@LouisIngenthron yes, i’m sure about it. in racial discrimination law, there’s unusually the idea of liability for disparate impact, as opposed to discriminatory intent, so you might have a chance. but that’s the exception, not the rule. 1/

@LouisIngenthron before the mcdonalds lady could famously win a settlement for getting burned by coffee, she had to present extraordinary evidence that mcdonalds was superheating water in ways likely to produce unusual burns and that mcdonalds had experienced this before. if it had been an unforeseeable outcome of an ordinary business process (as the public was misled to believe), there would have been no liability. 2/

@LouisIngenthron there are already large industries building tools to predict inmate recidivism, or purporting to measure teacher’s “value add” by black-box algorithms independent analysts are deeply skeptical of. (see Cathy O’Neill’s Weapons of Math Destruction.) people spend years in jail or lose their jobs because of these tools. no one is accountable for their processes. 3/

@LouisIngenthron when a self-driving car maker or operator injures or kills in ways that are deemed the “car’s” error, firms might be fined, but a fine as @pluralistic puts it is a price, just a cost of doing business. the level of accountability we apply to decisionmakers at these firms is incredibly attenuated compared to the level of accountability’s — often criminal — that we impose for similar infractions by human drivers. 4/

@LouisIngenthron @pluralistic we do this on purpose, pretty knowingly. the argument is “if we imposed strict liability on decisionmakers at these industries, so their liability would be comparable to that of an unmediated individual making the same choice and causing the same harm, we would strangle all progress, because firms and managers simply would not take the necessary risks.” and that’s not ridiculous! maybe we accept that some eggs need to be broken to make our solar punk omelette. 5/

@LouisIngenthron @pluralistic but we should at least acknowledge it for what it is, an informaly sociaized subsidy to those businesses in the form of tolerating means of neutralizing accountability that more traditional actors would have faced. if you pretend there’s nothing new here, just the same accountability shifted to different relevant decisionmakers, you are mistaken. /fin

@BenRossTransit the “people” was created as a claim upon the land. and not as real estate, but as moral property. the injury is the perceived theft, not the borders. Lemoine emphasizes the nationalist zeitgeist of mid 20C anticolonialism in his piece. i would very much add to that an enterprise of Palestinian identity construction supported by the much broader Arab community, of a “people” dispossessed and streadfast in determination to reverse that. a confluence of interest and zeitgeist.

@BenRossTransit it has been an astonishingly effective tactic. philo/antisemites allege that Jews are smart but Israel’s utter incompetence at countering or diffusing the tactic, Israel’s reflexive eagerness to deter with disproportionate force (as Lemoine usefully emphasizes) when that plays right into their adversaries’ strategy, should disabuse everyone of that.

@BenRossTransit why were Americans all “Free Tibet” 30 years ago and hardly thinks about Tibet today? there is no content to demands for consistency in people’s indignation and attention. if it soothes you that you can scry in these inconsistencies some bigotry if those which criticize a party you sympathize with, maybe that’s psychologically useful, but it has no normative content other should defer to.

@BenRossTransit (the obvious answer by the way with Arab obsession with Israel is that they consider it theft of “their” dominion, not merely oppression of coreligionists in random places. indeed we’d probably agree that Arab countries have worked assiduously to ensure the conditions of oppression are not relieved in a way that might diffuse the conflict rather than freeze it in a position of transgenerational agony.)

@BenRossTransit (i consider this Arab irredentism as illegitimate as all irredentisms, and view the UNs complicity in it as a perhaps fatal wound to that organization’s already flagging hopes for legitimacy. but irredentism is distinct from antisemitism, the implicit charge that usually lies behind calling attention to an “obsession” with Israel and its atrocities.)

@BenRossTransit i won’t speak for Philippe, but one answer is that “ethnic cleansings” sort and segregate while colonizations mix. often the “cleansing” is a consequence of the colonization — the mixture is unstable or unsupportable — but they are nevertheless distinct. the mid 20th C abjured colonization but embraced ethnic cleansing settle hostilities resulting from past mixing. Israel’s founding was out of phase, as is its clear desire to “cleanse” now.

@BenRossTransit i think Philippe’s piece is, whatever else you want to say about it, refreshingly nonnormative. he is — correctly in my view — neither sympathetic nor unsympathetic to either party, but traces a theory about how they arrive at the pickle they are in, under which both parties’ behavior is pretty understandable.