anyone who has to work to earn a living is a prostitute; we're just using our bodies a slightly different way.
this guy is special because he's rich enough to guarantee that he doesn't have to, he just loves doing it; he's not a prostitute, he's just the ruling's class' willing removed.
Gov. Tina Kotek ordered the move, which follows reporting by Oregon Public Broadcasting and ProPublica that highlighted impediments green energy advocates blame for the state’s poor ranking when it comes to the growth of renewables.
Just the UK, as far as I'm able to find. Some US users have to verify by clicking the box, but I do not believe they've been en-masse required to upload ID or use the UK's facial recognition nonsense.
From the discord age verification FAQ:
The age verification features described in this article are fully available only to users in the United Kingdom and apply to all new and existing UK accounts.
You might be confusing it with how several states have attempted to implement identity verification for access to porn sites (which has so far avoided a similar scandal to this one by virtue of rampant, contemptuous noncompliance on the part of the porn sites)
Throw away email! Are you going something illegal online that you would want to bypass the government and big techs absolute right to spy on everything you do! That's it people will henceforth only get one single email address assigned at birth that they will be forced to use for all online interactions henceforth. I hope you feel ashamed of yourself with all the children you put at risk with your thoughtless selfish behaviour. Now upload an image of your face certified by a government official and a copy of your birth certificate just to be sure that ~~terrorists~~, uh ~~criminals~~, uh child abusers don't win.
*Please tell me this is the most superfluous /s of all time. *
Age verification helps us provide you with an age-appropriate experience, such as managing default settings and controlling what sensitive content you see on Discord (more on when age verification ...
Here's the information directly from the FAQ as of right now:
Q: Is my data stored when I use Face Scan or Scan ID verification?
A: Discord and k-ID do not permanently store personal identity documents or your video selfies. The image of your identity document and the ID face match selfie are deleted directly after your age group is confirmed, and the video selfie used for facial age estimation never leaves your device.
These were photos submitted via the compromised support provider (Zendesk) via the Discord support portal.
Automated age verification via their partner (k-ID, which has its own issues) is a separate system, which was only available to some users. Other users had to contact Discord support manually and submit photo ID, which went through Zendesk, which was then compromised in this breach.
Additionally, for the automated process, it's the video selfie that's on-device and never transmitted, but photos of your ID and selfie photo are transmitted, just supposedly deleted afterwards. Those ones are **not* included in this breach, as far as we're aware, as it's an entirely different third-party with wholly separate infrastructure.
Which is why you farm off stuff like this to third parties whenever possible
DiscordCorp will get a slap on the wrist and give people an offer of a free six months of discord turbo (so long as you provide payment info so it can auto-renew on month seven).
But ANY meaningful consequences will go toward Zendesk Corp for not doing what they were supposed to. And... then everyone will just use ZZendesk instead
Well, yeah. Discord isn't exactly at fault here, they're operating as best they can within the boundaries of a piece of legislation that could be best described as gods gift to the "I-told-you-so" crowd. This breach is exactly what everyone was warning would happen with the UK ID laws, and discord got stung first as they're one of the few companies trying to adhere to the law in good faith (which, yes, why in hell they're trying to do this is good faith is a very good question)
Literally days ago i was accessing a nsfw channel and i got "well, you should send to us your ID and things so i can verificate you" and i thought "no way! I don't want to give my infos, if they have a data breach we are all doomed" and i ignore, well i don't want to say "i told you so" but...
In my opinion, they're still somewhat at fault, because this was them failing to find and configure their software to work with a third-party identity provider who's infrastructure was built to handle the security of sensitive information, and just choosing to use email through Zendesk because it was easier in the meantime. A platform that I should note has been routinely accessed again and again by attackers, not just for Discord, but for all sorts of other companies.
The main problem is that legislation like the Online Safety Act require some privacy protections, like not collecting or storing certain data unless necessary, but they don't require any particular security measures to be in place. This means that, theoretically, nothing stops a company from passing your ID to their servers in cleartext, for example.
Now compare this to industries like the credit card industry, where they created PCI DSS, which mandates specific security practices. This is why you don't often see breaches of any card networks or issuers themselves, and why most fraud is external to the systems that actually process payments through these cards. (e.g. phishing attacks that get your card info, or a store that has your card info already getting hacked)
This is a HUGE oversight, and one that will lead to things like this happening over and over unless it becomes unprofitable for companies to not care.
PCI DSS stands for the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard. It is a set of security standards designed to ensure that all companies that handle credit card information maintain a secure environment.
While there's plenty of merit to what you're saying, I'm too sick to have a coherent thought beyond maybe pointing out that the main issue with legislation like this isn't that it doesn't specify security requirements, but that it's forcing people who do not have infrastructure established to collect and manage sensitive info of this nature in the first place.
Discord never set out to collect this much PII, and as far as I'm aware there's never been a breach of their payment information processing. Like you say, it's an established thing to handle payments and is fairly routine to implement. There is no routine method of handling ID verification yet, and the solutions that exist were forced to be developed rapidly and with no standards.
The legislation is at fault for putting people in this situation - that they used Zendesk was a boneheaded move (I haven't seen details of the breach, was that really the vector that got attacked?) and sure, they're at some degree of fault for letting this happen. But the vast majority of the blame lies at the feet of the asinine legislation that all but explicitly mandated that this situation arise.
Oh, of course the legislation is to blame for a lot of this in the end. I'm just saying that Discord could have already partnered with a number of identity verification services that do already have this infrastructure up and running, with standardized and documented ways to call their APIs to both verify and check the verification of a user.
At the end of the day, Discord chose to implement a convoluted process of having users email Discord, upload IDs, then have Discord pull the IDs back down from Zendesk and verify them, rather than implementing a system where users could have simply gone to a third-party verification website, done all the steps there, had their data processed much more securely, then have the site just send Discord a message saying "they're cool, let 'em in"
Forced arbitration tends to backfire massively when you have something of this scale because of everyone starts doing it. The cost of that forced arbitration is more than what the lawsuits would have been without it. It's a big reason why like steam got rid of it. If you get too many people trying to go after you, it's just not worth it and costs too much.
Sounds like Discord is about to have 2 million cases of arbitration to sort out.
One person takes them to arbitration, it's short work for their legal team, if 1000 do it's harder, if 100,000 do, you still have to respond in a timely manner. The costs would be astronomical.
Valve and a few others removed it for that reason, it's a bomb waiting to blow.
"dont always... when it hits the fan" is a little too elusive compared to a legal document you agreed to online imho so i will not necessarily hold to that
So glad I ditched discord the second they considered going public, converting people to Matrix sucks because Element is terrible for group calls, [Edit] tried setting up a Snikket server via Docker compose yesterday but their documentation sucks for manual setups, I don’t need them handling reverse proxying for me and rather they didn’t bind to the host network and instead bind to a docker network eventually my tweaks broke docker itself and I had to restart the service.
The fact that these photos and PII (personally identifiable information) were not destroyed after the verification process was certified is absolutely atrocious OpSec. I don't even care which of the two companies is ultimately responsible, because they are both responsible.
Zendesk for their bad OpSec
Discord for both outsourcing this AND not having contractual requirements to properly secure and destroy PII when it was no longer required.
I work in IT, and treat PII like it's dangerously radioactive, because in the digital world, it really is.
Right. It blows me away the required training we have to do for physical files more secured than Fort Knox! Tech world? Eh just throw it in the recycle bin
Me when I get a request for PII pertaining to a suspected corruption case: Have one of our corporate lawyers give me a written and explicit statement of what data I'm supposed to send to whom or get bent. I'm not touching that with a ten foot pole and gloves unless I have a legally solid affirmation that what I'm doing won't come back to bite me, and that our workers' council knows about it and will back me up.
I'm reluctant to even confirm that I can get that information in the first place. I mean, I'm the one with full access to the audit tool, so I probably do, but I'd have to access that data in the first place to check. I don't think that anyone would notice or care so long as I don't share that information, but as you said: dangerously radioactive; don't touch if I can help it.
discord isn't at fault here. I don't say they do good stuff either, i just want to stick to the facts. It's the UK government who forced them in the first place
It was obvious things like this will happen, unlike banks and government sites social media sites don't have strict cyber security requirements and they want these sites to have a government ID. It was a bad idea from the start.
I believe people from ~~EU~~ UK and people who say they were under 13 and got reported. They needed to send in a pic of them holding their ID to get unbanned.
I've criticized the sort of personal information that is allowed to be managed by banking entities in the cases of Accidental Americans, where people who have nothing to do with America except that they were born in the US have their data handled by private entities to be passed onto governments they've never been in. Public entities that should handle and be responsible for it in their actual home countries want to wash their hands off from them and there's too much money against too small of a minority for anyone to care about their rights. It doesn't matter how banks have consistently proven that they or their staff can act criminally, either.
At least here, it affects a lot more people so it will likely bring in the change and reform it needs, even if the sensitivity of this data is significantly less.
Gonna have to say, this guy is definitely gonna be screwed by this:
Yep. This is just the first. As long as individuals submit to these ID verifications, services which provide them will be highly targeted. I find it ridiculous that 1.5 million people actually submitted their info to access discord instead of finding a workaround or alternative. I can only imagine how many are gullible enough to verify on porn sites.
Well before the UK online ID laws, I saw some memes about people getting asked for ID as proof of age for NSFW servers, just to send to server admins. I figured it was a ID fraud scheme of some sort, but now I'd chalk it up to manic "protect the children" believers.
The Labour under Starmer is closet Tory. I wish that the popular Manchester Labour mayor (whose name I forgot) takes his place as PM, which actual leftist politicians try to make him to be. Although this will be a Sysiphean task under the ruthless politicking in British politics and Labour Party's own strict rule on who could become PM.
so instead of creating some kind of authorization system that would not require sending your private information to everyone the govt did nothing and instead put that responsibility on EVERY company. begs the question why rushing so much?
The department of Social security could have created some sort of public/private key pair to very age and DOB. But that's too much to ask for isn't it?
Have you seen the USA? UK? Russia? China? I really don't want the government making any system to tie internet to any identity. I really don't want any government having any role in the internet.
so instead of creating some kind of authorization system that would not require sending your private information to everyone the govt did nothing and instead put that responsibility on EVERY company. begs the question why rushing so much?
I would suppose that this is because there is not a single way valid for every govt. For example, in Italy we have SPID, which is different from what Germany, France and every EU state have. If Discord wanted to use it, they had to implement a numbers of way to do it, which can be not that easy.
Joking aside, now that I think about it, what difference does does it make if companies are stealing infos and spying on you with government mandated age verification checks, and hackers stealing your government mandated age verification info? This just reinforces my view that governments (and companies) are nothing but glorified gangsters.
Option 3: companies that you pay to provide authentication service. Regulated so that they clearly tell you if they are subsidizing service outside of your payments.
We nearly already do this with certificate services and they would probably be in a good position to offer an id service.
Option 3: companies that you pay to provide authentication service. Regulated so that they clearly tell you if they are subsidizing service outside of your payments.
Then you just need to hack this company instead of Discord, you only change target.
To me giving a company or government permission to create the databases allowed for mass facial recognition is the same thing as giving the facial recognition data to criminals. It will be leaked/hacked/sold, etc. It is only a matter of time.
How many Social security numbers in the U.S. have been leaked/hacked/sold/illegally transferred? ~340 million.
Facial recognition will be a near useless tool for security in 10 years, and 100% for population monitoring at the rate we are going.
my friend who also lives in the uk was unable to view a Reddit post that had a picture of dental decay because it was marked as nsfw and Reddit requires you to verify age using ID/selfie to be in compliance with the uk's Online Safety Act to see anything marked as nsfw.
my comment was a play on the people who think this is all worth it because it might prevent kids from seeing porn
The countries of the collective West, covering up the terrorist acts of the Kiev regime and the regular attacks of the Ukrainian army on the Zaporozhye nuclear power station, are becoming "direct accomplices" of the Ukrainian crimes, Maria Zakharova …
yeah, the azov brigade is definitely guilty of ethnic cleansing style pogroms and i'll never cease to be amazed that their activities have been covered up considering that you can find them with simple google searches.
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.
I mean, I’m as big a ML fans as you’ll find on Lemmy, but this is a slop machine to build some Altman hype.
A controllable, integrated version as a tool, with augmentations like VACE or SDXLs controlnet would be neat. Thats also great because it’s not so easy for 1 click zero effort automated spam, which is by far Sora's largest market as is.
…And guess what. We have that, it’s neat already, it’s open weights, it's improving, and it’s not so controversial/abused because there’s an actual tiny barrier of entry to using it, like Davinci Resolve vs instagram filters.
The less barriers to entry the better for something like this. Imagine all the people who have always wanted to make movies/tv shows but haven't had the ability to who could use these tools to make pilots/trailer to sell to studios, or even create full series/movies to self-publish.
Trying to put barriers and "controls" in front of it purely because you don't like that it can be used to make "slop" is dumb.
Free and open source CGI software can be run on older computers.
And take years to learn how to use well, compared to literally seconds of using an AI video generation tool. Then there's the actual rendering and iteration, which can now be seconds versus hours/days.
Lazy people who want to feel special will generate AI slop.
People who want to make stuff will be able to make amazing stuff with ease with AI.
You AI haters are all so closed minded, only capable of thinking of the lowest common denominator. Who cares if people make AI "slop" when there will also be visionaries making mind blowing stuff with AI?
Heaven fucking forbid that a person dedicates themself to learning a perfecting a craft. Meanwhile, you sloppers are out here thinking you're gonna take over the entertainment industry with your, "Yo Sora, make me a movie that's like Pulp Fiction crossed with Fight Club with supernatural elements."
Who cares if people make AI “slop” when there will also be visionaries making mind blowing stuff with AI?
Because that's all that it's good for. Every year it's, "Oh this is going to be so much better in 6 months, bro. It'll be able to generate full movies by then, for sure, bro." And every year it does get better, but it's still complete and utter garbage. It's still slop.
And even if it's not slop, LLM tech is basically just a repackaged soulless slurry of existing media. Unless there is a fundamental breakthrough in AI tech, it will always be that. LLMs just work that way. It is a limitation of the technology.
If you can't see that, then you truly don't understand what this tech is.
Heaven fucking forbid that a person dedicates themself to learning a perfecting a craft.
So you think that things should always be difficult and extremely time consuming, taking years to learn, even though new tech comes out that means it doesn't have to be, just because.......why exactly?
The same people that dedicate themselves to learning and perfecting a craft can also use these tools and will be able to do amazing things with them - or they can continue not using them if they want.
Meanwhile, you sloppers are out here thinking you’re gonna take over the entertainment industry with your, “Yo Sora, make me a movie that’s like Pulp Fiction crossed with Fight Club with supernatural elements.”
Ok so again, narrow minded and short sighted. What people can do with this is do their usual movie making process - storyboarding, script writing, etc - but can then literally "film" the scene and chop and change it, iterating and fixing almost instantly. It doesn't just spit out an entire movie - at least yet! You can give it exact words to say, camera angles, filters, etc - it basically allows the would-be director to shoot scenes in real time at any time they want, from any location, regardless of the weather/time/location/etc.
Because that’s all that it’s good for. Every year it’s, “Oh this is going to be so much better in 6 months, bro. It’ll be able to generate full movies by then, for sure, bro.” And every year it does get better, but it’s still complete and utter garbage. It’s still slop.
Dude, the technology has been around for only a few years lol. In that time it has absolutely gotten so much better - Google's video generation is a mind blowing upgrade for example.
LLM tech is basically just a repackaged soulless slurry of existing media.
You don't understand how it works if this is what you think.
If you can’t see that, then you truly don’t understand what this tech is.
That look incredible though. That's the point - now people can make incredible stylized or realistic videos with nothing more than a few words and a few seconds wait.
You're like someone complaining about a technology like raytracing because all you saw was some devs use it to do a few shadows and cut their framerate in half. You can't see the big picture. You can't see that with every medium there is "slop" - there are terrible writers writing books, it's not just all new york times best sellers. There is terrible music, not just grammy winners. AI video generation will have tonnes and tonnes of crap, but it will also have masterpieces.
Filler words makes a piece feel more human. Ironically cutting out human tics in favour of a more sterlised presentation yet criticising AI, how ironic.
It's a bit excessive for my taste as well. Traditionally if you felt the need to cut this much just to make the sentence come out the way you want, you'd just do another take instead of making this many cuts in post. Over-cutting of spacing also makes the pacing a bit too "word-vomit" rather than "polished" imo.
I imagine this is more normalized in stereotypically "zoomer" presentation of video content, but it might also just be this guy (or their editor's) style.
I don't think there is a good reason. It's an interesting ability for a model. I can see the appeal why people are interested in much the same way I can understand why people climb mountains. Wouldn't wanna do it myself but I can see why you like it kind of way. For me this falls into the category of "the general public doesn't need to have access to this." I get mad when I hear people talk about it in terms of what is and isn't allowed in it. "And then I tried to put a light saber in it and that was okay but I couldn't make me into Super Mario." You just created enough heat in a server farm that will kill a polar bear, that needs to be cooled with future drinking water we need to desalinate, and you have huffed some more air in the hyped up bubble economy surrounding so-called AI. All so you can see where the model draws the copyright line? And if you think that I was modest in my hyperbole, you'll probably agree with me when I say in a similar spirit that we as a species deserve to eradicate ourselves off this planet.
The so-called AI peddlers have the same problem as news peddlers online. It's fucking hard to turn users into paying subscribers. And they need to turn a profit at some point. It's the merciless mechanics of capitalism that dumps all these models on an unprepared general public at dumping prices. A drive to increase shareholder value above any other consideration. It's time to change that.
And I'm not opposed to this model existing. Research it, fine tune it, offer it for the actual cost you're running in the background plus a bit of a profit margin. And when it costs $207.40 per month to make these brief videos, I'd be okay with that. It would price out enough users not to undo any of the insufficient climate saving measures we as a species have already implemented.
I didn't know that! Thank you for that tidbit. Also wanna take the time to say I feel I derived more satisfaction learning of the source than I lost from the bummer.
High demand will drive efficiency gains in subsequent generations of technology. It'll be like how processors today use a tiny fraction of the power that processors a decade ago used for the same amount of work. Better instruction sets, architectures and smaller lithography has driven efficient and competitive computing. Similar will happen for AI processors
This is a bit irrelevant but we can't use sea water for cooling instead. And if we're already heating sea water can't we just heat it up more in the end and create a combined desalination server farm.
I think there biggest problem with sea water is dirt, not just the salt. So it's easier to waste drinking water on cooling the chips. The idea of a combination server farm and desalination plant is probably possible. Desalination is expensive though. I remember reading about Singapore's efforts. So this would have to be a big investment with profits pushed far back into a sustainable future. So if you're on the board and have this fiduciary responsibility to increase shareholder value you'll probably throw your hands up and give up at that point. Without governments making wasting drinking water on server cooling expensive, this plan will never even make it to the c-suite.
I have never once asked why something should exist. It’s the human will to make new cool things, and in 5y this model will train on your refrigerator, so you aren’t stopping it. These videos complain about the problems of exponentially increasing technology rather than look towards solutions, like anti capitalist organizing. Like, ok, this destroys copyright and IP: guess what copyright and IP is DUMB CAPITALIST NONSENSE. Let’s overthrow it. These people are complaining about companies selling access to these models under cost: that’s because this can never make a profit! If you don’t need labor, cost goes to 0. This will spur unemployment and harm, which will spur worker participation and class warfare.
And the environmental cost is still lower than meat.
To me all the complaining is the sweet voice of class consciousness.
And the environmental cost is still lower than meat.
Meat, whether you think it's moral or ethical or not, serves a need. People need to eat. People don't need AI slop.
It's kind of like saying, "Well yeah I leave this 50kw diesel generator running 24/7. It's way less environmentally damaging than meat. No, I'm not using the power it generates for any real purpose, but who cares, it's environmentally friendly!"
I don’t think meat is unethical, nor do I think AI is unethical. Both serve a purpose (slop doesn’t serve a purpose but slop exists because we are doing ai research and expansion which very much serves a long term purpose). I’m just trying to put AI water and power use into perspective.
And the environmental cost is still lower than meat.
It's not meat.
It's cars and planes. We know this because we observed a drastic drop in air pollution in both 2008 (following the financial crash) and March 2020 that can be attributed to basically the entire planet no longer commuting and traveling.
That said, LLM's water and carbon footprints are likely going to be far more devastating than meat consumption, not that it'll matter. Everyone is still going to vote Democrat and Republican and things will steadily continue to get worse.
Literally mention meat and the internet goes berserk. Does anyone have any commentary on the remainder of my post?
We still couldn’t reverse climate change with 2020 or 2008 numbers… We are FUCKED. Best not to think too hard about it because thanos could barely solve climate change.
I disagree that LLMs carbon footprint will be more than meat. I think it’ll remain thousands of times less than meat basically forever in fact. That’s basically claiming that GPU servers will outnumber cows and chickens in the future. But whatever.
It's cars and planes. We know this because we observed a drastic drop in air pollution in both 2008 (following the financial crash) and March 2020 that can be attributed to basically the entire planet no longer commuting and traveling.
It's both, and a handful of other industries. The tiny blip of dropped emissions during covid did absolutely fucking nothing to help air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. It's just feel-good bullshit the media spread around. Travel is a significant portion of ghg emissions, very comparable in impact to meat production.
It's remarkable that demradlibs used to be all "anti-war" during the Bush years but gradually moved so far to the neo-interventionist right wing through Obama that you're cold war level gung ho for NATO and for spreading Russophobia.
In reality there's absolutely nothing out of the ordinary about west aligned nations to have dysfunctional elections or open dictatorships and no amount of screeching about "western values" and corny reddit slogans like PutlerPutlerPutler changes that. Which is US/EU propaganda to the point of censoring "enemy" media but weirdly doesn't bother you amirite.
Firstly, I'm not American. I live in Europe. So fail one. Secondly, I'm a Socialist, so fail two. Fuck liberalism, and screw America, but ultimately, that doesn't mean you have to swallow everything the enemies of American push. Oh, and I'm on Lemmy because I haven't touched Reddit in a while. You're the weirdest leftie that is still actively on an enshittified right-wing hell hole and the projection is real crazy. You cannot demand critical analysis from Americans, and fail in it yourself.
Oh, btw, Russia is capitalist, with many, many billionaires. The proletariat are not reaping the benefits of their exploitation.
I live in a world where you can be anti-captalist and not shilling for Russia.
Let's go back to basics though, if you have a source saying something, you have to ask who said it, and whether they have a motive. Russia Today is the Russian state broadcaster. It's a really dreadful source to use to understand a war Russia are currently in. I'd suggest you'd find a less biased source, but not too many of them are pushing Russian propaganda.
I'm really curious. How do you run polling stations, where you have to advertise to the public where they are, and to come there, and protect yourself from drone and missile strikes? I really want to understand how you can run elections where you're being invaded. Can you help me out here? Any examples?
I get really annoyed with Libtards throwing around terms like "tankies" but you're really kind of walking the ball into your own net (football reference) when you're shilling this hard for Russia.
Examples of countries that have had territory invaded that run elections? I asked for examples because I'd love to see real world examples and not fictional examples from inside someone's head...
If like me, you were wondering how this changed anything since they've been doing this for years, then you will find this part of the article to be relevant:
FTA: Martial law and a general mobilization were first declared in Ukraine in February 2022 and have since been extended numerous times.
The China National Space Administration and China Atomic Energy Authority have jointly released new findings on far-side lunar samples brought back by the Chang'e 6 mission, revealing that the moon's far-side mantle is colder than the near side.This
I made a post on Showerthoughts saying if you are a guy and you are a virgin at 22 years old, you are fucked because most women in their 20s have sexual experience, so if you are a 22-year-old guy, a woman who’s 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, or 30 wouldn’t want to date you because they have sexual experience already.
However, I could be wrong, so do some women with sexual experience date a virgin? If so, why?
Being a virgin doesn’t matter to the vast majority of people. If a woman finds a person attractive, they’re not gonna care if they’re a virgin. If they do, they’re probably pretty judgmental and not worth the time. I’m now 28, I don’t think I’ve heard anyone mention virginity for at least 6 or 7 years.
L'evento dei Black Carpet Awards ci fa porre una domanda spinosa: celebrare la diversità in un evento a parte è un atto di inclusione o di separazione?
Ecco i punti chiave:
1. Il Paradosso della visibilità: da un lato, eventi dedicati sono fondamentali per dare luce e voce a chi, nel mainstream, fatica a emergere. Creano comunità e modelli di riferimento potenti.
2. Il Rischio della ghettizzazione: dall'altro, un evento "collaterale" rischia di confinare la diversità in una nicchia, implicitamente suggerendo che non sia ancora pronta per il palco principale dell'industria.
3. La meta finale: il vero traguardo non è avere palchi paralleli, ma un cambiamento strutturale. Camera Moda e le istituzioni devono integrare la diversità nel cuore degli eventi ufficiali, rendendola la norma e non l'eccezione.
In sintesi: I Black Carpet Awards sono un sintomo necessario di un'industria in transizione, ma ci ricordano che il viaggio verso l'inclusione è completo solo quando la diversità sarà il palcoscenico stesso.
Ok, so why do they utilize these tools and the left cries about it.
I've said this for a while. The hate of AI on lemmy was encouraged by Astro turfing methods. This way leftist who usually are at the cutting edge of things instead knee cap themselves on a technology that acts as a force multiplayer. They will use this and advance. We will bitch and moan. The end result will be that they gain more and we don't. So you can be upset and you can cry and hate this or me for pointing this out. That will never change the outcome. Your feelings don't matter. What matters is outcomes right now. It matters what will get people to vote when it's time. if you concede tools that help you reach eyes and ears of voters, be ready for consequences.
We gain by generating counter-slop? Wtf are you on about.
Anybody with a half a braincell can see the detrimental impact AI is having on social media & internet content generally. It's not astro turfing, it's just constantly dealing with generated nonsense that's causing the hate.
People who are more susceptible to manipulation, which unfortunately seems to be right-leaning folks, seem to fall victim into believing & spreading it the most. They rarely do any form of fact checking.
Everybody is susceptible to manipulation. Are you crazy. Who do you think you are. It's basic shit here. You need to push a singular message through repetition and people adopt it every time. The left are so ignorant to basics which is why everybody and their grandma knows about cat litter boxes rather than the arguments against it. This era of leftist are absolutely outclassed by a mile.
Yeah, this person's right! We should start making inflammatory AI videos, too! Dump that whole tanker ship in the fire, fuck it!
No. I am sorry, but no. The hate on Lemmy is not against AI as a technology, it is against how it is being used, how it is being peddled, how it is being shoved down everyone's throats, and how much damage it's doing to our environment (edit: and society, and art, and culture, and politics, and economy, and wellness, and overall desire to maintain a steady heartbeat!)
And, to your point about feelings not mattering, from what I've seen, most people (including myself) are exhausted! We are surrounded by people losing their shit left and right, bigotry, racism, hate in general are mainstream, Fascism is out, about, and in power, and it looks like we're all forgetting that the planet is literally burning up again.
We are tired. Most of us have already been through enough shit as it is, we would want nothing more than to see the end of this string of "once in a lifetime" disasters, yet we understand that the easy way out means we'll end up becoming exactly what's ruining our lives right now. This isn't just about winning, HOW we win is equally important, if not more so. Because that will set the tone for what would follow.
Oh, I said nothing about honour! There's being nice, and there's being fair. I'm more for being fair than being nice, and as I see it, it's fair to hit back. The difference is in the nuance of how I hit back. Why eliminate when immobilise would suffice, y'know?
Not to mention that the bullshit in AI videos made by the left would absolutely get called out in every propaganda outfit on the right. It would just give them more ammo (without the usual lies).
But even more important, it will grant legitimacy to everyone who responds to damning video evidence by claiming it was AI. We don't need to make shit up, the reality is already horrifying. All AI will do is make it harder for people to believe their own eyes.
It's absolutely exhausting knowing how much potential humans have to do great things, but having to watch humanity choose to destroy themselves instead.
In all ways imaginable, especially emotional. I've seen some sad shit in my life, but this overall bend toward mindless self-annihilation our species seems to have is by far the saddest...
I think it’s pretty obvious why people would be upset about a propaganda machine being used by a government to demonize its political enemies and voting base? The Iraq War started over less false pretenses, and look how that rolled out. The damage produced by this lying machine will be unimaginable.
Cool, it's super important to be aware how getting punched will affect you while getting punched. Just don't punch back because that isn't what we're about. In the end we win somehow. Maybe they'll break their first on our head I dunno.
Depends if you're in their labor camp or not. There's a time and place for everything. Why be concerned about the environment if creates an environment where the people who will outpace you will destroy it anyways. You're not saving anything by letting them seize power
They utilize these tools because they have no morals. They are willing to lie and cheat their way into whatever they want.
The left does not have that advantage. We don't want to lie, we don't want to cheat, we want the liars and cheaters to be removed from power. Lying harder isn't going to work for us because unlike the right, we will call out our own for it.
Right which is my point. But why does the left fall on their own sword. They have all the ability. If we truly believe the left have more people, that Gerry mandering is needed because most people lean left. Then it should be a no brainer than the left needs to activate a fire under each other to overwhelm spaces. But we do the opposite. We retreat. The only conclusions I can think of when I read between the lines is that we were targeted by right wing astro turfing as much as the right was. Or we're just not smart people as a whole and it's actually maybe a good thing we're being backed into our corners
I think part of the issue is that people on the left also tend to see nuances, which means more things to disagree over. Left falls out, right falls in line and all.
Nah, it wasn't astroturfed. Current gen AI is little more than automated theft ATM. A lot of artists had their work stolen with no compensation. And now have an even tougher time ahead, competing with the thieves than they already had before. A lot of the angst and hate has been knee-jerk and lacking nuance. Doing as much to alienate people from their cause as bring them to it. But it's real.
What's equally absurd however. Are those that naively think we could use AI against those already using it. They're building farms that consume more power than major cities. With more compute than even large groups of average individuals will ever be able to muster. It doesn't matter how much of a force multiplier it is. 10x return on a force of 10,000,000 is exponentially more return than a 500x increase on a force of 100.
Ai may just be a tool, but it's not going to turn the tide in favor of the left.
Yea of course, that's what all the headlines were shared kept trying us everyday multiple times a day. They told us they would take our jobs, they'd assault our women and children, they threatened our way of life. Familiar
Lemmy’s daily active user numbers are not big enough to be a worthwhile astroturfing target.
The real reason people shit on AI here is because it’s a platform with a bias toward people who are fairly tech savvy and or work in a technology field. Which is why every 3rd technology post here is a Linux circle jerk.
A lot of users here understand the technologies and are working in spaces where they’re being asking to “implement AI” by idiots who don’t understand the tech and aren’t trying to solve a user problem.
It 100% is perfect for astroturf. It's the perfect size for it. Large population need more money and effort to afford astroturf. Lemmy is the right amount then you let the Lemmy users generate more content for you.
We all saw this with Reddit. They always started with smaller city subs before moving to bigger ones. Always
I have seen this recently pretty often that people seem to believe Lemmy is an equal representation of the real world. It’s probably one of the more niche media platforms, though. I come here because I enjoy every third Linux post. I also know that I have to go out of my way to find someone who has even heard of Steam, let alone a Steam Deck in the real world.
Ya, I don't really get the hate either. It's just a fun new way to make memes. I feel like most are blowing things out of proportion because the media is telling them to.
As much as I hate to use this term because of the most prominent person associated with it:
This literally is an infowar, this is an actual psyop.
Targetted and fairly convincing mis and disinformation deployed at exactly the moment it would generate the most chaos and distrust in your own ability to evaluate reality?
If they can take something like "woke" and use it to mean something bad, we can take infowars and use it for something good (and correct/accurate). Make that usage of the word the default when people hear it, not the other thing.
Always have. Most of them have never met the people they've been taught to hate. Or believe for some reason that the few they know are some sort of exception. The token "good ones".
Right they hate these straw people. I mean, I;m not going to say my own cognitive projection of "conservative" is 100% accurate, but at least my nightmare scenarios are about actual bad things happening, and not like conservative nightmares of genetically inferior people getting to enjoy the gifts of civilization.
The difference between us and them is that we don't want to do things to hurt them. Far from it. We honestly want to do things to help them. When we do hate them, it's not for who they are, but who they choose to be. And that makes all the difference.
The sooner you realize that the call is coming from inside the house, the better. We're dealing with a revived KKK and a government that openly supports them. These people are very capable of running their own psyops.
I feel like AI generated videos of very active things like protests would be easy to debunk. Just look at the people in the background and point out the people disappearing after moving behind another person, or look for changing faces.
In the article they mention videos with literal AI watermarks being passed around as if they were real. The targets want to believe they are true and will ignore anyone debunking them.
If right wing people were smart they wouldn't be right wing. Of course they're going to believe and share AI slop video. They're emotional driven fools.
Even if the images were real, I see a woman using her first amendment right to speech and assembly being assaulted by someone who has sworn to uphold the constitution.
People have always been easy to manipulate. Especially in the type of social and ideological isolation the internet age has brought about. That’s why most city people are less right wing. Hard to villainize groups of people when you interact with them daily. Also hard to isolate into ideological containers when you interact with varied points of view contrary to your bubble.
The smartest move I ever made was dropping all mainstream social media. I don't get any of this BS. Meta, Twitter, and Reddit are a plague on society and I'll have no part in it.
What would prevent Lemmy from becoming another Reddit if it gains the same user count? Not promoting specific users only because they have a lot of Karma?
Nothing prevents it totally. It could 100% be just as bad as Facebook. But only those servers owned by those propaganda pushers. It is harder to take over the whole and push your agenda to all users, when they can simply block your instance and let you stew in your hate.
Best example for that: the tankies, which are mostly ignored or ridiculed outside their own safe spaces.
And while I do think there will always be nationalistic fuckwards, I think the big number now and in the past are only possible due to massive propaganda. If that is not possible, people steer more to "normal" stuff. Because most people are not majorally negatively affected by the status quo.
Yeah, after writing it I felt it was wrong. What I meant is: most people are not hurt by what is being pushed in the mass media as source of the problem. If that outside factor goes away, they will focus more on what is happening around them. That the status quo in our current world is hurting a lot of people is absolutely correct, sadly.
What would prevent Lemmy from becoming another Reddit
You'd need to convince every one hosting a Lemmy instance (and all possible future ones) to sell their platform for money or blackmail them into submission...
With Reddit, they only needed to convince Spez which is like convincing an alcoholic to have a free shot of his fav poison
If Lemmy, or any other fediverse social network, ever got that big, you would be guaranteed there would be plenty of splinters of de-federation in the network. There would be small networks totally isolated from the mainstream cluster, and others that only federate parts of it. You could choose to hang out in some counter-cultural bubble, or choose a curated connection to the biggest networks, if you didn't want to engage in them fully. The trick would be finding "your people," but the tech works.
Fair point. I was kinda confused when I first tried to join Lemmy and went for lemmy.world. Hopefully if shit hits the fan people will be less reluctant to switch over to other instances
reddit and all commercial social media make more money when they have more users, so they attract a lot of users with ragebait and clickbait.
we don't profit if we have more users, so we don't have an incentive to send clickbait and ragebait, and the absence of these toxins alone will probably drive up the quality a bit.
Agreed on the greed aspect, I'm wondering how would we defend against bots and incindiary propaganda differently from eg Reddit. My guess is that Lemmy is susceptible to that just the same
What's wild about this is that people predicted AI would be used for nefarious purposes, but generally in the form of like, showing your opponents doing crimes. But here it's being used to show their own side doing crimes while the other side is only made to look "cringy" or more like a stereotype.
It really speaks to the utter depravity of the US right that, given a machine that can generate any video of anything they could imagine, this is what they do. These people are utterly incompatible with any kind of free or even functional society, and I really don't know what could ever be done fix them or their culture.
If they instead made convincing AI generated videos of some imaginary leftists going first and starting a revolution, then it might not have the intended effect.
Anyone acting out violently should be culled from society. Not partisan issue. I definitely lean like way left and there is much to be done without murder. Work ‘em into a frenzy. Let them eat their own. Let them have their violence upon themselves. See, I didn’t do a goddamn thing. These fuckers are gonna off themselves quicker than Howard Dean can say woooo!
Some dumbass sumbitch eating this up. Unfortunately it’s like 50x that. So many dumb motherfuckers, not enough natural disasters to help the rest of us along.
The phrase “I voted for this” has become a common thing for far-right supporters of Trump to say when something particularly brutal has happened to their political opponents.
I'll tell you what's at the bottom of it, If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you. -- Lyndon B. Johnson, attributed by Bill Moyers
I've met racists who love this quote, they just think that "convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man" is equivalent to "convince a colored man he’s as good as a white man" here. They really do.
Also there are plenty of people who don't consider themselves racist, yet think their (American, British, whatever) color hierarchy exists outside of English-speaking countries and people there have to take it into account.
The kind that "is not racist", but if someone is racist, it's only the way that they are on top. They can't conceive that a Vietnamese or a Chinese racist may have a racial hierarchy where they are near chimps. When facing evidence of such being possible, they lose their mind and behave, honestly, quite racist.
I remember as a kid growing up in a extended family just emerging from the worst kind of american poor. My fathers generation was the first to have decent living conditions but still faced hunger as children. They all could remember when they got electricity and running water. The older generation of aunts and uncles would often say things like 'We may be poor but at least were not N******s". That hasn't changed a lot in some circular family tree's.
Expect much more of this and soon enough it will be impossible to distinguish between Real and fake videos
We can fix a little with digitally.sigbed videos to at least show that a video came from a verified source but that still won't fix the issue with leaked videos. Basically, leaked videos and open mike videos / audio clips are over, we can't ever trust them anymore
With the way things spread on social media from user generated content it would be hard to get that done I'm sure. Like the video almost everyone saw of Charlie, the video was indeed real but the spread was so beyond control that ot broke almost every filter algorithm on social media. I can't imagine how much "suppression" talk would be mentioned if we had digitally sign the source even though it would be totally valid. [Viral > Truth]
I think the article really makes the point that it doesn't matter. The videos can LITERALLY have a watermark on them from the AI software, and people just dgaf. The battle is lost before it begins.
As with things like quotes and claims that could always be fake, it's back to the old journalistic practices of verifying sources with a second source. But that means being ignorant of things that were not being investigated by journalists, which creates a different filter bubble.
it’s back to the old journalistic practices of verifying sources with a second source.
that has as a necessary pre-requirement that people are actually interested enough in an objective truth that they're willing to pay some journalist to do the research.
is that really the case anymore? I can see it being useful in the 20th century when people were interested in new economic developments and stuff
This has to be what trump is seeing over on Truth Social that's got him thinking cities are burning from protests, or at least that could be what his advisors are showing
Fuuuuck, gaslighting the gaslighter in chief. This is how humanity ends. All bc reality has become trapped within an endless circle of AI generated gaslighting and fuckery thanks to these idiots.
Yet another reason they probably want to stir up violence. Not only does it tip us closer towards civil war, capturing public violence means more data to feed into AI and generate violent videos.
'No worries, we'll stop at our earliest convenience. Till then, please remain calm and stop struggling so much, it's off-putting for our other guests.'
I don't know. My entire life people have more or less told me the truth is stupid and worthless. Pretty sure were never were a truth society. It's just that now we have given up the pretense and pretext that it even exists and have decided bullshit is what really makes us happy.
I'm saying it again: We can't know what's true anymore. Whenever something happens more than a few miles away, chances are high that you know nobody who was involved there physically, so there's no reliable way of knowing what actually happened anymore.
I think we can only make reasonable choices about things that are close enough to ourselves; not about very far-away entities.
AI is coming along at the perfect times for these jackals, and as we got closer and closer, through deep fakes, etc., we all knew who would be the first side to abuse it for its political propaganda power. They even knew it, they could hardly wait for the tech to catch up to their nefarious requirements.
Yeah? Kinda the point. Like absolutely nothing was happening in Portland. Nothing at all. But trump sent troops anyway because Portland is such a hellhole. Now there’s protests, but they seem to be far more entertaining and mocking than anything else.
I'm convinced AI content generation was created with the sole intent of manufacturing outrage material for gullible idiots.
because the rate at which these technophobic illiterates have adopted AI, and expertly use it to generate bullshit, is too high to be otherwise plausible.
Yeah, no doubt. My mother got radicalised by Facebook over the years. It went from cute dog and cat things to "harmless" conspiracy theories (think bigfoot), culminating in fucking her with QAnon propaganda indoctrination. Last I checked up on her, there's machine generated rubbish all over her feed. She's beyond saving at this point. Suppose she was always primed for this kind of thing, being pro-homeopathy anti-vaccine person.
She doesn't question the machine generated content at all, and I saw that if someone points it out, which a scarce few have done, she just justifies it with "well it could be real, this kind of thing does happen."
At this point I don't think it matters if this technofascism was a knowing plan, or an unfortunate series of events that by themselves seemed justifiable to the people making the decisions, but it doesn't really matter. We're here now. They're not only trying, but succeeding in coercing governments and undermining democracy.
Many experts are forecasting the end of a key provision of election law — enabling Republicans to shore up their advantage in the House, according to a new report.
Ahead of the court’s Oct. 15 rehearing of Louisiana v. Callais — a case that has major implications for the VRA — two voting rights groups are sounding the alarm, warning that eliminating Section 2, a provision that prohibits racial gerrymandering when it dilutes minority voting power, would let Republicans redraw up to 19 House seats to favor the party and crush minority representation in Congress.
Bye bye free and fair elections by the midterms! And people called me crazy for predicting this.
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i did Primerica out of desperation back in the 90's and they made us sit through presentations and videos like this and i resented it.
watching something like it again 30 years later was enjoyable, but only because it was a pleasant trip through memory lane re-seeing the aesthetics and home decor that i realized were prevalent in upper middle class homes back then when i had to travel to do Primerica.
also: i've had to work at a couple of diners during high-school/college and tandmen cooking has been the status quo atleast since the 80's; it's only high end restaurants/diners who don't do this and it's wild to learn that people are still unaware of it.
New documents and court records obtained by EFF show that Texas deputies queried Flock Safety's surveillance data in an abortion investigation, contradicting the narrative promoted by the company and the Johnson County Sheriff that she was “being sea…
That sheriff has since been arrested and indicted on felony counts in an unrelated sexual harassment and whistleblower retaliation case. He has also been charged with aggravated perjury for allegedly lying to a grand jury. EFF filed public records requests with Johnson County to obtain a more definitive account of events.
At least his side of the story has a happy ending.
The rest of the story is bonkers, though. The headline could not possibly do it justice. This is one you need to sit down and read with a cup of tea.
There are a range of medical procedures and medicines that label can be applied to. Is “abortion” still homicide when it is used to prevent illness, death, and suffering? How about when medicine is used to remove a non-viable pregnancy as mentioned in the article?
Imagine if a person broke into your home and you kicked them out, then they died of pneumonia. Their family sues you for killing them. But you didn't kill them, you just kicked them out.
The person at fault is the person who committed the trespass.
She wouldn't have to abort if the dick-haver kept it in his pants, would she?
We need an anti-flock campaign. A city government didn't give them permission to put their cameras up and when they did it anyway, the city covered them in garbage bags before they could get removed.
Like pleading with Hector not to fight Achilles, Cassandra has been warning about ALPRs for over a decade now, possibly two, that they were too intimate a search to allow law enforcement to use them without narrowly-defined warrants.
As with the Greek wooden horse Cassandra shouted was going to burn Troy to the ground, only too late we are seeing how such power can be used.
A Resonant‑Shell Cosmology: A Reflective–Dynamic Boundary as an Alternative to ΛCDM. resonant‑shell” cosmology in which the observable universe occupies a closed Friedmann–Robertson–Walker (FRW) region bounded by a thin, timelike, nearly reflective s…
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They have gotten money from Bill Gates foundation. Still its a pop sci YouTube and does a good job at it. Some say its spreading misinformation or that context is missing. I don't really see malicious intentions. Expecting more of a pop sci publication is kind of absurd; take a real class and study if you want more.
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While not wrong, this is now quite a bit dated. Kurzgesagt acknowledged being called out for it and addressed it via various channels. One of them here:
I feel like propping up the industry primarily responsible for one of the largest (if not the largest) crises in human history is an appropriate place to draw a line.
They've continually called for switching to renewables though, and put out a bunch of videos on how damaging climate change is and will continue to be...
It's definitely not only that. I and, from what I've seen discussed here and elsewhere online, many other people have stopped watching the channel because of many valid reasons completely unrelated to AI. I haven't watched a single one of their videos for years, something changed in their content and I just lost interest. Then there have been several controversial events throughout the years, both objective bad stuff and subjective things that made many loose interest and faith in their integrity. They definitely became one of the many channels that lost it's way because of how big it got. The animations became too "perfect" in a weird way, they lost their personality and they also got scared of having real opinions so they started doing this "all sides" shit and that's when I tapped out. I've tried to watch new videos from them about once every 6 months or so, but I can't even make it past a minute without completely loosing interest.
I mean, I didn’t watch this video because I lost interest when the channel started getting really dark around 2020. I just needed a laugh during the pandemic. I didn’t need 4 videos in a row about the end of the world, then a few about the end of the universe, followed by a future civil war. It was too much.
In that it's mostly a merch ad hidden behind a clickbait title.
So I guess it's a good test for that sort of "just read the headline" response.
It's been a rough few days and I think I may be coming around. What hope is there to parse AI misinformation if people can't parse a Reddit-like link aggregator?
I may be done with this place at this point. It's just all bad. If not the whole Internet, certainly the whole of social media.
Completely agree, their channel has changed a lot and seems to be producing videos on a conveyor belt now, while before they used to do one video or maximum two a month. Now it seems they produce a video a week, and interesting topics are more hard to come by.
When they said that they're "almost 70 full time people and a lot of freelancers on top" I almost did a spit take. I know there are big channels and operations on YT, but this seems such an unreasonable amount of employees for this type of channel and audience. No wonder it feels oversaturated and overdone, they probably feel the need to put more and more videos to keep their huge team and expences afloat.
Just find a sustainable pace and team size, don't go the corporate way of growth over all.
This whole video felt like an advertisement to me. I’d already seen it twice, was it necessary to crosspost it again? You could at least have waited a couple of weeks before reposting the same content.
Their quality going down is probably what’s killing their channel. Every video is a merch ad, and the occasional shilling for the fossil fuel industry probably doesn’t help any.
These things are to be expected when you get bought by private equity, but let’s not be dishonest and say it’s all AI slop that’s killing them.
They are owned by private equity? It's pretty common these days for the more popular YT channels. Veritasium, Astrum, Fireship, fern., and Hoog are some other examples. Basically, if it's a popular YT channel, it's either owned by PE, in negotiations to be acquired by PE, or pursued by a PE firm in the hopes that they can acquire it. Private equity is accelerating their acquisitions, actually, and they want to control everything that captures the attention of viewers.
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Anyone down voting this should be ashamed of themselves.
Like deeply and personally ashamed.
The type of shame that follows them for the rest their lives, because that's how scummy you'd have to be in order downvote someone shining a light on how private equity is buying out major YouTube channels.
Something that I was entirely unaware of, and appreciate your comment regarding.
I get it. They like the channel, and don't want to think that a channel they love could do something they don't love. Or maybe some of them don't see it as a bad thing in the first place.
Me, I'm the opposite. I want to know who owns the media I consume, because I want to know who might be influencing the things I see. It's always better to have the whole truth, even if that truth hurts. It doesn't mean you can't enjoy the channel still, it just means you're better prepared to understand the context of anything that that channel might say. Even cold hard facts with empirical evidence can be propaganda, depending on how it's presented.
I never made myself out to be virtuous, nor do I care about what you think of me. I'm an asshole, and that's fine because I love me exactly how I am and don't need random strangers on the internet for validation. and I certainly don't care about what you think of them making propaganda videos. I wouldn't even still be in this thread if you guys weren't still throwing a tantrum about somebody calling out your precious favorite YouTube channel for their less-than-stellar quality and tendency to pander to billionaires.
I posted my opinion, you got butthurt over it. that's as far as this conversation is ever going to go, because I don't care about you enough to bother arguing it extensively. now why don't you take your sci-fi antisemitic trope of a username and get out of my mentions.
Bringing this general issue up in a thread about Kurzgesagt, without also providing evidence that Kurzgesagt specifically is actually part of that issue, is at best irrelevant and at worst misleading though
I didn't single out any particular YouTube channel for individual scorn. My comment was in reference to that very well sourced video about private equity buying up / investing many YouTube channels, of which they provided sources for in the description of the video.
Look, I'm sorry you got invested in Youtube channels and now feel betrayed, but that's something everyone else already understood: don't blindly trust anyone or any organisation, they can be bought, and will when it's advantageous to do so.
In the meantime, don't shit on people's work without a good reason, or you're doing the work for those who mean to control you.
It's not a matter of betrayal, it was a video revealing another area of influence in society that is now controlled behind the scenes by private equity.
Whose work was I shitting on? I was shaming people who were down voting that very well sourced and informative video, that documented private equity's quiet takeover of major YouTube channels.
Maybe you should review the comment thread and see if you meant to respond to someone else, because that's the most charitable explanation I can come up with for your responses to me.
I mean, I would probably sell the channel myself. That's a lifechanging amount of money. I would buy some land deep in the backcountry, build a little walled village, and invite my family and friends to come live there. Grow our own food, set up some solar panels and wind turbines, buy up plenty of guns and ammo, and see if we couldn't hunker down and live out the ever more likely downfall of the American economy in relative peace.
So basically you would turn yourself in a mini-me version of Zuckenberg, Musk and Bezos. Given this consideration I would reassess my life priorities if I were you
the priority would be the lives of my friends and family. that is a priority that will not change as long as I draw breath, no matter what anyone thinks.
Well, if the societal structure falls there won't be anything left to provide for your friends and family and you'll be left to eat each other in your compound as will the billionaires using their fortunes to build survival bunkers. If that's the way you wanna go, with the leg of your mother as dinner, be my guest. If you, on the other hand, want to have a positive impact on the whole process helping stop this social decline there are much better ways to use your hypothetical money. It's up to you to decide, greed over cooperation or the other way around?
my family and I grow most of our food, and we're part of the local community garden where the small town we live in also grows food that is shared with everyone.
so out of the two of us, I'm pretty sure it'll be you who is starving.
And prayvtell, where do you find your seedlings and your fertilizer? And the tools to be used to work the fields? That's the problem of people like you, you can't see how intertwined it is our life with the rest of the world and you don't know how much it sucks to be living at a subsistence level. But go off with your fantasy, it does cost anything to dream.
Also, I forgot to ask how would you fare in a draught, a hailstorm or a long winter. But these are impossible conditions in your dreamworld I reckon
And prayvtell, where do you find your seedlings and your fertilizer?
well we use the stuff we grow for seeds, we don't buy into the capitalist propaganda that you can't replant things because It'S iLlEgAl. and compost is free and easy to make. also, I'm planning on getting chickens for fertilizer as well, once I build the infrastructure for them. they are great for dealing with insect pests too!
And the tools to be used to work the fields?
my next-door neighbor is a 40-year old dude that took up blacksmithing after he watched one too many YT videos. he made me a knife for last christmas out of a rusty steel cable.
Also, I forgot to ask how would you fare in a draught, a hailstorm or a long winter
I live in the midwest, we deal with those all the time.
dreamworld
a better world is possible, and it's not a dream. get up off your ass and make it with your friends. don't let legality or naysayers tell you something is impossible, that's capitalist propaganda meant to keep you down.
Yes of course, a utopia is waiting for those who are able to grow a crop using a field inside of an apartment.
Dude, you're projecting a reality which could be applied to a very narrow set of people in modern society and in the western world. Imagining a better future is possible and good, but we need to keep it aligned with the actual realities present at this time. Being a bad crop away from death and surviving in a close anarchist encampment can work in a movie like 38 years later, not in real life
it worked for humanity for thousands of years, you pessimistic doomer. you're going to be a wage slave forever, and die unhappy, because you're obviously too afraid to even consider that life could be at all different to the way it is now. you can't even imagine that solidarity and building mutual aid networks could improve your life. what a sad, depressing, incapable, pitiable thing you are. you've got Stockholm syndrome for the system that's going to murder you.
You speak of solidarity after having decided that a possible life changing sum of money would be used to benefit you and the people you decide are worthy of your benevolence. Let me tell you brother, you need to have a look into a vocabulary as soon as possible. And to what the tech overlords are doing with their money. You'll find to be more similar than you think to Bezos and Zuckerberg
Also,he conditions described in your posts are those we had to endure during the middle ages, when citie and villages were tiny nation states and in constant war with eachother to scrap the poor resources we had available at that time, when serfdom was a common occurrence and when people were lucky to live beyond 40 years of age. Not my best pick if I have to choose a future for the whole of humanity.
Lastly you still haven't time how should people living in cities and urban areas live in this futur of yours. Does your crop grow on asphalt and concrete or do you see the problem your "vision" would bring to a huge prt
You talk about,s solidarity afeter having decided that a life-changing sum of money would be used to benefit you and those you deem worthy of yourself. Please pick up a vocabulary and look at the definition of the words you use. Also look at what Bezos and Zuckerberg are doing with their money and how they're building their compounds and you'll find to be closer to them than to an anarchist.
Humanity already went through the conditions you described in your post: it was during the middle ages, when cities were tiny nation states at constant war with eachother to scrap the poor and few resources available, serfdom was pretty common and people were lucky to live past 40 years of age. Not exactly my first choice when it comes to decide how I would like to live my future life.
Lastly I despise the system we live in as much, if not more, than you. But, differently from you, I'm not used to throwing away the baby with the bath water and I prefer to safeguard those advancements wich are truly helpful to humanity such as vaccines, democracy and human rights to cite some of them.
I almost forgot, you still haven't explained how should people living in cities and urban areas survive in this future of yours. Does your crop grow on asphalt and concrete or do you see the problem your "vision" would bring to a huge part of any population?
Keep on dreaming of a 38 years later were you're the protagonist, I'm sure it will help you and everyone else ;)
You talk about,s solidarity afeter having decided that a life-changing sum of money would be used to benefit you and those you deem worthy of yourself.
anarchism is all about mutual association. so yes, anarchist communities would be made of people who agreed to be a community together. this is basic.
Humanity already went through the conditions you described in your post: it was during the middle ages, when cities were tiny nation states at constant war with eachother to scrap the poor and few resources available, serfdom was pretty common and people were lucky to live past 40 years of age. Not exactly my first choice when it comes to decide how I would like to live my future life.
what a first-world mindset. many places in the world still operate like this, you're just so comfortable in your way of life you don't even think about them. I would encourage you to break out of that mindset, and show a little interest in the wide world around you.
I almost forgot, you still haven’t explained how should people living in cities and urban areas survive in this future of yours. Does your crop grow on asphalt and concrete or do you see the problem your “vision” would bring to a huge part of any population?
yes, crops do grow in the cities. many cities are turning to urban farming in order to feed people. singapore is a leader in this, because they have a very large population with very little area for anything, let alone farming food. with not only private citizen-grown farms, but also the worlds first commercial rooftop farming company. and it's not just rooftops, farms are appearing indoors, sometimes taking up entire floors in some skyscrapers. in cities in china, such as chongqing and shenzhen, urban farms and gardens are very common, and shoved into whatever small areas they can be put into. i've seen them in alleys, dead space between buildings, on rooftops, hanging from the ceiling, and even on top of concrete walls in the form of potted crops.
but it's not just asia, places like new york city are also mandating green spaces on top of some skyscrapers as well. those can take the form of parks, or farms, depending on the preferences of the building owners, as long as they are natural plants. furthermore, many residential apartment buildings in places like new york, chicago, and other american cities are seeing rooftop farms appear. in reality, almost everyone can grow some food for themselves, even if all you have is a single small window sill.
you seem to be very ignorant of the world. I would also encourage you to seek out information on green initiatives, and how people in cities are dealing with the problems they face in an urban landscape. there is no doubt that you are speaking on a topic you are woefully unprepared for.
Keep on dreaming of a 38 years later were you’re the protagonist, I’m sure it will help you and everyone else ;)
if the best you can do to argue against me is bring up a fictional zombie apocalypse in which everyone was infected and died, then perhaps it is time to admit you already lost the argument. we're talking about reality here and what is happening right now all across the world, not your fantasy horror worlds.
anarchism is all about mutual association. so yes, anarchist communities would be made of people who agreed to be a community together. this is basic.
Being considered worthy of living in a space you so kindly have cut out of the external world is not association if you still haven't realised that.
what a first-world mindset. many places in the world still operate like this, you’re just so comfortable in your way of life you don’t even think about them. I would encourage you to break out of that mindset, and show a little interest in the wide world around you.
And still I wouldn't want to live like that. Our goal as a specie should be to elevate those living in hellish scenario like the one I described and that you so eagerly wish for all of us. Maybe this hasn't crossed your mind since you must be very young and fairly able bodied, but not everyone is capable of living in conditions where safe drinking water is unavailable and the best health care is relying on the phase of the moon to ingest the medicine cooked up by a wannabe shaman. It's not about being comfortable, it's about making everything better for everybody, for Christ' sake. You want to see millions of people die while you gloat about your helm and your ditch sorrounding it? Go for it, but at least don't call it "solidarity"; call it for what it is: egoism and main character syndrome.
yes, crops do grow in the cities. many cities are turning to urban farming in order to feed people. singapore is a leader in this, because they have a very large population with very little area for anything, let alone farming food. with not only private citizen-grown farms, but also the worlds first commercial rooftop farming company. and it’s not just rooftops, farms are appearing indoors, sometimes taking up entire floors in some skyscrapers. in cities in china, such as chongqing and shenzhen, urban farms and gardens are very common, and shoved into whatever small areas they can be put into. i’ve seen them in alleys, dead space between buildings, on rooftops, hanging from the ceiling, and even on top of concrete walls in the form of potted crops.
but it’s not just asia, places like new york city are also mandating green spaces on top of some skyscrapers as well. those can take the form of parks, or farms, depending on the preferences of the building owners, as long as they are natural plants. furthermore, many residential apartment buildings in places like new york, chicago, and other american cities are seeing rooftop farms appear. in reality, almost everyone can grow some food for themselves, even if all you have is a single small window sill.
you seem to be very ignorant of the world. I would also encourage you to seek out information on green initiatives, and how people in cities are dealing with the problems they face in an urban landscape. there is no doubt that you are speaking on a topic you are woefully unprepared for.
Good luck feeding a city of millions with the fruits of planted pottery. You're gonna need a lot of pottery. Jesus Christ, a proper lot of pottery.
if the best you can do to argue against me is bring up a fictional zombie apocalypse in which everyone was infected and died, then perhaps it is time to admit you already lost the argument. we’re talking about reality here and what is happening right now all across the world, not your fantasy horror worlds.
If the best you can do is responding to a snarky remark I left at the end of my comment thinking that it was the main point I was trying to make while imagining cities where millions of people live able to support themselves with only a couple of trees and tomato plants and completely misunderstanding the meaning of the anarchist mindset I'm afraid we're not having an argument at all, we are displaying the level of delusion you are willing to let yourself live in. Just like those asking for a civil war do not absolutely understand what they're asking for so do you with your call for an uncontrolled fall of the system.
Being considered worthy of living in a space you so kindly have cut out of the external world is not association if you still haven’t realised that.
that exactly is what mutual association is. I suggest you read the AFAQ, because you very clearly do not know anything about anarchism. the freedom of association requires the freedom to disassociate.
as for the rest of your comment, it takes a real special sort of person to look at examples I gave you of cities literally feeding thousands of people through urban farms and go "nah, I can't conceive of that being true, so it isn't". that's MAGA levels of denial. it doesn't matter your opinion or feelings on the matter. it's a real thing, it's happening now, and it's slowly being scaled upwards. snarky bullshit remarks aren't going to change that.
I will be blocking you now. you're not interested in accepting reality, and so our mutual association is no longer mutual, and I'm taking advantage my freedom to cut closed-minded useless people out of my life. live the rest of your sad little life as a slave to capitalism in whatever depressing, dystopian way seems best to you.
Keep on disassociating from someone who is trying to make you think about the result of your actions, that's exactly how grown up people act and that's gonna make associating so much wider when you'll find yourself alone in your fiery outrage. A perfect example of a pizza cutter kind of anarchist, all edge, no point.
You talk about agricultural projects which feed thousands in cities where MILLIONS of people live. You talk about cooperation but you don't consider those who are unable to cooperate due to age, health conditions or any ithe reason. You talk about changing the system but you offer nonviable alternative other than "break it all down and hope for the best". I'm sorry, I can't be bothered with auch juvenile ideas of revolution, they would only bring death and suffering for too many people to be considered viable. I hope you'll grow up sooner rather than later and realise that we can only hope to improve the situation when we will learn everything about the positives of the current system and how we can keep them while discarding everything else.
As for myself I'll be living in this hellish capitalist system as you will until it won't collapse on itself or until I'll die, it rest to be seen what happens first. But I'll be living in it with the clear objective of improving it without needing to kill hundreds of thousands of people during that process, thank you very much
if you wanna just have boards with rusty nails and maybe a baseball bat for defense when trump takes the mask completely off and his raving followers form pogroms to round up people who aren't loyal to him, then I will say something nice in your memory when the time comes.
oh, sorry, I misunderstood your question. Veritasium and Astrum are science channels, Fireship covers programming. fern. and Hoog do what I guess you could call deep dive videos on all sorts of topics. everything from how the North Korean king travels, to how that giant hotel aquarium broke several years ago. it's pretty random with them.
Astrum makes space stuff videos? I dunno, been a while.
Fireship makes videos about programming. Has series about "(Programming language/Framework) explained in 100 seconds", for example. I think people are complaining that the channel is slipping into AI dudebroery.
Hoog is a history/explainer type channel, I think.
Do you have actual evidence for Kurzgesagt being among PE-owned channels, or are you just extrapolating? Because the video you linked doesn't mention them, and a quick search didn't turn up anything about that.
if most of your money comes from billionaires and you admit to making propaganda videos for them, you're owned by private equity. it doesn't matter how much you or they argue about how that isn't technically true because it's not officially on paper.
Like it or not, words have meaning, and black and white thinking is comfortable, but doesn't help anyone. There is still a massive difference between the gates foundation having a 0.5% stake in Kurzgesagt and them being "owned" by PE, and pretending otherwise just means you're not actually interested in any kind of productive discussion.
When you sell your soul to the devil, it’s gone forever. And I never implied I was interested in “productive discussion”. I said what I said because I’ve seen what evidence there is and have made my own conclusions. I never said I was interested in debating.
No wonder veritasium has felt "off" for me for a good while as well. A few years ago I deliberately stopped watching that channel, seems there was a deeper reason behind my superficial reasons and gut feelings
They seem to use the "shotgun" future in Youtube for titles and Thumbnails. Having the a bunch of different titles and and thumbnails and eventually sticking with the combo that drives the most engagement.
Idk about fossil fuels specifically but they been directly being sponsored by big companies and in return making propoganda for them for a few years now.
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I watch that channel for years and i had no idea. I post his answer over the channels answer. Although that is 3 years old, i wonder what is now happening.
They accepted, and continue to accept a great amount of money from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. That foundation owns over $11 billion in investments in the fossil fuel industry, including coal-burning utility companies.
In return, there were quite a few videos that Kurzgesagt admits were funded directly by the Foundation, that exaggerate the positive influence corporations owned by the foundation have had. Videos which the CEO of Kurzgesagt has admitted they probably would not have made if the Foundation had not paid for them.
That’s really embarrassing that we as a community have chosen, of all possible creators, to deride Kurzgesagt for taking money from The Gates Foundation. It’s 0.05% of their holdings. ZERO POINT ZERO FIVE. Which, by the way, is down from 6% in the past after public concern — yes, a whopping 6%. Scourge of the earth, locked out of heaven: The Gates Foundation. Those computer nerds strike again. And we choose to punish a great content contributor for that. Shameful display of purity politics.
Yeah. It seems like a ridiculous accusation to make. Bro couldn't even answer the question about example of shilling so they had to pivot into the crime of taking money from a foundation to produce high quality educational content.
They accepted, and continue to accept a great amount of money from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. That foundation owns over $11 billion in investments in the fossil fuel industry, including coal-burning utility companies.
In return, there were quite a few videos that Kurzgesagt admits were funded directly by the Foundation, that exaggerate the positive influence corporations owned by the foundation have had. Videos which the CEO of Kurzgesagt has admitted they probably would not have made if the Foundation had not paid for them.
question answered. if you don't want to accept the CEO of Kurzgesagt word that they would not have made the videos if they hadn't been paid to, then that isn't my problem. I'm not here to convince you, and I don't mind if you don't believe him.
I said what I said to voice my own opinion on their channel, I didn't voice it as an indication that I was interested in debating the matter. I've already come to my own conclusions. read their website and their medium, or search up one of the deep dive videos on it if you're really interested. I'm not going to go too far out of my way to convince anyone, since it doesn't really harm me in any way if you believe me or not.
I also didn't say anywhere that you should stop watching their videos. you should, however, know who owns and funds every bit of media you consume, so that you can use that information to be healthily skeptical of things people are telling you, just as you are with me. I still watch fern., even though they are owned by PE, because their videos are high quality and mostly free of bias. but I keep in the back of my mind that they have corporate overlords that might want me to believe one thing or another.
I did a few searches and while I didn't find that quote from Kurzgesagt's CEO, I did find the contribution listed from a decade ago on the Gates foundation website. $570,000 paid out over four years. They also gave NPR $2,000,000 the next year.
Since I didn't find the CEOs quote you've mentioned, I can only question the context around it. Would those videos not have been made because the Gates foundation specifically tied the funding to those videos being created? Or would they not have been made because Kurzgesagt didn't have the money to do so otherwise?
Regardless, Kurzgesagt is a private company and if they wanted to conceal hidden agendas by corporate contributors, they would just keep quiet - not openly acknowledge that they made content with money given to them by some larger organisation.
If we're going to denounce any group of people that are connected via Bacon's Law to a disastrous corporate industry, the moral high ground will be unachievable for the entirety of our species.
The Hated One did a video some years ago on the matter, if you're curious then search it up because they list all their sources for everything including the quote from the CEO.
I never told anyone to be outraged by it. You just got outraged because I criticized a channel you presumably like. I've literally said several times in this thread alone that I watch channels owned by PE.
I don’t really do online fights anymore. I check in on Lemmy twice a week max for a maybe a few minutes tops. I’d suggest getting involved with your local community as a great way to channel your energy rather than reply 5m after I posted a new comment. Take care ✌🏻
the CEO of Kurzgesagt word that they would not have made the videos if they hadn’t been paid to
This on its own proves nothing bad. Some videos just require a bigger budget to make and can't be made on their otherwise limited budget. Or the topic is just lower priority due to writer interests. If they were forced into covering specific topics then that's a different story, but I haven't seen any evidence that was the case.
Does any of that matter in this situation, anyway? Exaggerating their content in exchange for money already places question on their reliability as an educational content creator.
Hint: the investment of $11 billion refers to investment of Gates Foundation in fossil fuels.
Well, considering these exact words were used:
That foundation owns over $11 billion in investments in the fossil fuel industry, including coal-burning utility companies.
What can I say but duh. If I misunderstood anything, it was the comment I replied to, which was unclear about the "0.05% down from 6%" detail, and seemed to be associating that with the $11 billion figure by context.
But hey, nice deflection, and super cool of you to be that rude about it, too.
yes, there is also some other sponsorships, including some from other bill gates owned groups/corporations. I don't think support from billionaires is necessarily good as long as it's diverse.
I'm trying to think of their 'fossil fuel shilling' video and only videos that come to mind are where they say we're too entrenched in the fossil fuel industry to make a switch to renewable overnight. It's just not realistic.
And other than fuel, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of products made from petroleum. Approximately 85% of petroleum is made into fuel. Rest is used to make things like pharma products, paint, pesticides, polymers etc.
even people who needs to use petrolatum(aka protroleum) comes from it, for thier dry skin, plus it used in many topical medications. topical ointment medication is more potent than the cream forms.
The problem is when the contributors influence what the videos say, in contradiction to data.
Kurzgesagt's video on +2° / +3° / +4° over the global mean isn't going to be so bad video was conspicuous to me, and is in fact, based on fossil-fuel industry rhetoric, rather than climatology estimations (which tell us over +1.5° is going to fuck us, and is).
It's allegedly a documentary, not fiction. It should make sense from beginning to end.
Sounds like you feel the need to defend Kurzgesagt for sentimental reasons, and since they're presenting themselves as a source for accurate information, that just won't do.
They link all their sources. So regardless of where their funding comes from I'd rather have a good source of information instead of a non-existent perfect source.
for context, our buddy null here got banned from c/leftymemes because he just kept spamming "ok tankie" to everyone. what he doesn't know is that I'm banned from .ML and Hexbear, and run an anti-tankie comm, so him saying this to me is very amusing and I'm thinking of adopting him.
It’s important to have a coalition of support and so I won’t single anyone out, hence I used the word “we”. I have to assume others share their opinion about Kurz. But the larger point is that this is classic left infighting and, ironically, it stalls actual progress. Before we can be good at something, we have to be bad at something.
I don't care if it's 80% or 0.8%. if you take money from billionaires to produce specific videos for them as propaganda, then that is shilling for them. there isn't any way you can spin that to make it not true, but I'm sure you'll do your very liberal best.
that's not how i read it at all. no misinformation here.
see, the fact they took money to publish critical misinformation about climate change is not a joke. it should take more than an "i'm sowwy" to fix their reputation.
I'm unsure we are talking about the same comment. The misinformation is the claim the Gates foundation is continuing to fund Kurzgesagt, when that clearly isn't the case. This incorrect information is veiled by beginning the statement with the truth of the 2015 grant.
Insofar as the reputational damage Kurzgesagt has incurred, I'm not sure there's much meat on that bone. Sure, you might believe they have fallen from grace or some such, but as I pointed out in another comment here, we can't just connect everything under the sun and say 'group A is bad because groups B through Y are all next to one another and with group Z doing all those injustices, group A is complicit in those crimes'.
To me, the question of whether Kurzgesagt is a Gates mouthpiece is pretty cut and dry. A few reasons for this, but the most glaring is simply that the money didn't keep coming, and it wasn't much money to begin with. I wouldn't be going out of my way to talk up my employer to clients if my last bonus was a decade ago and didn't even cover my rent for the month I got it.
Secondly, if you take money from billionaires to make propaganda videos for them, then you’re owned by them. You sell your soul to the devil, you can’t undo it later because you get called out for it.
The video gives an elaborate description on their evaluation of "AI" and it's influence on the Internet at large. And then they conclude with "we'll continue like before" directly contradicting the title.
Feels disingenuous. And ironic after they talked about their extensive investments into fact checking.
The channel hat always been disingenuous. It's not the first video they have where they develop a well written essay that has conclusions that make no sense with the information presented. It's the theater of research without any of the substance. The editors just do whatever they want, under the expectations that the writing team will support their preconceived notion.
They're an entertainment channel, not a science communication channel. They have said some awful, totally not fact supported stuff in the past.
Climate change whitewashing for corporations with awful conflicts of interest. Others have posted the links to the videos elsewhere in this comment section.
As far as science channels go, you've got SpaceTime for college students, Veritasium for high schoolers, and Kurzgesagt for newborn infants or maybe a smart dog. It's probably at about the right level if you want to explain science to an Australian Shepherd.
Yea, nah, it absolutely is. They often sneak in bad information and poorly interpreted data to fearmonger (see their nuclear power "educational" videos where they instill fear) and other such things. They're just like some other science channels. Like veritasium, which shilled out for Waymo. Just because the animations are very very nice doesn't mean you shouldn't confirm the information they present, and quite often it's wrong on purpose to butter up the right people. If you don't believe me, that's okay. They're not dangerous like pseudoscience channels. Most things they present are good. I just hate that they mix in BS.
You're using a lot of weasel words and zero sources for someone arguing we should all fact check things.
I'm not even saying your wrong, but your going to have to do a lot more than that to convince me that "they're known for" everything you just said, because that sounds like you have a very specific beef with them that overshadows everything else they've ever done (in your estimation) and your projecting that as a universal truth, when really it's not.
I respect your opinion, but there are certainly far more worse channels than there are better ones, and they're known for being one of the better ones.
That + entertainment over information quality. I'm not here to convince anybody, my goal was to make y'all think twice about just blindly trusting theor videos. They're the Linus Tech Tips of the science channel world.
Right so you say everyone should source all their work but then claim very specific things about the channel and then refuse to provide sources.
Interesting.
But I guess as long as you're not here to try and convince anyone that what you're saying is true it's okay for you to just say anything regardless of validity. That's very political of you, well done.
I literally never said everyone should source all their work. You're reading between the lines. What I said is that SOME science channels sneak in misinformation and shilling in their videos which are otherwise educational and most of the time very accurate.
The video gives an elaborate description on their evaluation of “AI” and it’s influence on the Internet at large. And then they conclude with “we’ll continue like before” directly contradicting the title.
You missed the entire point of the video.
The claims are simple:
in order to make this type of videos, they need to be able to reliable fact check
data on the internet is increasingly polluted by AI slop, making it harder to distinguish fact from slop
for now, they have no choice but to continue while being extra vigilant... but eventually, if things do not change, they will be unable to perform
It's the exact same situation about climate change... we need to act now, most of us will suffer otherwise but for now we continue on living while trying to adjust where we can (recycling, reusing, less/no meat, etc) even if we know that will not be enough long term.
Not the guy you're answering to, but I kind of agree with him, the point is fuzzy and the title is clickbaity. With sucha title I expected they would present numbers and figures.
well, it may be a matter of context and tolerance here but I find the concept they are presenting is axiomatic and as such would not require any further explanation:
They use the internet to research their videos... the internet is getting more and more polluted with false narratives... ergo, it is becoming harder to research for their videos. Without good source, there are no videos.
If I tell you plants need water to exist but each season brings less and less rain year after year... would you say a title such as "drought is killing the plants" clickbaity?
I assumed they don't do their research using random crap on "the internet", but reliable experts, peer reviewed papers and such. No specific claims about topics, funding, time or anything. And again, no numbers, so hard to argue objectively.
I assumed they don’t do their research using random crap on “the internet”, but reliable experts, peer reviewed papers and such
Yes, that is what they claim. But I am sure you have seen how hard it is now to find something even if you know exactly what you are looking for. It's not like there are 2 libraries online for anything you need, right? You start researching about topic A and read that Dr XYZ did a study on this so you look for that study... just to find out Dr XYZ does not and has never existed.
No specific claims about topics, funding, time or anything. And again, no numbers, so hard to argue objectively.
So you want a specific number as to how many bad sources they are now forcing to discard because they turned out to be AI slop?
Those metrics aren't any more trustworthy than their own subjective word anyway. If they wanted to say they took more time then they could delay at their whim anyway. If they said their production costs increased, then again, they could spend the money to fit the narrative. On those particular points objective evidence is so susceptible to being gamed that it isn't really more valuable than their subjective reporting.
Numbers of subscribers/views could be a bit more informative, but then people inclined to disbelieve would claim it's because of any number of other reasons not because of AI slop.
Killing in this case sounds like the content is becoming harder and harder to create, which they lay out the subjective case for, but that wouldn't be exactly something they could use figures to present, since it's so subjective.
The one point they might have been able to show with numbers would be the emergence of AI slop 'infotainment animations' diluting the audience, but that wasn't exactly the biggest point of the video and it might be a bit early to be able to demonstrate statistically credible evidence on that one.
Also, presuming they are sincere and put in all that effort, they are competing with other sources that have no such discipline and they are able to flood the field and grab eyeballs faster than they could.
Propagating feel-goodism about climate change while taking money from the Bill&Melinda Gates Foundation and saying that eventually climate change will be solved by technology, whitewashing carbon capture technologies and overselling their potential, taking money from Templeton Foundation when making videos about consciousness, using the "Israel fighting Hamas" narrative in a 2025 video regarding wars...
I didn't say they have to like it, that would be silly.
I'm criticising them for making an incorrect statement, being corrected on it, then acting extremely proud of being ignorant of the facts, and committing to not informing themselves.
They have been doing this animation style since 2013.
Why do you think they use AI?
I think your AI senses are broken, you see AI everywhere where there is not. You're like the extreme opposite of AI Tech Bro. Like you have paranoid AI-phobia or something.
I watched this with my son last night. Quite enjoyed it. I find the cadences of the narrator's voice oddly soothing, although ironically it sounds very like an AI voice.
I mean there's been some controversy surrounding a number of their videos. Some were under fire for poor research or demonstrating a singular, not widely-held view on certain topics. And I think for one video they were accused of plagiarism iirc. This was when it was still somewhat early days for the channel, haven't followed them since so not sure what the state is now.
In the video you're literally commenting on they explain how they fact check their videos and how they work with professionals in the field at matter.
You can always complain that something wasn't as good as you personally wanted it to be but that may very well be bias. The people making the accusations may have a bias. All we can do is take the totality of their output and cast judgement on that.
The point was that they haven't always held themselves up to those standards and have sometimes only used professionals espousing a single viewpoint (where multiple exist).
I should mention this isn't bias, iirc the channel did release a video apologizing for some of the issues (though not all), so it wasn't even up to their own standards by their own admission.
Looking things up now, I see that the plagiarism case was slightly different: they had published a video on addiction, which was fairly explosive in its claims. Turns out it was citing basically just one fringe researcher who was also accused of plagiarism. The claims did not seem to hold up to scrutiny.
When another channel doing a series on how pop-sci influencers can sometimes spread misinformed ideas asked some questions to Kurzgesagt, they were immediately a bit apprehensive but agreed to do some interview questions, though with the caveat that they were busy with other things and needed a few weeks before it could take place. Then before the interview took place they suddenly put out their own apology video and took the addiction video down. At no point was it mentioned that another channel prompted this action, it was presented as some kind of inward reflection that they had come to themselves.
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You can't really call it slop just because you disagree with their views and representations of things.
Their stuff is carefully researched and sourced, human crafted and open to critique. Whether they're correct in their assessments or not is of course up for debate, but it's good craftsmanship and they show their work.
Eh, there's a lot of blending of conjecture, opinion and fact all presented as truth, and their handling of mistakes could be better - they've openly said if they consider a mistake to be minor then they don't even issue a correction or update.
I personally think that attitude towards production pushes it towards slop, as for things like entertainment one of the key defining things that separate slop from quality media is passion, but if you don't care about making accurate content then are you any better than just getting AI to write a script?
A huge blocklist of manually curated sites that contain AI generated imagery for uBlock Origin & uBlacklist. - laylavish/uBlockOrigin-HUGE-AI-Blocklist
A huge blocklist of manually curated sites that contain AI generated imagery for uBlock Origin & uBlacklist. - laylavish/uBlockOrigin-HUGE-AI-Blocklist
Then other day I was trying to find out how to get just one AD account not to sync through to Azure without disabling it. And the AI came up with this complicated instruction set that didn't work and was totally made up from nowhere. Now what on earth was the point in doing that?
At one point it told me I had to triple click on something. Because that's totally a thing.
It's so fun when it's so specific about some detail with casual confidence that is based on absolutely nothing at all. I know ultimately it's architecture is more akin to a predictive word generator, but it seems so much better.
Saw a clear demonstration and it is wild that the output is consistent, but at least in the model I saw being run, every word is generated without it having considered what the word after would be or what the general concept it is going for. For a human one has to already know the concept before he/she starts putting words to it, but at least the models I've seen explained with detail, it manages to assemble it word by word without knowing where it is trying to go in advance.
I get the frustration, but it does actually cost money to make content, especially high effort content like this.
Add on top of that the fact that the people involved need to be able to eat, have a home, provide for their families, have a life.
People would complain if they were sponsored by some shitty VPN provider or the like, and also complain about them trying to sell merch. I certainly wouldn't work for free, so I don't see why they should have to.
It's not really that hard to do a couple of key presses to skip ahead, either. It's what I do.
I dont think its AI Slop thats "killing the channel" if that statement is even remotely true its due to more and more of their videos being slop sci low information videos. The target audience must be stoners who want to watch something that is visually appealing and feels educational
terrible animations, and its worst than other "education science channels" the least they could do is use actual footage or pictures of the things hes discussing.
Honestly, it isn't the AI so much as it is the suspension that rules that apply to us should also apply to AI. They are barely legal companies getting away with murder due to the residual power of a corrupt empire in decline.
Much the same as blockchain - it could have been exciting and fun, but it was immediately put to work to exploit people, and in the end that's what the tools effectively were.
Yeah, and if it weren't for the techbro nonsense, it would be tossed onto the pile of mathematical curios that don't have nontrivial uses.
The thing is - we often do find uses for those curiosities years later.
In the mean time, I wouldn't mind if a decentralized video game came along where game assets were decentralized, distributed by bittorrent, and player assets were decentralized and tracked by blockchain.
You'd be surprised how valuable these technologies can be when they're not only being developed to create new financialized services to overcharge people for. Manufacturing and shipping has huge capital and logistic buffers created by information gaps, production shortfalls, fraud, etcetera, and cryptographic ledgers are excellent for ensuring accurate production and inventory information is relayed to clients in realtime. What's more, it has the potential to mediate international transactions without relying on Swift or global banking institutions that are an extension of US authority.
Notice how nothing I said was about fucking NFTs. The western financial system completely lost the plot doing super cocaine and became convinced they could just ask the rest of the world to stay slaves forever. They don't even care about its potential! They want TrumpCoin.
Kurzgesagt is annoyingly techno-solutionist but now that they are a big target of AI slop (their artistic style being heavily copied), they complain. That's good I guess.
If you actually watch the video that's not what they're talking about. They are talking about how it's difficult to fact check information in a world of AI misinformation.
I always find it's easier to know what a video is about if I actually watched the video. It's just this little life hack I've come up with.
Watch the video? Duh. Thanks I watched it, and I know they don’t talk about how AI steals their art style (even though it’s really happening). I just pointed out the irony. The video also says they are usually enthusiastic about new tech but not this time.
I know this channel well enough to have seen countless videos praising fake tech like carbon capture and that’s why I have a problem with them. Am I allowed to have an opinion?
You are allowed to have an opinion but when it's a stupid opinion expect to be ridiculed for it.
Carbon capture is an actual technology it's real and it works. There's not a lot of it about yet but there's also not a lot of fusion reactors yet but they're also real technology.
What is the problem with techno-solutionism? Is it just that under capitalism techno-solutionism often results in corruption? Is the development of lemmy not techno-solutionism (to the enshittification of reddit)?
Tangential, but thats what disgusted me about the Osaka world expo. The theme was sustainability so you had fossil fuel companies presenting wildly impractical "solutions" and art projects. The message was "things are under control, continue sleepwalking into oblivion"
There's nothing helpful about giving up though is there.
And we could stop climate change, it's entirely possible, presumably people don't want to die so they will take action but they probably not going to start to act until climate change becomes more apparent, that's depressing but that's human nature. Humans have a long history of making radical changes at the last minute, e.g the cold war.
We like to go right up to the cliff edge but we tend not to take the final step.
After all even China is cleaning up its act and they're the least likely to be cooperative so if even they're doing something about it there's hope.
“with effort, we can solve climate change, or minimise its effects.”
The issue is not the claim that with effort we maybe can minimise the effects, it's the techno-utopia angle. We will solve this by changing nothing about the underlying economic system driving climate change, but Bill Gates and other smart billionaires will make some fantastic technology that will save us!
We will not solve it, it's way too late for that. Still, every 0.01°C additional warming counts. People not born yet will suffer more from everything we don't do now. So, rolling on our backs and giving up is not helping at all. Going vegan is a easy first step to make a difference. Start blowing up pipelines after that. 😀
Large YouTube channels usually try different titles and thumbnails during the first few hours after upload, so the title OP posted was probably accurate at the time of posting.
La settima puntata di Matrimonio a Prima Vista 15 — in onda su Real Time mercoledì 15 ottobre 2025 in prima serata — riunisce per la prima volta le tre coppie. La reunion accende vecchie ruggini e nuovi equilibri: se Roberta Murano e Luca Merlo proseguono spediti, Dario Del Vecchio e Roberta Bordonaro sembrano arrivati al capolinea. Ma i momenti più duri sono, ancora una volta, quelli tra Melissa Cicciari e Matteo Conca.
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.
Gallego confronted Johnson, demanding to know why Grijalva's swearing-in had been delayed, and if the delay was connected with the release of the Epstein files.
“This has nothing to do with Epstein," Johnson shot back, adding that Gallego was being "absurd."
Arizona Senate Democrats Mark Kelly and Ruben Gallego clashed with Speaker Mike Johnson in the hallways of the Capitol on Wednesday, over the swearing-in of Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva.
The IRS is sending mass furlough notices to employees and shuttering most of its operations, now that a government shutdown has extended beyond its initial contingency plan.
The agency posted on its website Wednesday morning that, “due to the lapse in appropriations, most IRS operations are closed.”
The IRS, which is preparing for next year’s filing season, kept all its employees on the job for the first five business days of the shutdown. Its contingency plans, however, didn’t specify what would happen if a lapse in funding extended beyond Oct. 7.
According to the agency, an “IRS-wide furlough” began Wednesday, “for everyone except already-identified excepted and exempt employees.”
It’s not clear which employees will keep working at this point. The IRS hasn’t posted an updated contingency plan yet.
Another edition of LinuxDays took place in Prague last weekend – the country’s largest Linux event drawing more than 1200 attendees and as every yearm we had a Fedora booth there – this time we also representing CentOS.
I was really glad that Tomáš Hrčka helped me staff the booth. I’m focused on the desktop part of Fedora and don’t follow the rest of the project in such detail. As a member […]
that's for sure and especially so that the american gov't is now controlling who can and cannot join the linux kernel developer's group; it's easy to see them expend a tiny bit more energy to add people to the watch list
A group of conservative donors spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop a rightwing version of late-night talkshows like the Tonight Show and the Late Show, leaked documents reveal, in a further indication of the right’s ongoing efforts to overhaul American culture.
News of the effort to pump conservative viewpoints into the mainstream comes as entertainment shows and the media at large are under severe threat in the US. In September, Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show was taken off the air, under pressure from the Trump administration, after Kimmel’s comments after the killing of Charlie Kirk, while Donald Trump has launched multiple lawsuits against TV networks and news organizations.
Four pilot episodes, each of which has been watched by the Guardian, were made of the rightwing chatshow. It was promoted by the Ziklag group, a secretive Christian nationalist organization, which aims to reshape culture to match its version of Christianity. In an email in 2022, Ziklag – which ProPublica reported spent $12m to elect Trump last year – urged its members to stump up money for the project, called the Talk Show With Eric Metaxas.
Republicans have been eager to challenge mail-in ballots, with Donald Trump centering it in his attacks on the electoral process. Mike Bost, a Republican representative from Illinois, filed the suit to argue that the Illinois law allowing ballots to be counted up to two weeks after election day if they are postmarked by the deadline unconstitutionally allows an extension of the election period.
Lower courts threw Bost’s suit out, ruling that the conservative congressman in his fifth term did not suffer an injury and had no standing to sue. The appeal argues that the cost of staffing a campaign past election day is a financial injury giving him sufficient standing to challenge the law.
Education Secretary Linda McMahon has been clear about her desire to shut down the agency she runs. She’s laid off half the staff and joked about padlocking the door.
She calls it “the final mission.”
But the department is not behaving like an agency that is simply winding down. Even as McMahon has shrunk the Department of Education, she’s operated in what she calls “a parallel universe” to radically shift how children will learn for years to come. The department’s actions and policies reflect a disdain for public schools and a desire to dismantle that system in favor of a range of other options — private, Christian and virtual schools or homeschooling.
Over just eight months, department officials have opened a $500 million tap for charter schools, a huge outlay for an option that often draws children from traditional public schools. They have repeatedly urged states to spend federal money for poor and at-risk students at private schools and businesses. And they have threatened penalties for public schools that offer programs to address historic inequities for Black or Hispanic students.
Under Trump, the Department of Education has been bringing in activists hostile to public schools. It could mean a new era of private and religious schools boosted by tax dollars — and the end of public schools as we know them.
Mass mobilizations have been a feature of Claudia Sheinbaum’s first year presiding over Mexico, and to finish her first “accountability” tour of Mexico and mark one year of governance, she had her biggest yet. More than 400,000 people came out to watch her speak for nearly an hour on Sunday, October 5, reflecting on her and the party’s achievements in the first year of her term, and the continued “fourth transformation” of Mexico.
In recent weeks, Sheinbaum has visited all 31 states of Mexico, outlining her administration’s current projects, plans and results in each state.
The communication strategy of MORENA, the governing party, is very front-facing, with both Sheinbaum and her predecessor Andrés Manuel López Obrador hosting daily press conferences from Monday to Friday, and then generally traveling to one or two parts of Mexico over the weekend. This has proven extremely effective in countering the narratives from the large press corporations that own and operate the majority of Mexican media outlets, as well as of course maintaining closer communication and accountability with the people of Mexico.
Sheinbaum has faced significant challenges in her first year, most notably due to relations with the administration of US President Donald Trump, with problems ranging from tariff threats even to members of his administration suggesting unilateral military intervention against Mexico. While Trump has threatened Mexico with tariffs at every turn, Sheinbaum’s firm but open stance has proved effective in negotiations with Trump and today the country has managed to achieve important exceptions to the aggressive tariff regime.
Sheinbaum arrives at one year in charge with historic levels of approval, depending on the poll you choose your approval rate is somewhere between 72% and 79%. While other countries around the world aren’t as comprehensive in approval polls as Mexico, this likely makes Sheinbaum the most popular leader in the world.
So, how did she get to that level of popularity and what are her challenges in maintaining or growing it? Here are some of the points mentioned by Sheinbaum in her speech and the highlights from her first year governing Mexico.
Reiterating economic achievements
Sheinbaum began by reiterating some of the economic achievements, both that MORENA has accomplished since 2018, and some of the present moment.Between 2018 and 2014, 13.5 million Mexican, Mexico is now the second least unequal country in the Americas, behind only Canada, and the income gap between the richest and poorest was reduced from 27 to 14 times over.Annual inflation has settled at 3.7% percent, unemployment is at 2.7%, a record level of foreign direct investment was reached and annual economic growth is expected at 1.2%.
Sheinbaum’s initiatives from her first 12 months.
Sheinbaum created three new social programs. One is Salud Casa por Casa, a door-to-door free healthcare system for the elderly, where healthcare professionals come into their home for regular check ups. Another is Pensión Mujeres Bienestar, which gives women their pension from 60 years of age, rather than 65, to recognize unpaid work in the home. The final is Beca “Rita Cetina”, which is a universal scholarship for all secondary students in public schools, this is a payment every two months of 1900 pesos (USD 103) to cover schooling costs.The constitutional recognition of several rights, such as the right for women to live lives free from violence, the right of access to the internet, the right of access to housing, the right to social programs and more.Mexico has served more than 86,000 deported Mexicans who have been deported from the US in special comprehensive care centers, under a program called ‘Mexico embraces you”. This includes registering them into Mexicans social security systems to assist them with access to housing, employment and transportation to their area of origin, as well as food and shelter in the meantime.Sheinbaum said the “4T is bringing back the trains”, with many rail projects underway, after they were previously privatized in the late 90s. These make up more than 3000kms of railway across the country, including two trains from Mexico City, to Pacucha and Queretaro respectively, and further expansion of the Interoceanic train, which is a key part of Mexico’s attempt to create an alternative trade corridor to the Panama Canal.Sheinbaum emphasized the administration’s goal to “promote equality and the recognition and just development of women in Mexico.” The current government has created The Secretariat for Women as an official government ministry, opened a national support line for women, has opened the first 678 free centers for women that focus on comprehensive care for women, but the administration is aiming to build 2,500 in total. The government is also aiming to build 1,000 early education and childcare centers, which will provide free childcare to children from 40 to 1,000 days old.Sheinbaum has also made access to water a key feature of her first year in charge. About four billion cubic meters of water have been de-privatized, a new agricultural irrigation technology program is being developed across 13 states, and there are 20 new strategic drinking water and sanitation projects.The Sheinbaum administration will build 1.7 million homes, 400,000 of those for Mexicans without social security, and the rest with accessible loan offers for those who earn less than two minimum wages.Another key feature of her first year in charge has been more scientific investment and projects, with funding for scientific research projects increasing by 193%. These include the production of an electric car, a project for Mexico to make its own semiconductors, the production of observation satellites and more.
Security
A challenge moving forward for Sheinbaum will be continuing to manage the security situations, although her early strategies have proved effective.
52% of Mexicans rank insecurity and drug trafficking as the most important issue affecting the country, and 63% of Mexicans living in urban areas consider it unsafe to live in their city. This figure rose from the previous year, but in fairness, levels were historically low before.
Sheinbaum and Omar Garcia Harfuch, her secretary of security, have taken a different approach to security than AMLO had. Sheinbaum and Garcia Harfuch also worked together when Sheinbaum was the mayor of Mexico City, and homicides dropped 50% in the six years they worked together.
The results have been swift, with Sheinbaum reporting a 32% reduction in homicides over her first year. Between September 2024 and July 2025, there was an average of 64.9 homicides per day. While these numbers are stark, it is a marked improvement from the 98.5 per day that Mexico was experiencing in 2018, when MORENA first came to power.
In 2007, before Felipe Calderon’s aggressive, US-backed security strategy, Mexico was experiencing 24.3 daily homicides.
Mexico also recently managed to get the United States to sign an agreement to attempt to limit the inflow of weapons from the US into Mexico. This is a huge point for Mexican security as even the US itself has recognized that 74% of weapons used by organized crime groups in Mexico arrive illegally from the United States.
However, Mexican political commentator and editor of Mexico Decoded, Viri Rios makes the point that this agreement focuses only on increased border surveillance and inspection, and misses the core problem of dangerous weapons being too easily acquired and severely unregulated in the US.
In theory, the US agreeing to this new policy will give them more accountability for the guns that continue to arrive in Mexico.
Early results are extremely promising, but Sheinbaum’s grapple with security and US relations will be critical moving forward.
Tallis Boerne Marcusis an Australian journalist currently based in Mexico City.
probably the best politician that this world has ever seen and i was surprised at how much american propaganda that i had unknowingly swallowed over the decades about mexican politics until i forced myself to learn about her.
the people of the united states could learn A LOT about mexico because it too was ruled by a two-party duopoly for almost century; just like the united states is right now; but the mexicans have managed to vote 3rd party and it's making their lives better meanwhile the americans can't get past the culture wars that keep the democrat-republican duopoly in charge.
you're behind the times; publications like the guardian and the new york times have labeled her efforts to overhaul the legal system to remove the united states' control over it as "authoritarian" almost a year ago.
Assuming good faith, I guess this is about the hypocrisy of everyone acting extremely morally righteous when it comes to the sexual exploitation of animals and then tolerating, accepting and celebrating all other forms of exploitation of animals. I really hope it is not going the other way around.
In dairy, cattle are sexually exploited. Cows must be preggers to give milk, so they wank a bull to get his semen, then a farmer will inject that semen into a cow while holding her cervix with his hand up her arse. Then when she gives birth, the calf will either become a milker like her mum, or become veal if he's a boy.
But we don't talk about that. It's only wrong if you stick your peepee into a cow.
Not true at all, they've been able to make cows produce milk with artificial hormones for decades now, which is also why veal isn't as widely available as it used to be
To be fair, I read it correctly the first time and didn't occur to me that it could be interpreted in any other way until I went into the comment section.
There's not a single news story on google news landing page or the front page of reddit. I don't think anyone who isn't directly impacted really gives a shit.
For as long as 55-year-old Hopi Chairman Tim Nuvangyaoma has been alive, high-voltage power lines have cut across Hopi lands in northeast Arizona, carrying vast amounts of power long distances throughout the Southwest.
But residents of the Hopi Reservation have never been connected to that grid. Instead, tribal members have relied on a single power line that runs roughly 30 miles east and west across high desert punctuated by three distinctive mesas, home to 12 distinct villages, including some of the oldest inhabited communities in the United States.
Those who live more than a mile away from that line — nearly 3,000 people — have no access to electricity. Families need to rely on generators to power everything from refrigerators to medical devices.
The rest of the reservation is connected to the grid, but the power is unreliable and outages can sometimes last days.
"If you have a power surge or any kind of power outage, you're definitely going to lose that power to that equipment that somebody's life might be reliant on," Nuvangyaoma says.
The tribe thought those days without reliable electricity were about to change.
Nicole Kidman amplia la sua già ricca filmografia televisiva con Discretion, nuova serie Paramount+ prodotta da A24 e ispirata a un’idea originale della scrittrice Chandler Baker. Accanto a lei, nel cast e in produzione, ci sarà Elle Fanning. Un progetto che conferma la centralità dell’attrice australiana sul piccolo schermo dopo titoli come Big Little Lies, Nine Perfect Strangers e The Perfect Couple.
Shortly after flour disappeared from the market in November 2023, it began to circulate again in the sacks originally intended for distribution by UNRWA. This sudden appearance was the result of an act of mass looting by crowds of hungry people, which we only heard about afterward: they had stormed the UNRWA warehouses, some breaking down the doors while others scaled the walls, and emptied them of their supplies—not only flour, but also tinned sardines, corn oil, milk powder, and dried lentils and chickpeas—in a matter of minutes. Apparently, they’d even taken wooden desks, shelves, and the agency’s archives—all of which could be used as firewood. I bought a sack of looted UNRWA flour for more than four times the usual price and made my way home as if bearing priceless treasure. My wife Ula and her sisters were jubilant, and we were all seized by a dark joy amid the wasteland of fear and grief that grows vaster and more desolate by the day as the war continues to escalate. We felt momentarily comfortable and safe; we could bake our own bread now, instead of waiting under the hot sun for hours in the uncertain hope of finding some at the bakery. But another problem stood in our path: to turn the thin rounds of dough into bread we needed an oven, and all we had in the apartment was a gas canister that barely sufficed to cook our regular meals. We would have to find some other way.
Mud ovens, which are what rural Gazan families have always used for cooking and baking, are dotted across the green patches that lie between the apartment blocks in Hamad City. The women they belong to are generous and volunteer their help when other families turn up needing to bake something, only asking them to bring enough paper and cardboard for fuel. But we didn’t have any paper or cardboard in the house—only my books.
Ula looked at me timidly. “Let’s use one or two for now, and when the war’s over you can replace them,” she said, as gently as she could. “The kids need food more than they need to be read to.” The ugliness of it was devastating. In all the years I’d spent amassing my modest library, it had never occurred to me that I might one day have to weigh a book against a piece of bread for my children. I was stunned by the cruelty of the choice, paralyzed by the question it raised: How had things gotten this bad, this fast?
Ultimo appuntamento per Lezioni di Mafie: Nicola Gratteri, Procuratore Capo di Napoli, torna mercoledì 8 ottobre 2025 in prima serata su La7 con “Camorra Social Club”, un viaggio che parte dai vicoli di Napoli e arriva fino al carcere minorile di Nisida. Al suo fianco Antonio Nicaso e Paolo Di Giannantonio per illuminare come la criminalità organizzata campana si sia evoluta nell’era digitale, sfruttando social network e nuove tecnologie per promuoversi, reclutare e cercare consenso.
Ultima puntata di Lezioni di Mafie, anticipazioni 8 ottobre 2025: “Camorra Social Club”. Gratteri con Nicaso e Di Giannantonio analizza camorra e social.
This isn't news, nor is it politics. But given networks' actual competition these days, tech seemed a safe home to share.
To: Bari Weiss
RE: Good luck, babe!
I honestly cannot believe you’ve willingly decided to go into the worst kind of job that exists: management at a dying company.
Managing sucks! It sucks even when you like the people you’re managing and it’s a low-stress position! And I’m sure I don’t have to tell you: running CBS News is not a low-stress position. You are going to get blamed by everyone above you for decisions that are made by people below you, and you are going to get blamed by people below you for the decisions that are made by people above you. You’re also going to get blamed for your own decisions, just for kicks. You have elected to take a job where the primary purpose is for you to eat shit and own the death of broadcast TV news, a thing that is going to die no matter what you do. Nice work!
This is the glass cliff to end all glass cliffs. You’re Marissa Mayer at Yahoo without the Googler street cred. You’re Nancy Dubuc at Vice without the string of hit TV shows. You’re Linda Yaccarino at Twitter without the advertiser relationships. You have been hired as a sop to a Trump administration that is actively hostile to the actual free press, and you will be made to oversee wave after wave of layoffs until you quit or get fired and the entire news division is shut down in a final spasm of cost-cutting after the next inescapable media merger.
This is a pretty brutal assessment of the state of the media ecosystem.
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.
The song "Ween el Malayeen," in English "Where are the Millions" was written by the Libyan poet Ali alKilani during the First Intifada (~1987 - 1993). He wanted it to be in classical Arabic with well-known words that could be understood all across West Asia and North Africa. It was aimed at the leaders of these nations to condemn and question their silence on the Palesinian cause. Their silence, as we all know, has only gotten worse since then due to continued Western imperialism, Zionist divide-and-rule tactics, and US regime change operations.
Omar alJaffori, the composer and melodist, intended for the song to be performed by three singers from different West Asian and North African countries, symbolizing borderless unity and solidarity.
These are the three female singers we see here:
Sawsan Hamami from Tunisia, Julia Boutros from Lebanon, of a Christian background, and Amal Arafa from Syria
The song itself references verses from the Qur'an, specifically Surah Al-Fil (The Elephant). The verses recount the story of Abrahah's Abyssinian army attacking Makkah to destroy the Ka'bah using war elephants, but flocks of birds carrying stones of baked clay came and defeated the invaders.
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.
"The guy at the epicenter [is] basically starting to do what all ultimate bad actors do in the final inning," Morgan Stanley's Lisa Shalett tells Fortune.
Timeline of Operation Midnight Hammer – Public Domain
With the bombing of Iran’s nuclear sites at Natanz, Isfahan, and Fordow, the United States risked becoming “plugged … into some of the fiercest conflicts in the world,” according to veteran Middle East correspondent Patrick Cockburn. The ceaseless refrain—repeated by Prime Minister Netanyahu in his latest tirade at the UN General Assembly, “the curse of Iran’s terror axis”—“constitutes the most awesome threat not only to Israel, but to U.S. interests in the region, means that Trump is now directly involved “not only against Iran, but in interlinked conflicts” against Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and various Shiite paramilitary groups aligned with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps in Iraq. Should the Islamic Republic choose to retaliate against American troops stationed in the vicinity of its reach, the U.S. will not interpret it as an overdue moment of reckoning for its years of nihilistic endeavors—it will treat it as yet another unprovoked offensive. Key to the expansion of their power and territory, violent states are largely in the business of exploiting pretexts, manipulating or even fabricating threats that justify intervention and subjugation. The new phase of the conflict against Iran thus carries all the foul trappings of a “forever war,” in which the stated objectives admittedly cannot be attained, and withdrawal is considered a humiliating capitulation that haunts electoral success. Trump’s patented volatility could prevent this outcome, but that would require a decoupling of Iran from the conflicts raging in the Arab states.
The timing was telling. As Iran’s Foreign Minster Araghchi met with European leaders in Geneva, who counseled the Islamic Republic to call off the bombing of Israel and accept U.S. demands to relinquish all uranium enrichment, Israel was pummeling Tehran. Pressure was being exerted on all fronts, but the professed goal of preventing the Iranian regime from developing nuclear weapons suffers from a fundamental incoherence: the more violent these preventive efforts become, the more likely it is that Iran will move to weaponize its nuclear energy. Although current assessments, from the IAEA to Tulsi Gabbard, conclude that it has been over two decades since Iran pursued such a program, figures in both Israel and the U.S. insist on a repetition of previous debacles. “The world has witnessed how the United States attacked Iraq for, as it turned out, no reason at all,” wrote Israeli military historian Martin Van Creveld in August 2004. “Had the Iranians not tried to build nuclear weapons, they would be crazy.” A 2012 article by the late Kenneth Waltz that caused quite a stir proposed that, “Despite a widespread belief to the contrary, Iranian policy is not made by ‘mad mullahs’ but by perfectly sane ayatollahs who want to survive just like any other leaders.” If the regime “desires nuclear weapons, it is for the purpose of providing for its own security, not to improve its offensive capabilities (or destroy itself).”
“Iran doesn’t want to speak to Europe,” Trump said during the Geneva proceedings. “They want to speak to us. Europe is not going to be able to help on this one.” Consistent with U.S. positions taken in the past, European involvement in this region can serve only two purposes: one, to effectively communicate U.S. demands in its stead; and two, to provide a veneer of multilateral legitimacy, assuaging the world community whenever it feels that the U.S. is exercising outsized influence in negotiations. One 1999 EU resolution following the Wye Memorandum negotiations, for example, lamented that “despite the fact that it continues to be the leading supplier of economic and financial assistance to the region, the European Union was not involved in the political discussions which led to the resumption of dialogue nor in the undertakings entered into”—a historical pattern that a handful of European states profess to have put behind them by recognizing the State of Palestine.
Iran’s exchange with Israel was largely a predictable culmination of the events stimulated by October 7, when Israel, in league with its ascendant American backers, seized upon “the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust (Jonathan Greenblatt)” and began implementing their contingency plans for Gaza. From the U.S. and Israel’s point of view, Tehran constitutes the final domino required to fall in a series of four: first, the leadership of Hamas, having orchestrated the bloody 2023 break-out from the Gaza Strip, what senior Israeli national security official Giora Eiland labeled in 2004 as a “huge concentration camp,” the kill-list of Deif, Haniyeh, and Sinwar graciously prepared by the International Criminal Court in the form of arrest warrants; second, the leadership of Hezbollah, whose subsequent intervention on behalf of the Palestinians led to the decimation of its own leadership and command structure, while producing a deep trepidation among fellow Lebanese to become embroiled in more war with Israel; third, the rapid undoing of the Assad regime in Syria, ending not only the gross depredations of that family’s dynasty, but also the primary land-route through which Iran could militarily bolster its Arab allies.
Posing as the arbiter of maturity and wisdom, The New York Times’ editors recently opined that, before “being dragged into another war in the Middle East,” which would entail “committing American blood and treasure,” Trump and his retinue of extraordinary legal scholars mustn’t forget to “put the issue to a vote in Congress,” so as not to violate the canons of domestic checks and balances and hence repeat the mistakes of our past. After all, “Our laws are explicit on this point.” To declare war “is not the decision of Mr. Netanyahu or Mr. Trump. Under the Constitution, Congress alone has that power.” With this prudent admonition, the editors confess that, of course, “Iran’s government is a malevolent force in the world and that it has made substantial progress toward acquiring a nuclear weapon,” but “thanks partly to Israel’s humbling of Iranian proxies like Hamas and Hezbollah,” there may be another way by which the beast can be subdued. No mention is made, as part of this liberal civics review, of the flagrant illegality of Israel’s bombing of Iran, its ongoing genocidal project in Gaza, the conduct of its “humbling” of Arab foes, or of U.S. complicity in it all, the last of which proceeds with a multi-dimensional criminality designated only for the most powerful international gangsters.
Sentiments such as this, rich in both entitlement and fatuity, elicit ridicule in other, civilized intellectual cultures better acquainted with the injurious nature of Washington’s aggressions. Even in countries on the immediate periphery of those discussed above, having been (by and large) spared the tonnage of F-35 payloads and Abrams tanks, observers perceive new waves of U.S. bombing as little more than another stage in a trite imperial pattern, with perhaps still more devastating consequences than its previous incarnations. Aasim Sajjad Akhtar writes in Pakistan’s leading daily, Dawn, that, “There is no secret to what the Empire and its Israeli outpost want—to eliminate the one challenger to their power in the Muslim world,” all others having been effectively cut down or coopted. “If today the argument is that the repressive, theocratic regime that rules Iran must be removed, yesterday the same was said about the Afghan Taliban, Saddam Hussein, the Assad dynasty and Muammar Qadhafi.” Incidentally, at least three of those governments were destroyed under concocted pretexts that metamorphosed into loftier concerns over state repression. In the case of Pakistan, Akhtar explains, “Ziaul Haq and Pervez Musharraf immensely damaged Pakistani society by aligning with Washington to prosecute wars in Afghanistan,” the “enduring legacies” of which are “wide-spread influence of the militant right-wing, and the ‘Kalashnikov culture’” that has fueled Islamist insurgencies in the Balochistan region. Discussion of this prevailing maelstrom will remain vexingly absent from Western arguments favoring Iran’s destruction.
News reports claim that both Hezbollah and the Houthis have been ordered by their paymaster in Tehran to stand down for the time being, to be reactivated in the event of another U.S. escalation. Parties to the Axis of Resistance, however, understand well the illusory nature of such a stasis. Should Israel find itself itching for a fix, it will simply provoke a conflict with a target of its choosing, confident in the ability of the great revisionists of chronology in Western media to properly assign blame. Already, the media are warning of Iranian efforts to rearm its Axis, with numerous shipments of weapons reportedly intercepted en route to Lebanon and Yemen. All the while, Prime Minister Netanyahu has accused the al-Sharaa regime in Syria of crossing “red lines,” that is, inside Syria, one of which is sending troops to areas on the outskirts of the Golan Heights, illegally annexed to Israel. The utterly laughable pretext is the protection of the Druze minority of Syria, as if Israel has suddenly decided to balance its genocidal impulses in Gaza with purely altruistic ones in Syria. In fact, this “pledge to defend the group is giving [Israel] an opportunity to display military dominance over its weaker neighbor and assert more control over their shared border,” according to TheWall Street Journal.
President Obama’s special envoy to Iran, Robert Malley, summarized Israel’s current strategy to Adam Shatz as “the regionalisation of the ‘mow the lawn’ strategy practised in Gaza and Lebanon.” In Syria, he added, “it has gone beyond ‘mowing the lawn’ – it’s ‘mow the hell out of whatever dirt may still be there.’ Even without any evidence of a Syrian intent to attack, even in the presence of clear conciliatory signals from the al-Sharaa government, Israel has continued to go after supposed weapons caches and to occupy parts of southern Syria. They did this because they could, because Syria was in no position to lift a finger in response.” In this respect, Syria is the ideal punching bag, enduring abuse while clamoring for legitimacy.
This drive to provoke is tendentious in Israeli strategic operations, and the associated apologetics that define mainstream commentary likely affect the measurement and care with which rivals conduct their retaliatory maneuvers. In other words, in a thoroughly captured media environment, unprovoked strikes can be sold as acts of defense. A Chatham House analysis of last April’s Iranian bombing of Israel, retaliation for the latter’s attack on Iran’s embassy in Damascus that killed a senior commander of the IRGC, along with 15 others, found that, “Had Iran’s intent been to hurt Israel, it wouldn’t have violated a core principle of military operations – the element of surprise. But it did. It telegraphed its intentions to Washington and several Arab and European capitals, and assured them that its strike would be relatively limited,” resulting in minimal damage. Efforts to sell Iran’s later bombing of Tel Aviv and Haifa as more unprovoked aggression have fallen flat in most of the world, resulting in a worrying deficit of sympathy for Israel.
Historically, widely publicized atrocities have prompted Israel’s most ardent supporters to greatly accelerate their white-washing efforts. The first major debacle with which the lobby contended was the Qibya massacre of October 1953, when David Ben Gurion’s forces, led by a young Ariel Sharon, killed some 70 Palestinian civilians. The fallout was unexpectedly difficult, drawing rebuke from Washington. Isaiah Kemen, the Abraham Foxman of his day, conceded privately that the killings “undermined the moral position of the Jewish people … discredited the premises of our propaganda and has given the color of truth to Arab propaganda.” Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, and, later, Operation Cast Lead in 2008-9 resulted in similar international isolation.
Israel’s image as a blameless sanctuary for the Jewish people, surrounded by “human animals,” in the forthright phrase of Israel’s former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, once benefited from a buoyancy rarely seen in world affairs, certainly for a state of its size. This was not achieved through standard techniques of Congressional lobbying. What cannot be denied is that the operative networks of the “Israeli Lobby” extend far beyond AIPAC, the ADL, or even the Christian Broadcasting Network. In fact, they encompass practically the whole spectrum of elite Western institutions, including the news media, scholarship, politics, the corporate sector, high-tech, entertainment, and finance. So awesome and reflexive are their defenses (and promotions, in the case of the American Evangelical community) of Israeli violence that widespread cynicism thrives as to whose bidding the U.S. government is actually doing.
Horrifying images of mothers holding withered children and mobs of incalculable Gazans struggling for food aid has evidently turned the tide of public opinion against Israel, once again. A July 2025 Gallup poll shows that, by now, only a minority of Americans approve of Israel’s military actions in Gaza, and a majority disapprove of its bombing of nuclear sites in Iran. The time is now ripe for the kind of reappraisal required to extend this disapproval. We need not accept the notion that U.S.-Israeli terror is the sole determinant in the remaking of the Middle East. Its obvious unpopularity can help give rise to an educational restructuring, in which all roads no longer lead to Iran. The task, of course, is a tall one.
Iran as Boogeyman
Svante Cornell, a Swedish scholar long known for his predilections for the Azeri dictatorship, bemoans the Iranian “arc of domination” in the neighboring Arab World, as it takes advantage of what he feels are the honest miscalculations of the U.S., particularly in Iraq. He alleges that the Bush administration, for example, bet on the wrong horse, falsely expecting that empowering its Shia majority would translate into democratic dividends and gratitude for having toppled its chief enemy, Saddam Hussein. “But,” Cornell says, “the U.S. Iraq war did not go according to plan, and the missteps of the U.S. opened an opportunity for Iran to step in and work not only to counter the U.S. presence in Iraq, but to assert its own influence in the vacuum created by the United States.” How utterly nonplussed Bush and his planners must have been at the frigid welcome they received in Iraq, one of many dramatic twists in the epic, Why Do They Hate Us? The real story of our “failure” in Iraq is therefore the industrious cunning of the mullahs, who thwarted another democratization effort. Bone-headed accounts such as this read much like the internal assessments of the Reagan era, couched in the purity and virtue of its own foreign policy. A 1983 intelligence memo declared that “Moscow has chosen to allow its relationship with three successive US Administrations to deteriorate in substantial measure because of its refusal to moderate its aggressive pursuit of Third World opportunities.” Like Russia before it, Iran today is not to cultivate allies, only obedience, and fold whenever the legitimacy of its power projection comes into doubt.
In one of the few in-depth studies of the event, Ervand Abrahamian writes in his history of the U.S. and Britain’s 1953 overthrow of Iran’s parliamentary regime that “the coup left a deep imprint on the country—not only on its polity and economy but also on its popular culture and what some would call mentality.” Governments the world over suffered similar fates throughout the 20th century, many of whom are yet to fully recover even after obtaining a degree of independence. Materially, continues Abrahamian, “the coup set back by at least two decades the whole process of oil nationalization throughout the world—especially in the Middle East and North Africa.” Along with converting the country into a vicious dictatorship that amassed one of the worst records of torture and political repression in the world, Iranians were not granted reprieve from the scramble for its oil resources. Eventually, the era of decolonization saw one victim after another begin to retake, or at least reorient the control of, its foreign-owned resources. Major producers slowly “took over their oil resources, and, having learned from the past, took precautions to make sure the oil companies would not return victorious.”
In the wake of the October 1973 war between Egypt and Israel, and the ensuing oil embargo, Henry Kissinger pioneered the method by which the excess petrodollars of the region’s major oil producers would be recycled into expensive capital-intensive projects procured by the West. The aim was to establish a multinational counter to the price-setting powers of the producers by setting up what analyst David Spiro called an “oligopsony,” or a “cartel of consumers.” “Large scale development projects and other projects will put the Shah, for example, in a position where he must sell oil in order to sustain the commitments he has made,” Kissinger told a group of congressmen in June 1975. Diplomatic historian Jacob Darwin Hamblin’s review of the record finds that “Nuclear power generation became a key part of that petroleum strategy” primarily to free up oil for lucrative sales on the international market. Assistance from Western institutions was crucial. Eager to begin feeding from the trough, “French negotiators convinced Iran to build its enrichment facility in France, and the decision turned out to be a serious blunder for Iran, tying up considerable sums of capital.” It ultimately proved “particularly good for France, which was able to secure its own enrichment future with external money, and have the facility at home, in the southern provincial village of Pierrelatte. Most importantly, the project absorbed an enormous amount of Iranian capital and gave France some leverage in its negotiations with Iran in any future oil crisis.” The arrangement quickly bore fruit. “We may have broken OPEC,” Kissinger positively reported to President Ford in March 1975.
Before long, Iranian authorities grew skeptical of this scheme and sought more independence in its quest for peaceful nuclear energy. Having ratified the Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1970, Iran was legally entitled to produce on its own soil, access, and dispose of its nuclear energy as it saw fit, granted that it was for peaceful purposes. Breaking free of external control became a key rallying cry for the young protestors who eventually spearheaded the removal of the Shah. “The behavior of the United States reinforced Iranian desires for diversification in partnership,” says Hamblin, and, since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, to no one’s surprise, “Russia has been particularly helpful in picking up where Europeans left off,” providing technology and know-how on drastically different terms. In light of other changes in international political alignment, China has also become the primary purchaser of Iranian oil, particularly worrying because it “is too big for Trump to bully now,” as Bloomberg Businessweek has recently noted.
Little wonder why editors in the business press seem to want nothing more than to restore the pre-1979 system. Trump has wondered aloud why Iran would want to produce nuclear energy while in possession of so much oil, and many commentators now look forward to an agreement which would see it again import its enriched uranium, ostensibly from Western sources. Put differently, Iranian energy-independence would prove disastrous for U.S. control.
Throughout the 1990s, the reformist government of President Khatami suggested a track for negotiations aiming to resolve all the most pressing areas of antagonism, including “weapons of mass destruction, a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the future of Lebanon’s Hizbullah organisation and cooperation with the UN nuclear safeguards agency [IAEA],” as reported in the Financial Times in 2006. The EU urged that it be pursued, but was forced by the Clinton administration to fall in line and retreat. A similar situation followed the U.S.-British invasion of Iraq in 2003, when the U.S. similarly rebuffed Iran-EU efforts. In May 2010, with encouragement of the Obama administration, Turkey and Brazil offered to help mediate the growing impasse, proposing that Iran would export close to 1,2000 kg of its low-enriched uranium to France and Russia for conversion into civilian-grade fuel, after which it would be returned for its domestic industries. The next month, the U.S. killed it at the Security Council in the form of Resolution 1929, opting for more sanctions.
In a 2013 profile on the current Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, specialist Akbar Ganji outlines a solid rationale that Iran could easily adopt, in light of the preceding 46 years of antipathy towards the Islamic Republic: “Khamenei suspects that even if all of Iran’s nuclear facilities were closed down, or opened up to inspections and monitoring, Western governments would simply pocket the concessions and raise other issues—such as terrorism, human rights, or Israel—as excuses for maintaining their pressure and pursuing regime change,” citing Libya’s Qaddafi and Saddam’s Iraq, who were still invaded after having relinquished their weapons of mass destruction. The regime still chose the path of negotiations, concluding with the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, subject to the most rigorous sanctions regime in the world, hopeful sign for anyone worried about a threat from Iran. The E3, flouting Russian and Chinese efforts to salvage diplomacy, reimposed severe “snapback” sanctions in September that will further strangle the Iranian economy, in what is billed psychotically as another effort to kickstart negotiations. As the documentary record reveals, Iran ought to be praised for the supreme restraint and patience it has exercised in the face of these absurd machinations, wherein threats, sanctions, cyberattacks, and outright bombings are marketed as peace inducements.
The power wielded by the U.S. in certain areas has since grown significantly since the pre-revolutionary period, particularly in the sphere of economic warfare, otherwise known as international finance. Authors of a 2022 article in the American Journal of Sociology find that the financialization of U.S. warfare has greatly expanded its ability to instill submission to its commercial designs abroad. They argue that the policy “works like a virus by requiring infected corporate giants in high-risk countries to act as if they were U.S. legal persons and therefore to always follow U.S. law over other rules,” subordinating them to a U.S.-dominated “surveillance capitalism.” In the case of Iran, the U.S. began by targeting smaller, defenseless firms, then gradually enlarged its bullying operation to include several juggernauts of global capital. “[S]tarting with a few nondescript companies dealing with Iran’s shadow economy, now the largest European banks, the world’s largest telecom equipment providers, the world’s largest aircraft manufacturer, the world’s largest oil companies, and the world’s largest rolling stock manufacturers have all seen their inner rules reconfigured by U.S. sanctions law, forcing them to pull out of global markets if not complying with U.S. sanctions law.” Keeping Iran’s economy dependent on oil sales operating in an international market would therefore keep it in a realm in which the U.S. still wields tremendous leverage.
Much the way during the Cold War the USSR was the ubiquitous specter used to justify U.S. intervention throughout the world—invoking political and military links, both real and fabricated—Iran has been assigned a similar role in the Middle East, presented as a near omnipotent boogeyman that has implanted its links deep in Arab states. This presentation greatly benefits U.S.-Israeli efforts to expand its warmaking in a region still considered critical for international power. October 7, it can be argued, handed Israel its own 9/11—an act of terrorism so severe that it can implement its most wide-ranging contingency plans while above suspicion.
In 2009, Anthony Cordesman wrote that during previous, bloody sojourns in Gaza, dignified as “operations” in Israeli parlance, the IDF “did not go to war with plans to conduct a sustained occupation [of Gaza], to try to destroy Hamas or all of its forces, or to reintroduce the Palestinian Authority and Fatah, although such contingency plans and exercises may have existed.” The past 24 months reveal that they certainly did exist, and would be implemented if given an adequate pretext. Internal plans likely stretch back much further, but one of the early articulations came from dovish Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who famously admitted to reporters in 1992, “I wish the Gaza Strip would sink into the water, but I cannot find for it such a solution.” His extremist statement did not spare him from the bullets of an even more extreme assassin three years later, but the depth of the sentiment he expressed endured in Israeli politics across a wide spectrum. In July 2014, the ultra-right Knesset member Moshe Feiglin wrote a seven-point prescription for Gaza, which reads like an exact playbook of what Israel has implemented since October 7. After issuing one official “ultimatum,” Israel’s army will seek to destroy the “enemy population” of Gaza, allowing those who wish to leave an outlet into the Sinai, hence Israel’s current need to control the Rafah. “Sinai is not far from Gaza and they can leave. This will be the limit of Israel’s humanitarian efforts,” he asserts. “All the military and infrastructural targets will be attacked with no consideration for ‘human shields’ or ‘environmental damage,’” he continues, after which the IDF will oversee a complete siege of the enclave. Then, “the IDF will conquer the entire Gaza, using all the means necessary to minimize any harm to our soldiers, with no other considerations.” Occupied Gaza will finally be absorbed into Greater Israel, as it is “part of our Land and we will remain there forever,” also helping to ease the burgeoning housing crisis in Israel. Feiglin is confident that the few wretched Arabs that remain can be paid to leave, or accept the supremacy of their new Israeli wardens.
The Arab delegations assembled in Cairo know full well that their efforts amount to political theater. A trivial point, worth reiterating, the U.S. and Israel have not spent the last two years destroying Gaza to simply institute a ceasefire, allow in massive humanitarian aid, rid it—somehow—of Hamas, spend upwards of $100 billion to rebuild an entire civilization, and then return it to the Palestinians, all of whom are still cut off from the West Bank. No, the infinite credit line required for such an effort is earmarked to convert the area into another province of Israel. Capitalizing on the recent killing of six Israelis in Jerusalem, Smotrich also announced his plan to annex 82% of the West Bank, in the process slandering the Palestinian Authority with the same hysterical rhetoric typically reserved for Hamas. In other words, there are no more “good Arabs” anywhere, and Israel must exert its control directly. He added that “the villages from which the terrorists came should look like Rafah and Beit Hanoun,” i.e., completely flattened and emptied of its current residents, paving the way for Israeli seizure.
Soon, the Egyptians will come to realize that the only appropriate humanitarian act left is to begin accepting droves of hapless Palestinians through the Rafah. The refusal to comply with Israel’s ethnic cleansing will therefore be superseded by the need to ensure that all Gazans do not simply die off amidst the rubble of their former environs. September’s Israeli bombing of Doha, meant to murder more of Hamas’s leadership as it considered peace proposals, was yet another stark warning to negotiating parties: Try as you might, our plan is already in full swing. Qatar responded: “As has happened before, the Israelis sabotaged hopes for peace, further prolonging the war and complicating efforts to bring back the hostages.” Cairo would surely be next, pending U.S. willingness to completely scrap the 1978 Camp David Accords, but Israel’s alleged discovery of new tunnels underneath the Philadelphi Corridor have not proven a sufficient ploy. Given that the members allegedly killed in the attack had arrived in from Turkey, with whom Israel does not have a security treaty, Ankara should also be on high alert.
Breach of the Genocide Convention aside, the lesser crime of targeted assassination is hardly discussed. Six UN special rapporteurs condemned the Doha strike, saying it “violates the human right to life, the UN Charter prohibition on excessive use of force, and Qatar’s sovereignty.” In response to the killing of Saleh Al-Arouri just south of Beirut in January, two of the same UN special rapporteurs observed that, “Israel was not exercising self-defence because it presented no evidence that the victims were committing an armed attack on Israel from Lebanese territory,” a key requirement of the UN Charter. One would be hard-pressed to find an Israeli assassination that is not befitting of such a characterization.
Relief for Gazans
After the April 2024 murder of seven aid workers working with the World Central Kitchen, B’Tselem published a report entitled Manufacturing Famine: Israel is committing the war crime of starvation in the Gaza Strip, finding that Israel’s begrudging permission of paltry international aid into the enclave is “clearly too little, too late, and attests to Israel being chiefly responsible for the humanitarian crisis that has, since the war began about six months ago, spiraled into the catastrophe we are witnessing now.” Israel is waging war not only on Gaza’s physical infrastructure, having destroyed cement factories, religious institutions, schools, hospitals, agricultural land, and sewage treatment facilities, but on the future of the very civilization that occupies it. Systematic starvation, when employed as a method of war, is doubly devastating; it not only consumes its immediate victims, like the ill and the elderly, it also severely impairs the development of children, particularly in their first two years of life. As is well-known, half of Gaza is composed of children, ensuring that, long after the current assault has ceased, Palestinians will continue to mire in its hideous effects.
At the end of last February, for example, Israel made its first foray into overseeing direct aid administration in Gaza since the October 7th attacks, in a context Amnesty International characterized as an “already catastrophic humanitarian situation in the entire Gaza strip.” After escorting up to 30 aid trucks to the Nabulsi Roundabout, just southwest of Gaza City, “The events illustrate how a power vacuum in the Gaza Strip, particularly in its bombed-out biggest city in the north [Gaza City], has created a combustible mix of starving people, soldiers and militants that humanitarian experts and military analysts said was destined to blow up sooner or later.” Israel then decided to partake in the aid distribution process more directly, but not without its patented murderous touch, somewhat placating citizens who had worked to disrupt the dispatch of any aid. Instead, crowds of recipients were shot at indiscriminately, and aid workers, by mere virtue of aiding the intended prey, truly court their own demise. “The U.N. and international aid groups have scaled back their missions to the north in recent weeks because of the intensity of the conflict and widespread lawlessness,” TheWall Street Journal reported, resulting in conditions that resemble an archetypal Haitian disaster. More recently, when hospital beds, medical equipment, and medicines dried up, parallels were drawn to famines seen in Darfur and Somalia.
The Freedom Flotilla Coalition of humanitarian, volunteer-crewed boats, which set sail for Gaza in the wake of Israel’s criminal attack on and seizure of the larger Global Sumud Flotilla, has already been attacked in international waters. The flotilla was some 150 nautical miles away from Gaza, with at least eight of its boats already invaded and crews kidnapped – the Abd Elkarim Eid, Alaa Al-Najar, Anas Al-Sharif, Gaza Sunbird, Leïla Khaled, Milad, Soul of My Soul, and Um Saad. The Conscience, one of the few powered boats in the flotilla, kept sailing longest despite being under attack by an Israeli military helicopter, but has now also been seized and its crew abducted.
Footage from one of the boats show an Israeli soldier attacking a mast-mounted camera:
A statement from the flotilla organiser calls on governments of those attacked to act urgently. Shamefully, the UK government has already said that Israel’s criminal attacks on humanitarians in international waters is a “matter for the Israeli government”.
A statement from Palestinian legal group Adalah condemns yet another flagrant violation of international law by the occupation regime as it continues to starve Gaza:
Adalah condemns Israel’s assault and unlawful interception of the Freedom Flotilla Coalition’s flagship vessel, the Conscience, and eight sailboats of the Thousands Madleens — a coordinated humanitarian initiative sailing together to confront Israel’s illegal blockade of Gaza amid the ongoing genocide against Palestinians.
Before losing all communication early this morning, participants aboard the Conscience — primarily doctors, nurses, and journalists — reported being attacked by an Israeli military helicopter, while Israeli naval forces simultaneously intercepted and boarded the Thousands Madleens sailboats. The vessels were located approximately 120 nautical miles from Gaza, deep in international waters, when the attack took place. According to Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the military is transporting participants to an Israeli port.
This new mission, which set sail with around 145 participants from around the world, sought to challenge Israel’s illegal and deadly siege of Gaza.
Israel’s assault on unarmed civilians at sea and its seizure of humanitarian vessels constitute a grave breach of international law and highlight the impunity with which Israel continues to act.
Adalah wrote to Israeli authorities to inform them that it will represent all flotilla participants and has demanded immediate access to them upon their arrival in Israel. Adalah will challenge the unlawful detention and the confiscation of the ships and aid.
Below are pre-attack videos from some of the national delegations, including UK, participating. Individuals have also recorded their own personal versions.
Pensando che fosse una semplice rappresentazione, ho partecipato a una serata in cui tre membri (due ragazzi e una ragazza penso di poco più giovani di me che ho 36 anni) di una compagnia teatrale hanno in realtà fatto una sorta di laboratorio in cui (è più complesso di così ma non voglio farla lunga) ci hanno fatto ad esempio camminare scalzi avanti e indietro nel salone in cui eravamo, a volte con sottofondo musicale, per trovare il ritmo nei movimenti, la coordinazione, riappropriarci della nostra fisicità, imparare la coordinazione guardandoci costantemente gli uni gli altri, spesso entrando in contatto. Ad un certo punto la ragazza pesca me per provare a farmi fare certi movimenti e dovevo seguirla guardandola spesso dritto negli occhi, cose tipo sorreggerle le braccia. Poi ad esempio per due volte mi si è lasciata andare addosso e io ho dovuto cercare di accompagnarla fino a terra - io faccio il magazziniere e di pesi ne sposto anche a manina, e vi assicuro che lei (lo dico perché lei per prima ci faceva ironia sopra, fa sollevamento pesi) non era esattamente una piuma.
Ora. Io, per quanto una parte del mio carattere non sia esattamente estroversa, non ho normalmente problemi col contatto fisico o visivo (per lo meno con le persone amiche strette), ma quelli sono stati i minuti più... non voglio dire imbarazzanti perché non è quello, potrei dire 'interiormente scioccanti' che io abbia mai vissuto nella mia intera esistenza. Non solo la parte di attività con la ragazza (e non in quanto donna, penso mi sarebbe successo anche con gli altri due), ma considerando tutto l'insieme.
Mentre tornavo a casa, mi sentivo talmente agitato che ho dovuto fermare l'auto, spegnerla, prendere fiato e ho cacciato un urlo sfogatorio talmente forte che ho sentito male nella gola.
Una volta rincasato mi sono fiondato a letto ma per molto tempo non ho preso sonno, il mio cervello voleva dimenticare tutto, avevo continui scatti con le braccia.
Il giorno dopo al lavoro ogni tanto mi tornavano in mente dei momenti della serata e mi mancava il fiato, dovevo fermarmi e respirare forzatamente, e qua e là altri scatti inconsulti alle mani, che spesso mi portavo alla faccia. Tornando verso casa ho avuto una crisi di pianto.
Adesso, il giorno ancora successivo, sto cercando di tornare alla normalità, ripetendomi che era una situazione che non faceva per me e che quindi non devo farmi troppi problemi per come mi sono sentito.
Sembrerà esagerato da dire, ma mi sento esattamente come il testo di Somewhere I belong dei Linkin Park, pressoché parola per parola.
A posteriori avrei potuto dire che volevo interrompere perché mi sentivo a disagio, e sono sicuro che l'avrebbero fatto, ma tant'è.
Non fraintendetemi: il laboratorio in se è stato molto carino e coinvolgente, loro tre molto bravi, niente da dire.
Vi è mai successa una cosa simile?
Come accennavo prima, io non ho problemi con la mia fisicità, di per sè nemmeno con gli estranei (tipo se sono in fila al supermercato e uno mi tocca il braccio per chiedermi qualcosa non mi dà fastidio), ma quello che è successo due giorni fa... quello mi ha scosso. E non mi spiego il perché. Se mi direte che ho dei problemi lo accetterò, forse ho bisogno di sentirmelo dire.
Greetings, I need MFA and a few other things for work. I'd like to swap to a dumb phone on my off times. I don't want to constantly swap out a SIM as it eventually damages the card itself.
What are my options? And is there a dumb phone you recommended?
I don’t see why you couldn’t have two separate devices - a basic smartphone that has only the apps you need for work (and no other personal information on it such as photos, contacts, etc.) and a “dumbphone” for personal use.
You can use the smartphone without a SIM card if you don’t need to receive calls or texts (some authenticators only require you to enter a code in their app instead of calling or texting you). There are also VOIP and virtual numbers you that you can use on that device if you need call and text features without giving away your personal number.
I like the rugged CAT dumb phones and believe Nokia still makes decent ones.
Can you talk with the IT team? I was able to switch my MFA to a Yubikey. They rolled out the MFA policy quite recently and I immediately sent an email like "Hello. I do not have a smartphone. What are my options?" They also had the option for SMS verification, but I had been looking at getting a Yubikey for myself anyway so might as well get work to pay for it.
I mean, that's on the IT department in most countries. Like if you don't have a smart phone, you don't have a smart phone. If they want it for the job usually they would need to either provide an alternative or provide the device.
do you call much. tracfone its easy to pick up cards or up your minutes online. their unlimited is fine to but honestly I find the minutes more useful as I don't even like being on the phone.
My goal is minimalism. I'm not sure if I will stick to it. But I want a distraction free life. No ads. No TV. No time durdling on my cell phone. No corporate overlords.
My wife and I realized how distracting a phone can be and I just want some good quality time away from it. But I work in tech in tech need authenticatorsamd on-call functionality. I want to separate my work and personal life as much as I can.
Get a Pixel, put Grapheme OS on it. Set up a work profile. The work profile can be turned off manually or on a schedule, blocking any app within it including Google and any other stuff.
On your personal profile, use only Fdroid & Accrescent for your basic needs.
The problem I have is pixels are really expensive. I just use base model phones. I know the used market is a thing. But really I just don't want as many distractions at times.
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Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov has said that the United States must "understand the depth and severity of the consequences" should it decide to provide Ukraine with long-range Tomahawk cruise missiles.
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German police will soon have the power to shoot down drones, Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt announced Wednesday, following a wave of suspected Russian surveillance flights over military sites, airports, and key infrastructure.
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Trump’s second term escalates as federal troop deployments in Oregon and Illinois test the limits of presidential power and America’s democratic restraint.
eldavi
in reply to jackeroni • • •anyone who has to work to earn a living is a prostitute; we're just using our bodies a slightly different way.
this guy is special because he's rich enough to guarantee that he doesn't have to, he just loves doing it; he's not a prostitute, he's just the ruling's class' willing removed.