Notes on the Conflict in Israel-Palestine

Various disjoint notes on the on-going disaster in Israel/Palestine.

Out of the Nightmare: War, Biden, and Christian Fanaticism

(I wrote these down in the middle of the night after waking up out of a nightmare.)

Biden is Old, and It Doesn't Matter

I don’t think the concerns about Biden’s age are legitimate. He’s extraordinarily healthy for a man of 81 years. All this concern about Biden’s age is just Hillary Clinton’s emails all over. Behind the bad press is racism and sexism; the press is hinting that – horrors! – we might end up with a black woman as president.

Hilzoy on Mike Johnson, Speaker of the House

[Commentator Hilzoy wrote this on Bluesky, which is still in closed testing. I like it enough that I want to see it published more widely, so (with permission) here it is.]

I actually think it’s worth listening to Mike and Kelly Johnson’s podcast, at least if want to understand our new Speaker. (shudders) Personally, I’d start with the first episode, which is rather interesting, at least if you are not deterred by what Josh Marshall called its 700 Club vibe. Then I’d listen to Episode 12, which is about Jan. 6. (Both of these are from 2022, but before the Congressional elections.) But for those who are not prepared to devote maybe an hour to this, a brief thread.

What is left of the Zionist dream?

What is left of the Zionist dream, now that Israel is committing genocide? Now that Israel has allied itself with Nazis, white supremacists, and Christian nationalists? How can Israel survive when its allies hate it, and all that it stands for?

Facebook: Maximizing Conflict

"The maximization of […] implied the maximization of inter-human hostility. All the existing sources of this phenomenon were tapped, and those proving particularly fruitful were patriotism, parochialism, xenophobia, ochlophobia, racial, religious and linguistic differences, and the so-called ‘gulf between the generations.’ " – John Brunner, The Jagged Orbit

In Brunner’s novels, it was arms sales, but in our world it seems to be engagement. Facebook promotes conflict. Genocide in Myanmar, violence in Kenya, India South Sudan, the United States. Brexit. Personal conflict: I’ve seen Facebook wreck long-standing friendships by throwing conflict in people’s faces.

The Jagged Orbit was one of a quartet of novels that Brunner wrote exploring future trends. The trends explored in The Jagged Orbit were racism and proliferation of lethal weaponry. The other novels in the quartet were Stand on Zanzibar (overpopulation), The Sheep Look Up (environmental destruction), The Shockwave Rider (rapid social change and ubiquitous computing.) Despite many failures and arguable sexism, Brunner got a lot right. Notably, the works are strongly anti-racist and global in perspective.

The Jagged Orbit ends on a hopeful note; the terrifying artificial intelligence goes insane and breaks down, the arms dealers suffer a setback, and one of the characters embarks on a project of unification. Our current situation…is not so hopeful. We’ve got a world of people who’ve been encouraged to be hostile to each other. Entire countries have already broken down in genocide. And there seems no-one with enough power willing to act to reduce the conflicts.

"AI" and the World

Statistical language models like ChatGPT are exactly the reverse of fictional artificial intelligence. Instead of a disinterested logical machine, we have something that mirrors human language with all its faults and virtues, a distorted mirror of ourselves. They can be useful in producing unreliable but grammatical prose and winkling out obscure computer language syntax (large language models are basically very large grammars), but they are more error-prone than humans, have no executive function, and are without conscience.