That being so, it should surprise exactly no one that AI companies exploit underpaid workers jn the global south while commuting ecocide; that they plagiarise at an unprecedented scale; that they’re actively undermining education, academia, the arts, the internet - every possible human field.
That AI isn’t actually intelligent doesn’t actually matter: the goal - the sales pitch - is “what if you could profit from labour without having to pay for it,” which implicitly situates labour as valueless. It’s never been about creating a tech utopia; it’s about not having to respect workers.
I don’t think we talk enough about how the foundational, most aspirational premise of the AI industry is “what if there was a human-level intelligence that didn’t have human rights.” Like. Exploitation is literally the whole point! Of COURSE they hold human life, intelligence and labour in contempt!
In short, we, the black and the white, deeply need each other here if we are really to become a nation-if we are really, that is, to achieve our identity, our maturity, as men and women. To create one nation has proved to be a hideously difficult task; there is certainly no need now to create two, one black and one white. But white men with far more political power than that possessed by the Nation of Islam movement have been advocating exactly this, in effect, for genera-tions.
I’m always thinking about Baldwin’s phrase, “achieving our identity” as a multiracial nation
Added!
“Can capital discipline the mad king? Find out this week!”
The South ending Reconstruction and plunging their populations into a backward looking culture and economy until it was forced to modernize by the Civil Rights movement is imo a very clean parallel.
very aspect of life in this country is designed so that people do not form bonds or relationships with other people, it's wild to watch in action. Never seen divide and conquer applied this rigorously to a domestic population that is not under foreign occupation
It’s not a war crime, it’s a “hallucination”
They killed 180 children and their teachers in a double-tap strike on a school. The girls were 7 to 12 years old.
Myths about Passover by Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg (excerpt) A lot of literalist religious perspectives, both Jewish and Christian, presume that the Exodus story is a faithful recording of historical fact. But the historical accuracy of the Exodus is hotly debated among scholars. Archeologists and Egyptologists have never found evidence that could be directly connected to Israelites' enslavement or departure, or of a large group of people-600,000 men, plus women and children—wandering the Sinai Peninsula for 40 years. Regardless, some truths are deeper than history: The story of enslavement and liberation is a deep, indelible facet of Jewish theology. And a mature faith can hold an expansive understanding of God and holy texts that embraces the ways this story—no matter whether it happened historically—helps us see who we are and the nature of our obligations to those oppressed today.
From my family’s homebrew haggadah:
Also a reminder of how rapidly the political right is radicalizing
My hottest take as an atheist Jew is my belief that progressive Christianity is the only movement capable of achieving the profound reconstruction of American society that leftists desire
Great piece by @lgtobin.bsky.social in today’s News-Miner!
The university that taught me who I am is now turning its back on inclusion www.newsminer.com/opinion/comm...
Damn
I’m over in the SSB, where is this??
This is why I’m very adamant about refusing to accept the slippage in terms like “identity politics” and “woke” I simply cannot accept the idea that decades of theory and work can simply be rewritten by dipshits on the internet bowing to peer pressure.
god THIS right here! if you accept that the people who are temporarily wielding political power get to refine the words you use to think and communicate, then maybe you had no business doing liberatory work in the first place
These repeated attempts to "communicate" with AI left me feeling adrift from my own language. I thought of the opposite of poetry. Poetry sets you adrift from language in service of connection to meaning and other people; this is how it recreates language. This set me adrift in service of nothing.
Agreed, and I think the current media/information environment is so bad that holding any bad actors accountable is pretty unlikely
truth before reconciliation, a concept
EXCLUSIVE: At more than 30 installations, U.S. commanders told troops the war on Iran is a Christian war.
The Military Religious Freedom Foundation has been “inundated” with more than 110 complaints.
One NCO said they were told the U.S. war is to bring about Armageddon and the return of Jesus…
They are literally running with “we have always been at war with Eurasia.” Unreal.
Is humanity forming en-masse? for lo, tyrants tremble, crowns grow dim, The earth, restive, confronts a new era, perhaps a general divine war, No one knows what will happen next, such portents fill the days and nights; Years prophetical! the space ahead as I walk, as I vainly try to pierce it, is full of phantoms, Unborn deeds, things soon to be, project their shapes around me, This incredible rush and heat, this strange ecstatic fever of dreams O years! Your dreams O years, how they penetrate through me! (I know not whether I sleep or wake;) The perform'd America and Europe grow dim, retiring in shadow behind me, The unperform'd, more gigantic than ever, advance, advance upon me.
Whitman, “Years of the Modern”
Eisenhower
I think about this Tony Benn speech much more than I used to
If kids are old enough to play war games they’re old enough to struggle with the politics of war games
People hate on Toys (1992) for being a weird film (it is!) but we had it on VHS and this scene had a real impact on me as a kid
Joe Dante and Hideo Kojima are close seconds but no director was more right about the future of war than Barry Levinson with the 1992 box office flop Toys.
