Erik Haugen @ech@qoto.org

@SandyO@urbanists.social @QasimRashid I think in rhetoric and political debate around this it is probably best to start from a shared assumption that Hamas is a baby killing rapist terrorist group of thugs, and so our questions are more about how to best degrade their abilities, stop similar groups from rising up, and so on rather than whether we want them to do something different like return hostages or stop using human shields. Of course all civilized persons think they should free hostages, and stop taking hostages or do sick thuggish/terrorist things like use human shields. No need to call on people like Rashid to repeat that over and over again. He even just said, unnecessarily in his 2nd post, that he believes in the sanctity of Jewish and Palestinian lives.

The useful questions are things more like:
* is there a non-military solution that gets them to stop raping/killing/kidnapping?
* how do we degrade their capabilities without "radicalizing" more people to take their place?
* how do we get actors like Iran to stop using them and the Palestinian people for their own political gains?
* Should we pressure Israel to e.g. better enforce protections against settler violence, or better due process before doing things like bulldozing suicide bombers' houses?

I say "we" here because I'm in the US and as far as I can tell my tax dollars are bankrolling whatever the IDF is doing here: Rashid will have outsized influence on these questions if he wins the election, even though this isn't Israel.

@anubis2814 @QasimRashid Yeah, anti-semitism doesn't need much prodding to rear its ugly head from all over the political spectrum. Disgusting.

@OvertonDoors @QasimRashid Bill Foster is a conservative?

@hedgielib AI can help you write the prose you need to write to do (1), (2), and (4). *ducks*

@ljrk @QasimRashid Yeah, it's regrettable that Foster walked away (is that what happened?) instead of asking about what you're saying – "how can Israel achieve the security goals it obviously needs to achieve if it ceases firing weapons?" There might be great answers to that question; I'm not really sure what they are, though.

@rbreich Naively, I'd think the right answer is to make it cheaper and more effective to do table stakes things like "make sure people file".

Perhaps if the tax code were simpler this would be possible.

But even if not – why is that the expensive thing that IRS doesn't do, first, if it is short on funds?

@kinyutaka @LevZadov @ekes @justpeachy @ItsTrainingCatsAndDogs@kolektiva.social here's another metaphor: suppose there's a guy who rapes, kills, and kidnaps babies. Then the cops get into a shootout trying to arrest that guy. Someone is killed by a stray bullet.

At this point it's pretty reasonable to thoroughly investigate if the cops are taking necessary precautions to avoid that sort of thing, while at the same time recognizing that it's probably not possible to completely avoid any risk of that and still arrest the rapist baby murderer.

FWIW some people like Jordan Peterson seem to think IDF shouldn't even try to use force here; like in the metaphor don't arrest the guy at all.

@justpeachy @ekes @LevZadov @ItsTrainingCatsAndDogs@kolektiva.social well, I'm asking what those other ways are. I sure hope there are other ways; I've explicitly said I don't know what they are, though?

@justpeachy @ekes @LevZadov @Linux_Is_Best@mstdn.social @ItsTrainingCatsAndDogs@kolektiva.social Then what instead?

@justpeachy @ekes @LevZadov @Linux_Is_Best@mstdn.social @ItsTrainingCatsAndDogs@kolektiva.social No, I mean in response to the mass murder. After the mass murder/rape/kidnapping on Oct 7, naively I would think the IDF would at some point need to degrade the capabilities of the group that carried it out. (especially since they say they intend to repeat it many times: ‘there will be a second, a third, a fourth’). How do they do this while minimizing civilian casualties? I had hoped they could do better than they are now, but I have no idea if that is realistic.

This matters in a practical sense to me personally, because the government I have the privilege to vote for seems to be bankrolling whatever they're doing: because of that it is on me to find an answer to this question, at least in some sense.

@kinyutaka @LevZadov @ekes @justpeachy @Linux_Is_Best@mstdn.social @ItsTrainingCatsAndDogs@kolektiva.social And those internment camps were far from the worst example of things the Allies should have done differently!

@ekes @LevZadov @justpeachy @Linux_Is_Best@mstdn.social @ItsTrainingCatsAndDogs@kolektiva.social Exactly; that gets at what I'm asking. (I don't get the "please... " line?)

So are they missing the mark in this regard? How do we (you and I) evaluate this – assuming we don't want to take the IDF's or Hamas' word for it?

@rticks@mastodon.social @LevZadov @justpeachy @Linux_Is_Best@mstdn.social @ItsTrainingCatsAndDogs@kolektiva.social Dude nobody cares if you block them.

@rticks@mastodon.social @LevZadov @justpeachy @Linux_Is_Best@mstdn.social @ItsTrainingCatsAndDogs@kolektiva.social I just asked for a solution; isn't that evidence?

@LevZadov @ekes @justpeachy @Linux_Is_Best@mstdn.social @ItsTrainingCatsAndDogs@kolektiva.social You see the allies' actions in WW2 as "genocide"? They were *stopping* an actual genocide, although I don't think that was the main goal. Well, anyway, like I said, we could have done a lot better there, sure.

@LevZadov @ekes @justpeachy @Linux_Is_Best@mstdn.social @ItsTrainingCatsAndDogs@kolektiva.social (1) How should they defend themselves? I'm hearing a lot this kind of thing – describing Gaza as an open-air prison, and so on. But no coherent alternative IDF could be pursuing instead.

It would be great if there was some magical way Israel could end Hamas without any civilian casualties, but I don't know if that is possible. Like in WW2, we killed, what, like a million German civilians? That was awful. We probably could have done better. But certainly not 0, right?

@huntingdon @lowqualityfacts I feel like if it had automatic fire capabilities like the military version of the ar-15, the M16, which is an "assault rifle", it would be even more dangerous, wouldn't it?

(And automatic weapons have been essentially banned in the US for decades, there's very little political support for changing that, I think.)

But I think that isn't the point of people complaining that the ar-15 isn't an assault rifle. I think the point of all that semantic hair splitting is that the "assault weapon" bans are incoherent nonsense.

Those laws let you buy things like ar-15s (or similar weapons like a ruger mini), but just not if they have certain safety features or pistol grips. That's just... weird.

Do you want to ban semiautomatic weapons? If not, then why do you want to ban just "tacticool" ones like the ar-15? That, if I understand correctly, is the point.

@lauerhahn @dangillmor A coup... what did he do along those lines?

Assuming we all agree there's a distinction between "filing lawsuits about what you think are procedural violations" (like what Gore did in 2000) and "attempting a coup" (like what Ferdinand Marcos did in 1972)....

Did Johnson support more the former, or more the latter? (If it's the latter, sorry I missed it in what I've read, I'd love a pointer.)

@ct_bergstrom @drs1969 Yeah, it's a tool that writes (mediocre?) prose; I think it's best to think of it that way.

So if you want to use it to write something, you have to go back and forth with it until the material is correct.

If it answers questions correctly, you got lucky: it's echoing something from its training data, I guess.

That's my understanding of how it could be useful. People seem concerned that it is going to take over the world and kill us all, so I might be missing something, though.