Indeed. Do you disagree on what I said?

Israel was basically created by the West, in land that belonged entirely to Palestine. Then, decades later, with Western help, Israel had conquered half of that land, and the UN just decided to enshrine the borders at the time. Now, some more decades later, Israel has expanded way beyond those “compromise” borders, thanks to even more Western help.

There is no “internal conflict” that the West needs to help ending. It was always the West, seeking to create an allied enclave in someone else’s land. Or, to build on your metaphor, this is a fight between the adults and the only child who was there from the start, because they want their own kid to play there instead.

Palestine has attacked territory that was assigned to Palestine by the UN in 1947. The UN also makes it very clear that a country may lawfully recover occupied territory “by any means, including armed force”. UN laws are thus very clear: Ukraine and Palestine can recover territories by force. Now, that doesn’t mean you should support them in their struggle to do so, but if you don’t, it must be for some other reason (e.g., Israel taking over would constitute a huge strategic gain for the US, while Russia taking over would destabilize the world and thus benefit small or weakly aligned players).

The dozens of hard-hatted staffers who gravitated toward nearby street vendors couldn’t be told apart except for brightly hued safety vests that bore their employers’ names and official logos.

I wouldn’t have expected from Bloomberg a less disrespectful way to describe working-class people.

One way to see it is that if you tried to use a Linux filesystem on Windows, it would entirely refuse to read it. At least Linux can handle Window’s filesystems to a reasonable degree.

Why would you tell that to them? Schadenfreude? It’s just asshole behavior, and probably false even under your own definition (you should read up on medically defined biological sex, chromosomic vs genetic, gonadal vs apparent, also sex hormones and embryological development of primary sex characters), not to mention current definitions that are much more useful in practice. And even if you want to keep believing that trans people are just delusional and their ideas are completely false, think whether it would be fine for an atheist to laugh at someone whose only reason to keep going is God.

What you’re saying is that children should carry the responsibility for the acts of their ancestors.

No. I’m not saying that at all. I’m saying that people carry the responsibility to choose against unfairness if they have a choice. Whether the unfairness was created by your ancestors or someone else’s is irrelevant. If you are in an unfair position thanks to past unfair acts, and you can choose to let go of that position (or do some other action) to remove that unfairness from the world, then you should. Or, put otherwise, you don’t “deserve” that position, because it was attained unfairly.

Who’s the judge calculate the outstanding balance they both will naturally come to the conclusion that they’ve been unjustly treated

Well, I’m just stating that forgetting the past is not a good ethical standpoint. It is reasonable to believe it’s at least a practical one, and maybe it’s interesting to reason about the role it should have in lawmaking, resolving conflicts on a case-by-case basis, etc., but that is far from applicable in this case, or in general. I find no reason to use that simplification (which gives different outcomes) unless we’re in a situation where it’s become really difficult to reach consensus.

What if it turns out that your grand grandfather was a soldier who brought home some gold of dubious origins?

Then I would have the obligation to act according to it (return it, etc.). I would still have the right to get that wealth back, but then I would be forced to do something with it.

Anyway, I think I might be overexplaining and making it way more complicated than necessary. Everything I said can be summarized as follows: people have the right to not be affected by anything outside their control. Managing to provide that right is equivalent to effectively deleting the effects of every past and present unfair action. For example, if you properly redistribute wealth, then all of this family wealth robbery stuff simply fades away over time, as redistribution favors differences of recent origin and smooths out older variations.

Forcing people to be responsible for more than their immediate actions (e.g., also for guaranteeing other people’s rights, justice for everybody, etc.) is only concerned with what people should be expected to do. A cycle of violence is not any more justified than it would be in any other situation. For example, I can use violence to defend myself from immediate aggression; if I include an unjust status quo in my reasoning, then I might also use violence to free myself from the consequences of past violence, but that would not create a “cycle” wherein a stable, nonviolent state cannot be reached, since every “allowed” instance of violence would still only be associated one-to-one with an equivalent instance of “disallowed” violence.

I’ll give a more concrete example. If someone is trying to rob me, let’s suppose it is lawful to use threats to protect my personal property. Now, if my family’s wealth was robbed long ago, I would have a right to recover it, and whoever has it now would have an obligation to return it. If they refuse, then they are essentially under the same ethical case as if they were directly robbing it from me, so it would be lawful for me to threaten them too. If they escalate, that would be unethical, so it is simply impossible to justify any cycle of violence.

But those events have consequences for the living right now. If you’re in poverty while someone else is rich because their ancestors stole from yours, then the current situation is unfair. You could of course simply equate all past actions to a sort of “ambient” condition, presumably outside the realm of ethics, but that would not necessarily have the effect of negating them:

• Thinking in terms of rights, if you have the right to inherit (literally or effectively) wealth from the past, then that should be conditional to also inheriting any ethical considerations associated to that wealth.
• At any rate, there’s no reason to believe ethics doesn’t apply to ambient conditions. E.g., if I become seriously ill for reasons outside my control, society should compensate and take care of me. This comes naturally in the form of welfare, or partially as insurance.

Exactly. Every change to the world order has people in favor and against, and can have a multitude of effects deep into the future. If one carefully considers them, one can subjectively label some change as good, some as bad, a few violence justified, most condemnable. But setting some arbitrary point in history as the stop point is unsound from a justice standpoint.

Events are not isolated in time; past events make future events possible, while future events are determined by the past. If you condemn the events leading to the status quo, then it’s necessarily the case that you should not take the status quo as any sort of ethical baseline. That is, the current inhabitants of the island must not be exposed to war, and they will obviously decide their fate with their actions, but I don’t find a reason to believe that their government deserves any special status regarding the island.

You are wired to think that you currently exist and that you should keep doing that at all costs, but those beliefs cannot be explained or comprehended in terms of logic, so for all purposes they are false, and acknowledging that has been useful to me.

Anyway, if your existential crises are very short and intense, accompanied by intense fear and feelings of impending doom, feelings that you can’t breathe, then they probably have a physical component to them. It is very important that you understand the difference between regular intrusive thoughts of death and panic attacks that express themselves as feelings and thoughts of death that you might already have interiorized. The former can be managed, the latter cannot, and are usually self-reinforcing and need a combined therapy.

If you think you might be having the latter (I did for a couple of months), avoid alcohol for a while, and talk to a doctor; you may be advised to take a low dose short-acting anxiolytic drug whenever you feel like you’re going to have one (I started with 0.5 mg lorazepam sublingual, then switched to 0.25 mg).

Either they sent it there on purpose to provocate a respone, which would at least make some sense, or it malfunctioned, which also makes sense since the balloon did not send any communications during that time.

Edit: on further thought, I think if it had broken down, they could simply have reported it. It’s likely they sent a weather balloon on purpose, either to test the waters or create bad PR in the US.

I’m not performing any comparison. The US Air Force destroyed the Chinese balloon, then analyzed it, then destroyed three non-suspicious balloons. I understand the reasons why the Chinese balloon was suspicious, and I understand the reasons the other three balloons were not. Also, one of those three balloons (presumably the one from a research institution, but I could not find any source linking identified balloons with statements made prior about them) was of a comparable size to the Chinese balloon. My point is simply that the US never takes down its own balloons, and much less in such a short time, right after analyzing a balloon that they found suspicious. If you have a better hypothesis, I’ll be glad to hear it.

Since they already state they “suspect it was a spy balloon” and anyone would assume they would have performed such an analysis, them mentioning either that they performed it or that the analysis revealed it was a spy balloon would not reveal any otherwise secret information. But not mentioning either seems like an indication that the analysis was performed and did not reveal anything of use. Also, it does not explain why they destroyed three regular weather balloons right after the analysis.

The article repeatedly uses the adjectives “surveillance”, “spy” to refer to the balloon, even though there is no source confirming that was the device’s purpose, and notably it did not send any data home during its transit over the US. Forensic analysis only revealed meteorological equipment, antennas (which according to leaks were just regular communication antennas), basic steering devices and solar panels. Notably, no firmware analysis was mentioned, which would have easily confirmed its status as a surveillance balloon.

The other three balloons downed a week later were confirmed not to be spy balloons; the Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade claimed one, one research institution from the US (I don’t remember) claimed another. They were the kind of balloons that the Air Forces typically don’t take down, but apparently just decided to in a very short timeframe.

Maybe they initially feared it was a spy balloon, discovered in a few days it wasn’t, then tried to alleviate the diplomatic hit by destroying every other “unidentified” balloon in their airspace, Chinese or not. And the PR mitigation for the local population is here: the balloon must have been for surveillance. This is the only hypothesis that makes sense to me (edit: feel free to provide others or point out flaws in my reasoning).

Glycation, hyper-inflammation and mechanical distortion. It’s not exactly that you lose the ability to recover, your body simply patches injuries pretty effectively, which reqvires lots of mechanisms that we have evolved. Since the evolutionarily critical years are the teenage-early adulthood (little lost effort in childhood, little reproductive benefit later), those patching mechanisms are hyper-optimized for that time frame.

Don’t you guys also want to overthrow a government?

According to communist theory, our current liberal governments are not democratic, because capital exerts control over them by various means. Thus, overthrowing them is necessary. Of course, if we had a democratic government, we wouldn’t wish to overthrow it.

Tell that to the people in china.

If I’m not mistaken, there were extremely small-scale protests about COVID-19 measures and the government immediately listened and removed them.

If you like your government, you don’t want anyone to organize against it. And if many people think like you, a truly democratic government would act according to your desires and jail the agitators.

Or, put otherwise, if you use the democratic mechanisms in place, it’s all good. If you protest or demonstrate because you feel you aren’t heard by the government, that’ll usually have an effect. But if, deep inside, you want to overthrow the government, everyone will hate you and you’ll be jailed or worse.