floofloof

joined 2 years ago
[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 hours ago

It's a case of what Upton Sinclair observed:

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

This must be that famous and unique commitment to free speech Americans talk about so much.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago) (1 children)

What a country, deporting its own citizens. Quite the look, internationally.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago)

Very brave of them. I too used to stand up to school bullies privately, at home, in my mind.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

Some things are never forgotten.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago)

I recently learned that Steve Ballmer is a director of and major donor to the Jewish National Fund, which supports the Israeli military and the settlers in the West Bank and around Gaza. This made me like Steve Ballmer slightly less.

https://shopisrael.com/blogs/support/does-steve-ballmer-support-israel

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_National_Fund

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I'm not saying we should tolerate fascists, or expend all our energies trying to understand why a hateful person is hateful. But we have to recognize that they're not monsters or subhumans, they're people. Cruel and hateful people, but people like us. Those tendencies are in us all, but in some people they become totally dominant and in other people they shrink until they're almost not there. But they're there.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

They are worthless animals not fit to be called humans

That's the kind of attitude towards fascists that leads to complacency and a belief that it couldn't happen here or we're better than that. The most important thing to understand about a fascist is that they're a person like you. No one is immune to the risk of falling into it. All it takes is the right circumstances to incentivize a person, and there's a decent chance they will take up fascism.

If we hold that Nazis were monsters, or subhumans, or some other kind of beast entirely unlike us, we will never dig deep to understand what makes fascism appealing or what needs it serves, and we will miss the warning signs in ourselves and those around us should we start sliding towards it. I think most Americans missed their own country's capacity for fascism until it was right on top of them, because they had spent decades imagining the Nazis as some special kind of inhuman monster. That attitude is dangerous. Fascists are ordinary people like us.

[–] [email protected] 122 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (43 children)

Torvalds is still very active on the Linux kernel. As far as I know, he's in charge of it and makes major decisions about its direction.

Bill Gates retired from Microsoft in 2008.

 

cross-posted from: https://piefed.zip/post/129794

British police forces have signed contracts with a controversial US tech giant to buy AI-powered software that uses data about an individual’s race, sex life, health and political beliefs, it can be revealed. > > An internal police memo obtained by The i Paper and Liberty Investigates confirms an intention to “nationally” apply the “Nectar” intelligence system, currently deployed as a pilot by the Bedfordshire force after being developed with Silicon Valley data analysis group Palantir Technologies. > > The document, obtained under freedom of information rules, shows how the Palantir system is designed to bring together dozens of existing law enforcement databases into a single computing platform to draw up detailed profiles of suspects, as well as collate information on victims of crime, witnesses, and vulnerable individuals including children.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

The USA doesn't really do the constitution any more.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago

Why would he? It's all he has.

 

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/67401038

The nuclear scientists were killed using a special weapon whose details were barred from publication, Channel 12 says.

The 10th nuclear scientist was killed shortly after the other nine, as part of the overnight Thursday-Friday Israeli operation, which included strikes on Iran’s ballistic missile program and the Natanz nuclear site, along with the elimination of top members of the Islamic Republic’s military leadership, the network says.

The nuclear scientists were all killed while they were sleeping in their beds, with Israel deciding to carry out the assassinations simultaneously so that there wouldn’t be time to tip off those being targeted.

The scientists apparently believed they were safe from such targeting in their homes, a senior Israeli official tells Channel 12, noting that previously assassinated nuclear scientists were killed while heading to their cars after work.

Israel had been tracking Iranian nuclear scientists for years and the ten killed last week were marked for assassination in November of last year, Channel 12 says.

Just when I feel like dystopian news can't really disturb me anymore...

Leaving this totally unrelated article about Palantir and Israel here for absolutely no reason at all...

How Israel Uses AI in Gaza—And What It Might Mean for the Future of Warfare:

 A program known as “The Gospel” generates suggestions for buildings and structures militants may be operating in. “Lavender” is programmed to identify suspected members of Hamas and other armed groups for assassination, from commanders all the way down to foot soldiers. “Where’s Daddy?” reportedly follows their movements by tracking their phones in order to target them—often to their homes, where their presence is regarded as confirmation of their identity. The air strike that follows might kill everyone in the target's family, if not everyone in the apartment building.

Abraham, whose report relies on conversations with six Israeli intelligence officers with first-hand experience in Gaza operations after Oct. 7, quoted targeting officers as saying they found themselves deferring to the Lavender program, despite knowing that it produces incorrect targeting suggestions in roughly 10% of cases.

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