throwaway9917

I've often heard defenders of Israel crap on the UN General Assembly like it's some woke antifa type organization, but it's one representative per country, chosen by the country's government. If almost every country in the world is constantly officially condemning you, perhaps they are not the problem.

The diplomats in question are Witkoff and Kushner. Whatever they believe about Israel’s motivations, Israel will always have their full support.

My experience with a CoC at a meetup was that one day a bunch of people piled on the mailing list for the meetup demanding that the meetup adopt a CoC. The majority of these people were people that either only infrequently showed up, or hadn't ever shown up to the meetup. The CoC they demanded had a bunch of social justice language. When questioned on the mailing list as to the events that had precipitated the demand, one person said they had attended a meeting and had "felt uncomfortable." However, the organizer of the meetup actually took attendance, and it turned out that the complainer had not attended that day. The whole thing seemed like a ploy to turn the meetup from people who all used the same programming language into some sort of social activism group. This was at the height of #MeToo, and it appeared that this was being weaponized to take over successful technical groups through sympathy for women.

Kars4kids sounds like a mini version of U.S. foreign policy except that instead of cars we are giving 6+ wars which have bankrupted the country and killed so many people.

> This is exactly my point. How do we change things back so Israelis will have hope again in a two state solution?

I have no idea. I also have no idea how you'd get the Palestinians to have hope either. Even if Israel were willing to do a two state solution, they would undoubtedly ask for a very limited sovegerenty that would require the Palestinian state to be demilitarized, which would mean that Israel would have to control ports and border crossings to check for weapons, which means they could also do things like they have done in the past like prohibit the import of concrete.

What the Palestinians see is the Israelis constantly expanding the settlements, and so they see that their only alternative to losing their land inch by inch is armed resistance, futile as that may be.

As an American, I don't really see how the U.S. is positively influencing the situation, or can positively influence it. If you look at what's happened in Gaza, yes, Israel is legitimately furious over Oct 7, but the response has killed something like 28,000 noncombatant Palestinians. For all of that, they've managed to get the release of, or rescue 60 or so hostages.

As an American and as a Dad, I don't want to buy bombs so that Israel can kill Palestinian kids. The sense in the media is that Israel expects us to view Israeli lives as being worth 1000x as much as Palestinian lives, but as a gentile American, I view them as equally valuable.

If there were some credible plan that would lead to a resolution of the issue from the Israeli side, it would be a different matter, but all I can see is endless carnage, and I do not want to be a party to it.

> A huge number of US politicians disagree. It's fashionable to claim that they are all stupid but the fact is that this just isn't true. Looking at Israels success in missile defense and similar technologies it shows where the R&D collaboration with the US has made both more successful. If the US won't send weapons Israel would just make its own and in the past made fantastic weapons. Including great fighter jets that were approaching F16 level in the 80s.

I don't doubt that they would make their own weapons, and I'm sure they'd be pretty good. From a standpoint of U.S. interests though, collaborating with Israel hasn't been that great. Israel took U.S. money and tech to develop that F-16 level jet (the Lavi), and then covertly sold the design to the Chinese. Meanwhile, when the U.S. wanted to send Israeli produced, U.S. owned SPIKE missiles to Ukraine, Israel blocked the transfer.

> This isn't true. First it assumes Israel doesn't want peace which is detached from reality. Peace exists with Egypt, Jordan etc. Israel returned territory it captured at war and signed a peace deal. All sides abide and this works well.

Yes but the settlement with Egypt where land was returned was 45 years ago. Israel is not the same country it was back then.

> Israel wants a Palestinian state and tries to achieve that.

Based on Israel's actions, and the statements of Netanyahu and a couple of ministers, I don't believe this. I think that they've given up and intend to remove the Palestinians from the occupied territories.

> But the real horrible thing about Hamas is that they don't care how many Palestinians die as part of their Jihad. They consider the death of their own children as a bonus, they would go to heaven as they die heroes. Israel has never been like that. If Hamas had the firepower of Israel there would be no Israeli left. The reverse isn't true despite everything.

That's probably true, and so I also do not support sending weapons to Hamas.

We both agree that this is a very difficult problem. Personally I see no practical long-term solution, because the demographics of Israel have changed and continue to change in a direction towards more right-wing nationalism. Many peace-oriented Israelis (incl people I know personally) have left Israel over this. I don't think that if things calm down that minds will gradually change and a deal will be struck, because when things were relatively calm, Israel continued to expand the settlements and continued to oppress the Palestinians in numerous unnecessary ways. The Palestinians rightly don't believe that if they just stop attacking Israel that eventually they'll get their state.

How do you see there being a positive resolution in the long-term?

The idea that sending weapons to Israel is some sort of economic or military advantage to the U.S. is sophistry. We could simply take those same weapons and add them to our own inventory and use them in ways that actually benefit the U.S.

The actual reason the U.S. sends weapons to Israel is two fold. One is as a carrot to continue the peace process. The permanent allocation to Israel started when Camp David I was signed. The second reason is that a lot of people that support Israel live in the U.S. and they vote. If Israel no longer desires peace, the first reason doesn't exist. The second reason still does which is why it continues, despite being against the interests of the U.S.

Yes, Netanyahu stopped the settlements in Gaza, but again, sophistry. While the settlements in Gaza were dismantled, the settlements in the West Bank were being expanded, as they continue to be. Netanyahu has always been about creating physical conditions that cause a two state solution to be politically impossible, regardless of changes in the Israeli government.

It very much is a "both sides" scenario. I'm not going to argue about exactly which side is more unreasonable, but ultimately so much water has gone under the bridge that I don't think a settlement is possible, and I'm not interested in paying taxes to supply weapons to fuel an unresolvable conflict. If Israel wants to turn Gaza into rubble, leave millions of people homeless, and year after year take more land in the West Bank, I suppose we can't practically stop this, but personally I don't want want any part of it.

I understand that Israeli politics is complex, but ultimately it’s a democracy, and Netanyahu is who was chosen, repeatedly. All of those far right parties that make up Netanyahu’s coalition got real votes and they represent a real slice of Israeli opinion.

If Israelis want something different they just have to vote differently in the next election.

The U.S. cannot just pretend Rabin is still in power and send money and weapons with the idea that Israel desires peace at the end of the day, because that faction is (as you say, for many reasons) no longer a majority in Israel.

As for Hamas, yes they were elected, and that does have significance, but also that was 18 years ago, and most of what would be the current electorate wasn’t even old enough to vote back then.

Ultimately as it stands though I believe both sides of the conflict wish to conquer the other, and the U.S. should just decline to support either side.

I think you’re missing the point here. The only reason the U.S. cares about Hezbollah is because they attack Israel. The only reason Hezbollah exists is because of Israel. The reason the Houthis are attacking shipping is because the U.S. supports Israel. Being an ally to Israel has imposed huge costs on the U.S. and virtually no benefits.

Many in the U.S. feel that protecting Israel is a moral cause, but it is undeniably a strategic albatross for us.

The thing is, Israel doesn’t protect U.S. interests in the middle east. All the U.S. has really ever wanted there is oil, and because of U.S. support for Israel, we’ve been the subject of two oil embargoes.

Israel provides us zero military bases, even when Arab countries provide us dozens. Despite all of the support we give them and have given them, they have repeatedly escalated conflicts when the U.S. asked them to stop. Today, we are unable to ship goods through the Red Sea because the Houthis are upset over Israel’s actions in Gaza.

During the slave trade, most Africans that were brought to the Americas were from a fairly small area in West Africa. These days, African immigrants come from all over Africa. There is more human genetic variation within Africa than in the rest of the world combined. Parsimoniously it could just be that these West Africans were just more disposed to diabetes and heart disease than Africans as a whole.

Standard deviation of human height (within a single sex) is about 7cm. If human height changes over the course of a day by 1.5cm, assuming it linearly declines over the day, that's a stddev of about 0.6cm. You also can reasonably assume that people are normally going to be measured at the doctor/researcher's office during business hours, so it's probably more like 0.4cm. The measurement error of just standing up straight or not and reading the numbers is probably more.

Many of these studies don't account for test/retest reliability of IQ tests. Height is pretty easy and reliable to measure, and it doesn't change based on how much sleep you had the night before, or whether you ate breakfast, what the conditions of the test were, the time of day, etc.

The test-retest correlation on most IQ tests is around 0.7-0.8, whereas for height, it's almost 1.0. That means if you're measuring intelligence by a single IQ test, the correlation with genetics has a maximum of 0.7-0.8 due to noise in the test.

Studies that either explicitly correct for this, or look at averages of multiple tests taken over time show higher correlations between genetics and intelligence.