Prejudice is pre judging. The term is the combination of the prefix "pre" with the action of "judging". But what precisely does "pre" mean?  Pre what?  Definitions of prejudice pull in the following concepts: "unreasonable", "adverse", "unfair", "irrational", "hateful".

But let us for a moment stop talking about words and instead talk about reality. In reality, we constantly judge things and update our judgements. We judge how fast an oncoming car is travelling to make a decision about whether or not we should pull out into traffic. And we update that judgement multiple times as the car approaches.  We judge whether a 20-something black man in sneakers in an alley way in the bad part of town at night might present a greater-than-average security risk to our billfold, and we update that judgement when we notice the wrist tag from the club he came out of to have a smoke.  We judge whether a person may engage in gossip about other people based on the fact that she is female.

When I was younger, I tried to not use any statistical information at all about other people. Everybody was entirely neutral and empty and I was petrified of judging anything about them at all lest I be accused of prejudice, lest I get something wrong and offend them. Heavens forbid someone should think I was unfair to them (I'm very fair minded) or hateful. But this did not work well for me. Maybe it was nice for other people, but I was a highly ineffective person. I was socially inept. And in some cases it was downright dangerous.

Now, rather than avoiding judgement, I work on being as nimble as possible with my judgements. Update them rapidly; don't hold them tightly. This is better. If a judgement is distinctly negative, you can give people the benefit of the doubt unless that puts you at too much risk. When a judgement isn't negative and people are bothered simply by an expression of a judgement over a group in the abstract... I think all you can do is apologize and move on.

In certain situations, people need to avoid certain kinds of prejudgement altogether, like if you are a traffic cop you don't want to pull someone over for "driving while black." But in the vast majority of situations, you will commit microaggressions and sometimes people will express discontent, but you will be more effective.

We should all work on being more tolerant of microaggressions, and not presuming the person is hateful or stubborn in their sometimes-gonna-be-wrong judgements.


My thinking on this is wildly divergent from yours. We could argue it out if you want. Otherwise I'm happy to just disagree and move on.


When I get hit by a wiffle bat all I feel is loved


I didn't mean it to be condescending. The definition of "condescending" includes the term "superiority" which I do not think applies.  IMHO there are statistical facts about humans that some people (especially in the West) try to ignore or erase or consider improper to acknowledge for PC reasons. One is that women care more about people and gossip about people, whereas men care more about things and that kind of talk isn't generally called "gossip".  I think it is normal and healthy (and important) for people to gossip about other people.

There are many other forms of political correctness that I don't follow and that I find stifling. For example if I mock a Chinese person by making a squinched up face and say "ching wong chong," is that condescending or offensive?  In the West people think of course yes it is.  But in most non-Western cultures, they recognize it for what it is.  I am showing the Chinese person how he presents to me... his face seems shaped differently, his words seem to sound differently.  If he then makes strange sounds to show me how my English sounds to him, or tells me I sound like I have a hot potato in my mouth, I laugh about it. I take no offense.  And then we both go get drunk or whatever.


What is condescending?


Here are the upsides and downsides as I see it. I'd like to hear of an alternative that has better upsides than inbox/outbox relay rendezvous.

Upsides:

1. Users only need to configure which relays they wish to use. Other than that, they don't have to worry about which relays the people they follow use, everything just works automatically including:
1a. They magically get all the event from everybody they follow, and people who follow them get all of their events.
1b. When they tag someone that person reads that event, and when someone tags them they see that event.
2. Users do not need to use the same relays for all of (1) to happen. They can use entirely disjoint sets of relays. Meaning nostr becomes completely decentralized, people can even use personal relays if they wish.
3. This works without events ever needing to be copied from relay to relay.

Downsides:

1. Clients need to connect to relays that the user didn't configure. They can prompt for permission (annoying) or just do it (possible privacy concern).
2. Clients may need to connect to lots of relays if the users that are followed are spread out across lots of relays.  On mobile devices, each connection's overhead (primarily SSL) drains battery.

I don't think those downsides are a big deal, given that upside #1 is HUGE.  Any solution that doesn't provide upside #1 is going to either be a nightmare UX or is going to hyper-centralize nostr.

If I'm wrong, please prove it. I would happily stump for your better solution if one exists... I don't think one exists.


That is true.


This was a historical accident. I called my client "gossip" originally because I thought the name would appeal more to the females, and I thought getting a male user base would be easy so effort should be focused on seeking a female user base.  I never did much else about making my client "girly" though.

Later on I found out that "gossip protocol" was a term of art already in use in the bitcoin community.

Since the gossip client was the first client to seek events from where people were posting them, instead of from a fixed set of relays, people started using the term "the gossip model" to mean "do what the gossip client does... which is to somehow find out where people post and read from those places."

Later on I wrote NIP-65 as a way that people could advertise in a more formal way what relays they will be writing their notes to (and where they can reliably read from).  If you utilize someone elses NIP-65 kind 10002 event "write" relay, this is called the"outbox model" because they write to that relay as an outbox and you go pick stuff up from it.  If you utilize someone elses NIP-65 kind 10002 event "read" relay, this is called the "inbox model" because you write there and can have some hope that they will be reading events that tag them from those relays.

Nostr is not p2p.  If we had p2p, we would not need relay rendezvous.


How about clients by default don't connect to or AUTH to anything, and instead they prompt the user to ask what the user wishes?  And once the answer is known for a relay, no more prompting for that relay. And on a per-relay config page the user can change their answers? Gossip client has this backend code finished but the UI isn't done yet.

I personally won't be turning on the feature, but I understand why it matters for some people.


Emmett Shear succeeds Sam Altman
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-20/openai-s-board-hires-former-twitch-executive-shear-as-ceo?utm_content=business&utm_campaign=socialflow-organic&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&cmpid=socialflow-twitter-business#xj4y7vzkg


You are a major nostr dev. Your faith and comments regarding Christianity cannot diminish that. I would never think less of your nostr dev credibility based on how much you talk about Christian things.

Of course if your comments about Christianity started to drown out your comments about nostr, I might start to have trouble following you due to the noise. You are nowhere near that point, far far from it IMHO.


That dog gets it.


I don't believe that small amounts of aluminum salts or ethyl mercury cause any serious damage to your body by direct means.  Rather, I think what happens is that any foreign protein that happens to be present where the vaccine hit your muscle tissue may very well become an additional target of the aggressive immune response. So your immune response becomes sensitive to the partial bit of virus (as intended) and may become sensitive to ... peanuts or shellfish or maybe even something endogenously produced that is important to your body's functioning.  In any case, I think they are a crap shoot where the odds are quite high that you will be fine, but perhaps a significant minority develop potentially lifelong ailments.  I don't know how big a "significant minority" is as this is "out of my lane".


Use magnesium in deoderant. Best product switch I ever made. Total and complete lack of any armpit smell since I started using magnesium-based deoderant. Apparently the microorganism that turns sweat into smell cannot tolerate magnesium.  I'm not sure about bitcoin or nostr, but I'm sure about using magnesium-based deoderants (at least when it comes to effectiveness).


My COLDCARD is cold.  Because I'm holding.


Given the situation in Gaza there is a lot of talk about anti-semitism and a lot of accusations. As for myself, I'm far too refined to extend my "anti-" across all semites. I'm too refined to extend my "anti-" against all the Jews. I'm too refined to extend my "anti-" across all the Zionists.  I am anti-revisionist-ZIonism.  But I don't even have to single out that group because I also happen to be anti-asshole, and all revisionist Zionists are assholes.  So it is more parsimonious for me to just say that I am "anti-asshole."  But as a retort to being accused of being an anti-semite, saying "No, I'm not an anti-semite, I'm an anti-asshole", I tend to be misunderstood. 😅


I suppose when he says "full of bugs" he means issue #1 ?


That is a special ops turtle


Curious about which atomic ordering you should use?  The rust nomicon clears it all up with this sentence:  "It's defined in terms of madness-inducing causality graphs that require a full book to properly understand in a practical way."


Based on discussions on telegram 2-3 weeks ago, I've got a branch for gossip to have new "allow_connect" and "allow_auth" flags on a per-relay basis.  They start out as None meaning the user is prompted.  Afterwards it behaves like a switch you can adjust in the per-relay settings.  There are also global flags as to whether the relay connection requires approval, and whether relay auth requires approval, you can turn them both off and just let it rip the way it does currently.  In fact they are off by default.

This branch isn't merged yet because the UI work hasn't been done.


Yes it is always tomorrow in New Zealand


It is November 19 in New Zealand.


Ancap is (correct me if I am wrong) where people choose which Justice Organisation they want to belong to because there is no centralization, and there are multiple, and they fight it out when they have differences.  That is what nation states are.

I assert that whatever your imagined ideal system is, it will evolve/degrade into what we have now.


Happy birthday nostr:npub1sg6plzptd64u62a878hep2kev88swjh3tw00gjsfl8f237lmu63q0uf63m


Alt shows as Problem Tracker Event on gossip


It needs an '@' before it for usability.


I couldn't agree more.


It cuts both ways though. As people write to social media, sure, they hand information to the government for free.  But as people read from social media, they get a true picture of what society is thinking and wrest free of the government and media manipulations.


GM.

Breakfast: toast, eggs, bacon, canteloupe, coffee


I spent far too much of my late teens and early 20s studying anarcho-capitalistic ideas. I just never ran in to the shortened form "ancap" back in those days.

BTW I concluded that anarcho-capitalism is no different from what the world already is, and as you can see it doesn't work very well.


I just saw the flash above the lower shadow. Thanks.  I also see she touches the table at the end.

I still don't know what is happening. Maybe some sort of photographic table top that retains shadow images?


I had to look up ancap and I got "Australasian New Car Assessment Program" before I got anarcho-capitalism


You are right. In the final analysis, anybody can do it however they want.

But there is a github repo people have been arguing about recently that specifies NIPs. Those are not commandments, but they are seen as the correct version of nostr and clearly are the NIPs most developers will aim at.  Therefore, there is some kind of power if you get to specify them and others don't... even if it is a soft power.


How is this done?

https://twitter.com/Enezator/status/1725467246011535400


I think there is a fundamental contradiction in the idea of decentralizing the nostr NIPs.  If it were truly decentralized we would have multiple NIPs repositories that did not agree.  A protocol doesn't work well when there are different variations on the different NIPs.  As much as it is anthetical to our very natures, I think it has to be centralized and that we have to fall in line as subservient to the people with merge access.  At least it is not a govenment, it is just a protocol specification. And at least it isn't just one person, it is many. And clearly they don't like this state of affairs either but there is nothing to be done about it. Seriously I see no way to truly decentralize it without a long period of nostr-wars where clients and relays only become "eventually compatible" based on what people actually code, and things that happen that way tend to accumulate crap over time (not that nostr doesn't have it's share of accumulated crap for other reasons).

It's great to have a decentralization ideal. But sometimes for practical reasons ideals cannot be achieved and pragmatism needs to overrule. And we cannot all have merge access.

I had merge access once but I revoked my own permissions. Then I got them back somehow. Then they went away again somehow. Generally I wasn't using them because I don't want the responsibility. It's fine to complain about a merge you don't like, but anybody who wants merge access automatically becomes suspicious in my book.


I agree that user@domain will be misunderstood as an email address, which is a usability issue.

I don't agree that @user@domain is up for grabs. As others said, Mastodon uses that.

I agree that it is largely a branding/usability issue.

I don't agree that a URI scheme is a usability disaster. I think the @user@domain is a usability disaster.  I don't think a slightly longer string hurts usability as much as a mastodon-looking string that soapbox says is formatted correctly but oops it cannot connect to the server.

I don't think I'll have any more points to make to any reply. I'm barely interested enough even to make these points.


Did you forget to use nipple covers for your sheer lingerie try-on haul?  Naughty.


To add to that, using "nostr:nip05:user@domain" doesn't require any context. It says what it is.

Using "user@domain" requires context. You have to know external to the data that this is a nip05 address.  In which case you already know that it is not an email address.

A user only confuses it with an email address if the context isn't obvious.  And if the context isn't obvious, then the data should specify the context.


user@domain is specifying a user at a domain, it is not specifying any protocol.  The fact that people see it and think it is an email address is unfortunate, because this format of specifying a user at a domain was not originally intended to be used exclusively by email.

An email address URI is "mailto:user@domain"

We could use a URI something like "nostr:nip05:user@domain".  I don't like the verbosity though.

But I don't like @user@domain. There is no way to tell that this is a nostr thing at all. Could be a mastodon address.  Could be a bluesky address.  Might be an email address with a typo.


GM


“When people get used to preferential treatment, equal treatment seems like discrimination.”  ― Thomas Sowell


I read it to mean a "multinational peacekeeping" force that wasn't all Western.... say US, France, China, Egypt and Saudi Arabia for example.  But I have no idea what they actually mean.

Even if it was American, American soldiers are FAR less likely to kill innocents because they don't have the history of racial hatred.  So even that would be better than what we see right now.


"The United States and several European Countries are reportedly discussing the Deployment of a Multinational Peacekeeping Force to the Gaza Strip which may include U.S. and NATO Troops similar to the KFOR Mission in Kosovo; these discussion are being had in the hope that this Deployment may allow Israeli Ground Operations in the Strip to Wrap-Up with this Force being seen as able to prevent Hamas from Returning to Power, but so far this has not yet been seen as Feasible." -OSINTdefender on twitter

I am in favor of this. People on either side should be in favor.  If you are pro-Palestinian you'll be glad it is not IDF soldiers intentionally killing innocent people and bulldozing buildings. If you are pro-Israeli you'll be glad that Israel won't be able to be accused of that stuff anymore.  Also the official position of the U.S. is a two-state solution.


I used to be very shy as a kid, and even as an adult for a very long time I was afraid to be wrong, so I said very little.

Once I realized that talking is how humans think in groups, I opened up. Being wrong is just part of the process. I'm far less careful now, and I love being corrected.

I appreciate you Lyn, you say the greatest things.


That is what I see too. Intensely emotional tribalism. I can get myself drawn into it too if I'm not careful.

I also find people cannot separate their desires from their predictions.


No!  No!  It cannot be!

You have not heard the end from me!  I will ... I swear I will release incompatible features, cherry coloured candy-like reflective features with high definition fonts that draw in the masses! And I will secretly insert features that cause other clients to go into endless loops!  I will make secret deals with arthurfranca and others from the far away lands to spread these features until it is too late!  And I will have my revenge!


It is true that I have usurped the term for my own devices, even as a up-jumped lowly client developer.  But I got away with it, didn't I?  I'm now the Dioces of Relay Models, and the plebs cannot tell the difference!  Bwaaahahahahaha!!


So wrong.


I'm sorry.  I was just trying to say that it is never the case that nobody wants to sell.

When I traded with Interactive Brokers there were always piles of bids and asks at different price points. If there is not enough bitcoin to supply to potential buyers, the price of BTC goes up until there is. Market makers don't need to hold any securities, they can get their several pip spread by putting together buyer and seller that overlap and taking the difference for themselves.


Apparently I don't have the clout to elevate a typical Thursday of throwing axes into a holiday.  Maybe if I were part of the NIP priesthood, or if I were as powerful as Zeus my declaration would carry more weight.


I declare today to be the First Holiday of the Nostr, and I deem it to be the "Day of Fights"

Fights over the NIP priesthood.
Fights between Mutiny and Zeus.
And all the lesser fights that didn't make it into my feed.

Fight on, drink, and be merry!


I love that jeruSALEM (shalom, salam) means "peace".  What a misnomer.


Some pseudo intellectual surmised that Neandertals died out because they couldn't think as collectives, and so they couldn't organize in huge groups like humans could, and those huge groups won battles.  That was the theory of Yuval Noah Harari, the brains behind the World Economic Forum.

I'm not convinced.


You can only understand this if you give up thinking in absolutes.  If indeed nobody wanted to sell, the price of BTC would go up to infinity.

What actually happens is someone decides that is high enough and takes some profit.  The bid price has to go up high enough to meet the lowest ask.  Upward jumps in the price of BTC happen when there is nobody left to sell at the current price, and the price has to jump up to the next ask.  Downward jumps happen when nobody is willing to buy at the current price and the price has to fall to meet the highest bid.  With enough players trying to time the market, the market remains fairly liquid and the price doesn't jump too massively.


I hope the young Americans who have read Osama bin Laden's "Letter to America" that became popular on TikTok recently think about it and come to the following conclusions:

1) Wow. If collective punishment is valid, then shit, I'm guilty???!!  Fuck.  I don't accept that.  Therefore, collective punishment is always wrong. Osama bin Laden was wrong!
2) ... hmm... that means Judging people in groups is always wrong.
3) Holy shit!  That means wokeness is way off the fucking rails because it is entirely group-oriented instead of individual-oriented.
4) Let's fix the mess we made of America


National should toss Winston Peters and make a deal with TPM.  Make Act and TPM work out their differences. That would be so much more fascinating.


Yes. I follow/aggregate a number of feeds using flym on android.


Say "GM"


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l06RqPiAGzQ

🫂


I share your lack of appreciation of Family Guy.  In fact after not seeing anything funny on TV in years, I turned mine off and didn't bother to install one in my new house.


1. Why don't the Palestinians have a state?

Every offer Palestine ever got was shitty and they were negotiating for more. Of course they failed in their goals for a better deal.

The Oslo accords, most often cited by pro-Israeli people, was not even an offer. it was a first step without an offer of a state, but it conceded many things to Israel making their occupation legal, giving Israel the area that splits the West Bank into a bunch of tiny pieces, a wonderful place from which to continue their obvious divide-and-conquer strategy.

2. You are next

This is mostly an extreme viewpoint held by very few Muslims (e.g. ISIS) yet almost every Jew attributes this belief to all of the Muslim Brotherhood including Hamas, but it is not true. You can always find some extremist saying it, but you can find hundreds of Muslim leaders saying it is not true.

It can be argued that "you are next" might apply to you being attacked next by Israel. The "Greater Israel" plan is widely known. Search for the map of "Greater Israel".

3. Why are there so many Palestinian refugees in the world?

He is flat wrong on his figures here. There are about 6 million Palestinians worldwide. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_diaspora

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_refugees shows there are only 5.6 million registered Palestinian refugees.

4. Ethnic cleansing

I don't blame him for not knowing the facts here because within Israel the facts on this are supressed, it is illegal to teach about it in schools... kind of like Tiannamen square is in China (but to a lesser degree).

Nonetheless, during the Nakba in 1948, 700,000 Palestinians were forcibly removed from the land that Israel claimed.  I don't have a death count, but entire villages were slaughtered as a warning to the other villages that they had better get moving, attested to by elderly Israeli men who took part in it.

That was the ethnic cleansing.

His number of 160,000 in 1948 only counts Palestinians who did not get pushed into the West Bank or Gaza (slighty greater areas than today's borders due to the 1967 war that came later).  The actual number is closer to 156,000.  Those were Palestinians who lied and claimed to be Jews so they wouldn't be pushed out of their homes.  Later they came clean and are now citizens of Israel.

Pushing them out, occupying the West Bank taking more and more land, making their lives worse and worse so that they leave on their own, and "mowing the lawn" with bombing raids to kill some but mainly to terrorize the rest so that they hopefully leave has been the strategy ever since.

This is a genocide against the Palestinian Nationality (not technically against the ethnicity since some Palestinians live in Israel) according to the Geneva convention 1948 definition.  I don't like to argue about words, but technically it is a genocide.

Also, comparing populations from 1948 to today, both sides grew, so it's a dumb way to compare.  I have killed billions of yeasts while making sourdough starter, far more than I have today, and yet the amount of sourdough starter I have today is more than what I started with.

I don't know why all the Jews left Lebanon, Syria and Egypt (I'd like information about that) but probably because they felt more welcome in Israel and felt unsafe in those countries. I have not heard anybody claim that those countries killed their Jewish populations.

The arabs living in Israel enjoy *almost* the same rights as Jews. They don't have a right of return, which is reserved for only Jewish people.  But yes, some are judges and they have their own minority political party.

He is right that many Arabs prefer to live in Israel, rather than under occupation in Palestine. No suprises there.

5. Hamas doesn't like gays

Same-sex sexual activity has been legal for males since 1951 in the West Bank and it has ALWAYS been legal for females. As for Gaza there is no consensus on the matter. But they are discriminated against and don't have the same rights as in Western countries. For example, they can't serve in the military.

6. Gaza is not a prison

He is right, it is not a prison. I never liked the analogy myself.  If you don't have a visa to travel to another country, you are trapped in your own country.  That is true of very many people worldwide.

But Gaza is not a country, these people are stateless refugees and they have no government charged with defending and protecting their civil rights (unless you count Hamas, but they suck at it).  Gaza it is quite small, overpopulated (these people can breed!) and they often cannot get out even if another country gives them a visa, since they are denied a port and denied an airport. And they are blocked from international trade. Call it what you want.

Israel provides them water and electricity, while also not allowing them to build their own water and electricity resources to a level of self-sufficiency for alleged "security" reasons. So it's disingenuous to call the water and electricity they provide "aid to their enemies."  In fact they do it this way to ensure control over Gaza, so they have the power to cut them off.

It is true Hamas leaders are rich, and Hamas are terrorists.

He said "If Hamas enjoys their support of 65% of the people in Gaza, then what is happening is their fault".  That was Osama bin Laden's argument for attacking American citizens, because they voted for the government that committed crimes against his people, therefore all Americans are guilty and legitimate targets.  This Israeli (and many other Israelis) thinks like a terrorist and believes in collective punishment which is a war crime.

It is true Hamas takes the money and invests most of it in military instead of infrastructure. Hamas is pretty much the military-industrial-complex of Gaza.

7. Constitutions

He quotes (fairly accurately) an old 1988 Hamas charter. Hamas has a 2017 charter that says none of those things. That doesn't mean they aren't lying (I think Hamas is evil).

The conflict is about land. It is also about lies and misdirection. And it has very little to do with religion. The Likud 1973 charter states that "Between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty."  History shows the Palestinian areas shrinking and shrinking over time. They just cleared and are flattening most of Northern Gaza.  The plan for a Greater Israel is well known.


I received this very event from nos.lol

So, um, no.


If your message is censored on twitter, facebook, etc....  then I think maybe highway overpasses?


IMHO after the Russia-Ukraine war, Russia must pay reparations to rebuild the parts of Ukraine it damaged/destroyed.
IMHO after Hamas is destroyed, Israel must pay reparations to rebuild the parts of Gaza it damaged/destroyed.
In a war, it is fair to damage enemy infrastructure, but you are on the hook to rebuild it once the war is over.
There is a lot of precedent.
Germany had to pay reparations under the Treaty of Versailles, and again after WW2.
The US would have had to pay for Hiroshima/Nagasaki except that Japan waived it under the Treaty of San Francisco.


I love that you are taking my comment seriously. It makes this whole thread so much funnier.  Because I'm really just trying to pull your chain.  I hope you know that.


Dear friends, today is a great day for online privacy!

With an overwhelming 51:2 vote, the EU parliament has decided *AGAINST CHAT CONTROL*  proposed by the EU Council. It included warrantless mass surveillance of phones and circumventing end-to-end encryption.

The fight is not over yet.

We will see how the Council adjusts its stance.

https://proton.me/blog/eu-parliament-chat-control

https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/historic-agreement-on-child-sexual-abuse-proposal-csar-european-parliament-wants-to-remove-chat-control-and-safeguard-secure-encryption-2/


Your mission, should you choose to accept, is to make sure that the governmental powers that wish to censor independent media voices in order to enhance the power of their propaganda fail miserably until they give up such a foolhearty and misguided pursuit.

This task cannot be achieved just by building nostr software. You must also actively debunk government propaganda and actively spread such debunkings.

I've heard enough about bitcoin for two lifetimes. What I am hoping to see more of are the information fires that burn down the ill-begotten agendas of governments.

Nostr adoption will skyrocket as the message gets out to the masses that we are calling out all the shit, and that this uncensored place is where they can  reliably find those callouts.

At least that is how I see it.  I know we aren't ready for masses, and so we also need to focus on nostr itself.


Keeping animals alive forever is going to require the terraforming of Mars. Do you support terraforming of Mars and do you support the forcible transfer of animals (a possible crime against animality) to the terraformed Mars so that they do not die of Malthusian starvation here on an overcroweded Earth?


I surely didn't start it. I copied the idea from some other client, perhaps Astral


Now that people want it, I'm turning off my "client" tag on posts.  😝


Feh. I don't want to eat reincarnated Leonardo.  Probably tastes like lawn.  Maybe I'll eat Sun Tzu - I'm sure he ate meat, and maybe he even ate people, making him super powerful!  Hell, anybody from PNG that eats their dead ancestors must have acquired generations of power, famous or not.


Sure, that's fine. I'm just offering my opinion, not something I think should be part of the protocol.


Users should be able to disable this feature.  I overhreard in a dark alley way: "User [redacted] uses buggy client [redacted]?  Great.  Now I can focus my attack on that client's bugs."


A year ago a lot of clients included a 'client' tag.  Gossip made it optional, default is off for privacy reasons. I have it on so people can contact me about invalid events gossip may create, so as the developer I can get them fixed.


well obviously


I don't believe in reincarnation, but just in case it is true I'm going to increase my meat consumption to increase the chance of eating someone famous, such as Leonardo DaVinci or Nikola Tesla.


I remember eating teriyaki chicken at our local Buddhist temple. Every time they put on the event.


Wow. Didn't know you lived in such a place.


I buy everything right now with an EFTPOS card and I'm sure they track everything already. And they already can freeze my bank assets if they wish.


Your charge of immorality comes from one accusation of defilement.  But in the old testament, the rules about who can sleep with whom under what circumstances are not agreed upon between different cultures.  This is starting to sound like The Game of Thrones R+L=J.  Maybe she fell in love with the prince.


> what kind of event you want to see next

I want to see a kind 30023 event next  (that was a little nostr humor)


He didn't like the fact that it created enemies, and says so clearly in verse 30. Didn't say anything about the injustice of it.  Verse 2 doesn't make clear if their sister was raped, but their response sure does. So killing Shechem was fine by me.  But to make friends with the whole group, and then slay all their men who put trust in you? Horrid.

Maybe the entire story was demonstrating that nobody should ever trust a Jew. That's the message I took from it when I was young and didn't have clearer saner ways of thinking about people as individuals and not as groups.


Brief speech of condemnations, on or about 11 November 2023
Prince Turki Al-Faisal
Saudi Arabia's former intelligence chief and former envoy to US, UK

All military occupied people have a right to resist their occupation, even militarily.
I do not support the military option in Palestine.
I prefer the other option: civil insurrection and disobedience.
It brought down the British Empire in India and the Soviet Empire in Eastern Europe.
Israel has overwhelming military superiority and we see in front of our eyes, the devastation and oblivion it is brining to the people of Gaza.
I categorically condemn Hamas' targeting of civilian targets of any age or gender, as it is accused of.
Such targeting belies Hamas' claims to an Islamic identity.
There is an Islamic injunction against the killing of innocent children, women and elders.
The injunction is also against the desecration of places of worship.
I also condemn Hamas' gifting the higher moral ground to an Israeli government that is universally shunned, even by half of the Israeli public as fascist, miscreant and abhorrent.
I condemn Hamas for giving this awful government the excuse to ethnically cleanse Gaza of its citizens and bombing them to oblivion.
I condemn Hamas to further undermining the Palestinian Authority as Israel has been doing.
I condemn Hamas for sabotaging the attempt of Saudi Arabia to reach a peaceful resolution to the plight of the Palestinian people.
But equally, I condemn Israel's indiscriminate bombing of Palestinian innocent civilians in Gaza and the attempt to forcibly drive them into Sinai.
I condemn Israeli targeted killing and the indiscriminate arrest of Palestinian children, women and men in the West Bank.
Two wrongs don't make a right.
I've been hearing a repeated phrase in American media: unprovoked attack.
What more provocation is required to make it provoked than what Israel has done to the Palestinian people for three quarters of a century?
I refer you to the article in the Middle East Monitor of February 17, 2014 under the title: Israeli army veterans admit role in massacre of Palestinians in 1948.
Read it and weep as I did.
Just this year, from May to July, over 450 Palestinians were killed, including 67 children.
This bloodletting must stop.
I condemn Israel's stealing of Palestinian lands.
I condemn Israeli colonists for rampaging through houses of worship in Al-Asqa Mosque in Jerusalem.
I condemn Israel for destroying Palestinian homes and olive orchards.
I condemn Israel for incarcerating Palestinian women, children and men in concentration camps without recourse to due process.
I condemn Israel's targeted killings and assassinations of Palestinians.
I condemn Israel for funneling Qatari money to Hamas, the terrorist group as defined by Israel.
I condemn Western politicians for shedding tears when Israelis are killed by Palestinians, but refuse to even express sorrow when Israelis kill Palestinians.
There are no heroes in this conflict. Only victims.


Oh yes. Very complex. And the New Testament is a godsend (shall we say) for the Christians to come out of that crude and brutal way of thinking.

I do not mean to indict all god-fearing people in my post (even though as an athiest I tend to lean that way), but I started it with "religious nationalists" and I meant only the most extreme of them.  But maybe even that is too far of a stretch as times have changed.  Still, I continue to be suprised at how little they have changed among certain people such as Ben-Gvir and Netanyahu.


I was raised a Christian by my mother, and she believes the Bible is the word of god and perfect. When we got to the story about the tribe circumcizing themselves and then Israelites slaughtering them 3 days later, I knew it was morally wrong.  Nobody said so, not the church, not my mother. but I knew it.  Because morality doesn't come from god, it comes from within, from circuitry we evolved with. Sometimes there were some handwaving arguments, but I was a smart kid. So when I got older, these various handwaving arguments about this, about god even existing, they all fell away as I became an adult.


old


Also, if Palestinians didn't believe in god, they would be FAR more civil, much less willing to yield to "gods will", much less willing to martyr themselves.

Morality is a complex game-theoretic system of behavior and signalling that keeps us all civil, and it is not at all easy. There are no absolutes, but moral actions bring about consequences. Feeling "this is all too much" and playing life on "easy mode" by believing in a god and doing what the Chursh says just yields all your capability and power to someone else who will most likely abuse it.


If you want to know how far religious nationalists will go in pursuit of what they believe must come to pass, read the book of Joshua. Not only does it document serial genocides and recount that history as "good", Joshua 1:18 quotes the people answering Joshua's command with "Whoever rebels against your word and does not obey it, whatever you may command them, will be put to death."  Yes, that is right, irrespective of the command no matter how illegal or vile, the supporters of the god-nation will kill anyone who disobeys the state.

No, that was not a quote from the Quran.

Did you hear about the time when a reasonably friendly group wanted to "lie with" Jewish women, and the Israelites told them they needed to be circumcized first? and they all got circumcized at the same time, and 3 days later when they were in the most pain, the Israelites went in and slaughtered them all?

Or what about the time when they said they were attacking Hamas underneath a hospital, except that the proof was a complete joke and easily rebutted, and so what actually happened is that they simply destroyed an enemy hospital? Yep, that just happened.

By their deeds you shall know them.


When humans lived together in small groups, liars would be caught out and would suffer the subsequent lack of trust by the group. And so the incentive not to lie was strong. But in huge societies where the people being lied to have little recourse against the liar, there is little incentive not to use this tool to achieve whatever social end you are seeking.

I can come to two conclusions (1) get out there and lie because it works (I hate this conclusion, I recoil from it), and (2) retreat from large communities (generally large online platforms) and center your life around smaller interactive groups of people (family, local shops, church if that is your thing, and small online groups like nostr).


I never cease to be amazed at how readily the majority people believe whatever they are told, and that they are so easily controllable just by lying to them.


Well said.  But of course, not well enough because language is too poor to do that thought justice.


#HRF has launched a #CBDC Tracker!

https://cbdctracker.hrf.org/home


Accounting is the art of explanation, accounting for WHY did value go from A to B?  Was it a purchase, a loan, a loan payback, a transfer, etc.

Bitcoin doesn't do accounting. There is no accounting for why sats moved from one address to another.


😁  Thanks.

Funny thing, gossip has all the backend code for follower tiers but the UI code stalled


Good stuff.


I agree with that.


So top-level community posts are replies to a community definition.  Since I don't implement nip-72, that is what gossip will see, but since kind 34550 is not a feed displayable kind it won't be rendered as a note in the feed, so it will just be handled as a reply to something broken I guess. I'll work something out when I get to that stage.


> usually direct it back

I guess you can't do that with atypical compliments like:  You blow the biggest chin-bubbles and your armpits are very wet


> Remember! You can't brin guns to the airport.

Only in Texas


Awesome, someone I know of from outside of the nostr/bitcoin community.  I'm glad you're here.


Rebuilding everything on top of nostr is as bad as rewriting everything in rust.


I think maybe this guy in the IDF is trying to signal to the world that Israel is full of shit and is actually just killing Gazans every chance they get, but he has to do his job and make it seem like he is not betraying them, so he just does a horribly bad and easy to refute propaganda in hopes the world sees it and recognizes that Israel is totally full of shit.

And we saw it.

Message received, loud and clear.


I had never heard of it until today. I'm sorry if you have had any trouble getting in touch with client developers.

Gossip's downloading code is pretty much follows HTTP standards, and has no uploading code.  I have no plans to work in this space for at least 4 months, maybe longer.


The IDF has now told us the names of the Hamas terrorists who were guarding captives in the basement of the Rantisi hospital.

The names of the terrorists are:  Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.

Keep an eye out for them.  They are wanted dead or alive.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Palestine/comments/17ummb0/the_idf_released_propaganda_saying_that_a/
https://rumble.com/v3vje5d-israel-caught-faking-hamas-hospital-videos.html


You can do it with the gossip client.


It is a deleted note.


Thomas Jefferson put his feet in cold water I think to prevent colds. Dunno if it was supposed to cure them


Also reminds me about those special bags that preserve garlic cloves. In NZ they have to disclose on the label how it works. The amazing high tech answer? The bags block light keeping the garlic dark. That is all.


I knew who he was but typed the wrong name because I'm old.


I didn't know TikTok was banned in China! Here is Ron Paul objecting to censoring TikTok in the USA:

https://rumble.com/v3ujs91-dr.-rand-paul-defends-free-speech-opposes-senate-bill-to-ban-tiktok-novembe.html


I feel the need to speak out against anti-semitism.  Yes, I'm very concerned about dead Palestinian children, but there is a clear line that I need to draw on the other side.

People practicing the Jewish religion are just people, just like you and I, and nobody should hate them for their religious beliefs.

People in Israel who believe in a national homeland for the Jews are generally normal and good people who simply have a nationalism idea. I disagree with their support of what happened in 1948 and the 75 years of ongoing hell it caused, but some of them don't even know about the history because in Israel they try hard to erase this past and pretend it didn't happen.  So I don't hate Zionists who believe in Zionism as it was originally formulated (called Labor Zionism) which is that Jewish people want a state for themselves.  I'm OK with labor Zionism.

What I am very much not OK with is revisionist Zionism, in which Israel attempts to capture all of Palestine and remove the Palestinians completely.

Please don't hate Jews.  If you want to hate someone, hate Ben-Gvir or Netanyahu.  There are specific people who have done very bad things you can focus your hate on.  Please don't go off hating all the Jews.


They are such a tease: "I know about a note, I'm not gonna tell you where I saw it, nanny nanny boo boo!"

If we had a resolution service that mapped ID to relays they would be great. But there is no resolution service in nostr.


Me too. I don't load 'em. I don't see 'em.


I read "50kt" as 50 kilotons


Congratulations! Your child is non-binary!


Well Head & Shoulders shampoo sure the fuck is.  They sell it as anti-dandruff, but in all their advertising they demonstrate dry scalp not dandruff.  Dry scalp creates tiny flakes, ahd Head & Shoulders shampoo is very drying, so it CAUSES the thing they pretend to be curing.  In fact it does cure dandruff, it's just that people don't know what dandruff is, so they legally get away with it.

Similar story with mint-flavored antacid tablets. They cause acid reflux via the mint.  Mint relaxes the muscle that holds your stomach closed.


Wealth-to-GDP numbers are interesting.  The lower the number, the faster the country is growing.

Hong Kong is worst at 8.4 and is an obvious outlier.

The countries below that, in the range from 6 down to 5, include Italy, Spain, Switzerland, USA, New Zealand, Australia, United Kingdom and France followed by Canada and Japan at 4.9.  These countries are growing slowly.

China is at 4.4 but already has 19% of global wealth.  India is also at 4.4 with 3.4% of world wealth.

Germany does better at 3.8

South Africa is at 2.2, Brazil is at 1.9 and Russia is at 1.8.


Global share of GDP has shifed

1995:  G7  44.5%,  BRICS 16.9%,  REST: 38.2%
2010:  G7  34.3%,  BRICS 26.6%,  REST: 39.1%
2023:  G7  29.9%,  BRICS 32.1%,  REST: 38.0%

While the BRICS now command a greater share of global GDP than the G7 do, the G7 are still far wealthier (51.7% of global wealth versus 24.6% of global wealth).  GDP indicates current growth, while wealth is accumulated from historic growth.


2L of Jim Beam costs the equivalent of NZ$41 in Japan at a Tax Free shop.  In New Zealand duty free airport shops the lowest deal ever found was NZ$59 (more typically it is NZ$70).  I saved over 30% by buying in Japan and putting them into my checked luggage.


Get a different shaped toilet that doesn't splatter back


As plutonium heats up, it passes through six solid forms before it melts, and in each one the atoms occupy a very different volume than the previous form.


Politically, internally, Israel has never had a majority government, and they have serious troubles making coalition governments. People argue for ethnostates, that bringing in outsiders like Muslims into London causes problems and people should remain with their own kind otherwise civility and unity suffer.  But the ethnostate of Israel is a shipwreck of a country that was verging on civil war prior to Oct 7, demonstrating that this clearly does not work as so many people imagine. All people are different, even brother against brother, and unity is achieved via statecraft, diplomacy and persuasion, not via ethnicity.

But as a libertarian individualist, I don't believe unity is necessary. I think everybody should be free to sign up for as much or as little government as they want, signing only the contracts that they choose.


I'm OK with it remaining if Bibi was thrown out and the Likud party got out of power and they changed their stance radically, and started being nice to Palestinians and trying to make peace with them, rather than trying to make their lives miserable so that they would leave.  It is possible.  I don't predict it will happen though.


“To announce in advance that you will break international law and to do so on an innocent population, it reduces all the code that was there from second world war on protection of civilians and it reduces it to tatters.” - Michael D Higgins, president of Ireland, November 2023

When this statement drew the ire of the Israeli ambassador to Ireland, there were calls from the public to expel the ambassador.  Interestingly, Irish parliamentarians rarely debate whether Israel is in the right or not, they debate whether Israel can be allowed to continue to exist or whether it must be dissolved.  The Irish have a history of using what the British portrayed as terrorism to achieve their own independence and have a lot of sympathy for the plight of the Palestinians who they see as being in a similar situation, under the thumb of a stronger power.  Apparently nobody is arguing that Hamas's attack on civilians was justifiable, and everybody there condemns it.


Do you find yourself in sticker shock every time you go to the supermarket? Does your paycheck seem to cover less and less of your household needs? Are you tired of being spied on by the government for no reason?

Well now there is something you can do about it.

Nioctib is a new option that is available to help you take control of that shrinking dollar.

With just one simple orange pill per day, you can have the freedom and opportunity you've been looking for.

Nioctib is not for everybody. Side effects may include insomnia, rapid wealth gain, renewed interest in social media, increased confidence levels, and some women may find you more attractive.

Please don't check with your doctor to see if Nioctib is right for you. Just buy and hodl.

Nioctib. Now you're in charge.


Mastodon survives on grants and direct sponsorship, and had rejected venture capital due to concerns about independence and ownership. And it is much larger. So while this looks like a problem in the long term, it doesn't look imminent.


But that is not how linux started. And Bill Gates was certain (based on his capitalistic ideals) that it couldn't possibly succeed because there was no profit and therefore no incentive and therefore Bill Gates ignored it entirely to his detriment.  The lesson should be that it is dangerous to be so convinced in our beliefs about how things work that we ignore what is actually happening in front of our faces.

I have no problem with people thinking about how monetary incentives could align with nostr. Nothing I'm saying is a counterpoint to that, it is a side point.


Don't underestimate the amount of value that people will voluntarily contribute.  Consider linux.  Consider the entire open-source movement.  There is plenty of high quality stuff built by people who ask for nothing in return, just because they have the time, capability, inclination, and desire to make the world a better place.  There don't need to be many such people because what is built once scales to many users.  You might see it as a dumb decision to work for free - but life isn't actually all that hard, and once you've solved the problem of 'not being poor' some people don't really aspire to get rich and given that life is meaningless anyways, would rather just do what is fun for them, like programming a nostr client.


When Trump supporters head to Trump rallies "we aren't sending our best"


I just realized that China is shaped a bit like a ball sack


I think the idea of putting kind-10002 events all over the place is temporary. I'm hoping for better solutions. Pablo runs wss://purplepag.es/ which is dedicated to ONLY hosting 2 event kinds including kind 10002.  Also that event is designed to be as small as possible.  So in terms of scaling out with many of those events, I don't know how we could do better.

Just because we can all have personal relays doesn't mean we will. Having thousands of people on a relay is fine.


Cool.

Putin never called it a war, it was always a special military operation, because I don't think he wanted animosity with Ukraine, but he needed that port. Unfortunately the West turned Kiev into serious belligerants and Russia responded as they needed to.

I think this was also motivated by the situation at Kaliningrad where trains from Belarus were no longer allowed to carry in steel. Access to a military base is critical and so maintaining clear access was front and center in Putin's mind.

There are Ethnic Russians in North East Ukraine in areas where Russia hasn't really pushed to capture. That is why I don't think it was about protecting ethnic Russians.


I believe Russia's intention with Ukraine (based on what actually happened) was to create a land bridge to Crimea to ensure they always had unrestricted access to Sevastopol and their only warm water port.  Ukraine used to always be friendly with Russia and Russia has rented that area for a long time, consistently occupied that port for hundreds of years.  But once Ukraine was being courted by the EU and NATO, that threatened Russia's access to that port.

I think all the claims about protecting people in the Donbass, de-Nazification, etc, was just a sales pitch to the public.  Russia achieved it's aims and I think Ukraine and Russia will settle and put a border along the current battle lines with some negotiated small regional variations.

All those people claiming Putin was Hitler and was going to march across Europe if he isn't stopped... they weren't very accurate, were they?

All the people who said from way back that Ukraine should settle and not continue fighting... if only Zelenskyy had listened to us a lot more people would be alive right now.


This is a really interesting interview about why the U.S. position and it's propaganda to it's own people is falling out of alignment with Netanyahu's position and the current actions of Israel.  The video is long, so I start you where this part gets interesting.

https://rumble.com/v3urnry-wartime-lies-and-propaganda-exposed-a-conversation-with-scott-ritter.html?start=3431


He is a scientist, so I believe it.


He is arguing against genocide based on an ethnicity of Palestinian. That is not happening as he demonstrates well.  But it is possible (I think likely) that a genocide of the national identity called Palestinian is occuring.


Hey, it worked! I'm not going through hell anymore.


Someone said some days ago in some NIP proposal discussion that we will run out of kind numbers because currently we're limited to 40000. Some weeks before someone else had complained that I had written somewhere that the kind number should be a `uint16`, which can only go up to 65536.

In the meantime, some people make NIP proposals that involve very different events, but that use just one kind number and differentiate events by adding `d` tags or by other tricks. That is justified in the name of _flexibility_: the idea is that by having a string in which people can write anything the protocol is automatically more flexible, extensible, powerful, magical.

But this is not true. Using strings to differentiate between what could have been differentiated by a number doesn't make anything more flexible, it just adds confusion and inefficiency. Take [NIP-58](https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/blob/master/58.md) for example. It's the NIP that defines **badge creation, award and acceptance**.

It makes sense for the badge creation to be _parameterized replaceable_ (kind 30009) and differentiated by the `d` tag, as each pubkey can create multiple badges, and it makes sense for the badge award to be a normal, non-replaceable event (kind 8), as badges can be awarded to many people and the awards never change. But it **doesn't** make sense that for each badge receiver to craft a list of badges they have accepted and want to display they have to use a _parameterized replaceable_ event (kind 30008) with a `d` tag set to `"profile_badges"`. Why this magical string?

I believe the idea was that people would be able to craft different badge lists. For example, they would use the `"profile_badges"` value for badges they want to display in their main profile, and some other value, for example, `"hidden_badges"` for badges they have accepted but don't want to display in their main profile, and `"rejected_badges"` for badges that they want to explicitly reject -- or something like that.

The idea makes sense, but does it really? We could have done the same with a kind 10007 meaning _profile badges_, kind 10008 meaning _hidden badges_ and kind 10009 meaning _rejected badges_. That would save disk space and bandwidth, it would make it easier for relays to index these events and, most importantly, it would make implementation simpler. In the world of `d` tags, every programmer that tries to implement creating these badge lists have to go to the NIP and hardcode the kind 30008, then look for the magical string that must be set at the `d` tag and write it, exactly like in the NIP, as a string, and add that as a tag to the event, the same is valid for when a client wants to support reading the tag lists. While in the multi-kind world you only need to hardcode one magical number. It's undeniable that `{"kinds": [10007]}` is a simpler filter than `{"kinds": [30009], "#d": ["profile_badges"]}`. You may say the differences are negligible, but I'm just trying to illustrate a principle.

I have the impression that in the minds of many programmers to be able to write a string gives them the impression that everything is more flexible and magical: "oh, I can write _anything_, while if the stuff is in kinds I would have to first get authorization from the NIP overlords". Maybe the NIP process can be improved, but ultimately this makes little difference. You can definitely write _anything_ in the `d` tag, but you can also write _anything_ in the `kind` field too, the actual requirement that exists, and that exists for both, is that others start using the exact same kind number or `d` string that you're using, and vice-versa, and there is no shortcut for that, you necessarily have to come to an agreement with others -- which is what the NIP process tries to facilitate.

We should use kind numbers as much as possible, and `d` tags only when absolutely necessary.


The Gossip


Testing.  This is a link to a parameterized replaceable event from code I just wrote so I wanna make sure the code worked.
nostr:naddr1qqvnyvpjxvcnzvpe94ex2mrp0ykhyetwv3jh5an0w4eszxrhwden5te0v96zumn0wd68yam0wf4hxtnrdakj7qgswaehxw309ajjumn0wvhxcmmv9uq3wamnwvaz7tmvvyh8yetvv9ukzcnvv5hx7un89uqsuamnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0dshsz8mhwden5te0dehhxarj95crytnydaexzenpvd6x7une9ehhyee0qy08wumn8ghj7mn0wd68yttsw43zuam9d3kx7unyv4ezumn9wshsz8thwden5te0dehhxarj9e3xjarrda5kuetj9eek7cmfv9kz7qfqwaehxw309ahx7um5wghx26tww4hxg7nhv9h856t89eehqctrv5hszxrhwden5te0dehhxarj9enx6apwwa5h5tnzd9az7qgmwaehxw309ahx7um5wghx66ttv4jxjmr8v4ezucm0d5hsz9thwden5te0dehhxarj9ehhsarj9ejx2a30qyghwumn8ghj7mn0wd68ytnhd9hx2tcpzfmhxue69uhkummnw3eryvfwvdhk6tcpzdmhxue69uhk7enxvd5xz6tw9ec82c30qyv8wumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnrw4e8yetwwshxv7tf9uq3wamnwvaz7tmjv4kxz7fwdehhxarj9e3xzmny9uq3wamnwvaz7tmjv4kxz7fwwpexjmtpdshxuet59uq3gamnwvaz7tmjv4kxz7tpvfkx2tn0wfnj7qcyqqq823czyrhprfwl7sxpnf247s07g26g7q8xrry3yftz9t3hkmptkeahd38yjavrakj


Bottom up, no question.


I don't think Israel will lose in the short run. I think they will use chemical weapons to kill everybody in the tunnels and will get US support for it. I fear they may continue on and kill every last Palestinian, being unable to know who is and who isn't Hamas. I sympathize with innocent and aggrieved Palestinians so I hate that this is happening to them. But I won't let my hopes and desires interfere with my prediction engine.


Yessir. I'll just keep marching on through then.


shhhhhhhh


A lot of terms have been bandied about regarding relay models: Gossip relay model, outbox relay model, and inbox relay model. But this term "relay model" bothers me. It sounds stuffy and formal and doesn't actually describe what we are talking about very well. Also, people have suggested maybe there are other relay models. So I thought maybe we should rethink this all from first principles. That is what this blog post attempts to do.

Nostr is notes and other stuff transmitted by relays. A client puts an event onto a relay, and subsequently another client reads that event. OK, strictly speaking it could be the same client. Strictly speaking it could even be that no other client reads the event, that the event was intended for the relay (think about nostr connect). But in general, the reason we put events on relays is for other clients to read them.

Given that fact, I see two ways this can occur:

1) The reader reads the event from the same relay that the writer wrote the event to (this I will call relay rendezvous),
2) The event was copied between relays by something.

This second solution is perfectly viable, but it less scalable and less immediate as it requires copies which means that resources will be consumed more rapidly than if we can come up with workable relay rendezvous solutions. That doesn't mean there aren't other considerations which could weigh heavily in favor of copying events. But I am not aware of them, so I will be discussing relay rendezvous.

We can then divide the relay rendezvous situation into several cases: one-to-one, one-to-many, and one-to-all, where the many are a known set, and the all are an unbounded unknown set. I cannot conceive of many-to-anything for nostr so we will speak no further of it.

For a rendezvous to take place, not only do the parties need to agree on a relay (or many relays), but there needs to be some way that readers can become aware that the writer has written something.

So the one-to-one situation works out well by the writer putting the message onto a relay that they know the reader checks for messages on. This we call the INBOX model. It is akin to sending them an email into their inbox where the reader checks for messages addressed to them.

The one-to-(known)-many model is very similar, except the writer has to write to many people's inboxes. Still we are dealing with the INBOX model.

The final case, one-to-(unknown)-all, there is no way the writer can place the message into every person's inbox because they are unknown. So in this case, the writer can write to their own OUTBOX, and anybody interested in these kinds of messages can subscribe to the writer's OUTBOX.

Notice that I have covered every case already, and that I have not even specified what particular types of scenarios call for one-to-one or one-to-many or one-to-all, but that every scenario must fit into one of those models.

So that is basically it. People need INBOX and OUTBOX relays and nothing else for relay rendezvous to cover all the possible scenarios.

That is not to say that other kinds of concerns might not modulate this. There is a suggestion for a DM relay (which is really an INBOX but with a special associated understanding), which is perfectly fine by me. But I don't think there are any other relay models. There is also the case of a live event where two parties are interacting over the same relay, but in terms of rendezvous this isn't a new case, it is just that the shared relay is serving as both parties' INBOX (in the case of a closed chat) and/or both parties' OUTBOX (in the case of an open one) at the same time.

So anyhow that's my thinking on the topic. It has become a fairly concise and complete set of concepts, and this makes me happy. Most things aren't this easy.


I have childish fantasies of a opt-in nation, with a constitution that 90% of people would not accept, and so those people self-select to stay out,  that isn't bound by geography, more like a secret society, that uses better forms of government, uses better forms of currency.  And that overr a long period of time evolves from a secret society into a nation with actual power, but doesn't dare start off with any such ambitions.


So one mess was replaced with another 🤣


nostr:npub1hlq93jdtkfg29a8s7fqzzzh82q3pkc20rxucwt4geh6e56wk3y2qxdz5wg nostr:npub10000003zmk89narqpczy4ff6rnuht2wu05na7kpnh3mak7z2tqzsv8vwqk


i2p is very interesting except that it is a single piece of Java software rather than an open protocol with many implementations.


Cheers!  I am so glad to see that you have done this.


He was involved in research on institutional corruption. I'm sure that this made him a target by corrupt institutionalists, and could be why the prosecution against him was so outrageous. He was a brave soul.  RIP Aaron.


Damn why couldn't you have posted that a week ago?


That can be partially fixed if sortition were adopted in place of voting. At least the Machiavellian psychopath part would be fixed, all the party nonsense would be fixed, all the buying votes and campaigning instead of doing your job would be fixed.


I thought I argued conclusively and very well that the past is relevant because the past determines for example whether a killing should be seen as just or not, whether an attack is a just response or not...  if it doesn't matter, than Israel is bombing Gaza right now for no reason, the past of October7 is irrelevant, bygones, water under the bridge, and therefore according to your metric Israel is horribly guilty of crimes against humanity right now. But I suppose you don't see it like that because you DO care about the past (October 7 was in the past).  But ONLY when that past matters for a favorable outcome for Israel. You refuse to accept this well made general point that I have made probably three times now. Which leads me to the only conclusion I am left with: that you are arguing in bad faith. And I hate to see that, but I have to call it out. I'd appreciate an explanation.

> Has Israel lied more than Hamas? Doubtful since Israel is an open democracy with many factions and a relatively free press and is under intense international scrutiny;

You imply "if they were lying we would know because they are an open democracy."  Well we do know.  The U.N. and most countries of the world except for Israel and the United States condemn Israel over and over for repeated and ongoing violations of international law and indiscriminate killing of Palestinians. The UN condemned Israel 17 times in 2020 alone. The balance of opinion about the facts is against Israel. That doesn't mean the UN are always right, but your point is demolished by these facts.

Why does the US side with Israel? Because Zionists sought power in the US, have a very strong AIPAC lobby, far more meddling than Russia's claimed meddling in the election, their people own most media companies, and they use these positions to advance the interests of Israel. They push to pass anti-BDS laws. They push to make protesting in favor of Palestine illegal. They get things cancelled from YouTube, Twitter, etc. The opinions of Americans matter most to Israel because the US is the strongest ally they could have, but they don't have enough manpower to do this to other nations, and hence most other nations see things more plainly and vote against Israel at the UN. That is why I believe most other nations are far more neutral and have a far clearer viewpoint, because they aren't heavily manipulated like the US is.

I reject the premise that Hamas broke the ceasefire. Israel broke the ceasefire.  Al-Aqsa flood was in response to Israel's violations of the ceasefire at the Al-Aqsa mosque in April 2021, May 2021, and on 15 April 2022 and 5 April 2023.  That is why the operation was named after the mosque.

But I'm sure you'll reject that. You reject everything you don't want to believe. Which isn't a good debating strategy, but you are welcome to continue rejecting everything. It seems to me you have a religious certainty about your beliefs. And so our discussion has become rather pointless in many ways.


Gossip requires manual user intervention to merge/overwrite from an event to the local database, and manual user intervention to then publish your local data back into another event.  It also shows you clearly the count of people in the list, and the date on the latest event, and the date you made the latest local change.  I made this all manual because when I coded that there were a lot of people complaining about their following list getting wiped out.  And multiple people have thanked me and used the gossip client as a backup, even if they don't use it regularly, so they can recover from such a thing.

Of course you can just download and save the latest event in a .json file too.


Thanks. The problem is pretty deep and now I have to get clarification about the nostr spec before I can proceed. https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/issues/870  But I do have a path forward and I've started down it.

But I'm awake now so the nightmare thoughts have subsided.


I disagree because my bank requires me to to 2-factor authentication, it requires me to type in a 3 digit CVV code to use my credit card online.  People expect these kinds of things. Normies expect these kinds of things.

Forcing it on them will work as long as the UX is easy. I don't think anybody has made an easy UX yet, but I hold out hope.


Mailing lists on nostr, if they really want to mimic mailing lists (which I think they should do better, but if), can use the inbox model and messages deposited into people's inboxes just like email does, with subject tags.  And some client manages the mailing list, you message it to sign up, etc.

But as I said, I think forums on nostr can be better than email mailing lists and shouldn't do that. They should be more like communities instead.


This.  Two bazillion is not enough.


I've been trying hard to fix that.


I think relays on i2p is a damn good idea


Some days I feel defeated by my own code. I was struggling today and had to turn in for the night without resolution. I hate this feeling, with my minds disconnected thoughts haunted with incomplete and impossible non-solutions dancing about in my half asleep fitful nightmares.


Be sure to use 'cargo check'. Don't try to link every time just to test if it compiles.


Some things I believe because of multiple good sources:

1. A high up IDF leader wanted Hamas to win so that he could deal with Gaza militarily rather than diplomatically. That was in a Wikileaks cable. I don't see that as a damning indictment beause he was an IDF leader and would of course prefer his own tools. But cynics see it as a desire to kill all the Palestinians.

2. Israel was dead-set against a Palestinian state well before 2005. By 2005 they unilaterally pulled out of Gaza in order to freeze the peace process. Dov Weissglass said "When you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state." You can look that up. The word "formaldhyde" is part of it so easier to search on.

3. Israel funded Hamas. That is rather damning, but again it was a strategy to scuttle the formation of a Palestinian state. Cynics can say it was so they would have an excuse to kill all the Palestinians. https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up-hamas-now-its-blown-up

BTW, the 21% of Israelis who are Arabs were accidents. Israel thought they removed all the non-Jewish Arabs in 1948. But because Jewishness isn't a race but rather a set of lineages among multiple races, some of which are Arab, you can't just look at someone to know if they are Jewish or not.  And so many Arabs just claimed that they were Jews so that their land wouldn't be taken from them. They kept this fact hidden for decades, and as they slowly tested the waters it was apparent that Israel was okay with them being there as they had integrated into their society well. A very few of them married in, but those allowances are rare. Now they have come out of the closet and claim to be Palestinian-Israelis.

Now I don't understand your point "Given that 20% of the citizens of Israel are Palestinian arabs, I think you might want to reconsider that assertion." my assertion being "Israel is far more an existential threat to Palestine than Palestine is to Israel."  I have reconsidered my statement and I stand by it.  Perhaps I should clarify that I am talking about the possible future existence of a legal entity called the State of Palestine. Israel threatens that possibility far more than Palestine (a non-state, but that has representation) threatens the existence of the legal entity called the State of Israel.

I'm again lost by your next statements the two paragraphs starting with "Who is in exile?"  The part of my statement you quoted was regarding the undisputed (except maybe by you) fact that there are Palestinians in exile on land called Gaza and the West Bank, who were removed from their homes, those homes being on land outside of Gaza/WestBank of which they are not allowed to go to, some of whom still keep the keys to the front door in hopes that one day they can go home, who are NOT Israeli citizens, who are in fact stateless, and who Israel is dealing with illegally according to international laws.  Now, given that extended statement, what was your point?

In the paragraph where you say "In fact, mostly untrue", you don't make a statement that invalidates the veracity of my statement. I agree with your statement though, except that I recognize that in at least one of those wars the question of who started it remains disputed.

As to Hamas misjudging, I entirely agree. Their actions make little strategic sense. I can only assume they are trying to enrage the neighboring Arabs as I stated previously. The UN has recognized the right of Palestinians to fight for their freedom by force if necessary, and as this is their land that was taken from them illegally without recompense, and they are kept in a blockaded region without statehood against international laws, I agree that they have this right.  That is because I am a libertarian. I believe in all people's right to liberty and to use violence against an authoritarian agressor that controls many aspects of their lives and denies them their liberty. Yet to my point, it is utterly dumb of them to assert that right because they cannot possibly achieve anything. They are too weak against even Israel alone, and especially against Israel and the USA combined. I urge them to fold.

I still don't understand why you would take the side of the agressor that did this to the Palestinians, with your defense being only that Palestinians really really hate Israel and lash out in violence from time to time, some of it being unjustifiably immoral. Of course they do, they are human beings with human emotions and they hate the people who turned their lives into shit. I take the side of justice. I believe in freedom, of liberty, of equality of all people, equal rights under the law. I agree justice must be had against Hamas' crimes too. But justice must be had against IDF solider's actions, against settlers stealing houses and killing the small children who try to fight back, for bombing indiscriminately and claiming everything is a Hamas stronghold (when the evidence is more and more clear that they are bombing rather indiscriminately based on the statistics of the dead being similar to the overall statisitcs of Gaza), for apparently intentionally targetting journalists, for not recognizing that the one who kills has the responsibliity to not kill innocents in the process (no FBI agent would blow up a builing because a hostage taker took hostages and then say "well he was using them for human shields, what can I do?" They would wait for a clear shot). Justice for all the violations of international law that Israel repeatedly and continually violates with the help of the US veto power, for refusing to give back the land they stole in the West Bank, for stealing more and more of it (do you believe in property rights?). Clearly Israel just wants to eliminate these people who are in it's way and take the entire land that they believe that Jehovah promised them thousands of years ago regardless of what kinds of atrocities they must commit to take it back. And that is entirely unjust and inhuman. And so I'm having this discussion with you to try to understand how you can take their side. And it seems to me so far that it is through a web of fictions that Israel has developed and spread to convince Americans to see the situation in a rather perverse way, but from the only angle where Israel looks like a good actor, as long as you don't dig too deeply.


It works for me on master. I tried a new profile, generated a key, and followed myself and it showed under Following right away.  If it is seriously broken in 0.8.2, I'll consider patching to 0.8.3, but I haven't had any other reports that this happens for anybody else, and I'm scratching my head as to how it could happen.


I'll do them when I do releases, which is already tedious as I have to move computers and monitors around, shift files to different computers checking their SHA sums, deal with lots of fiddly things that have to be right, login under my gossip account to post the sums, etc. It is much more of a pain in the ass for me than it would be for you to compile from source or to build the .deb yourself.


Which version?


In the channel, the filter looks like this: `{ authors: [you, counterparty], kinds: [4] }`
It subscribes to this filter on all of your outboxes and inboxes.


Happy Birthday to The Nostr


I have DMs going back 10 months. Gossip isn't deleting local DM events (unless you are purging the database).  But also, when we subscribe to a particular DM channel, there is no "since" field, we load all events in that channel (the DM channel is you plus the other party or parties (can be multiple with upcoming giftwrap DMs)).  Eventually we may need to optimize this but most people don't have thousands of messages to a single other person, so we just load them all again right now.

So if you click into a DM channel and wait, and if the events are on your inbox relays, they should get loaded and display.

If not, I guess we can try some debugging.


Uncle Bob Martin and I have been having some debate on the topic, if you wanted something to stimulate your thinking on it. I see myself as having more sympathy towards Palestinians being the most aggrieved party, and while I don't support Hamas I try to explain them. I see the good Uncle as having a more typical American Christian pro-Israel viewpoint.

I very much look forward to hearing your viewpoint.

Here are two threads where most of our posts lie.

I intend to create a "Palestine codex" which summarizes my thinking as replaceable events with a replaceable index linking to each topic... but I also intend not to do that given that I really don't have the time ;-)

nostr:nevent1qqsf8n9mvl7t5wwarkse9vrfl5vxg6fznn8epzhmqx79d830udekckqpzpmhxue69uhk2tnwdaejumr0dshsz8nhwden5te0dehhxarj94c82c3wwajkcmr0wfjx2u3wdejhgtcpr4mhxue69uhkummnw3ezucnfw33k76twv4ezuum0vd5kzmp0qyghwumn8ghj7mn0wd68ytnhd9hx2tcpzdmhxue69uhk7enxvd5xz6tw9ec82c30qy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnyv9kh2uewd9hj7qghwaehxw309aex2mrp0yhxummnw3ezucnpdejz7qg5waehxw309aex2mrp09skymr99ehhyee05w8ap5

nostr: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


I think that is correct. I think we are not anywhere close to running out of space to bury this stuff.  And eventually, if need be, with the much more developed economy of the future, it will become cheap to reprocess that tainted landfill land into more natural stuff.

But hey, they developed a better egg crate that farmers prefer. I think that is pretty cool.


I would attend. But not too soon. I can't spend my life at conferences I have heaps of coding to do.


The whole world has a problem with what to do with waste.  Some is incinerated, some is buried, some is recycled.  New Zealand ships our recyclables to China, who then just buries them because it's cheaper to do so, and we pretend to be morally superior recyclers. Gazans, due to necessity, may have developed techniques for dealing with waste that the rest of the world could benefit from.

I know that wasn't your point, but I take your point.


Which relay is that?


AS TO FACT DETERMINATION: Where Hamas and Israel agree as to what happened, and where I am not certain as to what happened, I would be keen to know. I would need sources. Best to just PM me if you wanted to go down that route. I don't have any expectations that you do, and that you are making a general point which I take and accept.

AS TO THE STRENGTH OF HAMAS: The belief that survival is at stake, that this is extential, presupposes that Hamas has the ability to execute it's intentions. You suggested in a prior post that Hamas is strong when I called them the "little guy". But I see Hamas as very weak compared to Israel, even with external funding, even with many people in the world wishing them well, even as they have focused the entire economy of Gaza on war, sacrificing even their own people's drinking water distribution for this effort, being starved of imports... in this state they can barely make functional rockets, these rockets have zero targetting ability, very small explosion radii, they have nothing resembling an iron dome to protect them, they have no tanks, they have no airplanes, their airport was destroyed, they have no port on the sea. They live in squalor, having to spend much of their effort just to survive with food and water and a bit of shelter, and having not much left to dedicate to military purposes. Occasionally a small amount of weapons get through. Israel has mostly effectively blockaded them for a long time, but as we have now seen this has not been totally effective. So they are weak, and Israel is not under any real existential threat from them via military force. It is under a threat of terrorism though.

AS TO EXISTENTIAL THREATS:  Israel is far more an existential threat to Palestine than Palestine is to Israel. Palestine is not even a recognized state at this point, although there are currently a stateless people in exile on land claimed by Israel. The territories of the refugees have shrunk multiple times, each time as the result of actions by the state of Israel. I find the argument that Israel should defend itself against an existential threat completely ridiculous in the face of the actual history. If that were a good course of action, then Palestinians should also defend themselves against an existential threat, one that has been 90% successful already. But that way just leads to the endless war we currently have. It is in everybody's best interest to seek an alternative.

AS TO ISRAEL WOULD HAVE LET THEM LIVE IN PEACE:  The evidence is strong that Israel would never let them live in peace. Claims like they could have been an economic powerhouse alongside Israel are complete fabrications of what Israel made or didn't make possible.

Look at the Oslo accords. They make legal the Israeli settlement of the West Bank (something the PA should not concede), Israel only withdraws from some of the territory that nobody lives in (nature reserves and such), it put Israel in charge of Area C which carves up areas A and B to make them discontinuous, it didn't recognize statehood for Palestine instead containing only utterly non-binding aspirations, It left Palestinians in charge of only 18% of the West Bank.  While it was being negotiated, Netanyahu continued expanding settlements into areas they were negotiating a withdrawal from... tipping off that they weren't really going to do it (else why waste money building things you can't keep?). It was a terrible deal.

Fatah and the PA have tried going down this path of being peaceful. It has not worked. Israel carved that up like swiss cheese, continues to slowly steal more and more land, injects more and more settlers, and kills more and more Palestinians there. I believe they do it in slow motion in order to avoid an international response, but I would be keen to hear if people have a better explanation. If Israel were just peaceful people respecting property rights and the right to life of Palestinians, maybe Gazan's wouldn't feel the need to defend their brothers in the West Bank.

AS TO WWIII AND HAMAS STRATEGY:  I don't think they want WW3, but I do think they want other Arab nations to come help them.

AS TO THE RIVER AND SEA THING:  I don't take a position as to whether Israel should or should not exist, so this section is about what Hamas is looking to achieve, not what I think is reasonable or just. Yes, Hamas wants Israel to no longer exist. All the people, current Israelis and current Gazans and current West Bankers... would all be living in a single secular nation together called Palestine. Nothing about that desire requires killing anybody, or destroying any economic property, buldings, businesses, or otherwise. Nothing about it requires Israelis to leave. It is a restructuring of government. It is a one state solution. Talking about it as if it is an existential threat to humans misrepresents it. I refer you to several points from the current 2017 Hamas charter:
16. Hamas affirms that its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion. Hamas does not wage a struggle against the Jews because they are Jewish but wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine. Yet, it is the Zionists who constantly identify Judaism and the Jews with their own colonial project and illegal entity.
17. Hamas rejects the persecution of any human being or the undermining of his or her rights on nationalist, religious or sectarian grounds. Hamas is of the view that the Jewish problem, anti-Semitism and the persecution of the Jews are phenomena fundamentally linked to European history and not to the history of the Arabs and the Muslims or to their heritage. The Zionist movement, which was able with the help of Western powers to occupy Palestine, is the most dangerous form of settlement occupation which has already disappeared from much of the world and must disappear from Palestine.
19. There shall be no recognition of the legitimacy of the Zionist entity. Whatever has befallen the land of Palestine in terms of occupation, settlement building, judaisation or changes to its features or falsification of facts is illegitimate. Rights never lapse.
28. Hamas believes in, and adheres to, managing its Palestinian relations on the basis of pluralism, democracy, national partnership, acceptance of the other and the adoption of dialogue. The aim is to bolster the unity of ranks and joint action for the purpose of accomplishing national goals and fulfilling the aspirations of the Palestinian people.

I don't accept claims that Hamas (and most Palestinians) just want to kill all the Jews if they got a chance (even as Nazis on nostr assure me that they do... Nazis have their own reasons for believing what they believe). Right now, most of them are very angry and probably do dream of killing Israelis because of it. But it is only because they are fucking pissed off, and given a continual stream of new reasons to be pissed off (check the news of what happened on October 6 someone else posted, every day it is like that for them). It is to Israel's advantage to sell the story that these people are all Jew-hating terrorists, because if you buy that story you are more likely to accept the Zionist apartheid, bombings, etc. The beliefs of Palestinian muslims are far less extreme than ISIS or Al-Qaeda or even Iran or Saudi Arabia. The vast majority are Sunni and in particular Da'wa salafiyya which practices a largely non-violent and mainstream Islamist tradition that is common around the world. They are not Salafi Jihadists. But far be it from me to tell anybody who they are, as I am not one of them and could be wrong.


I did not say that. Reply to what I said if you wish, but I will not reply to a non-sequitur.


I don't have a workaround.

I think nostr:npub1sn0wdenkukak0d9dfczzeacvhkrgz92ak56egt7vdgzn8pv2wfqqhrjdv9 has experienced similar issues with his client (iris/daisy/?).  A relay doesn't need explicit support for tor, but it mustn't block tor exit nodes.  I suppose some relays are run at ISPs which block tor exit nodes by policy.  It would be good to determine which relays are like that.

Tor will be slower because the service of onion routing isn't free, and network traffic is the slowest part of modern computing.


I don't tor from my phone.  I rarely tor.  Generally I am not trying to hide my identity from spying governments or spying ISPs.

If I were to use tor (and I'm not saying that I do or don't), I would use something like qubes OS or tails OS and use dedicated hardware for it.  Unless I was casually browsing in which case I'd use tor browser.


Thank you!


I'm doing the same thing with my watch!


It might be a bit more complex for someone who didn't architect their code in a way that expected nip-46.  But I'm doing this nonetheless.


Israeli, Palestinian officials commit to ensuring kids grow up hating one another

https://www.duffelblog.com/p/israeli-and-palestinian-officials-jointly-commit-to-ensure-children-grow-up-hating-one-another


Never change, Ser Sleepy. You must ONLY post memes. Don't kill off my memeing frog!

*sigh*

*sigh*

OK.  Fine. You may express other aspects of yourself. *grumble grumble*


I met a guy who I was told was karnage, but he wasn't a purple cat so I'm entirely unsure.


Palestinians see the two regions as both Palestine, and actions against one are actions against the other. Israel deals with the two regions as distinct, and it was in a cease fire with Gaza, so it doesn't see it's continued hostilities towards the West Bank as being relevant.

There is always a framing one can choose that puts you in a strategic advantage. And Israel is expert at this.


It did take them more than a year to plan and execute.  That doesn't mean they couldn't repeat it.


Interesting. So I think we are getting closer to the crux of the things I want to notice.

On a moral basis I find rape and torture and roasting babies alive to be very wrong, I find it inexcusable despite any history, and I find it inexcusable even if they might have some alternate moral code that excuses it, because we are the actors here and we choose not to excuse it (you may see this point differently and instead call something "absolute", but functionally we end up in the same place).  So on these points I think we agree.

As to what Hamas did on that day I think there is a lot of misinformation and I don't just reflexively believe a claim until I see stronger evidence. For example, if one side says Hamas roasted babies alive, and the other side denies it, and there is no video or photo evidence, I'm leaning towards "it didn't happen."  Where both sides agree, I lean towards "it did happen".  And where there is strong video/photo evidence, I lean towards what that implies.  With AI this is going to get much much messier. The roasted-baby picture was tagged as AI generated, then untagged as such - we don't really know if it was AI generated or not. Nonetheless it doesn't prove Hamas did the roasting or even that that picture came from a recent event. I don't take any offense to being corrected on the facts, but I also don't just accept what someone tells me happened actually happened.  But it is ok - I can work with a superposition of possibilities in my head, and we can debate as though it did happen, without me being sure.

But that was not the part where I think we are getting closer to the crux.

What you have laid out is an argument that 'extential threats require extential responses' and that this is 'rational'.  You didn't couch that in morality but you could have, but I'm glad you didn't because it simplifies the discussion.

I see it as moral versus strategic. Sometimes groups of people discard morals and act instead in their strategic interest. It is in Israel's strategic interest to eliminate a threat to them, despite the moral issue that innocent people are going to die as a consequence.

So my point is that Hamas engaging in terrorism does that same thing. All the moral opprobrum brought about in accusation against Hamas may be justified, but it misses the point that strategically Hamas has no other card to play. Strategically their hope is to enrage Israel to such a degree that they react disproportionately and perhaps even invade Gaza, triggering a wider war that engages Islamic Arabs in neighboring states who otherwise have not been getting involved.  And under a "trolley problem" ethos, one can perversely twist this into being moral in the long term if it leads to the Palestinians becoming free, even though it involved moral violations.

I do not claim it is moral. I am not defending terrorism. I think all these twistings of morality are just games people play to manipulate each other. Hell, I don't even believe in absolute morality, so I don't even believe there is any standard upon which to judge such twistings.  But recall that such twistings are made of other events, of Hiroshima, of Dresden, that in a wider trolley-problem ethos they were moral.  The problem is that such a twisting can be made out of anything.

Long-term strategy often is the primary motivator, and moral explanations are usually the tool for influencing people after the fact.


I appreciate the concern. But not responding isn't an offer I wish to accept. If you have anything to say I'm always grateful to hear it. I just posted to another one of your posts this same point but it bears repeating. Never presume I wish for your silence. Your posts do not spike my blood pressure, but sometime my responses do, especially if I post too rapidly and then regret what I said.  I am trying to learn not to respond too quickly.


And thanks


Ok this point needs clarification.  Twice now you've presumed any expression of weariness from me means that I want you to stop posting.  Never have I meant that. I respect more speech, in more ways than one ;-).  What I am signalling is that I may become less engaged.  I am not asking for you to hold back your opinion, rather I'm letting you know that I may be holding back mine, that I may back away for a bit.  But there are watchers who will see your reply, and they should hear it if you have something more to tell.  When I mentioned that I get knots in my stomach, this is not in response to your posts, it is in response to my own posts.


good name


I'm home

[imagine an emoji that indicates relief + satisfaction + weariness]


I like the slow relaxed pastoral lifestyle where my taxes don't fund bombs or missiles.

Tokyo is cool too in its own way, but not for me in the long term.


I regret this post. I misunderstood the note it was in reply to. I don't think we are so far separated. I did not wish to fire off posts and refuse replies as some dabate tactic. I'm sad I have so few replies from the good Uncle now and fear I have made a mistake.


On which point do you wish to change my mind? I see the horrors committed by Israel and I post about this topic in support of International efforts for a cease fire


Sorry that example was just an example. The context that I pulled out of was a debate with uncle bob martin about Israel and Palestinians.

I don't mean to imply Arabs are in support of rape.


I don't believe there is any moral state that justifies rape or torture. To the extent those things happened, I agree with nostr:nprofile1qqsza7flq8xjfylqgg66dwrmzrfuff6w9flt0s72795zdrm27ue3fdgpremhxue69uhkummnw3ez6ur4vgh8wetvd3hhyer9wghxuet59uq37amnwvaz7tmwdaehgu3dwfjkccte9ehx76m0w3shymewvdhk6tcpzamhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumn0wd68ytnzv9hxgtctnstgw


OK, I want to share my thinking on morality, absolute/relativeness, and statefulness.

Moral tenets are absolute mathematical concepts.

The application of any given moral tenet requires something physical to apply it to.

Oftentimes the same physical act (killing) can be morally categorized in different ways based on prior state. It could be murder, or justice, or self defense, etc, not to get into the weeds about any particular moral tenet.

Therefore state is critical and we cannot simply ignore the past when making moral judgements.

In the Israel-Palestine debate, there is so much past and such a huge disagreement about the moral state that it is intractable.

I do not believe acts are objectively right or wrong, those labels depend on your own set of accepted moral precepts, but also critically on your belief about what the moral state is.

But I am not a normatively moral relativist. I do not think we should allow raping if women just because the rapist is in a culture that accepts this as OK.

The universe and human nature hint at which moral precepts we all ought to subscribe to because they maximize good things for humans... Not because of gods or religions.

I would do this as long-form except for technical limitations O won't get into here.

nostr:nprofile1qqsza7flq8xjfylqgg66dwrmzrfuff6w9flt0s72795zdrm27ue3fdgpremhxue69uhkummnw3ez6ur4vgh8wetvd3hhyer9wghxuet59uq37amnwvaz7tmwdaehgu3dwfjkccte9ehx76m0w3shymewvdhk6tcpzamhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumn0wd68ytnzv9hxgtctnstgw


I hope you don't think that I believe the mission was to kill soldiers in their sleep. I hope you don't believe that I think Hamas was justified in their actions. I hope you don't believe that I support Hamas in any way.

Arguing from a smart phone while travelling, it is tempting to make comments short, which risks misunderstanding.

My point has been that there is a position one could take in support of Hamas that requires a particular set of beliefs about the facts (which I hardly share) and which is not nornatively morally relative nor relies on various leftwing beliefs if which Kisin is sure are the foundation of all support of Palestine.

Also of note,  only a very tiny sliver of left-wing Pro-Palestinians think Hamas's actions are justifiable. Most see Hamas as detrimental to Palestinians. Most simply don't believe Israels retaliation in its given form is ethical, and they care about dead babies.


I just had an excellent breakfast sandwich with amazing bread. So light and superthin crispy on the edges.


We don't have an agreed central question of debate. I think I'm demonstrating NOT that Hamas supporters are right, but that Kisin does not understand the reasoning behind their positions and presumes they stem from various characterature straw man leftie positions. I'm trying to show you can come to the same positions without holding any of those leftie positions.

If we want to debate we need to start from a central question.


In this note I am saying morality is stateful, not that it is relative. If I could murder and then wipe the state, I would get away with it.