority to determine what happens in their country (Israel). That is a textbook case of ethnic supremacism. And that's not even mentioning the violent expulsion of the Arabs that this de facto entailed.
Most Zionists have a goal of preserving a Jewish majority for pragmatic reasons - history has shown that it's the only way to ensure the safety of Jews. That's not a supremacist ideology at all.
Moreover, no country is perfect, and we shouldn't have double standards just for Israel. Can you identify any other Middle Eastern country that compares favorably, in terms of diversity and tolerance of all religions and ethnicities?
"Judaism" sometimes refers to the religion, but many Jews are not religious. Jews are a group of people from Judea, hence its historical name. Some dispersion to other regions doesn't change where a group of people is from.
And think about how absurd it would be for anyone on the planet to go murder Africans and steal their land under the guise of it being our “homeland”. Sadly that has happened, but they didn’t bother to use that excuse.
Hi! I'm sure this is very cool, but want to know what this does before I try it. I typed in the chat: what does this do? Will you build me an agent behind a phone number I can chat with? And it tried to open up iMessage which I denied because IDK in the first place what this is.
None of these things are the most likely reason. The national security establishment doesn't want a Chinese-allied socialist state with a regime perceived to be hostile in South America, especially if its resource-rich. But the timing is very convenient for burying the Epstein stuff.
Mistral is pursuing pursuing B2B use cases. Thats because they're releasing open models and the big thing about B2B is they HATE sending their data off-prem. OCR'ing and organizing old docs is a huge feature in B2B. Mistral's strategy seems smart to me.
Does anyone actually not realize this was to stymie criticism of Israel? You Netanyahu bragging about how this is central to winning the propaganda war. Ellison is the biggest private donor to the IDF. Put it together.
Jonathan Greenblatt (CEO of the ADL) was on record saying "TikTok is Al Jazeera on steroids" before the ban bill got a lot of wind.
What's ironic is that ultimately their suspicion that TikTok was influenced by the PRC to push an anti-Israel agenda was most probably incorrect. Israel lost the narrative in the West because it simply did a lot of shitty things in the war, and everyone from homeless people to war refugees carry around an HD camcorder in their pocket now. I still see shocking videos of what the IDF is doing in Gaza on a monthly basis, on Instagram of all places.
Scaremongering about the PRC was just the public facing justification for the ban bill. Its not like they can just come out and say "The Israelis have me on tape violating children and so I need to pass this bill to let them take over the biggest social media platform they don't control already so they can face less criticism for their genocide".
That and to promote the regime’s white supremacist agenda. (Expect to see a lot more nauseating propaganda along the lines of the memes that official Administration accounts have been posting.)
Don't you think the populace needs to be armed though? I think its a given that eventually the government will be intolerably corrupt and a revolution will be necessary. Nobody denies that less guns -> less shootings. The logic is that some amount of shootings are tolerable to preserve democracy, and that if our goal is to reduce mass shootings, social reforms intended to improve mental health are the correct choice.
Imagine you are in charge of a monkey enclosure. The monkeys sometimes go crazy and kill each other with rocks. You can:
A: Remove all rocks. Monkeys stay suicidally miserable but can't inflict harm as easily. Problem solved?
B: Mitigate conditions that make them suicidally miserable. Some say its impossible, but then again, just a generation ago the monkeys had rocks without frequent violence.
Why is it that only our country needs to be armed, but none of the others do? Do Germans need to be armed? Do Indians need to be armed? Maybe you could argue that Chinese people need to be armed, but every Chinese person I've met seems to like their government right now and is content with the levels of surveillance. Maybe arming the Uyghurs could have helped but somehow I doubt it.
All populations should be armed. The current democratic, liberal order in Europe is just a side effect of America's dominance, the same America that is the product of the revolution of a well armed population. Your counterpoint might be the U.K., which has arrested 12,000 people for social media posts recently.
The catch is, it only works with an enlightened, well educated population with philia and a sense of civic duty. Arming inner city Chicago has been a disaster.
That's tough to maintain that state, but we have to try, because if a population doesn't fit that description the country turns to shit and you won't want to live there. To disarm is to admit we can't be an enlightened country anymore and we won't try, and after that its just a matter of time until there is nothing special about America and its just another mediocre third world dump.
If a government were run by quakers, should the population require the same level of armament as if it were run by Attila? Perhaps by creating better governments we could reduce the need to arm populations.
I just don't see what arming citizens is going to do against a militaristic government.
Yes, because the idea is to establish an armed populace before society succumbs to tyranny, not in response to it. The central tenet is that even if a society is run by Quakers now, it won't always be, because in the absence of proper inputs societies tend to decay to their stable basal state which is despotism. When that happens, the population must be armed in order to revolt and restore a democratic system. I would even say its better to arm the populace while the government is still Quaker because that would establish the proper cultural mores surrounding gun ownership in an enlightened environment - e.g. knowing that gun ownership is a responsibility and right, connecting it with ideas of liberty and civic duty, viewing them as a last resort, learning about guns from your father and not your homie on the corner.
You need to have the population armed beforehand. Its not practical to try to dynamically adjust how armed the populace is in proportion to perceived governmental Attila-ness.
To your last point, an armed populace makes revolt feasible, and there is a spectrum here. The key is that the oligarchy will need to convince the army to stay on its side and punish the revolting populace. The more sacrifice and violence that is required, the harder it is to keep convincing them. Also, look at the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan: an armed, hostile populace is just much harder to control than an unarmed one. It dramatically increases the cost of every excursion from a military base, the number of soldiers required to subjugate an area, etc, and the grand lesson from those conflicts is that boots on the ground are still needed to control an area, and that technological solutions like drone strikes still don't scale well enough and aren't cleanly targeted enough to change that. Perhaps that will change in the future, but I actually suspect that the prevalence of consumer drones will maintain the power of the public to resist the military. Look at Ukraine and Russia; the dominant weapon system now is the consumer drone, eclipsing even artillery, which has democratizing implications for the future of the tug-of-war between societies and their governments.
Well it's been interesting talking to you. In good faith, I honestly cannot conceive of how arming the population prevents tyranny though. You give the example of Iraq and Afghanistan. Presumably you're saying the tyranny was the US occupation? Weren't these groups armed not before, but as a result of first (I believe) soviet and then American occupations?
Are there examples in modern times of a stable society consisting of a heavily armed population such that as a result of this tyranny has been curbed? Americans are the most heavily armed population in the world and it seems that tyranny is measurably setting in right now. The stability seems like it was higher in the beginning of the 20th century too. The 60-70's and now are the most unstable periods I believe, and the number of guns has only increased. So I don't think the US would be a good example.
In good faith, I cannot see how arming civilians reduces tyranny in modern times, unless your model actually is Afghanistan and Iraq. In those cases it's not that all civilians are armed. There are armed groups. That's not a world I want to live in though, anyways.
Yes, the tyranny in Iraq was the US occupation, though I am merely using it as an example that an armed, civilian populace can resist military control, not commenting on the morality of the occupation.
FWIW, Iraq was already well armed before the occupation, and looting of state arsenals in the chaos of the invasion amplified this. Afghanistan was a similar situation but armed networks were already organized moreso before the US occupation.
I don't think there are examples in very modern times of an enlightened, armed populace revolting against tyranny. The most recent I can think of is the Irish war of independence. They had low gun ownership, but correctly recognized the attainment of arms as of utmost importance, and it was through arms that they obtained liberty. I also still think that the American revolution is a fair example because the fundamental dynamic is still relevant. The Algerian war of independence comes to mind as well, which was more recent, though they were neither enlightened nor well-armed at the outset. Generally an enlightened society will produce a democracy which will take centuries to decay to the point of warranting revolt, and we are still in the first generation of these.
To your point about the US, merely having an armed populace does not gradually move society away from tyranny. The mental model myself and the founding fathers have is that even in the case of an armed populace, democratic institutions eventually decay to the point that the government is corrupt, despotic and intolerable. Its just entropy, as happens to our bodies. The population then revolts, and installs a democratic government, which then starts to decay again, and the cycle repeats. The fact that America is moving in a bad direction is confirmation of this tendency to decay, and not in any way antithetical to my stance. Eventually the decay surpasses a threshold which triggers the guns to come into play and reset the system.
If we can eliminate any hereditary diseases then this is great. Do any of you complainers understand how much misery this could save? Have you ever had a family member with a terminal, congenital disease?
It's eugenics. The debate is familiar. It was an extremely contentious and well-tread topic of discussion for many decades from then end of the 19th century onward.
There are thoroughly developed arguments that highlight its conceivable benefits when applied in way that someone judges ethical, and thoroughly developed arguments that highlight its conceivable threats and horrors when applied in a way that someone judges unethical.
The application of eugenicist principles to justify ethnic genocide during WWII, and the public surfacing of eugenicist policies put towards economic and racial oppression by the West when it was openly self-reflecting during the 60's and 70's, pretty much tabled the public debate because it provided evidence that convinced many that the threats and horrors were inescapable.
So yes, many "complainers" probably do understand exactly what you wish they understood, but they also understand the counterarguments and find them more convincing. You don't have to agree with them, but don't underestimate their breadth of their understanding just because they don't agree with you.
If it's eugenics to choose, without coercion, certain traits for your child, then eugenics as a term is meaningless. Am i participating in eugenics when i don't have children with my sister? Am i doing eugenics when i take a test for cystic fibrosis and use that to decide to have children or not? The entire debate you are referring to centers around the use of force and coercion to control what others can do, and if they can reproduce or not. This is not that.
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