wiredearp
13.6K posts
They never intended for you to be free
While I support this - there is a problem with American-style street protests. (Thoughts on strategy below). Zizek warned about this same phenomenon when he cautioned the Occupy movement not to "fall in love with itself". What he meant was, don't fall into the trap of thinking that your protest is enough in itself or that it achieves goals just because you want it to - your protest may backfire and instead become a therapeutic outlet of anger that gives the illusion of achieving goals while achieving none. It's not enough to know you are on the "good side" while your lack of strategic thinking leads to failure. To be able to say "I was there, I fought the losing battle" is not something to be proud of. The occupy movement degenerated into a protest about the "right to camp". Everyone forgot it was originally supposed to be a call for change to the centre of systems of economic power. It ended up being a protest about the right to have temporary toilets in isolated public parks. It was defeated because it failed to "occupy" the banks and shut them down. Instead it ended up occupying state owned parks and protesting about living conditions in tents in winter. Zizek's warning also applies to Anti-AI protest. Watch out for lifestyle and therapeutic protests that make you feel better about "expressing yourself" but achieve very little. They may even divert energy and create a false sense of achievement. 100 protestors in the street are like bugs that have landed on the surface of a huge autonomous tank. AI and the military are intertwined now. Think with more cunning, think more strategically - don't offer up your face to AI surveillance cameras. Plan not for "protest" but for subversion, and for legal, well targeted acts of sabotage. Establish the weak points in the AI industries and attack them. The Achilles heel is not the public street outside the Open AI, Anthropic or Palantir buildings. Think harder, plan better, aim to achieve specific concrete goals that derail the venture capital machine behind the AI industries, don't get caught up in vast political generalisations. "End Capitalism now" slogans didn't work for Occupy. You won't stop The AI military industrial complex with a cardboard sign, even though it might make you feel better about "doing something". Protest is not enough in itself. Get ready to shift to more effective strategies.
Dutch news says Men B is airborne. Aantal zieken door uitbraak meningokokken loopt op, Britse jongeren in rij voor vaccin /via @NOS nos.nl/l/2607248
As a European, I don’t understand how Trump and his failed administration remain in charge. I clearly don’t understand.
This is complete nonsense, by the way: it requires you to believe that there is a huge amount of unsold Iranian oil (140 million barrels, according to Bessent) just sitting in tankers at sea waiting for buyers. Almost by definition, when the oil is in a tanker it's because it already has a buyer 🤷 Oil in a tanker is the shipping part of the process: it'd be absurd to ship something without a buyer, all the more given how expensive a tanker voyage is these days (~$150,000/day). Also, the very notion that Iran would be selling oil when it couldn't access the money defies logic: why on earth would they do that? They've been selling oil almost exclusively to China precisely because China is one of the very few countries both willing and able to pay them, despite the U.S.'s banking sanctions. And therein also lies Bessent's key contradiction: it makes zero sense to "lift sanctions on Iranian oil" and at the same time have "banking sanctions remain in place." It means you can "freely" buy the oil but not pay for it, so it's still an impossible transaction... This, by the way, was confirmed by Iran's oil ministry who said that Bessent's statements on this subject were "a psychological game by the US Treasury Department aimed solely at ingraining hope into buyers and controlling market psychology," when the reality is that "Iran currently has virtually no oil [in tankers] at sea and no surplus to supply to international markets" (tass.com/world/2105049).
I februar 2020 skrev læger fra Wuhan i Global Times. > The influence of COVID-19 on the human body is like a combination of SARS and AIDS as it damages both the lungs and immune system
