The same ones listed in the article. Property ownership, speech, privacy, etc.

I feel like the rise of corporate personhood is the elephant in the room this article seems to avoid acknowledging.

Ah today’s batch of fresh horrors has arrived.

Fucking hell. The courage of this person. That poem at the end nearly broke me.

Yeah: a failure to get away with it.

Last year the army arrested guards who raped Palestinian prisoners and protesters that included members of the Keneset rioted and stormed the prison (Sde Tieman).

There is no way anyone is getting held criminally accountable for this.

I specifically said I wasn’t.

I’m not prescriptive in the order, but I would imagine they’re most likely to occur in tandem over a period of years.

I find this surprising, because frankly I agree.

I don’t know much about Dorsey, but in Musk’s case, I think this is another case of him espousing a good idea he’d never actually honor.

I think that anyone should be able to make movies with Mickey Mouse and no one should need to license code. But I suspect that like with free expression, these are values most proponents only like when it’s benefiting them.

Also, as for the alternatives to support creatives, I would say start with universal services. Universal housing, universal healthcare, universal education, universal food. We would have so much more art if we recognized that no one should have to “earn” their survival. Once that’s guaranteed – and abolish billionaires and extreme wealth inequality too – I think discussions over how to support creatives would take place from a much more favorable starting point.

Wow!

That’s good world building.

There is so much about the reporting on this story that is driving me bananas.

If we take the IDF narrative at face value, they’re asserting that they caught half a dozen militants who were unarmed and embedded with 9 medics. They then ambushed and killed some number and detained all the remaining unarmed personnel. They identified 6 as captured prisoners of war and 9 as non combatants and summarily executed all survivors and defiled their bodies.

And the coverage is like… ‘Israel was caught lying about how many medics they executed. Chat are we cooked 🤪?’

The framing of the coverage should be that as Israel’s genocide in Gaza moves into a new era in which the US president is no longer subtle in their embrace of extermination of innocent civilians, the army begins to experiment with open defiance of internationally recognized laws against war crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity.

That’s the story. This is like Elon’s sieg heil. The mainstream news is trained to find bullet casings and hold the poor accountable. But they have no idea how to react when the most powerful people in the world start spree-shooting in Times Square cackling.

There’s no mystery to solve! The story you’re covering is how other people with power are reacting and responding to naked attrocities, but the NYTimes is staffed by fucking Westworld robots! It’s maddening!

Ulgh it hurts so much to read this shit. Wtf.

I didn’t really understand the premise of the article. What concrete actions should Hamas have taken according to this author?

Geez … easy, bro.

We’re not saying you can’t enjoy it, alright! But if you start perving on the violence, don’t think we’re not gonna take notice, okay?

That’s fuckin’ nuts.

Also, this headline is bad. I thought he died. No. He just got a transplant after 100 days (whew).

I’m a materialist, so I think digital consciousness is totally possible. But then I’m also a bit of an animist too, so maybe you’re right.

I agree overall, though. It’s so much more epistimology than actual technology, and the field seems to be half grifters and half cultists. Which doesn’t really inspire confidence that this is in any way a genuinely useful commercial venture.

You mean The People’s Republic of Korea? They’re a communist utopia, aren’t they? /S

Wait, are you serious?

I didn’t get your comment. It sounds like you think that’s been bad, but immigration in the US and Europe have been successful ways to grow population and workforce, and the biggest problem has been that exploited nativists keep radicalizing and threatening these people.

That’s a problem, but it’s not actually caused by having too many immigrants.

What is the point, though?

If you made AGI, you’d have a computer that thinks like a person. Okay? We already have minds that think like a person: they’re called people!

I get that there is some belief that if you can make a digital consciousness, you can make a digital super-conciousness, but genuinely stop and ask what the utility is, and it’s equal parts useless and evil.

First, this premise is totally unexamined. Maybe it can think faster or hold more information in mind at one moment, but what basis is there for such a creation actually exceeding the ingenuity of a group of humans working together? What problem is this going to solve? A “cure for cancer”? The bottleneck to cutting cancer isn’t ideas, it’s that cell research takes actual time and money. You need it synthesize molecules and watch cells grow, and pay for lab infrastructure. “Intelligence” isn’t the limiting element!

The primary purpose is just to crater the value of human labor, by replacing human workers with workers with godlike powers of reasoning. Good luck with that. I’m sure they won’t come to the exact reasoning as any exploited worker in 120 nano-seconds.

It’s like Jason’s problem-solving advice in “The Good Place”:

“Any time I had a problem, and I threw a Molotov cocktail… Boom, right away, I had a different problem.”

Sure. Let’s work ourselves to death forTHIS.

I think Jews in Israel should continue to live in Israel while accepting full citizenship for Palestinians under a constitution that guarantees safety and equal rights for all.

I think settlements in the West Bank should be governed by a provincial government like Canadian provinces. And that government should afford those settlements infrastructure no greater than that of Palestinian villages, along with a robust and accountable justice system that strictly forbids terrorism and hate crimes, and offers Palestinians displaced by settler terrorism the right to return and rebuild their destroyed villages, financed by taxes on settlements that were illegally constructed until those villages are rebuilt.

None of this is any more preposterous than the American Reconstruction, end of Apartheid in South Africa, or Irish Independence. However as in those examples, this will absolutely need to be forced upon controlling interests against their protests. It is unfortunate but how emancipation works.

There is also a very unlikely precedent in zionism itself!

Before 1948, zionism was a fringe (almost utopian) project no less audacious than the abolition of slavery or end of colonial rule anywhere. And an Israel that included the existing residents of the land was widely claimed to be a goal. So I often point this out: if the heroes of zionism could boldly envision founding a state and living in peace when the first half was considered utterly impossible and then they got so far as to complete the first half of that, then what on god’s green earth kind of excuse do any zionists today have to justify condemning part 2 as impossible?

It was in the same decade that genocide was inflicted on Jews that the dream of a homeland was realized. So how can it be suggested as farfetched for us to simply declare that we all must now afford the same thing to Palestinians? I can say it no better than the grandfather of zionism himself, Theodor Herzl: “If you will it: it is no dream.”

At a certain point I worry that this gets to be more philosophy than deduction, but I would say that my reasoning is largely under-girded by two things.

First, I’m a realist, a materialist, and a consequentialist: if someone repeatedly does things that produce a consistent outcome, eventually I conclude – regardless of what they may say – that clearly that is the outcome they prefer.

Second, my impressions regarding anyone based the same thing as anyone’s: observing what people and groups say and do by following the news and testing how well various mental models predict and explain observed behavior.

Here’s an example: from reading Jewish Currents, 972 Magazine, Mondoweiss, The Intercept, The Forward, etc. I’m aware that the head of the Anti-Defamation League, Jonathan Greenblatt, has been a controversial figure even among his ideological peer group. Even within the ADL and like-minded organizations such as J Street critics have complained that Greenblatt demonstrates a bias against criticism of Israel and zionism that seems to routinely impede the overall mission of the ADL.

And now we’re at a point where the ADL has become wholly deferential to Elon Musk. They are not just passive toward him, they actively defend a man who has flatly stated that he believes Jews engage in media manipulation and act to enrich themselves even at the expense of any national allegiance. But: he’s also made clear that he’s prepared to support a Jewish ethnostate without reservation as long as he feels that the Jews refrain from challenging his own power and priorities.

This is just a case study. Greenblatt is not a uniquely important case. The point is that I look at this, and I have a mental model of Jonathan Greenblatt. I think about what I was raised to believe, and I understand how a man like Greenblatt can lie to himself all the way to quietly accepting the richest man on Earth unapologetically performing a sieg hiel salute in public. But going back to my point about being a realist and a consequentialist, it does not matter how convincingly one may insist that circumstances forced their hand, and that they made the best hard choice among bad options. It doesn’t matter how hard one insists that they’re a conflicted defender of human rights. If every time a group further yokes the rights and dignity of another group you say ‘Well… I’ll let it slide just this once’, then forgive me if I use the same mental model to predict your actions as I’d use for an embarrassed fascist. If you don’t like it, behave in a way that doesn’t conform so well to that ideological framework.

I consume credible journalism and analysis and follow where it leads. A great example is this analysis of the Sde Teiman riot. “A riot for impunity shows Israel’s proud embrace of its crimes” [+972 Magazine]. There are a lot of people like the ones described here who have dropped any pretense of opposing genocide. And it’s reasonable to conclude that the people who knowingly support them do to. And we can say the same about the people who knowingly support them. And when you apply this to the settlement of the West Bank and destruction of homes in East Jerusalem over the last decade, you’re left with a bewildering but unavoidable conclusion. Obama certainly criticized Netanyahu for subsidizing the obvious ethnic cleansing he was doing. But he never stopped sending crucial supplies and vetoing UN resolutions about it. The companies that build factories that rely on the labor of an oppressed class living under apartheid cannot claim not to know that they’re benefiting from and working to uphold ethnic exploitation. They know well enough that they seek to censor people who try to bring awareness to it. In other words, what do words of support for a two-state solution mean in the face of actively collaborating in the primary strategy that was employed to curtail any possibility of a two-state solution? It’s kind of a “2+2=4” situation.

But here’s where I think we can wrap up: Biden is retired. He lives in history now. I’m not interested in shaming anyone, I just want to help people figure out what is right and do it. And right now, that is (1) opposing genocide, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid and (2) recognizing attempts to justify or deflect from these practices and then calling these out for what they are. That’s what I’d encourage everyone to do. If you have a brain, use it; and if you have a mouth, use it too.