JoBo

Many voters believe, with good reason, that none of this would have happened without Biden’s assent. Biden has continued to speak of Israel’s attack on Palestinian civilians using the absurd language of “self-defense”. He has insulted Jewish Americans and the memory of the Holocaust by invoking them to justify the slaughter. And though his White House repeatedly leaks that he is “privately” dismayed by Israel’s conduct of the war, he has done little to stop the flow of US money and guns that support it.

Even after the US state department issued a vexed and mealy-mouthed report on Israel’s conduct, which nevertheless concluded that it was reasonable to assess that Israel was in violation of international humanitarian law, the Biden administration has continued to fund these violations. That state department report was published on 10 May. The Biden administration told Congress that it intends to move forward with a $1bn arms sale to Israel. “OK, [Israel] likely broke the law, but not enough to change policy,” is how one reporter summarized the administration’s judgment. “So, what is the point of the report? I mean, in the simplest terms, what’s the point?”

Meanwhile, Biden has expressed public disdain for the Americans – many of whom he needs to vote for him – who have taken to protest on behalf of Palestinian lives. Speaking with evident approval of the violent police crackdowns against anti-genocide student demonstrations, he said coolly: “Dissent must never lead to disorder.”

Worth reading in full but here's some snippets:

In 1985, hundreds of Columbia students, led by the four-year-old Coalition for a Free South Africa (CFSA), initiated a blockade of Hamilton Hall in the center of campus – the same hall peacefully occupied and renamed by students on Tuesday.

The protest lasted for three weeks, drawing worldwide support. The administration photographed, videotaped and threatened student activists with disciplinary charges and expulsion. Five months later, after years of dragging its feet, the university divested from companies implicated in apartheid South Africa.

In 2013 and 2014 a successful campaign by the Columbia Prison Divest students forced the university to divest from the private prison industry. Underlining the linkages of struggles, Students Against Mass Incarceration (Sami) sought the advice of Students for Justice in Palestine.

...

Omar was a Palestinian student activist on campus at the time, supporting the Free South Africa Movement and highlighting striking similarities between the struggles in South Africa and Palestine to dismantle settler-colonialism and apartheid. Omar was deeply inspired by the divestment demand as a tactic to pressure a duplicitous and complicit institution. He later co-founded the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement calling for ending international state, corporate and institutional complicity in Israel’s regime of oppression against Palestinians.

After the interview aired, Lehrmann was charged with sexual intercourse without consent, but the trial was abandoned in 2022 due to juror misconduct and not revived due to fears about Higgins’ mental health.

Without a trial and a means to clear his name, Lehrmann turned to defamation action, claiming that Network Ten and “The Project” presenter Lisa Wilkinson damaged his reputation by providing enough information in the program for him to be identified, though he was not named.

Network Ten and Wilkinson chose to fight the charge, mounting a truth defense, meaning that to win, the network’s lawyers needed to prove that on the balance of probabilities the rape happened.

Lee found Monday that the two had sex that night, but Higgins was so inebriated she couldn’t possibly have given her consent – and that Lehrmann didn’t seek to obtain it.

“I’m satisfied that it is more likely than not that Mr Lehrmann’s state of mind was such that he was so intent upon gratification to be indifferent to Miss Higgins’ consent,” said Lee.

The ruling delivers a devastating blow to Lehrmann’s attempt to clear his name. As Lee put it in his judgement: “Having escaped the lion’s den, Mr Lehrmann made the mistake of going back for his hat.”

Proponents of AI and other optimists are often ready to acknowledge the numerous problems, threats, dangers, and downright murders enabled by these systems to date. But they also dismiss critique and assuage skepticism with the promise that these casualties are themselves outliers — exceptions, flukes — or, if not, they are imminently fixable with the right methodological tweaks.

Common practices of technology development can produce this kind of naivete. Alberto Toscano calls this a “Culture of Abstraction.” He argues that logical abstraction, core to computer science and other scientific analysis, influences how we perceive real-world phenomena. This abstraction away from the particular and toward idealized representations produces and sustains apolitical conceits in science and technology. We are led to believe that if we can just “de-bias” the data and build in logical controls for “non-discrimination,” the techno-utopia will arrive, and the returns will come pouring in. The argument here is that these adverse consequences are unintended. The assumption is that the intention of algorithmic inference systems is always good — beneficial, benevolent, innovative, progressive.

Stafford Beer gave us an effective analytical tool to evaluate a system without getting sidetracked arguments about intent rather than its real impact. This tool is called POSIWID and it stands for “The Purpose of a System Is What It Does.” This analytical frame provides “a better starting point for understanding a system than a focus on designers’ or users’ intention or expectations.”

Worth giving this a click but here's a few summary paragraphs:

Trump's differentiator is authoritarian supremacy. This means that his pig ignorance, his grotesque indecency, his sexual assaults, his fraud and corruption, and his ability to walk around as a free man and enjoy press coverage that treats him like a normal participant in the democratic process even though he is an insurrectionist traitor to the constitution who threatens the families of the judges presiding over the 91 felony charges he faces are all positive qualities for him, because they are a way of demonstrating that he truly is an authoritarian supremacist. And so, as long as he promises maximum brutality against the people that our entrenched supremacist power systems don't favor, he gets to continue to rule over the public discourse and the law and basic human decency and even observable reality. His supporters' unshakeable support is how we can tell that authoritarian supremacy is what they want: they don't support him despite the fact that he is a rapist and a confederate criminal that enjoys total impunity, but because. Additionally, the fact that people who aren't paying much attention might slide his way is a pretty good way of detecting that brutality and supremacy and corruption are totally digestible parts of our status quo, intrinsic foundational aspects of the way things are.

Biden's differentiator involves maintaining the status quo; a promise that things will go on relatively steadily rather than dropping immediately and completely into fascist tyranny run by by and for creepy Christian fanatics who want to control our bodies and our lives to satisfy the bigotry and self-regard that they worship as their god. That's a compelling differentiator, at least for those that our system hasn't yet consumed. Thus, even though I still don't like Joe Biden, I feel I must vote for him, because I can clearly see that the other way this can go gets much worse for far more people—trans and gay people, disabled and sick people, people in poverty, people who are pregnant or can get pregnant, Black people and Jewish people and other marginalized people, and even eventually coddled little me, because the threat of open emboldened fascism is vast, and the end of any form of democracy in our country is real.

This is different from saying that things are not already very very bad for such people, as part of the status quo that Joe Biden promises to maintain.

Biden's problem is that many of us can clearly observe that our culture, our arrangement of power, and our government is built to consume people, and the easily observable proof of this is all the people it consumes. For people who would rather not be consumed, what is needed is not for us to stay the course, but to find radical change not toward fascism, but toward diversity, equality, equity, and inclusion, in opposition to our nation's standard traditional unsustainable supremacy, for the same reason that a cancer patient should seek cancer treatment, rather than creating inevitable disaster in pursuit of a return to a unmodified life that their sickness has made unattainable.

That means that even as I vote for Biden, I have to hold my culpability for voting for him and all the horrors that he is accommodating by maintaining and accommodating our status quo. On the other hand, if I didn't vote for him, I'd have to hold my culpability for not doing my part to prevent even worse from coming to even more people. And either way I must hold my culpability for my existence as a beneficiary of our supremacist system. I don't really have a position to take that frees me from culpability; that's how a supremacist system works. Trying to free myself of that culpability instead of holding it would just be another way of aligning with supremacy, which always blames its victims instead of itself.

But the ban – last updated in 2003 – only applies to traditional television channels and not to streaming television delivered over the internet. With audiences increasingly switching off traditional broadcast channels, the UK’s big political parties are preparing to take advantage of the loophole and pay millions of pounds to insert themselves into living rooms.

Tom Edmonds, who ran digital advertising campaigns for the Conservatives in the 2010s, said politicians were desperate to pay to access screens. He said if British broadcasters did not run such ads, US tech companies would happily take the money. “You are going to see political ads on your TV. A lot of it will go on YouTube because you can get it in HD on your TV,” he added.

In the past, British political parties did not have enough money to buy campaign adverts. But Labour and the Conservatives are set to take advantage of a little-noticed rule change announced last year by Michael Gove, which will increase the amount national political parties can spend on a general election campaign from £19.5m in 2019 to £35m for the next general election.

I don’t believe that our coverage of the Marion County raid or Kansas Legislature led to the digital purge of Kansas Reflector content. But I can’t say that for certain, because Facebook has been maddeningly opaque about the entire situation. Stone outright denied that the likeliest target — a column from documentary filmmaker Dave Kendall criticizing the platform — was the culprit.

But his technical explanation, given in a Friday afternoon phone call with editor in chief Sherman Smith, left us scratching our heads.

“It had nothing to do with the content. It had nothing to do with the story that you guys wrote,” Stone said. He instead blamed a domain issue with three separate websites, all of which operate separately and just happened to have posted Kendall’s column.

“It was a security issue related to the Kansas Reflector domain, along with the News From The States domain and The Handbasket domain,” he added. “It was not this particular story. It was at the domain level.”

A fourth site - Little Green Footballs - was also blocked and marked as phishing/malicious. They didn't understand why until they saw this story and went to look to see if a commenter had posted it. They had. WTF? Meta Cancels LGF

The arc of Boeing’s fall can be traced back a quarter century, to when its leaders elevated the interests of shareholders above all others, said Richard Aboulafia, industry analyst with AeroDynamic Advisory.

“Crush the workers. Share price. Share price. Share price. Financial moves and metrics come first,” was Boeing’s philosophy, he said. It was, he said, “a ruthless effort to cut costs without any realization of what it could do to capabilities.”

To drive down costs, Boeing chose to aggressively confront first its workforce and then its suppliers rather than partner with them. It left both, Aboulafia said, “angry and alienated.”

Maybe, to the extend that we are institutionalists, we need to recognize that our vote doesn't free us from any other obligations between elections. Maybe we need to recognize the ways our commitment to institutions that abuse others have caused abused people to despair and mistrust us. Maybe we need to admit how we were wrong about the nature of our institutions, how we believed they protected and benefitted everyone simply because they protected and benefitted us. Some of us, if we are particularly unthreatened by fascism and particularly benefitted by supremacy, might need to realize that listening and following are more effective anti-fascist actions for us now than speaking and leading.

Or maybe, to the extent that we are anti-institutionalist, we need to recognize that our anti-institutional alignment doesn't mean we aren't still culpable to the degree we are, and recognize that if we are taking that alignment primarily to evade culpability, we're still aligning ourselves spiritually with that institutional supremacy. Maybe we need to recognize that while elections aren't the only thing, they are still a thing. Maybe we need to recognize that just as voting doesn't free us from whatever culpability we carry, not voting doesn't free us, either.