I think David Van Zandt has a vendetta against Philip Weiss. Racists tend to be unfeeling or feel contempt for ‘lesser’ racial groups, and are merely indifferent to their suffering. The most intense ‘hate’ in hate groups comes from the intensity of feeling racists have toward other people of their own race they perceive as ‘race traitors’ - who demonstrate that people who share their culture and heritage can afford empathy for the ‘other’ whom racists believe are unworthy of concern.

Truthout is a reputable website, with good journalism and reporting. There’s a number of other websites that report favorably on Palestinians, and don’t toe Van Zandt’s line that criticism of Israel and antisemitism are the same thing. They have higher ‘Credibility’ and ‘Factual Reporting’ scores than Truthout. But Truthout occasionally rehosts reporting from Mondoweiss, a site that Van Zandt has labelled as ‘antisemitic,’ and therefore Truthout must be punished for giving support to the most notorious enemy of Israel – ‘self-hating’ Jews.

Thanks for the catch.

Since Zionists struggle to make a persuasive argument against freedom, justice, and equality for all people throughout the land, they seek instead to attack the message and messenger. When Palestinians proclaim “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” many Zionists argue that this is a Palestinian call for genocide. But as historian Maha Nassar has noted, there has never been an “official Palestinian position calling for the forced removal of Jews from Palestine.” The links between this phrase and eliminationism might be the product of “an Israeli media campaign following the 1967 war that claimed Palestinians wished to ‘throw Jews into the sea.’ ” Jewish groups such as the American Jewish Committee also claim that the slogan is antisemitic because it has been taken up by militant groups such as the Palestine Liberation Organization, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and Hamas. But as Nassar writes, the phrase predates these uses, and has its origins as “part of a larger call to see a secular democratic state established in all of historic Palestine.”

What Does “From the River to the Sea” Really Mean? --jewishcurrents.org

HuffPost was founded by four people, including Arianna Huffington, CEO of Thrive Global, and Andrew Breitbart, who also built the alt-right outlet Breitbart News. Breitbart was also instrumental in founding The Drudge Report, an early popular news site that promoted news and opinion favorable to the Republican Party, and was The Huffington Post’s direct inspiration, with the focus instead on the Democratic party and ‘progressive’ values.

Tom Nicholas is really great in this piece. SLRPNK link

People who get angry at Just Stop Oil tactics are just showing their ignorance of civil rights and protest history.

Alex de Vries predicted that current AI technology could be on track to annually consume as much electricity as the entire country of Ireland (29.3 terawatt-hours per year). For comparison, the Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index suggests Bitcoin uses 141-160 terawatt-hours (TWhs) of electricity annually. That’s ~0.7% of the world’s consumed electricity in 2022. The process of minting cryptocurrency is a very public activity, so the numbers are difficult to fudge. The cost of bringing extremely expensive nuclear reactors back online and driving demand for environmentally destructive Uranium mining and processing suggests de Vries’ guess was conservative.

I’m reminded of Jevon’s Paradox as applied to energy generation. I hope the AI bubble pops before much more investment goes into nuclear energy.

‘AI’ in the sense of machine learning algorithms is very old technology, and has seen revolutionary applications at every step of its development. Eliza was created in the 1960s and demonstrated that if the test of a computer’s artificial intelligence was whether it could fool a human that it was sentient, the value of that test depended very heavily on how willing the human correspondent was to ‘fill in the blanks.’ The results of those experiments show that the average person is extremely willing to fill in the blanks even when the technology is full of gaping holes.

In the podcast, they’re talking specifically about ChatGPT-style technology, its flaws, and the willingness of people to ‘fill in the blanks’ in a new dimension – to assume LLM technology is a truckload more graphics cards or a nuclear reactor away from what sci-fi writers mean when they say ‘Artificial Intelligence’ – and that is evidently false.

The petro-billionaire people who brought you “The Line” are joining up with the badly conceived Octopus Crane Tower idea people to bring you something that definitely will never be built and probably has deep conceptual flaws.

The important take away from this performance art is that the people causing global warming and who stand to benefit from pumping even more carbon into the air to are working on clever solutions to reverse it, and you can continue living your life as if things will eventually return to the pre-climate crisis status quo.