Interesting Links for 04-09-2022

[andrewducker]

1. What is it that Kiwi Farms does? And what is stochastic terrorism?

(tags:transgender bigotry assault murder forum terrorism )

2. Foreigners must tell the Israeli defence ministry if they fall in love with a Palestinian in the occupied West Bank

(tags:Israel Palestine relationships migration wtf )

3. The problem with having complicated conversations in a public place is the huge disparity in understanding and experience, and the impossibility of having a level of conversation that works for everyone

(tags:communication internet racism LGBT philosophy education teaching )

4. Why the Nazis weren't close to building an atomic bomb

(tags:nuclearweapons history wwii Nazis Germany )

5. Cloudflare blocks Kiwifarms

(tags:LGBT internet bigotry GoodNews transgender )

6. What has President Biden achieved?

(tags:USA politics democrats )

7. A man deliberately infected with HIV has been denied compensation because he once shouted at David Cameron

(tags:UK crime money )

8. How did "Steaming" come to be Scottish slang for"drunk"?

(tags:boats history language alcohol slang )

Comments

[altamira16]

The KiwiFarms thing has been so terrible. The YouTube video where Keffals explains it in her own words seems so scary.

[calimac]

2) Past time to make Palestine its own country. Unfortunately that's not going to happen.

3) The kind of that I often get is when people write and explain things to me that I know perfectly well but left out because they're irrelevant to my point.

4) Hmm. Nothing the poster says here is incorrect, but it feels off. For instance, not having the space and resources to make plutonium is not evidence you can't make an a-bomb, because you don't need plutonium to make an a-bomb. You can enrich uranium instead. (The US did both.) And despite the departure of many of central Europe's key physics brains, there were still enough left in Germany to have concocted one, if the government had supported it, but as the poster notes they ignored a-bombs as not immediately practical enough. But - important note! - the Allies didn't know this, and Germany's interest in acquiring Norwegian heavy water - a key ingredient - convinced them that Germany's project was on. So they reacted accordingly.

7) If I understand this, the rule for denying compensation was enacted to keep people from being compensated for harms they caused themselves. OK, but since this guy getting HIV had nothing to do with his having shouted at Cameron, a waiver, esp. one supported by his MP, should have been, like, automatic.
(Besides, shouting at Cameron seems a worthy project which I wish more people had indulged in at the time.)

[andrewducker]

2) I think the issue at this point is that there's no map of a Palestine state that would get majority support.

7) I completely agree. Unless there's a clear and direct link between the two crimes I don't see why they should affect one another.

[danieldwilliam]

3) Yeah, I think that's an astute observation about the different levels of knowledge and reflection that people are at. I notice it often when watching conversations about energy policy or electoral reform. Part of it is understanding the vocabulary. I was surprised when I discovered that the use of "legalisation" and decriminalisation" (or similar terms) was a) back to front between drug policy and the regulation of sex work and b) sex work discourse used the terms the same way as almost every other policy area where prohibition might be a thing. Coming initially from a drugs policy background it was a bit confusing.

I like the analogy of the scaffold rather than layers - I think that's helpful.

Need to be a bit careful conflating levels of expertise with a) knowledge of the jargon and b) legitimacy of opinion. I think there are many examples of bad faith actors creating and throwing around jargon in order to bamboozle or intimidate bystanders. And the legitimacy of opinion element is worth picking carefully through. The fact that someone can't tell you the difference between kilowatts and megawatthours doesn't deligitimise their concern about security of supply and whether they want to run the risk of a power outage.

[andrewducker]

Excellent point about legitimacy!

And I was the same about drug legalisation/sex-work decrimninalisation!

[danieldwilliam]

It's one of the reasons why I like things like Citizen Juries as part of a more democratic process.

[danieldwilliam]

4) I recommend Adam Tooze book on the Nazi war economy - The Wages of Destruction and I'm reminded of it by the comment that the Nazis were too busy committing genocide to build a bomb. They were often too busy committing genocide to get on with running their own war effort. To the point where you might draw the conclusion that they knew they'd lost the war before they started and yet still chose to start the war and committ genocide.

[andrewducker]

I'm willing to bet there was a fair bit of "Well of course we'll win, so it doesn't matter if we take our eye off the ball a bit..."

[danieldwilliam]

Probably. I'm no expert on the historical period having read a handful of popular history accounts. The impression I was left with was that there was a good chance that the very top people in the Nazi regime knew the gig was up before they started and started the war in order to inflict the maximum amount of damage on Jewish, Slavic, Romani and other populations - more or less out of spite.

[andrewducker]

In that case they must have been extremely surprised when they took the whole of Western Europe, and very nearly the UK!

[danieldwilliam]

I think they were. The blitzkreig method accidentally worked really really well in France for a variety of reasons. Partly through dumb good luck, partly through some faulty assumptions and muddled performance by the French and partly because they'd done quite a good job preparing themselves for the short victorious war they nearly got.

[danieldwilliam]

1) The ability to find people susceptible to manipulation, manipulating them in to adopting radical views, and then increasingly winding them up to violent crime - using AI - is a bit of worry.

[andrewducker]

It is a bit. We're going to definitely have to work on teaching people how to not be taken in by outright lies.