So the World Central Kitchen convoy a) cleared its route with the IDF beforehand, b) traveled on an approved route, and c) departed at an approved time, so d) the IDF knew exactly who it was killing when it struck the convoy three (3) times.
It was so obviously deliberate, and so deliberately cruel—not just to murder these people, but to terrorize other aid workers into abandoning the Palestinians to be starved to death. To prove the IDF’s impunity and reach, and to compel the IDF’s defenders into apologizing for yet another unforgivable atrocity.
@HeavenlyPossum The absolute best case scenario is that the IDF is so trigger happy and its chain of command has broken down the the point they can't coordinate not shooting aid workers with themselves. Not seeing many good arguments for continuing to go along with this murderous farce.
It is a misunderstanding to think cats don't love us like dogs do, or that they are less social, or that they are lower maintenance and need less attention and care. Cats don't even like it when we go out of our way to greet the dog but not them. They get separation anxiety. They sleep when they are stressed or bored (relatable), so we often misunderstand these emotions in cats. Cats feeling superior, or not needing us, or not caring, makes me so sad for cats, knowing all this to be false.
Republican politics is defined by a constant doubling down on unpopular policy because they are a bloodthirsty, theocratic, authoritarian minority of Americans and they literally don't care what the rest of us think.
There's a reason Republicans would rather do away with democracy altogether than change their tune.
@gwynnion There are definitely moments where things got noticeably worse real quick, but they were all accelerations of past trends rather than breaks from them. You can trace things directly from Trump back to Goldwater at least without any loss of continuity. The Republican party has been in the process of becoming this for at least sixty or seventy years.
Currently on my way to Norwescon. Spending a chunk of the flight reading slush and banning people who are still trying to send us "AI" spam as their own work.
Today in Labor History March 6, 1857: The Dred Scott decision by the U.S. Supreme Court opened up federal territories to slavery and denied citizenship to blacks. Dred Scott had sued for his family’s freedom, arguing that they had lived four years in the north, where slavery was illegal. The Court ruled 7-2 that people of African descent weren’t U.S. citizens and thus had no standing before the court.
Once again for people who were just exposed to the concept of "context" yesterday, evidently including Elon Musk:
The validity of tests is contextual.
If you have a test that is meant to detect COVID in a symptomatic individual, you can't give that test to an asymptomatic individual and expect it to work.
If you have a test that is designed to test if someone with a MD is ready to practice medicine, you can't give it to someone without a medical degree to determine if they are ready.
@hrefna I saw a study recently that ran GPT-4 through a creativity test for humans, which it aced, and some of the tests were like the exact optimal use case for an LLM. Like yeah, I bet GPT,-4 is superhumanly good at naming 10 words as semantically distant as possible, it's built of embeddings. It basically is a mathematical model of the semantic connections between words! But LLMs are super derivative! The process by which an LLM generated an answer to that test is completely different from how a human does, using it to try and judge intelligence in an LLM is not going to give you valid results.
I am not the easiest person to love here on fedi and now that I’ve seen really horrible accusations flying back and forth over The Bad Space I’m wondering what ya’ll say about me behind my back.
Like I know the pro-genocide crowd has been stalking me and gossiping about how anti-Semitic I am but hopefully that’s it.
I found out recently about Interlingua, where the design is any speaker of a romance language should be able to mostly comprehend it without being taught it first. And I'm frustrated to find I find the project pretty cool, and can in fact read it unprepared as an English/Spanglish speaker, and the reason this frustrates me is because the thing that introduced me to Interlingua was finding out that it had been adopted by the Urbit project
I’ve taken the year off from drinking. I was drinking too much, too often, and having a hard time stopping when I started. Too reliant on alcohol to manage stress.
So, at the end of the year, I’ll reassess: do I still want to drink? If so, can I do it without going overboard, or has that ship sailed?
Ancap visions of a "stateless society" entail taking numerous elements of the present system which are actually the result of centuries of collusion between the state and the economic ruling class, treating them ahistorically as "natural" and "voluntarily," and then constructing an imaginary "stateless" order with the nominal machinery of the state removed but all those other elements left in place as the basis of their "free market" order.
@KevinCarson1 Nobody likes wage labor. Wage labor sucks. Given any other option, most people will not perform wage labor. It's an agonizing and fairly new system and so many people act like it's as natural and inevitable as the fucking tides.
We are all in very grave danger, and at the rate things are going, you folks spouting theory in my mentions are going to end up very dead, having accomplished very little.
I tried it your way; maybe I was a bad messenger, but I tried it. The fash are still winning. I'm still trapped in a propaganda model environment where folks around me can't even agree on what the root causes are, what the problems are, let alone how to solve them.
But they do understand "fascists are bad." So I'm there.
Capitalism has NOT lifted millions out of poverty. The benefits of capitalism disproportionately favor the wealthy, and the majority remain economically marginalized. Capitalism commodifies individuals by reducing them to mere "human capital". Workers' value is exploited for the benefit of a privileged few. Capitalism's focus on private ownership and profit motives leads to unequal resource distribution, preventing equitable access to necessities.
@floatybirb@Radical_EgoCom What capitalism frames as poverty reduction is in large part the process of proletarianization, where people living subsistence lifestyles are brought into economies controlled by capital. There are upsides and downsides to this process, but a significant number of the people affected are not doing this willingly.
@simon_brooke That's true, but on the other hand he's also a coward whose only idea is to tack rightward as hard as he possibly can and sack anyone who disagrees.
I plugged in a Roku yesterday, and it's already the device that's had the most blocked advertising and analytics requests on my home network. One day, and it's made the most gross requests compared to everything else that's been monitored much, much longer.
They are such a trash company in every possible way. I don't know why anybody chooses to use them for anything. I'm doing this for development purposes. But after I'm done, I'm locking this in a box and dropping it in a hole, just to be safe.
Just recently had to break it down in a group because it's been flaring up, figured a post would be nice.
This may seem like a Jewish specific topic, but it is important for non-Jews to know as well.
Zionism vs Anti-Zionism.
First of all, if you're a non-Jew it's best to identify with neither as for non-Jews is almost always antisemitic. (And yes I mean both).
This is a one of the biggest bones of contention in the Jewish community and is absolutely a loud argument right now due to current events. Worse yet, it's generally so because of a mix of misunderstandings and extremism. Zionism
Originally this was the belief that the only way Jews could find some stability and safety would be to form a Jewish state. Once the state was formed, this turned into rabid support for Israel. For the milder of them, it basically boils down to patriotism... for the extremes it's nationalism
The loudest and most well represented of Zionists, however, believe basically that any criticism of Israel is inherently antisemitic, even by fellow Jews.
(How can this be antisemitic for non-jews? Short answer without derailing: Nazis are often Zionist) Anti-Zionism
Originally this was opposition to the creation of modern Israel, though each person had their own wildly varying reasons.
After the creation, many Anti-Zionists became Zionists. For the rest it mostly transformed into minimizing and addressing the damages caused by the creation of the state (ie. the occupation of Palestine). Many do dream of the potential of dismantling the state, but don't see it as feasible because creating a new humanitarian crisis to solve another isn't an acceptable solution.
They're generally painted by Zionists as if they want to abruptly end the state without addressing the crisis it would cause. (As such even mild Zionists often believe Anti-Zionism to be inherently antisemitic)
(Non-Jews can criticize Israel, but being/identifying-as Anti-Zionist is pretty much reserved for Jews; the exception being victims of Israel)
@cstross@shiri@witewulf Hard not to note that German, Italian, and various Balkan nationalisms were also terrible fucking ideas that killed tremendous amounts of people. Kind of feels like nationalism as an ideology was a terrible, murderous mistake in general.
Israeli Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu has suggested using nuclear weapons against Gaza.
Minister without Portfolio Gideon Sa’ar has suggested annexing parts of Gaza.
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and Intelligence Minister Gila Gamliel have separately advocated for resettling Palestinians outside of Gaza.
Gamliel’s ministry circulated a paper on expelling the population of Gaza into the Sinai desert.
Agriculture Minister Avi Dichter said that Israel is “rolling out the Gaza Nakba.”
Minister of Heritage Amichai Eliyahu has threatened to hand over Gaza’s land to former Israeli settlers and current Israeli soldiers.
It’s really hard to understand the Israeli state’s explicit policy as anything other than ethnic cleansing, at the mildest—of killing enough Palestinians and making life sufficiently unbearable for the survivors that they have to flee.
@HeavenlyPossum The disconnect between the Israeli governments rhetoric for western audiences and Bibi's ministers rhetoric for domestic audiences is kind of driving me insane. Are we just supposed to ignore all this? Times of Israel has an English edition, all of this shit is very easily verifiable and it makes a compete mockery of every argument apologists for the occupation expect us to take seriously. It's kind of insulting.
@simon_brooke@Micha_Silver The fact that the leaders of Hamas aren't even in Gaza, they're in fucking Qatar, drives me nuts. How is killing all these people supposed to stop Hamas even in theory other than by ethnic cleansing?
The Israeli state is starving the people of Gaza and I don’t know how to wrap my head around the horror of this.
I watched Asad do this to Syrians for years and it is a horrific way to die. People with diabetes will die first, in agony, and then children and the elderly.
I think Americans particularly don't understand how much of their view of the Middle East has been crafted by apocalyptic Evangelicals, neoconservative warmongers, and Christian Zionists, most of whom are both antisemitic and Islamophobic and would be happy to see the whole region go up in flames.
