Scapegoated for reporting

[jfz9580m]

65. Links

Last edited Sat May 16, 2026, 12:37 PM - Edit history (1)

Looking at the pointing hand, not what it is pointing to (Adam MacKay on Climate Change and War):

https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/staring-at-the-pointing-hand

War what (and who) is it good for? Hint: defense contracting and contractors. No wait that’s not a hint, it is a sledgehammer. What is most of the US state about now? I forget..What are those nice CEOs of Google, Microsoft, Facebook, OpenAi, Palantir, Lockheed Martin etc upto?
Who brings us our 24 hour hate 😍? We can’t invade the bunkers of the elite. I am angry about my life which is shit and have no particularly fixed principles? How about I start with that pos of there who is accesible and may quite possibly have a better life than me.
A little bit of regulation for tech like the brilliant Lina Khan? Nope.

Sorry. That is an assault on various things according to this creep (Marc Andreessen) - one of the architects of our present reality.

David Futrelle
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/marc-andreessen-silicon-valley-military-tech/

Janus Rose:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/major-tech-investor-calls-architect-of-fascism-a-saint-in-unhinged-manifesto/


Ma Etta has her work cut out for her:

https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/bitter-root

Etienne C Toussaint

But hate isn’t the only force that transforms. Later, we discover the Inzondo, people transformed not by hatred of others, but by the trauma and grief inflicted upon them. While Jinoo are created by perpetrating violence, Inzondo emerge from enduring it, their pain and rage turned inward until it consumes them.
Standing in my kitchen that evening, I kept thinking about something James Baldwin once wrote, something I’d cited in my legal scholarship without fully grasping its significance: “The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.” Bitter Root gestured at difficult questions. How do communities respond to systemic violence? Can people be healed from hatred, or must they be stopped by force? What do we owe to those in our own communities who’ve been so traumatized by oppression that they’ve become a danger to themselves and others?

At an interfaith calligraphy lesson the line between Muslim and Jew blur.

https://forward.com/culture/823984/interfaith-calligraphy-muslim-jewish/
Simone Saidmehr:

A Palestinian and an Israeli bereaved in violence make the case for peace

https://forward.com/news/819244/future-is-peace-aziz-abu-sarah-maoz-inon/

I do not speak of peace casually. I have been eaten alive with a cancerous hate at many times during the past 15 years. In my defense it was largely an undirected hate and pile of it was a blustering defense mechanism intended to scare off people. But I don’t think that scares people off anyway. It looks like febrile rage.

I am only an ordinary woman. So I have learnt more and more and am on my to surviving. What I remember from this time is emulating the same lack of moderation in my response to the whole that characterizes many things I find dejecting. Either syrupy reassurances of complete forgiveness - all glassy-eyed, zombified and cunningly insipid seeming enough to assuage the fears of various empty headed types. Or screaming wrath with somewhat unconvincing assertions of a promise to send everyone, everywhere who ever disrupted my life to perdition. Sometimes both within the space of 15 mins.
That can make one seem insane.

The reality though was I didn’t want to think about it. I wanted whatever it was to go away and leave me alone to miserably drivel and plod in familiar terrain. I wasn’t mentally unwell. I felt stripped of and denied any of the things that could work for one to allow one to reintegrate quietly into society using one’s own resources rather than ones that require one to grovel and plead with people one is at best indifferent to. And unfortunately, being not at all an ideal person, but a slacker/stoner I even feel almost martyred for that 😪. It is a lot of effort to feel positively. So I do get it.

But I got over it by eschewing either extreme. Which is what I shoot for. Neither forgiveness and apologies and cooperation. Nor war and thunder and brimstone. But laying the foundation in my mind to apply the same approach that guides routine scientific enquiry - find out what happened and why? What are its features, mechanics and dynamics. How to prevent it from ruining what is left of my life.

And pushback carefully, commensurately and hitting at the roots of all the real issues without going overboard or under the bus. It won’t be easy. If I have not lived in war zone or suffered the horrors many do, for which I am very grateful and would never fail to compare my situation- which is still far better than most. Because I had 33 years of a happy life, a small but supportive network of family (my mom and dad above all), friends and even a few colleagues and weak tie friendships like those on Du or a vegan lady I know and some others.

But I lost my mom. We were very close. And this was psychological torture sometimes. A lot of isolation, alienation, confusion- some of it no doubt my fault. I know it rationally more than I feel it. But some of it - part of the same pattern of solipsistic narcissism devouring the planet whole.

Everything is interconnected. Tejas Thackeray gets it:

Pooja Biraia covers it here:
https://www.theweek.in/theweek/specials/2024/05/04/tejas-thackeray-shares-his-passion-for-wildlife-conservation-and-photography.html

“But I always had a good understanding of the relationship various species had with their habitats.” In the years that followed, Tejas went from the Sahyadris to the Eastern Ghats, the northeast, the Andamans, the Malayan archipelago, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. “Everything in the tropics is interlinked,” he said.
He is cool. I liked him as soon as I read that piece. If Madhav Gadgil was too old (this was before he passed away), when I read this I thought “he would be easy to talk to”.

You cannot throw any piece away - civil/ LGBTQ rights, regulation, democracy, education, healthcare, science and the most shamefully neglected parts - the environment & basic common decency to animals whose cognition is much richer than humans want to accept. Factory farming and ventilation shutdown are moral abominations. The planet is not a dead rock to stripmine more and more recklessly; women’s rights and family planning/abortion access/education.
Bell Curves are everywhere.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-math-that-explains-why-bell-curves-are-everywhere-20260316/

Very few women want large families, though ones like me who want no family at all are also rare. Most are in the middle and it is merely coercion, lack of education and or access.

But a chaotically large and growing population helps undemocratic and greedy forces to parasitize every living organism and the planet with fewer consequences exploiting the confusion.

Physicians and biologists understand it. Regulation, homeostasis.
I doubt that Tejas is actually bad at math, anymore than Andreessen is good at..anything but corruption, self promotion and bloviation.

Prof Vassilevska is correct probably. Math is the foundation of everything and a profound implicit understanding of the interlinked nature of the natural and human world is an indication that someone has a far superior innate understanding of math than someone like that ass Andreessen.
https://news.mit.edu/2020/virginia-williams-professor-0107

Adam Becker gets it. He knows exactly what I merely intuit roughly - that these guys are pretty terrible at science often:
https://arstechnica.com/culture/2025/04/youre-not-going-to-mars-and-you-wont-live-forever-exploding-silicon-valleys-ideology/


These guys are refuse to accept the limits of growth by exploiting the planet and people worse off than me and me to the hilt.
It is exhausting.
(Accidentally made a thread of this instead of staying in this - my safe thread, hatrack in E&E aside).