It’s interesting in the case of Ukraine (also with cluster munitions): the problem is that they leave UXO which is then a danger to life and limb for decades after the war. But, so is being under the thumb of a murderous, genocidal dictator. So surely the standard should be not an outright ban, but a ban on using mines outside your own territory, or the territory of another country with their consent?
It gets difficult with territorial disputes but it also needs to be practical.
I mean, the artifact in LotR is magical. Reading too much into the name would be a mistake.
The term “social murder” is co-opting violent language to describe things that are not violent. I’m sure you can understand the difference even if you do like to use the term. What you mean is that the consequences of politics can be extremely severe, but once you see that is not the same as violence the way we both understand the term literally, you see that “politics is violent” is not a useful reply.
What you seem to be trying to say is that, because political decisions can cause mass deaths, violent language is by default justified in political discourse. That’s dangerous and wrong, and leads to politicians getting killed. And it’s not going to be right-wing politicians who get killed the most, because right-wingers are more l ikely to carry out political violence, once it becomes normalised through violent political discourse.
But this was about Israel more than the USA.
There are significant relevant differences between Britain and Israel today compared to German Jews and Germany in the late 1930s. But the same calculations need to apply when you allow violence into your speech: is it going to increase the risk of violence against innocent people? Anti-semitic assaults in the UK rose by approximately 50% in the wake of October 7th. (I was not able to find comparable figures for Islamophobic assaults, unfortunately), so this is against a backdrop in which Jews are at an increased risk of violence. So although “death to the IDF” does not call for violence against Jews in general, as the Chief Rabbi wrongly claimed, it does increase that risk.
Coming from the other direction, shouting “death to the IDF” does not materially call for justified action in a way that “fuck the IDF” does not; they are both merely expressing directionless disapproval. They will be seen too as calls for the governments to stop funding Israel, providing it with weapons, and associating with a government actively and brazenly carrying out ethnic cleansing.
We can also see that things are different for the people directly affected by violence. If a Palestinian shouts “death to the IDF” I don’t see that as unacceptable violent speech; I see that as an inevitable response to the violence enacted upon them. But Bob Vylan is not a Palestinian being attacked by the IDF so we shouldn’t give him the same latitude.
Mass music festivals are perfectly acceptable places to make political statements.
I didn’t say anything about political statements, I mentioned violent statements. There is a big difference between wishing death on people and expressing your disapproval with them, and anyone who can’t express the latter without the former should, generally, expect to be censured (and censored). The angry person you quote doesn’t even express violence.
It wasn’t though, was it. The IDF are not Jews in general; they are multi-ethnic and are the armed forces of a country at war. Would a chant of “death to the Russian Armed Forces” be Russophobic? “Death to the Wehrmacht” for anti-German during World War 2? “Death to Hamas” for Islamophobia?
Identification of the armed forces of a state with a state is a sign of fascism, and the identification of the state with an ethnic group is a sign of extreme nationalism - though admittedly that is less the case with Israel and Jewish people.
Chanting “death, death to the IDF” is violent and inappropriate at a music festival. “Fuck the IDF” would’ve been fine though.
The succinct way of defining the topology (on NxN) is the product topology of the discrete topology(/ies). Maybe that’s the discreteness you’re feeling?
Axiom of Choice is not regarded as a big deal by most set theorists, but it’s interesting when it comes up. The diagonalisation proof that there are undetermined games uses choice to well-order the set of strategies, so it’s actually the other way around: without choice it is consistent (assuming consistency of some other stuff) that all games in this formulation are determined. This is called the Axiom of Determinacy.
The axioms in question are power set and replacement: to prove full Borel determinacy you need to apply the power set axiom infinitely many times (using the replacement axiom). These two axioms are what gives the ZFC axioms their power, really.
Set theorists nowadays I don’t think debate about axioms per se. Set theory nowadays is at once somewhat pluralistic and somewhat settled (paradoxically). I’ll explain a little: set theorists are basically agreed that the ZFC axioms are natural, intuitively “true” (many set theorists would not put scare-quotes there, but I would), powerful enough to do all ordinary mathematics and more, and probably consistent. They also generally agree that many large-cardinal axioms are natural and probably consistent, though there is a wide variation in whether people think they are “true”; there is not nearly so much intuition that such huge objects could exist. This is different than our intuition behind the axiom of infinity, because that axiom is actually needed to do some ordinary mathematics (though you can do without it for a lot!)
The Projective Hierarchy continues the stratification of the Borel Hierarchy even further. If you assume infinitely many woodin cardinals, then you can prove Projective Determinacy. I have heard Tony Martin being quoted as saying that “if Projective Determinacy were found to be inconsistent” (and hence infinitely many Woodin cardinals is inconsistent) “then I’d be having serious doubts about [the axiom of] Replacement.” This gives you a flavour of how people think about the relationship between these concepts.
I wonder if this is the best they can come up with in response to the airbase attacks?
As a field of study, it’s the study of two-player games of perfect information (so think chess, not football or poker) in which each player may make countably many moves (you can also look at uncountable-length games but it’s not common). I’ll give you more detail than I would a child :P
Each player takes turns to move. You can encode the moves they make as coming from some set - for example they might just play numbers. The rules of the game are imposed by a winning set, which is a set of countable-length sequences of moves, and we say that player I wins if the infinite sequence of her first move followed by player II’s first move followed by her second move, etc, is in the winning set. Otherwise player II wins. (There are no draws, which technically means chess falls outside the scope of this setup, but it turns out not to be a big deal)
(This allows you to encode what moves are allowed by the rules - you just say that any sequence which contains a move where that player broke a rule is a loss for that player, regardless of what comes afterwards.)
Each winning set defines a different game. The property of determinacy is a property of sets of infinite sequences which says that there is a winning strategy for either player. A strategy is just a function which takes the finite sequence of moves up to that point in the game and tells the player (the player for whom the strategy is) what to do. A winning strategy is one which, if followed, always results in a win for that player.
If we modify the rules of noughts and crosses (tic-tac-toe) so that draws are arbitrarily decided to give a win to player I, we know that this (finite) game has a winning strategy. In fact, any finite game has a winning strategy (or, if there are draws, this means there is a non-losing strategy). The outline of the proof is that if player I does not have a strategy to get to one of the (finitely many) winning states, then we can find a strategy for player II which avoids those winning states. (Remember, winning states are winning for I).
So, which games are determined? Are all games determined? Well, it’s actually easy (through a diagonalisation argument, same as proving uncountability of the reals) that not all infinite (countable-length, that is) games played with natural numbers (as moves) are determined. But you can create a way of categorising the sets of countable sequences of natural numbers (i.e. the possible winning sets) by a kind of complexity. This is the basis of descriptive set theory. It starts with topology: you can define basic open sets in this space as those sets consist of all infinite sequences which share a common finite prefix. Closed sets are the complements of open sets, as usual. But then you can define a hierarchy of complexity where the next level are countable unions of closed sets, then the next level are countable unions of complements of countable unions of complements of open sets. (An introduction to descriptive set theory will say more about this).
It’s quite easy to prove that all open sets and all closed sets in this hierarchy of complexity are determined. It’s a little harder to prove that the second level is determined, and harder still to prove that the third level is. Eventually a guy named Tony Martin (D. A. Martin) proved that all Borel sets in this hierarchy are determined. If you know your analysis, the Borel sets are exactly what you’re thinking: they’re the sets formed by all arbitrary countable unions, intersections and complements of open sets.
The interesting thing about this proof was that it needed a huge amount of set theoretic “power”. Most ordinary mathematics like analysis doesn’t need all the axioms of set theory, but this needed a massive chunk of them. This makes it interesting to set theorists because it tells us something about the relationship between something quite concrete: complexity of sets and strategies for easily-defined games on the one hand, and something quite abstract: the axioms of set theory. This pattern continues higher up: more determinacy can be proved if you assume even stronger axioms, going beyond what is typically included in set theory.
How much sugar do you add?
How long do you boil it for? (You don’t know; you have to monitor the temperature)
How long does putting it all in jars take you? (ages)
It’s not difficult, but it is time consuming and not trivial.
Making jam is not trivial but it I think that makes it rewarding! My dad has made jam and marmalade for as long as I’ve known and it’s always an event. My parents have hundreds of jars (for some reason my dad calls them bottles? Only in a jam context though!) and every so often he cooks up a giant pot of jam with an old-fashioned sugar thermometer, testing the batch on a piece of baking paper, then bottling everything up. He often did it with my sister, who now also makes her own jam.
He labels all the jars, and we’ve opened jars that were… I dunno, a decade old I’m sure, and they were totally fine. So they will definitely keep for a long time!
I have a PhD in mathematics (set theory). It would be pretty tough to explain to a child. Specifically my PhD is in determinacy, which is way easier to explain than most branches of set theory, but you do need a decent understanding of infinity to really get anywhere.
I’m sure Netanyahu will be calling the IDF anti-semitic in a few hours.
You say “maybe” like it’s some unknowable quantity, but we can see what is going on in Hungary and that it’s getting increasingly authoritarian, and we can see Russian attempts to influence western democracies through bot farms and the like. It’s not unknowable; the evidence is there.
There are companies, big companies even, that kill off underperforming projects after less than a year, and most don’t take years to agree projects.
Yeah this is something that has got way worse over time. It used to be that most forums would default to “no politics” and then there were discussion areas set aside for that. And now if you criticise someone for bringing politics into something where it doesn’t belong, you will get angry responses declaring that you’re burying your head in the sand. No, I just don’t want lowest-hanging-fruit political comments on every cat picture.
I can’t quite put my finger on why he might want a corruption investigation into a politician dropped…
Never mind the American planes… these planes if nuclear-armed will be armed with American-owned bombs that will require American authorisation to arm.
JAQing off and Whataboutism are not those things.
Yeah, but if you go in saying that this is the inevitable result of having conservatives discuss politics here, I am suspicious that your threshold for those terms is waaayy lower than mine.
The person I replied to originally wasn’t talking about trolling or toxic behaviour, they were talking about conservative viewpoints (likening them to cannibalism, I might add) so, if you want to chip in that trolling isn’t welcome then I’ll certainly agree with that, but there’s a reason I’m not really talking about that.
Is there a mature filter that you’ve got turned off? I have never seen anything lewd on All!