Here's another meta-lesson: "woke" turns out to be broadly popular and is not actually going away.
Yes, many people *genuinely* give a fuck that tech leaders are promoting white supremacy and ethnic cleansing, and there will be actual consequences for this.
You’re right, what we choose to call things is important, but our calls should better reflect reality.
Like Venezuela: we definitely did things that a neutral observer could fairly & reasonably call Acts of War by conducting an aggressive military operation that ended in the result of us arresting Maduro. Yet the net result is that we did not actually fight a war in Venezuela, and we are still not fighting a war in Venezuela. So if a tinpot socialist dictator gets arrested in a forest & none of the invaders/law enforcement are left to shoot at when the smoke clears, was it really a war? Apparently not.
As to Iran, the only moral differences I see between our operations in Iran conducted by the US Department of War & our operations in Iraq conducted by the US Department of Defense 23 years earlier, is that 23 years earlier, the politicians actually bothered to try & make a convincing case to the American public first & the the invasion of Iraq was executed more competently. I definitely wouldn’t call either operation “defense”.
"You could say develop a target selection approach that is less likely to blow up a school halfway across the world than existing approaches."
Sure, you save some lives. Then the military realizes they can apply violence far more liberally than they ever could before. Subsequent conflicts result in a whole lot more death for the losing side. Maybe a lot more "militar-aged men" end up as cannon fodder for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Or... do those lives not count? Depends on your definition of "evil," I guess: I'm using the Christian one.
There’s a story in the Christian Bible about David, Old Testament. He was told to fire arrows into the ground. He shot 3. The response he got was something like “you should have shot more, now you’ll only sack 3 cities.”
Bullshit: the primary reason Trump (and many other right-wingers) are in power is economic. Pushback to this sort of outward white supremacy is, in fact, quite popular.
And to a large degree, there is little point in rationally debating these concerns as they are rooted in racial animus. If somebody deeply feels that their glorious white race is being replaced by hordes of deranged brown immigrants, that's not a position they can be argued out of: it's an axiomatic outlook on the nature of society and humanity that, for the most part, only generational turnover (and maybe life experience) can correct.
"When wolves get out of control, you shoot them. When gypsies take over public spaces, you deport them."
This is not "homeless pooping in the bushes," but just "gypsies". And the (very, very intentional) juxtaposition of killing wolves to deporting an entire ethnic group is revolting.
Not OP, but personally I spent some time reading DHH's blog posts. They are truly vile. It's entirely reasonable to want to boycott any product that sends money his way.
*You* don't care about it. Please don't confuse this with no one caring about it. I care a lot, as do most of my peers. If you don't see any pushback to this bullshit in your follows, you are in a bubble.
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