J.P. Loo @jpl.ac · 2hThis is annoying but also not exactly that high up on the list of ST’s problems given the relative lack of influence of this radical fringe. 010
J.P. Loo @jpl.ac · 4hSpecifically, Art 78 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which even the Israeli courts have held must be applied as part of customary international law (HCJ 7015/02 www.imra.org.il/story.php?id... ¶ 13), despite their departure from the ICJ’s holdings elsewhere.ihl-databases.icrc.org 0162
Reposted by J.P. LooLa Presse @lapresse.ca · 7hlapresse.caGuerre commerciale | Les États-Unis bloquent un camion de vivres à destination d’une île isolée du Nouveau-BrunswickUn camion transportant des provisions pour une île isolée du Nouveau-Brunswick, reliée au reste du Canada par la route américaine, a été refoulé à la frontière internationale mardi, a déclaré le député local. 364
J.P. Loo @jpl.ac · 5hI think it’s worth gaming it out in advance, and lots of Biden-era advisers seem to think that the lesson to learn is that there’s no point trying to pressure Israel from the point of view of even inching towards a just peace or even mere stability, so, to that extent, it is relevant. 210
J.P. Loo @jpl.ac · 5hI additionally find this point rather frustrating because whilst there are lots of campist pro-Palestinians, genuine universalist non-campists like AES are more concentrated on the pro-Palestinian side than elsewhere, and many Bidenists were *also* irrationally attached to (supporting) Israel. 010
J.P. Loo @jpl.ac · 5hAssuming the latter is true, the standard leftist answer is perfectly sound: the US is significantly more implicated in Gaza than, say, Darfur. The selectorates of the Sit-tat and RSF are not as easily pressured as that of Israel, a Western trade-dependent economy of people used to that status. 100
J.P. Loo @jpl.ac · 5hAlso, if the price of getting an advantage is letting the Chinese have an F-35, I’m not really sure that the Chinese are going to think ‘hm yes let’s show them everything, this couldn’t possibly backfire in exactly the same way we’re banking on’. 110
J.P. Loo @jpl.ac · 5hSure, and to that extent, the relevant segment of the Democratic party, of which Biden was a leading partisan but not the sole member, can be blamed for sticking to that same position of indolence until the end, when even in Israel 7.10 no longer was quite so dispositive of policy outcomes. 120
J.P. Loo @jpl.ac · 5hAnother obvious point is that China and Russia quite like having ties with other countries in the region, and insofar as they’d be willing to be Israel’s patron, they’d probably condition that on shoring up the stability of their Arab partners by actually addressing Palestinian demands. 210
J.P. Loo @jpl.ac · 5hI think this overestimates the extent to which the Israeli public or defence establishment would put up with a vague promise of some J-16s arriving in a few years in a less than friendly neighbourhood. Yes, maybe they’ll try this if you tell them to capitulate totally, so just don’t do that. 110
J.P. Loo @jpl.ac · 5hI follow European developments on settlement sanctions quite closely and can say that the prospect of pushing European capitals to do this was very viable and that a major impediment was deference to the Americans. (Deference can work the other way too, as e.g. the Iranians have found out.) 010
J.P. Loo @jpl.ac · 6hBiden could have excluded Israel from the Western alliance, which includes Israel’s largest and closest significant trade partner (Europe), ⩾50% of its trade/investment, and the only medium-term viable suppliers of weaponry. Russia and China are viable replacements at most in the long run if at all. 130
J.P. Loo @jpl.ac · 6hI agree with you that (1) the popular Israeli perception was that Biden placed significant pressure on Bibi. But that does not contradict any of the following. (2) Biden didn’t actually do so. (3) Biden had scope for much more pressure. (4) Some forms of additional pressure would have worked. 031
J.P. Loo @jpl.ac · 7hbonkers interview by Eylon Levy of the Otzma int’l spox replicating this but on the far right (approximately verbatim) —what about the ones attacking innocents? —they’re heroes —ok but they’re attacking innocents —anyone committing a crime should be arrested —how? send shabbak? —the boys are heroesx.comEylon Levy (@EylonALevy) on X"I'm not gonna sit here in the studio and throw these kids under the bus." His party controls the police. So why haven't the vigilante zealots in Judea and Samaria been stopped? 🎙️@YishaiFleisher jo... 000
J.P. Loo @jpl.ac · 7hWell, yes and no. I mean half (more) of the bloody doors are still open all the time, overcrowding is way worse, more people die, and so on. I do think locals are often being neglected in favour of flashier stuff e.g. Namo Delhi and metros though. 050
J.P. Loo @jpl.ac · 7hI agree with the latter, yes; I suppose, very pedantically, my claim would be that if the Haganah had not waged an insurgency against the British /and/ somehow achieved independence, the Irgun’s actions wouldn’t put it under the category of a successful anti-British insurgency (cf the Nakba). 120
J.P. Loo @jpl.ac · 7hIn fairness, has Kent actually said that either in this thread or elsewhere? 140
J.P. Loo @jpl.ac · 7hYou could of course argue that Israelis would *treat* it as existential, and indeed I think that is probably correct, which is why I support international pressure and non-violent Palestinian–Jewish co-resistance as embodied e.g. by Omdim Beyachad, but, again, that’s an argument from specifics. 020
J.P. Loo @jpl.ac · 7hAn armed struggle on the basis of the prisoners’ document notably does not fall under this category because the purpose would be to liberate Palestine on its 1967 borders, which does not existentially threaten Israel, even if Israelis very much wouldn’t like it. 130
J.P. Loo @jpl.ac · 7hWell, again, you are welcome to directly argue that the Israelis specifically are in a position to and/or will actually respond in such a way that some or all forms of violent Palestinian struggle would backfire, but involves citing actual specifics. 130
J.P. Loo @jpl.ac · 8hok but then the argument is no longer the strategy even described generically just isn’t going to work from a simple historical generalisation as in OP but rather that Palestinians’ specific circumstances make that unworkable 0110
J.P. Loo @jpl.ac · 8heh given the Irgun were suppressed following the Altalena affair you can claim that that was deviationist and exclude it fairly I think 140
J.P. Loo @jpl.ac · 8hIt’s sort of complicated. I don’t think it’s straightforwardly an upper /or/ lower bound. Some of the intended idealisations in Ingenia’s favour actually do mean that it’s not really a credible upper bound on difficulty, but the substantive problem is it’s not a lower bound either. 010
J.P. Loo @jpl.ac · 8hIndonesia, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Ireland, Mozambique, Angola and Zimbabwe achieved independence by violent means. I don’t actually think Palestinians are in a good position to copy them. But there isn’t really a generic argument from uniform historical failure that works. 2311
J.P. Loo @jpl.ac · 8hInteresting, was there any sign of this happening in the days before? ANP has a report suggesting business as usual from Tahoua dated yesterday!anp.neLa Commission Consultative de la Ville de Tahoua tient sa 3ème session ordinaire au titre de l'année 2026 - Agence Nigérienne de PresseTahoua, 29 Sept (ANP) – Le Gouverneur de la Région de Tahoua, le Colonel-Major Souleymane Amadou Moussa a présidé, ce mardi 29 septembre 2026 dans la salle de conférence de l’Hôtel de Ville de Tahoua,... 000
J.P. Loo @jpl.ac · 10hfn 24 does mention fixed-parameter tractability, but doesn’t dwell on the difference; cf /Cognition and intractability/ (2024) which explains at length on how parametrisation+an FPT constraint can avoid at least quite a few seeming counterexamples 010
J.P. Loo @jpl.ac · 10hI’ve a short draft (/Ergo/ desk-rejected it as too specialised) on what I think the real problem is that you might find interesting. 110
J.P. Loo @jpl.ac · 10hHowever, RNNs are not necessarily a good model of the dynamical systems we are either. And claims about other formalisms are pretty conjectural. So there is an open question here. I am much further from van Rooij’s position than you, but I don’t actually think this is the strongest objection. 110
J.P. Loo @jpl.ac · 10hOn computation, the real question is whether a reasonable cost model for dynamical systems can be given, and then whether it lies within a polynomial factor of a Turing machine. We know that e.g. RNNs with rational weights are within a polynomial bound of TMs (they also cite this). 120
J.P. Loo @jpl.ac · 10hI think actually there are reasonable responses in other papers she coauthored, but also caveats that then aren’t included. For instance, there’s not even the slightest investigation of parametrisation in that paper, even though this is one of the main defences of asymptotic constraints elsewhere. 220
J.P. Loo @jpl.ac · 11hprobably true that there haven’t been enough purges for Gofman and Zini to just make up a terrorist attack without leaks though 120
J.P. Loo @jpl.ac · 11heh with Gofman and Zini in charge I think the picture either already is very different or will be soon they’re clearly not joking around with trying to expose Eisenkot to assassination risk, for example 230
J.P. Loo @jpl.ac · 11hNot only solutions but even straightforward improvements. Ok, the precise contours of the final settlement in Jerusalem might be complicated. Why not aim to ensure that any settler terrorist who can be dissuaded by freezing their bank accounts is dissuaded? Well that has to be complicated too, &c 140
J.P. Loo @jpl.ac · 12hThis has somehow turned some of this lot off the most normie-lib opinion possible (that there are some good Palestinians and Israelis too) because apparently you need to shoot someone first to realise the naïveté of it all. 160
J.P. Loo @jpl.ac · 12hWould you say that the following substitution doesn’t preserve meaning? (1) Bee-keeping is hard. (2) Apiculture is hard. 210
Reposted by J.P. LooRob Shearer @r.v.cx · 13hIt is amazing how many Blueskyers are arguing about whether LLMs “reason” in complete ignorance of a full century of cognitive science. We used to think the defining feature of human cognition was systemic logic. It turns out humans are terrible at systemic logic. (GOFAI is *great* at logic.) 2445
J.P. Loo @jpl.ac · 13hIt’s also curious that seemingly none of the defences of Biden’s sanctions policy refer to the work of major Israeli organisations working on this (Terrestrial Jerusalem, Yesh Din, B’Tselem, Kerem Navot), most of which support sanctions. But I suppose some Biden dead-enders know better. 020
J.P. Loo @jpl.ac · 13hWhich act, and how is that responsive to the point that protective presence volunteers are obviously good people? 020
J.P. Loo @jpl.ac · 13hHere are lots of Israeli security officials who seem to have worked out that settler terrorists in the West Bank are bad people. Ah well, maybe the Israeli officials who think that the terrorists are bad just haven’t killed enough people to transcend their naïveté. www.nytimes.com/2026/08/31/w... 030
J.P. Loo @jpl.ac · 13hAnd let’s take the ludicrous other part of the claim that there were somehow no ‘bad guys’. What part of killing someone is meant to elucidate that there’s the people who tortured Israeli and Palestinian hostages weren’t in fact bad? The members of Combatants for peace seem to think otherwise.cfpeace.orgCombatants for PeaceFor 20 years, Combatants for Peace has brought Israelis and Palestinians together to co-resist the occupation and build a future of peace, equality, and freedom for all. 120
J.P. Loo @jpl.ac · 13hLots of Israeli soldiers who took lives and are in the reserves seem perfectly able to appreciate that the Israeli peace movement contains ‘good guys’. Would you care to explain to me why protective presence volunteers in the territories aren’t good people?nif.org 220
J.P. Loo @jpl.ac · 13h‘US Treasury said banks can process transactions…for basic needs…Levi [a sanctioned settler] said he could buy whatever he wanted’. If a sanctioned Iranian general were telling ABC that banks were ‘never…refus[ing]…requests’ for withdrawals, would the Biden administration have been equally indolent?abc17news.comIsraeli settlers in the West Bank were hit with international sanctions. It only emboldened themBy SAM MEDNICK and JULIA FRANKEL Associated Press SOUTH HEBRON HILLS, West Bank (AP) — For weeks after being sanctioned by the United States, Yinon Levi struggled to pay the bills, living at his farmi... 130
J.P. Loo @jpl.ac · 13hWhich Israeli cabinet ministers did Biden sanction? How many ‘West Bank Settlers’ exactly do you think Biden sanctioned, and why is the number of them sanctioned meant to be impressive in comparison e.g. to the recent British sanctions package? 120
