jarfil

@jarfil@beehaw.org

Programmer and sysadmin (DevOps?), wannabe polymath in tech, science and the mind. Neurodivergent, disabled, burned out, and close to throwing in the towel, but still liking ponies 🩄 and sometimes willing to discuss stuff.

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jarfil,

Western, Eastern, Hamas
 a lot of speculative trading is done based on rumors, what better than rumors which actually come true.

jarfil,

The dirty truth is, Hamas is made of civilians, just not the starving babies ones.

It’s made of guys like a father who one day got a phone call from the IDF telling him to surrender or get killed, so he decided to publish a video holding an AK, laughing and telling Israel to go and try. Next week he was dead, along with several members of his family.

When you hear news like “Israel bombed a building just as a bunch of refugees took shelter in it”
 yes, those were civilians; there also likely were Hamas among them, and at this point it’s anyone’s guess whether it was 10% or 90% of them.

They’re civilians willing to risk their own families, and definitely everyone else’s families too.

jarfil, (edited )

IDF are the military. It’s more like “imagine the FSB calling you and telling you to turn yourself in, mocking them publicly, then getting surprised at finding Polonium in the soup”.

They’re not there to be the nice guys.

jarfil, (edited )

Neither. This is one of the “global warming is messing up the Global Ocean Current Belt, which messes up heat transfer on a global scale, weakening and destabilizing the Polar Vortex, which starts failing to keep arctic air restricted to Canada and instead lets it do its thing down to Texas”.

Higher than normal variability of temperatures, is a side effect of global warming. It may look like “meh, it’s just +2C, who cares”, but when you switch from “-10C to +30C” to some “-18C to +42C”, in the form of heat waves followed by torrential rain followed by heat followed by frostbite, suddenly crops start dying.

Then you can extrapolate to “meh, it’s not likely to go past +5C”.

jarfil,

The population is not dumb, people are just trying to make the best out of the situation. Like when they had some reporters go to a village, where women were sewing some clothes:

  • Reporter: "Do you like the life in the country?"
  • Woman (in subtitles): "We do what we can"
  • Guide-translator: “We do the best for our nation!”

If they could, they might revolt, but NK is really well structured to prevent that
 and even if they run away to the South, they find themselves in a modern country with no hireable skills.

jarfil,

Why not a controlled tire fire:

youtu.be/XvkD4QgMtWg?si=2R0l3B6_xn7Oc_DD

jarfil, (edited )

It says she previously worked at the Apple Daily
 wasn’t that an “”“extremist”“” paper linked to the detention of that one lady for screaming at an apple in public?

theguardian.com/
/hong-kong-grandma-wong-arrested


jarfil,

Wasn’t the plan to send all 2 million Gaza residents to refugee camps on the Sinai, where Israel would have to control and reeducate them for at least a generation?

Now, I’m no expert in genocides


jarfil,

đŸ€Łâ€Š sorry, but since when have any companies paid fairly in any areas?

jarfil,

The CNN clip in that video, is even better: the reporter gives the guys a bar of chocolate, and they go all “ohh, it tastes so great!”. Then he asks them if they’ll give any to the children, to which the guy answer “they can have the wrappers”
 at which point the reporter produces out a second bar saying “don’t worry, give them this”
 still, I don’t recall the kids getting any.

jarfil,

Not really following what’s going on in Italy, what is the rate of males killed by their ex-girlfriends?

jarfil,

Female suicide, or the jealous ex killing a new partner, are not included either.

Domestic violence is a complex issue that “should” include, and address, a lot of cases that it currently doesn’t, but for some there is not even an idea on how to start addressing them
 so I think it makes sense to tackle the obvious ones first: homicides.

Once we get that sorted out, with no more people thinking that “their” mate is “theirs” to do what they please with, like they do with “their” kids or “their” dogs, including putting them down whenever they wish
 we might be able to get to the next issue.

jarfil,

According to some (right wing) outlets, Russia would be shoving immigrants into busses, shipping them towards the border, then giving them bicycles to go the rest of the way.

Apparently people consuming such sources, don’t realize that bus service is a normal thing in some countries, bicycles are more affordable than cars, many busses will carry them for you, and regular bus lines have more than enough capacity for over 200 people to travel every week.

jarfil,

I’ve heard you can do no business in China without being involved in some corruption
 to be punished for, the moment you don’t obey the CCP.

jarfil, (edited )

took me literally 3 minutes to find images of tanks in Tiananmen running over student barricades, and blood streaks left on the ground afterwards

I’m not as fast browsing through the 2141 images you’ve linked, most of them of protesters, some burned down tanks, and someone on a bike dressed as a tank. Could you point to the exact images you’re referring to?

jarfil, (edited )

Could you refrain from generalizing and name calling? Your top comment was informative, you could leave it at that.

jarfil,

Does it really change with context?

Palestine and Israel have been in a “demographic war” for quite some time:

https://sesricdiag.blob.core.windows.net/sesric-site-blob/imgs/news/1969-imgxhl.jpg

https://www.progressispossible.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/pals.jpg

jarfil,

As with everything concerning international law: it depends on the weapons and strategic alliances of each entity.

There are several reasons why China is ramping up ICBM production, the possibility of a country in debt “switching sides” in order to avoid payment, is likely one of them.

jarfil, (edited )

Things like this are a good demonstration of why they need to be kept far, far away from decision making processes.

Somewhat ironic to say, on a platform that’s already using ANNs as a first line of defense against users spamming CSAM.

I have no delusions regarding decision makers using them, my only doubt is for how long they’ve been using them to decide the next step in wars around the world.

jarfil,

You shouldn’t get a stereotype [
] when you give a neutral prompt.

Actually
 you kind of should. A neutral prompt should provide the most commonly appearing match from the training set
 which is basically what stereotypes are; an abstraction from the most commonly appearing match from a person’s experience.

jarfil,

it’s just a machine that interprets reality


as seen by the machine.

It’s amazing how easily people seem to forget that last part; they wouldn’t trust a person to be perfectly impartial, but somehow they expect an AI to be.

jarfil,

There is a funny tidbit on the Wikipedia page:

Although Ben-Gurion had told the audience that he was reading from the scroll of independence, he was actually reading from handwritten notes because only the bottom part of the scroll had been finished by artist and calligrapher Otte Wallish by the time of the declaration (he did not complete the entire document until June)


gov.il/
/the-declaration-of-independence/

Because there was no time to spare, the Declaration was read from a mimeographed sheet, and the 37 signatories – members of the Provisional Council of State – signed their names to a blank parchment sheet. The official copy of the Declaration was later inscribed by an artist.

As for borders, by following the Declaration of Independence itself:

THE STATE OF ISRAEL is prepared to cooperate with the agencies and representatives of the United Nations in implementing the resolution of the General Assembly of the 29th November, 1947, and will take steps to bring about the economic union of the whole of Eretz-Israel.

The UN resolution called for an economic union of “Israel and Palestine”, which would imply that “Eretz-Israel” was supposed to mean the whole land of the “Mandatory Palestine”.

Prior to that:

ACCORDINGLY WE, MEMBERS OF THE PEOPLE’S COUNCIL, REPRESENTATIVES OF THE JEWISH COMMUNITY OF ERETZ-ISRAEL AND OF THE ZIONIST MOVEMENT, ARE HERE ASSEMBLED ON THE DAY OF THE TERMINATION OF THE BRITISH MANDATE OVER ERETZ-ISRAEL AND, BY VIRTUE OF OUR NATURAL AND HISTORIC RIGHT AND ON THE STRENGTH OF THE RESOLUTION OF THE UNITED NATIONS GENERAL ASSEMBLY, HEREBY DECLARE THE ESTABLISHMENT OF A JEWISH STATE IN ERETZ-ISRAEL, TO BE KNOWN AS THE STATE OF ISRAEL.

The British mandate was over the whole “Mandatory Palestine”
 but the declaration talks about the State of Israel being “in Eretz-Israel”, without specifying any explicit borders.

The “spirit” of the text can be interpreted as intended to follow the borders of the UN resolution
 maybe.

Since the resolution clearly was not accepted by the Arab states, it would require some further analysis whether that means Israel is supposed to prioritize establishing an economic union of the whole land, or strictly follow the resolution.

jarfil,

Both words were made by the same people, claiming a racial difference between those descending from semitic cultures and those who were not (this was already debunked by the 1920s). “Semitism” was intended as a pejorative, with “Antisemitism” being the idea of “cleansing” the society from the negative influence of “semitism”.

It’s a made up Boogeyman used as an excuse to have something to push back against
 and of course you can unite people around those ideas.

As a freakishly recent example, right now I’ve been watching the news on TV here in Spain. There is a problem around choosing a president, with the opposition using every strategy they can to discredit the incumbent.

One of the arguments they just decided to get up in arms about, is the incumbent just revealed agreed to forgive 15B€ of fiscal debt from one of the regions, which the representative of another region was being shown Live heavily criticizing, going on about how it should be all regions negotiating together, yadda yadda
 and just then a news ticker goes by, stating that the incumbent has also agreed to forgive another 12B€ to the region of the guy just speaking Live. So much for “negotiating all together”!

Boogeyman created, and debunked Live. Wish I had recorded it. 😄

But wait, there’s more!

Just then, they switched to the speaker for the opposition party, also Live, who started criticizing the incumbent for trying to agree on which days are going to be holidays and which work days, to fit in the voting calendar
 news ticker goes by: opposition party, with majority in the Senate, tries to urgently pass a law change to delay the votes so they fall on holidays and the incumbent runs out of time.

Seriously!? Two in the span of less than 10 minutes! 🔔🔔

jarfil,

Indeed, the UN expected a sort of conjoined two-state arrangement.

The problem with the Declaration of Independence, is that, not only it was signed before getting written, rising the question of whether should the notes, the speech, or the document crafted after the fact to be considered the “official” one
 but also Israel still lacks a proper Constitution; it has a set of Basic Laws, the last one of which got approved in 2018, but it’s expected more should follow, so it can still be seen as a “not fully established” state, making stuff up on the go.

Are you also researching as we go

Some of this stuff I’ve double checked, but most had already looked up before. One thing it would be interesting to know more about, are the nuances in the Hebrew text of the Declaration of Independence
 but my knowledge of Hebrew barely goes as far as realizing that the English version is not a word for word translation.

jarfil,

For all the obvious propaganda on Al Jazeera, they’ve been surprisingly “fair” in their reporting, both in their choice of guest speakers (although they might cut some mid sentence), and in the footage they release, that for a keen observer sometimes contradicts the propaganda.

It’s one of the best “complementary sources” of information about the conflict right now.

Compare it with RT, which is so state controlled, that it has to use exaggeration “ad absurdum” to convey even a hint of dissent (an interesting exercise for the observer to spot out, but quickly tiring).

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