Top Democrats Smear Palestinian-American Politician for Criticizing Zionism
PhilipTheBucket @ PhilipTheBucket @piefed.social Posts 12Comments 78Joined 5 days ago
PhilipTheBucket @ PhilipTheBucket @piefed.social
Posts
12
Comments
78
Joined
5 days ago
If there is a version of zionism that can coexist with full Palestinian freedom, with full Israeli accountability for what they have done and are doing, and with fully equal democratic rights for all the people in Israel-Palestine regardless of creed and ethnic origin, including the right of return for all refugees as well as reparations in the context of a genuine Truth and Reconciliation process, then I have no problem being called that kind of a zionist too.
So are you saying "not all Zionists," then? I pretty much agree with everything you just said, I agree with all of that. Maybe more, truth and reconciliation is probably more productive, but my prescribed solution would be a little more inclusive of measured revenge to disincentivize repetition in the future. But yes we generally agree about all of that.
This was my central point: A lot of times, breaking down things into "isms" and "ists" can lead people to huge failures of thinking. I get why this Palestinian person is attacking Zionism. It makes sense to me. I'm just saying that once you start using a word that can both mean "a supremacist ideology created to destroy and conquer everything and everyone in its way" or also mean something so mild that you don't mind being identified with one version of it, that starts to become a dangerous word to use, because it helps people become more confused instead of helping them understand what is happening and what you wanted to communicate.
Like I said, I've seen people attack Bernie Sanders for being anti-Palestinian, it's not just some kind of idle speculation about how people could get confused by it.
It is your choice to focus on a "not all zionists" take
That's not at all what I was saying. It's actually backwards from what I was trying to say.
Am I a Zionist (if I want peace, and justice for Palestinian victims of the current genocide, but I also don't want Israel to be destroyed)? Is Bernie Sanders?
I thought I had it worked out, how to sort of strike a balance so I can keep my focus intact and let it be helpful without wasting time constantly correcting its stuff or shying away from actually paying attention to the code. But I think my strategy of "let the LLM generate a bunch of vomit to get things started and then take on the correct and augmentation from a human standpoint" has let the overall designs at a high level get a lot sloppier than they used to be.
Yeah, you might be right, it might be time to just set the stuff aside except for very specialized uses.
Certainly possible
I'm also genuinely a little bit alarmed looking back now at my pre-LLM code and seeing the quality vs. the with-LLM code.
If Himmler and Goring look like big fuckin' weirdos here, you are correct. Goring in particular became a hugely obese morphine addict in the later stages of the Reich. Albert Speer talks about going to his house to meet him and this slovenly wild-eyed dude in a robe coming to meet him at the door, and being absolutely shocked that this guy used to be some kind of war hero.
Hans-Ulrich Rudel, the top Stuka pilot of the war, recalled twice meeting Göring dressed in outlandish costumes: first, a medieval hunting costume, practicing archery with his doctor; and second, dressed in a red toga fastened with a golden clasp, smoking an unusually large pipe. Italian Foreign Minister Galeazzo Ciano once noted Göring wearing a fur coat that looked like what "a high-grade prostitute wears to the opera".[184] He threw lavish housewarming parties each time a round of construction was completed at Carinhall and changed costumes several times throughout the evenings.[185]
He was just a big fuckin' weirdo. He tried to say at his trial that he didn't have anything to do with any of this "holocaust" stuff, and they had a good chuckle and sentenced him to death.
IDK, I just popped open a project from 10 years ago and it's perfectly clean, it's actually better than some of my modern code because it's not LLM-ified to save time.
I think it has a lot more to do with whether it was made in that "kind of crappy IDK what I'm doing" phase of programming. Some of your old stuff is going to be in that category sure. As long as you're out of that, however long it took you to get there or however far away it was in time, your code should be good.
Partial plate matches and fuzzy matches exist for this reason, I don't think this would protect you if you were genuinely doing serious crime. I looked into the guy a little more, he's standing up against corruption of the NYPD which is a pretty important defense of the social contract (and apparently he's gotten cited and threatened for it, because the NYPD doesn't feel like it should have to follow the law.)
Apparently it's true:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/17/nyregion/license-plate-vigilantes.html
Presumably, what was happening was that NYC cops and city employees just didn't get tickets, but then with the automated cameras, the computer didn't know that it was supposed to give free passes to cops, and so they started bending their plates so they could keep their above-the-law status. Which is what prevents them from getting in trouble for having a defaced plate.
Fuck the NYPD, in other words
Yeah, that sounds about right lol. All my python projects for years were basically writing C in python. It actually took me all the way up until I got to look at the code ChatGPT likes to generate that I learned idiomatic python. My first database project was based on the Unix philosophy, where everything was strings (no ID keys, no normalization), because Unix is good.
The client wasn't happy when they looked at the DB code lmao. Whatever, it worked, they still paid us and I didn't do it again.
My first thought was "that might not be a bad idea the way things are going, just so the feds don't know where I am going at all times." My second thought is that I'm genuinely a little bit surprised that Flock cameras don't auto-flag this stuff and send a notification for the person to be pulled over.
If you defaced your plate into another plate that was also in the DB, then maybe you'd be fine, at least for a while.
My point is that attacking someone as a "Zionist," now that Israel exists and has for a while, is kind of meaningless and dishonest at this point. Specifically because the label can mean a few very different things, you can ratchet someone into a viewpoint they don't actually hold by using the loosest possible definition when classifying them as Zionist and then using the most damning possible definition when attacking them for being a Zionist.
I won't say 100%, but they're generally pretty good. Big ones I can think of:
- They're going to apply every attack against Kamala Harris that they did against Biden
- Trump is going to be infinitely worse for the Palestinians even than Biden was
The first is a little bit qualified I guess. I was somewhat against replacing Biden for that reason (definitely before the debate), which was absolutely a mistake. But I think in retrospect, the way that they were able to blame Kamala Harris for Gaza and inflation and make it work was pretty spot-on to what I predicted.
The second one, people were furiously telling me how wrong I was, how impossible it would be for anyone to be worse than Biden, and in early days saying that Trump had achieved a cease-fire and it was just proof of how easy it would have been if only Biden had put some slight effort to it.
Am I the only one who likes looking at my old code? Generally I feel like it's alright.
Usually the first project when I'm learning how to use some new language or environment is super-shitty. I can tell it's very bad, usually I don't like interacting with it if I have to make changes, but it's still not overly painful. It's just bad code. And that one exception aside I generally like looking at my code.
Known top Democrats Eileen Filler-Corn, Abigail Spanberger, and Tim Kaine. I mean, there are plenty of rabidly pro-Israel top Democrats, but none of them are in this article.
The emphasis on "Zionism" is a little bit weird, too. I've seen Bernie Sanders be accused of being a "Zionist," because he doesn't want Israel to be destroyed. I mean, I guess that's... true? Maybe? "Zionist" seems like something you can apply to a huge number of pretty reasonable people by that definition. It seems like kind of a textbook way to start to throw mud at a massively pro-Palestinian person, and accuse him of being anti-Palestinian, through cleverly dishonest use of language.
I don't want Israel to be destroyed. Am I a Zionist?
Edit: I looked up a little more about it. This Palestinian state congressman, who is a Democratic committee chair, has been talking vigorously on social media about the evils of Israel's most recent "war" since October 2023. It only turned into an issue with this specific post, because the language means one thing to him, but a very different thing to some people who are reading it, and so they objected.
Please accept our apologies, hopefully we're able to get our shit together at some point but it's likely to be like this for a while and probably get substantially worse before it gets better.
This is pretty good, but you gotta make it a little more subtle. Open with something perfectly reasonable and then sort of work up to the bait.
Yeah. I feel like in a few years when literally nothing works or is maintainable, people are going to have a resurgent realization of the importance of reliability in software design, that just throwing bodies and lines of code at the problem builds up a shaky structure that just isn't workable anymore once it grows beyond a certain size.
We used to know that, and somehow we forgot.
This has been happening to dozens of people. Yes, even white people from white countries. Don't fucking come to the US right now. We're not even really safe inside with our genuine US passports and all, definitely don't go out of your way to subject yourself to it if you're literally the currently active entry in the little Martin Niemöller to-do list.
I'm not talking to Palestinians, I'm talking to you. I'm pretty sure I explicitly said that I get why this person would say things that way. Sure, he's allowed. You're not. For you, I feel like it's fine for me to point out when you're using language that can be used in a careless way that can (and does) hinder the Palestinian cause by being used to attack their defenders. Right?
I would never dream of responding to this person's post by trying to tone-police him. I'm responding to the OP article, which is describing some people as "top Democrats" who are not top Democrats, putting their statements next to statements from the ADL to create an overall gestalt about "Democrats" by bringing in other things from other sources, other dishonest things. And I'm responding to you. Again, he gets to say these things in the way he wants to say them, it's fine, he's earned it. You have not. I get to disagree with you about your use of language.
I feel like I've reiterated enough at this point what my issue is. One person in the article is describing Zionism as "a supremacist ideology created to destroy and conquer everything and everyone in its way." Pretty much everyone in this conversation, I think, is against that. One other person is describing it as "the desire of Jewish people to have a state of Israel." Some people might be against that, for valid reasons at this point, but I don't think it is fair to attack someone who wants the second thing as if they were supporting the first thing. Using one word for both of those things and saying things like that it's the job of the "honest universalist democratic zionists" to make you stop, and otherwise you're going to continue with it, is just weird.
You're talking about Zionism as if it's a single international club, with central definitions and leadership that can include or exclude particular people. Honestly you seem like you're just persistently missing the point of what I'm trying to say. I've said it a few different times at this point, and it seems like you're still not grasping what I'm saying, so I'm going to give up trying. Cheers.