This Week (Feb 22-28)

I was supposed to write this yesterday but when I woke up to the news of a new war (this time on Iran) led by Israel and the US, a retrospective of the week seemed silly. Of course the first news I heard was of a girl’s school having been bombed with dozens of children killed. Par for the course for Israel, unfortunately. How anyone can continue to defend much less praise that state is beyond me, but as the book title goes one day everyone will have always been against this.

I had the opportunity to meet some other people in the movement last weekend and that was both invigorating and enlightening. So many people have been doing work on the cause of Palestinian liberation for so many years in so many different arenas. I watched Edward Said’s The Shadow of the West and it’s sobering to see how little has changed in the decades since it was released in 1982.

It’s both uplifting and humbling when I think of how much of my life I didn’t do anything and what a trivial impact I’m having even now. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not downplaying what I am doing. I think it’s likely that what I’m doing is as impactful as anything else, maybe more so. It just never feels like enough compared to the need.

One of the people I met last week was Omar Zahzah, author of the book whose cover I posted above. When he told me he was an author and that he had written a book called Terms of Servitude: Zionism, Silicon Valley, and Digital/Settler-Colonialism in the Palestinian Liberation Struggle I thought he had written it just for me. When I told him how excited I was to read it he handed me a copy and refused to take money for it. Needless to say that’s what I’m reading now and it’s as good as I hoped.

Earlier in the week I finished reading The AI Con, and frankly I didn’t get much out of it. Some of the arguments were novel and interesting, but the authors just clearly find LLMs without any merit at all and are highly critical of anyone who thinks otherwise. That was my main takeaway, anyway. It was pretty heavy on rhetoric and light on argumentation. I’m not saying it wasn’t worth reading or that there weren’t any solid arguments in it, I definitely learned some things. I just found it disappointing. I’m also just not as impressed with human beings as they are. They seem to believe that any product of human creativity or ingenuity is inherently superior to something a computer generates, and I’m not as convinced of that.

I don’t have a lot more to say about this week. I didn’t watch a lot of videos or read a lot of articles because I actually spent most of the time working on T4P stuff.

I will say, even though I detest electoral politics, that I am in equal parts awestruck by what a good politician Zohran Mamdani is and how disgusting the DNC is. I like to watch IHIP News from time to time and this interview Jennifer did with a Democratic strategist about the DNC spiking the election autopsy was cathartic if nothing else. Meanwhile Mamdani is out there fulfilling all his campaign promises in record time without conceding an inch on his progressive values. If the Dems really cared about anything but holding on to power they could learn something from him.

I’ll just close by saying I’m hoping for the best for the Iranian people and every other victim of the US and Israel in the region. At least it seems possible that the killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei could result in a shorter war than may have happened if he lived to lead the defense. Of course it may be worse, but things can always be worse.