RE: https://jaq.blessing.exchange/event/october-maariv/

Tomorrow (Tuesday)!! In London (UK)!! Queer Jewish Event!!

#Jew #Jewish #London #Queer #Mazeldon

When Chuck turned 50, his friends came to his house overnight and hung up a huge banner that said "[last name] is 50!"

Yesterday, my best friend from high school turned 50 and so I tried to figure out how to print a banner printed and get it hung up. Do they have task rabbit in California? I discussed this with a friend and the solution we found instead was that I had an A1 size poster printed and she volunteered to pick it up and attach it …somewhere… but the time zone thing is always a problem and she has her own schedule. So instead of overnight, she showed up in the afternoon with her 6 month old baby sleeping in a stroller and sung happy birthday while holding, essentially, an enormous birthday card.

All three of us were good friends around 20 years ago, but of course I moved and its been hard to keep up with the guy whose birthday it is as he's been married with a wife and a child. I haven't spoken to him in a few years and its been even longer since he spoke with the card-bearing friend who rang his doorbell.

When she arrived his parents and current regular friends were over having a little party and he was so surprised, she said, that he got teary eyed. He hung the poster in his living room.

I always remember what day is birthday is because 24 years ago my mother died and my dad didn't want company and I didn't know what do to with myself, so I went to his birthday party. He was enormously nice to me and I did not spoil his party.

So this year he had a birthday again, as he does, and I couldn't be there because I chose to migrate. And when I turned 50 here a few months ago, there were no surprise guests from the past (or parents, obviously) or really any gathering at my house. Because I chose to migrate.

Anyway, I failed to arrange a bagpiper, but I did try.

I've seen reports of left political content in the US being removed from insta, tiktok and blue sky. Meta has been (allegedly) implicated in election interference before, in the UK. If the US social media companies are dodgy in the US, they will replicate this everywhere.

I have tried arguing for years that activist orgs should move to fedi from corporate media, but they want to stay where the users are. It seems like maybe the next step is not moving the orgs, but moving the users.

But maybe getting everyone on to fedi isn't the answer for organising.

In the old days, people learned about protests from phone trees. They got on a list and got a call when something was happening. The closest equivalent now is a signal group. All the lefty orgs have announcement channels. Now there is also a London protest channel.

So maybe the first priority is to get people on to signal.

How could orgs change their behaviour?

Many orgs don't have websites, they have insta and linktree. Their linkree should include a link to their signal broadcast channel AND the regional protest broadcast channel. (You're not posting anything you wouldn't put on insta, so the channels might as well be public.)

Their broadcast channel can have links in the group 'about' information. One should go to their linktree and the other to the regional protest channel.

We might go back to leafleting at protests. The leaflets could have two QR codes. One could go to more information and next steps*. The other could go to the protest calendar.

Every group could be growing the whole movement via Signal. We might not get them off of meta via Instagram, but maybe we can denormalise WhatsApp. And create lists that are harder to shut down.

* And because we can't rely on insta, maybe the more info and next steps could be posted on a WordPress site, set up to also post to fedi.....

What do people think?

A bookcase was missing two of the shelf clip thingees for like two years and only now, after I got a new shelf and want to give the old one away, I find out ikea will replace missing parts for free.

There's a thought experiment in computer science called "The Chinese Room", first described in 1980.

The idea is this: There is a room with a locked door, but which has a little mail slot. You can put in sheets of paper with some Chinese text written on it. After several minutes, the paper is slipped back out, with a reply written on it. In this way, you can converse in Chinese with the room.

(Why Chinese? Well, this is the racism. Let's hold this thought for some paragraphs.)

What's inside the room? A person inside the room knows how to recognise and draw Chinese text, but doesn't understand it. For every input, he opens a giant set of books and thumbs through them until he finds the same characters listed as input. Then he copies down the listed output.

So if the man doesn't speak Chinese, does the room speak it?

Now, let's complicate this slightly. For every input, the books have several possible replies. The man has dice of various sizes. If there are five possible answers, he rolls a five sided dice and gives that output. The system if no longer deterministic. Does the room speak Chinese?

The man now has a chalkboard, with a zero on it. For every input, he finds an indexed list. Every element is a function to change the number on his chalkboard (which may include dice rolling) and a suggested output. He uses the number on the chalkboard to pick the output and then updates the number. The system is not deterministic and outputs now are tied to previous inputs. Does the room now speak Chinese?

We replace the man with a CPU that does exactly the same steps. Does the room now speak Chinese? Does the CPU speak Chinese? Is the CPU sentient?

This thought experiment has not yet been given a less problematic name. I learned about it at uni when we talked about AI. But after I was a student, there was an AI winter and a growing consciousness of racism and I wonder if it got skipped in future years because the name is awkward to discuss in class and the problem didn't seem very relevant?

I haven't seen much discussion of it recently, despite the obvious relevance to LLMs.

In diaspora Jewish communities, support for the state of Israel is built by invoking fears about Jewish safety. These fears are not fully irrational or unfounded.

Obviously the goal of pro-Palestinian activists is freedom and safety for Palestinians in the lands they have historically occupied.

Non-Jewish people negatively invoking Jewish ideas (like Zionism) tends to provoke the same fears that build support for Israel in Jewish communities, while at the same time de-centring Palestinians from their own struggle.

Just say you're anti-genocide.

That's why we're protesting, right? We want the murder to stop. I am against murder.

I increasingly think the use of the term "Zionism" in non-Jewish contexts is not a helpful strategy.

The problem with Israel is that is a deeply racist country committing genocide and ethnic cleansing, dispossessing people of land, and treating it's own minority citizens as second class.

People who say that Israel should be treated like any other state are right. Any state that was wantonly murdering so many people in an occupied territory would be rightly perceived as a pariah and sanctioned.

All of these complaints are based on the _actions_ of the country. We can compare these actions to other past sins: apartheid, fascism, colonialism, keeping in mind that these are metaphors that do not perfectly describe the current situation. Again, the problems stem from the state murdering people.

So why not mention "Zionism"? Brining up Jewish terms doesn't add clarity.

a. People mean a lot of different overlapping things when they say Zionism, which are strongly rooted in their own context, often a Jewish context. Liberal Zionists will defend Zionism because it is part of their identity. They are much less willing to defend settlements in the West Bank. Focussing on actions creates moral clarity.

b. White supremacists have used a condemnation of "Zionism" as a proxy to hide antisemitism. David Duke, while in the KKK, coined new slurs based on the term "Zionism". Bad actors are intentionally causing confusion. This is actually triggering for some people.

c. When activists coyly call Israel "the Zionist entity", this weird obfuscation also makes their motivations unclear. Are they against Israel because of it's murder or because it's Jewish? Probably the former, right? So why is their phrasing so fucking weird?

d. How is it clarifying to say "Zionism is racism"? You know what's racist? Murdering people based on religious and ethnic identity. How does invoking a Jewish idea add clarity to this? Is that clarity worth triggering a bunch of old Jews?

Or perhaps the inverse question is most useful. What do we gain (in non-Jewish contexts) when we say "Zionism" instead of "ethnic cleaning" or "genocide"?

I inherited some stocks from my dad and its basically a list of companies I've protested.

Is it possible to invest in co-ops? How does that work? How does one find lists of co-ops seeking investment? Are they looking for small investors?

My uncle Chuck remains my primary inspiration for how to be a middle aged man.

We've been saying it on fedi for months: BDS USA.

Well, now is the time to show up for it in person!! (In London, England)

Text found online:

💚 Hello Comrades 💚

🚨EEFP has announced a public demonstration to disrupt the British Museum's Blood Ball 🚨

📆Saturday 17th October *less than one week!*📍British Museum
⏰ 7PM🇵🇸 Please share far and wide with comrades, friends, family! 🔻 https://www.instagram.com/p/DeZnLIXIsTS

This Saturday 17 October, the British Museum will be hosting their second annual fundraising ball celebrating 250 years of the U.S. and the Bayeux Tapestry with the theme of “red”.

This ball will be one of the biggest events in recent history celebrating the U.S. This is whilst the U.S. has provided over $23 billion in military aid and arms transfers to Israel since October 2023, supplying tens of thousands of bombs, artillery shells and munitions that have been used to fuel the genocide in Gaza, and has engaged in wars of aggression this year alone against Iran, Cuba, Venezuela and countries across the Global South.

We must reject the normalisation of U.S. crimes in our public institutions. We must reject the British Museum’s track record of unethical sponsorships with companies like BP that are fuelling genocide in Gaza.

Join us to oppose the Museum’s celebration of the U.S. and its ongoing sponsorship with BP!

How shit has fast fashion gotten if something is considered 'durable' if you could wear it every other day for two months? This article was about how to tell if an item could survive that many wearings and washings.

Our clothes are rags, made for maximum profit at maximum environmental cost.

I read a thing about durable clothing in the Graun and it says a reasonable goal is to buy clothes you're planning on wearing at least thirty times.

I feel I must be some kind of outlier because that seems very few times.

God, could you imagine our current journalistic landscape trying to report on Eliza:

Will your human therapist become obsolete?

Is Eliza becoming sentient?

How will feeding all of our neurosis to a new life form make it like us? And unlike us?

Will our innermost thoughts drive computers insane?

"AI has turned coders from architects into janitors!"

Calm down, Ayn Rand.

Janitors are an extremely good and useful parts of an organisation. Unlike blame-absorbing meat proxies, which is an extremely bullshit job.

But let's be clear. Even in a world without AI, if a budget shortfall means letting go of either a coder or a janitor, no functional company would make the janitor redundant.

You can have an anti AI complaint about your job turning into bullshit without classism. The janitors are on your side in the struggle. The owners aren't. Know who your friends are.

Just going to unfollow people defending the Green Party antizionism thing. When the party leader has to specify there won't be investigations into what synagogues members belong to, a motion has gone way too fucking far.

(Ok, fine, Jews can defend it if they want.)

Sharing fascist propaganda to dunk on it or whatever is still sharing it.

Old York

Sure the queen is dead, but her symbolic value remains strong. Why don't we just appoint her a god-emperor who will eventually return and just downgrade the rest of the royal family and peerage?

People get absolutely buried in stuff. And then their lives get harder to manage and their bills go up and this is definitely an emergent vector of capitalist alienation.

My spouse has started watching a BBC reality show called 'Sort Your Life Out' which is an extremely templates intervention into people who are around the cusp of hoarding. Some definitely are. Some aren't quite there yet.

The show swoops in and helps people get rid of accumulated stuff.

It's a truth of our age that its very difficult to effectively reuse things that should be reusable, because they're still sold the same as disposable packaging. More durable plastic waste is not an improvement.

Anyway, I just dumped an enormous pile of plastic takeaway containers into a wishcycling bin because cautionary tales do actually work.