Diabolical-dialectical - A's Blog Thingy

"The Earth is listening" painting by Mikhail Pyaskovsky, USSR, 1988.

Here is a masterlist of every single genocidal statement made by the State of Israel, all appropriately quoted and sourced.

These statements cannot be retracted.

Quote from the Israeli State Minister of Agriculture and Development.

And yet, Zionists will tell you that “This is not a genocide, Hamas are using Palestinians as human shields!”

I low-key love the fact that sci-fi has so conditioned us to expect to be hanging out with a bunch of cool space aliens, that legitimate, actual scientists keep proposing the most bizarre, three-blunts-into-the-rotation "theories" to explain the fact we're not.

Some of my favourites include:

Zoo Theory: What if there are loads of aliens out there, but they're not talking to us because of the Prime Directive from Star Trek? (Or because they're doing experiments on us???)

Dark Forest Theory: What if there are loads of aliens out there, but they all hate us and each other so they're all just waiting with a shotgun pointed at the door, ready to open fire on anything that moves?

Planetarium Theory: What if there's at least one alien with mastery over light and matter that's just making it seem to us that the universe is empty to us as, like, a joke?

Berserker Theory: What if there were loads of aliens, but one of them made infinite killer robots that murdered everyone and are coming for us next?!!

Like, the universe is at least 13,700,000,000 years old and 46,000,000,000 light years big. We have had the ability to transmit and receive signals for, what, 100 years, and our signals have so far travelled 200 light years?

The fact is biological life almost certainly has, does, or will develop elsewhere in the universe, and it's not impossible that a tiny amount of it has, does, or will develop in a way that we would understand as "intelligent". But, like, we're realistically never going to know because of the scale of the things involved.

So I'm proposing my own hypothesis. I call it the "Fool in a Field" hypothesis. It goes like this:

Humanity is a guy standing in the middle of a field at midnight. It's pitch black, he can't move, and he's been standing there for ages. He's just had the thought to swing his arms. He swings one of his arms, once, and does not hit another person. "Oh no!" He says. "Robots have killed them all!"

https://medium.com/@hondanhon/these-are-the-deep-learning-neural-network-voyages-of-the-starship-enterprise-5c62dacc0480

One’s regret is that society should be constructed on such a basis that man has been forced into a groove in which he cannot freely develop what is wonderful, and fascinating, and delightful in him

Why Are Rich People So Anxious?

It’s a little bit silly, but I have this little Hippocratic oath for data designers in the book. There are two basic questions I encourage them to ask themselves. One is, does it increase self-determination of poor people? And two, if it was aimed at anyone but poor and working people, would you be able to do it? And if you answer “no” to either of those, don’t do it. You’re on the wrong side of history.

The High-Tech Poorhouse

It’s not hard to see parallels between the three dimensions of perfectionism and so-called “call-out culture,” lately the hegemonic tendency on the Left: a condition in which everyone watches everyone else for a fatal slip-up, holding themselves to impossibly high standards of virtuous self-effacement, and being paralyzed with the secret (again, not unfounded) fear that they’re disposable to the group, that their judgment day is around the corner. The pattern is of a piece with other manifestations of neoliberal meritocratic perfectionism, from college admissions to obsessive Instagram curation. And because it divides rather than unites us, it’s no way to build a movement that ostensibly seeks to strike at the heart of power.

Under Neoliberalism, You Can Be Your Own Tyrannical Boss

s h a p e c a t s

art in architecture // wien leopoldstadt

II

part 2 of art in architecture in leopoldstadt, vienna. and again a mix of modern and traditional formal language, executed as sculpture, mosaic or sgraffito. sometimes the artworks refer to biblical themes (weintraubengasse), local handicrafts (große pfarrgasse) or history, such as former buildings or residents (rotensterngasse & czerniengasse).

1. weintraubengasse artist: f. barzig, d.j.

2. zirkusgasse

3. große pfargasse

4. rotensterngasse

5. czerniengasse (completion 1962) artist: k.drexler