the icc claims the israeli settlements are illegal because the "palestinian people" deserve self-determination.

while i understand what they're attempting to state, and the ruling has a sound legal basis, the ruling is also rooted in complex historical inaccuracies. it would be helpful if we could start by defining what the term  "palestinian people" actually means.

there is an interesting article here about the territorial changes in the ottoman empire:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_evolution_of_the_Ottoman_Empire

i'll let you sort through it yourself, but it is abundantly obvious that the entire coastal region of the eastern mediterranean was split into ottoman provinces from the mid 16th century until the end of world war one, when the british and french created their own provinces, of which palestine became one (by mimicking ancient roman political divisions).

generally speaking, the ottomans considered the eastern mediterranean coast to be a part of the province of syria:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoman_Syria

before the mid 16th century, the region was controlled by other varieties of turks, by crusaders, by arab colonists and by byzantine romans, and while the area was called palestine after the philistines, who were greeks, there was never any sort of palestinian state, or really even a distinct palestinian province after the end of roman rule. the region was broadly seen as southern syria or northern egypt, depending on who was more powerful at the time, and variously under the control of despots in constantinople or on the arab peninsula.

the closest thing to a palestinian state was the crusader states.

so, who are these "palestinian people"?

i don't mean to be disingenuous. the context of the ruling is clear enough, and it is relatively obvious that it intends to refer to the people that lived in the palestinian mandate created by great britain after the first world war, out of the southern parts of the ottoman syrian province. this was a political identity created by a colonial power, and not an indigenous identity, but it is what they mean.

but, who are these people? and where did they come from?

while nobody has ever wanted to admit it, everybody has always known that they were about 80% indigenous converted hebrews and about 20% colonial arabs and turks (with a substantial amount of genetic influx from subsaharan slaves, brought in by arabs). this was obvious enough that ben gurion wrote a book about it, and it has since been confirmed beyond a doubt by modern genetic science.

so, if the "palestinian people" are actually converted hebrews, and we agree in principle that they should have self-determination, what does that actually mean?

it would mean that they need voting rights and land use rights in an israeli state. 

because they're actually hebrews.

this is where the ruling gets confused, as it confuses what is a religious conflict between a single ethnic group (hebrews, some of which are jews, and some of which are muslims) with an ethnic conflict between arabs and hebrews, which is not the actual truth, even if it has taken on that form in territorial wars.

if the palestinians are arabs, they are not indigenous to the region, and should seek self-determination outside of it. if the palestinians are hebrews, which they actually are, they should seek self-determination within the hebrew state. there is no logical or legal basis to have a hebrew state that is muslim parallel to a hebrew state that is jewish. that would be like trying to carve pre-revolutionary france up into catholic and calvinist spaces, and we see how that turned out (not good. lots of dead people. for a long time.).

and, that brings us to the actual issue before us, which would be the land use laws and enforced segregation in the hebrew state, which claims to be western and democratic, but has segregation laws that are neither thing and need to be abolished. this is done by supporting a civil rights movement within israel, and not by arguing for parallel states on the same land that will have no future but perpetual warfare.

the icj ruling is consequently misguided, but not for the reasons proposed by netanyahu. the "palestinians" in the west bank, who are mostly muslim hebrews, need to have some right to compensation if the indigenous group, which is the jewish hebrews, wishes to seize the land for itself, which means what? it is hebrews seizing land from hebrews. they are seizing their own land from themselves and then giving preferred status to a member of the indigenous religion over the introduced one, which has the added layer of complexity that they're basically the same fucking religion, anyways.

what i want the icj to do for me - please - is to sit down and try and actually define these terms properly in order to clarify what they're actually fucking talking about. their ruling is rendered incoherent without properly defining the terms they're using, but if they were to actually do so, they would find they don't have an issue to adjudicate on, besides the lack of egalitarian land use laws in a country that sees it's particular indigenous denomination of a set of shared cultural beliefs as superior to any other derived one.

right now, democrats and liberals are the no-fun party, the stay-at-home losers.

can joe biden play saxophone?

they need to convince people that they know how to have fun and they don't get it.

i want to remind people that it was the democrats that pushed down all kinds of restrictions on personal freedom during the pandemic, and the republicans that argued against them, and in favour of greater personal liberty. in a state like new york, that likes to party and be free, and where democratic support was suppositioned on the cultural assumption that republicans were crusty old losers and democrats played the saxophone and smoked pot, this was a defining, generational, cultural shift.

older democrats probably don't get it.

i'm both old enough to realize the shift and young enough to have been incredibly annoyed with democrats for severely degrading my summers over 2020, 2021 and even 2022. i have had a different issue to deal with in 2023 and 2024, but i wasn't allowed to cross the border into detroit to have fun between march 2020 and may 2023 and it was the democrats that were responsible for that. 

people in their 20s and 30s may never forget that.

like ever.

for the next 50-70 years.

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/07/10/biden-new-york-trouble-00167198

regarding the question of national vs state-level polling, you certainly want to look at state-level polling as superior to national polling, and it is a basic mistake to suggest otherwise. i don't know how else to put it: that is simply wrong. any prof would mark a giant red X over it. 

it is also the same mistake that the media made in 2016.

what you do when you try to distribute national polling to state-level polling is make a bunch of crazy assumptions, like that black people in georgia are similar to black people in illinois because they're black, then try to force racist generalizations on to micro-demographics. again, these are misapplied techniques used in branding and marketing, they are not designed for politics. the statisticians actually doing this should know better and they will admit it if you prod them and ask them the right questions, but they're getting paid to do a certain thing, and most of them don't give a fuck.

i would have agreed with 538 a few weeks ago: the democrats have an inherent advantage in the current electoral college system. the game is rigged, so to speak. that wasn't the case 20 years ago, and it may not be the case 20 years from now, but the basic underlying math is that the republicans are seen as psychotic extremists in far too much of the country to give them a serious chance at winning.

the reaction to biden's cognitive decline (which i don't think is substantively worse than 2020. that is, what i'm saying is that you should have realized he was out of it four years ago, and i wonder what effect consistent republican messaging on the point has actually made. it's subconscious. it gets to you. it would be repeat the lie, if it wasn't actually true, but that latter point is merely a happy coincidence; they'd lie to you if it wasn't. it's just easier to repeat the truth, i guess, but it's the same propaganda model, and i suspect it actually worked.) even indicates as much; people are trying to push biden out because they're afraid trump will win. this isn't some shift towards trump, it's a reaction against him.

in context, however, the culmination of recent events has shifted the race, and it follows that 538's model will shift to adjust...in two months. this is a criticism of 538's model (and of nik nanos' model in canada) that i've been making for years, that it is an inherently conservative model designed to measure brand preferences for soda or cereal or some other purchasable commodity that is being misapplied to politics, which are not conservative, but incredibly dynamic. it works on some level for party loyalty in terms of buying memberships or making donations, because that is kind of like buying soda or cereal. sort of. the core voters can be tracked into terms of consumer preferences, but core voters don't swing elections, independents, new voters (often low information) and young people do. however, when people shift political allegiances, as is currently happening, it tends to happen immediately and all at once. not only is 538's model going to have difficulty picking up sudden shifts in voting preferences in michigan or pennsylvania (or new york or oregon), but it's actually designed to smooth them out, meaning you have to wait for several months after the shift has occurred before the conservative models reflect it.

despite the introduction of advanced voting, elections are still snapshots, they aren't averages. you want to look at snapshot polling to make election predictions, not smoothed out conservative averages. my insistence on doing this is against conventional contemporary wisdom, which is in truth not so wise (they actually should and do know better) but is the reason i consistently beat the models when i sit down and do the math carefully. 538's model consequently isn't wrong, exactly, it just has a tremendous time lag built into it that makes it essentially useless for this application, which it wasn't designed for, and that is 538 and nik's fault: they should know not to use this model for this application.

what the model is useful for is tracking political donations, so the parties like it, but you can't use it to predict elections where voting preference is dynamic, and 538 itself should clarify it, because they know it.

now, the flip side of the argument is that you need to ponder this question: will the debate, and the news conference, and trump getting shot at, and him picking a log cabin republican for vp, and the internal revolt against biden, be things that have long term effects on voting preference, or will it actually smooth out? is 538 arguing it will smooth out? i don't actually think they are, but if it does then their model will make an accurate projection, and what you're seeing right now will be a blip that comes out in the wash.

i don't think that's the case. i think these are real shifts that will last at least a year or two, that biden is permanently done for. 538's model is designed to not pick that up until october, by which point it might have actually flipped back, if it were some other scenario. i wouldn't project that.

in some elections, 538's model will work because you don't have dramatic shifts. in this election, it won't work, because you're going to see massive fluctuations, as everybody realizes these are shit options across the board and nobody knows what to do. 538 should acknowledge that his model can't project an accurate result in the presence of massive fluctuations because it is actually designed to negate them and explain that to people so they get it.

however, the 538 site, which i haven't been to in a while, is useful because it shows it's work. ignore the model, and look at the most recent polling. don't take the grading system overly seriously; try to pick out the surveys that use phones (and therefore have random sampling) while mostly ignoring the online polls. those snapshots will tell you what people want today, not what people will pick in november, but if you follow the snapshot polls, you will get better outcomes than the smoothed out averages, unless the situation stabilizes, which i doubt will happen.

https://www.semafor.com/article/07/18/2024/the-only-place-biden-is-winning-538s-election-model