Komunitas
hexbear.net
if the believe Jews are above the law I strongly disagree with doing this. A strong distinction needs to be made between Zionism and Judaism. Zionists are not engaging in settler colonialism because they are Jewish, or because Judaism has any inherent relation to settler colonialism or Fascism. Conflating Zionists with all Jewish people strengthens the Zionist position and accuses all Jewish people of complicity in Zionist violence. To ask them if Israelis should be above the law would be acceptable, as Israeli citizenship is distinct from Jewishness. Israel’s Nation-State Law, which says that only Jews have a right to self-determination in Israel. To compliment discussions of the Nation State law, I would suggest also discussing Israel’s methods of decreeing who is and who is not Jewish. The methods by which the state decides who it will and will not recognize are contentious and are at odds with some sects of Judaism. This further emphasizes the distinction between Zionism and the Israeli state, and the diversity of Jewish people around the world. Here’s a Harretz article that briefly touches on some of the convolutions of the matter Here’s a Pew article that touches on the complicated nature of Jewish identity as it affects religious self-identification in America and in Israel
Komunitas
hexbear.net
“Buy 100% American made! That’ll ensure it’ll last forever!” In all seriousness I’m not sure. Tons of things aren’t bifl and aren’t meant to be, they have a natural lifespan. The problem is that the natural lifespan in the US is cut unnecessarily short for such things because Walmart wants to keep selling you stuff. You could try making your own clothes but it’s hard and time consuming to do that for everything. Having an economy divorced from production is unfortunately going to become even worse of a drag as time goes on. It’s why I’m sounding the alarm bells and begging all my friends and family to get off the sinking ship that is the west. They won’t listen, but I do it because I care, and maybe someone will listen. I’m in China, and in Asia in general, people have access to affordable high quality tailors and fabrics. I’ve noticed products I’ve bought off of pinduoduo are better quality than products I’ve bought off temu, despite it being the same company. There’s also the fact that there is a lack of recourse when your seller is halfway across the world. The thing is, you aren’t going to find many options for affordable stuff outside China, so I believe looking for labels like “American made”, and “Italian made” is not the answer. Chinese logistics, manufacturing, production, automation, quality… it’s pretty close to the best value in the world, even the cheapy things sold in the US. The only way you could do better is with actual real slave labor like in Bangladesh or India. While I was in the US and doing my own research into all this was the best course of action for me was to basically buy the cheap Chinese good off of Amazon, tenu, wish, Shein, whatever and aggressively use the return policy if quality wasn’t up to snuff. Learn to look at stiching, fabric, and other markers of quality, never buy the cheapest thing from a Chinese retailer, a $3 tank top from Shein can be terrible but a.$30 dress can be amazing. 100% make sure to never pay the Walmart/target/bullshit markups, unless you absolutely need to assess the items quality in person and are willing to pay the premium to do so. If a cheap flimsy shirt that gets destroyed in a month is $3, pay the $3, don’t pay $30. Once your clothes get worn through, learn to patch/darn/mend. Conspicuous mending can be beautiful and really cool. And shop at thrift stores and see if you can snag something good.
Komunitas
kbin.social
With an emphasis on once held hostage. People were killed and mutilated during the kidnappings, the old lady who was later released was beaten with sticks and struggled to breathe during the motorcycle ride. She said they were kept in clean rooms, slept on mattresses, and received medical attention. They received white cheese and cucumber for eating, and Hamas told them “We believe in the Quran: We’re not going to hurt you”. The former hostage, Oded, noted that they took care of even the smallest detail, and her son sad that “If everybody in there is in the same situation, there is room for optimism”. This doesn’t justify any of the actions of the terrorist attack. Obviously the situation is awful. But there is a good chance the hostages are still allright, which is a glimmer of hope in an awful situation assuming you have any piece of your humanity still intact. Furthermore, I don’t believe my original post was that unclear, and you’ve clearly read the reporting. You knew exactly what I was referring to, and you’re still out there wasting people’s time trying to fuel hate. As if there’s not enough of that already. Fuck off. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-10-24/ty-article/.premium/85-year-old-israeli-grandmother-recounts-hamas-captivity-says-government-deserted-us/0000018b-615d-d312-a1fb-f77f9aea0000 https://www.politico.com/news/2023/10/24/freed-israeli-hostage-hamas-attack-00123323
Komunitas
lemmy.world
Yeah thats an interesting statement right? Because when I look up a chart I see the same thing. But when I go to buy lumber, and especially sheet materials, its all still 2.5x - 3x what I was paying in 2019. So as an individual which should I believe? The lived experience I have is the one that took the money out of my account when I bought the lumber. Some examples: This was $15 in 2019/20: https://www.homedepot.com/p/15-32-in-x-4-ft-x-8-ft-Sheathing-Plywood-Actual-0-438-in-x-48-in-x-96-in-20159/206827282 (You might get a different price. For me, its $26) And this was $25 in 2019/20: https://www.homedepot.com/p/3-4-in-x-4-ft-x-8-ft-Hi-Bor-APA-Rated-Sheathing-Pressure-Treated-Plywood-95360/202087831 (You might get a different price. For me, its $60) Non-treated 2x4 were $2, and treated were $3.5 in 2019/20: https://www.homedepot.com/p/2-in-x-4-in-x-96-in-2-Premium-Grade-KD-HT-Stud-058449/312528776 https://www.homedepot.com/p/2-in-x-4-in-x-8-ft-Standard-Better-Hi-Bor-Pressure-Treated-Lumber-95344/202087781 (You might get a different price. For me, its $4, and $6) Its a reflection of the same presentation that the Democrats tried to make about the economy: “Look at these abstract metrics disconnected from your lived experience, they say that the economy is great!” But thats irrelevant if the most reliable form of data I have, my lived experience, disagrees with it. The reality is I live in an old house and it needs some serious repairs. I have to put some of them off because the cost of materials is just ridiculous, let alone trying to find contractors to do work at anything less than robber baron prices.
Komunitas
lemmy.world
I do have insurance, as we’re legally required. Haven’t been to a dentist for years even tho i need it, the money isn’t there. Insurance only covers it for a small amount if you pay a premium, which i’m not doing obviously. I went to my childhood dentist after being unemployed and homeless, dad was convinced the government would get me a house and when i lived with him they told me “no, that’s the old system”. He didn’t believe me so he kicked me out because he was so sure of himself. When i got to the dentist after a couple of years he started pointing out what premium things i needed and how i could afford them after saving the money from the years i didn’t go. I tried to explain to him like an adult that i had lost my savings and was pushed into homelessness and unemployment. He then decided to get his ego bruised and started calling me names. I got pretty sick of his childish behaviour and decided to never come back. I tried a differenr dentist when i was actually ready and could see myself build up the funds again, but i ended up having to move for a job and life has only gotten more expensive while my wage stayed stagnant. Right now i’m making more, finally but it’s at a job i’m not sure i can physically handle. It’s been 4 weeks now and it’s 4 weeks of backpain and painkillers to keep going.
Komunitas
slrpnk.net
Niagara Launcher is a great, but different launcher. A modern + minimalist Android home screen optimized for one-✋ access and staying focused. Designed by a German team who really cares, believe they group just went fulltime after having been done with university. They also allow you purchase the apk to avoid Google. They have a free version and a trial of the premium version. https://niagaralauncher.com/
Komunitas
lemmy.world
Spotify like many others here. Just haven’t had many issues with the program and it does what I want for a reasonable price. Wanna give a big shout out to Nebula. It’s meant to be a YouTube-esque site but solely for educational content. I found it via LegalEagle but it has a ton of documentaries and other educational content creators. I believe my subscription is $5/year or something like that. Just insanely cheap for really high quality content. I have the Disney+/Hulu bundle. I love Disney movies and with all the franchises they own now I feel it’s worthwhile. Hulu happens to have quite a few of my favorite shows and the bundle made it worthwhile to me. Currently trying out YouTube premium and, I know this won’t be a popular opinion, but I think it’s worth it to me. I use a lot of YouTube and also chromecast it. While it’s possible for me to get ad blocked YouTube for free on mobile and cast it to my TV it’s… Cumbersome and unstable. I generally have the opinion that I don’t mind paying for services I enjoy using so… For now, gonna stick with YouTube premium. Just so much less of a headache. AmazonPrime but only for Amazon’s services really, the few shows that are on Prime Video for free are a nice bonus though. And currently I pay for Netflix and share it with my family but the very first second Netflix cracks down on that I’m dropping it and have told my family as such for years. Already started torrenting most shows I kept up with via Netflix in preparation. The only other one I consider is HBO… But there just hasn’t been enough of an allure thus far.
Komunitas
lemmy.world
I agree with that… somewhat. Except they are providing a service. The content is not produced by YouTube, but it is made available by YouTube. There’s a cost to provide that service and value to the consumer for having videos available to watch. I doubt you want to pay for the service, so how is it supposed to work? What pays YouTube’s costs so we can all keep watching videos for months and years to come? I get that this comes across as someone simping for YouTube. I’m not trying to do that though. I’m just intrigued by this worldview and would like to understand if there is more to it or if you believe YouTube should not be compensated some other way. Is it a “Fuck you. I got mine.” mentality where people watching ads and paying premium cover the cost for you to use the service for free? Or is there some nuance I’ve missed?
Komunitas
lemmy.world
I despise ads because they steal time, and their very existence is an insult to the people that are exposed to them. All ads tell me is „your time is worth very little and we believe you are easily manipulated“. Based on average ad length and cost on YouTube, ChatGPT has calculated that advertisers pay about $9 per hour of ads. While that seems a bit high to me, it is plausible. My time is worth more than that. Yes, I do pay for YouTube premium. Though in a cheaper country, because the normal price is excessive imho.
Komunitas
reddthat.com
By Marissa Keane, Science and Technology Reporter-Associated Civic News Bureau, San Francisco SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — A major technology company announced Tuesday that it will introduce a paid customer service option that guarantees access to a human support agent, months after eliminating its phone support lines entirely. The company, NexaCore, said the new offering, called Human Support Plus, will cost $29.99 per month for individual users and more for business accounts. Subscribers will be able to speak with a live representative by phone or video, bypassing the company’s automated chat system. NexaCore phased out phone-based customer service last year, citing efficiency gains from artificial intelligence tools. Since then, users have relied on chatbots and self-service help pages to resolve account and billing issues. In a statement, NexaCore said the new tier responds to “user demand for expanded support options” while preserving the company’s “AI-first service model.” “We believe automation should handle the majority of routine requests,” the statement said. “For more complex needs, Human Support Plus offers an enhanced experience.” Consumer advocates criticized the move, arguing that access to human assistance should not require an additional fee. “Charging customers to talk to a person is a troubling trend,” said Laura Kim, a policy analyst at the Digital Rights Center. “Many users are already paying subscription fees. This turns basic service into a luxury.” Online forums and social media platforms have been filled with complaints since the phone lines were removed. Users reported being locked out of accounts, unable to resolve billing errors, or stuck in repetitive chatbot loops. NexaCore said most issues are resolved through automated systems and claimed customer satisfaction scores have remained stable. The company did not release independent data to support that claim. Industry analysts say the move reflects a broader shift across the tech sector, where companies are reducing labor costs by replacing support staff with AI-driven tools. Some firms have quietly reintroduced limited human support after backlash, often through premium plans. “This is likely a test,” said Marcus Feld, a technology analyst with Redwood Research. “If people pay, other companies will copy it. If they do not, firms may double down on automation.” Human Support Plus will launch next month in the United States, with international availability planned later this year. NexaCore said standard users will continue to have access to automated support at no additional cost.
Komunitas
news.abolish.capital
A report in the Israeli Haaretz newspaper has resurfaced that showed Israel have been using AI deep-fakes and other disinformation to create the supposed push for the restoration of the Pahlavi monarchy in Iran. US administration and media, eagerly supported by their enablers in the UK and other Western states, have been pushing claims of a widespread popular uprising and of violence by the Islamic Republic government to repress it. Trump has threatened to attack Iran if protesters are killed, creating a pretext for him to grant Israel’s wish for renewed US military aggression against its main resistance. AI: a two-headed motorcycle ‘cop’. Israel AI allegations But the claims have been based on disinformation and, in many cases, AI-generated images and footage – including, notably, a two-headed ‘policeman’ and an apparent AI fake of women lighting cigarettes with an image of Ayatollah Khamenei. Audio in old footage of anti- and pro-government demos has been replaced to suggest it shows new anti-government protests. I asked Elon Musk’s Grok, 3 times, for the source of this photo and 3 times it refused to tell me. I believe it to be either taken outside of Iran or edited with AI or both. No ash on the ground Photo on the ground has English writing on it They don’t look like Iranians https://t.co/9JkpYuvGsA pic.twitter.com/0ae96OR1jR — Citizen Journalists (@citizenjournos_) January 10, 2026 Israeli accounts are even using (clearly fake) AI videos showing monarchists and Israelis celebrating together at the anticipated fall of the Islamic Republic: That’s what they (global bullies) do when they’re desperate for regime change. People haven’t forgotten the 1970s, SAVAK and Papa Pahlavi’s torture police. Any monarchist protest is a Zionist sponsored fake. pic.twitter.com/sJx92yr3Ic — Mesocricetus Incognitus (@RattusIncognito) January 2, 2026 By contrast, apparently real footage shows small groups of anti-government protesters being shouted down by larger pro-government demos: | BIG: Unprecedented reactions that did not exist before 3-4 girls were chanting anti-Iran slogans when all the other students stopped them and started waving Iranian flags and say: “Uneducated student who’s puppeted by the Mossad!” pic.twitter.com/GTYdCu6nGH — Arya – آریا (@AryJeay) December 31, 2025 Intelligence agencies involved Former CIA director Mike Pompeo’s new year X post had already confirmed that Israel’s Mossad was involved in instigating and coordinating street protests. But Haaretz’s October 2025 report pre-dates the protests and the Western media and social media mass propaganda campaign around them. It pre-dates the 2026 push to restore Reza Pahlavi, the son of the deposed and disgraced, CIA-installed shah. And it does so very usefully. The Haaretz article was written on the occasion of Pahlavi’s visit to Israel in autumn 2025. As is frequently the case, Israeli ‘mainstream’ media are a lot more honest about political context than their Western counterparts. Haaretz notes that Pahlavi’s support is limited to those who left Iran to escape the 1979 revolution – and why: While Pahlavi enjoys some popularity among the Iranian expat community, it’s far from clear that Iranians want him as a leader. The son of a former dictator who enjoyed Israeli and American patronage, he carries the political baggage of his father, whose rule was known not only for its openness to Western culture but also for corruption, political repression and the torture of regime opponents. As with Cuban exiles in the US – and indeed Pahlavi himself – this is hardly a surprise. They were the ones who lost out to a popular uprising. They want what’s ‘theirs’ back. Extensive campaign Haaretz points out that Pahlavi claims that he has a lot of support on social media for his restoration and for his visit to Israel. But then it adds where that ‘support’ comes from [emphasis added]: When asked about the responses he was getting to his visit to Israel, Iran’s archenemy, he said reactions had been largely positive. He also referred reporters to his social media accounts. “Don’t take my word for it, search on social media … on Twitter, Instagram, any platform,” he said. “If you do the research yourself, you don’t need to ask me the question. The answer is right before your eyes.” Pahlavi’s answer is particularly noteworthy in light of the findings by Haaretz and TheMarker, Haaretz’s business newspaper. It turns out that a large-scale digital influence campaign in Persian was underway, operated out of Israel and funded by a private entity that receives government support. The campaign promotes Pahlavi’s public image and amplifies calls for restoring the monarchy. The campaign relies on “avatars,” fake online personas posing as Iranian citizens on social media. They were first discovered by social media researchers in Israel and abroad. The campaign was not limited to Pahlavi’s visit to Israel – and spread across multiple platforms, aiming to influence Israeli politics as well as international [emphasis added]: the campaign included fake accounts on platforms such as X and Instagram and used artificial intelligence tools to help disseminate key narratives, craft its messages and generate content. According to two of the sources, there were also efforts to amplify the posts of Pahlavi’s ally in Israel, Gamliel, a minister from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party. Given that the operation was indirectly funded by taxpayer money and designed to serve Israel’s geopolitical interests, some of the people involved were uncomfortable with the pressure to use the campaign to promote the minister, two sources said. Parts of this network and its accounts were already exposed by Haaretz. Sources linked the campaign to the network of pro-Pahlavi accounts first detected by independent social media researchers Nitsan Yasur and Gil Feldman, and first reported by Haaretz’s Bar Peleg. At the time, the effort was described as an apparent foreign-influence operation. The target audience was unclear due to posts that seemed to promote the minister. But the sources stressed that the campaign only looked foreign – its origins were in Israel. Tellingly, Gamliel’s own AI-generated social media output gave a hint of the 2026 campaign: Snapshot of an AI-generated by Gamliel, Netanyahu and his wife, according to Haaretz. Exposed Information warfare detection experts Citizen Lab conducted other research cited by Haaretz. This research exposed mass AI campaigns against the Islamic Republic. Citizen Lab’s pedigree includes detecting and exposing the notorious Israel ‘Pegasus’ software. Israel and its clients used Pegasus to spy on journalists, politicians, human rights activists, judges and others – and the Saudi government used it in the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. The Lab’s findings showed a much wider campaign, one clearly connected to the Israeli regime [emphasis added]: Alongside the network found by the Israeli reporters, Citizen Lab has discovered another pro-Israel, Persian-language influence campaign, being revealed Friday in a report published in tandem with the investigation by TheMarker and Haaretz. This campaign included dozens of fake accounts pushing out AI-generated content, which Citizen Lab researchers assess is very likely operated by the Israeli government or by a contractor acting on its behalf. Their report’s conclusions are based on what the institute found to be signs of synchronization between the online campaign’s content and Israeli military actions during the 12-day war with Iran. This includes signs that the operators had prior knowledge of Israel’s attack on Iran’s infamous Evin Prison and even seemed to have prepared content in advance. Other research corroborates [emphasis added]: According to the sources, part of this effort is based on a network of fake accounts originating in Israel. A social media researcher into the network that was previously exposed by Haaretz identified hundreds of suspected fake users on X promoting Pahlavi, sharing his messages and using hashtags like #KingRezaPahlavi. These were found alongside posts promoting Gamliel. Not all of the suspected avatars, of which there almost a thousand, were said to be part of the same campaign, but a much wider network was exposed. In fact, the X post that exposed the network included an AI-generated video titled “Next Year in Free Tehran” that meshed local politics with geopolitical interests and had massive exposure, most of which was likely inorganic. The video shows Netanyahu, his wife, Gamliel, her partner, Pahlavi and his wife walking through Tehran’s streets. The video received many more views than most of the minister’s X posts, and these and other attempts to amplify it helped Israeli researchers locate a network of users exclusively promoting Iranian content. This included Gamliel’s frequent X posts about regime change in Iran and posts that publicized her ties to Pahlavi. Haaretz elaborates: All the accounts Citizen Lab identifies as part of the network were … inactive until kicking into action on X one after the other or even together early this year, further suggesting that they were part of an inauthentic coordinated campaign. The accounts’ activities intensified when the war with Iran broke out. The network included fake X accounts pretending to be real users, but was also found to be connected to the X page @TelAviv_Tehran, an outlet of sorts. Fake users linked to the campaign amplified the page’s content, including AI videos produced exclusively by it. Among the videos generated was a clip of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei as Hitler, based on the famous scene from the film “Downfall” where the Nazi leader vents at his generals. The AI-generated video of Khamenei throwing a tantrum was distributed by both the @Tel Aviv_Tehran page and another account from the network, and only by them. The most striking case linking the network of accounts to Israel is an online campaign that coincided with a real-world campaign: the Israeli strike on infamous Evin Prison, which houses Iranian dissidents. And, just as with the current campaign, the AI-driven fake news tries to stir unrest directly – and, with the aid of international corporate and state news, to smear Iranian officials as fleeing, to embolden anti-government actors: The campaign also tried to piggyback on an authentic protest by Iranians [by] calling for people to go to their balconies at 8 P.M. and shout “Death to Khamenei” and “Death to the dictator.” Accounts in the pro-Israel network joined together to amplify the message … For example, accounts distributed fake videos … while adopting hashtags identified with the real protest… The researchers determined that the pro-Israel campaign also included a fake news report and a deepfake video of an Iranian singer performing a protest song. For example, the network distributed a screenshot of a fake BBC Persian story about senior Iranian officials fleeing the country; BBC Persian confirmed that it had never published the story. A Jerusalem Post headline from the 2026 disinformation campaign. Corporate ‘news’ outlets across the ‘west’ ran similar headlines at the same time. Reach This ongoing campaign is not a one-off, or limited to Iran. Immediately after Trump’s illegal abduction of Venezuela’s president and his wife, US figures and an army of bots and ‘sock puppets’ amplified video of ‘Venezuelan citizens’ tearfully thanking Donald Trump for his attempted regime change. But the video was fake, generated by AI: View this post on Instagram A post shared by Lady Bunny (@official_lady_bunny) It’s often said that the first casualty of war is truth. That also applies to information war, especially when the US or Israel – habitual liars with no truth to back their aims – are involved. But UK politicians and ‘mainstream’ media are no better; even Israeli media is more honest. They are all too eager to engage in and amplify this disinformation and don’t even need the excuse of war or regime change. The only antidote to disinformation is good information. Find your reliable sources and amplify them; scrutinise every claim for authenticity. We are many and they are few. Featured image via the Canary By Skwawkbox From Canary via This RSS Feed.
Komunitas
ibbit.at
Jeffrey Epstein, 1980. Image Wikipedia. In an article last week, I argued that Jeffrey Epstein was not a lone rogue predator. This week, I turn to the more troubling question: how did Epstein, a man with no credible résumé, no transparent wealth, or a conventional career path, manage such an unconventional ascent into America’s halls of power? Epstein’s rise was not the result of financial brilliance. He was a college dropout, hired as a teacher at an elite Manhattan private school on dubious credentials. A former student later recalled wondering, “How did this guy get his job.” From there, Epstein invented the persona of a mathematical prodigy. A cover, uncertified qualification, designed to confer learning skills or deception to explain his rise into the world of high finance. Epstein climbed the financial and social ladder through a singular relationship with the Israel-first Jewish billionaire Leslie Wexner. Without Wexner, there would be no Epstein as we know him. Leslie Wexner is the founder of L Brands (formerly Limited Brands), the retail conglomerate behind Victoria’s Secret, Bath & Body Works, Abercrombie & Fitch, and The Limited. Wexner accumulated considerable fortune, which he leveraged through tax-exempt mechanisms to cultivate pro-Israel Jewish leadership and strengthen Israel’s long-term political, cultural, and institutional influence in the U.S. Epstein joined Wexner in the 1980s and suddenly became his most trusted financial adviser. What followed violates all norms of fiduciary responsibility between two parties. Epstein was granted sweeping power of attorney over Wexner’s fortune, real estate holdings, and business dealings. Epstein stayed at Wexner-owned mansions, and ran the family office, despite having little in the way of a proven financial track record prior to the relationship. Wexner’s Foundation, which Epstein ran from 1992 to 2007, poured hundreds of millions of dollars into Israel-focused initiatives, including Birthright Israel, Hillel International, Israeli leadership fellowships, and elite training at U.S. institutions such as Harvard’s Kennedy School. These programs aimed to promote future political, academic, and media leaders with a distinctly Israel-centric orientation. Epstein helped develop and develop Wexner’s Israel-first objectives. Central to the Wexner Foundation is the Wexner Israeli Fellowship sponsoring mid-career Israeli officials for special training at elite U.S. universities. The Fellowship bankrolled senior Israeli military officers, intelligence professionals, policy advisers, and other public-sector leaders to study in U.S. academic institutions like Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. The selection criteria focus on “Jewish Israeli” professional experience and leadership potential to serve Israel, likely including individuals linked to illegal Jewish-only colonies in the West Bank. Fellows taught in governance, public policy, strategic management, and institutional leadership, and while taking advantage of their extended presence in the U.S. to network and develop long-term relationships with U.S. policymakers, financiers, and academics. Released emails showed that Epstein continued his relationship with Wexner even after his 2008 sex-crime conviction. The relation persisted—denied by Wexner— despite Epstein’s public allegations of child abuse. The Israel-firster–Wexner, may have believed that preserving Epstein’s relationship outweighs any public liability. To properly contextualize Epstein’s relationship with Leslie Wexner, a brief background is warranted. Wexner’s father-in-law, Yehuda Koppel, was a commander in the pre-1948 Jewish terrorist organization, Haganah and served in its intelligence arm. Koppel was later posted to New York to open an office for Israeli airline El Al, which historically served as a front for Israeli intelligence. Beyond Epstein’s role as managing the wealth that poured into Wexner’s Israel-first foundation, Epstein also acted as an informal geopolitical intermediary on behalf of Israeli strategic interests. This was evident through his extensive relationship with former Israeli prime minister and defense minister Ehud Barak. Epstein’s probable association with Israeli intelligence may have been birthed in the mid-1980s, when Barak was the head of Israeli military intelligence and later as army command. It is no coincidence that Epstein joined the Israel-first Wexner’s group soon arpund that time period. Many years later Epstein and Barak’s relationship became public. Epstein provided him with housing in New York, assisted him financially, and helped broker deals involving Israeli military and surveillance technology. Barak continued his association with Epstein long after his 2008 conviction. In addition, an Israeli intelligence officer closely tied to Barak stayed repeatedly at Epstein’s Manhattan residence between 2013 and 2016. Epstein was useful not only as a financial operator but as an unlikely diplomat—or perhaps an intelligence asset—whose personal networks was aligned with Israeli government interests, intelligence channels, and powerful state actors. As such, his influence went far beyond social events, or sex parties. Part of a broader covert architecture of strategic deal-making, Epstein brokered a security agreement between Israel and Mongolia. He led a backchannel between Israel and Russia during the Syria civil war, and facilitated the transfer of Israeli surveillance technology to the West African nation of Côte d’Ivoire. How many pedophile “financial gurus” enjoy the time, reach, power, and possess fake foreign passports to operate across continents, largely in service of a single state? If this is not sufficient to condemn Epstein as a potential Israeli asset, nothing will be. Like the Israeli airline El Al front for Israel intelligence, Epstein’s control over financial transactions for a wealthy foundation could have potentially served a similar purpose: a discreet conduit for moving money under the cover of philanthropy, shielding it from scrutiny and subverting local law-enforcement authorities. The Epstein–Wexner relationship was far more reaching than the philanthropic foundation. This might, in part, explain Epstein’s wealth, and his decades of protection. But until Epstein’s meteoric rise in the financial market, and his relationship with Israel-first sayanim is fully examined, the Epstein story and his credible link to Israeli intelligentsia will remain incomplete. The post How American Israel-First Sayanim Enabled and Protected Epstein appeared first on CounterPunch.org. From CounterPunch.org via this RSS feed
Komunitas
ibbit.at
Yesterday, in an apparent attempt to regain control of the national narrative surrounding the deadly shooting of Renee Good in Minneapolis, Vice President J.D. Vance led the administration in pushing a video of the shooting captured by the shooter himself, Jonathan Ross, on his cell phone. The video shows Ross getting out of a vehicle and walking toward a red SUV where Good sits in the driver’s seat. Sirens blare as he walks toward her. She smiles at him and says: “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you.” As Ross walks alongside the car, she repeats: “I’m not mad at you.” As he reaches the back of the vehicle, another person, presumably Good’s wife, Becca, says: “Show your face.” As he begins to record the vehicle’s license plate, the same person says: “That’s okay, we don’t change our plates every morning,” referring to stories that agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) switch out plates to make their vehicles hard to track. “Just so you know, it’ll be the same plate when you come talk to us later.” Ross’s camera pans up to show the person recording him on her cell phone. She continues: “That’s fine. U.S. citizen. Former f*cking veteran.” As she walks to the passenger-side door, she looks at him and says: “You wanna come at us? You wanna come at us? I say go get yourself some lunch, big boy. Go ahead.” Another officer approaches the driver’s side of the vehicle and says to Renee Good: “Out of the car. Get out of the f*cking car.” As the passenger calmly reaches for the passenger-side door handle, the police officer on the driver’s side again says: “Get out of the car!” Other videos indicate that he had then put his hand into the car and was trying to open the door. Good quite clearly turns the wheel hard away from the police officers to head down the street as the passenger yells: “Drive, baby! Drive! Drive!” Someone says “Whoa!” as the car moves down the street. Ross’s camera shows his face and then sways—remember, he has been filming all this on his phone. There are three shots and the houses on the side of the street swing back into view on Ross’s camera, indicating he did not drop it. As the car rolls up the street, Ross says, “F*cking b*tch!” just before there is the sound of a smash. What is truly astonishing is that the administration thought this video would exonerate Ross and support the administration’s insistence that he was under attack from a domestic terrorist trying to ram him with her car. The video was leaked to a right-wing news site, and Vance reposted it with the caption: “What the press has done in lying about this innocent law enforcement officer is disgusting. You should all be ashamed of yourselves.” The Department of Homeland Security reposted Vance’s post. As senior editor of Lawfare Media Eric Columbus commented: “Do Vance and DHS think we can’t actually watch the video?” Multiple social media users noted that Good’s last words to Ross were “That’s fine. I’m not mad at you,” while his to her, after he shot her in the face, were “F*cking b*tch!” The release of this damning video as an attempted exoneration reminds me overwhelmingly of the release of the video of the murder of Black jogger Ahmaud Arbery in February 2021 in an attempt of one of the murderers to prove they had acted in self-defense. In that case, the district attorney for that circuit told police that the video showed self-defense and declined to prosecute. When the story wouldn’t go away, one of the murderers apparently thought that everyone else would agree that the video exonerated the killers. His lawyer gave the video to a local radio station. The station took the video down within two hours, but the public outcry over the horrific video meant the killers were arrested two days later. A jury convicted them, and they are now in prison, two for life without possibility of parole, one for life with the possibility of parole after 30 years, when he will be about 82. In the case of the murder of Ahmaud Arbery, the murderers and their protectors were clearly so isolated in their own racist bubble they could not see how regular Americans would react to the video of them hunting down and shooting a jogger. In the case of the murder of Renee Good, the shooter and his protectors are clearly so isolated in their own authoritarian bubble they cannot see how regular Americans would react to the video of a woman smiling at a masked agent and saying: “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you,” only to have him shoot her in the face and then spit out “F*cking b*tch” after he killed her. The thread that runs through both is the assumption that an American exercising their constitutional rights must submit, without question, to a white man holding a gun. This is the larger meaning of federal agents from Immigrations and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Patrol in U.S. cities. While they are attacking primarily people of color, the message they carry is directed at all Americans: you must do what the Trump administration and its loyalists demand. Another recording from the past few days shows a federal agent walking toward a woman recording him. She tells him: “Shame on you.” He answers: “Listen. Have you all not learned from the past couple of days? Have you not learned?” She responds: “Learned what? What’s our lesson here? What do you want us to learn?” He begins: “Following federal agents….” and he knocks the phone out of her hand. Hours after Good’s death, Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem appeared in Manhattan behind a podium emblazoned with the words: “ONE OF OURS, ALL OF YOURS.” After doubling down on their false narrative, the administration pulled 200 Customs and Border Patrol agents from a crackdown in Louisiana to send them to Minnesota, where administration officials already had deployed 2,000 federal agents—more than three times the number of police officers in Minneapolis. There they are cracking down, apparently indiscriminately. Yesterday, Gabe Whisnant of Newsweek reported that ICE has detained four members of the Oglala Lakota Nation, a federally recognized tribal nation of the Indigenous peoples who were in North America long before European settlers arrived. In November, as Sarah Mehta of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) noted at the time, the administration replaced almost half of ICE leaders across the country with Border Patrol officers. Border Patrol, a subagency of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, is the agency responsible for acting on President Donald J. Trump’s policy of taking children from their parents during his first term, and it remains at the center of complaints of cruelty, racism, and violation of civil rights. This is the agency led by Greg Bovino, and the one behind the attack on a Chicago apartment building led by agents who rappelled into the building from a Black Hawk helicopter. Although ICE currently employs more than 20,000 people, it is looking to hire over 10,000 more with the help of the money Republicans put in their One Big Beautiful Bill Act of July. That law tripled ICE’s budget for enforcement and deportation to about $30 billion. On December 31, Drew Harwell and Joyce Sohyun Lee of the Washington Post reported that ICE was investing $100 million on what it called a “wartime recruitment” strategy to hire thousands of new officers. It planned to target gun rights supporters and military enthusiasts as well as those who listen to right-wing radio shows, directing ads to people who have gone to Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) fights or shopped for guns and tactical gear. It planned to send ads to the phone web browsers and social media feeds of people near military bases, NASCAR races, gun and trade shows, or college campuses, apparently not considering them the hotbeds of left-wing indoctrination right-wing politicians claim. This afternoon, Kyle Cheney, Ben Johansen, and Gregory Svirnovskiy of Politico reported that the day after Good’s murder, Noem quietly restricted the ability of members of Congress to conduct oversight of ICE facilities. The policy came out in court today after ICE officers denied Democratic Minnesota Representatives Ilhan Omar, Angie Craig, and Kelly Morrison entry to a detention facility in Minneapolis. Last month, a federal judge rejected a similar policy. Trump and his allies have singled out Minnesota in large part because of its large Somali-American population, represented in Congress by Omar, a lawmaker Trump has repeatedly attacked, from a population Trump has called “garbage.” As Chabeli Carrazana explained in 19th News, shortly after Christmas, right-wing YouTuber Nick Shirley posted a video that he claimed showed day care centers run by Somali Americans were taking money from the government without providing services. The video has been widely debunked. In 2019, a state investigation found fraud taking place in the child care system and charged a number of people for defrauding the state. After that, the state tightened oversight, and state investigators have conducted unannounced visits to the day cares Shirley hit in his videos, where they found normal operations. Shirley claimed fraud when the centers would not let him in, but child care centers lock their doors and obscure the windows for the safety of the children, and would not let a strange man inside the facility to videotape. But Trump used the frenzy to justify cutting $10 billion in antipoverty funding to five states led by Democrats—California, Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota, and New York—only to have a federal judge block his order yesterday. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins promptly announced she was withholding $129 billion in federal funding from Minnesota, alleging fraud. Minnesota attorney general Keith Ellison responded: “I will not allow you to take from Minnesotans in need. I’ll see you in court.” When Kaitlan Collins of CNN asked Trump yesterday if he thought the FBI should be sharing information about the shooting of Renee Good with state officials, as is normally the case, Trump responded: “Well, normally, I would, but they’re crooked officials. I mean, Minneapolis and Minnesota, what a beautiful place, but it’s being destroyed. It’s got an incompetent governor fool. I mean, he’s a stupid person, and, uh, it looks like the number could be $19 billion stolen from a lot of people, but largely people from Somalia. They buy their vote, they vote in a group, they buy their vote. They sell more Mercedes-Benzes in that area than almost—can you imagine? You come over with no money and then shortly thereafter you’re driving a Mercedes-Benz. The whole thing is ridiculous. They’re very corrupt people. It’s a very corrupt state. I feel that I won Minnesota. I think I won it all three times. Nobody’s won it for since Richard Nixon won it many, many years ago. I won it all three times, in my opinion, and it’s a corrupt state, a corrupt voting state, and the Republicans ought to get smart and demand on voter ID. They ought to demand, maybe same-day voting and all of the other things that you have to have to safe election. But I won Minnesota three times that I didn’t get credit for. I did so well in that state, every time. The people were, they were crying. Every time after. That’s a crooked state. California’s a crooked state. Many crooked states. We have a very, very dishonest voting system.” Trump lost Minnesota in 2016, 2020, and 2024. Protesters took to the streets today across the United States to lament the death of Renee Good and demand an end to ICE brutality. At Strength in Numbers, G. Elliott Morris reported that ICE’s approval rating has plummeted in the past year, from +16 to -14. The day ICE agent Ross shot Renee Good, 52% of Americans disapproved of ICE while just 39% approved. In February, 19% of Americans held a strongly unfavorable opinion of ICE, while today 40% do. There is, Morris notes, “a growing and intense, angry opposition to [ICE] across America.” — Notes: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trumps-focus-minnesota-ice-shooting-rcna252826 Heather Cox Richardson, “Letters from an American,” November 26, 2021. https://apnews.com/article/immigration-new-orleans-minnesota-400be6de1c5712a9dd0ec972907cbd03 https://www.mprnews.org/story/2026/01/09/federal-officers-move-from-louisiana-ice-crackdown-to-minneapolis https://www.aclu.org/news/immigrants-rights/border-patrol-agents-replace-top-leadership-at-ice-offices-despite-human-rights-violations https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/12/31/ice-wartime-recruitment-push/ https://19thnews.org/2026/01/child-care-fraud-minnesota-fact-check/ https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/hhs-freezes-10-billion-child-care-funding-5/story?id=128945422 https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/09/us/politics/trump-child-care-funding-freeze.html https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/10/trump-administration-suspends-129m-benefit-payments-minnesota Strength In NumbersSupport for abolishing ICE hits a a new highThis is my free Chart of the Week — a data-driven look at what’s happening in American politics right now. If you find this useful, consider becoming a paid subscriber to get Tuesday’s premium Deep Dive and support independent polling and political journalism…Read more3 days ago · 321 likes · 34 comments · G. Elliott Morris https://www.newsweek.com/ice-detains-native-americans-minnesota-minneapolis-oglala-sioux-11339071 https://prospect.org/2026/01/08/minneapolis-ice-noem-homeland-security/ https://time.com/7345243/ice-protests-renee-good/ https://www.politico.com/news/2026/01/10/minnesota-democrats-ice-00721211 Bluesky: thetnholler.bsky.social/post/3mbz3va3en22e post/3mbz6aij5zs2w lebassett.bsky.social/post/3mbz5c6lrqk2t dominicervolina.com/post/3mc3b6soa222e atrupar.com/post/3mbzfgztguv2g kyledcheney.bsky.social/post/3mc4ipwxnnb2y Share From Letters from an American via this RSS feed
Komunitas
ibbit.at
Nocturne by James Whistler Hello, Welcome to Cultural Capital. I’m back from book leave! I spent virtually all of December in the British Library. The BL is a strange place. A masterpiece of 1990s postmodernism, it looks like an oil tanker made of red brick. It is (not unsurprisingly) loathed by King Charles. Its defining quality is its maddening inefficiency. It is obviously catastrophically underfunded. I remain fond of it. The BL doesn’t open until 9.30 am and insists on performing a bag check on almost every visitor so there is an enormous queue every morning, winding all the way around the plaza outside. Sometimes you have to wait for twenty minutes in the cold as if you’re lining up to buy bread in a failing state somewhere in the Soviet Union. If you want a good desk you must then race to secure it. I mean race. If you don’t actually run up the stairs to the reading rooms, there is a strong chance your favourite seat (I believe I have identified the best seat in the whole library) will have been nabbed by a student who will then spend the whole day procrastinating on TikTok while you glower impotently at them from across the room. Although British Library reading rooms should be full of ancient Marxists with long beards writing Das Kapital it’s actually full of undergraduates at London universities who constantly whisper to each other and record TikToks. Around exam season they all develop nervous coughs. Gen Zs recording TikToks not pictured During my month of daily BL attendance there was a strike, then access to books was suspended for a week while the online catalogue was updated and then the library closed for Christmas. On a number of occasions the internet stopped working for the afternoon and nobody could explain why. In the grand scheme of things this probably counts as a reasonably effective month of operations. Someone really needs to give the British Library a lot of money. Somehow I did manage to finish my book — which has now been officially announced. The New Dark Ages argues that the age of print is now giving way to the age of the screen and that this fact is reshaping our entire politics and culture. It expands on a lot of the ideas in my essay on the dawn of the post-literate society. All being well it will be published later this year. The Observer recommends it as a best book of 2026. So does The Times (though they are admittedly biased as they employ me). Thanks for reading Cultural Capital! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Why are so many elite college students disabled?This fascinating piece in The Atlantic reports on the explosion of disability at elite universities. These high achieving students are generally not in wheel chairs. They mostly have ADHD, anxiety and depression. At Brown and Harvard 20 per cent of students are registered disabled and the numbers are only growing: The surge itself is undeniable. Soon, some schools may have more students receiving accommodations than not, a scenario that would have seemed absurd just a decade ago. Already, at one law school, 45 percent of students receive academic accommodations. Paul Graham Fisher, a Stanford professor who served as co-chair of the university’s disability task force, told me, “I have had conversations with people in the Stanford administration. They’ve talked about at what point can we say no? What if it hits 50 or 60 percent? At what point do you just say ‘We can’t do this’?” This year, 38 percent of Stanford undergraduates are registered as having a disability; in the fall quarter, 24 percent of undergraduates were receiving academic or housing accommodations. As the article points out these disabilities get these already highly privileged students extra time in exams which seems suspicious. Perhaps more relevantly, it also appears to be the case that being mildly disabled has become oddly prestigious — a mark of being special. Will Storr wrote brilliantly recently about the growing romanticisation of mental illness and the rise of the “patho-influencer”. ADHD and autism influencers attract millions of followers online often spreading the dubious message that mental health problems are glamorous. It also seems that efforts to destigmatise mental health conditions have somewhat backfired: Today’s romanticisation of psychological disorders has been explored in a recent paper by psychologists Awa Ndour and Lucy Foulkes … “personal accounts of mental health problems are often rewarded with praise and attention in the form of ‘likes’, comments and followers, which are powerful indicators of social acceptance.” The researchers found widespread evidence of “mental health problems being held in a positive regard… portrayed as beautiful, glamorous or interesting, or as a useful means of achieving specific goals.” This romanticisation occurred “mostly online”. Storr suggests the phenomenon can be traced to the rise of fashionable therapy in the post war era. I have always thought this stuff goes deeper back to the romantic idea of the mad genius. Classical statues were not painted horriblyMost people are now aware that the classical world was more colourful than it looks in museums. Greek and Roman statues were almost always painted. A number of famous reconstructions are well known, apparently showing that the ancient world was not only colourful but positively tacky: This piece argues that classical statues weren’t like this at all. After all “it looks awful”. Were Greeks and Romans really this tasteless? And a lot of classical painting is still beautiful to modern eyes, such as this Roman fresco from the first century BC: Indeed we have good evidence that the classical world was not garish: there actually exist some contemporary images of statues, showing how they appeared in the ancient world. The resemblance between the statues in these pictures and the modern reconstructions is slight. The statues depicted in the ancient artworks appear to be very delicately painted, often with large portions of the surface left white. A well-known example is the depiction of a statue of Mars at the House of Venus in Pompeii. The writer argues that part of what is going on may be a form of trolling on the part of museum curators, keen to attract publicity to their reconstruction work and perhaps also to shock the sensibilities of an ignorant public that they believe is too attached to an image of a pristine white marble classical world. The life and death of Britain’s most famous treeThis is such an enjoyable (and deeply reported) article by Rosa Lyster on the felling of the sycamore gap tree which stood in a dip on Hadrian’s Wall. This caused a national outcry in Britain. The tree was undoubtedly very picturesque. But as Lyster hints, the furore caused by its felling was not entirely without its comic aspects: People across the country spoke of slaughter, and compared its loss to that of a close family member, or to the death of Princess Diana. They cried and cried about it on the radio; they said they felt as if their hearts had been ripped out. They spoke of evil, and desecration, and named the fantastical medieval-seeming punishments they would like to see visited on the scumbags who could have done this. Alastair Campbell, one of the architects of Britain’s entry into the Iraq War, wrote that the tree’s loss had left “a scar in the hearts of the many, many people who have felt its majesty.” A celebrity chef posted online that a “sentinel of time” had been murdered. Kevin Reynolds, the director of Robin Hood, compared the felling to the destruction of the Big Dipper, and said that it was “the second loss Prince of Thieves has suffered in the last couple of years—Alan Rickman and now this.” (Rickman had played the Sheriff of Nottingham.) Lyster attended the trial of the murderers vandals where the main question seemed to be whether it was possible to charge the guilty men of murder when all they’d done was chop down a very famous tree. RIP Audiobook recommendationOn my way to and from the British Library I listened to the audio version of Rory Sutherland’s book Alchemy. I loved it. I don’t think I’ve ever had so much fun listening to an audiobook. Sutherland, as readers probably know, is the world’s most famous (and eccentric) ad man. Alchemy draws on evolutionary psychology to explain the role of the irrational in economics and marketing. It’s full of fun stories — why does toothpaste have stripes? Why does red bull taste so bad? That sort of thing. If you have Spotify Premium you can listen to it here. How the age of the screen is changing creative writingThis is an interesting piece by the novelist Rebecca Makkai about how her creative writing students seem to be struggling to write novels because their principal experience of fiction now comes from television not books. Makkai writes that her students often awkwardly try to make the conventions of TV work in their novels: “so many issues I address with my writing students stem, I suspect, from subconsciously internalizing what works on the screen and trying to make it work on the page.” Look at even the sappiest love stories of the 1900s, and eyes, eye color, and eye contact are barely mentioned. Yet do a Control+F on “eyes” in any mediocre modern novel and you’ll get not only “I stared into his soft green eyes” but also a constant commentary on where someone is looking. (“He cast his eyes to the floor,” “Her eyes met Ralph’s,” “He glanced toward the audience,” etc.) So… What changed around 120 years ago to make us so obsessed with eyes? Film happened. Specifically, two things: The closeup shot on an actor’s eyes to telegraph emotion (self-explanatory), and the “shot-reverse” shot, which might need some explanation. This is the film editing technique wherein a two-person conversation is filmed over the shoulder from one side, then the other side. In order for us to believe they’re really talking to each other, and for a sense of spatial continuity, the director makes sure characters are matching the “eyeline.” That’s all fun stuff, but there’s no reason we need to bring that fixation to the page. It might be familiar from the screen, but is it really true to life? Is eye color honestly the first thing you notice about someone? Are you constantly tracking where someone else is looking? Really? (If so, stop doing that. It’s creepy.) Semantic leakageAI sceptic Gary Marcus explains the phenomenon of “semantic leakage”, a fascinating byproduct of the too easily forgotten fact that Large Language Models are statistical pattern matching machines not real intelligence. Because LLMs are looking for patterns in data not making logical connections in the manner of human brains, they draw associations that make no sense from a human point of view. So “if you tell an LLM that someone likes the color yellow, and and ask it what that person does for a living, it’s more likely than chance to tell you that he works as a ‘school bus driver’”. As Marcus explains: The words yellow and school bus tend to correlate across text extracted from the internet, but that doesn’t mean this particular individual who likes yellow drives school buses. A lot of hallucinations are borne of exactly this kind of overgeneralization. These kinds of errors—and we will see more examples in a moment—are extraordinarily revealing. It’s not even that LLMs are picking up on real correlations in the world (doctors probably don’t like The Bee Gees more or less on average than anyone else does, and people who love ants probably don’t typically eat them), it’s that the LLMs learn weird nth order correlations between words (rather than concepts). It’s not even that there is a correlation between liking yellow and driving school buses, it’s that there is a correlation between words that cluster with yellow and words that cluster with school buses. RIP John CareyThe literary critic John Carey died before Christmas. Carey was one of the greatest critics of the post war era and one of my heroes: cantankerous, enjoyably anti-elitist and beautifully insightful about poetry. This passage from his book What Good Are the Arts? is one of my all time favourite passages of literary criticism. Carey is making the argument that literature is the greatest artform partly because it can acheive the quality of “imagination-stirring indistinctness”. And it is this genius for indistinctness, he says, that can help us to understand why Shakespeare was a better writer than his rival Christopher Marlowe: Shakespeare’s superior indistinctness can easily be seen if we compare the way Marlowe’s Barabas, and Shakespeare’s Shylock, talk about their wealth. Here is Barabas: “Bags of fiery opals, sapphires, amethysts, Jacinth, hard topaz, grass-green emeralds, Beauteous rubies, sparkling diamonds … “ [I i 25–7] And so on. Pretty good, you will say. Yes, it is. But it is not very indistinct, so the imagination has not much to do. You can easily picture bags of jewels. Of course, even Marlowe’s lines are beyond the reach of visual arts like painting or photography. You cannot paint grass-green emeralds, except by some ponderous device like juxtaposing painted grass and painted emeralds, whereas language can merge the two in a flash. Painting cannot manage metaphor, which is the gateway to the subconscious, and that hugely limits it by comparison with literature. True, there is Surrealist painting, but it is static and deliberate, and quite unlike the flickering, inconsequential nature of thought. However, with all due credit to Marlowe’s jewels, compare Shakespeare’s Shylock when he hears that his daughter (who has run off with her lover, taking some of her father’s gold and jewels with her) is living it up in Genoa and has exchanged a ring for a monkey. “Thou torturest me Tubal, – it was my turquoise, I had it of Leah when I was a bachelor: I would not have given it for a wilderness of monkeys”. [III i 1I2] Marlowe could never have written that. Quite apart from the human depth, the indistinctness is what stamps it as Shakespeare’s. ‘A wilderness of monkeys’, the lightning phrase with which Shylock registers his wit, scorn and outrage, is unforgettable and unimaginable – or, rather, imaginable in an infinite number of ways. How do you imagine it? Are there trees and grass in the wilderness? Or just monkeys? Are they mixed monkeys, or all of one kind? With tails or without? Of what colour? What are they doing? Or are these questions too demanding? Is the impression you get much more fleeting, much less distinguishable from the mere blur of total indistinctness? At all events, compared to ‘grass-green emeralds’, ‘a wilderness of monkeys’ is a wilderness of possibilities. We are tempted to say that it is a ‘vivid’ phrase, and it is understandable that we should want to use that word about it. But ‘vivid’ is often used to describe clear-cut effects, such as a bright pattern or colour composition, and Shakespeare’s phrase is not vivid in that way, rather the opposite. It manages to be at once vivid and nebulous. It is brilliantly and unfathomably indistinct, which is why the imagination is gripped by it and cannot leave it alone.’ The place to start if you haven’t read him is his polemic against the snobbery of twentieth century modernist writers The Intellectuals and the Masses which you don’t have to agree with (I increasingly think I don’t) to find immensely enjoyable. John Carey 1934-2025 Thanks for reading Cultural Capital! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. From Cultural Capital via this RSS feed
Komunitas
ibbit.at
Another extraordinary banner from a Visibility Brigade chapter, this one in Woodland Hills, CA Hi, all, and happy Friday. Welcome to the end of a truly horrendous week. You did it again! It’s astonishing, really, to consider that we’ve survived almost a year of this nightmarish administration. But we did! And not only have we survived, but we’ve fought like warriors and scored a stunning number of wins. While we’re nowhere close to being out of this mess, we have made huge progress. It’s important to acknowledge that. I’m deeply proud of you. So many have chosen to bury their heads in the sand. You have chosen to stand up. It redounds to your honor. A couple of miscellaneous things: First, a reader posted a link in the comments this week to a magnificent spread sheet which contains contact information for not just all members of Congress, but Cabinet members, the Supreme Court, news organizations, and so much more. It’s extraordinary. I’m not sure who put it together—if you know please let us know in the comments—but it’s a magnificent and hugely useful document. Please bookmark it and share it widely. Second, the House passed a three-year ACA premium tax credit extension bill yesterday. SEVENTEEN Republicans sided with Democrats on the final vote. This is hugely encouraging, and we must credit Hakeem Jeffries, with whom I often disagree, on getting this vote through. It’s also really important to thank the Republicans who bucked their colleagues and voted the right way on this. Those Republicans are Robert Bresnahan, Mike Carey, Monica De La Cruz, Brian Fitzpatrick, Andrew Garbarino, Jeff Hurd, Dave Joyce, Tom Kean Jr., Nick LaLota, Mike Lawler, Ryan Mackenzie, Carol Miller, Zach Nunn, María Elvira Salazar, David Valadao, Derrick Van Orden, and Rob Wittman. If one of them is your rep make sure to thank them! Finally, Renee Good’s wife just released a statement talking about who Good was. It’s gorgeous and heartbreaking and I truly hope you’ll share it. The full statement is here, but here’s an excerpt: Renee sparkled. She literally sparkled. I mean, she didn’t wear glitter but I swear she had sparkles coming out of her pores. All the time. You might think it was just my love talking but her family said the same thing. Renee was made of sunshine. Renee lived by an overarching belief: there is kindness in the world and we need to do everything we can to find it where it resides and nurture it where it needs to grow. Renee was a Christian who knew that all religions teach the same essential truth: we are here to love each other, care for each other, and keep each other safe and whole. Renee Good will not have died in vain, friends. Not on my watch. Not on yours. Today, and this weekend, and going forward, we take our actions for her, and for every victim of this administration’s lawless and brutal rule. We will defeat them. We will do it by loving each other, just as Renee Good said we should. And, in the end, we will prove that love is more powerful than fear. Call Your Senators (find yours here) 📲 Hi, I’m a constituent calling from [zip]. My name is ______. First, ICE needs to be abolished. They’ve always been notorious for brutal and undisciplined behavior, but that has escalated this week to an unacceptable and terrifying level. Our rights are being trampled and people are being killed. Congress must get rid of ICE and replace it with an agency structured around lawful and non-political enforcement of the country’s immigration laws. [H/T] Second, please tell the Senator I expect them to pass the three-year ACA premium tax credit extension. We can’t wait. We need this help now. Finally, Donald Trump and his entire administration need to be impeached and removed. They’re endangering our democracy, encouraging violence on civilians, and flouting the Constitution. Thanks. Call Your House Rep (find yours here) 📲 Hi, I’m a constituent calling from [zip]. My name is _______. First, ICE needs to be abolished. They’ve always been notorious for brutal and undisciplined behavior, but that has escalated this week to an unacceptable and terrifying level. Our rights are being trampled and people are being killed. Congress must get rid of ICE and replace it with an agency structured around lawful and non-political enforcement of the country’s immigration laws. [H/T] Second, please tell the Congressmember I expect them to pass a War Powers resolution to stop Trump’s war on Venezuela—or any other country. His administration is failing to help Americans in any way. The idea that they are capable of running another country when they can’t even run ours is insane. Finally, Donald Trump and his entire administration need to be impeached and removed. They’re endangering our democracy, encouraging violence on civilians, and flouting the Constitution. Thanks. Extra Credit ✅ The terrific put out an action page today with phone scripts and a Resistbot (PTCKBJ) urging congressional action to stop an invasion of Greenland. Please use and share it! Get Smart! 📚 KNOW YOUR RIGHTS with the ACLU—Friday, January 9, 8:00 PM ET This weekend, people across the country are taking to the streets to demand accountability, honor Renee Good’s life, and make visible the human cost of ICE’s actions. Before you take action, learn your rights and how to stay safe and peaceful. Join the ACLU’s Protest Safety, Know Your Rights and De-Escalation Training on 1/9/26 at 8 PM ET. This training will give you the tools to take action safely, confidently, and with key de-escalation strategies in hand. You’ll learn how to protect yourself, your community, and stand up for your rights. Register here. Messaging! Messaging! Messaging! 📣 put out a social media toolkit to help advertise this weekend’s “ICE Out For Good” actions. Please use it and spread the word! Link to the toolkit is here. Give 💰! There is a Go fund Me page for Renee Nicole Good’s wife and child. If you feel moved to give the link is here. People have already given over a million dollars! Indivisible is also encouraging us to donate to the Immigrant Defense Network. I concur! Get in the Streets! 🪧 Indivisible, MoveOn, Working Families Party, and many others are organizing an “ICE Out For Good” weekend of action THIS WEEKEND. Find your event—or plan one—in this doc. You can also find a recording to yesterday’s emergency ICE response call there—if you missed it it was pretty awesome. Win Races! 🗳 Help reach North Carolinians voters on the Registration Repair List. There are almost 72,000 voters on this list, with an ID number missing from their registration. The list is nothing more than a ploy by the Republican-controlled Board of Elections to make it more difficult to vote, but voters on the list must “repair” their registrations or risk having to vote a provisional ballot. The North Carolina Democratic Party is spearheading the effort to help “repair” these registration. It’s slow work to reach these folks, so every effort makes a difference! Join a phone bank (from anywhere!) on 1/15. Sign up here. Resistbot Letter (new to Resistbot? Go here! And then here.) 💻 [To: all 3 reps] [H/T] [Text SIGN PIGHHN to 50409, or to @Resistbot on Apple Messages, Messenger, Instagram, or Telegram] (Note that for the most effective RESISTBOT it’s best to personalize this text. More about how to do this here. But if you’re short on time just send it as is using the above code.) As your constituent, I am urging you to stand up for families that need access to child care in face of the Trump administration’s threats to freeze funding and impose burdensome paperwork requirements. Access to reliable child care is crucial in the United States and enables millions of parents and guardians – especially mothers – to enter or remain in the workforce. There is no evidence of widespread fraud that was claimed erroneously by a YouTube influencer who targeted child care centers run by Somali immigrants in Minnesota. Threats to freeze funding cause uncertainty for millions while punishing children and working families nationwide. Right now, child care centers have not been given clear instructions on procedures they must follow; if funding is slowed or stopped because of unnecessary administrative burdens, parents will lose jobs and some child care centers will close. There is a long history of bipartisan support for child care assistance in Congress. Please push back against this attack on families by the Trump administration. Child care is critical to working families and our economy. OK, you did it again! You’re helping to save democracy! You’re amazing. Talk soon. Jess Chop Wood, Carry Water is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Share Leave a comment From Chop Wood, Carry Water via this RSS feed
Komunitas
ibbit.at
Bullets: American buyers of aluminum are paying record spreads over global benchmarks, amid Trump’s 50% tariffs and worldwide shortages of industrial metals.A small handful of US firms are benefitting from the squeeze and are even modestly increasing production. But the shortage of aluminum globally is 2 million tons per year. Outside China, production of aluminum continues to decline. Chinese aluminum smelters have the capacity to close the gap and lower prices. But regulators here are prioritizing China’s domestic supply chain for bauxite, and have placed hard ceilings on aluminum production, and reduced exports of finished aluminum products. Inside China / Business is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. For the YouTube video for this report, please follow this link: Report: Good morning. Markets for industrial metals are going crazy, because of the tariffs and the trade wars and China’s export bans on dual-use applications for anything coming out of their refineries here. Now it’s aluminum, with prices hitting multi-year highs, because of the new import tariffs and shortages in the spot markets. The Midwest premium for aluminum is at a record high. That is what US buyers pay—prices are quoted on the LME, and the Midwest Premium is added to that benchmark price to cover freight and import taxes to the United States. The exchange price for aluminum is $2,850 a ton, plus freight and tariffs to US markets takes it to $4,792 a ton. The import duties nearly tripled, from $560 per ton to over $1400, since January. The tariffs are driving that record spike in the Midwest Premium. The market believes now that President Trump’s 50% tariffs on imported aluminum, mostly from Canada, are here to stay. Aluminum consumers in the US are paying much more, but the high tariffs have benefited a small handful of American suppliers. Century Aluminum is a big fan of the high tariffs, and announced plans to restart a smelter in South Carolina, creating over 100 new jobs by next June. ALCOA is the biggest aluminum producer in the United States, but they source a lot of their supply in Canada. That resulted in the company paying $69 million more in tariffs this quarter compared to last. But they’re booking higher profits anyway, because aluminum prices are so high. “Rising US prices have more than made up” for the unfavorable tariff impact to the company. Alcoa announced they are stepping up their buys of Canadian aluminum to previous levels, paying the 50% tariff and passing along higher prices to US buyers. US prices for aluminum are rising much faster than in other markets, with the Midwest Premium more than doubling in five months. That’s because of the tariffs. But China is deeply impacting the aluminum markets with their policy changes. Chinese regulators are placing hard ceilings on domestic production of aluminum, which is tightening supplies everywhere else. China is the world’s largest producer and consumer of aluminum, with 60% of the global total. In 1949, China produced 10 tons of aluminum. Last year it was 40 million tons. Here is the 50-year chart, and China doesn’t show up at all until 2000 or so, and 25 years on, today produces more aluminum than the rest of the world combined. Here’s where that Chinese aluminum is going. Construction and transportation are more than half. Capital equipment is 8.9%–durable consumer goods, is 7%. So all this aluminum is mostly consumed here, in China, except for the consumer goods and packaging that are headed to export markets: But this is the problem, as far as China is concerned: They have a supply chain dependency on imported bauxite. China’s bauxite reserves only add up to 2% of the global supply. What’s more, only the bauxite in Guangxi province is high-grade. So China needs to import the bauxite ores, for refining here. Guinea and Australia together are over 90% of China’s bauxite imports. 70% of the mines are owned or controlled by Chinese firms, but Chinese policymakers are taking steps to increase domestic supplies, and to reduce that dependency. It starts with a production limit of 45 million tons, and China’s domestic producers aren’t bumping their heads on that ceiling, yet. They hope that buys them some time to expand domestic reserves to 5% of the world’s total, up from 2%. And there is a new push for recycled aluminum, with a target of 15 million metric tons of recycled by 2027. This strategy, they hope, will make China’s aluminum supply chain more resilient and secure in the next two years. But here is where that leaves things outside China. US consumers are having more trouble finding aluminum, and the shortage of aluminum in markets outside China will be 1.8 million tons. China’s exports of finished and semi-fab aluminum products have dropped by 900,000 tons per year. That is half of that global shortage, then. And aluminum production outside China is also falling, by 1.1 million tons per year. A two-million-ton decline in overall aluminum availability outside China. Two million tons, short. Going back to that press release from Century Aluminum. They’re excited to restart 50,000 metric tons of idled production. So, we need 39 more of those. And a lot more bauxite. Be Good. Resources and links: The Chinese Aluminium Sector: Challenges and opportunities for decarbonisation https://transitionasia.org/the-chinese-aluminium-sector-challenges-and-opportunities-for-decarbonisation/Aluminium Price Reaches Three-Year Peak at $2,920 per tonnehttps://discoveryalert.com.au/aluminum-price-2025-high-china-production-impact/Citing Benefits of 232 Tariffs, Century Aluminum Announces Restart to Bring Mt. Holly SC Plant to Full productionhttps://centuryaluminum.com/investors/press-releases/press-release-details/2025/Citing-Benefits-of-232-Tariffs-Century-Aluminum-Announces-Restart-to-Bring-Mt–Holly-SC-Plant-to-Full-Production-Increasing-U-S–Aluminum-Production-by-10/default.aspxAlcoa: High US Aluminum Prices Offset Trump Tariff costshttps://www.ttnews.com/articles/alcoa-aluminum-prices-tariffsReuters, Why did copper escape US tariffs when aluminium did not?https://www.reuters.com/business/why-did-copper-escape-us-tariffs-when-aluminium-did-not-2025-08-05/Reuters, Aluminium premium hits record in US on tariffs, global squeezehttps://www.reuters.com/business/why-did-copper-escape-us-tariffs-when-aluminium-did-not-2025-08-05/ Inside China / Business is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. From Inside China / Business via this RSS feed
Komunitas
news.abolish.capital
Bullets: American buyers of aluminum are paying record spreads over global benchmarks, amid Trump’s 50% tariffs and worldwide shortages of industrial metals. A small handful of US firms are benefitting from the squeeze and are even modestly increasing production. But the shortage of aluminum globally is 2 million tons per year. Outside China, production of aluminum continues to decline. Chinese aluminum smelters have the capacity to close the gap and lower prices. But regulators here are prioritizing China’s domestic supply chain for bauxite, and have placed hard ceilings on aluminum production, and reduced exports of finished aluminum products. Inside China / Business is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. For the YouTube video for this report, please follow this link: Report: Good morning. Markets for industrial metals are going crazy, because of the tariffs and the trade wars and China’s export bans on dual-use applications for anything coming out of their refineries here. Now it’s aluminum, with prices hitting multi-year highs, because of the new import tariffs and shortages in the spot markets. The Midwest premium for aluminum is at a record high. That is what US buyers pay—prices are quoted on the LME, and the Midwest Premium is added to that benchmark price to cover freight and import taxes to the United States. The exchange price for aluminum is $2,850 a ton, plus freight and tariffs to US markets takes it to $4,792 a ton. The import duties nearly tripled, from $560 per ton to over $1400, since January. The tariffs are driving that record spike in the Midwest Premium. The market believes now that President Trump’s 50% tariffs on imported aluminum, mostly from Canada, are here to stay. Aluminum consumers in the US are paying much more, but the high tariffs have benefited a small handful of American suppliers. Century Aluminum is a big fan of the high tariffs, and announced plans to restart a smelter in South Carolina, creating over 100 new jobs by next June. ALCOA is the biggest aluminum producer in the United States, but they source a lot of their supply in Canada. That resulted in the company paying $69 million more in tariffs this quarter compared to last. But they’re booking higher profits anyway, because aluminum prices are so high. “Rising US prices have more than made up” for the unfavorable tariff impact to the company. Alcoa announced they are stepping up their buys of Canadian aluminum to previous levels, paying the 50% tariff and passing along higher prices to US buyers. US prices for aluminum are rising much faster than in other markets, with the Midwest Premium more than doubling in five months. That’s because of the tariffs. But China is deeply impacting the aluminum markets with their policy changes. Chinese regulators are placing hard ceilings on domestic production of aluminum, which is tightening supplies everywhere else. China is the world’s largest producer and consumer of aluminum, with 60% of the global total. In 1949, China produced 10 tons of aluminum. Last year it was 40 million tons. Here is the 50-year chart, and China doesn’t show up at all until 2000 or so, and 25 years on, today produces more aluminum than the rest of the world combined. Here’s where that Chinese aluminum is going. Construction and transportation are more than half. Capital equipment is 8.9%–durable consumer goods, is 7%. So all this aluminum is mostly consumed here, in China, except for the consumer goods and packaging that are headed to export markets: But this is the problem, as far as China is concerned: They have a supply chain dependency on imported bauxite. China’s bauxite reserves only add up to 2% of the global supply. What’s more, only the bauxite in Guangxi province is high-grade. So China needs to import the bauxite ores, for refining here. Guinea and Australia together are over 90% of China’s bauxite imports. 70% of the mines are owned or controlled by Chinese firms, but Chinese policymakers are taking steps to increase domestic supplies, and to reduce that dependency. It starts with a production limit of 45 million tons, and China’s domestic producers aren’t bumping their heads on that ceiling, yet. They hope that buys them some time to expand domestic reserves to 5% of the world’s total, up from 2%. And there is a new push for recycled aluminum, with a target of 15 million metric tons of recycled by 2027. This strategy, they hope, will make China’s aluminum supply chain more resilient and secure in the next two years. But here is where that leaves things outside China. US consumers are having more trouble finding aluminum, and the shortage of aluminum in markets outside China will be 1.8 million tons. China’s exports of finished and semi-fab aluminum products have dropped by 900,000 tons per year. That is half of that global shortage, then. And aluminum production outside China is also falling, by 1.1 million tons per year. A two-million-ton decline in overall aluminum availability outside China. Two million tons, short. Going back to that press release from Century Aluminum. They’re excited to restart 50,000 metric tons of idled production. So, we need 39 more of those. And a lot more bauxite. Be Good. Resources and links: The Chinese Aluminium Sector: Challenges and opportunities for decarbonisation https://transitionasia.org/the-chinese-aluminium-sector-challenges-and-opportunities-for-decarbonisation/ Aluminium Price Reaches Three-Year Peak at $2,920 per Tonne https://discoveryalert.com.au/aluminum-price-2025-high-china-production-impact/ Citing Benefits of 232 Tariffs, Century Aluminum Announces Restart to Bring Mt. Holly SC Plant to Full Production https://centuryaluminum.com/investors/press-releases/press-release-details/2025/Citing-Benefits-of-232-Tariffs-Century-Aluminum-Announces-Restart-to-Bring-Mt–Holly-SC-Plant-to-Full-Production-Increasing-U-S–Aluminum-Production-by-10/default.aspx Alcoa: High US Aluminum Prices Offset Trump Tariff Costs https://www.ttnews.com/articles/alcoa-aluminum-prices-tariffs Reuters, Why did copper escape US tariffs when aluminium did not? https://www.reuters.com/business/why-did-copper-escape-us-tariffs-when-aluminium-did-not-2025-08-05/ Reuters, Aluminium premium hits record in US on tariffs, global squeeze https://www.reuters.com/business/why-did-copper-escape-us-tariffs-when-aluminium-did-not-2025-08-05/ Inside China / Business is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. From Inside China / Business via This RSS Feed.
Komunitas
ibbit.at
The other day someone forwarded me an image of a tiny UK based neo-Nazi group White Vanguard posing for the camera. Twelve people dressed in all black, stood behind a banner with Nazi iconography looking intimidating. It seemed to be a concerningly large gathering, considering the group is so extreme. But take a closer look, my contact said. I did, and lots of things about it became very unusual. A man standing near the back seemed to have only one leg. Why did the text on the banner look so strange? Another man’s hip blended into that of his comrade. Somebody had a spare arm. Had the group used AI to exaggerate its membership? A dozen neo-Nazis seemed to become six weirdos and their imaginary friends. I could think of plausible explanations for some things that seemed off. There had been some unusual editing, that’s for sure. But some of it could have been the effects of using photoshop to obscure peoples’ identities. One online AI-image detector told me it was “100%” likely to be an image doctored with AI. Another told me it wasn’t. I got lost in the sauce, squinting at my screen. I concluded that we’ve reached an uncomfortable point where it’s becoming almost impossible to tell whether a carefully-made static image is substantially AI or not, without substantial time and resources. Maybe this group is smaller than perhaps it would like us to believe. But the problem of the illusion of the power of the far right is wider. A few weeks ago the social media site X started making the countries of origins of accounts available. There was embarrassment as it turned out that some neo-Nazi accounts were also being run from places where most neo-Nazis would regard the people as very much subhuman. Anti-migration accounts were run from places more likely to be the sources of migration than the endpoint. Many on the racist far-right love Israel, but some Israel booster accounts turned out to be run by enthusiastic Indians. All queasily funny; all very embarrassing; all demonstrating the strange ability of the internet to fake power. This synthetic neo-Nazism is a strange echo of the general story of AI: whatever we think makes us truly human has, slowly, unevenly, been shown to be possible to simulate using a sufficiently large number of numbers in a matrix on the internet. Whatever neo-Nazis think makes them truly superior has been shown to be entirely possible to simulate from the Global South, given a sufficiently large amount of training data. There are two great mechanisms of the internet at play here. The first is what we can call the great arbitrage mechanism of the internet: the internet has collapsed the cost of getting labour from around the world. Digital tasks can be done from anywhere with a connection. Because when you speak to ChatGPT, the computing is done somewhere else, you can use it even on a relatively slow connection. You don’t even need to be good at English. The language skills that are embedded in the model are now everyone’s to use, although this global arbitrage also produces strange specificities in the language – see the massive rise in the global use of “delve”, which was formerly mostly used in Nigerian English. Because Nigeria is one of the broadly Anglophone countries with the worst paid workers, the process known as Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is cheaper to do there, and so the preferences of specifically Nigerian English speakers are encoded into the models. And this same arbitrage of labour costs means that simply getting attention online can produce a decent wage for people in poorer countries. The amounts dolled out by X for getting engagement with premium subscribers might not be much if you’re living in the UK, but it can be life-changing elsewhere. But how to get attention? This is where the second great mechanism of the internet comes into play: its grand moral inversion machine. The more outrageous the content, the further the internet’s viral mechanisms will propel it. That induces a strange folding of the moral landscape, with the fringes brought back towards the centre of our attention. And nothing has been more unacceptable in much of the world since the end of the Second World War than Nazism. Neither law is absolute, but they combine to get you digital workers in the Global South cosplaying as neo-Nazis for Elon bucks. Neo-Nazism has become a lucrative commodity, one whose circulation pollutes and distorts the wider economic conditions we all have to live in, like a toxic spill from a profitable factory might kill the workers it relies on. You have probably come across some of this slop: distorted crime statistics accompanied by racist caricatures, fantastical nonsense talking about “Hyperborea” – a mystical utopia, video stills taken out of context from the far right’s latest cause celebre, phonk remixes of supercuts of Hitler speeches, or the now-tired endless rearrangements of the chad/wojak memes. But what are the actual powers of such images? Who is actually influenced by the spread of such dross? It was pretty typical about a decade ago for the alt-right to speak in terms of “meme magic” – to ascribe, quasi-ironically, mythical powers to the circulation of images. The idea hasn’t gone away and since the alt-right, the technologies for producing images have hugely improved. The neo-Nazi creator of the The Will Stancil Show was still following this line last month: “I’m memeing myself into power,” she said in a podcast interview, “and I’m memeing national socialism into the public.” The show is a cartoon parody of the much-maligned liberal lawyer Will Stancil, who was previously the target of sexually explicit threats from Grok, the X-based AI model, and is stuffed full of racist stereotypes. It looks like a cartoon, but was made entirely with Sora AI, OpenAI’s video generation tool. Of course it looks a bit clunky, but the cost is vastly less than standard animation. But outside of self-mythologisation, do these images actually matter? We can see their importance if we take a broader view of the structure of online movements. Think of the far right as a stack of things, each one an important layer, but none sufficient on their own. Images are in the pile, somewhere near the bottom – important, but not autonomous. Below them lie the visceral feelings of anger and inadequacy that neoliberalism both produces and uses as a fuel. And one level above the images are the forms of political activity that lead to a movement being formed. Images are an essential intermediary: they glue the feelings together and make them articulable – and then allow for movements to cohere around the ideas expressed within them. They’re not autonomous or powerful alone, but images are an essential part of the stack – no images, no cultural power, and the whole thing begins to melt like a steel beam covered in burning jet fuel. So in this overall context, what has changed about the images of the far right? All the above examples are a long way from the classical forms of far-right aesthetics: think, for example, of the 1936 Leni Riefenstahl film The Triumph of the Will which depicted the 1934 Nazi party congress in Nuremburg. The way these images were distributed has changed as much as the content of the images, and the two are linked. You had to go to the cinema to see The Triumph of the Will, where it pushed images of severe, quasi-spiritual order and vitality. By contrast, the astonishing rise of the alt-right was mediated by a viral dynamic of sharing and outrage, and its images were consequently more chaotic and less orderly. But this simulated online power rings strangely hollow for the far right. In the internet’s hall of one-way mirrors, some of the mirrors are convex – they show things distorted in strange ways, and make some beliefs seem vastly more prominent than they are in real life (if we can ever talk about such a thing). In short, online, power is fakeable. Hacking, trolling, and swarming are the tactics of actors who have no right to be as powerful as they are. On the alt-right, this asymmetric potency lent the movement a sense of insurgency online – it seemed, for a moment, to be almost identical with the internet itself. But it wasn’t enough. Despite the internet – an extension and blurring of public and private space – there remained a pervasive feeling on the far right that the street, and the ability to exert a will within it, imbued a movement with legitimacy. One important moment of this return to the street came in 2017 when the alt-right sicked itself onto Charlottesville, Virginia, US, for the Unite the Right rally. Online, the alt-right had been able to fool itself and others: it was intellectually cohesive, powerful, and slick. But it wasn’t. In Virginia the movement instead discovered that, actually, it looked like shit. Far from being epic and based, it was in fact heterogenous to the point of chaos, ugly, and disorderly. Nazis flags, random assortments of kneepads and shields, death’s skulls, yelling people pouring milk on their own faces to counteract tear gas, and the murder of antifascist protester Heather Heyer. The march was a moment of disarray for the alt-right, not just because it lost one of its main backers in the White House, Steve Bannon, but because it became obvious to itself that it was not composed of the ubermensch it had imagined. But AI lets you circumvent the problem of in-person power almost entirely. When you need to conjure a crowd, you can. Sure, for now everyone might look the same and the physics of the videos might be properly lysergic, but the models are improving all the time – you have to look quite closely to see the strangeness of the static images. We might ask if AI is, in general, “right wing”. The answer, in terms of the stated political beliefs of AI agents, when you can elicit them, seems to be largely “no”. Mostly, they’re basically left-liberals, which is hardly surprising given that most of their system prompts are written by people who more or less have those beliefs, although X’s Grok is an obvious outlier. AI certainly can be used to produce propaganda for the far right – stuffed, as it is, with the training data that facilitates the tedious repetitions of the same basic ideas we’ve become accustomed to, even as the very ease of reproducing those ideas undercuts all their claims to insight and racial uniqueness. What does our new era of AI image production do for the far right? AI can conjure pasts that didn’t happen and worlds that couldn’t have been (either because people have slightly too many fingers in them, or because the structural conditions of global capitalism don’t allow for the kind of musty class collaboration that is imagined). It can also be used to simulate the appearance of an unbelievable crimewave – the shaky cameras of apparently live video covering over the strangeness of the movements and the implausibility of the set ups. Or, in the case of Grok, to directly produce tracts of vitriol. It might also soon allow the far right to produce the illusion of a cohesive mass movement on the streets where, in fact, only a much less impressive one has appeared in meatspace. There are, of course, real far-right movements out there, and they are growing larger – forming the kinds of connections that sustain movements for the long-haul. But they are also disappointing even to their participants. Their events are mostly quite dull to actually attend, full of aggy and sometimes coked-up people who get tiresome fast. Imaginary people are always better than the real ones. The imaginary movements, better than the real ones. And the imaginary nation is the best of all. Increasingly sophisticated AI might allow for far-right propaganda to achieve what they have always aimed for – the creation of the synthetic unity of an imagined people. Just so long as their limbs don’t blend into each other in weird ways. From Novara Media via this RSS feed
Komunitas
lemmy.world
It’s funny that even though theft rates have plummeted since the mass software upgrade, premiums have stayed high. They have savant-level mathematicians (actuaries) evaluating risk and even with compelling data showing otherwise, they choose to keep labeling these cars high risk and continue to charge exorbitant premiums.
Komunitas
news.abolish.capital
The other day someone forwarded me an image of a tiny UK based neo-Nazi group White Vanguard posing for the camera. Twelve people dressed in all black, stood behind a banner with Nazi iconography looking intimidating. It seemed to be a concerningly large gathering, considering the group is so extreme. But take a closer look, my contact said. I did, and lots of things about it became very unusual. A man standing near the back seemed to have only one leg. Why did the text on the banner look so strange? Another man’s hip blended into that of his comrade. Somebody had a spare arm. Had the group used AI to exaggerate its membership? A dozen neo-Nazis seemed to become six weirdos and their imaginary friends. I could think of plausible explanations for some things that seemed off. There had been some unusual editing, that’s for sure. But some of it could have been the effects of using photoshop to obscure peoples’ identities. One online AI-image detector told me it was “100%” likely to be an image doctored with AI. Another told me it wasn’t. I got lost in the sauce, squinting at my screen. I concluded that we’ve reached an uncomfortable point where it’s becoming almost impossible to tell whether a carefully-made static image is substantially AI or not, without substantial time and resources. Maybe this group is smaller than perhaps it would like us to believe. But the problem of the illusion of the power of the far right is wider. A few weeks ago the social media site X started making the countries of origins of accounts available. There was embarrassment as it turned out that some neo-Nazi accounts were also being run from places where most neo-Nazis would regard the people as very much subhuman. Anti-migration accounts were run from places more likely to be the sources of migration than the endpoint. Many on the racist far-right love Israel, but some Israel booster accounts turned out to be run by enthusiastic Indians. All queasily funny; all very embarrassing; all demonstrating the strange ability of the internet to fake power. This synthetic neo-Nazism is a strange echo of the general story of AI: whatever we think makes us truly human has, slowly, unevenly, been shown to be possible to simulate using a sufficiently large number of numbers in a matrix on the internet. Whatever neo-Nazis think makes them truly superior has been shown to be entirely possible to simulate from the Global South, given a sufficiently large amount of training data. There are two great mechanisms of the internet at play here. The first is what we can call the great arbitrage mechanism of the internet: the internet has collapsed the cost of getting labour from around the world. Digital tasks can be done from anywhere with a connection. Because when you speak to ChatGPT, the computing is done somewhere else, you can use it even on a relatively slow connection. You don’t even need to be good at English. The language skills that are embedded in the model are now everyone’s to use, although this global arbitrage also produces strange specificities in the language – see the massive rise in the global use of “delve”, which was formerly mostly used in Nigerian English. Because Nigeria is one of the broadly Anglophone countries with the worst paid workers, the process known as Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is cheaper to do there, and so the preferences of specifically Nigerian English speakers are encoded into the models. And this same arbitrage of labour costs means that simply getting attention online can produce a decent wage for people in poorer countries. The amounts dolled out by X for getting engagement with premium subscribers might not be much if you’re living in the UK, but it can be life-changing elsewhere. But how to get attention? This is where the second great mechanism of the internet comes into play: its grand moral inversion machine. The more outrageous the content, the further the internet’s viral mechanisms will propel it. That induces a strange folding of the moral landscape, with the fringes brought back towards the centre of our attention. And nothing has been more unacceptable in much of the world since the end of the Second World War than Nazism. Neither law is absolute, but they combine to get you digital workers in the Global South cosplaying as neo-Nazis for Elon bucks. Neo-Nazism has become a lucrative commodity, one whose circulation pollutes and distorts the wider economic conditions we all have to live in, like a toxic spill from a profitable factory might kill the workers it relies on. You have probably come across some of this slop: distorted crime statistics accompanied by racist caricatures, fantastical nonsense talking about “Hyperborea” – a mystical utopia, video stills taken out of context from the far right’s latest cause celebre, phonk remixes of supercuts of Hitler speeches, or the now-tired endless rearrangements of the chad/wojak memes. But what are the actual powers of such images? Who is actually influenced by the spread of such dross? It was pretty typical about a decade ago for the alt-right to speak in terms of “meme magic” – to ascribe, quasi-ironically, mythical powers to the circulation of images. The idea hasn’t gone away and since the alt-right, the technologies for producing images have hugely improved. The neo-Nazi creator of the The Will Stancil Show was still following this line last month: “I’m memeing myself into power,” she said in a podcast interview, “and I’m memeing national socialism into the public.” The show is a cartoon parody of the much-maligned liberal lawyer Will Stancil, who was previously the target of sexually explicit threats from Grok, the X-based AI model, and is stuffed full of racist stereotypes. It looks like a cartoon, but was made entirely with Sora AI, OpenAI’s video generation tool. Of course it looks a bit clunky, but the cost is vastly less than standard animation. But outside of self-mythologisation, do these images actually matter? We can see their importance if we take a broader view of the structure of online movements. Think of the far right as a stack of things, each one an important layer, but none sufficient on their own. Images are in the pile, somewhere near the bottom – important, but not autonomous. Below them lie the visceral feelings of anger and inadequacy that neoliberalism both produces and uses as a fuel. And one level above the images are the forms of political activity that lead to a movement being formed. Images are an essential intermediary: they glue the feelings together and make them articulable – and then allow for movements to cohere around the ideas expressed within them. They’re not autonomous or powerful alone, but images are an essential part of the stack – no images, no cultural power, and the whole thing begins to melt like a steel beam covered in burning jet fuel. So in this overall context, what has changed about the images of the far right? All the above examples are a long way from the classical forms of far-right aesthetics: think, for example, of the 1936 Leni Riefenstahl film The Triumph of the Will which depicted the 1934 Nazi party congress in Nuremburg. The way these images were distributed has changed as much as the content of the images, and the two are linked. You had to go to the cinema to see The Triumph of the Will, where it pushed images of severe, quasi-spiritual order and vitality. By contrast, the astonishing rise of the alt-right was mediated by a viral dynamic of sharing and outrage, and its images were consequently more chaotic and less orderly. But this simulated online power rings strangely hollow for the far right. In the internet’s hall of one-way mirrors, some of the mirrors are convex – they show things distorted in strange ways, and make some beliefs seem vastly more prominent than they are in real life (if we can ever talk about such a thing). In short, online, power is fakeable. Hacking, trolling, and swarming are the tactics of actors who have no right to be as powerful as they are. On the alt-right, this asymmetric potency lent the movement a sense of insurgency online – it seemed, for a moment, to be almost identical with the internet itself. But it wasn’t enough. Despite the internet – an extension and blurring of public and private space – there remained a pervasive feeling on the far right that the street, and the ability to exert a will within it, imbued a movement with legitimacy. One important moment of this return to the street came in 2017 when the alt-right sicked itself onto Charlottesville, Virginia, US, for the Unite the Right rally. Online, the alt-right had been able to fool itself and others: it was intellectually cohesive, powerful, and slick. But it wasn’t. In Virginia the movement instead discovered that, actually, it looked like shit. Far from being epic and based, it was in fact heterogenous to the point of chaos, ugly, and disorderly. Nazis flags, random assortments of kneepads and shields, death’s skulls, yelling people pouring milk on their own faces to counteract tear gas, and the murder of antifascist protester Heather Heyer. The march was a moment of disarray for the alt-right, not just because it lost one of its main backers in the White House, Steve Bannon, but because it became obvious to itself that it was not composed of the ubermensch it had imagined. But AI lets you circumvent the problem of in-person power almost entirely. When you need to conjure a crowd, you can. Sure, for now everyone might look the same and the physics of the videos might be properly lysergic, but the models are improving all the time – you have to look quite closely to see the strangeness of the static images. We might ask if AI is, in general, “right wing”. The answer, in terms of the stated political beliefs of AI agents, when you can elicit them, seems to be largely “no”. Mostly, they’re basically left-liberals, which is hardly surprising given that most of their system prompts are written by people who more or less have those beliefs, although X’s Grok is an obvious outlier. AI certainly can be used to produce propaganda for the far right – stuffed, as it is, with the training data that facilitates the tedious repetitions of the same basic ideas we’ve become accustomed to, even as the very ease of reproducing those ideas undercuts all their claims to insight and racial uniqueness. What does our new era of AI image production do for the far right? AI can conjure pasts that didn’t happen and worlds that couldn’t have been (either because people have slightly too many fingers in them, or because the structural conditions of global capitalism don’t allow for the kind of musty class collaboration that is imagined). It can also be used to simulate the appearance of an unbelievable crimewave – the shaky cameras of apparently live video covering over the strangeness of the movements and the implausibility of the set ups. Or, in the case of Grok, to directly produce tracts of vitriol. It might also soon allow the far right to produce the illusion of a cohesive mass movement on the streets where, in fact, only a much less impressive one has appeared in meatspace. There are, of course, real far-right movements out there, and they are growing larger – forming the kinds of connections that sustain movements for the long-haul. But they are also disappointing even to their participants. Their events are mostly quite dull to actually attend, full of aggy and sometimes coked-up people who get tiresome fast. Imaginary people are always better than the real ones. The imaginary movements, better than the real ones. And the imaginary nation is the best of all. Increasingly sophisticated AI might allow for far-right propaganda to achieve what they have always aimed for – the creation of the synthetic unity of an imagined people. Just so long as their limbs don’t blend into each other in weird ways. From Novara Media via This RSS Feed.