Why would they meet Israel's offensive head-on?

The desire to defend their territory and the optics of launching a highly provocative surprise attack only to immediately hide in well supplied tunnels while the people they ostensibly exist to protect are left absolutely defenseless and at the mercy of the enemy?

Israel wants to 'defeat Hamas', but has no way to cope with the fact that Hamas fighters can go back to looking like civilians at any point they wish.

Right, but not "hiding behind civilians" was something Hamas had to pledge to do when they ran in competitive elections because it does not make the civilians particularly happy. This was one of their campaign promises. In the 2014 war, they made a big show about how their soldiers wore uniforms, how they operated like a real military, how they were defending their territory like a real military, etc. Hamas having more martial prowess than Fatah has always been part of their sales pitch.

Now the optics are:
1. Hamas plans its attacks in isolation, communicating with foreign sponsors, but not the public. (This can be justified to a degree be opsec needs.)
2. Hamas carries out the attack, ostensibly "for the people of Gaza."
3. Hamas has no strategy to inflict losses on Israeli air assets, leaves the strip open to bombardment. (This can perhaps be justified by poverty)
4. Hamas seems to have no strategy for stopping ground incursions, leaving at least main thoroughfares open to occupation. (This seems hard to justify).

This makes them look more like a terror organization than a state; more like they work for Iran than the people of Gaza. After all, what exactly is the expected return on this action for the people of Gaza, especially if a military defeat isn't inflicted on the IDF?

In 2006, Hezbollah was able to make much of better than expected combat performance against the IDF. This was particularly bolstered by loud Israeli recriminations and finger pointing over what was, in the context of similar US and UK operations (e.g., Second Fallujah), not that bad. This, plus their strong efforts in financing relief and recovery efforts made the short war a strategic victory, even if it was a tactical stalemate. But the optics are not at all the same if Hamas provokes an invasion and then melts away with a "not my problem" directed at Israeli tank columns bisecting the Strip.



Yes, but at the cost of public support and making Fatah look like far more of an actual "government" than Hamas. If you're military force isn't there to defend the population, what is it there for? To scuttle Saudi-Israeli rapprochement on behalf of Iranian funders? The leadership already faces questions about their wealth and their Qatari assets, the proper allocation of priorities, etc.

Hatred of Israel is not identical with love of Hamas. Palestinian organizationscan and have lost the support of their people due to poor performance in governance, perceived dereliction of duty, and military losses before. Hamas itself has had to suppress protests over its (mis)rule in recent years.

So, I would think the point was to bait Israel into an invasion, where they could score a military and propaganda victory by forcing them to withdraw, thus increasing their leverage in negotiating better conditions in Gaza. But if they just hide? What new leverage do they get there?

It's one thing to say, "we can inflict costs on you and if you pursue us we will inflict losses on you, so settle up," it's another to have the message seem to be "we will inflict costs on you where possible and then hide for as long as you keep pressure on us."

Demonstrations of martial prowess, even if they are largely illusory, tend to be good fodder for militant groups. But you need at least something to spin up as a win.

Now I'm reading though that a large number of the initial attackers, perhaps 1,500, tried to hold territory in Israel. So between losses there and losses to air attacks and raids, I suppose its possible that Hamas has just already taken significant attrition. It's combat forces are not particularly large. But if that's the case, the whole attack seems to be an even larger blunder. Those forces are also what let them control the Strip.

Right, but the actual teachings of Jesus are more against the Sadducees' formalism than the Pharisees. The shift in named focus probably has more to do with the fact that the Sadducees had been significantly reduced as a contemporary power by the time the Gospels were set down.

Judaism at the time had already split into multiple competing sects: Sadducee, Pharisee, Zealot, and Platonizers.

The NT certainly motivated anti-Semitism at times, but so did the OT. The OT's prolific examples of Israel's collective recalcitrance and evil doing was often used as justification for oppression. And yet I find it hard to classify the Tanakh as "anti-Semitic," in any straightforward way, given it's also a pillar of Jewish culture and that culture's survival itself.

But the story itself leaves open this possiblity of being used in this way precisely because, unlike many holy books, it frequently casts its people in a negative light. The Book of Johna for example has the hated Assyrians repenting of their sins in a way the Jews never fully muster, much to the chagrin of Jonah himself. Job features the piety and holiness of an Edomite, a descendant of Esau, whom the Jews continually warred with and oppressed. Ruth again shows a foreigner acting more holy than most of the chosen people. These texts open the door to internal and external critique, although they also seem to set the ground for success as a diaspora people living among and (in antiquity) converting large numbers of foreigners. Because, around Christ's time, we see Jews actually being quite successful in converting large numbers of foreigners. And, their Platonizing (Philo to Alexandrian Christians) actually seems to have set the ground work for later Neoplatonism too.

Once a Jew has accepted the divine revelation of Jesus Christ he has placed himself outside of Judaism. If religion were sport then he would be playing a very different sort of ballgame. We have religious schisms within Judaism at this time: See Hillel vs Shammai.

Not originally. The first center of Christian worship was the church led by James in Jerusalem. This Church was made up of Jews who considered themselves Jews. Paul's letters acknowledge the authority of this church and ask that funds be sent there. He sees his role in preaching to Jewish converts as special (the "Gentiles" in this context were largely non-Jews who had already accepted the Jewish God). Converts are something you see in the OT, e.g., Achior in the Book of Judith, Ruth, etc.

"Jewish Christians," appear to survive into the fourth century in Palestine and Armenia in isolated areas. And of course this tradition exists today in Messianic Judaism, which makes much of the early, more Jewish James/Peter centered faith.

Christians only began taking on a distinct identity during the rebellion against Rome, which they sat out, circa 70 AD. Paul's letters actually pre-date this period, as do some of the others.

The NT is a compilation largely written by Jews for other Jews or for recent converts to Judaism. Had Christianity flamed out in its first 150 year or so, it would be thought of as a sect within Judaism. So, with that in mind, it's hard to see how it could really be "anti-Semitic," as such. The justification for allowing Jews to continue to practice their religion, unlike the pagans, was drawn from the NT.

Saying the NT is anti-Semitic is a bit like saying Luther or Calvin's work is "anti-Christian." To be sure, their work has motivated a good deal of prejudice, oppression, and violence against Christians, but it's an internal schism.

The Jews are somewhat unique in surviving with their own distinct culture in place as a diaspora people. However, there are other diaspora peoples, and they have faced similar issues as well.

Second, the fact that the two great monotheistic faiths descend from Judaism has given it a unique place in Christian and Muslim lands. While Jews have been the victims of oppression and violence from both groups over the generations, they have also been tolerated far more than any other faith due to this connection. Christians, for example, exterminated all "pagan" religions and generally tried to purge lands they conquered from any trace of Islam (e.g. the Iberian peninsula). Jews however, were allowed to stay as a separate group due to their connection to Christianity, although they were also often beset by ghastly pogroms due to their differences.

You see a similar phenomena in Islam, although Islam historically tended to be more tolerant of Christians than vice versa.

No other diaspora group has this same sort of deep link to major world religions.

I would have thought that, where a metaphysics leads you to count two cups where there is otherwise but one, that alone would be grounds for doubt.

There are actually n cups my friend, where n = the number of people experiencing, and thus representing the cup.

From this, we can must conclude that there are at least some 8 billion Moons, many more once you include the moths and other animals. This might be what is causing sea levels to rise. You get that many Moons in one place, and the pull of their combined gravity is sure to increase.

If there is some global measure of the average standard of living, I wonder if it is flattening off, soon to start declining - for the first time in history(?).

Quite the opposite. Global inequality has been going down the last decade or so, and at a decent clip. Standard of living and life expectancy might be declining in parts of the developed world, but incomes in the poorest parts of the world have grown significantly. Global access to the internet and literacy has also been booming, and it's hard to discount the benefits that can come from people having access to all that information (although you get risks too).

So it isn't all bad news. Also, wars in general tend to kill a far smaller percentage share of the populations involved than they used to because a collapse in the food supply and disease isn't likely to follow any more.

As to ‘what it is the is re-born’, the Mahāyāna Buddhists devised the doctrine of the alayavijnana (the storehouse consciousness) which is similar in some respects to Jung’s ‘collective unconscious’.

There is a bit of that in Patristic theologians too. The collective unconscious is somewhat like the Plotinian "world soul," where each individual psyche is part of the global Psyche that has access to the same "ideas" of Nous.

I think it's interesting that Jung came to think he was in contact somehow with an ancient Gnostic given the ways in which his modern theory coincides with a lot of quite ancient Platonist ideas.

For the early Augustine, one of the triumphs of the afterlife would be that we are no longer "cut off" from one another, in the position where I can't experience what you experience and vice versa (psyche alienated from itself). When perfected, we will no longer have misunderstandings because we will be united "in Christ." "Now we see through a mirror darkly, then face to face."

But I've always had the same problems with Plotinus, the platonizing Patristics, and Shankara: "can something be 'real illusion?'" It seems like either the illusion has some sort of ontic reality of it doesn't, and if it does have a sort of "true but lesser reality" then that needs to be explained how that works. Eriugena at least seems to answer this.

but was anathematised for his doctrine of ‘the pre-existence of souls’ which implied that souls were not created by God at the time of conception but existed for an indefinite period before conception.

Yeah, but long after his death and two "Origenist crises." It was really more a problem with where successors took his ideas. He fit in quite well with the ideas of his day (e.g. Cyril of Alexandria who got to stay a saint had similar ideas, and Plotinius himself was a contemporary in the same circles, albeit pagan.) He was tortured to death for his faith, but as an orthodox catholic martyr, not a heretic.

He's sort of like Pelagius, famous as a heretic, but mostly because of what other people did after him.

Funny enough, I've heard people say that Erasmus is pretty much an Origenist who just obscured his sources. Evagrius of Pontus, who gave us the "seven deadly sins," was also a thoroughgoing Origenist, so his legacy doesn't seem to have been too hurt by the judgement. We'd probably have more of his works if he'd not been condemned though.

IDF progress as of half a day ago; maps seem somewhat reliable in being tied to geolocated media. I would imagine that the IDF will be more active at night than during the day due to their advantage in night vision and drones with thermal imaging.

Both losses and resistance seem to have been quite low so far. No fatalities reported by the IDF, no Hamas imagery of losses. The IDF has released a small amount of footage showing ground forces engaging isolated resistance.

At least one hostage was rescued during a raid on Hamas tunnels.

I am sort of at a loss to explain this. The IDF appears to have already moved more than halfway to the sea and now has an orthogonal spearhead moving down the coast. I assumed Hamas' whole plan was to provoke an attack so that they could attack the IDF in Gaza, but they don't seem to be defending particularly vigorously. The original attack also would have made more sense if they had developed some sort of air defenses, but it doesn't seem that they have.

I suppose they might be waiting for the IDF to push into even denser urban areas. But what if the IDF doesn't and focuses on tunnel infrastructure alone? Then it just looks like they provoked an attack, then fled the field and left the people they supposedly lead and protect to fend for themselves. It certainly doesn't make them look good; who exactly were they doing this all for if they don't defend the Strip? I'm at a loss to explain it.

Granted, if even a fairly low percentage of all reported fatalities are Hamas members, then their relatively small armed forces have already taken pretty atrocious losses, so it might be that they are just in disarray. This would make even more sense if the leadership was killed.

The other thing I thought of was that Hamas was expecting more support for Iran. Prehaps this was headed off by US diplomatic overtures, which would explain the large force deployment to the region. Hamas has at least said something to the effect of "we thought Hezbollah would do more," although you can't really complain if you start a war without telling your ally your plans first and they aren't particularly hot on following you into the fight, especially if you pick a losing battle. Iran's denial of involvement in the attack was unequivocal as well.

This all might be a good thing in terms of civilian losses and the duration of the war. Depends on exactly what the IDF's goals are. I'm just surprised.

Is your goal here to see how well you understand transcendental idealism as generally presented or how well transcendental idealism holds up to scrutiny?

If the latter, I would have a few contentions.

1. There is experience, therefore something exists.
2. That something, or a part of it, must be producing experience.
3. The unified parts of that something which are producing it is the ‘I’.
4. The ‘I’ can only produce experience through (data) input (i.e., sensibility).
5. The production of experience via sensibility (and whatever may afterwards interpret such sensibility) entails that one’s experience is a representation.

1. Ok.
2. Why must something "produce" experience? Why can't experience just exist? It seems you are assuming causality here. But from whence cause and why invoke it here if you're "starting from nothing" ala the cogito?

What causes the thing that "produces experience" to exist and why should we find it more likely that "something that produces experience must exist" than simply that "experience exists?"

3. Seems to hinge on justifying #2.

4. This just seems to beg the question. I can see 1, but then we jump to "something must produce experience," and now to "it must produce that experience due to causes external to itself (inputs)."

5. Sure, if you assume something like: "data input ----> processing ----> output." But why not assume something more basic, like light passing through a window. Something like: "Experience exists. Experience flows, changes." - seems to require fewer presuppositions.

Personally, I think the attempt to build up a foundation for knowledge from something like 1 is just the wrong way to go about things. Epistemology seems to inevitably be circular and fallibilist to me. But, if you're going to do it that way, then it seems like presuppositions need to be limited (else it is just assuming what you set out to prove).

Thusly, science (and the like) are pragmatic for paradigmatic and not ontological purposes.

Why must we have "absolute certainty" when it comes to "ontological purposes?" History seems to show that we're bound to be wrong either way. Building up one's system from a "firm foundation," doesn't seem to make it any less likely to crumble. That being the case, it seems like the methods of science are good enough to inform ontological questions (where relevant obviously).

I recently started reading more about John Scottus Eriugena. For someone so well regarded among neoplatonist scholars, it is surprising how little "cred" he seems to have today. I've now seen a few different people describe him as the "apex" or "climax" or neoplatonism.

Anyhow, he makes a distinction between the "nothingness" of God and the nothingness of things without being (which, it turns out, is also God).

The "nothingness" of God is "nothingness through excellence” (nihil per excellentiam) or nihil per infinitatem (“nothingness on account of infinity"). This is "nothing" because nothing can be said of It; God transcends everything. Any positive statement is limiting and thus inappropriate. God is a true infinite, beyond all limitations, and thus the true "nothing" beyond any positive definiteness.

But then we also have the nothing of non-existence, “nothing through privation” (nihil per privationem). At first glance, it seems to me like you are dealing with the latter (privational nothingness) in the OP, but upon further consideration, it becomes hard to say.

Anyhow, Eriugena would say that this second nothing (through privation) is only defined by, and thus only has existence relative to things that do have existence. Thus, such nothing cannot exist "of itself." Rather, this "nothing through privation" emerges dialectically. It is, in fact, part of the larger infinite nothing, created being itself being a dialectical process of being and non-being.

Eriugena divides nature into four “species:"
1. That which creates and is not created (i.e., God - nothing);
2. That which creates and is created (i.e., Primary Causes or Ideas/Forms);
3. That which is created and does not create (i.e., Temporal Effects, created things);
4. That which is neither created nor creates (i.e., non-being, nothingness).

"The four divisions are not strictly a hierarchy in the usual Neoplatonic sense where there are higher and lower orders, rather, as Eriugena will explain, the first and fourth divisions both refer to God as the Beginning and End of all things, and the second and third divisions may also be thought to express the unity of the cause-effect relation. Finally, the division is an attempt to show that nature is a dialectical coming together of being and non-being. Creation is normally understood as coming into being from non-being. God as creator is then a kind of transcendent non-being above the being of creation. These themes are rigorously discussed and disentangled throughout the dialogue."

Fascinating stuff. Don't get how this guy flew below my radar so well, seems sort of like Hegel way ahead of his time. OFC, the opus is an 800-page dialogue, so who knows if I will ever get to it. It always shocks me though how dismissive my education was of medieval philosophy, but then how much of "groundbreaking" modern philosophy turns out just to be stuff that was already done, just with the overtly Christian content removed.

…the Creative nature permits nothing outside itself because outside it nothing can be, yet everything which it has created and creates it contains within itself, but in such a way that it itself is other, because it is superessential, than what it creates within itself..

It follows that we ought not to understand God and the creature as two things distinct from one another, but as one and the same. For both the creature, by subsisting, is in God; and God, by manifesting himself, in a marvelous and ineffable manner creates himself in the creature….

The problem here is the same as that for reincarnation: what is it that is reincarnated? What is it that revisits an earlier time? What could it mean to say that you experience what it is like to be Lincoln? It would be Lincoln experiencing what it is like to be Lincoln. It's not that any disembodied consciousness can experience any portion of any life, since there could be nothing to say that this was Art experiencing Lincoln and not Lincoln experiencing Lincoln.

If you returned to an earlier time, it would not be as an observer, but as that participant; nothing would or could be different.

This was also a big problem for medieval Islamic and Christian mystics, as they considered the extinguishment of the "self" in divine contemplational and mystical union with God. TBH, I think they resolve it fairly well, but it's unclear to me how their solution could apply to reincarnation.

Al-Ghazali's The Niche of Lights has some good parts on this. Describing his fellow mystics:

Plurality is totally banished from them, and they become immersed in sheer singularity. Their rational faculties become so satiated that in this state they are, as it were, stunned. No room remains in them for the remembrance of any other than God, nor the remembrance of themselves. Nothing is with them but God. They become intoxicated with such an intoxication that the ruling authority of their rational faculty is overthrown. Hence, one of them [al-Hallaj] says, “I am the Real!” another [Bistami], “Glory be to me, how great is my station!” and still another, “There is nothing in my robe but God!” [also attributed to
Bistami]

But Al-Ghazail says we have to measure any experience against reason:

When this intoxication subsides, the ruling authority of the rational faculty – which is God’s balance in His earth – is given back to them. They come to know that what they experienced was not the reality of unification but that it was similar to unification. It was like the words of the lover during a state of extreme passionate love: “I am He whom I love, and He whom I love is I!”

The analogy to the "unity in the way lovers are unified" became a preferred analogy in the Sufi tradition and the West (the West already had the Song of Songs to help justify this sort of union from Scripture).

In this view, any "union" is not truly "ontological." Otherwise, we would have the mystic going out of existence and then coming back into it. This is the "gappy existence problem." The problem of "who" is experiencing the mystical union, what your post gets at, is solved by positing that the self is never truly extinguished, it just appears that way phenomenologically.

But does this work for reincarnation? It seems more problematic because there isn't the "return to sobriety" afterwards. There were Christians who posited reincarnation, Origen of Alexanderia for example, but he came before the contributions of the Islamic scholars and I don't know if he deals with this.

Of course, it is unclear if even "victory" in a long war is in Russia's long-term interests. The longer the war goes on, the more permanent Europe's move away from Russian energy exports. Substitute infrastructure will be constructed, new supply chains set up. The war was obviously intended to be short. How exactly is Russia's security enhanced by gaining a bit more territory over 3-4 more years of conflict, and maybe another 200,000-300,000 losses? At this point, it seems like any realistic victory is set to be a pyrrhic one.

The same might be said of Ukrainian reconquest of a good deal of territory. But at least there, one could argue that another collapse in the front ala Kharkiv or Kherson might be enough to end the war. If the bridge to Crimea can be knocked out, the peninsula put under siege, and most land within the 2014 borders put under Ukraine's control, it does seem like it would be quite difficult to continue justifying the invasion.

But to satisfy your lazy quest for knowledge here's a journalist from Forbes literally using the words "at will".

"Only the Russian air force can deploy attack helicopters and fighter-bombers at will directly over the heaviest ground fighting."
— Forbes

This is literally an article about Russian helicopters being shot down by advancing UAF forces. It details how Ukraine has increased the air defense capabilities over brigades advancing into Russian-held territory.

The destruction of a large number of rotary wing craft over the past two weeks thanks to the US (finally) delivering long(er) range missiles has further reduced Russia's ability to use rotary wing craft. First, because obviously they can't use destroyed craft, and must repair damaged craft, but moreover because they now have to store them quite far out, near the limits of their operational range.

The claim that Russia can use their air force "at will" is patently ridiculous no matter who says it. Why would they be trying to knock out the power grid by lobbing air defense and anti-ship missiles at power plants, and firing off volleys over the Black Sea if they were actually free to just hit Ukrainian cities with their massive supply of cheap gravity bombs? It makes absolutely no sense.

Have Russian sorties been increasing as of late? They haven't. They have been using air assets less and less. They have sometimes thrown them into operations to help fill a gap (e.g., the rout in Kharkiv was plugged using air assets, although at the cost of several losses). They have been using more glide bombs, which is helping them, but they have been prioritizing longer range glide bombs precisely because they can't use the same strategies they were using in Syria due to losses. Moreover, their problem is more lack of trained pilots than airframes.

Russia retains a significant advantage in air power, but this is more of an aid to them on defense than offense, since they have been unable to carry out complex air operations for the entire war nor to carry out successful SEAD.

So why are they loosing more men and materiel every day? That doesn't sound like winning a war of attrition.

Right. Getting to a place where you have less armor and less artillery than your opponent, where things look to be ending up, is not a sign that you are winning a war of attrition.

I would certainly allow that Ukraine may not be able to break Russian defenses and take back additional large areas of territory, although this doesn't seem that unlikely. I would even allow that in the long term, looking out to 2026-2028, if the stars align right, Russia might be in a position to carry out significant offensive operations; but it's hard to see the current strategy as "paying off" in the short term.

AFAIK, the consensus is that immigration is generally a net positive on total economic output in the long term, and that the long-term overall displacement effect is small. But the displacement effect is there in the short term and it overwhelmingly affects people who are already in a precarious employment. Is that roughly how you would characterise it as well?

I don't see any sort of consensus. Considerations of all the "long term effects" of migration bleed into political science as well. You end up with questions about how migration affects electoral politics, questions about how short-term increases in inequality can produce a long-term trend towards even greater inequality due to positive feedback mechanisms, etc. Disentangling all of these is quite difficult.

Obviously, you can't just compare outcomes in the countries with the highest rates of immigration. 14% of high-income nation's populations are foreign born, just 1.4% of low-income countries. The lowest migration states tend to have a low quality of life, e.g., North Korea, Haiti, etc., but clearly this isn't because they have low immigration. Rather, no one moves there because they have very low quality of life, particularly for the regions they are in.

But we might compare differences between rich nations.

Low immigration states include: Japan (2.0%), Finland (6.9%), Republic of Korea (2.3%), Lithuania (4.2%), the Czech Republic (4.8%), Poland (1.8%), Slovakia (3.4%), or Hungary (5.4%), Chile (4%) vesus

Ireland (17.1%), Sweden (20%), Germany (15.7%), USA (15.4%), France (14.1%), UK (14.1%)

But the problem here is that a lot of small, high immigration level states are actually quite selective about who is allowed to immigrate, so the rates alone don't necessarily answer our question. What stands out to me is this: immigration rates don't seem to have had a particularly big effect on growth, standard of living, or political stability one way or the other. You have Hungary, with low immigration but unsteady politics. You have Eastern European states with lower migration and better growth trajectories than the West, but this seems to partly to be catch-up growth, them gaining ground lost during Russia's occupation of half the continent. Japan and ROK face pressures from population declines, so they have some problems that are more acute, but they also seem to have avoided some problems by having less migration.

The only thing that stands out to me is that lower migration states tend to be a bit more equal vis-a-vis income inequality, but the effect is small and there are outliers on each side. Iceland is very equal but high migration. Japan isn't particularly equal but has low migration.

But that said, I don't think we know what the long-term ramifications are yet. On America's current trajectory, per Pew, about 1:4 Americans will be foreign born by 2050 and 1:2 will be foreign born or have at least one foreign born parent. The arguments over immigration are hard because the process is cumulative and societies are complex. There might be tipping points in the systems. I personally think the issues will tend to become more acute as:

1. Native populations age and more resources go towards retirement benefits.
2. Immigrant populations (first + second gen) come to make up more like 25-50+% of populations, what many wealthy nations will see in the second half of the century.

This sets up a fight over resources that splits by age, but then age also has come to track closely with ethnicity. It seems possible that tipping points exist. The last time nativism had so much reach in the US was the last time migration was a high as it is now.

The flip side is demand for emigration. That might go down across most of the world, but will surge in SSA, since their population is set to boom through 2100, surpassing Asia's population.

The whole idea of "illegal colonization" by groups of refugees is itself problematic. Jewish settlement was initially encouraged by the Ottomans. Later waves of Ashkenazim were the result of their being the victims of ethnic cleansing and genocide. The Mizrahim population of Israel moved there largely due to being expelled from the surrounding countries. We might ask, were the Huns colonizers? The Magyars? Are Muslims necessarily colonizers in India or Europe? Were the Mongols colonizers or simply conquerors?

It seems to me that "colonization" losses its meaning if stretched too far. There is a difference between migration, conquest, and colonization.

And how far can we go back with claims of "illegality?" Are the descendants of Europeans and Africans justified in living in the Americas? If not, how can we condemn the Serbs from trying to ethnically cleanse the Muslims who arrived in the Balkans due to contemporaneous Ottoman expansion into the area?

My problem with "colonizer/colonized" rhetoric is that it is often used in extremely reductive ways that don't take account of the particular history of any given context. At its worst, it seems to reduce to essentially a skin tone hierarchy, completely blind to any historical nuance.

I personally don't even think it's fair or legitimate for the US to expel illegal immigrants who moved into the country b]decades[/b] ago, so I find it hard to think of how I could be consistent in declaring that Jews in Palestine who have largely been there for at least a generation are somehow "illegal," simply by virtue of a "lack of proper history." Israel has done many reprehensible things, and it's those things they should be held to account for. But the issue can't be that the Jews there, writ-large, are "illegal" through their very presence. This sort of reductive thinking is fodder for the Israeli right and simply helps justify their abhorrent acts.

For a more straightforward example of this hypocrisy, one might consider outrage over "gentrification." There are, of course, very legitimate concerns over rising costs of living, rents, etc. However, sometimes arguments against gentrification are explicitly framed in terms of "cultural displacement," i.e. the idea that the dominant ethnic group in a neighborhood somehow gains a right to exclude other groups.

E.g., groups in LA have protested against new White and Asian arrivals from the Pacific Northwest, arguing that they needed to be somehow limited from certain neighborhoods because they were "colonizing" them by displacing the "Hispanic nature of the neighborhood."

This just seems completely unsupportable. First, in this context, the neighborhoods in questions themselves became Hispanic over the past generation or so, due to migration trends, the same phenomena in question. Second, you can't move to the United States and then complain about people from other states moving into your neighborhood, particularly on cultural grounds. That's the way the country works.

I certainly can see why people get upset about cultural displacement. Obviously, it can be saddening to see the culture of a neighborhood completely replaced over the course of 5-15 years. However, I don't see how one makes an argument that positive action to stop it is acceptable in some contexts but not others. It seems like the sort of thing people should learn to accept, to get over, rather than a phenomenon we attempt to stop. On a similar note, I can also understand why people get sad about churches closing, but that doesn't mean we have a right to force others to attend and donate to them.

You also see the same sort of hypocrisy in the argument that people from throughout Latin America somehow have a "greater right" to live within the borders of the US because they are descended from the native peoples of their home countries. I find this ridiculous. It would be like claiming that a Russian or a Romanian has a greater right to emigrate to the UK than an Algerian because they are "more European."

Even leaving aside the essentialism here, the peoples of Ecuador or Columbia don't have any close historical relation to the peoples of lands literally thousands of miles away. Parts of Latin America are even geographically further away from some parts of the United States than Europe or North Africa, and, historically, there is more documented contact between the northeast of Canada/the US and Europe/Africa than between the native peoples of that region and South America.

Thus, the idea seems to spring from a very essentialist conception of who are "colonizers" and who cannot be such. Also a conception of the "right to live in X place" grounded in little more apparently than skin tone.





This is made worse by claims in liberal media spaces (e.g., John Oliver's "Last Week Tonight") that economists essentially agree that immigration has net positive impacts for all of society, providing benefits without significant costs. This is simply not the real consensus in the field.

So, to 's point, there are sort of two things at work here. First, there is justified disapproval of nativist, racist sentiment. Second, there is the idea that it is "obvious" that immigration makes the host country better off. Given the second point, it becomes equally obvious that any opposition to immigration can only be motivated racism. After all, when the evidence in favor of immigration is so potent, what else could it be?

Of course, not all "leftists" conflate opposition to immigration with racism, but it certainly does seem to happen.

The problem is that it isn't at all clear that immigration benefits all developed host countries, nor that the benefits and costs of immigration are evenly distributed. Moreover, the case in favor of immigration is often made in fairly disingenuous ways by advocates.

What you'll normally see in the US context is the case that immigration is good for the federal budget and GDP growth. This is pretty much a consensus opinion. First, immigration simply boosts economic growth for the simple fact that a larger country will tend to have a larger economy. It is totally unclear if immigration tends to boost per capita GDP though, and there are clear example where waves of immigration have actually tanked per capita GDP.

Main point: fiscal health is not equivalent with social welfare, and the federal budget is not equivalent with "all government budgets."

The reason immigration helps the US federal budget is because most of the budget goes to entitlements for senior citizens and defense spending. Immigrants tend to be younger, and so, in the short to medium term, they pay in taxes to the entitlement system while not drawing benefits. However, in the long term, immigrants from the developing world actually hurt the budget outlook, because they tend to be lower earners and thus pay in comparatively less in taxes than the average American, while still being eligible for the same benefits in the future. In general, the more generous a state's welfare system, the less advantageous it is to the budget to have low-earning migrants move to the country.

The disingenuous part comes when liberals advocate in favor of illegal immigration by pointing out that most illegal immigrants pay into these entitlement programs but will not be eligible for them. Thus, they are a "net benefit," for the system. This is disingenuous because liberals generally agree that if these people pay into the system, they should get the benefits. It is not generally a liberal position that states benefit from having a large group of "second class citizens" who lack voting rights and access to basic welfare programs. Indeed, the liberal position is generally that these people should simply be legal immigrants.

The other sort of disingenuous claim is that immigrants "use less welfare than natives." This is true, if one controls for income, but when the context is: "is migration a net strain on the welfare state?" then the question is better framed in absolute terms. And here, it is true that low-income immigrants use significantly more assistance than the average citizen. This should shock no one; means tested benefits go to those with less means, that is how they are designed.

Re defense budgets: Defending the US takes the same amount of money if it has 300 million versus 330 million people. The added population doesn't really affect this part of the Federal budget, while it does contribute new tax revenues.

However, things shift dramatically at the state and local level. English language learners (ELL) are significantly more costly to educate. Special education students are even more costly to educate (maybe 2-3 times as much). Migrant families have a far higher share of students on IEPs (special education), and it is widely acknowledged that no state properly funds these programs. Additionally, the concentration of low income, ELL, and SPED students in a district seems to demonstrate profound congestion effects, such that these students impose costs on one another when concentrated within a district. In this way, migration can have profound effects on local services, especially once one takes into account what poor school system performance tends to do to real estate values, and thus local tax levies.

Of course, there are lots of ways US school funding should be fixed to deal with this issue. However, the point is simply that immigration can have profound negative effects of services locally under the current system.

In the US, there is also no effort to try to move new migrants into areas that have shrinking populations, where housing is cheap and labor in demand. Thus, all the congestion problems end up being compounded by the fact that migration is focused into expensive cities, and also focused into areas in the Southwest where water scarcity is an increasing issue.

The other issue is the way immigration affects inequality. Having a large number of migrants who tend to earn lower wages and who enter the country with very low networth necessarily increases inequality, at least in the short term.

In general, it is the wealthy who benefit the most from migration. The wealthy are insulated from congestion effects and the degradation of local services because they tend to live in places with high rents/home prices, which represent a barrier to migrants. The wealthy tend to own real estate, and so see their assets appreciate due to the increased demand for housing that comes with population growth. The wealthy also tend to purchase more labor, meaning they benefit the most from the increase in the labor supply and decrease in wages.

Meanwhile, it is poor natives who stand to see their rents increase and their wages decrease due to migration's effect on demand for housing and the supply of labor. Plus, there is further a negative relationship between the ability of workers to unionize and migration. Both factory owners of the Gilded Age and Amazon have produced memos on the benefits of a highly diverse workforce-- that this diversity acts as a check on unionization efforts.

The oppression of religious and ethnic minorities across MENA and Central Asia is very much a mixed bag and also shifts based on the politics and alliance needs of the day. It's a bit like Reformation Europe, where Catholics and Lutherans would fight these incredibly bitter contests, but then agree to beat up on the Anabaptists it Calvinists together.

Or perhaps it's even more like how, through Luther's day, Pope Leo X was urging the European monarchs to put aside their differences to beat back the Turks, who were rampaging through the Balkans and smashing their heads against the bulwark of Austria, and yet during the following inter-Christian religious wars, alliance with the Ottomans was not out of the question. Same deal with the Fourth Crusade turning on Constantinople, the supposed beneficiary of the early eastern Crusades.

And the fraught political-religious situation across those regions doesn't look to be getting especially better.

Of course, every time a commentator says something like "well Islam in the region just needs something like the Reformation," I sort of slap my head because that time was not one of some sort of nice transition towards tolerance. It was full of wars that killed a significantly higher proportion of their nation's populations than both World Wars combined, and the wars raged for centuries.

I'm going to agree with everyone that context is too important to give an answer here. We'd have to consider things like: "what are the goals of the groups involve?" "What are their motivations?" And quite importantly "what are the probable results of their actions and do they actually further their goals?" The last is important because it is often the case that a group might be justified in using violence in some form, yet nonetheless use violence in such a way that their own cause is actually hurt.

Now, if your cause is important enough to shed blood for, then it's morally wrong to torpedo it out of blood lust. The desire for vengeance itself can't be the justification.

No, I'm suggesting the broader point that attempting to treat of human freedom in physical terms at all is problematic. Physics simply doesn't provide the resources to decide if you will put sugar in your coffee, or not. For that sort of thing we need a different conversation, one about what what you want and want you believe.

But surely physics has something to say about freedom, no? It clearly defines many things we aren't able to do. At the same time, a better understanding of physics has greatly expanded our ability to do things. One was not free to cross continents in a day until airliners were invented, etc.

Deterministic vs stochastic maybe doesn't make a huge difference. The point is that behaviors produce outcomes that are "predictable enough," that our desires can be reliably met through taking or avoiding specific actions.

But I agree with what I think you're saying. That's why I say "self-determination," isn't identical with freedom. Freedom is a quite complex idea, and I think human freedom lends itself to a fairly complex typology (negative freedom, reflexive/positive freedom, authenticity, social freedom, and moral freedom).

So, what I should have specified better in the OP is that I was thinking about plausible ways of understanding freedom "within the context of major paradigms in the philosophy of physics," as opposed to freedom overall.

One point I was thinking of was that, because the boundaries of systems are hazy and arbitrary, individuals' identification with larger entities of which they are a part can, in some ways, empower individuals.

Complexity studies is an interesting tie in because it shows how relatively small "sub-systems," can sit astride "leverage points," in larger systems and do a lot to dictate their behavior. The absolute monarch with strong authority and loyalty from their court is a good personal example of this, but we could also consider the freedom members of central bank board members have to shape their economies.

The point of the drive was take the railhead at Tocomak and cut off forces on the river in Russian held Kherson to withdraw. It's aim was cutting ground lines of communications, the exact thing it did to force a Russian withdrawal from the rest of Kherson and Kharkiv.

The other objective is obviously to get the bridge to Crimea in MLRS range so it can be destroyed. A follow on goal would be to drive to Melitopol and encircle Russian forced in Kherson if they had yet to withdraw.

Russia is aiming at a far smaller operation here, nothing that can really be said to be of strategic value, unless one considers that getting the "legally defined boundaries of the Donbass," within their control might make suing for some sort of peace more palatable domestically.

Not really. Shias get on with Sunnis fine in some contexts. It's generally been the Sunni majority that has spawned ideologies that are extremely hostile to the other side (e.g., "they are heretics that must be completely removed.")

There is definitely bad blood on the Iranian side, but there is nothing that necessitates that they be opposed to everyone across the sectarian rift. Iran sponsored Hezbollah, who fought beside the PLO during the War of the Camps in Lebanon, against rival Shias from Amal (backed by Syria). But of course, now Iran is an ally of Syria and an enemy of the PLO.

So yes, it is largely about strategy, but there is some real zeal there too. Iran, as the vanguard of revolutionary Islam, has this sort of "sacred role" in advancing the cause that will help the faith retake Jerusalem. It's just that they go after this aim in quite self-serving ways, sort of like the United States re being a vanguard of "liberalism and democracy." Sure, people really believe it and are motivated by the ideal vision, but the shape it takes can be extremely cynical, so much so that it actively undermines the idealistic aim.

Politically, peace in Palestine is not particularly in Iran's interest. It removes the biggest issue they are popular on in the region and removes their main cat's paw for breaking up the tacit Gulf-Israel alliance and hitting Israel. If Palestine became a "Jordan," of sorts, Iran would lose out.

I'm not sure I follow. What about making change (process), as opposed to stability (substance), essential makes explanations intentional? It seems to help with moving from an "is to an ought," because of the possibility of strong emergence, but it doesn't seem to necessitate it.

And is this a problem? Ought explanations do seem essential to a subset of phenomena, so how the ought is to be accounted for seems essential.

If the mind isn't made of some sort of unique "mental substance," it seems to me like it has to be a process. This, as opposed to a discrete object, because of how dead bodies don't produce conciousness and most environments produce dead bodies instead of live ones .

I'm not sure what a solution would look like. Perhaps the Arab states can help by offering funding as a "carrot" for peace, but they don't exactly have the best credibility as negotiators for the most part.



Yes, they are an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. Iran began supporting them because they wanted to support parties attempting to spoil the 1990s peace process. A deal isn't good for Iran because Israel is a good wedge issue for Iran that helps keep the Gulf-US relation on the rocks and helps them with public support "on the Arab street."

It's an alliance of convenience in many ways, but it's old enough to be well cemented. The relation is in some ways akin to medieval vassalage.

Musings: It's clear Hamas' attack was barbaric and should be condemned. However, what level of oppression and colonisation are the Palestinians to accept until armed resistance becomes justified? I think we can agree that at some point violence to gain independence is justified. Historic examples include slave revolts.

Absolutely. To my mind what makes the Hamas attack unjustifiable has nothing to do with violence being used. Violent resistance can be justified in this situation. It is rather the way in which the attack fits in to over all Hamas strategy and their relationship with the people they claim to be advocates of that makes it unjustifiable.

What could Hamas possibly have expected from this situation but that Israel would respond, taking advantage of its many military advantages, bringing death and misery to Hamas' subjects, destroying Hamas' supplies of weapons, and killing their fairly limited numbers of trained fighters? In what way might this help with furthering Palestinian aims? It seems the attack has given Israel a freer hand to persecute the people of Gaza than they have had in decades vis-á-vis international opinion and internal opinion. That Likud is actually being blamed for the disaster does play to Hamas' aims, but this seems like one of the hardest responses to the attack to predict beforehand.

So it isn't the attack, but how the attack was done:

-Planned in secret with no feedback from the people Hamas claims to represent

-A brutal style of attack as one can imagine, including intentional killing of children, rapes, etc. followed immediately by retreat as soon as the military response they were baiting out arrived— retreat into their own urban areas with the obvious goal being both to hide behind the civilian infrastructure and to have that infrastructure targeted in the hopes that the reprisals would stoke local, regional, and international opinion in their favor.

Can such hiding be justified? Prehaps, but only if it's tied to a plan with decent odds of success.

This last move is reprehensible for two reasons:

A. It's claiming to represent a group you rule over by force, with torture and repression; starting a war "on their behalf;" then, immediately on contact, you flee to your well supplied tunnels while the people you claim to be "fighting for," suffer. You make absolutely no realistic efforts to stop violence against "your people." There are no sorties out to stop strikes, there was clearly no air defense system put into place first. They are completely ignoring any duty to defend their own people, leaving them prostrate before the enemy, putting all faith in the enemies' self control and mercy since they simply will not defend the people they claim to represent. It's "too high risk," to defend the people. But if it is "too high risk" for you to defend your people in any meaningful way, one might consider that it's not a good time to provoke the enemy with the most outrageous attacks possible.

I am well aware of the power imbalance that Hamas now faces. But IMO, this itself heavily militates against such attacks in the first place. It suggest using other means. They should use other means if the other choice is "attack in as provocative a way as possible, then turn and hide behind our civilians and count on Israeli restraint to save them." And, to the extent Hamas has tried to prevent people from evacuating within Gaza, which is opaque right now, this is downright criminal, akin to Stalin's moves to force civilians to stay in combat zones.

You can't attack and then immediately hides, making no realistic efforts to defend your people and then claim you are justified by the need to defend them. The same attack would be more justified if they had built some sort of air defense system they thought might work, but they clearly didn't, the game plan was always to pull back into urbanized positions, to enjoy safe tunnels and stockpiled supplies while the population "suffered for the cause."

2. Given their current diplomatic and military situation, such an attack was completely unlikely to work in their favor. While violent resistance might be justified, that doesn't mean it's always the most advisable course of action.

Israel seems like an opponent that would be particularly vulnerable to well organized non-violent resistance, which has been historically better at forcing concessions world-wide anyhow. As the hopes of military victory become less and less reasonable, it seems incumbent on the leadership to begin changing their tactics.

That their tactics don't change, despite decades of failure, I would guess has to do with the fact that foreign support is more important to their control and impunity than popular local support. That the leadership is insulated from any of the privations of the average Gazan probably doesn't help.

It's beneficial for the Arab states; it's not beneficial to Iran. Likewise, any such move would likely be beneficial to Fatah, and, if it worked out, Palestinians writ large, but it would not be beneficial to Hamas. Right now the rule over a poor area, but they rule with impunity.

That's part of the problem. Hamas' funding and ability to keep control over the Strip isn't really conditioned on popular support or "getting results," but on continued financial and military assistance from Iran.

This is why Hamas is so beneficial to Likud. Hamas doesn't necessarily face incentives to do "the best thing possible for independence and economic development," quite the contrary in some sense. Their incentives shape their intransigence and their intransigence had (until now) been a boon to Likud.

Science necessarily entails elements of subjectivity. After all, it's about what we (subjects) think is going on in the world.

Correct/incorrect itself also seems to presuppose some sort of purpose. What is correct/incorrect "of itself?"

To be sure, you have examples of questions that cannot be answered due to problems of self-reference, but that seems like a subset of bad questions. Same with the examples of "begging the question." It seems to me that questions are bad or incorrect as regards the purposes for asking them.

It seems to me like you can definitely ask bad questions. This gets at problems in the sciences re paradigms and theory ladeness.

Your questions about phenomena are informed by your theories. You examine your data, empirical findings, in light of the existing paradigm.

The most common distinction between pleasure and happiness I am aware of is something along the lines of Aristotle's definition of eudaimonia (generally translated as "happiness" or "flourishing") vs pleasure. Aristotle's explanation ends up covering purpose too as well.

In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle argues that pleasure, honor, and virtue arenot equivalent to happiness. Rather, these three are subordinate means of achieving happiness, in the same way that “bridle making… [is] subordinate to horsemanship.” They are “lower ends… pursued for the sake of the higher,” i.e., happiness.

Aristotle calls the life spent pursuing pleasure “completely slavish… a life for grazing animals.” Pleasure is a “good of the body,” (sensuous experience alone) while eduaimonia is a “good of the soul.” For Aristotle, this makes eudaimonia unique to man, since it requires reason.

Pleasure is temporary, while eudaimonia must be measured across a lifetime. A man whose life goal is to build some sort of lasting peace settlement or to provide for his family will be "unhappy" if these efforts fall into ruin after his death. While “a truly good… person… will bear the strokes of fortune suitably,” a hedonist will fall into misery if their fortunes change. Thus, eudaimonia is a stable form of happiness that is not easily disrupted by circumstance.

For Aristotle, happiness is “activity of the soul in accord with virtue.” It is the development of what is unique to man: reason. Excellence in reason allows man to make good choices and turn his desires towards good aims. Virtue is a “necessary condition for happiness,” while honor and pleasure may be “cooperative instruments” that aid happiness, but they are not happiness itself. Wepraise honor and justice, which bring happiness about, but instead celebrate happiness, as it is the greatest good we hope to achieve.

Saint Augustine develops this point in Aristotle. Augustine makes a distinction between "things desired for the sake of something else" (e.g., wealth to buy things) and "things desired for their own sake," (e.g. mystical union with God). For Augustine, the things we should focus on having are the things we cannot lose or fail to possess, the incorporeal, eternal things of God (wisdom, etc.). These are what we desire for their own sake. Since these cannot be seized from us (at least not in a straightforward way) they are a more stable source of happiness. And, for Augustine, they are more stable sources precisely because they are closer to man's telos/purpose, the contemplation of the divine. "You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you."

(Aristotle has a second definition of "happiness" he throws out later, which specifies the "contemplative life," as that which will produce the greatest happiness as well, although his first definition is more popular. So, he also ends up close to Augustine in some readings.

For a more modern version of this sort of "stable, self-developed" view of happiness, consider Maslow's "self-actualization," Jung's "individuation," or Hegel's "bildung."

However, we shouldn't be tricked into thinking that this means happiness lies in "being good," for Aristotle. Per Aristotle, one may be virtuous, yet still “suffer the worst evils and misfortunes.”

Augustine agrees with this when "being good" simply means "acting morally." However, for Augustine, while we can experience pain and suffer due to circumstantial misfortune, the deeper satisfaction we get from having a deep sense of purpose and union with the divine outweighs these misfortunes. To be sure, it would be better to have pleasurable surroundings and this sort of enlightenment/divine union, but this isn't always possible. And indeed, it might require suffering to bring us to the higher form of happiness, to turn our eyes from the pleasures of the senses. Saint John of the Cross gets at this idea, the need for a "purgation of the senses," quite well in his The Dark Night of the Soul.

Now, as to a "meaning of life," consider the proposition that "an effect is a sign of its cause" (Bonaventure, Aquinas). Our life's meaning then becomes dependent upon the determining source of our life. This helps make an argument for freedom as a chief goal in finding meaning in life. For we are free to the extent we are self-determining (not mere effect), and so our life has meaning (as opposed to being merely a sign of something else) to the extent we develop our freedom.

This sort of definition of life's meaning in terms of human freedom is no problem for the scholastics religious sentiments, in that our freedom is "in God," for them. God liberates us from being mere effects, from being driven by instinct, desire, and circumstance (Romans 7). In union with the divine, we are instead determined by Logos and through self-transcending Spirit.

Generally in philosophy of physics the universe is "everything that exists that causally impacts our world." The idea of "multiple universes" is that other universes might exist (we have some reason to think they might), but they are causally isolated from our own.

The idea of multiple universes is sometimes attacked for being "unfalsifiable," for this reason.

Oh yeah, it's tactically useful, for sure. I just question the rationale for expending the massive amount of resources that have already been lost there given the apparent odds of success. It would be the equivalent of the AFU launching another NATO style maneuver offensive directly into Russian defenses (and on a significantly larger scale), with the goal apparently being to secure an arbitrary political border for x date .

Particularly the use of penal assault brigades given how wonderfully that went last time. :roll:

In this case, I meant "universe," in the sense the term is generally used in the philosophy of physics and physics itself. I should have made that clear.

The continued use of penal battalions for offensive operations seems like it could be a harbinger. Once you normalize forcing men into attacks sure to incur high losses, with little hope of gain, how long before you run out of prisoners and start doing that with the conscripts? At an estimated 290,000 losses to date, Russia is going to reach the point soon where, if it wants to continue offensives, it's going to need to force the mobiks to do it.

Also an interesting choice given the last "frontal assaults until we grind down our manpower," style offensive ended in a coup and the government having to flee Moscow.

Bright side for them, it seems possible from reports that they may have gained a foot hold on the trash heap they're fighting over (seriously).

You mean the formalism, or the entire concept of information as difference/asymmetry (being thus something that is relational and not reducible via straight forward superveniance relations)?

In what way is it it more "anthropomorphic," then something like the inverse square law, Maxwell's equations, etc.?

because I work from an unshakable conclusion that ALL reasoning consists entirely of thought and belief and all thought and belief is existentially dependent upon conscious experience. That could be put a bit stronger:All conscious experience is thought and/or belief.

I was thinking of this. Hegel doesn't deny time or the fact that we aren't actually starting from nothing.



Gotcha. Given the illustrative examples, I assumed "elemental" was something like Empedoclean elements, but per , I appear to be mistaken.

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On the original topic, just spitballing, say we have two countries that declare war on one another after a diplomatic fallout. Maybe one king stole another's wife, ala the Iliad. The troops and ships are mobilizing but no one has started fighting yet. So the war exists, but not the fighting. Is this a war that does not "consist of" fighting?

But of course, war writ large goes back to earlier species, and it seems individuals fighting is exactly what war "consists of," in the universal sense.

Which makes me ask, is this for only the universal case, or the particulars as well? You can't have an individual apple pie without first having apples, but it seems possible to have war prior to fighting. Maybe this says something about the essence of war.

Gaza, who knows. Yet remember that Israel has basically twice tried to take care of Lebanon by launching an war against it. Twice it has had to retreat from Lebanon and then the rockets have flown again from there.

And what is dismantling Hamas? Great, you can declare that every Hamas leader is either dead or in captivity! And how much time when the next generation of Hamas comes into existence? A decade? So you'll have a few years before it's time "to mow the lawn again". How great is that idea of perpetual war?

I meant that "if an alliance of Egypt and the Gulf State joined the war on behalf of "the Palestinians," they would end up occupying Gaza as part of their offensive operations. And if they did that, they would almost certainly get rid of Hamas too, since they are enemies. I don't know if they would have the same "mowing the lawn" issues.

Likewise, if some sort of Arab expeditionary force attacked from the north, using Lebanon as a staging, ground, maybe coming down through Turkey maybe, crushing Hezbollah would likely be on their agenda as well eventually.

I mean, the whole idea is farcical in the first place. My point was simply that the whole "we'll provoke Israel so that they kill so many civilians that the whole Arab world joins the fight," is fanciful. It's fanciful because it's incredibly unlikely, but it's also fanciful for Hamas and Hezbollah to engage in because, as Iranian clients, they are ostensibly enemies of the very people that would be coming to "join the fray." The entire "everyone unites to take out Israel" delusion requires that everyone uniting magically puts down some extremely deep grudges.

Now, given what happened during the civil wars in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, the genocidal sectarian struggles there, this seems like pure delusion. That's what I mean by "insane millenarianism." And even if it worked and Israel was destroyed, it seems almost certain, in the current context, that "allies" wouldn't want to just hand over the land, nor that the Fatah - Hamas war wouldn't kick off again.

That might sound reasonable in theory, but in practice it never works out that way, and because Israel is seen as the occupying force it will receive most if not all of the resentment resulting of it.

Never? You might consider how the PA lost its grip on Gaza and was able to be forced out in a violent coup. Hamas was able to gain power and influence, in large part because Fatah was seen as weak, ineffective against Israel, and unable to provide improvements in quality of life.

The claim that an insurgent group can never lose enough traction due to bad performance to be replaced is falsified by Hamas' rise itself. Consider also Hezbollah vs. Amal in the context of an ongoing struggle with other groups within Lebanon, or the way the SDF is hemorrhaging Arab members due to its use of repression.

[quoteIn reality, bombing campaigns and collective punishments have never worked. They have always strengthened the insurgency, while simultaneously inflicting immense suffering on civilian populations.[/quote]

This simply isn't the case. The majority of insurgencies fail (84% in a dataset from 1900 containing 303 insurgencies). Guerillas/irregular forces are the sort least likely to win their conflicts (in comparison to conventional warfare of symmetrical non-conventional conflicts).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/40863761

E.g., FARC never took over Columbia. The various insurgencies in Egypt never succeeded in winning a victory over the government; this was only achieved (briefly) via non-military resistance. Syria crushed an earlier insurgency, prior to 2011. China has crushed insurgencies in East Turkistan, Tibet, etc. Stalin crushed post-WWII insurgencies. The Tamil Tigers were defeated despite the obvious zeal displayed in their frequent use of suicide attacks. The Shining Path is much reduced and clearly did not achieve a "victory," and the same is true of the Naxalites. The insurgency in Chechnya was also defeated, etc.

The illusion that insurgencies tend to be successful comes from two sources:

- First, the fact that these are the wars the West has been most likely to be engaged in since the end of the Second World War due to their lack of conventional peers. This is a cultural bias. Decolonization is wrapped into this, a larger historical phenomenon. Further, there is a strong selection bias at work here in that Western ground forces have generally only been used in conflicts were the state being supported is clearly out matched. No one much recalls support for states that just involves arms transfers.

Second, that insurgencies tend to last longer than any other type of war also helps sustain this illusion. Conventional wars tend to have the shortest duration, followed by SNC (neither side fielding significant amounts of armor, airpower, heavy artillery, e.g., Liberia, Sierra Leone, CAR, DRC, etc.). But it's a mistake to conflate staying power with victory. If anything, the fact that insurgencies tend to last so long is symptom of their inability to successfully win military contests.

Neither is it the case that insurgents that attack civilian targets in terror attacks (as opposed to military/police targets or property) are more likely to succeed. Every context is different, but writ large it seems to hurt insurgents' causes if anything.

https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monographs/2010/RAND_MG965.sum.pdf

On a side note, it is also not the case the violent resistance is more likely to attain a total victory in removing a regime or achieving lesser concession than non-violent resistance, quite the opposite. And non-violent resistance has the added benefit of making future conflict less likely. Ghandhi wrote at length about the importance of "how you win" for the future. Unfortunately, a lot of people didn't listen and we had the disaster of the Partition, multiple wars since, and the sides aiming nuclear weapons at each other. Not that all the tensions can be tracked back to the Partition period, but a good deal can be.

https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/the-future-of-nonviolent-resistance-2/

Of course, every situation is different and there are different ways to run the numbers, but these are fairly robust trends (particularly the fact that insurgents tend to lose). This is not to say Hamas isn't justified in violent resistance of some sort. However, if your cause is important enough to kill for, then its important enough not to do things that make it less likely to succeed, and this is where I think this attack has been a catastrophic blunder.

In reality, bombing campaigns and collective punishments have never worked. They have always strengthened the insurgency, while simultaneously inflicting immense suffering on civilian populations.

This is not the case, although I think it holds true in this context. Stalin's massive use of force and absolutely massive scale internal deportations crushed resistance effectively. You can see large scale use of force defeating revolts going all the way back to the Roman destruction of the Second Temple and mass deportation of the Jews out of Judea.

I've known plenty of Muslims who drink lol. But even without that, you can blame hashish and captagon, which Hamas sort of corners the market on in the Strip anyhow.


Maybe. But carrying ops out in total secrecy that result in massive collective suffering while failing to accomplish any real goal outside of that very suffering? And then preplanning so that you're sitting cozy on supplies while others go without? That could spark backlash.

For example, the Siege of Leningrad certainly made the residents hate the Germans, but it also sparked significant hatred of the party. One, for the incompetent defense and political moves that made the siege a reality. Then, for the way the party elite didn't starve and used their control of resources to oppress. And also for the total lack of concern the government seemed to show in people, blocking evacuations, etc. (something Hamas seems to be engaging in to some degree). Survivors have some tales of pretty profound hatred for their own leadership in bringing the situation about at least.

And of course, the Red Army had to rely heavily on coercion, summary executions. and "blocking detachments," throughout the war, precisely because of this sort of thing.

The KMT's inability to effectively resist the Japanese, and how that played into the hands of the CCP is a similar example. Hatred of the Japanese did not equate to love of the KMT, which was blamed for both failures and their own actions of brutality.

Edit: Just as an indicator, Hamas was against an evacuation of the north, and allegedly put efforts into stopping evacuees, but 700,000-800,000 appear to have left despite their calls. Were the border with Egypt open, it doesn't not seem like the call by Hamas for everyone to stay in place would be particularly well heeded. And who can blame them. Passing out weapons is one thing. Asking you to keep your family in a combat zone to be used as a shield?

Certainly not positive about it, but there has been movement on the hostage negotiation front, the US is calling for a delay, and there have been some Israeli press releases that seems to presage a further delay.



The IDFs problem is that a siege is by far and away the safest way to destroy Hamas but also a gross violation of human rights. Realistically, they can't choke Hamas off from food, electricity, etc. without doing it to everyone. If they were alone in a fort or something, the obvious move would be to just sit and wait until they surrender.

I don't think there is a way for them to "thread the needle," here. They're going to have to let a large amount of supplies through and this will mean that Hamas is supplied. There isn't a real way to constrict their access without constricting everyone elses too, especially since they are armed and organized and can make sure they get supplies first.

Gaza ground offensive seems unlikely this week, perhaps longer.

Fire across the Lebanese and Syrian border ramped up, with 27 Hezbollah members and 7 members of Islamic Jihad and Hamas killed, as well as 6 or 7 (conflicting reports) members of the IDF.

The Islamic State and Al Qaeda called for global attacks on Jews, but what else is new? Contra to their position here, Jihadis seem to be taking advantage of the distraction this generates for Syria and Iran to carry out their own offensives. But of course, Assad is "just as evil." I recall the (dubious, to say the least) IS propaganda videos claiming SAA forces forced prisoners to chant "there is no God but Assad," and defile Korans.

IS stands to gain from new Turkish operations in Syria, while the SDF will be hindred in their fight against IS by them. The SDF itself has been implicated in gross use of force violations, mass arrests, disappearances, and killings, in their offensive operations against Arab tribes in Deir ez Zor.

Lebanon's economy is in shambles, the power and water grid failing, Beirut still a mess after the 2 kiloton explosion that rocked it. And yet Hezbollah's harassing attacks promise to bring more strikes down, and obviously this is not particularly pleasing for Hezbollah's many enemies. Lebanon is an economic basket case, and this has caused the scars of its 1975-1990 civil war to begin reopening.

Iran continues to have problems with domestic unrest in its Persian community, and faces an even larger threat from growing resistance from their very large minority population, particularly the Kurds and Azeris. Meanwhile, what Azerbaijan plans military vis-á-vis Armenia still seems to be an open question.

The Taliban are facing an IS offensive and were exchanging fire with Iranian forces just the other month, with a growing fight over water rights. Aside from this, they face other active insurgent movements.

And of course, one could see the same sort of chaos erupting in Egypt or Saudi Arabia, a bit less so in Jordan.

Point being, the whole region is a basket case. The whole argument about "all the neighbors rallying to destroy Israel," is millenarian nonsense, and should never have been allowed to be a part of actual military strategy within Hamas. I continue to think they didn't think their attack would be as successful as it was, but the very idea of trying to mobilize support by getting your own civilians killed is pretty grim. Also very short sighted.

Suppose the Gulf States and Egypt did mobilize against Israel? It's unclear if they could win, and there is the nuclear deterrent, but moreover, if they occupied Gaza or southern Lebanon one of the first orders of business would be completely dismantling Hamas and Hezbollah.

The millenarian view seems to suppose that anger over Israel will be so powerful that it will lead to popular coups across the Arab states such that "everyone becomes allies." I don't get how anyone could look at the history and not think such a second, more violent "Arab Spring," wouldn't be far more likely to result in a cascade of civil wars instead.

I don't know if Hamas drank too much of their own Kool Aid, just badly miscalculated, or simply acted for Iranian interests here. The more I think about it the less sense it makes. Reminds me of the GOP, the lunatics begin running the asylum and torpedo their own efforts.

From Russian Telegram.



Russia has lost at least around two regiments worth of equipment, and probably more men since they switched to unsupported infantry assaults, attacking a literal trash heap. This might be more WWIesque than even Bakhmut.

It seems a decision was made that an offensive must occur somewhere but why they picked a frontal assault on a an area they have banged their head against without progress for just under a decade is beyond me. Then, another Russian helicopter appears to have been downed by Russian air defenses, this after the heavy losses to their remaining rotary wing craft from MLRS attacks earlier in the week.

Of course, Russian milbloggers don't think this will slow things down. "After the armor is expended, then come the 'meat assaults.'" Grim.

The documented armor losses do not suggest blew production capabilities. A lot of hardware is stuff that hasn't been produced in 50-60+ years.

BTW: to answer the question.

1. We are conscious, although what we mean by that term and the reality of consciousness might be quite different (Dennett, Bakker, etc.). It is unclear to me if "higher level" group entities made up of conscious entities can also be, in some ways, conscious.

In support of this unpopular opinion, I would point out that it seems to be the case that distinct "brain areas" can generate experiences in (relative) isolation. This being the case, the idea of "composite consciousness" doesn't seem completely far-fetched. But if consciousness is grounded in "computation" or a more amorphous "information processing," then this seems to leave open the door that the universe itself would possess a form of consciousness.

This seems like it might be a problem (or a perk). But it also doesn't seem equivalent with panpsychism, since information and computation are processes, and so we wouldn't say "fundamental units of stuff have experience," but that experience emerges to the extent that the entire process shows this sort of recursive, "metacognitive" computational structure.

IDK, maybe this is a perk. It would seem to make panENtheism make more sense.

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2. Epiphenomenalism is probably false, but it's a hard question to answer definitively. Consciousness seems to play a role in decision making, and it's obvious how a capability for self-reflection would be useful for survival and reproduction.It seems like a mistake to me to presuppose, as epiphenomenalism does, that you can get the same "input/output" behavior without the experiences, that the two are separable. If the two are inseparable, than they are causally inseparable and experience has a causal function.

3. "A full explanation of behavior can be given by a purely physical, third-person description of the objective situation without any appeal to subjective experience." By definition, an explanation of behavior that doesn't include the experiences is not a complete explanation.

4. I am increasingly thinking that saying the world is made up of "physical" versus "mental" stuff is irrelevant distinction. If there is only one substance, then process does all explanatory lifting. Positing some sort of hard line between the physical and the mental seems to be a misstep born of Kantian (crypto)-dualism and positivist misconceptions about what "objectivity" is.

I will allow that some things are "more real" than others, but I think this holds in the sense that Hegel and Plato meant it. Things are more real to the extent that they are less simply effects, i.e. to the degree they are more necessary, self-determining.

It seems to me like the problem for the eliminitivist comes up in defining what metacognitive is supposed to mean here. For to say, "consciousness is an illusion cast by the processes of thinking about thinking," is not very helpful unless one already has clear idea of what "thinking is," and how to identify itin nature. Further, if we accept computational theories of mind, we'd have to ask when computation becomes thinking, since it seems clear that not all computation is thinking.

Perhaps elimination would be easier if theorists actually backed off "computation," as an explanatory model? The philosophical problems of defining what computation is vis-a-vis physical systems are myriad and daunting.

I like eliminative works for a few reasons. They do a good job cataloging the myriad ways in which "consciousness" is not what it seems to be, to us. Global workspace theories seem like they are on to something. But even if "to explain is to explain away," you still need to adequately explain first.

Where they fail is in being able to tell me why I shouldn't think then that an ant hive experiences consciousness, and more consciousness than the ants that make it up. Or why the FBI isn't more conscious than its individual members. Maybe it's prejudice, but these things don't seem like they should be conscious. And yet, if thinking emerges from really complex, really recursive, computation, markets, etc. seem like prime candidates for consciousness, Keyne's "animal spirits" vindicated.

This problem has made integrated information theory more palatable to me. It might seem to lead us towards panpsychism, but it also explains why you can't just replicate a brain scan with paper towels and get a "consciousness." Down to the very basic level, quantum effects and all, the paper towel brain is simply not a true replica of the brain. It is just a model of the course grained structure of the real brain, but the real brain itself is a very different process.

IDK, do any eliminitivists do IIT? All the one's I've read are CMT guys. IIT seems to attract pancomputationalists and pansemiosis folks, and these ideas, while they have some interesting things to say, seem to leave open the fact that everything is conscious.