supersquirrel

I would like to start sharing podcast episodes I like on lemmy/threadiverse, but it feels like there is no non-awkward way to do it. Often podcasts don't actually have their own website and it feels obtuse to link to applepodcasts or something...

For more than twenty years, human rights advocates have warned that unchecked drone warfare would shred the boundaries between war and peace, between combatants and civilians, between military force and basic law enforcement.

Trump’s maritime killings are the predictable collapse of a system the Obama administration cemented into place: killing people far from any battlefield, without legal authority, without congressional approval, and without the slightest regard for human rights.

"The authoritarianism of China and how little it cares about individuals is so scary!" - US Conservatives screech with shrill voices as they deport innocent people to said authoritarian and scary country for no good reason other than blind hatred and a lust for authoritarian violence as if it will somehow magically bring them comfort or prosperity in a zero-sum process.

Speaking for the US many populated arid areas are completely unsustainable as population centers (ironically also where most people in the US have been moving for awhile now), especially because water resources haven't been managed rationally in many arid areas. This story will absolutely be a global one though, see Tehran for one massive example, Lake Mead for another. No water and deadly heat waves are going to make for limitless ghost town tourism attraction opportunities!

The future is bright for abandoned building photography communities!

While the UAW does not specify a specific minimum wage, its letter notes that addressing wage suppression in Mexico would disincentivize offshoring and create “billions of dollars in new working-class purchasing power,” which could help jump-start demand for vehicles in Mexico.

Does it even matter what the context of the open mic is much beyond a certain point or even the type of open mic? Are people going to complain about hearing a spicy email between singer-songwriter guitarists or between edgey standup sets?? No, it is guranteed quality content no matter what you are really just the messenger except you still get the experience of performing in front of people. Win-win for would-be artists and performers! Just keep it the right length, read the room and all.

The neoliberal model of capitalism hit the rocks in 2008 and has stagnated ever since. Multibillionaire tech oligarchs dominate Western society. Meanwhile, China, a state-directed economy, has continued to grow while transforming itself into the world’s leading manufacturer of high-tech goods and infrastructure, dispelling the notion that the Western liberal model of development is the only one that can succeed.

And then there is the decline of liberal politics. Far-right parties are quickly moving from the role of insurgents to that of chieftains in many Western countries. Even where centrists cling to power, they are increasingly shedding their own association with liberal political values. From Britain to Germany and Romania, ostensibly center-left governments and liberal-democratic states have put into question fundamental liberal tenets, including equality before the law, freedom of speech and assembly, and respect for the outcome of free and fair elections.

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What these inconsistencies in Pilkington’s worldview reveal is someone trying to ride two horses that are moving in different directions. He wants to appeal to the tastes of the insurgent right-wing forces in Western societies, who constitute the target audience of this book, while at the same time identifying with the major success story of our time: non-Western, non-liberal China. But the truth is that the Right intensely dislikes China just as much as the centrist liberals do. Neither tendency would like to admit the reason for this: they have more in common with each other than what divides them.

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There is also an emerging consensus around the construction of police states that strip away fundamental rights. Here, there is more contention, as both the Right and the centrists accuse one another of attacking freedom of speech and assembly. The reality is that both are implementing increasingly draconian policies in power, working hand in glove with Big Tech to do so. Tech-driven authoritarianism is likely to be the defining feature of a post-liberal order.

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Liberals have frequently spoken the language of universal rights while relativizing them in practice. This is most obvious when we look at the liberal history of colonialism and imperialism. But post-liberal authoritarianism seeks to take pride in supremacy, arguing that it is justified because of “natural” hierarchies between people and peoples. Approached consistently, this supremacism is the basis for the arbitrary exercise of executive power by the strong over the weak — despotism.

In 2023, Torres and his colleague Timnit Gebru coined the acronym TESCREAL to describe a constellation of ideologies — Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, Longtermism.

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All of these people also embody the same kind of discriminatory attitudes that animated the eugenics movement of the twentieth century. Elon Musk has warned about global population decline, but if you look closely at some of his tweets, it seems that he’s more explicitly worried about white populations declining. Several months ago, someone tweeted that the white demographic globally is about eight percent of the world population, and Musk’s reply to this was something to the effect of “and declining fast.” There is very much a racial component to his anxiety about not just immigration, but population decline. Musk basically thinks that white people are superior, and hence it would be very bad for the future of humanity and post-humanity if the white population were to decline.

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There are two essential things for people to understand about what’s happening in Silicon Valley. One is that the TESCREAL worldview is ubiquitous. It’s the water these people swim in and the air they breathe. So you just cannot understand what’s going on in Silicon Valley, especially with respect to the race to build AGI, without some understanding of transhumanism, longtermism, and all of these TESCREAL ideologies.

The second really important thing for people to understand is that a key component of the utopian vision at the heart of TESCREALism is a pro-extinctionist stance. Utopia looks like a world in which post-humans, not humans, are the ones who rule the world. When Peter Thiel hesitated, he was just channeling this pro-extinctionist component of the TESCREAL worldview. It’s not humanity, it’s post-humanity that is going to ultimately go out and colonize space, that’s going to run the show.

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The rationalist community is very influential in Silicon Valley, and what the rationalist community basically tells its members is that once you’ve mastered this or that theory within the field of decision theory, once you’ve mastered the patterns of thought that are optimally rational, you then have direct access to fundamental truths about what the future ought to look like. And because rationality provides a universal and objective perspective on the world, you don’t need anyone else’s perspective. That is exactly how these billionaires in Silicon Valley are thinking about our collective future.

Earlier this week, more than a dozen Jewish organizations signed a statement accusing the ADL of “racist and Islamophobic attacks on our mayor-elect [that] undermine our shared commitment to confronting both antisemitism and Islamophobia in New York City”. Mamdani told reporters that “anyone is free to catalog the actions of our administration.” He added, in reference to a false statement made by Greenblatt in a CNBC interview: “I have some doubts about Jonathan [Greenblatt]’s ability to do so honestly, given that he previously said I had not visited any synagogues, only to have to correct himself.”

The Nexus Project was established in 2019 as an effort to foster education about antisemitism, particularly as it intersects with issues relating to Israel. It is behind a definition of antisemitism that is often presented as an alternative to the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) one, which has been increasingly adopted by US universities and policymakers despite its conflation of some criticism of Israel with antisemitism.

But increasingly, the Nexus Project is also dealing with questions of authoritarianism in the US, Jacoby noted. It recently published a blueprint that challenges the rightwing approach to combating antisemitism embraced by the administration, which largely mirrors the Heritage Foundation’s Project Esther plan to dismantle the Palestine solidarity movement in the US.

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[ADL] has been widely criticized for narrowing its anti-extremism and civil rights mission to focus on pro-Israel activism, and recently took down its online “glossary of extremism”, which included information on the far right, after it came under fire from Elon Musk and rightwing influencers. The ADL was once considered an authority on tracking antisemitic incidents, but the credibility of its data has increasingly been challenged for framing peaceful pro-Palestinian actions, including by Jews themselves, as antisemitic.

note - this article isn't a defense of Israel, don't worry

"The most compelling and difficult thing is when hope is built up. On Friday all the judges were saying that SNAP benefits would be released, then it was appealed, then it was 'We'll have the shutdown taken care of,'" Kirkhart said. "So this nonstop uncertainty, I feel like, is developing into a certain level of trauma. It feels like it's never-ending and that's very challenging."

^ This is how fascism works at a mechanical moment to moment level.