I think it's clear that Biden and the west is banking on collapsing the country economically, which I totally understand as a reasonable idea. But I think that it fails to account for the incredibly unpredictable and negative consequences of collapsing a state. And that's before considering that it's a nuclear state.
They're a socialist Israeli football club popular among leftist Israeli Jews and Arab Israelis. Famously, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, the American-Israeli hostage who was killed in Gaza in August was among their fans.
As you can imagine, they face a pretty hostile environment throughout Israel these days.
It should come as no surprise at this point that Israelis have come to believe in an entitlement to act aggressively anywhere in the world and treat any response as illegitimate and unjustifiable. This has become an inherent part of Israeli nationalist culture from top to bottom at this point.
You know what I find so odd? Her dad is one of Jamaica's most renowned economists. He's a highly respected long-time presence in Jamaican economic policy. His academic and policy work is far to her left, and they're apparently estranged.
I wonder if she's familiar with her dad's work. I wonder if she'd been able to sit down and have dinner with him at any point over the last year and ask his thoughts what he would've said.
Brig Gen Itzik Cohen declared last week that the hundreds of thousands of people remaining in northern Gaza have been reclassified as combatants and no further food will reach them.
They are going to be eliminated, and the land annexed and resettled.
I've heard this called "soft climate denial", and unforntuately it's widespread.
People like Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi say that they believe in climate change. But let's imagine that we're roommates and you told me that there's an out of control wildfire a few miles away and the governor has told us all to evacuate. One roommate says that they don't belive it and they're staying. And I say 'Shame on you for denying this! I firmly believe in the wildfire. It's urgent that we act now, which is why I've ordered travel maps on Amazon so we can begin plotting our evacuation route as soon as they arrive.'
Would you characterize this is accepting the crisis, or being in a state of soft denial?
Instead of banning them, ban the extraction of profit on producing and selling them. Turn them into an entirely recreational market. I'd love to see the outcome of trying that.
I didn't know who this specific woman is, but it doesn't sound like any of this is a secret. For instance, it is public knowledge that Qatar has provided financial aid to Hamas, and serves as a go-between for Israel and the US. Netanyanu famously defended his practice of facilitating these cash transfers.
Also, this all seems sort of secondary when Israel -- the US's close ally -- is beginning an extermination campaign in northern Gaza. It's hard to really discuss any other issue in the midst of what has become a macabre genocide in full view of the international community.
I've spent a lot of time thinking about this, because over the last year I was writing the world guide for a solarpunk setting to be used with a tabletop RPG or as a writing guide. And while I was working on this, OpenAI came along and put the Turing test out to pasture.
Several existential crises later, the result looked remarkably like I hadn't thought about it at all: in the game setting, there are robots and they are treated like people. Like Bender on Futurama.
I think @TootSweet@Lemmy.world (love the username, btw!) is absolutely right that our concerns are all largely shaped by the presumption that today, everything someone builds is built to benefit the creator and manipulate the end user. If that isn't the case, than a convincing android could just be... your neighbor Hassan.
Most machines probably wouldn't have a reason to pretend to be human. But if one wanted to, that's basically transorganicism. No disrespect to OP, but if a machine is sentient, trying to restrict it from presenting as organic seems pretty similar to restrictions on trans people using the restroom that matches their presentation.
And if they are trying to deceive you maliciously, well... I currently know everyone I meet is organic, and I already know not to trust all of them.
I think his intense commitment to getting Trump elected makes more sense when you consider this article.
His enormous wealth is largely stored in the form of Tesla stock, and that stock has been valued based on the belief that it isn't a car company, it's a robotaxi service currently selling the hardware to finance the software development. The value -- and his wealth -- can persist indefinitely as long as investors continue to accept that premise, no matter how long delayed. But if something tangibly undermines that premise, Musk could conceivably lose the majority of his wealth overnight.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Agency is probably the greatest threat to his wealth. He doesn't worry about competitors or protestors or Twitter users or advertisers. They're all just petty nuisances. But the federal regulator over roads... that is his proverbial killer snail. And I think fully capturing the entire federal regulatory state is his strategy to permanently confine that snail.
More than anything else, I think that's what is motivating his radical embrace of fascism.
YIIIIIIKES