Blaming Ordinary People For The Ecocidal Consequences Of AI, And Other Notes

Reading by Tim Foley:

I just saw an article in The Conversation titled “Your AI habit is wasting precious resources. Here’s how to use it responsibly,” and it pisses me off because you can already see where this is going. Neoliberalism is already doing that thing where they shift all the blame for the environmental consequences of ecocidal capitalism to the individual consumer, like how they told everyone to ride bikes and recycle instead of regulating the corporations who are actually destroying our biosphere.

There are plenty of reasons why we should all avoid using AI, but the push to offload all the responsibility for the ecological consequences of data centers onto individual users instead of just regulating AI companies is typical capitalist power-serving bullshit.

This is especially the case when AI is being aggressively shoved down our throats on every front, and when we all know most of this AI infrastructure being built up all around us is probably just going to wind up going toward mass surveillance and the western war machine. Telling people not to use ChatGPT to make shitty memes isn’t going to save us from the ecological fallout of the AI-driven facial recognition murder drones we’ll have patrolling our skies in the future of this increasingly dark dystopia.

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A UN independent inquiry issued a report on Tuesday finding that Israeli forces have been deliberately targeting Palestinian children, saying Israel is guilty of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza, as well as war crimes in the West Bank.

I have said it before and I will say it again: the single dumbest conspiracy theory of all time is that there’s a secret plot between all the world’s mainstream humanitarian institutions to falsely portray Israel as a genocidal apartheid state.

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My new thing is just telling hasbarists “Nobody believes you.”

Because nobody does. Nobody’s buying the “Israel did nothing wrong because words words words words” schtick anymore. No amount of words can paper over all the horrifying shit we’ve seen these last few years.

There’s no real point trying to win a debate with an Israel apologist; they’ll always ignore all facts, reason and ethical concerns and just make whatever noises they need to make to advance the interests of their prize ethnostate. But by putting a “Nobody believes you” under their hasbara screeds it lets all the normal people know that they’re not the only ones who smell bullshit.

And that’s all you really need to do. Communicate to everyone that they don’t actually have to engage the mountains of words justifying transparently horrible actions, and that it’s fine to trust your instincts on this one. There’s no amount of words you can throw at someone to manipulate their thinking if they already know you’re a liar.

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The other day the IDF issued a statement complaining that “Hezbollah launched 50+ projectiles toward IDF soldiers operating in southern Lebanon.”

I’m sorry, operating where?

It’s been bananas watching the hasbara machine trying to spin Lebanese people firing upon hostile invaders inside Lebanon as some kind of unwarranted act of aggression.

After the 2024 “ceasefire”, Israel attacked Lebanon on a daily basis; this happened for months on end without a single kinetic response from Hezbollah. The mass-scale murdering resumed after Hezbollah fired a few rockets when the US and Israel launched the war on Iran, following month after month after month of daily IDF attacks on southern Lebanon.

Hasbarists have been trying to frame the IDF invasion as Israel going in to protect itself from unprovoked attacks by “terrorists”, but the violence has been unbelievably one-sided by Israeli forces, with Hezbollah exhibiting remarkable restraint.

Israel is very clearly and undeniably the aggressor here, and it’s absolutely hilarious that we’re being asked to view them as innocent little victims when they’re attacked by Lebanese men in Lebanon during an active military invasion.

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Oh those people are terrorists, you say? What terrorist things are they doing? Oh, they’re killing military forces who are invading their country?

Okay.

Oh and those other people are terrorists, you say? What did they do? Oh, they broke into a weapons factory and destroyed military equipment intended for use in an active genocide?

Okay.

Oh and those other people over there are terrorists also? What evil terrorist crimes are they guilty of? Oh, they held pieces of cardboard with the words “I Support Palestine Action” on them?

Okay.

Maybe I just don’t understand what terrorism is, then.

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