I think this is a non event.

Mamdani has been publicly stating his opposition to the Israeli occupation for years. Israel’s government has been accusing him falsely of antisemitism since he became known. And the NY press has tried to rattle him over it since Israel began attempting to smear him, with no effect.

This is like holding a press conference to announce that the Berlin Wall has fallen. Yes. That was the state of affairs yesterday and the day before, and presumably will remain so tomorrow.

This isn’t something anyone needs to or will react to.

That’s what I said! Fifteen minutes isn’t far. But it’s no longer close.

About twelve.

You can hate US imperialism AND hate Chinese imperialism.

It’s actually quite easy if you just fucking hate imperialism.

I feel like the biggest problem in getting people to react to torture is that it’s so unrelatable.

I think a lot of people hear “stress positions”, “24 hour lights”, “pitch blackness”, and they think, ‘Well I’ve been tired before. I’ve been stuck in a hot airplane with the lights too bright. I’ve been in the dark before, these are minor discomforts.’

And I don’t think they understand that the point of all torture is to induce suffering. If the people doing this aren’t slicing someone’s body parts off with hot knives, it’s because you can get the same effect by telling someone to kneel on the ground and not letting them up for a full day, but there’s less mess.

It makes me really sad that I think people are often able to get away with torture because a key part of modern torture has been finding techniques that minimize visual signs of damage and have no similarity to things most people have experienced, and thus sound benign.

Not mentioned in all of this is that torture is – to many people’s surprise – actually very damaging for torturers too. The prison guards at this place are probably at an extremely elevated risk of intimate partner violence and suicide.

Fuck all it, especially weak-ass complicity in this fascist bullshit.

Yeah, a common them I come back to is cycles of mistreatment: people who were push from their homes pushed people from their homes.

Chill, man. I’m not here to fight.

I’m also not going trying to white-wash anything. War and tribalism are indeed ancient, and historical echos can certainly be found. But my point is this: the regional conflict between Jews and Muslims is most certainly not a persistent, perpetual, irrational animosity that has stubbornly raged on for millennia. It is true that it is informed by a long cultural relationship. But the violence is modern. It’s caused by political forces, and it can be ended by changing those political forces.

Prior to the Zionist movement and the Arab nationalist movement of the twentieth century, Jews and Muslims (and many other groups) cohabitated Israel-Palestine (or Trans-Jordan or whatever you want to call it). They did in fact share the land peacefully in the nineteenth century.

https://www.972mag.com/before-zionism-the-shared-life-of-jews-and-palestinians/

True. It definitely has a long history. My point though – as you said – is that it’s really a persistent myth that these people are just oil and water. Their conflict is far more material than that.

It certainly isn’t intractable.

I must politely reject this assessment. There have been decades and centuries of peaceful coexistence. It isn’t as though this is a persistent condition.

Prior to 1948, there were a lot of Christians and Jews living in Palestine without major conflict.

The modern ethno-religious tensions are the product of modern political events, not some mystic curse.

I think the most important takeaway here is that for those of us in the imperial core, the urgency has never been greater to understand the architecture of power and find the weaknesses in its ediface.

The opportunity (and associated responsibility) to pursue shared liberation is greatest for each of us on in America and Europe.

Divest everything. City governments, schools, business, whatever. My city – Oakland – has had great success at this. And each institution that joins the efforts is another crack that will eventually bring end the occupation. We can do it this decade!

We have to have hope enough for ourselves and those with far fewer options.

Holy shit, really?

That is Sony levels of stupid.

View from the Top.

I saw it when I was in my twenties with a friend because we (two mostly straight guys) thought we were going to see the latest silly Mike Myers movie. And then it turned out that he was barely in it! They just took all his scenes and put them in the trailer! The actual movie was a very dull romcom staring Gwyneth Paltrow and some guy who I don’t remember being in the trailer at all.

When it ended, we walked out of the theater and just said to each other ‘What the hell was that?’.

Also, I think Shallow Hal kind of falls in this too. I don’t recall the trailer being great, but it had to be good enough that it got me to see that terrible movie.

Also, I don’t know if this qualifies, but I remember that The Cable Guy staring Jim Carrey and Matthew Broderick was the first time I saw a movie and realized that a trailer can be misleading. They deliberately promoted it like The Mask and Ace Ventura. I think I was like 12 when I saw it, and it creeped me way the fuck out.

It wouldn’t surprise me if it’s actually a better movie than people remember, but the misleading promotion was a great way to ensure the movie didn’t find its audience.

Respectfully, religion really isn’t the cause, it’s just correlated with ethnicity, like language.

The up/down vote system directs the ranking algorithm on how to order posts and comments, and it visually signals to the user the relative popularity of a comment.

This, imo, is a wildly underappreciated mechanic for combating a lot of the harmful issues people associate with social media.

Most people recognize that discourse on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. is designed to divide and inflame people. the reddit-style downvote is remarkably effective at addressing this:

It does two key things in particular:

1. Downvoted comments are down ranked and hidden, so people are exposed to less toxic content.

2. If people do engage with unpopular comments, the negative score influences how people engage with them. On Facebook, commenting to defend Biden’s Israel policy will get elevated and create viscous fights. On Lemmy, it will get flagged with a virtual dunce cap. You can dunk on it, but there’s no point in arguing with it: we can all see that the argument is already over. Laugh and ignore.

Taken together, these discourage people from feeding trolls, and in doing so reduce the incentive to post something uncivil or stupid. It’s a remarkably powerful tool to address a huge problem, and I wish more people understood this.

The murdered we’re Al-Muntasir Billah Abdullah, 26; and Youssef Asasa, 37.

Their poor families… Also, fuck the AP for making that paragraph 11. Jeez.

'Guys, it’s no big deal. I was just doing a science experiment to test whether escaping from a life sentence for my crimes was feasible.

So far, my hypothesis appears to be false.’

Yeah, agree. Tables can be used standing or while sitting in the floor. Chairs are nice, but without tables a lot of stuff would happen at floor level anyway.

Definitely easier to get by without chairs.

Also, there was a lot more hope than change.

Ultimately, Obama did a perfect job executing neoliberalism. And by demonstrating the outcomes of neoliberalism when perfectly executed, I think he also executed neoliberalism in the other meaning.

This is what I was going to say.

Also, long form narrative. Right now LLMs seem to work best for short conversations, but get increasingly unhinged over very long conversations. And if they generate a novel, it’s not consistent or structured, from what I understand.

First, I think she’s a shameless exaggerator.

Second, this is so stupid. Forget your health: how do you actually think you’re effective without rest? Every human being knows exactly how rest works, because we can all run this test ourselves.

This myth persists that some people can force themselves to be effective with minimal rest by pure will, despite the fact that every one of us has experienced sleep deprivation at some point, and all of us know that without sleep we have the intelligence of a 9 year old.

Anyone who claims to be the exception to this biological rule is either lying or they’re stupid because they didn’t sleep and now have the intelligence of a nine year old.

Also: not “needing” sleep is often something said by people with insomnia. People like Trump and Musk do survive on only a few hours of sleep a night. But this isn’t because they’re strong or smart: it’s because their brains are not functioning correctly and they can’t get sleep they need.

Sleep isn’t optional. This PM is fucking up their job by walking through life confused and disoriented.