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Cake day: June 4th, 2023

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  • I can understand this idea of anti Zionism from before the state of Israel existed. There were options at that time about how to do things. But now we’re here some 70 years later and we have millions of Jews that have been born and grown up in a Jewish state for generations. So in the context of today’s reality, I’m trying to understand what does anti Zionism mean?

    Like does it mean that Israel should continue to exist, but not explicitly be a Jewish state? Or maybe some other change to how it’s administered? Or it should not exist at all? If it shouldn’t exist, then what about the millions of Jews that live there? It’s not clear to me what anti Zionism means today.



  • The article does a decent job of going into some of the nuance about the different ways the apartheid label might or might not fit things that are thing on. But in the end who cares if we can fit a class of actions into the apartheid label?

    Why don’t we just look at the actual actions that are taking place and discuss them for what they are. If Israel levels half of Gaza in intense bombing campaigns that kill tens of thousands of people, then we can see that and discuss what to do about it. Who cares if it doesn’t fit the apartheid label.

    I see similar arguments every day now where people are arguing if it’s genocide or ethnic cleansing or apartheid or whatever. What does it change if you’re able to cognitively classify a set of actions with the correct label?

    Maybe if you justify your favorite label then you can condemn Israel/Hamas harder, but this doesn’t actually change anything and it doesn’t lead to greater understanding. I’d actually argue that settling on your preferred label actually leads to less understanding. That’s because once you’ve categorized something to your satisfaction, you tend to become more blind to contradictory evidence.

    For example, let’s say we all agree that Israel is an “apartheid state”. That label comes with a lot of baggage that’s going to color our views of future actions. We might miss out on changes in Israeli laws or courts or political leadership that contradicts the apartheid label.

    Better instead to try and see things clearly as they are instead of trying to force labels onto things. This takes more effort because labels serve as cognitive shortcuts, but the result is a better understanding of what’s actually going on.







  • It’s fun to think about this stuff, but like the YouTube comments discuss, this is not going to be a practical solution. The cost:benefit ratio just isn’t there.

    My personal opinion is that continued electrification of existing transport modalities is probably going to be the defining feature of future transportation developments for the next century. The biggest issue is battery energy density, but I’d be shocked if things like solid state batteries didn’t start coming online within the next decade or two. There’s just so much investment going on here right now.

    So obviously things like electric cars and buses on existing roadways is going to continue growing. Full self driving will eventually occur. Convoys of high speed electric vehicles traveling down highways will basically do everything that high speed rail is supposed to do, but without the need to build high speed rail. Like by the time a transcontinental high speed rail system would be built (50 years?) It would be obsolete.

    That’s not even taking into account how the enormous investment and innovation fueled by the electric car/truck/bus industry is also going to enable electric airplanes. Being able to fly a couple dozen people to local air strips a couple hundred miles apart will be a true transportation revolution. You’ll be able to connect up all these regional locations without any significant infrastructure and at aircraft speeds and for relatively low cost.

    High speed rail is amazing for high density locations like Europe, Japan and China. But for the USA it’s a much tougher sell. And with upcoming developments in electric vehicles it’s likely to be obsolete by the time you finish building it. It’s sort of like trying to convince a big African country with poor telecom infrastructure to build out a national network of expensive high speed fiber optic cables instead of going for something like wireless cell towers or just switching to satellite constellations like Starlink in another decade.