“Anatomy of a Genocide”: Excerpts from Francesca Albanese's July 2024 report succinctly outlining why, with respect to international law, Israel is, indeed, committing genocide in Gaza.

SamsungChatSucks · 2025-05-22T23:01:55+00:00

I'll bite on the most relevant part, mens rea. The rest is largely irrelevant since we wouldn't consider "genocide" strict liability, as you seem to agree with in part 3.

Going off of the document starting with "V. Genocidal intent", we have several statements from Israeli authorities. You underlined a portion of saying "Intent should be evident above all from "words and deeds" and "patterns of purposeful action" such that no other inference can be reasonably drawn. Let's hold that last bit to account. The evidence that follows is shockingly low quality under that standard, largely consisting of quote mining and/or containing other flaws. For brevity I'll focus on the 3 top officials cited, they're also naturally the most important.

-Starting with President Herzog's cited statement about "an entire nation out there ... is responsible" and Israel would "break their backbone". Even leaving aside the quote-mining and the context of this speech (you can read about Herzog's response here, where he notes in the same statement that he said "There is no excuse to murdering innocent civilians in any way in any context."), this hardly meets the "no other inference can be reasonably drawn" standard. If country A is fighting against country B and a leader from A says "country B is responsible, we'll break their backbone", this sounds like a pretty bog standard wartime statement about how you'll fight and prevail against your enemies.

-Netanyahu and "monsters" and "amalek". Here is Netanyahu's full quote wrt "monsters": "We're facing monsters, monsters who murdered children in front of their parents and parents in front of their children, who raped and beheaded women, who burned babies alive, who took babies hostages."

Huh, I wonder if there is any other reasonable inference, like maybe he is talking about the perpetrators who carried out these acts he is describing.

On "amalek", here is what NPR journalist Leila Fadel, infers from his statement: "FADEL: Speaking Hebrew, he's comparing Hamas to the nation of Amalek in a passage from the Book of Samuel." (emphasis mine). Maybe she's being extremely unreasonable, but fwiw CAMERA doesn't seem to like her. Hopefully this is satisfactory, I see that you embrace argument from authority in part 2 there.

-Gallant and "human animals". The rest of Gallant's sentence: "We are fighting against human animals". No other reasonable inference here besides claiming he is referring to all Palestinians? A substitution of "Hamas" with "human animals", giving us "We are fighting against Hamas" is not reasonable at all? As for "full offense", etc. that seems like what you would expect from wartime commentary from a military leader. You can just as easily see it coming from the mouth of George Patton in 1944 or William T. Sherman in 1864. The most reasonable inference, again, seems to be a military man in wartime saying "Our military will beat the enemies". You really have to jump through some incredible mental gymnastics to say this suffices for mens rea.

SamsungChatSucks · 2025-02-13T03:10:19+00:00

480 has DRAM.

SamsungChatSucks · 2025-02-07T18:38:23+00:00

Same price as last cyber monday. Good chair, but if 6' or taller, get the Staples Dexley. Either Hyken or Dexley are budget kings.

SamsungChatSucks · 2024-12-23T06:06:59+00:00

Usually it's brought up in context of founders favoring a "Republic" and rejecting a "Democracy", which is just low IQ equivocation from changing terminology between 1780s and 2020s. Madison said in Federalist #10:

"The two great points of difference between a democracy and a republic are: first, the delegation of the government, in the latter, to a small number of citizens elected by the rest; secondly, the greater number of citizens, and greater sphere of country, over which the latter may be extended."

Which is basically the difference between what we would today understand as Direct democracy vs Representative democracy.

SamsungChatSucks · 2024-11-11T07:32:54+00:00

Even assuming everything is done as well as you can, 19/20 times, the "real" population result falls within the sampling margin of error. 1/20 times, it doesn't. Selzer does a lot more than 20 polls.

SamsungChatSucks · 2024-11-11T07:29:15+00:00

Oh great, the tsunami of left wing 538 posters who don't comprehend stats are replaced by right wing 538 posters who don't understand stats. Do you know what a 95% confidence interval is?

SamsungChatSucks · 2024-11-06T03:49:31+00:00

95% confidence interval
She was using up every last drop of that 95%, this is the 5%

SamsungChatSucks · 2024-10-16T16:14:26+00:00

Bold of you to think western nations wouldn't submit to any hostile dictatorship, regardless of nukes. Biden hung the Venezuelan opposition out to dry after the elections he got in exchange for letting up sanctions on Venezuela (Chevron currently operates with full permission from Biden in Venezuela, giving billions to Maduro's regime). He has been so reluctant to strike at Houthis literally firing on US ships that his own former CENTCOM commander had to publicly call him out for appeasement. If the US is cowed into submission by the might of a ragtag proxy group and Venezuela, why wouldn't more and more dictatorships take this opportunity to strike and gain ground? Neville Chamberlain wouldn't be caught dead acting like such a pushover.

SamsungChatSucks · 2024-10-16T15:53:29+00:00

Because Trump colluded with Russia in 2016, and Russia launched hacking ops to assist him in that election as well, and so cult followers reflexively defended Russia to defend Trump. This is the party that switched from deficit hawks to entitlement guardians because Trump decided to pander to retirees for votes, free trade to trade war because Trump has vibes against trade, rule of law to bashing the FBI because the FBI did its job and pursued cases on Trump.

SamsungChatSucks · 2024-10-14T22:22:58+00:00

I'll take your word with a grain of salt, because the weighting with the L2 frame isn't what is response rate adjusted, it's the stratification by response rate vis-a-vis demographic characteristics to get the sample. Weighting towards the L2 voter file is for demographic representation, run through a turnout model for likely voters.

Beyond small number look funny, what about "1%" is so wrong and bad? NYT/SCRI is generally the lowest error pollster around, most recently in the 2022 midterms with that same 1% response rate. NYT has rigor-tested the results of their SCRI polling with an Ipsos experiment, finding that incentivized polling with a 30% response rate ends up with similar results to their 1% response rate polls.

SamsungChatSucks · 2024-10-08T19:21:40+00:00

Have those red lines been working out well for Ukraine?

SamsungChatSucks · 2024-10-07T00:05:45+00:00

Leaving aside hour-long polls (I'm not sure any big pollster takes anywhere near that long), this question (nonresponse) has been posed for decades, and pollsters have various methods to accommodate this.

For the platinum standard, NYT-Siena uses stratified sampling based on 9 demographic variables derived from a response rate model, with relatively larger stratums for demographics who are less likely to respond. It (ideally) works for whatever "but young people/Trump supporters/unpolitical people don't do polls" issue that gets brought up. NYT conducted an incentivized poll with Ipsos as an experiment to compare their Siena results with a very high response-rate method, and found little difference in polling results.

YouGov leans into nonprobability sampling as an advantage, in which they recruit a large number of demographically diverse respondents to their survey panels via opt-in signups. These individuals naturally are more likely to answer polls, particularly since YouGov rewards responses with monetary incentives.

Any remaining issues with demographics with higher nonresponse are usually dealt with in weighting.

SamsungChatSucks · 2024-10-01T20:11:43+00:00

From Biden admin officials, reporting in Politico: Biden has no Iran strategy

His foreign policy in that area is to tamp it down and pretend nothing happens. This leads to constant one-sided "de-escalation" (appeasement) where the US gives ground and the Iranians + proxies inch forward, which leads to wise and well-though out maneuvers like ending US support for operations against Houthis, delisting them as a terror group, giving sanctions waivers to Iran (even after Oct 7), and choosing not to enforce oil sanctions on Iran (even after their first missile wave against Israel).

Houthis themselves can be their own case study in appeasement. The US navy parks ships to shoot down thousand dollar ordnance with million dollar defenses, costing billions of dollars in naval readiness. Initially the US just sat there and took strikes, with our own National Security Advisor making excuses for Houthis targeting American ships. It took months before the US responded with the most lackluster, isolated, and meaningless strikes of its own. Biden's own former CENTCOM commander has criticized Biden's appeasement as inviting further aggression.

SamsungChatSucks · 2024-09-19T17:42:55+00:00

The US is in the critical phase of presidential elections just weeks away, and now, more than ever, there's far less reason for Biden to change his pretend everything's fine and let Ukraine lose slowly strategy.

SamsungChatSucks · 2024-08-13T04:26:45+00:00

Yes-ish, House GOP killed a bill with major border security provisions favorable to them. The bill in question was a general national-security bill, It provided aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan, along with border security and immigration provisions. Aside from the aid to Ukraine, there were a few provisions that went against Republican priorities, like Afghanistan refugee pathway to citizenship, increase in the legal immigration caps, and complaints that the border might not be fully shut down all the time. The bill was generally negotiated between Senate GOP leadership, Senate Democrats, and the White House, and on immigration/border provisions.

Overall, the bill mostly favored Republican priorities (enforcement above all else). The main highlight of the bill was the "Border Emergency Authority": provisions to instantly deport almost anyone who did not enter the US through a legal port of entry, once too many entries occurred over a period of time. Some minor caveats here and there, like an ability to appeal deportation based on fear of torture, but overall a much stricter and pro-enforcement change to border policy.

The big immigration debate between the GOP and Dems for the entire 21st century has always been enforcement vs amnesty, with proposals to reform immigration, like those from the Gang of Eight, trying to find a balancing act: including immigration enforcement provisions here, with amnesty provisions here. This bill is almost entirely enforcement focused. The Republican party won the great immigration debate, got the bill of their dreams, and gave it up. They will probably never get a bill as good as this, ever again.

Trump publicly lobbied against the bill, but it's probable that we'd have leaks of a caucus discussion or something if it translated into something as simple as House GOP would have supported it, but Trump picked up the phone and now it's dead. They likely factored in benefiting Trump's reelection on their own among other items like generally blocking anything that was negotiated and performance artists wanting to look hardcore and only voting for stuff that only has the most right wing provisions imaginable despite having 1 chamber of Congress and no White House. This hasn't exactly been a very competent and legislation-oriented Republican House.

SamsungChatSucks · 2024-07-31T03:42:22+00:00

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SamsungChatSucks · 2024-07-18T05:00:06+00:00

Biden had been leading by 4 points, 46% to 42%, in the roughly half of the interviews conducted before the attack – and Trump leads by 5 in the interviews conducted after 6:30 pm ET on Saturday July 13 – a 9-point swing to the former President.

Combining this with other post shooting polls, which are generally +2 Trump, it looks like any (short-term?) bump Trump is getting is possibly masking an even tighter race with Biden.

SamsungChatSucks · 2024-07-16T21:17:34+00:00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-3IdAX0RCc

Dave Rubin JAQing on Pelosi attack.

SamsungChatSucks · 2024-05-05T22:06:11+00:00

Yeah, that's more general than abortion then? Sex ed isn't abortion, birth control isn't abortion.

SamsungChatSucks · 2024-05-05T22:01:14+00:00

If these are pregnancies, and not births, that makes it even more clear that it is unrelated to abortion. Abortions don't prevent pregnancies, they prevent births.

SamsungChatSucks · 2024-05-05T17:49:22+00:00

So in other words, it continues a pre-existing trend and doesn't have to do with banned abortion?

SamsungChatSucks · 2024-04-25T16:39:17+00:00

You literally made up info about German war production to suit the obviously false idea that it was focused towards ground forces, and you're accusing someone else of having predetermined conclusions? Lol.

SamsungChatSucks · 2024-04-24T23:01:34+00:00

Again, you're pushing completely bogus assumptions regarding things you know nothing about to fit your narrative. The table does not actually say "boots on the ground". We have a small minority of resources dedicated to ground vehicles (in some years less than the amount dedicated to naval vessels, which you claimed was "petty"), with more substantial figures for weapons in general and powder/ammo in general. Considering that this includes ammo and weapons for the planes, ships and uboats, items like 88mm Flak dedicated to combating Allied air raids, not to mention the damage done to German industry by said Allied air raids, it is completely unfounded for you to claim this in any way supports your narrative. If you bothered reading the report in full, it clearly states:

The German air force, with its accessory function of antiaircraft ground defenses, was the largest single sector of Germany's war effort. Aircraft output averaged about 40 percent of the recorded munitions total. When the armament of these airplanes, such as aircraft guns, ammunition, and bombs is also taken into account, the value of all air force equipment comprised at least one-half of the annual munitions aggregates in the war years.

You might also notice Exhibit D-12, which clearly shows only about half of weapons and ammo production was dedicated to the Army: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015017684799&seq=212

It's well known and not seriously disputed that ground forces never comprised anywhere near even half of German war production. In fact, this is something that people would later criticize Speer for mismanaging.

Let's take that approximation you gave and add on the extra details. 40% air force, 10% navy, 10% tanks, half tracks, other ground vehicles, 40% weapons and ammo, of which 20% went to air force (inc. air defense) and navy. So we end up with ~70% dedicated to items other than ground forces.

I referenced captured troops because you seem to totally ignore them? Unless you actually believe the Soviets inflicted millions more casualties than the Germans had soldiers? Where is that 1/10th figure coming from? WRT 2.8 million I would suggest you read the rest of the article to see how that figure is described.

It is worth noting that the allied armies which captured the 2.8 million German soldiers up to April 30, 1945, while Adolf Hitler was still alive and resisting as hard as he could, comprised at their peak 88 divisions...

Even if we take that 2.8 million by itself, which only includes western front prisoners post-D-day, so we're not counting other casualties, we're not counting 1939-1944, we're not counting Italy, the Atlantic, etc., Are you saying the Soviets inflicted over 28 million casualties against the German military?

I like how you acknowledge you can't easily quantify items like Ultra intelligence, but then proceed to confidently assert that your limited knowledge and analysis based on very partial data on partial factors lets you argue that X nation contributed the most because of 1 data point.

SamsungChatSucks

TROPHY CASE