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.

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.

Whew.

The thing about these incidents that I find most interesting is that they basically reveal a widely held suspicion among many people that these government contractors are over-crexentialed bullshit artists.

This just shows what we’ve all suspected: they’ve been cutting corners, claiming underserved authority, and making up shit for years. But now some folks are checking and reporting on it.

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.’

This is an excellent shower thought.

The other issue I have is that this is an example of a recurring issue in which the tech obsessed ultra wealthy declare their plan to solve a problem for which a very straightforward policy solution already exists.

We don’t need tech to extend lives or feed the hungry. We just need to remove the paywalls to existing resources.

I addressed this in several other responses.

I’m aware that there is a strong consensus among the actual scholars who study this. The issue is that a consensus is being obstructed throug editorial control by elites. The question being debated, imo, isn’t whether Israel committed genocide (we all know they have). It’s whether Wikipedia breaking standard procedures is a sound strategy to circumvent the suppression of truth by elites.

I think the case in both directions is strong. It’s very appealing in the short term.

Can you specify which alternatives you’re talking about?

Also, I don’t know what’s specifically questionable about any of this. I haven’t disputed or justified anything. I’ve just expressed a contrary opinion on tactics.

I want to be clear.

I know it’s a genocide, and I agree that this is the consensus of academic scholars. The only real dispute is coming from donors who can manipulate the editorial process.

This is the crux of the dispute within Wikipedia: when the system works correctly, scholars write; their institutions publish; Wikipedia summarizes. But if bad actors interrupt the execution of step 2, should Wikipedia break protocol further to circumvent the attack? Or effectively allow it to be successful to maintain process?

I think the argument for the former is compelling, but I think Wales recognizes the downstream consequences, and I think I very reluctantly agree.

The bad actors do need to be countered. I just don’t think Wikipedia is an effective tool to do so.

I know this is an unpopular opinion, but I think Wales is correct.

I understand this seems irrational, because of course Israel committed genocide in Gaza. And Wikipedia’s job is to describe reality, right?

Wrong. Wikipedia’s job is to describe historical and scientific consensus. It is fundamental to their mission that they do all they can to avoid arbitrating disputes. I know that’s painful, but it’s a matter of roles: academics and media organizations arbitrate, and Wikipedia’s role is to catalog and communicate the consensus these organizations reach.

It’s terrible that a minority of biased actors have managed to prevent media and academic institutions from reaching consensus when the subject is so straightforward and obvious. But until that is addressed, unfortunately Wikipedia is hampered from describing the consensus reality by the needs of their core mission. They are designed to be downstream of these organizations, and they have to be to remain effective to their core mission. It’s like how the UN lets war criminals like Netanyahu visit and speak. As much as we’d all like them to kick him the hell out, doing so undermines the core purpose of the institution. It’s uncomfortable, but it’s the job description.

I think one solution is that their should be more than one crowd-sourced encyclopedia for the world. Wikipedia will always suffer from a Western, English-speaking bias.

Deep take. Thanks for sharing.

What does this mean?

WOW. So that’s where that video came from.

This is such a wild portrait into this attorney. They’re a lawyer in the Israeli army, so I can’t not assume that they’re ultimately complicit in so many atrocities. And yet they also did something incredibly selfless and dangerous in the name of justice, which most humans will never ever do.

It must be enormously painful to sacrifice your career and entire family’s social standing to bring a gross abuse to light, and then have much of your own society say, ‘Now that we’ve seen this proof… We’re going to stick with our position. You thought we’d change when you proved the claims of rape? No, we’re just going to admit that we endorse rape.’

I do appreciate their bravery, because the release of this video, imo, has been one of the most impactful events in the narrative of Jewish Israeli self image. This event did force a reflection. It forced Israeli Jews to confront that their actions were inconsistent with their belief that they are a righteous people. Unfortunately, it seems that when faced with this incongruity, they resolved the conflict by accepting that they’re the bad guys rather than insisting on stopping it. But I think accepting it did move the world another step towards accepting reality. And that’s progress towards the day the occupation is ended by external pressure.

This is an interesting observation, but I watched Daredevil like a decade ago and I’ve never seen Superman & Lois so I don’t really know what you’re talking about.

Deal removes constraint on OpenAI’s ability to raise capital

I think they mean “raze”…

Agreed. His comments are so bizarrely stupid on so many levels.

They’re not just “wrong”: they’re half-right-half-wrong. And the half that is wrong is idiotic in the extreme, while the half that is right casually acknowledges a civilizational crisis like someone watching their neighbors screaming in a house fire while sipping a cup of coffee.

Like this farmer analogy: the farmers were right! Their way of life and all that mattered to them was largely exterminated by these changes, and we’re living in their worst nightmare! And he even goes so far as acknowledging this, and acknowledging that we’ll likely experience the same thing. We’re all basically cart horses at the dawn of the automobile, and we might actually hate where this is going. But… It’ll probably be great.

He just has a hunch that even though all evidence suggests that this will lead to the opposite of the greatest good for the greatest number of people, for some reason his brain can’t shake the sense that it’s going to be good anyway. I mean, it has to be, otherwise that would make him a monster! And that simply can’t be the case. So there you have it.

It’ll be terrible great.

100%.

Peter Frase deconstructed this in an article a decade ago (and subsequent book) “Four Futures”.

It’s really not complicated. Saying 'the rich want to make us all obsolete and then kill us off ’ sounds paranoid and reactionary, but if you actually study these dynamics critically that’s a pretty good distillation of what they’d like to do, and they’re not really concealing it.

Uh… @DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works ?

I think it sounds like you might be a danger to yourself.

I don’t know your situation, but I just want to point out two things:

1. The belief that those around a depressed person secretly don’t want them around or would appreciate them more when they’re gone is wildly untrue. It kind of sounds like your brain is trying to convince you of this, and you should know that your brain is almost certainly lying. Lots of people know folks who are depressed that we love very much and are grateful to have in our lives.

2. People who survive suicide attempts consistently experience enormous regret and relief that they survived. They typically describe the experience as terrifying, and report that it felt like someone else was trying to kill them.

I know that during depression, negative thoughts can make a convincing case that you cannot expect anything to get better, but there are A LOT of people alive today who enjoy their lives who felt the same way at some time in the past. I hope that with support you can perhaps be one of these people.

It’s so bizarre… surreal… darkly comic – I don’t know the right phrasing for this – that Ben G’vir so embodies this Israeli form of double-speak. He will deny and confess in the same sentence.

He is the kind of guy who will say ‘Any accusation that I am a torturer is a lie! Also, though, I do believe that torture is appropriate and I’m very committed to acting on that belief.’

So much has happened, many people don’t know or remember. But I feel like the Sde Tilman riots were a turning point. Soldiers caught on camera raping a man in detention. And the public outcry including from members of the government was ‘They’re innocent! And also completely justified in raping that man! We’re not criminals! And also we will bring furious violence against anyone who tries to hold us accountable under the law!’

Trump does this too, though even he isn’t as skilled at it. ‘To call me a fascist is slander! How dare you! But also I don’t consider that a bad thing.’

It’s very dark.