The state of Israel's historical and presently ongoing colonial Genocide

I’ve not yet posted anything about the recent “mowing the lawn” that the state of Israel is waging presently (and is always cycling through since 1947 and 1967) against the oppressed citizens of the still presently unrecognized state of Palestine.  This since the very beginning, I’ve kept up to the minute and have viewed some of the most horrific scenes since and still every day after the previous.  Entire families exterminated, every member of a family save but for a few.  Horrific scenes of inhuman carnage and the murdered and maimed children.  Recall that the Palestinians forced into the enclosed, open air prison of the densely populated 'city' that is the Gaza Strip, with their three different 'passports', are accorded no rights, not even the rights of prisoners.  Gaza's population of children is approximately half of the entire population.  According to the best measures of UNICEF, of the entire population 45% are children, and 44% are refugees.    

I’m not sure that I’ve seen anything quite like visiting the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp at around six-years-old or so, an experience that will not leave me until I die.  The Shoah (The Holocaust) occurred decades and decades before I was alive, and the remnants of it haunt me when I remember it, such as now.  What we’re witnessing right now every day is the Israeli state’s (the most racist and fascist since I’ve been alive and followed it) colonial genocide waged against the most oppressed human beings alive right now.  Where's our Tikkun olam?  The Palestinians have been being murdered since The Balfour Declaration and the ethnic cleansing and colonial extermination of the indigenous Palestinians which culminated in the Nakba of 1948.  This grotesque and inhuman genocide is to this very day proceeding with no objection by the so-called United States (but rather, is actually in full support and quietly arming and escalating the genocidal assault) is the only nation state in the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), and a permanent one, that could condemn and even allow for the ICC, (of which, the so-called United States has always voted against its recognition, for the obvious and transparent For Reasons of State) to prosecute the perpetrators functioning within the ever more fascistic Israeli state, of which the former Israeli State’s Foreign Minister, Schlomo Ben-Ami, would himself condemn.  Yet the so-called United States is the only UN member that could alter the genocide by ceasing to reject the positions voted in favor of by essentially the entire General Assembly and the other permanent members of the Security Council, being one of the permanent members of the UNSC.

I’ve recently been uplifted by witnessing the mass opposition to the so-called United States’ unconditional and inhuman support of the state of Israel’s ongoing colonial genocide, perhaps the historical residues of the original genocidal campaign of the colonial Europeans waged against the Indigenous of the Americas.  The masses of people who take to the streets in protest all across the world, are the only force alive that has the possible, essential, and necessary force to alter the course of the so-called United States' executive, legislative and judicial branches, more towards the actually ethical and human. 

Shall I mention the fact that the so-called United States has not and still refuses to publicly acknowledge the state of Israel’s large thermonuclear arsenal.  Given that under U.S. Code (law) itself declares that it is illegal to support a nuclear state in providing aid (military aid more specifically).  Let’s not for now get in-depth into the United Nations and the most heinous international crimes, Apartheid and colonial genocide, with the staunchest support from the so-called United States, perhaps the historical residues of the European colonial and genocidal occupation of the Americas.

Bibliography

Chomsky, Noam, Pappe, Illan, (2015). On Palestine. Haymarket Books.

Finkelstein, Norman, (2018). Gaza: An Inquest Into Its Martyrdom. University of California Press.

Khalidi, Rashid, (2020). The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine. Metropolitan Books.

There are myriad more, but these three are essential.  One ought to read Edward Said as well, among so many others, such as Tariq Ali, Arundhati Roy, the Israeli journalists Amira Hass and Gideon Levy at least.

Artificial Intelligence, Christopher Hitchens on Breaking Bad and the actual Sciences: An Interlude on Ridiculousness in the form of H.L. Mencken

So very eerie and creepy the manner in which some particular human coded software running on some particular hardware can produce such nearly convincing fabrications and lies strung whole cloth from a pervasive, perverse, and plagiarized digital database scraped off of the clear web by the coded software. Far beyond the corporatization of the internet and its inevitable digital disconnect (McChesney, 2013) the so-called AIs are essentially constructed pre-made for the global authoritarians and fascists to wage the most concentrated and potentially lethal form of fascist propaganda so far in the history of the human species.

A preliminary, going further into the corporate produced ‘AIs’ (Alphabet/Google/NSA/CIA) are more fundamental discussions of its actual humanly produced potentially lethal functions (not yet as terminally lethal as the potentials of nuclear holocaust and ecological extinction) and its barely tenuous connection to such mathematical and philosophical discussion as self-awareness and the ‘Turing Test’ that most of those who cite it do not actually understand.

Recent Addendum (October, 16, 2023)

The A.I. programed fabrications scraped off of the clear web, such as the NSA has been doing since before the Snowden exposures, are so far continuing on, potentially towards catastrophic consequences.  Almost to the exact date of two months ago, another A.I. Hitchens creepy frabrication scraped off of the clear web by some human coded software/program has been released.  Absolutely ridiculous and reckless, for shame.  The fascists of the world are as aware of and probably grateful for such a premade machine for producing and distributing presentations that those who are unfamiliar with the subject matter may be made to perceive these fictional presentations as reality.  Mussolini, the Nazis, Franco, they would have already annihilated human civilization had they such a machine as this.  The modern day fascists across the globe could cause the initiation of nuclear holocaust, and as such the annihilation of most life on earth, omnicide. 

References

Bla de, de bla here it is: AI Hitchens on Breaking Bad

Chomsky, Noam, The Turing Test

Chomsky, Noam, Can Machines Think? 

Chomsky, Noam, Advances in AI: ChatGPT | Human Brain

 Chomsky, Noam, Kahn, Jeremy, Marcus, Gary, Debunking the great AI lie

 McChesney, Robert W. (2013), Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is turning the Internet against Democracy. The New Press

 

'Purpose' of the Universe

 

Great discussion. I’ve been a fan of Shermer since reading Free Inquiry and Skeptik .

It's not that the universe has a purpose that was designed or willed into its big bang origins, such as humans understand the purpose of all living lifeforms, there are mathematically reaveled fundamental laws that govern the known universe and all of its known contents.  These are clearly more than ample, given the right circumstances, a planet orbiting a star in the habitable zone, such as Earth, to give rise to universal truths and laws that produce, given the right subatomic and molecular elements, the most complex biological structures in the known universe. A significant portion of these lifeforms develop emergent properties such as cognitive processes that in plenty of examples produce conscious self-awareness, which is not yet fully understood.

The human neural-architecture is the most complex structure in the known universe, and we are still discovering more of its structure and functioning.  The majority of the computations of the human neural-structure functions entirely independent of conscious awareness. Precisely how the human neural-structure produces the emergent property of conscious self-awareness and free-will, which is itself bound to the molecular properties of human physiology set within specific scenarios such as functioning within a social setting, given that humans are a social species, is not yet known and may well in principle be beyond the limits of human understanding, Noam Chomsky's conceptual distinction between problems and mysteries. The social scenarios within which humans have propagated the human genome therefore define the horizons of the functioning of the emergent properties of the human neural-architecture and the emergent neural computations that give rise to conscious self-awareness and conscious social awareness.

 

References

Kuhn, Michael Lawrence, Shermer, Michael, (2023), Does the Cosmos have a Reason? Closer to Truth