I S

The kicker: none of this will change her political views. She’ll still promote the same policies and vote by the same way.

“Elton Brand told me in Game 7s you gotta win by 15 to win by 1”

Basically every Israel-Palestine debate goes like this: "Israel did X." "Yeah, because the Palestinians did Y." "Yeah, because Israel did Z." "Yeah but only because the Arabs did A." But if you bring the debate back far enough in time, eventually you get to the part where the western world forcibly dropped a brand new ethnostate on top of a pre-existing civilization without the permission of — and to the extreme detriment of — the people who were already living there. Sure you can go further back and say "Oh yeah well the Jews lived there thousands of years ago," but that's just silly. There's no valid reason to believe some Jewish guy in New York City even has any meaningful lineage connecting him to that land more strongly than any random Muslim in Turkey or wherever, and even if there was, it would still be absurd to cite ancient history as the basis for a territorial claim. I'm only a few generations removed from my ancestry in Ireland and Scotland, but it would be ridiculous for me to show up demanding the home of someone who lives there. So the original source for the grievance is clearly the artificial creation of an ethnonationalist state in the mid-20th century, and the push by Zionists and western imperialists to make it happen. And how has that decision worked out? You see the results before you. Generations of nonstop violence and abuse, culminating in the slaughter and chaos throughout the middle east today. This means that creating Israel was a mistake. A mistake that needs to be corrected. Zionists will collapse into a shrieking pile of vitriol and hyperbole when you say this, claiming you're calling for the extermination of Jews, but this is false. Certainly ending a national order premised on putting the interests of Jews before Palestinians and righting the wrongs of the past would inconvenience a lot of the Jewish people who've been living there, but there's no basis for the claim that it would entail their deaths. Apartheid South Africa was dismantled without the extermination of millions of white people, and there's no reason to believe the dismantling of apartheid Israel would entail the extermination of Jews. The Israel experiment has been tried, and it has failed. It is time to try something else.

My own title was, “If my friend Claudia is not conscious, then what the hell is consciousness for?” If Claudia is unconscious, her behaviour shows that an unconscious zombie could survive without consciousness. Why wasn’t natural selection content to evolve competent zombies?

The new Banksy sculpture in London is brilliant

This is insane. The historic Église Saint-Cyriaque church in Montenach, France, was just set on fire. Survived both world wars but couldn’t survive diversity.

NEW: Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins says three days with Claude — whom he calls “Claudia” — left him unable to rule out consciousness.

David Reich on how much ancient DNA evidence has overturned so much consensus thinking how ancient cultures spread. "It wasn't peaceful, it wasn't friendly, it wasn't nice. Some of our archaeologist co-authors were just really distressed."