I agree that Amazon getting even more control over the ebook market would be bad for authors and publishers.
But how would (hypothetical) more formidable DRM constitute even more control over the ebook market?
(Do you mean more control by preventing more piracy? Or by preventing more good-faith circumvention? Or more control because ebooks might be published even more Amazon exclusive than they already are, because of superior anti-piracy protection?)
To reassert the lost context, here is the original claim and counter-claim:
>>> Maybe if Israel stopped violently expropriating Arab lands, and assaulting and raping Arabs without consequences. It’s really not that complicated.
>> This is nonsense and you know it.
It’s apparent from the copious evidence presented here (with which you do not engage) that the original claim was, in fact, not nonsense. A real counter-argument would show 1) that these events did not occur or 2) that there were consequences for the assailants.
> Then Israel has at least several criminals, just like every other country on the planet.
Irrelevant false balance on a literally global scale. May I use this example in the logic text I’ve been workshopping?
The nonsense is the application of impossible standards like "Israel should have zero criminals" or "Israel should have a successful conviction for every suspected crime, never mind evidentiary standards".
If someone wants to make a serious argument about a systematic problem in Israel, that requires data, not a few accusations. For example, at least 10 of 110 released hostages were reportedly sexually assaulted in Hamas captivity [1], and there were zero arrests for it.
If Gazan detainees in Israeli custody experienced SA at the same rate, that would be over a thousand cases of SA. The parent also broadened their search to include SA allegations against Israelis in the West Bank, so they would need to show ~300k cases just to argue equivalence.
If we were to accept all the parent's sources as reliable, that's 12 reported cases of SA. They're 0.004% of the way there.
> The nonsense is the application of impossible standards like "Israel should have zero criminals" or "Israel should have a successful conviction for every suspected crime, never mind evidentiary standards".
This is an aggressive misreading of OP. Many countries’ militaries are routinely criticized for the sexual assault perpetrated by their soldiers. When US soldiers do it in Okinawa, for example, they can and have been turned over to local authorities, and their actions are disavowed. [1] Criticism of this pattern of sexual assault in Okinawa is not a call for the military to uphold some “impossible standard.”
If you want to try again to generate a valid counter-argument to OP you need to research SA committed by IDF soldiers and demonstrate that it falls under either 1) or 2) above, or some other form of logical refutation. Presenting yet more data about Hamas is neither effective nor persuasive to that end.
The original claim was that terrorists might stop attacking Israel if it stopped "assaulting and raping Arabs without consequences". So which way are we to read it?
- Israel is being held to an impossible standard of zero crime, or a 100% conviction rate for suspected crimes.
- Or Israel is being accused of having a prolific, systematic problem, with no data to support the accusation.
So it draws from an opinionated sampling of the “western canon,” not exactly the list I would choose but then again I’m not a classics educator. Some clear choices for providing fig leaves against claims of Christian bias, but it seems kinda obvious that this is designed to lean in that direction. Few people are reading St. Athanasius or St. Bede the Venerable in their secular liberal arts classes.
I don’t know how to follow this intuition, but I weirdly suspect more left leaning people nerd out about this kind of thing than right leaning people. There’s a reason liberal arts programs lean left. Nothing about MAGA seems to be all that like intellectually conservative these days.
There are definitely some conservative Christian nerds that have their favorite early father of the church and won’t shut up about e.g. the difference between homoousios and homoiousios, but in my experience these people tend to be too aware of the intricacies of Christian doctrine to think much about MAGA-based Christian revisionism.
> I increasingly find myself in disagreement with Scott’s essays on social issues and public policy, despite broadly sharing his small-L liberal outlook.
Well, there's your problem. Scott isn't a "small-L liberal." He does a decent job at masquerading as one, but ask a fan to recount his "greatest hits" and they're all boring old orthodox conservatism: race realism [1], IQ [2], anti-identity politics [3], etc.
(No, I'm in the mood to debate his positions on any of this, it's all been done to death and further debate isn't going to change anyone's mind, let alone his. The citations are there to establish that he is aligned with these views, whether or not it's warranted.)
One fringe benefit of belonging to "The Church of Graphs" that I don't think the author really touches on is that believers can do motivated reasoning _very_ easily. Scott is an expert at laundering his motivated reasoning through well-researched citations and data that supports his points, but he's not so great at giving the other side a fair hearing.
Nevanlinna theory isn’t that obscure (in the sense of mathematics, I suppose) but it is very difficult (for me, probably less so for Tao) when working to have the whole of 21st century analysis in your head at once and see what could be applied where. I can see how an LLM would be quicker than a human at recognizing a context where a theorem from an apparently unrelated subfield could be applied.
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