testfactor @ testfactor @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

Eh, I figured it'd happen when I posted. I don't really worry about it much.

I had a genuine question I was curious to get opinions on, and figured hearing what other people thought was worth loosing some meaningless Internet points, lol.

I don't really disagree with anything you said, though I think it's a pretty loose interpretation of the literal words on the protest sign, which was the crux of my question.

Though, I do agree that a protest sign has limited real estate, and there's certainly an interpretation where the sign was more going for "vibes" than any attempt to be read literally.

I will say that, while I agree that Israel hasn't exactly been champing at the bit for a two state solution, I don't know that all the blame falls on them there.

As late as 2017 the position of Hamas was, "we will accept the 1967 borders, so long as we don't have to recognize the state of Israel as existing and we retain the right to take over all of the Israel portion as well at some later date." https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/5/2/hamas-accepts-palestinian-state-with-1967-borders

There's also the question as to whether any deal made with Hamas has much weight, as it's not the only leadership structure amongst the Palestinians. Fatah still has significant pull, and have largely been sidelined by Hamas. So any agreement made might not even mean anything, as a lot of Palestine don't align with the group you're negotiating with.

Mostly I say all that to say, the position is more complicated than just "Israel are being a bunch of dicks." Negotiating to any kind of peace is going to be a hugely uphill battle, even if the Israeli government was suddenly super invested in coming to a compromise. There is no clear solution to the problem.

I would consider the black population of South Africa liberated, absolutely. I'm iffier on saying that "South Africa" was liberated. But that's not a bad point at all.

But I think the thing that muddies this for me though is the use of "Palestine" instead of "the Palestinians." The issue is that there's a meaningful distinction between the two in the cultural zeitgeist, and they aren't therefore as interchangeable as "South Africa" in your above example.

But overall I don't hate that explanation/comparison. It works enough that I can reasonably interpret the person's intent with the sign through that lens. Thanks.

I do disagree with your second point though. A protest is, first an foremost, an exercise in messaging. The idea that the messaging doesn't matter is tantamount to saying the protest doesn't matter. I agree that this particular quibble is comparatively small, but I think nothing is more uncompelling than a protest that conveys "we don't know what we want, and we're mad as hell about it."

This is certainly just an opinion, but I think for a protest to be effective, it needs a fairly concrete set of goals, with well defined expected outcomes. Without that, the people you are protesting against have absolutely no incentive to change.

It's the Chick-fil-A problem to some degree. Exactly what steps does that franchise need to take to get people to stop boycotting? They took a lot of action in the wake of the bad publicity, and it made no difference to those who were boycotting it. (This isn't a defense of Chick-fil-A btw. Just an observation about the boycott.)

This is in direct contrast to something like a workers strike, where work is stopped until a concrete list of demands is met, and then people resume work. They act as a cohesive unit, and there are a concrete set of things that the target can do to make it stop.

And to be clear, I think that the student protests going on do have well defined goals. Get University money out of programs that support the state of Israel. I think the messaging was good on that front, at least at first.

Where it falls apart for me, and maybe this is just biased media coverage, but it feels like half the protestors don't know that that's the goal, as opposed to just general opposition the genocide. And that's why I think messaging is important, and needs to be policed, to keep the messaging clear. Anything other than that absolutely hurts your movement.

I agree with everything you said being the goal of the protests, but that wasn't my question.

My question was, "is this particular protest sign arguing for the abolition of the state of Israel?"

The sign seems to be advocating for things beyond what are listed in your post, which is why I asked the question.

Maybe I'm reading into the verbiage too much, but I have trouble coming up with an interpretation of "liberate Palestine" that is both a coherent and doesn't involve the dissolution of the state of Israel.

Maybe it's just going for vibes, and there wasn't much thought behind the choice of words, but it's the actual choice of words that threw me off.

I don't think that's what I'm implying though. I'm all for signs that say "end the genocide" or "equality for Palestinians."

I think my question is, does the sign in the thumbnail imply that the state of Israel can't exist without genocide?

I think it absolutely can, and that's why I was questioning the message on the sign, as it seems to oppose what you claim most of the protestors want.

Genuine question. The sign in the thumbnail says, "We want Palestine to be liberated." What does that mean?

Is it advocating for the dissolution of the state of Israel? Like, "liberated" implies the removal of an occupier, no?

It can't just mean "stop the murders," right? Like, if that's the case it was say to liberate the "Palestinians," not "Palestine" right?

I just ask because I feel like the messaging on this is a bit all over the place at times, and calls for the abolishment of the state of Israel seem a bit extreme to me, and I'm trying to figure out if that's the actual stance people are taking.

The other guy is probably being a bit over the top, but your initial comment was kinda anti-Semitic, no?

Like, if I was reading a comment thread about black people and responded, "but is it as funny as eating fried chicken and watermelon," I don't think someone would be out of line saying, "are you asserting that all black people just eat fried chicken and watermelon?"

And then saying the thread isn't about them isn't exactly absolving the initial comment is it? The comment would still be racist, no?

Idk man, that guy got disproportionately hot about it I think, but your initial comment was a bit rough too, right?

Pennsylvania. This happened in Pennsylvania.

Took me a not inconsiderable amount of time to validate that.

Figured I'd post it in case others wondered what state this was in. It just keeps using the county name.

Not sure why this is getting down voted? Like, we can agree that genocide and antisemitism are both bad at the same time, right?

Like, just because Israel's actions against Palestine are evil, does that necessarily require someone to embrace the Holocaust? Clearly not, right?

And I realize that Zionist =/= Jewish, but it's dancing a fine line, no? At the very least it's a call to violence against a Jewish adjacent group that I think feels pretty deeply uncomfortable.

Maybe I'm alone in that though. :/

Just out of curiosity, are you vegetarian/vegan?

Nah, it's the 5th Amendment. The right against self incrimination. You can't be forced to testify against yourself.

Basically, I can't put you on the stand in the court room and be like, "did you do it?"

You're always aloud to just stay silent and make the prosecution have to prove their case without your help.

But they are allowed to search you physically and take any physical things they want as evidence, be it a ring of keys or your fingerprint.

I feel like this has always been the case? There's not a lot of precedence to be sure, but people have been operating under that assumption for a long time.

That's why, if you need to keep the cops from looking in your phone, you should use a password. Can't be compelled to give a password.

The classic example is a safe. There's tons of court precedence that you can be compelled to give the cops a physical key to unlock it if there is one, but you can't be compelled to tell them the combo if it's a dial lock.

I think the issue with this interpretation is the word "inherently" in the original post. It implies there is some intrinsic value to the art that makes it political.

While it's true that all art can be interpreted politically, it's no more or less true than "all food can be interpreted politically" or "all cats can be interpreted politically." I can understand absolutely anything you want in a "political frame of reference."

When a definition is that broad, it becomes useless.

I don't think you understood my last apple analogy at all, but honestly, I'm not really emotionally invested in trying anymore.

I think our impasse at it's core is that we simply disagree on how much luck plays a factor in becoming a "X-ionaire."

You seem to think that the ones who did it are just the best of the best at being unethical businessmen. I look at the ranks of those who made it and I don't see genius Machiavellian strategic masterminds. I see people who capitalized on exactly the right idea at exactly the right time.

I can't pont to a Zuckerberg or a Gates or a Musk and say, "ah, this was the unethical strategy that got them to the top." I see that they were at the right place and time to fill a massive unfilled niche in society, and to beat everyone to the punch.

That's not skill. That's luck. That's not masterful strategy. Luck. It's not the inevitable outcome of their unethical business practices. It's dumb luck.

Are they unethical? Absolutely. Did that help along the way? To a degree, certainly.

But like, think about it like this. Did Bill Gates ruthlessly stomp on others people and companies to grow Microsoft to what it is today? Absolutely. But how many competitors were there in that space that he needed to stomp? Five? Six? That means that out of 8 trillion people on Earth, he was one of 5, maybe 6, that even had the opportunity to corner that market.

And why is that? Because life isn't perfect information, and opportunities aren't evenly spread.

To make one final pass at the apples example. In life, the apples aren't uniformly spread across the trees. You have to have the thought, "I bet there are some apples over in that part of the orchard," and then go look for them there. Sometimes there's a few. Sometimes there's a lot. Sometimes there's none. Not every area you search will be bursting with apples. Sometimes, very very very rarely, there's 200 billion apples in the area you go looking. And not everybody knows what's going on everywhere else in the orchard at all times. Sometimes you and 5 or 6 buddies stumble onto the same patch of 200 billion apples at the same time, and you fight to the death over them. Sometimes you leverage that big pile of apples you just got to force others to look for big apple patches for you. Sometimes you use the influence from your big pile of apples to change the apple finding rules in your favor. Or sometimes, you're a random dude who thinks, "man, I bet there's a bunch of apples over there," and you find them and pick them all on your own. At the end of the day, the people who have big piles of apples have them because at some point they either looked and found a motherload of apples, and beat out anyone else who saw it while they were picking, or someone who did gave them all their apples on their deathbed. And being unethical can help you kill off the people in your immediate vicinity who saw the same bunch of apples you did, but to even have that opportunity to crush your competition means that you were lotto winning lucky to even be in the race at the start.

Here's the the disconnect though. There are hundreds and hundreds of businesses that have done exactly the same things that Facebook did and went nowhere. Same strategies. Same exploitation. Same formula.

What makes Facebook different isn't that they did those things better. It's that they did them in the right place at the right time to corner the market.

I think there's a good analogy to the music industry. The most popular/famous/wealthy musicians aren't that way because they are more talented, or ruthless, or have the "winningest" music strategy. There are tens of thousands of other musicians who can play their songs as well or better than them, with more natural talent and willingness to murder for fame and wealth. So why are the famous people famous? Why are they household names while so many who are just as good if not better, with the same drive and strategy and goals, can't earn enough to put food on the table? It's luck. They won the popularity lottery by being in the right place at the right time to play to the right people that started the ball rolling.

And sure, ruthlessness and being unethical can help on that path, just as natural talent and determination can. But ultimately, at the scale we're talking about, they're negligible forces in the face of raw luck.

To use the apple picking example, what I'm saying is this. If you remove all "extraordinary" luck, and just see how well someone can do by being the meanest, most ruthless, crafty apple gatherer it is possible to be, the most they could end the day with is, let's say, 10 million apples. But we know that some people have 200 billion apples. So how do we reconcile that? The people with that many apples found an apple pile. That's the only way to get more than 10 million apples. And sure, maybe you actually found some other guy who found the pile and killed him to take the pile from him, or had some system by which you could trick people into pile hunting for you, so that you have better odds of finding the pile, but at the end of the day you have to find the pile to get more than 10 million apples. There is no other alternative. And yes, being unethical can greatly raise your odds of finding an apple pile, but anyone can find it. It's just very likely to be one of the unethical people.

But all this is, again, irrelevant to your original position, which was that there is some dollar amount X that you cannot get or keep without engaging in unethical behavior. Not that it's unlikely to get or keep, but that it is an actual impossibility. Do you still hold to that position in the face of the lottery example?

Of course billionaires can exist without having a winning strategy. Notch didn't set out to be a Billionaire. He just played infiniminer and thought it was cool, so he asked Zach Barth if he could make a spinoff. Facebook was started because Zuckerberg was trying to trick a chick into sleeping with him. These billionaires didn't have some Machiavellian scheme to become billionaires. They just made a thing that happened to dominate their respective industries. It happens when someone is first to market in a field that is prone to natural monopolies.

And of course money is a zero sum game. There's a limited amount of currency in circulation. That's true on it's face (ignoring government's creating more, etc.)

But I think the issue that we are actually disagreeing on is your claim that someone can't get more than X dollars by chance.
My counter to that is, "sure they can, by winning an X+1 dollar lottery." And I don't think you've made any sort of counter to that point other than, "yeah, but they couldn't keep it without being unethical," without ever providing a timeframe that you would consider sufficient to meet the definition of "keeping it."

The issue is that your example fails to be analogous in that no one has ever had a winning strategy to becoming a billionaire. If there was an implementable strategy that anyone could do if they were unethical enough, there would be a hell of a lot more than 3000 of them in the world.

The only way to become a big-apple-person in your example is to find the treasure trove. You aren't physically capable of beating people up quick enough to steal all their apples. No current billionaire strategized their way into that position. They all found the apple lotto pile. Sometimes that pile is called Minecraft, and sometimes it's called Amazon, but they all became billionaires by finding a giant pile of apples.

And absolutely not on any strategy that makes more than 2% overtaking you. If I have 200billion dollars, at 2%, and you have 1billion at 10%, it's gonna take you nearly half a century to even reach my starting balance. Yeah, sure, you'll overtake me eventually, but that's more likely to happen because I died than because you ended up making more money than me.

And this is once again you moving the goalposts. What does it mean to "maintain that level of wealth"? Stay the richest for 5 years? 10? 20? 100? Your whole life? What if I die the day after I got the money? Do I have to invent an immortality potion to ever be able to claim to have "maintained" it? If you are unwilling to define what you mean by that, I'll just be aiming for an ever expanding, nebulous, "that's not quite enough."

I think we've now both accused the other of Russel's teapot, lol. Your claim that it's impossible to ethically become a muliti-billionaire is equally unfalsifiable, at least feasibly. I don't feel like I'm claiming anything absurd here. If you won a lottery that made you the richest person on earth (that was in some way devoid of any of the ethics concerns of the normal lottery system), then you would have become the richest person ethically. Or, at least, without having exploited excess value of other people's labor.

This isn't a Russel's Teapot because I'm arguing for a logical construction, not a point of fact. I'm not saying that such a person exists and you can't prove they don't. I'm arguing that it's almost tautologically true that if those events could happen, then my position holds water. I'm only arguing that it's within the bounds of the possible.

As for maintaining the money in a way that's ethical, sure, why not. Just throw it into a savings account that earns 2%/yr. Split it among a ton of banks and credit unions to stay within the FDIC insurance limits where possible. If you have 200billion dollars, that's 4billion a year to live on. Seems pretty easy to maintain your wealth that way. Am I missing something there?

I don't know what you're driving at with the "slippery slope" statement? Do you think I'm advocating that we should all be held accountable for the crimes of every dollar we have ever had in our possession? Or are you trying to imply that I'm arguing for always taking money indiscriminately? Regardless, I think it's reaching pretty hard in either direction.

I mean, artistry is inherently popularity driven, and we can see how knock offs rarely impact the demand for the original.

Damn, how many Minecraft or Minecraft adjacent games have come out in the last 15yrs? Have any of them made any dent in it's sales?

Look, you've set up a motte and bailey here. If I point to any example that concretely exists in real life, like Minecraft, you'll just say that the "X" wealth value is too low. If I say a hypothetical that doesn't exist, you'll say it's an impossibility. You're effectively asking me to prove a negative here.

If you truly, in your wildest imagination, can't think of a single way, no matter how extremely and unbelievably unlikely, that someone could become the wealthiest person on earth without exploiting the labor of others, I'm happy to agree to disagree on the issue. But it seems like that's more a lack of imagination on your part than anything.

Hell, here's a simple one. Elon Musk decides to will his entire fortune to a random stranger drawn by lottery, you end up winning, and then he dies. Congrats, you're now the richest person on earth. Did you exploit someone's labor to get that money?
All money on earth has at some point belonged to someone who did, and I'm not culpable because the $20 bill in my wallet was once probably owned by Jeff Bezos (or, you know, someone who's dead and evil). Are you now responsible for every ill thing that Elon Musk has done because you won his death lottery? Did you commit some evil acts on your path to becoming the richest person on earth?

Yeah, the only thing I'd push back on is why I keep harping on that one point. I think that's been the whole cycle here. I've been saying, "I think X," which has been responded to with a "here's a more nuanced and detailed TUVWYZ," to which I respond with, "yeah, I agree with you on all those letters, but I'm specifically talking about X." And then the loop goes around again. I'm "continuing to push this one point" because it was the point I opened with and the only one that mattered for the purposes of the discussion at hand.

But, all that said, I'm not too worked up about it, and I agree this has gone on longer than it probably should have. Not everyone needs to agree on everything, and I think this issue, while a pet peeve of mine, is ultimately small in the grand scheme of things.

Hope your weekend has continued well, and I'll get back to enjoying mine as well. :)