Chomsky’s response to a given international event is one of the most predictable phenomena I can think of—even the comets and the tides throw more curveballs. One could easily replace him with a chatbot.
EDIT: to clarify, if you can predict what a famous personality is going to say on a given topic well enough to replace it with a chatbot, listening to said personality on that topic no longer has much value.
Physicists’s responses to a given claim of discovering FTL signaling are one of the most predictable phenomena I can think of—even the comets and the tides throw more curveballs. One could easily replace them with a chatbot.
Well, yeah. If I were a physicist, I might find it annoying to give the same press interview for every individual incorrect claim of FTL signaling. It might be nice if somebody replaced me with a chatbot and let me go back to doing physics.
Predictable isn’t necessarily the same as wrong. I suppose, here, one must distinguish between listening as “seeking out the person’s opinion” and listening as “assigning credence to that opinion”. I can listen-1 to crackpots, but I don’t listen-2 to them. I listen-2 to my role models, even when I don’t need to listen-1 to them (thanks to my ability to model their response).
to clarify, if you can predict what a famous personality is going to say on a given topic well enough to replace it with a chatbot, listening to said personality on that topic no longer has much value.
Not true. A chatbot (complex enough), can give you an interesting result you haven’t thought about it before.
I think Scott failed the inverse turing test. When reading his blockquote I would be quite confident in identifying that as something that Chomsky didn’t write.
Valid moral judgement of “thousand eyes for an eye” actions is inherently pretty simple; if Scott is looking for something very sophisticated, he’s not interested in morality. (One may have a sophisticated response to an eye for an eye situation, but a thousand eyes for an eye is pretty one sided when you do not feel affiliated with either group).
Valid moral judgement of “thousand eyes for an eye” actions is inherently pretty simple;
Comparing 1 of something to 1000 of exactly the same thing done under exactly the same circumstances is pretty simple. Needless to say, that doesn’t hold true in real life situations. What makes you think it’s so simple here?
What’s your argument? That there may be 1000 to 1 difference in the value of life or something? Apples don’t have to weight exactly the same as oranges for 1000 apples to be heavier than 1 orange.
Read what I said: exactly the same thing and exactly the same circumstances. Imagine a case where someone steals a crate of 1000 oranges. He dumps them on the side of the road to rot, but you happen to have come by and you recover all the oranges except one. However, the police then arrest him. Police time is not cheap; in fact, the cost of arresting this guy happened to equal 1000 apples.
Also, the guy surrounded himself with apples and the police had to step on them to get him. Much of the 1000-apple “expense” was really this.
In this situation, claiming that you spent 1000 apples to make up for the loss of one orange is stupid.
He certainly tried to destroy more than one orange. The fact that he only succeeded in destroying one doesn’t make his crime small.
There is no reason why the cost of arresting him should equal the damage caused by the crime.
If the guy forces you to step on some apples to arrest him, you don’t get to count that towards the cost being expensive.
By your reasoning, if someone tries to shoot me, and misses, the police can’t even put him in jail because the guy caused almost no damage, so the judge is not justified in causing damage to him.
No, by my reasoning, if someone shoots in the general direction of a crowd and misses, police shouldn’t drop a bomb at him, likely miss as well, but kill 1000 people. Because if the police starts doing this, they’re failing at minimizing danger to the public, very spectacularly so as well.
There is a reason why getting rid of a murderer should not cost far more lives than projected deaths from the murderer. That reason is police being here to minimize violent deaths.
There is a reason why getting rid of a murderer should not cost far more lives than projected deaths from the murderer.
There’s a reason why police and military are not the same thing. I don’t remember offhand how many people died on the Pacific front in World War II, but I’m pretty sure it’s more than died at Pearl Harbor. And at least at Pearl Harbor the US had the option of not entering the war and not getting any more Americans killed. The idea that you should not kill any more of the enemy than the enemy kills of you is something you and a lot of other people have basically made up. (And why aren’t you counting the projected deaths from the murderer as the murderer killing a few people at a time until forever, thus resulting in infinite projected deaths anyway?)
Also, what do you do if the enemy decides to deliberately surround himself with civilians so as to maximize the civilian casualties from attacking him?
You’re killing far, far more civilians than your enemy does (unless of course you now declared said civilians the enemy as well). You can’t say that about any allied nation in WW2.
Also, what do you do if the enemy decides to deliberately surround himself with civilians so as to maximize the civilian casualties from attacking him?
The same as what you already do when they surround themselves with Israeli citizens.
The same as what you already do when they surround themselves with Israeli citizens.
Israeli citizens generally live in places that Israel has control over. Doing “the same” would mean Israel should take over Gaza; when Gaza is under its control, it would then be able to keep Hamas from surrounding themselves with Gazans. I’m fairly sure you would not actually recommend that.
The Imperial Japanese Army posed a significant threat to US interests and long term security, expecially given that it was allied to the other Axis powers. Still, many people believe that the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was excessive and immoral.
Anyway, WWII is a poor analogy for the Israel-Gaza conflict: the threat level Hamas exerts on Israeli security, or even economic welfare, is minimal, therefore the damages to the security ang welfare of Gazans caused by Israel “self-defence” operations are seen as greatly disproportionate.
In fact, it is often argued that Israel military actions are even inefficient at accomplishing their stated goal of protecting the security of its citizens, as opposed to other non-military options that Israel has, such as avoiding to provoke Hamas to fire rockets by imprisoning and killing its members in the West Bank without good cause, or finding reasonable terms for a truce (face-saving for both parties) once the mess had been started. In the medium-long term, it can be argued that it would be in the interests of the security of Israeli citizen that their government negotiated a permanent political solution with both Fatah and Hamas.
Another important way in which analogies based on traditional warfare fail, is that Gaza or the West Bank aren’t countries separate from Israel, they are regions under Israel military occupation. Gaza has some level of autonomy, with Hamas acting as a de facto government for day-to-day administration and law enforcement, but Israel keeps control over Gaza airspace and access to international waters, which still counts as military occupation under international law. International law, which many people find morally reasonable, also says that an occuping powers has special duties to protect the civilians of the regions under occupations: since they don’t have a fully sovereign government taking care of their interests, the occupying power must take the burden on itself.
In any case, international law, and I would say common morality as well, condemns the killing of civilians if it doesn’t accomplish a reasonable and “proportionate” military objective. The Allied firebombing of Dresden, and maybe even the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, can be argued to have accomplished valuable and proportionate military objectives despite the high number of civilian deaths, as they greatly damaged the enemy industrial capability and hence their war effort. In the current round of Israel-Gaza conflict, thousands of Gazan civilians have been killed, including children playing football on a beach, people in the premises of an UN school, etc. Israel officially claims that some of these deaths were accidents and blames the others on Hamas usage of human shields. Maybe that’s techically true, but when you are bombing and shelling an heavily populated area, a certain amount of “accidents” and more or less deliberate human shielding are inevitable. You know that a lots of civilians are going to die, and you need a damm good military objective in order to justify it. What military objective is Israel accomplishing? Hamas is still firing its rockets, which are still extremely ineffective at killing Israeli citizens. Eventually, Israel may stop the Hamas rocket launches by destroying all the caches and smuggling tunnels. And it will take only a couple of years for Hamas to replenish its arsenal, and for each dead militant, Hamas will be able to recruit three from the enraged population.
This combination of large loss of civilian lives and minimal accomplishment of military objectives, particularly given the status of Gaza as an occupied territory, are the reason why people argue that Israel actions are disproportionate and doubt Israel good faith in its claims that it is trying to minimize civilian losses.
The alternate, uncharitable hypothesis to explain Israel behavior is that it is trying to maximize Gazan civilian deaths while maintaining the plausible deniability it needs in order to keep US financial and military aid and support in the UN Security Council. Thus Israel can’t nuke the Gazans or put them into death camps, but, according to this model, it would love to.
This model, where all the Israeli are bloodthirsty monsters, is overly uncharitable. Real world politics is complicated: Israel has an almost pure proportional political representation system, which results in coallition governments where small parties that can switch sides are greatly favoured. The current ruling coallitions has nationalistic and religious parties which are apparently made of kill-all-Arabs bloodthirsty monsters, and the government as a whole has to balance padering to a broad electorate, which includes bloodthirsty monsters that vote for said parties. Overall, the average Israeli voter is probably not a monster, but finds it easier to cooperate with the Israeli monsters rather than with the Palestinians, who also have their share of kill-all-Jews monsters.
Anyway, this comment is quite long and discussion of contemporary object-level real-world politics is discouraged here, probably with good reason. The Israeli-Gaza conflict is one of the most divisive political topic ever, therefore I’m not going to carry on this discussion any more.
One thing we learn even in situations that are not in the Middle East is that actions cause incentives.
Refusing to kill militants when protected by human shields encourages the taking of more human shields.
In any case, international law, and I would say common morality as well, condemns the killing of civilians if it doesn’t accomplish a reasonable and “proportionate” military objective.
It’s not hard to bring up the Wikipedia article. Proportionality requires that the force be proportionate to what is necessary to achieve the objective, not that the force be proportionate to the number of deaths caused by the enemy.
for each dead militant, Hamas will be able to recruit three from the enraged population.…
This combination of large loss of civilian lives and minimal accomplishment of military objectives, particularly given the status of Gaza as an occupied territory, are the reason why people argue that Israel actions are disproportionate and doubt Israel good faith in its claims that it is trying to minimize civilian losses.
If this was truly what they believed, then I could, for instance, argue that Israeli attacks don’t make it easier for Hamas to recruit from the enraged population, and it would also count as an argument that Israel’s attacks are proportionate. I don’t believe for one second that such an argument would be received in such a way.
Your analogy breaks down because in the case at hand, there is no impartial police that can enforce a fair punishment. Also, oranges and apples are not moral patients.
EDIT:
By your reasoning, if someone tries to shoot me, and misses, the police can’t even put him in jail because the guy caused almost no damage, so the judge is not justified in causing damage to him.
To clarify, a more apt analogy would be if somebody shooted in the air in the general direction of your house, knowing that with overwhelming probability he was unlikely to hit you, and in retaliation you dropped a napalm bomb in his neighborhood, killing everybody but him. Oh, and let’s not forget that you provoked him to shoot at you by kidnapping and killing various members of his immediate familiy after accusing them, without any judicial oversight or even plausible evidence, of kidnapping and killing your dog. A dog that you had intentionally let illegaly roam their property in the first place. How about that?
a more apt analogy would be if somebody shooted in the air in the general direction of your house, knowing that with overwhelming probability he was unlikely to hit you, and in retaliation you dropped a napalm bomb in his neighborhood, killing everybody but him.
The “overwhelming probability” of being “unlikely to hit” is a bad analogy to the real world. Hamas’s rockets don’t kill many people, but they’re not so unlikely to hit that they don’t kill some people. It’s not as if they’re blowing a puff of cigarette smoke towards you and increasing the probability by 0.001 that you may someday get cancer—people actually die from those rockets.
Furthermore, you left out the part where the guy deliberately shot at you from a crowded neighborhood so that the only way to defend yourself is to endanger the people around him.
It’s not as if they’re blowing a puff of cigarette smoke towards you and increasing the probability by 0.001 that you may someday get cancer—people actually die from those rockets.
How many Israeli civilians have been killed by rockets since Operation Protective Edge? Three. Out of a population of 8.1 million. If Hamas hired tourists to go to Israel and puff smoke in crowed areas it would probably have a greater effect on the Israeli mortality rate.
Furthermore, you left out the part where the guy deliberately shot at you from a crowded neighborhood so that the only way to defend yourself is to endanger the people around him.
Have they really? In those three decades, there have been periods where they were genuinely seeking a political solution, but it certainly hasn’t been the majority of that time. And it’s pretty hard to argue that they’ve been seeking a political solution in good faith in the last 6-10 years; they’ve been sinking considerable resources into projects directly counter to negotiation (settlement-building).
Certainly lip service has been paid more or less continuously, but I don’t think you could consider it an active political project of the Israeli government at any point during the Obama administration.
And it’s pretty hard to argue that they’ve been seeking a political solution in good faith in the last 6-10 years;
That’s because it was clear by that point that this isn’t working and that the Palestinians have even less interest in a good faith political solution.
Not going to claim Hamas has (that would be ridiculous), but Fatah has made fairly consistent, credible efforts.
But while this is arguing over questions of fact, it’s still politicised and unlikely to be productive or change anyone’s mind, so tapping out is probably wise on my part.
As often happens, the truth is more complex than either of you are giving credit for.
Neither Fatah nor Hamas has much real popular support, at this point. I agree that Fatah has in fact been making credible efforts towards negotiating a peace deal, actually (and I say this as an Israeli). Hamas, yes, they are in fact genocidally-inclined clerical fascists, Sharia law blah blah, executing dissenters in the streets, blah blah.
But Hamas has one thing going for them: they fight the Israelis. Fatah does not, certainly not as much as the Palestinian public would prefer. So the current situation is: most Palestinians favor the PLO’s traditional ideology of semi-secular nationalism, and believe in the PLO’s traditional historiography, but consider the Fatah organization itself to have become corrupt stooges for the Israeli occupier. Some of them channel this belief into despair, some into political anarchism, and many into a quiet, tacit support for Hamas militancy.
Netanyahu’s nonstop bad-faith “negotiation” ever since his election and reelection has not been helping.
I’ve been thinking about the issue in terms of (armchair) game theory:
Ostensibly, both parties essentially claim to be playing a a tit-for-tat strategy in an interated prisoner dilemma where the other party is a DefectBot that can’t be cooperated with. Who played “Defect” first and when is a matter of dispute: arguments usually involve to events going back to at least the British Empire, if not the Ottoman Empire or even the Roman Empire. Regardless of who started it, both parties think (or at least claim to think) that they can’t break the defection cycle by attempting to cooperate unilaterally, hence they defect.
Obviously this analysis is simplistic since it models the Israeli and the Palestinians each as a single agent. But since, as you say, Palestinians tend to more or less unwillingly support Hamas and the Israeli tend to support Netanyahu and his coallition government (also more or less unwillingly?), I think this two-agent model is a reasonable first-order approximation.
Another issue is that there doesn’t appear to be a Schelling point that both parties recognize as a “default” solution for the bargaining problem they face. It seems that both parties operate under a framework of “This land is ours. You have no right to be here. Anything we might concede you is more than you deserve and you’d better be grateful and accept it without question before we change our mind.” This isn’t conducive to productive negotiation.
Your approximation is roughly correct. I would only add that while your statement about “our land” does represent the pro-settler faction of Israeli society, I do believe there’s a large double-digit percentage who are “settlement-apathetic”, and whose support can be “purchased” by whichever political side offers them greater quiet and prosperity in which to lead their private lives. They vote for peace when it looks like it will work, and when they are convinced (not necessarily in relation to fact, as you noted) that the Palestinians just want to exterminate us and will try indefatigibly, they vote for military repression.
There’s also an internal contradiction here: Bibi Netanyahu is an American-style neoliberal. People don’t actually like that here. At all. They only really put up with it because it comes as a package deal with the “security through military action” platform of the Likud and the religious idealism of Jewish Home.
Bibi can only keep his job by maintaining quiet, but whenever he’s successful in that, people remember all their Western-style everyday-life problems that are because of Bibi.
Ostensibly, both parties essentially claim to be playing a a tit-for-tat strategy in an interated prisoner dilemma where the other party is a DefectBot that can’t be cooperated with.
Israel has an various periods starting with Yitzhak Rabin attempted to play unilateral cooperation under the theory that this would lead to cooperation on the other end. Hasn’t worked out that way.
It would help to actually look at the history rather than simply completing the pattern and pretending to be wise.
“This s our land, and anybody who suggests that somebody else might have some modicum of claim over it must be pretending to be wise and <insert teacher’s password here>.”
Israel has an various periods starting with Yitzhak Rabin attempted to play unilateral cooperation under the theory that this would lead to cooperation on the other end. Hasn’t worked out that way.
“Anything we might concede you is more than you deserve and you’d better be grateful and accept it without question before we change our mind.”
It seems that both parties operate under a framework of “This land is ours. You have no right to be here. Anything we might concede you is more than you deserve and you’d better be grateful and accept it without question before we change our mind.”
If that was an accurate description, there would be no Palestinians there at all.
I don’t think that contradicts anything I said, and it doesn’t contradict anything I intended to say; I was familiar with most of it (other than the extent to which the various views are common among Palestinians, where I have very little basis for judgment) and agree.
I was trying to point out that people professing to be negotiating is not the same thing as actually negotiating, and while there have been 30 years of professions of negotiations, the actual time spent making an honest attempt has been much smaller. This is also true of the PLO, obviously (IIRC, Arafat was particularly guilty of it), but no one was previously claiming the opposite position on that front.
I was trying to point out that people professing to be negotiating is not the same thing as actually negotiating, and while there have been 30 years of professions of negotiations, the actual time spent making an honest attempt has been much smaller.
Yes, when your partner has no interest in honest negotiations it’s hard keep attempting that indefinitely.
According to Wikipedia, he killed none and injuried four, including the President of the United States. How many people did the US government kill in order to “self-defend” from John Hinckley, Jr?
That might be because he had US citizens around him rather than foreigners. If someone’s firing from the middle of a group of foreigners, apparently its ok to drop a bomb there.
If someone’s firing from the middle of a group of foreigners, apparently its ok to drop a bomb there.
If someone is firing from the middle of a group of people, and said people won’t have no interest in stopping the firer and are actively giving him support.
If you read the comment section, Scott is very careful to avoid blue vs green, as evidenced by the nearly equal split of haters and few supporters (distribution of political views on a given issue is rarely normal, it is bimodal more often than not, so the moderates tend to get more hate than support). Granted, the comment itself is obviously a mockery of Chomsky. The context is that Chomsky is so far down one side, his response is predictable enough to be automated.
The context is that Chomsky is so far down one side, his response is predictable enough to be automated.
That’s only true if the person who’s reading the post can only see black and white and who doesn’t care about deeper understanding and arguments.
In this case Chomsky would probably speak about how Hamas usually does claim responsibility for terror acts that it commits. The latest conflict escalated on grounds that Israel claimed that Hamas is responsible for a kidnapping for which Hamas didn’t claim responsibility.
Speaking about the timing and the motivation of various parties for the kidnapping could be interesting.
Analysis of Egypt’s role in this conflict would be interesting. Especially as Egypt lately outlawed the Muslim brotherhood.
EDIT: to clarify, if you can predict what a famous personality is going to say on a given topic well enough to replace it with a chatbot, listening to said personality on that topic no longer has much value.
I’ve heard that D-Wave quantum computer solves the P vs NP problem. I wonder what Scott Aaronson has to say about it. :D
EDIT: to clarify, if you can predict what a famous personality is going to say on a given topic well enough to replace it with a chatbot, listening to said personality on that topic no longer has much value.
This is true to the extent that all of one’s beliefs, thoughts and feelings are reflectively consistent, incorporating all available evidence into a cohesive, integrated whole.
Comparatively little of the process of learning is the absorbing of evidence not previously heard. Most of the benefits come from deliberate practice#Deliberate_practice) and repetition. If I didn’t listen to the advice of people whose advice generation I could emulate I would be much worse off.
Having clicked through and read the rest of Scott’s comment, I feel compelled to add the proviso that when applying this heuristic, one should check whether one’s predictions are, in fact, accurate.
Scott Aaronson.
EDIT: to clarify, if you can predict what a famous personality is going to say on a given topic well enough to replace it with a chatbot, listening to said personality on that topic no longer has much value.
Physicists’s responses to a given claim of discovering FTL signaling are one of the most predictable phenomena I can think of—even the comets and the tides throw more curveballs. One could easily replace them with a chatbot.
Well, yeah. If I were a physicist, I might find it annoying to give the same press interview for every individual incorrect claim of FTL signaling. It might be nice if somebody replaced me with a chatbot and let me go back to doing physics.
Predictable isn’t necessarily the same as wrong. I suppose, here, one must distinguish between listening as “seeking out the person’s opinion” and listening as “assigning credence to that opinion”. I can listen-1 to crackpots, but I don’t listen-2 to them. I listen-2 to my role models, even when I don’t need to listen-1 to them (thanks to my ability to model their response).
Do you often read physicist’s response to claims of FTL signalling? It seems to me like there is not much value in reading these, per the quote.
Not true. A chatbot (complex enough), can give you an interesting result you haven’t thought about it before.
I think Scott failed the inverse turing test. When reading his blockquote I would be quite confident in identifying that as something that Chomsky didn’t write.
Hardly surpising, since his comment was parody.
Valid moral judgement of “thousand eyes for an eye” actions is inherently pretty simple; if Scott is looking for something very sophisticated, he’s not interested in morality. (One may have a sophisticated response to an eye for an eye situation, but a thousand eyes for an eye is pretty one sided when you do not feel affiliated with either group).
Comparing 1 of something to 1000 of exactly the same thing done under exactly the same circumstances is pretty simple. Needless to say, that doesn’t hold true in real life situations. What makes you think it’s so simple here?
What’s your argument? That there may be 1000 to 1 difference in the value of life or something? Apples don’t have to weight exactly the same as oranges for 1000 apples to be heavier than 1 orange.
Less Wrong’s first Israel/Palestine flame war...this place finally feels like a real blog. [Sniffs, wipes tear from eye.]
Read what I said: exactly the same thing and exactly the same circumstances. Imagine a case where someone steals a crate of 1000 oranges. He dumps them on the side of the road to rot, but you happen to have come by and you recover all the oranges except one. However, the police then arrest him. Police time is not cheap; in fact, the cost of arresting this guy happened to equal 1000 apples.
Also, the guy surrounded himself with apples and the police had to step on them to get him. Much of the 1000-apple “expense” was really this.
In this situation, claiming that you spent 1000 apples to make up for the loss of one orange is stupid.
He certainly tried to destroy more than one orange. The fact that he only succeeded in destroying one doesn’t make his crime small.
There is no reason why the cost of arresting him should equal the damage caused by the crime.
If the guy forces you to step on some apples to arrest him, you don’t get to count that towards the cost being expensive.
By your reasoning, if someone tries to shoot me, and misses, the police can’t even put him in jail because the guy caused almost no damage, so the judge is not justified in causing damage to him.
No, by my reasoning, if someone shoots in the general direction of a crowd and misses, police shouldn’t drop a bomb at him, likely miss as well, but kill 1000 people. Because if the police starts doing this, they’re failing at minimizing danger to the public, very spectacularly so as well.
There is a reason why getting rid of a murderer should not cost far more lives than projected deaths from the murderer. That reason is police being here to minimize violent deaths.
There’s a reason why police and military are not the same thing. I don’t remember offhand how many people died on the Pacific front in World War II, but I’m pretty sure it’s more than died at Pearl Harbor. And at least at Pearl Harbor the US had the option of not entering the war and not getting any more Americans killed. The idea that you should not kill any more of the enemy than the enemy kills of you is something you and a lot of other people have basically made up. (And why aren’t you counting the projected deaths from the murderer as the murderer killing a few people at a time until forever, thus resulting in infinite projected deaths anyway?)
Also, what do you do if the enemy decides to deliberately surround himself with civilians so as to maximize the civilian casualties from attacking him?
You’re killing far, far more civilians than your enemy does (unless of course you now declared said civilians the enemy as well). You can’t say that about any allied nation in WW2.
The same as what you already do when they surround themselves with Israeli citizens.
Israeli citizens generally live in places that Israel has control over. Doing “the same” would mean Israel should take over Gaza; when Gaza is under its control, it would then be able to keep Hamas from surrounding themselves with Gazans. I’m fairly sure you would not actually recommend that.
The Imperial Japanese Army posed a significant threat to US interests and long term security, expecially given that it was allied to the other Axis powers. Still, many people believe that the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was excessive and immoral.
Anyway, WWII is a poor analogy for the Israel-Gaza conflict: the threat level Hamas exerts on Israeli security, or even economic welfare, is minimal, therefore the damages to the security ang welfare of Gazans caused by Israel “self-defence” operations are seen as greatly disproportionate.
In fact, it is often argued that Israel military actions are even inefficient at accomplishing their stated goal of protecting the security of its citizens, as opposed to other non-military options that Israel has, such as avoiding to provoke Hamas to fire rockets by imprisoning and killing its members in the West Bank without good cause, or finding reasonable terms for a truce (face-saving for both parties) once the mess had been started.
In the medium-long term, it can be argued that it would be in the interests of the security of Israeli citizen that their government negotiated a permanent political solution with both Fatah and Hamas.
Another important way in which analogies based on traditional warfare fail, is that Gaza or the West Bank aren’t countries separate from Israel, they are regions under Israel military occupation.
Gaza has some level of autonomy, with Hamas acting as a de facto government for day-to-day administration and law enforcement, but Israel keeps control over Gaza airspace and access to international waters, which still counts as military occupation under international law. International law, which many people find morally reasonable, also says that an occuping powers has special duties to protect the civilians of the regions under occupations: since they don’t have a fully sovereign government taking care of their interests, the occupying power must take the burden on itself.
In any case, international law, and I would say common morality as well, condemns the killing of civilians if it doesn’t accomplish a reasonable and “proportionate” military objective.
The Allied firebombing of Dresden, and maybe even the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, can be argued to have accomplished valuable and proportionate military objectives despite the high number of civilian deaths, as they greatly damaged the enemy industrial capability and hence their war effort.
In the current round of Israel-Gaza conflict, thousands of Gazan civilians have been killed, including children playing football on a beach, people in the premises of an UN school, etc. Israel officially claims that some of these deaths were accidents and blames the others on Hamas usage of human shields. Maybe that’s techically true, but when you are bombing and shelling an heavily populated area, a certain amount of “accidents” and more or less deliberate human shielding are inevitable. You know that a lots of civilians are going to die, and you need a damm good military objective in order to justify it.
What military objective is Israel accomplishing? Hamas is still firing its rockets, which are still extremely ineffective at killing Israeli citizens. Eventually, Israel may stop the Hamas rocket launches by destroying all the caches and smuggling tunnels. And it will take only a couple of years for Hamas to replenish its arsenal, and for each dead militant, Hamas will be able to recruit three from the enraged population.
This combination of large loss of civilian lives and minimal accomplishment of military objectives, particularly given the status of Gaza as an occupied territory, are the reason why people argue that Israel actions are disproportionate and doubt Israel good faith in its claims that it is trying to minimize civilian losses.
The alternate, uncharitable hypothesis to explain Israel behavior is that it is trying to maximize Gazan civilian deaths while maintaining the plausible deniability it needs in order to keep US financial and military aid and support in the UN Security Council. Thus Israel can’t nuke the Gazans or put them into death camps, but, according to this model, it would love to.
This model, where all the Israeli are bloodthirsty monsters, is overly uncharitable. Real world politics is complicated:
Israel has an almost pure proportional political representation system, which results in coallition governments where small parties that can switch sides are greatly favoured. The current ruling coallitions has nationalistic and religious parties which are apparently made of kill-all-Arabs bloodthirsty monsters, and the government as a whole has to balance padering to a broad electorate, which includes bloodthirsty monsters that vote for said parties.
Overall, the average Israeli voter is probably not a monster, but finds it easier to cooperate with the Israeli monsters rather than with the Palestinians, who also have their share of kill-all-Jews monsters.
Anyway, this comment is quite long and discussion of contemporary object-level real-world politics is discouraged here, probably with good reason. The Israeli-Gaza conflict is one of the most divisive political topic ever, therefore I’m not going to carry on this discussion any more.
One thing we learn even in situations that are not in the Middle East is that actions cause incentives.
Refusing to kill militants when protected by human shields encourages the taking of more human shields.
It’s not hard to bring up the Wikipedia article. Proportionality requires that the force be proportionate to what is necessary to achieve the objective, not that the force be proportionate to the number of deaths caused by the enemy.
If this was truly what they believed, then I could, for instance, argue that Israeli attacks don’t make it easier for Hamas to recruit from the enraged population, and it would also count as an argument that Israel’s attacks are proportionate. I don’t believe for one second that such an argument would be received in such a way.
Your analogy breaks down because in the case at hand, there is no impartial police that can enforce a fair punishment. Also, oranges and apples are not moral patients.
EDIT:
To clarify, a more apt analogy would be if somebody shooted in the air in the general direction of your house, knowing that with overwhelming probability he was unlikely to hit you, and in retaliation you dropped a napalm bomb in his neighborhood, killing everybody but him.
Oh, and let’s not forget that you provoked him to shoot at you by kidnapping and killing various members of his immediate familiy after accusing them, without any judicial oversight or even plausible evidence, of kidnapping and killing your dog. A dog that you had intentionally let illegaly roam their property in the first place.
How about that?
The “overwhelming probability” of being “unlikely to hit” is a bad analogy to the real world. Hamas’s rockets don’t kill many people, but they’re not so unlikely to hit that they don’t kill some people. It’s not as if they’re blowing a puff of cigarette smoke towards you and increasing the probability by 0.001 that you may someday get cancer—people actually die from those rockets.
Furthermore, you left out the part where the guy deliberately shot at you from a crowded neighborhood so that the only way to defend yourself is to endanger the people around him.
Don’t use political examples in a non-political argument. There are always plenty of others to choose from.
This has been about Hamas for the past 8 posts, even if nobody’s actually used the word “Hamas” before.
Yep. Kinda serves you right for using a political quote to make a non-political point about rationality ;)
That wasn’t me, it was shminux.
My intention was to add on to your reply. I can see why that was confusing, though.
How many Israeli civilians have been killed by rockets since Operation Protective Edge? Three. Out of a population of 8.1 million.
If Hamas hired tourists to go to Israel and puff smoke in crowed areas it would probably have a greater effect on the Israeli mortality rate.
As opposed to seeking a political solution?
Isreal has been trying that for ~30 years. It doesn’t seem to be working.
Have they really? In those three decades, there have been periods where they were genuinely seeking a political solution, but it certainly hasn’t been the majority of that time. And it’s pretty hard to argue that they’ve been seeking a political solution in good faith in the last 6-10 years; they’ve been sinking considerable resources into projects directly counter to negotiation (settlement-building).
Certainly lip service has been paid more or less continuously, but I don’t think you could consider it an active political project of the Israeli government at any point during the Obama administration.
That’s because it was clear by that point that this isn’t working and that the Palestinians have even less interest in a good faith political solution.
Not going to claim Hamas has (that would be ridiculous), but Fatah has made fairly consistent, credible efforts.
But while this is arguing over questions of fact, it’s still politicised and unlikely to be productive or change anyone’s mind, so tapping out is probably wise on my part.
As often happens, the truth is more complex than either of you are giving credit for.
Neither Fatah nor Hamas has much real popular support, at this point. I agree that Fatah has in fact been making credible efforts towards negotiating a peace deal, actually (and I say this as an Israeli). Hamas, yes, they are in fact genocidally-inclined clerical fascists, Sharia law blah blah, executing dissenters in the streets, blah blah.
But Hamas has one thing going for them: they fight the Israelis. Fatah does not, certainly not as much as the Palestinian public would prefer. So the current situation is: most Palestinians favor the PLO’s traditional ideology of semi-secular nationalism, and believe in the PLO’s traditional historiography, but consider the Fatah organization itself to have become corrupt stooges for the Israeli occupier. Some of them channel this belief into despair, some into political anarchism, and many into a quiet, tacit support for Hamas militancy.
Netanyahu’s nonstop bad-faith “negotiation” ever since his election and reelection has not been helping.
I’ve been thinking about the issue in terms of (armchair) game theory:
Ostensibly, both parties essentially claim to be playing a a tit-for-tat strategy in an interated prisoner dilemma where the other party is a DefectBot that can’t be cooperated with.
Who played “Defect” first and when is a matter of dispute: arguments usually involve to events going back to at least the British Empire, if not the Ottoman Empire or even the Roman Empire.
Regardless of who started it, both parties think (or at least claim to think) that they can’t break the defection cycle by attempting to cooperate unilaterally, hence they defect.
Obviously this analysis is simplistic since it models the Israeli and the Palestinians each as a single agent. But since, as you say, Palestinians tend to more or less unwillingly support Hamas and the Israeli tend to support Netanyahu and his coallition government (also more or less unwillingly?), I think this two-agent model is a reasonable first-order approximation.
Another issue is that there doesn’t appear to be a Schelling point that both parties recognize as a “default” solution for the bargaining problem they face. It seems that both parties operate under a framework of “This land is ours. You have no right to be here. Anything we might concede you is more than you deserve and you’d better be grateful and accept it without question before we change our mind.”
This isn’t conducive to productive negotiation.
Your approximation is roughly correct. I would only add that while your statement about “our land” does represent the pro-settler faction of Israeli society, I do believe there’s a large double-digit percentage who are “settlement-apathetic”, and whose support can be “purchased” by whichever political side offers them greater quiet and prosperity in which to lead their private lives. They vote for peace when it looks like it will work, and when they are convinced (not necessarily in relation to fact, as you noted) that the Palestinians just want to exterminate us and will try indefatigibly, they vote for military repression.
There’s also an internal contradiction here: Bibi Netanyahu is an American-style neoliberal. People don’t actually like that here. At all. They only really put up with it because it comes as a package deal with the “security through military action” platform of the Likud and the religious idealism of Jewish Home.
Bibi can only keep his job by maintaining quiet, but whenever he’s successful in that, people remember all their Western-style everyday-life problems that are because of Bibi.
It would help to actually look at the history rather than simply completing the pattern and pretending to be wise.
Israel has an various periods starting with Yitzhak Rabin attempted to play unilateral cooperation under the theory that this would lead to cooperation on the other end. Hasn’t worked out that way.
“This s our land, and anybody who suggests that somebody else might have some modicum of claim over it must be pretending to be wise and <insert teacher’s password here>.”
“Anything we might concede you is more than you deserve and you’d better be grateful and accept it without question before we change our mind.”
If that was an accurate description, there would be no Palestinians there at all.
I don’t think that contradicts anything I said, and it doesn’t contradict anything I intended to say; I was familiar with most of it (other than the extent to which the various views are common among Palestinians, where I have very little basis for judgment) and agree.
I was trying to point out that people professing to be negotiating is not the same thing as actually negotiating, and while there have been 30 years of professions of negotiations, the actual time spent making an honest attempt has been much smaller. This is also true of the PLO, obviously (IIRC, Arafat was particularly guilty of it), but no one was previously claiming the opposite position on that front.
Yes, when your partner has no interest in honest negotiations it’s hard keep attempting that indefinitely.
How many people did John Hinckley, Jr. kill? One. Out of a population of, oh, 300 million.
According to Wikipedia, he killed none and injuried four, including the President of the United States. How many people did the US government kill in order to “self-defend” from John Hinckley, Jr?
That might be because he had US citizens around him rather than foreigners. If someone’s firing from the middle of a group of foreigners, apparently its ok to drop a bomb there.
If someone is firing from the middle of a group of people, and said people won’t have no interest in stopping the firer and are actively giving him support.
Yeah, like that U.N. school.
Funny how the U.N. school had to objections to being used for rocket storage and as a platform for launching rockets.
Downvoted for the original context of the quote: blue and green politics, strawmanning, etc.
If you read the comment section, Scott is very careful to avoid blue vs green, as evidenced by the nearly equal split of haters and few supporters (distribution of political views on a given issue is rarely normal, it is bimodal more often than not, so the moderates tend to get more hate than support). Granted, the comment itself is obviously a mockery of Chomsky. The context is that Chomsky is so far down one side, his response is predictable enough to be automated.
(After that post in Discussion, every time I read “blue” and “green” my brain automatically replaces them with “attractive” and “creepy”.)
That’s only true if the person who’s reading the post can only see black and white and who doesn’t care about deeper understanding and arguments.
In this case Chomsky would probably speak about how Hamas usually does claim responsibility for terror acts that it commits. The latest conflict escalated on grounds that Israel claimed that Hamas is responsible for a kidnapping for which Hamas didn’t claim responsibility. Speaking about the timing and the motivation of various parties for the kidnapping could be interesting.
Analysis of Egypt’s role in this conflict would be interesting. Especially as Egypt lately outlawed the Muslim brotherhood.
So it is aqua politics?
I’ve heard that D-Wave quantum computer solves the P vs NP problem. I wonder what Scott Aaronson has to say about it. :D
Good point.
This is true to the extent that all of one’s beliefs, thoughts and feelings are reflectively consistent, incorporating all available evidence into a cohesive, integrated whole.
Comparatively little of the process of learning is the absorbing of evidence not previously heard. Most of the benefits come from deliberate practice#Deliberate_practice) and repetition. If I didn’t listen to the advice of people whose advice generation I could emulate I would be much worse off.
Having clicked through and read the rest of Scott’s comment, I feel compelled to add the proviso that when applying this heuristic, one should check whether one’s predictions are, in fact, accurate.