The mini-singularity
Err, happy MLK Day!
This week represents the convergence of so many plotlines that, if it were the season finale of some streaming show, I’d feel like the writers had too many balls in the air. For the benefit of the tiny part of the world that cares what I think, I offer the following comments.
My view of Trump is the same as it’s been for a decade—that he’s a con man, a criminal, and the most dangerous internal threat the US has ever faced in its history. I think Congress and Merrick Garland deserve eternal shame for not moving aggressively to bar Trump from office and then prosecute him for insurrection—that this was a catastrophic failure of our system, one for which we’ll now suffer the consequences. If this time Trump got 52% of some swing state rather than 48%, if the “zeitgeist” or the “vibes” have shifted, if the “Resistance” is so weary that it’s barely bothering to show up, if Bezos and Zuckerberg and Musk and even Sam Altman now find it expedient to placate the tyrant rather than standing up for what previously appeared to be their principles—well, I don’t see how any of that affects how I ought to feel.
All the same, I have no plans to flee the United States or anything, just like I didn’t the last time. I’ll even permit myself pleasure when the crazed strongman takes actions that I happen to agree with (like pushing the tottering Ayatollah regime toward its well-deserved end). And then I’ll vote for Enlightenment values (or the nearest available approximation) in 2026 and 2028, assuming the country survives until then.
The second plotline is the ceasefire in Gaza, and the beginning of the release of the Israeli hostages, in exchange for thousands of Palestinian prisoners. I have all the mixed emotions you might expect. I’m terrified about the precedent this reinforces and about the many mass-murderers it will free—as I was terrified in 2011 by the Gilad Shalit deal, the one that released Sinwar and thereby set the stage for October 7. Certainly World War II didn’t end with the Nazis marching triumphantly around Berlin, guns in the air, and vowing to repeat their conquest of Europe at the earliest opportunity. All the same, it’s not my place to be more Zionist than Netanyahu, or than the vast majority of the Israeli public that supported the deal. I’m obviously thrilled to see the hostages return, and even slightly touched by the ethic that would move heaven and earth to save these specific people, almost every consideration of game theory and utilitarianism be damned. I take solace that we’re not quite returning to the situation of October 6, since Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran itself have all been severely degraded (and the Assad regime no longer exists). This is no longer 1944, when you can slaughter 1200 Jews without paying any price for it: that was the original promise of the State of Israel. All the same, I fear that bloodshed will continue from here until the Singularity, unless majorities on both sides choose coexistence—partition, the two-state solution, call it whatever you will. And that’s primarily a question of culture, and the education of children.
The third plotline was the end of TikTok, quickly followed by its (temporary?) return on Trump’s order. As far as I can tell, Instagram, Twitter/X, and TikTok have all been net negatives for the world; it would’ve been far better if none of them had been invented. But, OK, our society allows many things that are plausibly net-negative, like sports betting and Cheetos. In this case, however, the US Supreme Court ruled 9-0 (!!) that Congress has a legitimate interest in keeping Chinese Communist Party spyware off 170 million Americans’ phones—and that there’s no First Amendment concern that overrides this security interest, since the TikTok ban isn’t targeting speech on the basis of its content. I found the court’s argument convincing. I hope TikTok goes dark 90 days from now—or, second-best, that it gets sold to some entity that’s merely bad in the normal ways and not a hostile foreign power.
The fourth plotline is the still-ongoing devastation of much of Los Angeles. I heard from friends at Caltech and elsewhere who had to evacuate their homes—but at least they had homes to return to, as those in Altadena and the Palisades didn’t. It’s a sign of the times that even a disaster of this magnitude now brings only partisan bickering: was the cause climate change, reshaping the entire planet in terrifying ways, just like all those experts have been warning for decades? Or was it staggering lack of preparation from the California and LA governments? My own answers to these questions are “yes” and “yes.”
Maybe I’ll briefly highlight the role of the utilitarianism versus deontology debate. According to this article from back in October, widely shared once the fires started, the US Forest Service halted controlled burns in California because it lacked the manpower, but also this:
“I think the Forest Service is worried about the risk of something bad happening [with a prescribed burn]. And they’re willing to trade that risk — which they will be blamed for — for increased risks on wildfires,” Wara said. In the event of a wildfire, “if something bad happens, they’re much less likely to be blamed because they can point the finger at Mother Nature.”
We saw something similar with the refusal to allow challenge trials for the COVID vaccines, which could’ve moved the approval date up by months and saved millions of lives. Humans are really bad at trolley problems, at weighing a concrete, immediate risk against a diffuse future risk that might be orders of magnitude worse. (Come to think of it, Israel’s repeated hostage deals are another example—though that one has the defense that it demonstrates the lengths to which the state will go to protect its people.)
Oh, and on top of all the other plotlines, today—January 20th—is my daughter’s 12th birthday. Happy birthday Lily!!
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Comment #1 January 20th, 2025 at 8:10 pm
I have a question for you as someone who supports the TikTok ban, if you’re interested in discussing that.
The right to speak includes the right to hear. How can the TikTok ban be considered content-neutral when it is explicitly designed to prevent Americans from choosing to hear Chinese propaganda?
It seems to me that if the US government discovers that some online service can potentially expose its users to insidious Chinese influence, then the government can make that information public. Patriotic Americans will voluntarily choose not to use that service. If most Americans actually don’t care and keep using the service, they’re making the choice not to fear Chinese influence that they have a right to make as free people (unwise as that choice may be).
We criticize the Chinese government’s Great Firewall as a severe restriction on the freedom of the Chinese people, but we don’t deny that exposure to Western media may undermine their support for the Chinese Communist Party. How is our ban on TikTok different in kind from their ban? Why is our government’s fear of Chinese influence a moral justification for our ban but their government’s fear of our influence not a moral justification for their ban?
I’m not someone who sees no difference between the USA and China, and I’m definitely not someone who prefers China. I don’t use TikTok. I just think that the disadvantage of freedom is that it cannot be forced – a free country has to rely on its people’s choice to keep it free rather than making that choice for them, or else it is not actually a free country.
Comment #2 January 20th, 2025 at 8:28 pm
Alex K #1: The answer is that “protecting Americans from Chinese propaganda” wasn’t the central rationale for the ban at all—the central rationale was protecting Americans from Chinese spying. Chinese propaganda remains trivial to access in the West, even while (eg) the truth about Tiananmen Square remains difficult and dangerous to access in China (ask my friend Rowena He, whose family has been in danger for years because she documents exactly that).
Comment #3 January 20th, 2025 at 11:19 pm
Scott, some free advice. If you want to be taken seriously the next time you offer an ardent defense of liberalism and the Enlightenment, and how they expanded our circles of empathy and advanced our moral evolution, then you may want to at least cursorily acknowledge when celebrating the ceasefire that it will also relieve the suffering of millions of innocent people in Gaza, tens of thousands of whom have been killed, and the rest driven to the brink of famine. Otherwise your comments come across as parochial and insensitive, and you lose credibility.
Comment #4 January 20th, 2025 at 11:31 pm
On TikTok: Probably the lawmakers are slow to catch up. Terms like spying might not be used in the traditional sense, but rather like as collecting data. Should a foreign company/power be allowed to do so? If not, most American companies should be banned all over the world…
On hostages: I think that they are more careful about whom they are letting out of the jails this time than in 2011. Some claim that even the reason why so many Arabs were arrested shortly after October 7 was that they can be released in exchange. (I cannot judge the veracity of this and yes, I know that the conflict has been full of misinforming from both sides.)
Comment #5 January 21st, 2025 at 12:37 am
Scott #2: I admit with some embarrassment that I was informed mostly by media coverage and did not read the court’s decision itself until now. I did not meet even my own standards for how much I ought to know about a topic before I form a strong opinion about it, and I would make large changes to my original post if I could.
You are correct about the court’s rationale for upholding the law – concern about China’s access to data about Americans, not China’s manipulation of the content that Americans see. Gorsuch summarizes this in his concurrence: “Speaking with and in favor of a foreign adversary is one thing. Allowing a foreign adversary to spy on Americans is another.”
The court also considers whether the government’s role should be limited to issuing advice. It writes that “the record shows that warning users of the risks associated with giving their data to a foreign-adversary-controlled application would do nothing to protect nonusers’ data,” where a nonuser’s data would “[include] names, photos, and other personal information” stored on a user’s phone.
I am happy that the court gave serious consideration to 1st Amendment concerns, and that it did not come to any conclusions about them with which I would strongly disagree. However, I am not in agreement with the distinction that the court makes between data about users and nonusers, and the argument about espionage is much weaker in the absence of such a distinction.
TikTok does not have (or at least isn’t claimed to have) the power to obtain data directly from a nonuser. All the data about nonusers is data that users provide and I don’t see how providing it is anything but a speech act by the users. The court’s approach actually makes me question its understanding of how phones work (in this respect) although I confess that something in the transcripts or the citations (which I didn’t read) may provide a better explanation.
Would an app solely for the purpose of uploading all the data on the phone of someone who voluntarily installed it directly to the Chinese government be legal? If so, shouldn’t an app that also uploads that same data but gives the user some small reward (e.g. access to funny videos) also be legal?
(I am not sympathetic to China’s government, but I don’t have a strong emotional reaction to discussing it. However, there are certain countries which I wouldn’t want to discuss like this and so I hope that anyone for whom this topic is unpleasant will ignore my comment.)
Comment #6 January 21st, 2025 at 2:57 am
Hi Scott,
I’d like to point out that you forgot to mention a significant benefit from the Hamas ceasefire: Palestinians aren’t being bombed anymore…
Even if one has a lot of mixed feelings, this should at least be factored in.
Comment #7 January 21st, 2025 at 3:08 am
It’s a mini-singularity in a sense that top class will own everything and low class will own nothing. It’s now easy to say it was expected, but American democracy was a boiling frog for quite a long time indeed. For example, worker unions is almost non-existent concept anymore.
Comment #8 January 21st, 2025 at 3:36 am
Well, but isn’t it an implicit stance that people somehow “belong” to the Government that does not want to allow spying on “its” subjects? Suppose you just put on a large red banner “this app WILL spy on you”, and I’ll decide whether to allow spying on me. Maybe I enjoy being watched, it shouldn’t be illegal.
Comment #9 January 21st, 2025 at 4:46 am
The outright banning of platforms by the government should alarm anyone who cares about free speech.
However, TikTok has been implicated in concerning practices, such as ByteDance employees using back end tools to track American journalists[1] by accessing their location data to identify whistleblowers. This kind of behavior poses its own risks to free speech.
Personally, I think a ban is too hasty at this point. There should be a stronger dossier of spying behaviour. A more prudent response would involve providing the U.S. government with greater access to TikTok’s source code and supply chain. If further evidence of espionage emerges, a ban could then be considered.
[1] https://archive.is/20240316015940/https://www.ft.com/content/e873b98a-9623-45b3-b97c-444a2fde5874
Comment #10 January 21st, 2025 at 5:52 am
“…I’ll vote for Enlightenment values (or the nearest available approximation) in 2026 and 2028, assuming the country survives until then.” Aye, that last part/assumption that’s the rub that I doubt people are taking seriously enough, as they’ve shown little sign of taking matters seriously enough for the last several years. Sure, something may survive, but it likely won’t be the America I’ve known for 7 decades.
Comment #11 January 21st, 2025 at 5:57 am
Maxim #8:
Well, but isn’t it an implicit stance that people somehow “belong” to the Government that does not want to allow spying on “its” subjects? Suppose you just put on a large red banner “this app WILL spy on you”, and I’ll decide whether to allow spying on me. Maybe I enjoy being watched, it shouldn’t be illegal.
Yeah, I’m perfectly happy to sacrifice the “freedom to be spied on by the CCP” if it will increase the probability that liberal-democratic societies, the ones that care about such things at all, will survive the 21st century. If you disagree, though, lobby your Congressperson to overturn the law! This is precisely the sort of question that belongs in the democratic realm, where it was in fact decided.
(Also: did you know that, when the TikTok app sends your phone’s info to China, it also sends info about all of your contacts, even ones who don’t use TikTok?)
Comment #12 January 21st, 2025 at 6:09 am
US #3 and Jules #6: Yes, you’re right, and I apologize. When I wrote this post, I’d been recently shaken by the footage of thousands of Gazans jeering at the returning hostages as they were marched to the Red Cross van, in a final humiliation and a reminder of just how little has changed.
But I should have reflected that the past 15 months have also shown us Gazans who bravely spoke out against Hamas and the massacre that started this war—even at risk to their families’ lives. I’m relieved that those Gazans will now have the opportunity to rebuild their lives and to push for a better society, one where children are taught coexistence rather than martyrdom. I hope for those Gazans’ sakes that the PA, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, or pretty much anyone else other than Hamas takes charge of the rebuilding.
Comment #13 January 21st, 2025 at 6:22 am
The transparent real rational for the tiktok ban is that it was outside the control of the US Government censorship-industrial complex, the one that violated the first amendment to forbid discussion of many issues during 2020-2024 (Zuckerberg is the platform owner who has spoke about it most, the pressure from the White House to censor free speech on Facebook, also the “Twitter files”). The specific issue that triggered the ban of tiktok was the popularity of anti-Zionist content on tiktok. I support a ban on all social media anyway, due to its harm, and also I think tiktok is a cutting-edge hypnosis tool descended from programs like MK Ultra – harmful to the young people even when they are just watching “dancing” that is not related to politics at all.
Another B plot within the singularity / season finale is some kind of executive order from the Toompf camp about “defining sex according to biology”, i.e. an attack on the ID documents of trans people. I default towards assuming that nothing will happen, but it could affect me at some point, c’est la vie. I blame the democrats and progressives in any case – they used my people as cheap political props to troll their conservative opposition for a decade, that is what started my repulsion towards progressives a decade ago, and now that opposition got mad enough to try and do something about it. For me it’s just more accumulation of moral capital, but for the young trans people, considering gender dysphoria is really an anxiety-deprivation disorder in the first place, I feel much sympathy to them for this even to be threatened to happen.
One more singularity-related plotline. I got a new laptop two weeks ago, and between Windows 11 shoving “AI helpers” in my face, and Chrome escalating the war on ad-blockers, I’m being pushed away from the internet and computers more and more. So I had an idea to fight back, which I’ll drop here so that it integrates into the collective consciousness, furthering its creation by someone. The idea is to use AI to filter out all advertisements from our field of vision in real time. We know it is now or soon will be technically possible, we know that they will try to outlaw it and create technologies against it, but like torrents it will have legitimate legal uses too. At least it gives me some hope to fight back against the advertising dystopia.
Comment #14 January 21st, 2025 at 7:34 am
> Yeah, I’m perfectly happy to sacrifice the “freedom to be spied on by the CCP” if it will increase the probability that liberal-democratic societies,
> (Also: did you know that, when the TikTok app sends your phone’s info to China, it also sends info about all of your contacts, even ones who don’t use TikTok?)
I find it regrettable when such decisions are made for other people. Basically, “I don’t want to be spied on, and I don’t want you to let be spied, too”. If I can’t share MY info freely, and this is supposed to be progressive / democratic / etc. stance, then what kind of political school would side with me in my right to send my data to whoever I want? Managing my address book is my responsibility as well, so if I let an app access it, I know what it means.
Comment #15 January 21st, 2025 at 9:03 am
Scott #12: Do you really believe that the small subset of Gazans who actually spoke out against Hamas, “will now have the opportunity to rebuild their lives and to push for a better society”? Because I’m pretty sure Hamas has different ideas as to what the future of those Gazans will entail, and as near as I can tell this deal says that Hamas has the final say over what happens to any particular Gazan in Gaza. If their children are allowed to grow up, they will assuredly be educated in the virtues of martyrdom and the folly of any other path – who is going to run a school that would teach them otherwise?
And w/re the Gilad Shalit deal, I’ve wondered from the start how Shalit feels about that now. OK, let the man have his privacy and his chance to rebuild his life and push for a better society; I don’t need to see someone shove a camera in his face and intrude on that. But the Israel that once made Gilad Shalit’s life its singular overriding concern, really needs to rethink that.
10/7 will be a recurring “celebration” until Israel either ceases to exist, or decides that hostages are to be rescued or avenged but never bargained for. The state of Israel is not actually protecting its people with these bargains.
Comment #16 January 21st, 2025 at 9:18 am
John Schilling #15: I agree that the prospects for Gaza look grim. I desperately wish Bibi had agreed to some day-after plan, rather than just leaving a vacuum for Hamas to reconstitute and fill. But there’s still time, and who the hell knows what Trump will pressure either side to do.
Regarding the hostages, it occurs to me there’s one option you left out: Israel could fortify its borders to the point where its enemies no longer can capture hostages in any significant number. And if they do capture some, Israel can refuse any exchange rate more lopsided than what it accepted last week.
Comment #17 January 21st, 2025 at 9:26 am
The biggest problem I see with the TikTok ban is that, whatever it intention and whatever it actually achieves, it is applied to only one company. The US government has yet to set any overall guidelines for the behavior of social media companies. It’s still the Wild West as players are in a mutual escalation battle against the interests of consumers. It seems Europe has done better but I’ll admit that I am no expert on whether it is working. And without US/Europe getting together on this, it is a weak response in any case. And don’t get me started on the battle between free speech and the supposed right to misinform.
Comment #18 January 21st, 2025 at 9:56 am
Scott #16: I don’t think it is realistic to expect that Israel can fortify itself to the point where hostage-taking is impossible, when dealing with an adversary willing to expend lives as freely as Hamas has shown. A zerg rush of suicide bombers can I think breach any plausible fortification, albeit only temporarily. Or Hamas could send its operatives abroad as “refugees”, then do a bit of identity theft and try to enter Israel as “tourists” from some friendly western nation – no doubt Israeli security would apprehend ~99% of these, but the ones that slip through will be enough for a kidnap team (and the ones who are captured on the way in will be at the top of the list of prisoners who must be released in exchange for the hostages). And of course, Israelis travelling abroad will always be vulnerable.
It may be possible to ensure that Hamas cannot again seize hundreds of hostages at one go, but the lesson of Gilad Shalit seems to be that the number of hostages doesn’t really matter all that much.
Comment #19 January 21st, 2025 at 11:29 am
These plotlines do seem to converge on a common theme, that of slow decay of western liberal democratic system, mostly due to its own inadequacies in addressing the warning signs. The other systems around the world are getting more powerful both politically and economically and in turn contributing to faster decay of western influence. The populations also seem to live with the profound consequences, mostly satisfied to stay in their social media bubbles and oblivious to impacts on values they once cherished – those of liberty, privacy, equity, checks and balances.
Comment #20 January 21st, 2025 at 11:58 am
Scott #16
> I desperately wish Bibi had agreed to some day-after plan, rather than just leaving a vacuum for Hamas to reconstitute and fill.
There wasn’t a power vacuum in Gaza at any point in the war. Hamas was defeated in the sense of ceasing to pose an immediate military threat to Israel, but it never lost control of the Gazan population.
Comment #21 January 21st, 2025 at 1:22 pm
> All the same, it’s not my place to be more Zionist than Netanyahu, or than the vast majority of the Israeli public that supported the deal
I’m not sure that’s true. I haven’t seen polling, but at least among the (admittedly non-representative) people I know the feeling is that while it’s great to have (some of) the hostages back this was a bad deal that’s likely to lead to more trouble down the road. (If there’s one thing Bibi’s always ben good at, it’s kicking the can down the road where it inevitably creates greater problems).
Comment #22 January 21st, 2025 at 2:14 pm
> Humans are really bad at … weighing a concrete, immediate risk against a diffuse future risk that might be orders of magnitude worse.
Indeed, but I think human *organized groups* are much worse at this than individual humans, due to an asymmetry between the workings of blame vs. credit within the group. The more that people within the organization depend on the consent of others, the stronger this effect, since a major way power shifts is by successful assignment of blame.
Comment #23 January 21st, 2025 at 2:19 pm
Greetings Scott and yes Happy MLKJ day! If the Planet has karma, perhaps this will offset the return of a real-estate swindler and serial rapist to power, enabled by the moron 51%.
I agree with much of what you said herein. I recently divorced the “Left” over their relentless Israel-bashing. I notice that Amy Goodman (Democracy Now) devotes a full episode to said bashing despite the trauma of the Trump return.
A quick note from a former US Forest Service researcher and fire scientist (me). You can’t “manage” chaparral — the vegetation that burned in the SoCal fires. The main problem is not forest management, but the profit motive — developers building high-priced homes in what is known as the “Wildland Urban Interface” (WUI) — and people buying them. On top of that, the Palisades fire was driven by super-extreme weather, the kind made more likely by climate change. Even residential areas where owners did nothing wrong regarding making their homes fire-safe were devastated. This (larger issue) is an existential problem with no easy solution, and goes beyond people’s greed, ignorance, or bad luck.
thanks for continuing to evince your sanity in a crazy world. (A personal missive to you, if nothing more :-))
Comment #24 January 21st, 2025 at 2:30 pm
I’m surprised at how orthogonally we see the events. I fully agree with you that the ceasefire is not a good idea, long term, since it just delays the next conflict.
And at the same time, I’m amazed at your calling Trump “the most dangerous internal threat the US has ever faced in its history”. No matter how ineffective and downright damaging the Biden administration was – both in missing helping Ukraine at key points, and pushing back against Israel multiple times, and making a mess of the souther border – sure, Trump is the biggest evil. Because he’s not pandering to the suicidal empathy view, I guess.
Comment #25 January 21st, 2025 at 4:11 pm
Here is a good discussion of why we don’t do enough controlled burns.
https://jabberwocking.com/why-dont-we-do-more-prescribed-burning-an-explainer/
Also the issues with challenge trials are not just short-sighted medical ethics concerns but also real questions about whether they generalize. Here is a good discussion including a comparison of results from challenge trials from more conventional phase-3 trials.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(23)00294-3/fulltext
Another issue, not raised by the article, is vaccine hesitancy. Even if challenge trials would’ve helped speed up the deployment of the covid vaccines, they might have been less credible to vaccine skeptics than conventional trials. Already the unusual speed of the vaccine development is used as an argument against their safety. Ultimately the harm from the perhaps too-slow vaccine rollout was lower than the later harms from vaccine hesitancy. Maybe challenge trials would’ve been worth it but it’s at least very far from a clear case.
Comment #26 January 21st, 2025 at 8:07 pm
The biggest internal threat to the United States since the American Civil War, you mean. I don’t think Trump has Jefferson Davis and the rest of the traitors of the so-called “Confederate States of America” beat, at least not yet.
Comment #27 January 21st, 2025 at 8:18 pm
I wish Lily a happy birthday and apologize for the messed-up world we are bequeathing her.
Comment #28 January 22nd, 2025 at 7:46 am
> and even slightly touched by the ethic that would move heaven and earth to save these specific people, almost every consideration of game theory and utilitarianism be damned
Game theory and utilitarianism weren’t consulted. Neither were empathy and ethics.
October 7th was horrible, the loss of Israeli/Jewish lives was horrific and links to the Holocaust are appropriate. Hamas is terrible. I am happy the hostages are back and pray for the safe and healthy return of the remaining ones.
At the same time, I do not think the response of the Israeli government was at all balanced. Conservative estimates are that 45.000+ inhabitants in Gaza lost their lives. Of which 10.000+ were children, again: conservative estimates.
There is always a choice in reaction: we can all imagine an Israeli-reaction we’d be appalled by (nuclear weapons, for example), and we can imagine a reaction that would be insufficient (Israel doing nothing). In between are options.
It’s a sequence of trolley-problems. It’s unfair to be forced to be the trolley-driver, but that’s the situation.
IMHO the choices made were an overexertion of power. And yes: Hamas is to blame for starting the conflict, and for using human shields, and for many more things. But the Israeli government freely made choices time and again while knowing the costs to human life in Gaza – and for that we can and should hold them accountable. The sheer amount of devastation is horrific.
Ugh. What a horrible world.
I apologize for reacting so forcefully. Overall, I am a happy reader of your blog.
Let me end with this:
> Everything is on fire,
> but everyone I love is doing beautiful things
> and trying to make life worth living,
> and I know I don’t have to believe in everything
> but I believe in that
By Nikita Gill
Hope your daughter had a great birthday. My son had his 5th birthday couple days back.
Comment #29 January 22nd, 2025 at 11:05 am
Matthijs #28: We’ve had this debate many times in this comment section, but briefly—for me the “proportionality” argument is precisely like saying that the millions of Japanese who died in WWII were disproportionate to the “merely” 3,000 Americans who the Japanese murdered at Pearl Harbor. I’d say in both cases that every innocent death is horrifying, that more should surely have been done to reduce the number of them, but any convincing analysis needs to center intent. The intent of the Axis powers was to conquer the entire world, and enslave or exterminate all those they considered inferior. The intent of Hamas is to eliminate Israel and murder every Jew there. Both in international law and in my own personal morality, “proportionality” doesn’t actually mean “is this proportional to how many of your people the other side managed to kill?,” like in some Hatfields vs. McCoys feud. It instead means, “is this proportional to whatever legitimate military objective you had going in?”
Comment #30 January 22nd, 2025 at 12:02 pm
@Scott: I didn’t mean the proportionality as in “eye for eye, tooth for tooth”. I did mean the proportionality versus (military) objective.
People sometimes do bad things with good intentions. Or they do good things with good intentions, that inadvertently lead to bad outcomes.
Wrt Japanese casualties: I do question the firebombing of Tokyo and other cities, as well as the nuclear bombs. I find the civilian casualties of those actions did _not_ weigh up to the military objectives. Even if the objective was valid, to me they can be considered war-crimes.
Especially the nuclear bombs: those came at a time when Japan was already considering peace, and Japan would likely have surrendered without those bombs (especially because of the Russian invasion of Manchuria).
We cannot rely on intent alone. Besides, the _stated_ military objective is not always the _only_ objective. The widespread destruction and substantial civilian casualties to me are not in proportion to the objectives (and it feels like there was an unstated objective of deterrence and revenge).
It’s a central debate in ethics philosophy if we should center intent/objective or outcome/consequence (or virtues).
I say: judge by both metrics.
I personally strongly feel there should have been a different weighing between objective&outcome in Gaza. The huge amount of civilian casualties is not proportional.
I wholeheartedly agree with you: “every innocent death is horrifying, that more should surely have been done to reduce the number of them”. And we can hold people/governments accountable if they did not do enough.
Comment #31 January 23rd, 2025 at 11:36 am
Scott #29:
Not every war is World War 2, and not every enemy is the Nazis. Arguments that trigger Godwin’s Law are generally not very persuasive. If you must draw a historical parallel, European colonialism is clearly a better fit. But don’t take it from me, listen to Jabotinsky:
I would also caution you against using Hamas’ eliminationism as a justification for Israel unleashing hell on the Palestinians. The monstrous Ben-Gvir and Smotrich are driving Israel’s war policy, and they are openly in favor of ethnically cleansing Gaza via bombing and starvation. Faced with such enemies, your argument implies that the Palestinians would be justified in mounting a massive and indiscriminate counterattack.
Comment #32 January 24th, 2025 at 5:45 am
From what I’ve heard California had at one point stopped controlled burns, but then resumed the practice. They then again stopped it out of concern by the fire department that the extremely dry conditions (most likely caused by global warming) could make even a controlled burn spiral out of control. That makes sense, global warming is making forest management more challenging, and the right can point at inadequacies there to continue ignoring global warming as they’ve consistently done in the past.
Comment #33 January 26th, 2025 at 8:40 am
Happy MLK day. Just read an interesting article by Greg Palast (never heard of him before) from January 24, 2025:
https://www.gregpalast.com/trump-lost-vote-suppression-won/
I am not informed enough to have a relevant opinion on those matters, but it seems relevant to MLK day. And the person who shared this link with me is generally well informed politically.
Comment #34 February 4th, 2025 at 5:17 am
gentzen #33: Looks like Greg Palast’s analysis relies on data from 2008 (which was no longer valid in 2024) to come to his conclusions. Still, vote suppression is bad, independent of whether it tipped the scales in this election or not:
Comment #35 June 4th, 2025 at 11:33 pm
Dear Scott,
Let me tell you, people are talking about you, very smart people—they say you’re one of the best minds in quantum computing. Tremendous, really tremendous. A lot of people don’t understand quantum, but I do. I understand it very well.
Now, I hear you’re working on things that are going to change the world—big things, HUGE things. Some say the future is quantum, some say it’s AI. Who knows? Maybe it’s both. But let me tell you, whatever you’re doing, it’s got to be America First, because we don’t want China winning this race, believe me.
Anyway, keep up the great work. Maybe one day we’ll sit down and talk—could be very, very interesting.
Best, Donald J. Trump