- Jun 2024
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www.bostonreview.net www.bostonreview.net
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The first 9/11, unlike the second, did not change the world. It was “nothing of very great consequence,” Kissinger assured his boss a few days later. And judging by how it figures in conventional history, his words can hardly be faulted, though the survivors may see the matter differently. These events of little consequence were not limited to the military coup that destroyed Chilean democracy and set in motion the horror story that followed. As already discussed, the first 9/11 was just one act in the drama that began in 1962 when Kennedy shifted the mission of the Latin American militaries to “internal security.” The shattering aftermath is also of little consequence, the familiar pattern when history is guarded by responsible intellectuals.
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- Jul 2022
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lis653.wordpress.com lis653.wordpress.com
- May 2022
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www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
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Impact of Israeli strike in Gaza akin to chemical weapons, NGO report finds
This is not war crime, but it works in this manner. This was a justification to affect agricultural production in order to make life more difficult for the residents of Palestine.
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- May 2019
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www.theatlantic.com www.theatlantic.com
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“On the ground in Syria,” he continued, “Assad is doing everything he can to make sure the physical evidence [of potential human-rights violations] is destroyed, and the digital evidence, too. The combination of all this—the filters, the machine-learning algorithms, and new laws—will make it harder for us to document what’s happening in closed societies.” That, he fears, is what dictators want.
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Google and Facebook break out the numbers in their quarterly transparency reports. YouTube pulled 33 million videos off its network in 2018—roughly 90,000 a day. Of the videos removed after automated systems flagged them, 73 percent were removed so fast that no community members ever saw them. Meanwhile, Facebook removed 15 million pieces of content it deemed “terrorist propaganda” from October 2017 to September 2018. In the third quarter of 2018, machines performed 99.5 percent of Facebook’s “terrorist content” takedowns. Just 0.5 percent of the purged material was reported by users first.Those statistics are deeply troubling to open-source investigators, who complain that the machine-learning tools are black boxes.
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“We were collecting, archiving, and geolocating evidence, doing all sorts of verification for the case,” Khatib recalled. “Then one day we noticed that all the videos that we had been going through, all of a sudden, all of them were gone.”It wasn’t a sophisticated hack attack by pro-Assad forces that wiped out their work. It was the ruthlessly efficient work of machine-learning algorithms deployed by social networks, particularly YouTube and Facebook.
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- Jun 2016
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dailynous.com dailynous.com
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Title: Is Polite Philosophical Discussion Possible? (guest post by Nomy Arpaly) - Daily Nous
Keywords: implicit bias, philosophical discussion, war crimes, moral inhibitions—
Summary: For brevity’s sake, let’s just say it’s a big part of politeness or civility not to correct people.<br>A soldier who is fighting, even for a just cause, is in a precarious situation, with regard to morality, because he has lost, of necessity, the basic moral inhibition against killing people.<br>A philosopher who is arguing with another, even in pursuit of truth, is in a precarious situation with regard to politeness, because she has lost, of necessity, the basic civil inhibition against correcting people.<br>Having lost, of necessity, the inhibition against killing people, some soldiers find themselves shedding other moral inhibitions—and committing war crimes.<br>Having lost, of necessity, the inhibition against correcting people, some philosophers find themselves shedding other social inhibitions—and being terribly, terribly rude.<br>That’s just the nature of inhibition loss.<br>You need the real thing.<br>Being compelled to break the rule of thumb against telling people that they are mistaken in the understanding of an important thing is no excuse for also yelling at them, repeatedly interrupting them and talking over them, responding to their painstakingly prepared talks with a sneering “why should I be interested in any of this”?<br>Furthermore, I will argue against the philosophical Henry Kissinger within many of us who worries that whatever might be true about war and war crimes, realistically speaking philosophical rigor just requires rudeness.<br>It’s clearly a vice, virtue ethicists would say.<br>I would like to add the following.<br>First, if everyone is rude, women are judged unfairly (as potential colleagues, for example) because rude women are treated more harshly than rude men, by everyone, due to implicit bias.<br>Again, changing behavior is much easier than changing implicit bias.<br>Some think philosophy should change here—either through what I called “pacifism” earlier or through changing the way we evaluate people, or otherwise.<br>It won’t solve everything, but if we reduce rudeness, I solemnly promise that more women will want to do philosophy.<br>It is shown most emphatically by downright quiet, mild-mannered philosophers whose objections, expressed in a nice tone of voice, are nonetheless absolutely lethal.<br>They say revenge is best served cold.<br>Philosophical discussion can legitimately feel like a very tiring game of squash.<br>(Vincent Van Gogh, detail of “Four Cut Sunflowers”)<br>
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