Israel has been calling Palestinian fighters “terrorists” to justify its slaughter of Gaza.
Breakthrough News journalist, Eugene Puryear, rips this narrative apart, explaining the long history of oppressed and colonized people being demonized and called terrorists and savage to justify the continued occupation of those people. No different than the Native resistance to American colonization, slave rebellions in the Americas, the Haitian Revolution, Palestinians are resisting Israeli colonialism, not out of bloodlust as the media has portrayed it, but because of decades of land thefts, massacres, second-class citizenship and the denial of the right to return that has persisted for decades.
as in anyone espousing the ideology of instilling fear as a weapon.
I wish that was what the word “terrorist” means.
It has always meant anyone using asymmetric tactics to oppose states or capitalism, both violent and non-violent. If it simply meant using fear as a weapon, then every state that has prisons and police would be terrorist.
The standard usage of the word is so hypocritical that it has become an authoritarian allegiance-signifying pejorative without any deeper meaning.
If it simply meant using fear as a weapon, then every state that has prisons and police would be terrorist.
Well… you said it 🙈
The Oxford definition adds “unlawful” as an extra requirement, but I’d readily call Iran’s morality police “terrorist”, despite being lawful and state sponsored.
I agree Iran uses fear to control its citizens, but that’s a pretty facile statement in an English speaking community. How do you feel about Anastasija Kukhta or Mikhail Lazakovich, both convicted of terrorism?
Russia and Belarus also use fear to control their citizens. Setting a place on fire to make the state fear you, definitely can be called terrorism. Asking for sanctions against a state… hm, kind of? Technically, many of the sanctions against Russia are also intended to instill fear, including amongst civilians so they stop supporting their state. Making the EU fear whether it will have enough fuel for the winter, is another case.
There’s a lot of terrorising going around these days.
The word is useless for describing violent acts in a meaningful way. It can mean making children traumatized with bombs, or making HOA members afraid their property value will decrease with graffiti, vastly different actions and outcomes.
No one who wants to be taken seriously should use the word “terrorist” in a descriptive context. It is not a meaningful word, it’s a noise people make when the word they actually mean is socially inappropriate or politically inopportune.
The word is useless for describing violent acts in a meaningful way
Agree.
It is not a meaningful word
Disagree.
“Terrorism” has a clear meaning, and observing when people use it, or avoid using it, is even more meaningful, as proven by those examples.
PS: I’ve been called a “no freeloading terrorist”, a “TV remote terrorist”, and a “cleaning terrorist”. It may not tell you much about what I did, but it should convey enough meaning about what they were thinking.
So long as I can disable it, thats all I care about. If people want to use it, go for it. But I dont want my personal desktop use to train an AI, or have it butt in like Cortana.
I get how it could be useful in certain settings but I feel like its offering help for a problem that doesnt exist most of the time. Like, do most people need generative AI to complete everyday desktop tasks?
Also this sounds like a potential privacy nightmare, even for Microsoft.
Yeah, it sounds like a problem with a contributor to Shutterstock not following the terms of use. The person who put together the marketing materials for Loki was just using stock images. I don’t think it should be on them to enforce shutterstock’s TOU.
So, it’s worth clarifying the nature of the this kind of “law” passed in Beijing. Which this article fails to do and comes across to me partially as fear mongering because of it.
Generally speaking when Beijing passes a law like this, they are not passing a law as we know it, it is a set of guide lines for the leaders of local provinces to implement their own policies and laws based on what they think will accomplish the goals set out from Beijing. Then Beijing observes what they come up with and if they like the outcomes of one, they implement it country wide.
For instance when everyone was hyper ventilating about “ ALL OF CHINA IS LITERALLY 1984 BECAUSE OF THE NEW SOCIAL CREDIT SYSTEM” in reality, Beijing had just essentially just asked the provinces to create their own systems that fallowed a vague guideline. And the provinces did, some provinces set up systems that would give people fines for saying mean things, some just set up an American style credit score system. In the end Beijing didn’t really find that any of them lived up to what they were asking for and all of the programs were quietly spun down.
Regarding the ‘1984 social credit system’ there are a lot of good resources which tell a story far diffrrent from yours. One recent example is tbe documentary ‘Total Trust’ by Chinese film maker Zhang Jialing. The film’s introduction says:
Total Trust is an eye-opening and deeply disturbing story of surveillance technology, abuse of power and (self-)censorship that confronts us with what can happen when our privacy is ignored. Through the haunting stories of people in China who have been monitored, intimidated and even tortured, the film tells of the dangers of technology in the hands of unbridled power.
Watch the film. There are many reviews about it (and other sources about surveillance in China). It’s really easy to find on the web.
I think this law has similar intentions.
Addition: <a href="">@megopie</a> it would be great if you could post a source of what you say. Thanks in advance.
That’s not about the social credit system though, that’s about the general censorship and surveillance apparatus. Which although robust and invasive is quite fragmented, there is no central database. local branches of law enforcement or internal intelligence or a million other parts of china’s own alphabet soup, manage, collect and use surveillance data, some terrifyingly effectively, some pathetically. Some not at all.
China is a big country with a lot of tasks being delegated to lower authorities, (and delegated from them to even lower authorities). Anytime I see someone talk as if the Chinese government is a monolithic entity it makes me want to pull my hair out. 90% of the time when someone talks about some new law in Beijing being created, they’re misrepresenting the reality, which is generally that the central government has directed provincial and local governments to pass their own laws and implement their own policies to address what ever Beijing has talked about.
For references about social credit in particular here you go:
two things are certain: the Chinese people will suffer, and there will be many scapegoats found within the government - people suspected of collaborating with Western spies, for example - to make examples of so that Xi is not at fault..
And our president’s response is to drive our country further into debt in order to pay homage to Israel and pretend that they aren’t a pack of barbarians. It’s sickening.
I'm honestly interested to see how this goes. Usually when someone is elected who claims to be "libertarian" they don't actually adhere to the philosophy or just pay lip service. I lean socialist myself, but one size never fits all and Argentina is in bad enough shape that maybe this will help.
It looks like he’s trying to heal a patient with bloodletting. I think it might help to revive the economy, but also may be a disaster. Also I think that the social guarantees should at least be in force after things get better, if not the whole time. Trying to work things out for the country by putting the citizens in even worse position does not seem like a humane thing to do even if it works :(
Same here. Milei as an experiment could go either way, but staying the course would have led to certain disaster… and to be frank, the country as a whole doesn’t have a lot to lose at this point anyway.
Could go either way fucking lol, the man is an insane cunt - what fucking possible way could it go except to shit? He might become a normal dude after a stroke? What the fuck
I think that’s a bit oversimplified. Milei’s no doubt a knob and there’s a good chance he’ll screw up, but the alternative would have been the former minister of economy doing four years of the same, which would have been a 100% chance of screwing up. So before you make any more oversimplified statements, consider the alternative to Milei.
Milei has inherited a country on the brink of economic collapse and hyperinflation, caused by a government that has financed its overspending by just printing more money for decades, and borrowing whatever foreign currency it could. This is obviously not sustainable.
He wants to link the peso to the dollar (so the government can’t print more money at will anymore - not to mention the fact that many transactions are already half-legally done in dollars anyway) and do away with some of the many regulations that the Peronists have been promising for decades will help the economy, but which most experts agree have unsurprisingly crippled it further, and in many cases facilitated corruption.
His opponent’s political program can be summed up as “introduce more subsidies”.
Which one makes more sense to you?
It probably depends on what you want to achieve. At the moment it’s probably to avoid hyperinflation, another national bankruptcy and poverty levels climbing to new all-time highs. Massa (the other guy) is known for trying to counter the effects of the current massive inflation by printing more money for government subsidies (let that sink in for a moment), so one could argue that whatever Milei actually does, it can’t be worse than that.
His (to put it mildly) over-the-top rhetoric, homophobia/misogyny and the suggestions to sell your organs to make ends meet etc. are different beasts altogether, but I can’t blame the voters for ranking having food on the table higher than strengthening LGBTQ+ rights. I’m grateful I don’t have to make that choice in my own country.
You are talking about a guy who takes economic advice from a “psychic medium” who he believes is in turn talking psychically to his dogs, who he believes are clones of resurrected jesus-dog.
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