I'm an erstwhile techno-optimist who was disabused of his Panglossian views by the Utah Data Center, drone warfare (now advanced to the point of remotely piloted rifles gunning people down on the streets of Gaza), crypto ponzis, AI enclosing and monetizing decades of humanity's collective mental efforts, and the general indifference or even embrace by most of the tech community of all of the above. Technology has liberatory potential, but not in the hands currently wielding it.
Well the header at least offers an accurate disclaimer as to the general state of October 7 discourse. Naturally, the author launches immediately in the first paragraph into lurid tales of rape unsupported by evidence, the standard for this sort of atrocity propaganda, which has been used to launder the case for a genocide which Israel and the U.S. have carried out over the past year.
" I can’t forget the semi-naked corpse of Shani Louk, paraded around Gaza on the flatbed of a truck, as hordes of men cheered on her rapists and crowded around the jeep to spit on her body"
No one knows if Shani was raped but the sight of her kidnappers spitting on her dying/dead half naked body and desecrating her to the sounds of cheering crowds is available for all to see in a video. In that kind of atmosphere of barbarism I think sexual assaults/rape isn't that far fetched. Her pelvis indeed seemed broken, who knows how and why.
At my company the CEO sent out a long email after October 7 lamenting how horrible and unjustified it was. Did the same occur at any of these BigTech MIC puppet companies?
Right, so, the Silicon Valley workplace is in fact a forum for political perspectives, as long as they're in line with the imperatives of the MIC and the profits to be made from selling to it.
The parent's criticism was of the American government. Also, Israel is certainly not acting more restrained in Gaza; civilian deaths are well over 100K at this point.
Sounds like a very vindictive policy in service of a mandate that ultimately turned out to be essentially useless at reducing the incidence of first-time COVID infections.
It was unscientific to impose any mandates for COVID vaccines whatsoever. Aside from the fact that the virus itself was not particularly dangerous to the vast majority of people, the vaccines themselves were already well known to provide very little (if any) protection against infection or transmission before any mandates were even imposed. To say nothing of the fact that it was not possible to have proven their safety after less than 2 years since their invention.
> It was unscientific to impose any mandates for COVID vaccines whatsoever.
Not only was it unscientific, to the point that they had to censor their opponents and coordinate the institutions to shun any dissenting scientists and experts, the mandate was found to be blatantly unconstitutional.
Do you think we're currently carrying out a genocide in Gaza because it's what was indicated as desired through "feedback from diplomatic peers and voting citizens"?
wow, I didn't know there were still "Russia is losing the war and on the brink of collapse" people still kicking around. Never underestimate the power of narrative!
The poster seems to be arguing that what we consider "terrorism" can be justified sometimes, but people have a need to whitewash their heroes rather than perform these justifications, so I think he is on your side
That's not how collateral damage works. The moral and legal responsibility is on the one dropping the bombs. As horrible as the US wars were, when we decided to kill Bin Laden, we sent a special operations team at night instead of flattening entire villages in Pakistan.
The indiscriminate killing that Israel is doing in Gaza and Lebanon is unprecedented since the second World War. Justifying it will normalize civilian casualties in future wars that with be disastrous for everyone.
Otherwise protected targets like hospitals lose their protected status if they're used as a base of military operations or for other similar purposes.
And the US didn't send a spec ops team to get Bin Laden because they were worried about the Geneva Conventions. They sent one because they wanted to make absolutely certain that they got their target (see Bin Laden's escape at Tora Bora in 2001 for an example of this) and because they were operating in Pakistan so showing up with a whole brigade or carpet bombing the compound wouldn't have gone over well with the Pakistani government. It already didn't go over well with just a surgical strike by spec ops, it would have been much worse if it was done by a larger show of force.
Okay, well then if government buildings house any members of the IDF or apartheid South Africa's military, then certainly they are also legitimate targets and it is not "terrorism" to destroy them with bombs? Or, conversely, the label must also be applied to IDF sorties?
>Okay, well then if government buildings house any members of the IDF or apartheid South Africa's military, then certainly they are also legitimate targets and it is not "terrorism" to destroy them with bombs?
Only if you ignore the distinctions between what was essentially a civil war fought by insurgents (like in Apartheid South Africa) and a war between two sovereign powers.
What percentage of Gaza, would you say, has to be leveled and carpet bombed before you would no longer characterize the Israelis as "limiting collateral damage"?
The decisions about which buildings to bomb are made by AI in order to select targets faster than humans can generate and review them manually. When you say making individual decisions, you mean through AI automation. This info comes from primary sources.
Showing restraint with atomic weapons is hardly a pass for lesser violence
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