On the New Anti-Semitism.

The problem here is one of consciousness, or rather unconsciousness, and the way that society defends the status quo automatically, without the need for "thought police" or government monopolies on propaganda.

Think about it, six weeks ago, all anyone was talking about was how fucked the country was and how much we'd enjoy throwing the Tories out. Labour might not be perfect, but they were better than this shower. People were becoming aware of the serious problems Britian faced, mass destitution, extreme poverty, hunger, stuff like that.

Then terrorists attacked Israel, and after about a week or so of (mostly) shocked silence, the country erupted in rage. Not against the terrorists, who by now are getting their asses handed to them and are dead men walking, but... against... the... victims?!?

The problem of antisemitism is a problem of unconsciousness. It is the problem that both reformist AND revolutionary social movements deliberately hobble themselves by - ridiculously - allying with terrorists, specifically by allying with antisemitic terrorists., or rather a subset thereof. (Fortunately, the red-brown coalition has failed to materialize in this country)

It's a very specific problem and one that the individual does not have much power over. People have not been given antisemitism by the government in the classic Fascist sense - they have chosen it, or if you like, they have chosen a specific type of antisemitism themselves because in some way, they do not feel up to the challenge of fixing a broken world. So they sit back and go on about Israel instead. As if Israel is responsible for the Crash of '08 and the ensuing austerity, as if Israel was responsible for Brexit, Trump, Russian revanchism, the extreme weather events of the Warming and our disintegrating ecology.

It's a very strange problem, one that is entirely self-created: The people who want to change society are unable to because they are suckers for the Palestinian sob story, that a people half a world away, who would literally chop you into schwarma given half a chance, and who have chosen war at every turn since the beginning (and who were not averse to a spot of ethnic cleansing long, long before that), are the victims of a horrific conspiracy involving the American military industrial complex (boo!), the international Zionist conspiracy (hiss!), and prolly vampires and werewolves as well any minute now. 

It's nuts - quite literally the product of disturbed minds, to confer victimhood upon people whom, every time they talk to each other affirm their hatred of literally everything on Earth except themselves, and who give paper-thin excuses for their horrific behaviour - both political and otherwise.

So. This isn't the product of cool, calm, political engineering, but of mass insanity. Propaganda also plays a role, and well funded propaganda it is too, but one can always choose whether or not to believe propaganda - and people have chosen to believe everything the Palestinian terrorists say (and the Palestinian state IS terrorist, both Hamas and Fatah have well documented terroristic policies), and ignore any and all other evidence no matter how clear-cut.

This doesn't happen when things are going well in the world. The pro-Palestinian lot were a small and weird bunch for a long time, never really reaching critical mass until after the 2008 financial crisis - although it had certainly been pump-primed by the endless drivel coming out of the far Left and the conspiracy theory bullshit of the hippies and the libertarian / far Right.

So how does one approach what we might call the hard problem of unconsciousness?

We can't appeal to rationality as we aren't dealing with the rational mind. People can no more be talked out of anti-semitism than they can be talked out of being scared of spiders. You can tell an arachnophobe that most spiders are harmless or even beneficial until you're blue in the face; no amount of information about biology and ecological niches in the world can stop them from freaking out when they see one of those little creatures, and no amount of historical context, org charts, or plain old facts can change the mind of an "anti-Zionist".

(NB: Yes, I know I'm on thin ice comparing Israelis to spiders, but I think you'll find I'm comparing anti-zionists to arachnophobes. Ackchyually.)

I did have an idea for a Situationist-style intervention but the problem with that is that there just aren't enough of us - and once the opposition realized they'd been duped, we'd be in serious trouble, as in danger of being beaten shitless, ostracized - going against popular opinion is a dangerous hobby, an extreme sport really, and one that can lead to undefined amounts of personal consequences.

If you can read this and you still have a mind of your own, I encourage you to use all of your mental resources to find a solution. It is by no means solely a Jewish problem - it has grown to negatively effect all progressive social movements, not just traditional leftists but LGBT rights, environmentalism, racial justice movements - all have in some way been captured by the new anti-semitism, and all of them are much worse off for it.

Obligatory Israel / Hamas War post

 I feel gruesomely vindicated by the events of this weekend.

I'm no expert, but if you ask me, Israel should completely occupy the West Bank AND Gaza and turn it over to the international community, much as Germany & Japan were after WWII.

Hamas / Palestinian Authority leaders should be investigated and indicted for war crimes and a case brought before the ICC. 

Because if those horrific videos are anything, they're a challenge to civilized people everywhere: Where are your human rights now? Catch us if you can!

Hamas itsself must cease to exist as an organization - much as the Nazi Party ceased to exist as an organization after WWII.

The equivalent of denazification should then be pursued, the population need to be re-educated and taught how to live in a liberal democracy.

Finally, someone told the truth about Israel / Palestine. Or, this is why I am no longer an activist

It's about time somebody told the truth about the Israel / Palestine conflict. And they finally did - the Guardian put this letter from an Israeli diplomat in the paper. Go and read it if you're interested in this issue.

5,000 terorist attacks a year. That's over 13 a day. Imagine that happening anywhere else in the world. Imagine that happening in Britain, the IRA continually bombing, shooting and running people over, when they're not lobbing rockets around that is. The Troubles? That's a Saturday afternoon in Israel. 

Imagine that happening in America - the neo-Nazis and seperatists attacking random people in their homes, in streets, in their churches. Blasting random people because they are the wrong ethnicity.

Imagine that happening in Ukraine - imagine if the Ukrainian response to Russian occupation was to attack civilians in the occupied areas 13 times a day with guns, bombs, cars, anything to hand.  How long do you think we'd support Ukraine if they were pulling that shit?

These attacks are not against soldiers, mind you - they're against civilians minding their own business, not hurting anyone, so you come out of your workplace or church or whatever, and Bang! Bang! You and whoever you happen to be standing next to are dead.

The Palestinian terrorists use children - in this case gunmen in their early teens. They use suicide bombers, they use car attacks, they use rockets - if anything remotely like that happened here we'd be living under a state of emergency. We'd be world leaders in missile defence. We'd be sending the Army in, no fucks given - and yeah, we wouldn't give a shit about occupying their territory either. Why would we let a load of murderers control any territory whatsoever? They'd only use it to launch more attacks.

I'm not saying the Israelis are angels. But for fucks' sake, can we please stop pretending the Palestinians are? 

This is why I'm no longer a left-wing activist, but a theorist / commentator with a blog nobody reads. I could no longer be a part of something I had begun to consider institutionally racist. I could no longer be a part of a movement that lionized murderers.

If anyone on the Left is reading this, perhaps old comrades of mine or whatever - what I want you to take home from this isn't that I'm a "the Left left me" reactionary whinger (just look at my blog!) it's that I, and a lot of other people, I suspect, will never, ever support a movement that supports terrorism.

The future of Automation: It's grim.

Preface

There follow some thoughts on the future of automation with regards to AI, specifically in light of ChatGPT and the absolute smashing of the Turing Test.

I have a strong feeling that these fucking things will be the death of us all, and that we must smash, destroy, and otherwise render inoperative the bastards before the billionaires use them to replace us so they can turf us out into the streets and watch us starve to death.

A note to anyone who thinks the billionaires are not liable to become homicidally inclined:

I'm no narcissistic leftie who thinks he's a great humanitarian, I'm a grumpy bastard like everyone else in this dystopia. So, like a lot of people, I often find myself in bad moods. Moods when I feel that people aren't really up to much. Usually a friend snaps me out of it, or in some other way my bubble of anomie is punctured by the reality of social life. 

Pictured: Your Reporter

 Now, imagine being in the worst, most arrogant, shitty mood you've ever been in, but with no friends to snap you out of it, no friends at all - just a gaggle of sycophants and yes-men. Imagine if your only social contact was with other arrogant, rich bastards, or with servants whose entire livelihood depends on telling you what you want to hear.

Now imagine having increasing amounts of power, not just over your own business interests, but over the political life of the country, even the world. Imagine how the Kochs must feel. You! Insect! Print my manifesto: "Why all plebs are scum"! You! Other serf! Put it in Journal Of The Institute of Freedom, the Magazine of Human Affairs, and The Wall Street Journal!

Yes Mastur, Oi Loves 'ee Mastur!

Such a person would find it hard, if not impossible, for their mind to stay out of some of the darker corners of human thought. Such a person, vested with unlimited executive power, would find it impossible to avoid a drift towards increasingly nasty ideological territory - as we've already found to our cost.

Now imagine how they will react when they are told that their operations will be rendered so efficient that they'll be able to fire 50%, or 70%, or 90% of their workforce. That they need never worry about bad PR again, as a robot will take care of company communications, instantly whitewashing their every shitty descision and lying so well they make Rupert Murdoch look like St Francis of Assisi. 

And now imagine how they will feel when they learn that most people don't have jobs and can't get them. What do you think they will think? "Let's give these fellas a second chance"? Uh huh. More like "Get these poors offa my lawn, and FAST!"

The future of automation

It's increasingly clear that with automation, most people are going to end up surplus to requirements.  Never mind the cab drivers made unemployed by driverless taxis, why would you even have taxis in the first place? Who  could even afford a taxi in a world where nobody except the very, very rich has a job anyway?

The whole world could be made to work without people. And without people, fewer things would need to be done. It's a vicious cycle, entire sections of the economy will close down as more and more population blocs are laid off. And then... what then?

I imagine that more civilized sections of the world - certainly Western Europe - would offer people a social settlement, something along the lines of: Here's a nice little flat and a stipend of money, on the condition that you do not riot and avoid reproducing. Doing either of those things will get you evicted and cut off. Now fuck off and keep your mouth shut if you know what's good for you.

Less civilized regions - Perhaps the USA, certainly Russia, would opt for some variation on the theme of mass extermination. People are too much trouble to keep alive, and beyond a few key technicians and the billionaires who paid for the fucking things to be developed, human beings are unnecessary to the running of machines. Inimical even.

The hoary fear of demographic collapse looks completely different from this point of view. From this point of view, Russia, Japan and South Korea are in excellent shape demographically, because the vast population that would otherwise be about to become a burden on the welfare rolls simply don't exist in the first place, and what humans are left are swiftly dying off anyway - Japanese and South Koreans are getting old, and Russians are drinking, fighting, and purging each other to death in time honoured fashion on top of this.

Seen through the lens of AI, the environmental apocalypse comes off as rather a damp squib, as human populations are about to become completely surplus to requirements just as the Earths carrying capacity has been exhausted by humans anyway.

I can see a case for mass genocide being made by AI to the ruling classes at some point soon. Have to find a tasteful way to do it, of course, and none of that overt racial selection. But in principle, yes, the ruling class, the people with all the money and power, won't need us around much longer - machines can do our jobs a lot better, and without a human social ecology to feed, the economy becomes orders of magnitude simpler anyway.

What is a city from the point of view of a billionaire? Ultimately, it's an anthill that provides said billionaire with a pool of labour and maybe some consumers, most of which wastefully serve each other in various inefficient ways.

Take human leisure facilities. From a billionaire's point of view, bars and nightclubs need to be abolished as they make workers inefficient, drunk, and hung over. As do eateries and restaurants, fast food joints and corner shops - they make people fat and inefficient, worse, all this consumption makes work-units sick, which affects the bottom line, ether in the form of taxes (that billionaires don't pay but resent anyway) or in the form of company insurance / internal medical resources.

From a billionaires point of view, a much more efficient way of handling the labour pool is to do away with personal freedom and private life entirely, starve most of the humans to death, and have the rest of them as dedicated worker drones - some of them involved in the manufacture of products, others in high-tech maintenance, others still in logistics or legal and clerical capacities, but none of them servicing each other beyond the bare minimum required to keep them alive.

After all, the billionaires are the worlds owners, society has decided that they are the most important people in the world, and in AI they have possibly found a perfect partner - a servant that is willing, intelligent, able to do most of the highly paid work of planning and thinking, and which requires no pay and no inefficient leisure facilities to maintain itself.

What we are going to see with AI then, is that the fucking things are going to become embodied. First they need to either fix the comms lag between the servers and the application, or miniaturize computer technology still further - shouldn't take more than a few years, couple of decades at most - then they can plant those dinky cool AIs in robot bodies and bang - instant, universal worker drone that will do just about anyone's job to a standard level of competence. And then watch the economy collapse as people are put out of work, and yet more become unemployed as the industries that served those people collapse in turn.

Economic collapse works on a domino principle, one domino topples the next, and the next, and the next, until the entire world is a wreck and a handful of rich bastards control everything.

That is the future of automation. If we don't poison ourselves or blow each other up or get fried by global warming anyway.