Kicking off in Israel

[epwc]

And yes we have absolutely brilliant Christmas dinners which we’ve hosted for years for the white side of the family. We also host the brown side for Eid, and whenever possible we try and bring them together

[Ymx]

And yes we have absolutely brilliant Christmas dinners which we’ve hosted for years for the white side of the family. We also host the brown side for Eid, and whenever possible we try and bring them together

Tomorrow??

[epwc]

Yes, got to be up at 5:00, night night

[Ymx]

Yes, got to be up at 5:00, night night

Eid Mubarak

[Guy Smiley]

You must have fun family Christmas dinners

Fun fact for you, YMX. We are both NZers, obviously. I am currently living in NZ after many years away, you have been gone for several years at least, correct?

One of the hot topics here is the relationship between Pakeha and Maori, it has been for many years. I am constantly astounded by the level of antipathy expressed by Pakeha towards Maori, in everyday life. There is a steady level of dehumanising involved... fucking Maaari are never satisfied, they want everything, cunts should be made to pay etc etc etc. Sometimes, those sentiments are freely expressed in front of Maori workmates... the prevailing attitude from Pakeha like this is that they own the right to do what they want to the land and Maori just get in the way.

As you know, the nation was founded on a Treaty between Brits and Maori and after years of legal battles we now recognise the Maori language document as the only true and correct version of that Treaty. Most of the sentiment I mention above goes against the spirit of that Treaty and we even have moves in Parliament from one coalition party to reframe the whole approach to Treaty and disown the rights of Maori under it.

There are people here in your homeland who basically want to eradicate the native population, mate. We are having a 'fun Christmas' every day.

[Slick]

This is better than I expected, YMX actually telling a Muslim poster what it is to be Muslim.

It's really something

[Uncle fester]

Why would it be a parody account if I think that climate change is a huge issue?

Are you a denier?

It felt like you were going for a bingo of causes.

I’m not a denier, no.

Imagine a world where people make their own minds up instead of regurgitating the far right xhitter accounts that they follow.

[Uncle fester]

This is better than I expected, YMX actually telling a Muslim poster what it is to be Muslim.

It's really something

Bad news for epwc is that all his friends are in Hamas terrorist cells.

[Uncle fester]

You must have fun family Christmas dinners

Fun fact for you, YMX. We are both NZers, obviously. I am currently living in NZ after many years away, you have been gone for several years at least, correct?

One of the hot topics here is the relationship between Pakeha and Maori, it has been for many years. I am constantly astounded by the level of antipathy expressed by Pakeha towards Maori, in everyday life. There is a steady level of dehumanising involved... fucking Maaari are never satisfied, they want everything, cunts should be made to pay etc etc etc. Sometimes, those sentiments are freely expressed in front of Maori workmates... the prevailing attitude from Pakeha like this is that they own the right to do what they want to the land and Maori just get in the way.

As you know, the nation was founded on a Treaty between Brits and Maori and after years of legal battles we now recognise the Maori language document as the only true and correct version of that Treaty. Most of the sentiment I mention above goes against the spirit of that Treaty and we even have moves in Parliament from one coalition party to reframe the whole approach to Treaty and disown the rights of Maori under it.

There are people here in your homeland who basically want to eradicate the native population, mate. We are having a 'fun Christmas' every day.

This is something I'm interested in.
Why did it turn out so different to Oz where the original population got decimated and in some cases exterminated?

Feel free to move to different thread or the history thread.

[epwc]

This is better than I expected, YMX actually telling a Muslim poster what it is to be Muslim.

It's really something

Bad news for epwc is that all his friends are in Hamas terrorist cells.

I am eternally grateful to ymx for bringing this to my attention

[epwc]

You must have fun family Christmas dinners

Fun fact for you, YMX. We are both NZers, obviously. I am currently living in NZ after many years away, you have been gone for several years at least, correct?

One of the hot topics here is the relationship between Pakeha and Maori, it has been for many years. I am constantly astounded by the level of antipathy expressed by Pakeha towards Maori, in everyday life. There is a steady level of dehumanising involved... fucking Maaari are never satisfied, they want everything, cunts should be made to pay etc etc etc. Sometimes, those sentiments are freely expressed in front of Maori workmates... the prevailing attitude from Pakeha like this is that they own the right to do what they want to the land and Maori just get in the way.

As you know, the nation was founded on a Treaty between Brits and Maori and after years of legal battles we now recognise the Maori language document as the only true and correct version of that Treaty. Most of the sentiment I mention above goes against the spirit of that Treaty and we even have moves in Parliament from one coalition party to reframe the whole approach to Treaty and disown the rights of Maori under it.

There are people here in your homeland who basically want to eradicate the native population, mate. We are having a 'fun Christmas' every day.

I thought that this had been done and dusted, didn't know it was still a live issue, if so that's shameful

[C69]

Ths is fucking comedy gold.

[JM2K6]

"Support Hamas" covers a wide range, I expect. Like you could claim that I support the IRA because I understand what led to them and why groups like that are sometimes the only way an oppressed population can attempt to force an end to systemic injustice. Obviously that is not what most people mean by "support the IRA", but it's all about how the questions and answers are interpreted.

Also excellent first post, welcome

[epwc]

"Support Hamas" covers a wide range, I expect. Like you could claim that I support the IRA because I understand what led to them and why groups like that are sometimes the only way an oppressed population can attempt to force an end to systemic injustice. Obviously that is not what most people mean by "support the IRA", but it's all about how the questions and answers are interpreted.

True, but I suspect that most people would have at least an inkling of that, particularly given our own 'Troubles'. Well, I'd hope they would anyway...

[JM2K6]

"Support Hamas" covers a wide range, I expect. Like you could claim that I support the IRA because I understand what led to them and why groups like that are sometimes the only way an oppressed population can attempt to force an end to systemic injustice. Obviously that is not what most people mean by "support the IRA", but it's all about how the questions and answers are interpreted.

True, but I suspect that most people would have at least an inkling of that, particularly given our own 'Troubles'. Well, I'd hope they would anyway...

A moment on social media exposes that as very wishful thinking, I fear

[Ymx]

For reference, these were how it was positioned and what the key responses were.





From here
https://henryjacksonsociety.org/wp-cont ... -Final.pdf

[Tilly Orifice]

Well, it's certainly remarkable that nearly a quarter of British Muslims think that a state founded on elbowing aside an existing Muslim population has a right to exist as somebody else's homeland. That's amazingly broadminded of them.

[Guy Smiley]

This is something I'm interested in.
Why did it turn out so different to Oz where the original population got decimated and in some cases exterminated?

Feel free to move to different thread or the history thread.

I might pursue this at a later date, when I can assemble the necessaries. I'm working this week and don't have the time / energy.

[Sandstorm]

Well, it's certainly remarkable that nearly a quarter of British Muslims think that a state founded on elbowing aside an existing Muslim population has a right to exist as somebody else's homeland. That's amazingly broadminded of them.

[Ymx]

Well, it's certainly remarkable that nearly a quarter of British Muslims think that a state founded on elbowing aside an existing Muslim population has a right to exist as somebody else's homeland. That's amazingly broadminded of them.

Wow !!! You utter piece of shit.

[Sandstorm]

Well, it's certainly remarkable that nearly a quarter of British Muslims think that a state founded on elbowing aside an existing Muslim population has a right to exist as somebody else's homeland. That's amazingly broadminded of them.

Wow !!! You utter piece of shit.

Too subtle for you?

[epwc]

Too subtle for you?

Clearly

[MungoMan]

Well, it's certainly remarkable that nearly a quarter of British Muslims think that a state founded on elbowing aside an existing Muslim population has a right to exist as somebody else's homeland. That's amazingly broadminded of them.

Wow !!! You utter piece of shit.

Too subtle for you?

[Uncle fester]

From the IT

The most horrifying aspect of the report, though, is its detailing of the guidelines on collateral damage; these inhuman calculations were made not by an AI system, but by the men and women of the IDF. During the early weeks of Israel’s slaughter in Gaza, for every low-ranking militant, it was permissible to kill 15 to 20 civilians; in attacks on high-ranking Hamas targets, the number was more than 100. It should be noted here that, even at the lower end of this scale, if 20 civilians were to be killed for each of the 37,000 military targets identified by the AI, the number of civilian deaths would be close to three-quarters of a million people, or about a third of Gaza’s population. In any attempt to reckon with the question of whether Israel is in the process of carrying out a genocide, it is worth bearing this calculation in mind.

This is essentially what "defeating Hamas" looks like.
"they make a desert, they call it peace"

[epwc]

Israel Times? Is it behind a paywall or accessible?

[Uncle fester]

Irish times. Behind paywall but happy to c&p.

Spoiler

Show

The Irish Times

(Opens in new window)
Opinion
‘The machine does it coldly’: Artificial Intelligence can already kill people
While Silicon Valley doomers worry about an existential threat to humanity posed by AI, they ignore the nightmarish and destructive uses to which it is already being put by the Israeli army

Expand

The most horrifying aspect of a report on the use of artificial intelligence by the Israel Defence Forces concerns the guidelines on collateral damage; these inhuman calculations were made not by an AI system, but by the men and women of the IDF. Photograph: Ariel Schalit/AP
Mark O'Connell's face
Mark O'Connell
Sat Apr 13 2024 - 07:00

Among the technological faithful of Silicon Valley, there is an ongoing debate about the risks inherent in the development of artificial intelligence. On one side are the so-called “doomers”, who believe that AI presents an urgent existential threat to humanity; without rigorous ethical, technological, and legal strictures in place, they argue, we face a non-trivial possibility of machine intelligence wiping humanity from the face of the earth. This Terminator-esque scenario is palpably absurd, but that doesn’t prevent people who identify as rationalists giving it a great deal of serious thought.

There are multidisciplinary research units at Oxford and Cambridge devoted to thinking through these prospects. Last year a Bay Area non-profit called the Center for AI Safety released a statement on AI risk; the statement, signed by the likes of Bill Gates and OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman, announced that “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”

On the other side of the debate are “AI accelerationists”, who believe that such fears are hysterical, and that the great benefits this technology will bring to society are worth whatever trivial risk might be inherent in developing it. Fortune favours the brave, they say, and a technological utopia of endless ease and abundance will be our reward.

I’m neither a technologist nor a futurist, but both of these prospects seem wilfully simplistic and implausible. What strikes me as strange is that each of them, and the debate between their respective proponents, get so much attention at a time when artificial intelligence is already being put to nightmarish and destructive uses, about which Silicon Valley’s prophets of AI doom apparently have very little to say.

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Earlier this month, the left-wing Israeli magazine +972 published a detailed report about the Israel Defence Forces’s use of AI systems to generate targets among the Gazan population. Drawing on data gathered from automated mass surveillance of the area’s 2.3 million residents, Israel’s “Lavender” AI uses its internal algorithms to assess the likelihood of each person being a member of Hamas’s military wing, or of the militant group Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Subjects who rank highly enough on the system’s scale of 1 to 100 are deemed targets for assassination, a process which is itself automated. In this way, according to the report, the system identified some 37,000 potential targets.

As with all AI systems, the value to its owner is largely in its minimisation of human labour. The report quotes IDF intelligence officers on the frictionless ease with which such a software facilitates mass killing.

It is easier to have faith in a statistical mechanism, said one officer, than in a grieving soldier whose loved ones had been murdered in the massacres of October 7th: “The machine did it coldly. And that made it easier.” Another spoke of the essentially negligible role played by humans in the process of selecting and killing suspected enemy combatants: “I would invest 20 seconds for each target at this stage, and do dozens of them every day. I had zero added-value as a human, apart from being a stamp of approval. It saved a lot of time.” (The Israel Defence Force denies many of the claims in the report. It has said it “does not use an artificial intelligence system that identifies terrorist operatives” and that Lavender is not an AI system but “simply a database whose purpose is to cross-reference intelligence sources”. It also said that “the IDF reviews targets before strikes and chooses the proper munition in accordance with operational and humanitarian considerations.”)

The most horrifying aspect of the report, though, is its detailing of the guidelines on collateral damage; these inhuman calculations were made not by an AI system, but by the men and women of the IDF. During the early weeks of Israel’s slaughter in Gaza, for every low-ranking militant, it was permissible to kill 15 to 20 civilians; in attacks on high-ranking Hamas targets, the number was more than 100. It should be noted here that, even at the lower end of this scale, if 20 civilians were to be killed for each of the 37,000 military targets identified by the AI, the number of civilian deaths would be close to three-quarters of a million people, or about a third of Gaza’s population. In any attempt to reckon with the question of whether Israel is in the process of carrying out a genocide, it is worth bearing this calculation in mind.

[ AI is generating ‘100 bombing targets a day’ for the Israeli army in Gaza ]

Attacks on low-ranking targets were made using “dumb bombs” –– unguided missiles whose lack of precision inevitably meant the killing and maiming of civilians, most often women and children. “You don’t want to waste expensive bombs on unimportant people,” as one intelligence source put it. “It’s very expensive for the country and there’s a shortage [of those bombs].”

The manner in which the IDF’s AI systems calculate the value of Palestinian lives is mirrored, in this way, by the language of Israeli officials. The machine does it coldly, as the intelligence officer quoted in +972′s report put it, but it acts in service of a machinery of state that is no less chillingly inhuman. The AI doomers of the tech world, whose worldview is formed of equal parts narrow rationalism and magical thinking, seem interested only in abstractions. They have nothing to say about the actually existing AI-assisted apocalypse being unleashed by Israel on the people of Gaza; they are incapable of thinking about AI as anything other than a kind of divine force unleashed upon the world by Promethean computer scientists.

But AI is a tool, like any technology, wielded by the powerful to serve their interests. If it obliterates entire sections of the employment economy, that is because the powerful are using it to reduce their labour costs. And if it facilitates the automation of death, it is because the powerful are using it to advance a project of colonial subjugation and extermination. It represents not a radical break with human history, in other words, but a radical intensification of historical business as usual: the rich getting richer, the poor getting poorer, and the powerless getting crushed by a machinery of power that is increasingly sophisticated, and enduringly barbaric.

[epwc]

Thanks

[Calculon]

"genocide"

[epwc]

Do you think there might be people under the rubble that haven't been counted? Do you think the Gazans or any of the NGOs in Gaza actually have the resources available to count the dead?

[Calculon]

I think this is almost certainly true

Hamas statistics are inconsistent, imprecise, and systematically manipulated to downplay the number of men and militants killed.

https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/med ... ion=inline

I suspect that the first tweet is fairly accurate

Israel claim 260 IDF soldiers killed and 501 seriously wounded since 7th October.

10,000 to 15,000 Hamas fighters killed, wounded unknown.

That means somewhere between 10,000-20,000 civilians killed.

The most impressive casualty ratio in any prolonged urban war, ever?

so would tend to agree with this conclusion

Either way… all of a sudden that “genocide” doesn’t really look very, well, genocide-like, does it? Nor does it look much like “an orgy of revenge-driven rage” or “slaughter of innocents”.

[epwc]

I'd say I need to see independent sources, I know someone who lost an innocent teenage nephew in the bulldozing of an apartment block that was deemed to be home to a terrorist in the first intifada, the cavalier attitude to innocent civilians is widely recorded:

https://www.fmreview.org/sites/fmr/file ... halper.pdf

I also remember the fates of Rachel Corrie and Tom Hurndall.

As a family we support MSF, they have lost many colleagues in this conflict, I believe this is the conflict with the highest number of casualties amongst NGOs (I'm making dinner so can't dig out any supporting evidence).

[Tichtheid]

Do you think there might be people under the rubble that haven't been counted?

Is it the custom to be buried as soon as possible after death? I seem to remember reading that somewhere.

This must only add to the trauma of losing loved ones if they are left under rubble.

[Ymx]

[C69]

So Israel's attack on Syrian sovereignty has implications.
FFS
Bibi bringing forth the apocalypse

[Uncle fester]

Imagine this will have no impact on Israel due to the disparity in ability but what will Israel do when Hezbollah start acting the maggot also?

[Ymx]

Shit is getting real



Also reports of explosions over Tehran. But not official

[Tichtheid]

What's a suicide drone?

Would that be a flying bomb, like a missile or something, an explosive that blows up on impact, maybe?

[Ymx]

What's a suicide drone?

Would that be a flying bomb, like a missile or something, an explosive that blows up on impact, maybe?

I’m guessing it means non renewable. Kamikaze

[Ymx]

[epwc]

Is it the custom to be buried as soon as possible after death? I seem to remember reading that somewhere.

This must only add to the trauma of losing loved ones if they are left under rubble.

Just like our Jewish cousins we bury as soon as possible, even in countries not equipped for such, my dad died at 22:20 on a Friday and was buried at 13:30 on Saturday. Lovely registrar was really helpful.

On another note have Israel taken any prisoners (not heard anything about them) or is it a strictly shoot the fuckers policy?

I can’t believe that Iran has even a chance of inflicting any damage on Israel but I’m sure Israeli (and probably US) retaliation will.