Thanks Amadee!

Nostr's signal to noise ratio is better than legacy social media, but there aren't that many posters here yet.

If you have any interesting online friends, see if you can get them to join up!

I agree, except on two points.

Lesser things do give rise to greater things. "Emergence".

The ant hill is greater than any individual ant, or even the sum of individual ants.

The ocean waves are greater than the sum of particle motions in the air and water.

And "Will" is quite complex, even though we experience it as monolithic.

Intentionality ("Will") as experienced by humans is modular, complex, and is mostly illusion.

https://sci-hub.se/10.1017/S0140525X00028636

Intentionality in bots is typically implemented very simply, there are many game and economics simulation libraries with intentionality, usually decision trees, sometimes with complex weights.

I'm not aware of any LLMs designed to have complex human-like synthesis of intentionality, but there is no theoretical or practical barrier. I guess researchers just don't want to creep out the normies!

(And there's no market for capricious, willful AIs, we have AWFLs for that).

Patrick Lawrence: The Banality of Propaganda

Nov 17, 2023

I watched a video clip Sunday of Isaac Herzog that takes all cakes in the way of silliness that also manages to be pernicious. In it the Israeli president holds a copy of Mein Kampf, translated into Arabic.

The video was made one day after an immense demonstration in London in behalf of a ceasefire in Gaza and the freeing of Palestinians from Israel’s long, violent repression. Here is part of what Herzog had to say:

“I want to show you something exclusive. This is Adolf Hitler’s book, Mein Kampf. It’s the book that led to the Holocaust, and the book that led to World War II. This is the book that led … to the worst atrocity of humankind, which the British fought against.

This book was found just a few days ago in northern Gaza, in a children’s living room which was turned into a military operations base of Hamas, on the body of one of the terrorists and murderers of Hamas, and he even makes notes, he marked, and learned again and again of Hitler’s ideology of killing the Jews, of burning the Jews, of slaughtering the Jews.

This is the real war we are at. So all those who demonstrated yesterday — I am not saying all of them support Hitler. But all I’m saying is by omitting to understand what Hamas ideology is all about they are basically supporting this ideology. ”

Israeli President Isaac Herzog seeks to justify his mass killing of Palestinian children by holding up the book Mein Kampf and claiming it was found in a "children's living room."pic.twitter.com/GLSGDHYrak

— Lowkey (@Lowkey0nline) November 12, 2023

You can view a one–minute, 22–second version of this video clip here, or a longer, BBC version here. In both, we watch the Israeli head of state play the Holocaust card, the Hitler card, the Jewish victim card and the Hamas-as-murdering-burning-slaughtering-monsters card all at once.

I cannot identify the television network that showed the shorter version of Herzog, and I am astonished that the BBC took it seriously enough to broadcast it, but this is the Beeb these days — always on for the trans–Atlantic cause.

How remarkably flimsy propaganda is in most cases, I thought after watching Herzog and taking my notes. This is true in many, many cases in the annals of the awful art — Hitler’s, Mussolini’s, Japan’s and America’s during World War II. As you look at it now, none of it is very sophisticated for the simple reason it does not have to be.

Propaganda is about forceful impact, subtlety the last thing on the propagandist’s mind. The banal will always do. The Japanese during the Pacific war were “Japs” or “Nips,” and in the plentitude of American propaganda images they had buck teeth and pencil mustaches and wore round glasses over their evil Asiatic eyes.

After watching the Herzog video I went in search of footage from London the previous day. There have been many demonstrations against Israel’s savage military campaign in Gaza since hostilities erupted Oct. 7, and may there be many more, but London last Saturday looks like the biggest to date.

“Free Gaza,” “Ceasefire Now,” “Not in Our Names” — these were among the things shouted and scribbled on placards as the protest wound slowly through Central London from Hyde Park to the U.S. Embassy several miles away. The police estimated the number of protesters at 300,000. From the footage—all I have to go by—I would put it nearer half a million.

One of the biggest protests in British history is happening right now in the streets of London for Gaza, for Palestine, despite the smears and threats 🇵🇸

Magnificent!pic.twitter.com/z9uvPK751P

— sarah (@sahouraxo) November 11, 2023

If you watch enough propaganda, contemporary or historical, you find that it does not matter even if the scripts and images betray the crudity and indignity of those producing the propaganda. The intent is solely to capture the thoughts and feelings of the unthinking majority however this needs to be done.

Israeli Propaganda Department Is Desperate

But this project is more difficult now, in the age of digital media and an increasingly influential independent press. So it seems to me. People can see more and see it more clearly and immediately now, providing they choose to look. And more and more people are so choosing.

If the idiotic Herzog clip told us anything, it is that the Israeli propaganda department is in a desperate state, having already lost the public-relations war as the Israeli Defense Forces dig the hole deeper by the day.

After watching the Herzog video and then the London footage, I thought of a memorable passage in Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism:

“In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow.”

Arendt was looking back to the Reich and Stalin’s Soviet Union when she wrote her celebrated 1951 treatise. But the thought seems never to have been thereafter far from her mind.

In a conversation with a French, free-speech activist not long before her death in 1975, Arendt had yet blunter words as to what eventually comes of circumstances such as ours. “If everybody always lies to you,” she said to Roger Errera, “the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer.”

Half a century before Herzog made his video and demonstrators filled the streets of London, Arendt called last weekend perfectly.

It is a fine thing that fewer and fewer people are taken in by the psyops and propaganda blitzes of the national security state, the corporate media, and ruthless — indeed Hitleresque, I shall say it — regimes such as Israel’s.

But to live in a world in which one believes nothing of what is said is its own kind of misery. It is effectively a surrender of all public discourse and public space altogether to the malign, the indecent, the inhumane, the degraded and degrading. The truth, and along with it logical thinking and plain decency, become “alternative.”

Is there a way to build beyond our debased circumstances? Or are we to wander indefinitely in a state of negativity, of not believing, of alienation from our own polities?

My answer is yes to the first question, no to the second: There is always a way to build a different future — this as a matter of general principle. In this case the project must begin with the reclamation of language. Rejecting the official language of those in power, as so many people now do, is a start. We must then learn again to speak the language that is not spoken, the language wherein truth resides.

In large part because of how I have spent my professional years, I am especially sensitive to the power of language as it is used in the cause either of clarity and understanding or of obfuscation and ignorance.

The language of institutions, the language of power, is made of obscuring euphemisms — “global leadership,” “collateral damage,” “regime change,” “the intelligence community,” “the rules-based order,” and so on through the bureaucratic lexicon — and of bold falsifications such as Isaac Herzog offered us last Sunday.

Orwell described how the language of ideologues and bureaucratic mandarins devastates our ability to think clearly — precisely its purpose — in “Politics and the English Language.” Since he published his essay in Horizon in April 1946, the problem as we have it is seven decades’ worth of worse.

This use of language has disarmed language itself, depriving it of its assertive power such that speech or writing outside the orthodoxy can be dismissed as a site of serious discourse. Language is rendered impotent as a medium of creative thought or as a prompt to new, imaginative action.

The preposterous, insulting use of “anti–Semitism” that now besets us is a case in point. The obvious intent is to impose a vast silence to obscure the crimes of apartheid Israel.

The task before us is one of restoration. It is to take language back, to renew its life, to wrest it from the deadening influence of institutions, bureaucracies, and corporate media — these having deformed language into an instrument for the enforcement of conformity. This is why every shout and placard heard or seen in London or many other cities these days is important, an act of significance and worth.

Clear language is an instrument — unadorned, written and spoken plainly, colloquial in the best sense of this term but perfectly capable of subtlety and complexity. It is the language of history, not myth.

This language is spoken not in the cause of empire but always in the human cause. “Free Palestine,” “From the river to the sea”: These are two-word and six-word examples of the language I describe.

This is the language necessary to confront power rather than accommodate it. It is language that presumes the utility of intelligence and critical thought. It is meant for the posing of many worthy questions. It is unreservedly dedicated to enlarging what is sayable in hostile response to “the great unsayable,” as I call it.

By way of this language a more vibrant, fulfilling public discourse awaits us. By way of this language the Isaac Herzogs, Antony Blinkens and Ursula von der Leyens who pollute our public space can be reduced to what they are — liars and propagandists. The power of the language I describe will deprive the language they speak of all power.

Let us speak it, let us write it, let us scribble it on walls and sheets of cardboard. Let us know it as the most powerful tool available to those who refuse the silence Isaac Herzog sought to impose upon all those Londoners last weekend.

https://scheerpost.com/2023/11/17/patrick-lawrence-the-banality-of-propaganda/

#gaza #palestine #israel #propaganda #lies

Devil's advocate here.

I've never voted FOR any candidate.

I start with the worst and work upwards.

I even joined an Establishment political party for a few years. Never ACTUALLY voted for them, but it was instructive. Most party members are well-meaning muppets. 80% of MPs are insincere careerists, and party apparatchiks are worse. Goes for every Establishment party.

Absolutely keep doing what you're doing, that's more impactful. But equally, don't unnessessarily neglect those feeble levers they dangle within our reach.

That I agree with!

But in this specific context, the State is being invited in by a private citizen, in return for personal and property rights enforcement. A less-objectionable nation-state intrusion is difficult to conceive.

This might be among the least-wrong fiat laws passed by a modern State. :-p

Compare and contrast with the USA's "Contiguous Zone" and China's "Nine Dash Line"...

I don't really see the problem with that Act. Applies to uninhabited islands only, and with the obvious purpose of phosphate mining.

Without phosphate fertilizers, ppl die.

Half naked in that climate makes perfect sense.

LOL waxed though, tests suspension of disbelief.

Who ever met a Greek that wasn't densely carpeted like a Wookie front and back?

We NEED women to be involved, to shame cowards and serial killers both.

Something I noticed about decentralised legal systems - medieval Gaelic and Norse legal systems, and modern Xeer - is that they are very obviously buttressed by the underlying threat of recourse to arms if one party evades arbitration.

Duelling maintains this threat but limits the scope for socially destructive escalation

Hell yes!

But Irish Code, and no hiring mercenary duellists to represent you. Family members only.

A mediaeval knight was part soldier, part gentleman farmer and part Mafia don.

"White Knight" was a BS trope even when it was new...

I think our positions on this are pretty close.

We don't have a good scientific theory of consciousness, mostly because they are so hard to Falsify.

We know what it isn't: unitary and logical a la Descartes and Plato.

We do know that much processing is not accessible to introspection, that it is surprisingly modular, and at least somewhat hardware-dependent.

"True" creativity and the like lack rigorous definition, so we'll never know when/if those goalposts have been reached.

I remember this! Must show it to my wife in the morning, she'll love it

Britain was having a revolution in property rights - feudal tenure was being replaced with Enclosure.

Dumping the now-landless displaced villagers into mill towns was only partially effective. Dartmouth Hulks could only hold so many.

But that island at the end of the world where everything is poisonous or flammable or both? Perfect for the blighters! We'll just send some guards to tax the entry and exit, and we'll maybe even turn a profit!

DissidentSound, martyr. Patron Saint of child molesters!

Your population has different, less civilised values. :-p

Civilisation being the set of norms, values and behaviours that allow a population to reconcile itself to living under tyranny.

I still think you're a century behind us and the UK.

Israel has definitely levelled up.

Other countries, the USA, even China, would attempt to find a fig-leaf of "military necessity" before killing wounded civilians through neglect.

Even Myanmar and Ethiopia don't do this in hospitals, or where a camera might see.

You Americans and your Bill of Rights...!

You haven't tasted Western Values, yet.

Here during COVID lockdown, police kicked in middle-class doors and dragged people out, for sh-tposting on Facebook about doing a protest.

Cavalry, Stella. Cavalry. :-p

"Calvary" is the exact frame in which DissidentSound would want his gruesome fate to be interpreted :-p

This is, of course, a war crime of the sort commanders have been hanged for.

Imagine if Russia did this! Or Iran. Or even China.

Israel committed this crime openly, backed by every Western government and our taxes.

https://video.nostr.build/2726e3274892964d7913a33ef3287bd661ab17cbab86b58657fb5e89dfa8eafa.mp4