Nothing in my life, no physical characteristics I have, have been more detrimental to my mental health and self-image than my below average penis size. And it’s like I’m physically gifted elsewhere, I’m fat, not tall (5’8), and not incredibly good looking. But none of this ruined my mental health like my bottom 1% penis.

It’s not hard to find accounts of other small/micro men with horrific dating experiences, terrible mental health and body image, and severe depression, all stemming from their penis.

For me, it completely ruined my confidence. Even though my length is average, my circumference is not. And that was enough to kill me. I’ve never dated, have no experience etc and have no intention to as a result. I’m 22, and can only see myself being alone forever. It’s just too embarrassing.

Now I know there are some physical characteristics worse. Like being really ugly, or some awful life changing conditions, but I still think a micro/small one is up there in terms of how significantly it impacts your life. It’s such a small part of your body, but it changes how you experience intimacy to such an unparalleled degree.

And I do believe it is a big deal. Women would (typically) like something average or around that. When you’re so far outside the norm either side, it’s not good. It’s not shallow to value your sexual experience and so people like me are normally not desired.

I’ll continue to reject women and not pursue women for my entire life.

Change my view.

This is not about AI's merits as a technology. This is about the current financial environment surrounding it.

To the best of my knowledge, currently AI buildouts are being funded by circular debt.

AI Circular Deals: How Microsoft, OpenAI and Nvidia Keep Paying Each Other

Which will only work if there is never a break in the chain of "I invest in your buildout of a data center, you buy my chips to build it."

Even ignoring that, the companies do not appear to be making enough money to cover their debts.

CoreWeave's slump puts spotlight on debt behind AI boom | Reuters

There are some companies like Microsoft that seem to be funding things with less debt:

Why Alphabet and Microsoft Suffer Less If AI CapEx Goes Wrong

But they are still spending a lot more than the AI seems to produce for it in revenue.

PYMNTS | AI Is Fueling Microsoft’s Growth. Can It Sustain the Costs?

Put this all together and it seems financially that the technology has potential value, but not as much as it costs.

I have personally observed a dominant sentiment that shames men near-unconditionally for having physical insecurities. The insecurities they are shamed for having are usually to do with their muscles, height or the size of their penis, oftentimes comparing to other men or previous partners of their current partner.

The response (which is an accurate one) that they usually get is to be told that women do not care about penis size, and that their insecurity is one that is stemming purely from themselves and that they need to deal with it. I however do not believe that women get the same ridicule when they themselves having these same exact insecurities, just in different areas.

If a man is insecure that his girlfriend's ex has a bigger penis than him, he's basically branded as an insecure loser who needs to get over himself. However, if a woman sees a picture of her boyfriend's ex and sees that she's more toned/fit than she is or has bigger boobs, that insecurity is oftentimes met with a more empathetic, caring, or even validating response.

Overall, my main premise is that both men and women frequently have socially-instilled insecurities about their bodies, especially in comparison to other people, however, men seem to be the only ones who are usually ridiculed for it. I believe that we should start treating men's insecurities with more tenderness and empathy like we do with women who are experiencing fundamentally the same types of insecurities, as opposed to going right for the throat.

To change my mind here, you would have to convince me that either A, women receive equal or more ridicule over their physical insecurities compared to men, or B, concede that men receive harsher criticism, but convince me that the relatively harsher criticism is valid or deserved.

I promise I'm not writing this as a response to that controversy at that famous university everyone is talking about.  

I had this idea a long time ago.  I just had not gotten around to writing about it yet.  In fact the impetus to this post dates back to a work retreat I was at during the World Cup this summer. 

While I was having lunch with some colleagues one day, the World Cup was on TV and one of my female coworkers (probably around 40) remarked about one of the players, "Ohhh, he's barely legal but he looks yummy!"  

The table just erupted into laughter. One person even got up and high fived her.  And I was thinking to myself, "If I had made that exact same remark about a woman athlete, I doubt very highly that people would have had the same reaction.  In fact, I bet people would find that to be very creepy and inappropriate, and I might even get reported to HR". 

Now I'm not some kind of incel gender warrior person who has no sense of humor and I know how to mind my own business, so I just let it go. 

But afterward, I started wondering whether there was something unfair about the whole thing. And the more I thought about it, the more I found myself bouncing between three different explanations.

Theory 1 -  There is a double standard and it is truly unfair

What that woman said is not OK.  She objectified a person who has dedicated his life to the pursuit of talent and sport and reduced him a sex thing. A man would surely have been called out in today's culture if he had said the same thing. 

More broadly, I wonder whether we have developed a cultural attitude in which male sexuality is treated as inherently suspect, while female sexuality is treated as relatively harmless or even empowering.

I also wonder whether this contributes to men’s difficulties forming romantic relationships. If men increasingly feel that expressing sexual interest is likely to get them labeled as creepy, predatory, or entitled, might some of them become more hesitant to express interest at all?

Could that be one contributing factor to what people call the “male loneliness epidemic”?

Was I therefore a coward for not calling that woman out, making an example of her and reporting her to HR?  I feel like maybe I was.  

Theory 2 - There is a double standard and it is fair 

It makes sense that women can make comments like that and men cannot.  

Why? Because Men commit a disproportionate share of sexual violence, and women have legitimate reasons to be more alert to unwanted male sexual attention, that’s why.

The same words can carry different implications depending on who’s saying them, the circumstances, and the broader social context.

A man making an equivalent remark might be perceived differently because women have good reasons to be more cautious about male sexuality.

Perhaps insisting that men and women must be judged identically in every such situation ignores real differences in risk and power.

Theory 3: We’re making too much of all this.

Maybe the problem isn’t that women get away with something men shouldn’t do. Maybe the problem is that we’ve become too uptight about ordinary expressions of sexual attraction.

Young athletes are attractive. People notice. Anyone who thinks anything is wrong with that is gaslighting us.

Not every expression of sexual attraction is an act of objectification, and not every mildly inappropriate joke needs to become a referendum on someone’s character.

The world needs to lighten up again and just chill out.  

Conclusion

I’m open to changing my mind on any of these points, and I’ll award a delta if you convince me.

I’m particularly interested in arguments that distinguish between explaining why people react differently and establishing whether those different reactions are justified.

Can you change my mind? About any of this?  

TlDr: Restorative justice advocates only believe in restorative justice until it relates to an issue they feel an emotional connection with. Then they are as bloodthirsty as any retributionist.

I'm going to preface this by saying that I do not believe in or support restorative justice. I'm pro-retribution and I have been for a long time. But I am going to try and take the perspective of a restorative justice [I'll call it rest-just for the rest of this post.] And the response that I've seen from people who are normally pro rest-justice has been things like:

From what I've seen majority of people who are typically pro rest justice has been that Geller should be outcast and isolated, and that he be forever marked with 'I'm a rapist.'

But like, that's not rest-justice. What's the whole point of rest-justice? Anytime you talk with their advocates the core of their philosophy is, ultimately "how can we make sure this never happens again?"

Well, it never happened again.

Unless I'm mistaken, what we know is this:

Geller raped someone.

Geller owned up to this and acknowledged it as rape.

Geller faced consequences most of us (me included) consider too light.

Geller never raped anyone again.

Like, despite what you or I think of being suspended as a punishment for rape, whatever else occurred (and we don't know the details of what the victim said or wanted) this worked. You may not like it, but unless I'm mistaken about this, the slap on the wrist (and whatever else may have happened) made it so Geller understood his transgression, and never did it again. Not only that, but he's supported anti-sexual violence organizations and charities, right?

This honestly sounds like a success case for rest-justice. And I feel in my heart of hearts that if Geller had of committed an act of non-sexual violence, then this is how it would be talked about. Most of the people who want him completely deplatformed would be saying "we need to allow for rehabilitation. Offenders are not subhuman monsters, we should not dehumanize them. We can be better than that."

Yet it's not because apparently rest-justice doesn't matter for crimes that we consider 'bad.' Therefore it's useless idea that most people only pretend to support.

Some definitions:

credible evidence: An actual statistical analysis based on hard data by a named individual with training and expertise in a relevant field. Could be a university professor, cybersecurity professional, etc. (Bonus points if it’s based on open source data with replicable analysis.)

substantial impact: a reduction by at least 25% of a relevant metric in the days following the airstrikes, without an alternative explanation.

propaganda bots: Bots that manipulate social media by posting, commenting, or voting on user content. (i.e.: NOT the CloudFlare data about web crawlers that’s been pushed as evidence.)

US social media: Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, etc.

Ryan McBeth, a YouTuber and intelligence analyst who has actually advocated that the US should kinetically strike bot farms, put out a video explaining the rumors and why he thinks there’s no good evidence for a reduction in propaganda bots.

BBC Verify concludes similarly:

While there is no evidence to conclude the strikes on Yandex's data centres have had an impact on Russia's influence operations, they have disrupted internet services for many.

This post is illustrative of the bot-driven campaign:

11k+ upvotes in 3 hours. The sub is 6 months old, yet regularly hits r/all. OP of the post is 2 month old account with 4.5 million karma, also a mod of the sub.

More are easy to find. These posts tend to be Twitter screenshots or similarly unsourced claims.

It seems giving ultimatums in a relationship has a bad connotation, but boundaries have a good, healthy connotation. I find that odd because i believe they ultimately function the same way. When people point out the difference between them, I find that it’s usually just semantics. “I will not be in a relationship with someone who sleeps with other people” functions the same way as “if you sleep with that person we are breaking up.“

I don’t think many would argue against that particular ultimatum but in general ultimatums seem to have a bad connotation that you should avoid in relationship conflict whereas boundaries are considered healthy. In both cases you’re making it clear to your partner that if they take an action there will be consequences.

To change my view I think I’d need you to show how they fundamentally differ in function beyond semantics. Maybe I’d change it with an outlier case but I’d prefer an explanation as to how they are all inherently functionally different.

Edit: At the gym right so only reading the smaller replies at the moment while I rest between sets. However I skimmed some longer ones that look like theyd had good points so I’ll try to really digest them and dole out some deltas later.

Did you know that out of the 13 states where black people made up +10% of the population, 11 states voted against the Civil Rights Act in Congress? The bill has passed because of states with tiny black populations that weren't affected much by desegregation and weren't threatened by the small presence of black people. There is a historical correlation in the US where the higher black population proportion is, the higher white supremacy gets, hence why thevsouth is perceived as the most racist and New England as a progressive haven (where black people barely exist) so i just think that the civil rights movement's success was a product of the states playing moral superiority knowing that their black populations were tiny anyway.

I'm not trying to discount how significant of a victory this is for gun rights advocates.

But I think that the political capital used to accomplish this feat might have been better used to adjust the Pittman-Robertson Act.

For those who don't know, the Pittman-Robertson Act was passed in the late 1930's and levies an 11% tax on firearms, ammunition and archery equipment in order to fund wildlife conservation efforts. As a result, about $1 billion a year is taxed and used for wildlife conservation efforts.

I believe that we should be able to either reduce budgetary expenditures in the federal budget and use those budget savings to contribute a similar amount of money to wildlife conservation, we could also place taxes on other items instead like luxury items or we could do a combination of both.

Almost every gun owner buys firearms and ammunition while only a small minority of gun owners own NFA items. Ammunition in particular has significantly increased in price in the past few years and while firearms haven't seen a similar and lasting price increase, guns can still be a significant expense for the poorest of Americans.

Pistol braces have not been legally classified as stocks recently and they're a lot like stocks and are used a lot like stocks, so SBR's are kinda pointless with that in mind. Shotguns themselves have become a pretty niche category of firearms, and short barrel shotguns are an even more niche category within that. According to some estimates, there are about 6.5 million registered suppressors, 1.2 million SBR's, and 210,000 SBS's. That is still a lot of NFA items in use, but considering how almost 100 million Americans own a gun, NFA items are not owned by a significant majority of American gun owners.

I understand that reducing the tax stamp for $0 has opened up the possibility of certain NFA items being deregulated all together. For suppressors, this could be huge as it could possibly allow a valuable piece of noise reducing personal protective equipment to become more widely used and affordable.

But I feel like my previously mentioned points are worth seriously considering.

TL;DR

Making guns, ammo and archery equipment cheaper for everyone would have been a better move to make first than making SBS's, SBR's, AOW's and suppressors cheaper.

Rather than trying to benefit all gun owners, Congress threw a bone to the more passionate and well to do gun owners to keep single issue gun rights voters satisfied.

I’ll start off by saying I’m very pro Palestinian but that I would like to create this post as it Israel is 100% in the right today. It’s a debate on the efficacy of pro Israeli PR strategy, not morality.

I think we can all agree that Israel has gone way down in popularity over the years. Zionists will essentially blame what they deem "blood libel." Pro Palestinians will blame the IDF's actions in Gaza and treatment of Palestinians in the WB.

I lean pro Palesitnian but the truth is that it's neither. I'd love it if Americans were able to get angry about the suffering of Gazans and WB residents, but in reality, I don't think there's anything the IDF could do that has caused or would cause a serious drop in popularity for that alone. And alone is the key word there, so what do I think Israel did that caused such a precipitous drop in their favorability?

I think it more has to do with the way they opinion policed Americans with such an iron fist.

The one thing about Zionists is they love to claim they don‘t care what people who oppose them think but it’s horrifically untrue. If they didn’t care, the ability to accept our disagreements and move on was and is there.

And what I’ll say is that I do think all things equal, if you de-identified Israel and Palestine and just discussed the situation as is, most would indeed support Israel. The logic here is that most people support an overwhelming defensive response to an attack.

Now, if you add the history to it, I think that a huge portion of people switch, but it would remain as most people in favor of Israel.

I think what happened is that the fact Israel cared this much about perception alone started to cause the massive drop in perception. I think it’s important to think about our own culture, which is one of an exceptional free speech.

We (from an American perspective) have one of the world’s broadest, if not the broadest, free speech protections and also free speech cultures in the world.

And the fatal mistake of Israel’s official and unofficial PR team is that they underestimated that. On top of that, regardless of if one thinks the focus on Israel is fair or not or the criticisms of Israel are unfair or not, people are much, much less willing to entertain the idea that criticism of a foreign nation is either “unfair” and/or “bigotry.”

People at a baseline just have a very high bar, if not insurmountable, to being open to the idea that being against a country is bigoted, which is a huge issue when Zionists’ claim, and Israel itself’s claim, is that being against the country is bigoted.

A lot of it comes down to the fact words are just that, words. Me or anyone else wanting anything from no new settlements to one state solution isn’t actually changing Israel’s capabilities. Therefore, if Zionists come down hard on words, it’s very hard to find a reason for this except their own insecurity.

A good example of this could be Tom Brady. If Tom Brady started going after randoms and tabloids that insulted and name called him, he’d rightfully look insane 99% of the time. Sure, there’s that 1% of the time where Brady might sue you if it’s demonstrably false, but a) it’s an exceptionally high bar and b) we all know even the most conservative of justices aren’t going to take the case of “Nation of Israel vs random tabloid.”

So, then, the question becomes “why do Israel and Zionists care if we accuse them of apartheid and/or genocide?”

Literally, that’s all you have to do.

If Israel and Zionists truly believed it was not a genocide, they would just ignore us. Israel is already very powerful militarily. There’s no reason they should care about whether you or I think it’s a genocide or whether the WB and settlements are a form of apartheid. But, they very much do care, like a lot, so we have to ask why.

And while I can’t mind read Zionists, the likeliest reason is that they know we’re right, so they lash out at us in a form of moral insecurity. Because remember, ignoring us = them genuinely not believing it’s genocide and apartheid (even if they’d be very wrong about that from our perspective). And they are doing just about the opposite, so you can do the math.

To be clear, Israel can use their own microphones and they tend to have stable PR when they do that. It’s when they start taking/trying to take others’ microphones away that their PR suffers.

It’s essentially a perfect Streisand effect. You have this pro Palestinian minority that are somewhat silenced, but generally left alone in an “agree to disagree” manner. Then, Zionists use an acute increase in intensity of the conflict to try and end that “agree to disagree” attitude people had towards pro Palestinians, and you have a rebound effect where people actually start agreeing with some pro Palestinian points.

In terms of what I think the actual conflict has done for Israeli PR, I’d say the war in Gaza has probably had minimal effect and the WB settlements probably have a “somewhat noticeably negative” effect, but nowhere near the effect Zionists’ direct treatment of Western dissenters has caused. The settlements cause some negative PR but ultimately, much like how gas prices and elections work, many people look at Zionists’ treatment of Western dissenters first and foremost in terms of having an opinion on Israel itself.

Recently, I’ve seen so many people online arguing that sex scenes in movies or tv shows are entirely “unnecessary” at best, and “disgusting” or “should be banned” at worst. Maybe this is just a case of the internet being the internet, but it seems like I’m in a minority of defending the artistic merit and value of such scenes.

I believe that sex is a normal and very emotionally significant part of the human experience. That being the case, it’s only natural that sex is something that would be represented in art. Not every piece of art is going to be created equally, but I have seen and often enjoy seeing that part of life depicted. If it was no longer present in movies or tv, I would miss it. The scenes often represent moments of union, emotional intimacy, desire, etc. They’re not usually there just to make you horny.

To be clear, I’m not saying that all sex scenes are good, obviously. Many are tasteless, gratuitous, sensationalist, or otherwise artistically bad, but that doesn’t taint the entire concept. I also don’t argue that everybody HAS to enjoy watching sex in movies, just like many people don’t enjoy violent films, but they shouldn’t discredit the artistic merit of those things.

Basically, I just think that a very puritanical and repressed perspective on sex scenes has taken root recently, and I find it concerning. Sex is a normal, healthy part of adult life and adult media is going to depict it. I think that people that don’t like it should stick to the tamer stuff that already exists without it, instead complaining about works that aren’t sexually sanitized

(I'm not 90 I promise.)

It seems to me like modern youth Internet memes (like "six seven", "italian brainrot," etc) are popular and viral purely because they don't make sense and are weird. Nobody actually knows what they mean, they just pass it around because everyone else is doing it and when asked what it is they just shrug. Occasionally, things have very vague meanings, like "skibidi" generally meaning something... good? But it can also mean something bad. And generally the meanings of these words don't really get more specific than that.

I feel like this is actually the purpose of these memes. People like them because they're incomprehensible. Obviously group psychology 101 plays into this too, and that's been true since the dawn of time - if everyone else likes this, I do too. But as for how these start, and why some perpetuate while some die, I think kids just equate weird = good these days. In earlier times, jokes (and often people) would become popular because they're witty and funny, and slang would become popular because it filled a common and important role in speech. "Rad" meant something was cool. That's already 900% more specific than "tung tung tung sahur", which literally means nothing.

I know the immediate response is that it's like this for every generation, we are all doomed just to not get it. I think that's probably true to some extent, but I really think especially due to Internet, AI, and social media culture, plus just people growing up on iPads and not recognizing good humor anymore, memes actually are worse in this way.

Change my view that the reason people like "six seven" and friends isn't just because they make no sense and that's the point, or that making no sense is good enough to pass as comedy.

This does not apply to criminal law or civil law. I'm not saying you can't sue a senator for slander, or that the government shouldn't be able to arraign a representative for robbery. But when it comes to administrative suits, where there's no victim per se, without impeachment proceedings there should really be no government action taken. For example, if a representative were discovered to have committed immigration fraud in such a way as to potentially invalidate their citizenship, the government should have to just ignore it completely as long as they remain in office. Newspapers could report on it and embarrass them, as long as they aren't papers that take any government money which could plausibly make them state actors. Congress could choose to impeach, although in practice Congress rarely impeaches Congresscritters. But if Congress doesn't impeach, then the remainder of the government should have zero power to do anything to a sitting Congresscritter if the basis is administrative.

All over TikTok and YouTube, GIFs of teen suicides are being posted, and people are sharing them, and the companies are doing nothing about it!

Ivee seen videos of people explaining there cercamstances and though iv never seen them i this that is just wrong imagine you death being imortalized and laught at all over the internet.

Not that I understand how some people know that KOSHA is a ploy to cancel free speech. But what would you rather have?

Kids lacking basic human empathy because of gifs of things that DEFFANELY shouldn't be seeing?

or

Having to word some things differently on a post to not get it deleted?

Police officers should have the same kind of professional licensing and regulation that are currently in place from other public safety roles that have a responsibility to care for and support our society and culture as a whole. Nurses, doctors, pilots and lawyers have to maintain licenses, and in some cases even have to pick up additional insurance, and must in ALL cases provide evidence of continuing education or at minimum experience a periodic review.

Most other "regulated" jobs can lose their ability to practice when they violate standards; but cops which have arguably the most significant authority also benefit from the least amount of objective third-party oversight and transparency.

In my mind, a licensing system could also make accountability something that would not only increase the transparency, but also limit the intra- or inter-district portability. Serious misconduct would cause a review by an independent "policing oversight" licensing body, and suspension or revocation would impact them across the entire US, vs. within the existing district or agency.

I see very little downside; please - CMV.

TLDR: we need to update the categorization we use of people when discussing this topic if the goal is peace for all. If the goal is to just pick a side and argue about it, please continue using Israeli and Palestinian.

Yes there’s no denying that the identities “Israeli” and “Palestinian” exist.

My claim is that using them is dividing up the pie of people in a fashion that leads to conflict.

Instead, we should talk about “those who want peace” versus “those who want conflict”.

Yes I’m aware of the recent Pew Research poll that only about 1 in 5 Israelis and Palestinians believe a two state solution is possible.

I’m also completely aware that this is a very pie-in-the-sky take that will never affect reality.

However, I think that the average human being living in the area wants to live in peace.

To me, the issue is “those who want conflict”, which are the extremists on both sides. Though they are the minority, they are much more vocal and have more power on both sides.

I’m aware there are lots of other aspects of the conflict including a broken trust that may never be restored.

But I feel if the discussion on this topic centered around calling out and being against “those who want conflict” rather than having to choose one side versus the other, we’d have a greater chance at all working together towards peace.

Feel free to call me crazy, I just think the categories we’ve chosen, while logical for many reasons, are the wrong ones to use to achieve a solution.

I just care about results. And achieving peace for the normal human being who I am labeling as “those who want peace.”

Edit: of course the terms Palestinian and Israeli can and should be used to discuss their nationality. But they should not by used when discussing who the “sides” are in the conflict. To me, the sides should be “those who want peace” and “those who want conflict”

You guys seen those police carts in parking lots with the cameras on them and every now and then they play a recorded voice that says, 'This area is being monitored for your safety'? I was on tour last year, saw those all over the country.

What does that remind you of?

You guys noticed how people are saying 'unalive' instead of 'kill' because saying 'kill' gets their videos demonetized on YouTube and TikTok?

Feels pretty doubleplus ungood to me.

And then there's Trump talkin shit about taking over Canada and Greenland while Russia invades Ukraine and China is eyeing Taiwan. How long do you guys think we've got until the three of them are Oceania, Eurasia, and East Asia?

Despite humanity's ever-growing body of scientific knowledge and increasingly sophisticated technology, the average person's ability to think critically, retain knowledge, understand complex ideas, and reason independently is declining.

Here are the main reasons I hold this view:

1st Educational outcomes are going in the wrong direction.

PISA results have shown substantial declines in mathematics and reading performance across OECD countries.

2nd Access to information doesn't necessarily translate into knowledge.

3rd We are increasingly outsourcing cognitive tasks.

4th The Flynn effect has reversed in some populations.

IQ scores, which had been rising for decades, have started declining in some populations.

*Edit : General knowledge is not a significant part of intelligence ok * 5th Scientific progress can conceal individual intellectual stagnation.

We're building on centuries of accumulated knowledge, but does the average person actually understand more, or are we just getting better at using tools we don't understand ?

Edit : Ok for this one, it has always been. 6th The growing popularity of intellectually shallow entertainment

Reality TV full of pointless drama, influencers whose entire personality revolves around their looks or showing off their wealth, and people who become famous for seemingly having no particular talent or skills.

What bothers me isn't that this kind of entertainment exists, but how popular it's become, and how many people seem to genuinely look up to these influencers and want to be like them.

Finaly, just looking at what's going on around me in my city, at work, on TV, etc. I can't help feeling that the average level of intelligence and critical thinking is surprisingly low.

This is what Elon said about why he was buying Twitter:

I think it's very important for there to be an inclusive arena for free speech. Twitter has become kind of the de facto town square, so it’s just really important that people have both the reality and the perception that they are able to speak freely within the bounds of the law.

If it looks familiar to those of you who have been around here a while that's because Reddit's CEO at one point said this:

We stand for free speech. This means we are not going to ban distasteful subreddits. We will not ban legal content even if we find it odious or if we personally condemn it because we believe in that ideal independently, and that's what we want to promote on our platform.

Those of you who have been here a long time know just how far Reddit has fallen from this standard. Elon clearly saw it occurring on Twitter as well, thought it was a problem, and stepped in to try to fix it. I think that this space can equally be considered a type of 'virtual town square' and that he could and should do the same thing here. CMV.

I posted something up here a while back  about how Israelis and Palestinians need to just recognize the basic fears and insecurity that each side feels about the other. It  did generate some interesting discussions and also some sickening dismissals of the basic humanity of some of the peoples involved in the struggle. 

But anyway, it got me thinking about the overall roots of the conflict as it is and I keep coming back to one basic thought - Why should anyone have expected the Palestinian Arab population to voluntarily accept the partition of their homeland?

To be clear, I'm not trying to question the basic validity of the premise that the Jews deserved a safe haven after centuries of persecution.  I understand the arguments for Jewish self-determination, particularly in the aftermath of the Holocaust. 

But I invite readers to imagine themselves in the shoes of an ordinary Palestinian Arab in 1947.  Imagine a conversation that goes something like this - 

 "We're creating a Jewish state here"

You ask why. 

You are told that the Jews have suffered horrific persecution and systematic extermination and need a state of their own. 

You might reasonably respond, "I'm very sorry to hear that but my family has lived here for generations.  Why should I lose my home because of crimes committed somewhere else by people unknown to me".

Doesn't that sound like a pretty reasonable response?  

I've noticed that people typically respond in one of two ways. 

The first is that they state that the Jews have an ancestral connection to the lands of the Levant going back to antiquity. 

That claim seems to be historically valid by everything that I have read. But consider the consequences of what would happen if we applied this same principle around the world.  North and South America would have to be almost entirely depopulated.  Countries like Turkey, Thailand, England and the entirety of Slavdom would have to be totally reordered.  It would be a mess 

I do not think that determining geopolitical legitimacy according to millenia old ethnogeographic realities is a very good idea. 

The second reply I often get when I ask people to consider the feelings of Palestinians who were forced from their homes is that people ask me to compare them to the Germans who were expelled from territories that today make up western Poland and Czechia. "If the Germans got used to it, why can't the Palestinians" is something I often hear 

I don't find this analogy to be persuasive either. First of all, Germany was a highly advanced sovereign state that had initiated a war of global domination, attacked all of its neighbors and was only defeated after a titanic effort by the combined forces of the most powerful states in existence. It was the most terrible war in history and the entirety of the German state and its highly developed technological sector was fully militarized and mobilized for war.

Mandatory Palestine, in stark contrast, was a tiny part of a crumbling empire. It had essentially no military or political power and presented no threat to any of its neighbors.  It could not be more different from Germany of the 1930s and 1940s.  

Moreover - and I cannot emphasize this enough - the post World War II expulsion of German peoples from Eastern Europe was a humanitarian disaster of the highest order. It should hardly be emulated. 

My broader point, once again, is not to take sides and to say that Israel is right or Palestine is right, it's to question the overall wisdom of dividing up a territory and forcing people from their homes in the first place.  To me it seems that it would have been remarkably easy to anticipate that such a move would produce an intractable conflict.  

And this wasn’t some problem that nobody could have anticipated in 1947.

Nearly three decades earlier, in 1919, an American commission led by Henry Churchill King and Charles R. Crane had investigated the political aspirations of the inhabitants of the former Ottoman territories. Its report raised precisely the sort of concern I’m talking about.

The King–Crane Commission recognized the historical connection of Jews to Palestine and the reasons behind the Zionist movement. But it also warned that implementing the Zionist program against the wishes of the existing Arab population would violate their political rights.

It recommended that the project be substantially modified rather than imposed on a population that opposed it.

I don't see how a reasonable observer in 1947 could have expected partition to produce a stable peace. 

What am I missing?

Ok- so context. This past Saturday Shane Gillis did an opening monologue in which he was talking about the challenges of going to the gym as a fat person. In that he said, “and women dress like whores now”, and goes on to describe a type of women’s shorts and describes leering.

Some a few points.

1. I personally did not find the specific routine particularly funny. I do find Shane funny at times. In some ways, humor should be beside the point.
2. I am open to the argument that punching down can be fundamentally problematic.
3. I believe in free speech, but also in free response. So there is not fundamental problem with deciding a thing is problematic. There is a wide range of things one can decide to do after that fact. It is this personal question which is the center of the CMV.

Much of the argument in the opposite goes something like- calling women whores for just wearing gym clothes contributes to the casual permission of sexual violence towards women.

Thoughts-
So I think my challenge is that I think it is a misrepresentation to say he called women whores. If I said, people dress like mummies- I am not calling people mummies.

The thrust of the joke was not that women shouldn’t dress like the way they do- just as it wasn’t about how gay guys shouldn’t be super fit- but rather ways that he personally feels super awkward being in those settings.

I do think it is important to note that while I don’t think Shane is “MAGA” he is without a doubt more conservative. But very center right. I don’t think it’s problematic to be sharing perspectives from this point of view.

—-
Where I am shaky.

I generally find CMV when it is not clear where someone is open to changing their view annoying- so here is where I am unsure.

1. The statement of women dressing like whores, is then followed by an argument that basically goes- how can you expect me not to stare. The scene in tires, which is basically the same joke- basically has the same arc. I don’t love this normalizing of lack of personal control based on fundamentally someone’s (a woman’s) existence seems to skate pretty close to the argument that most people want to make.
2. There is without a doubt a real problem of regular harassment women experience at the gym (and a wide range of other places) and I am sensitive to jokes that normalize this type of harassment.
3. I generally really like folks like Dan Levy, so always concerned when I find myself disagreeing with folks that I generally considered smart. (I even looked for examples where he used white in any joke, and there were none- so my prepared response of hypocrisy doesn’t land). This all makes me wonder if part of my unwillingness to see it as problematic is that as an older person- where then term whore was used very lightly throughout the 90s, has made myself less sensitive to its shifting out of use.

—- so was Shane Gillis monologue problematic? (I am less interested in your specific verdict- but rather the framework you use to get to that conclusion).

Edit-
1. There seems to be an argument that the problem is “not being funny” but I am using the definition of problematic as contributing to a culture of harm. Something could be funny and problematic- just as something could be unfunny and problematic or unfunny and non problematic.

While I do believe the hype will die down in the next five to ten years, I believe the thing that will be left over with be here for good. I think our grandkids will live in a very bland world and will not understand how to think critically, or even strive to create masterpieces.

I work in a field that works very closely to data centers and the companies that own and run them. There is a lot of money and time being put into our current models. I already watched as the younger guys in my field turned to google and YouTube to help solve their problems. Now I see them turning to ai and every day these models get smarter and smarter. It’s very easy for me to see in just one generation everyone I work with will only know how to do things if their ai tells them what to do. It is making the learning process easier but also lazier. Even the companies I work for are putting time and money into training their employees to utilize ai to make things more and more efficient. I personally already think we are at the point of no return, but give it a couple more generations and I think no one will even think what it would be like without ai to do the work. I am curious though if my thoughts are skewed because of my work and I would change my mind if I heard of people actually working for companies that are battling the progression of ai use.

I just saw a TikTok about the possibility of using CRISPR to cure down syndrome before birth.

And although most comments were atleast in favor of this use case, most of them said something along the lines of "This is a slippery slope that could lead to designer babys". But I don't get how that's even a bad thing in the first place.

We are already tinkering with nature everywhere, expanding our life way beyond anything natural. Why would that be any worse, just because it involved DNA.

I agree with the common sentiment that you should love your child no matter what, but if you have a parent that would rather have a child with blonde hair then brown hair or one with better eyesight (which the child would also profit from), I don't think we should stand in the way of that. Maybe it even leads to children being more loved by their parents. As I said it shouldn't require such a way, but that's not the world we live in, bad parents exist.

Another argument I often hear against this is, that this will only be affordable by rich parents. But you can say that about anything. That's how capitalism works. Rich people already can buy more things and make their childs life better then poor people. And when more people use and want to use CRISPR, it will also become more affordable, as it can be produced in masses and doctors taught more on how to use it.

To summarize: I don't think designer babys are wrong in any way. People just think that because they somehow see the DNA as big and scary and fear new technologies.

In response to price hikes or the enshittification of a product, I find the knee-jerk reaction most folks have is simply blaming billionaires or corporations.

So rather than taking up oxygen with this whinging, I respect those that are able to focus on the mechanisms that drive the outcomes.

The rules of the game are set and enforced by a handful of governing bodies, which is where public attention/pressure, advocacy, and votes pay off. For instance the FTC and the DOJ's Antitrust Division decide what counts as fair competition. Sector regulators like the FCC set the terms for entire industries. State attorneys general can bring their own cases. And Congress sets the mandate, budget, and authority for all of them.

The best part is, all of these orgs answer to the public through appointments, elections, and public comment periods.

Disclosure: I work as a consultant for F500 companies where I help executives make better decisions. These decisions are typically focused on maximizing profit through one means or another. I’m not an expert on industrial policy, economics, or philosophy. I’m just a guy that’s fed up with all this well-intentioned yet completely shallow and directionless complaining.

For those who don't know in Star wars The rebellion's less radical wing led by Mon mothma and Co was the faction that came on top at the end of the war.

It was too weak and did nothing (serious) about imperial collaborators and aristocrats after the end of the empire.

These wealthy collaborators would become the life line for the First Order, enabling them to comeback and immediately switched sides.

Saw Gerrera was right to be uncompromising and brutal in his methods.

Had he been in charge I'm quite sure he would have led a purge of obvious collaborators and imperial remnants.

There should have been mass purges after EP 6 to prevent the First order.