Author | Lightnews

(((Asa Zernik))) @asazernik.bsky.social · 2h

AFAIU those are respectively a) conventional invasion by the southern African states they were in a mini cold war with over apartheid/Namibia/Angola, and b) the end of apartheid removing that conflict from the board.

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(((Asa Zernik))) @asazernik.bsky.social · 2h

Genuinely curious as an outsider with only the vaguest awareness that such a thing existed: why was 2009 such a big cause?

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☀️ Starshine @starshine.bsky.social · 4h

saturday morning reading

Taiwain’s former nuclear weapons program

Nuclear weapons on-demand

David Albright and andrea stricken

Tyrion in game of thrones

That’s what i do

I drink Turkish coffee and realize how much i dont know things

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BeijingPalmer @beijingpalmer.bsky.social · 22h

I did! A good paper, but an even more essential one is Gambetta/Origgi on Italian academia and the preference for low-quality work. Literally everybody I know who has read this and has experience in China has remarked on how useful it is.

diegogambetta.org/wp-content/u...

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Greg Pak @gregpak.net · 1d

hey i know things are hard but just remember YOU are charismatic megafauna

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Micah @rincewind.run · 9h

my biggest takeaway from all the dudes talking about how could you possibly know this was a nazi symbol is there are a lot of fake WW2 nerds in the chat

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jolios torng @tarngerine.bsky.social · 17h

What happens when you turn a designer into an interpretability researcher? They spend hours staring at feature activations in SVG code to see if LLMs actually understand SVGs. It turns out – yes~

We found that semantic concepts transfer across text, ASCII, and SVG:

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Will Stancil @whstancil.bsky.social · 19h

Some AI experts told me it looks like Grok's been given a restricted list of sources when talking about subjects where Elon wants it to give a specific answer. So I asked Grok to give me a list of researchers on cognition and heritability and it spit out total bigots and pseudo-scientific cranks

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(((Asa Zernik))) @asazernik.bsky.social · 16h

Yeah. Just saying that 500 is perfectly large and that other methodology issues are introducing systematic bias instead.

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(((Asa Zernik))) @asazernik.bsky.social · 1d

An alternate take to others I've retweeted.

Alon (they/them) @alonlevy.bsky.social · 1d

Yeah, this. The ADL's primary problem is not that they care about Israel more than about Jews; it's that they attack left-wing anti-Semitism more vociferously than right-wing anti-Semitism, even when the latter isn't pro-Israel (Musk, as I never tire of pointing out, unbanned Quds News Network).

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A penitent who is loud @loudpenitent.bsky.social · 1d

It wasn't the ADL that made a bunch of people decide to side with Neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes because he was condemning Israel. People signed up for that dude's bigoted, antisemitic following BECAUSE he was hostile to Israel. You cannot actually neatly separate opinions on Israelis from opinions of Jews.

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A penitent who is loud @loudpenitent.bsky.social · 1d

Yes the ADL has clearly decided that protecting Israel is such a priority for them they they're willing to turn a blind eye to right wing bigotry and antisemitism.

This makes them just the mirror image of many leftists who decided anti-Israel activism was SO important antisemitism didn't matter.

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(((Asa Zernik))) @asazernik.bsky.social · 1d

That's a decent sample size if you're not trying to dig into the crosstabs! ie sample bias is a lot bigger of a worry than random sampling error.

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Ryan Geddie @ryangeddie.bsky.social · 1d

You still believe that material conditions are at the root of all social conflict? Because at seven it's marginal, right?

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(((Asa Zernik))) @asazernik.bsky.social · 1d

There's a reason most American Jews (and the Israeli Supreme Court) answer "yes it can be both"!

But the occupation creates an iron triangle (in the engineering sense). Democracy, a Jewish state, and the Whole Land of Israel: pick 2.

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(((Asa Zernik))) @asazernik.bsky.social · 1d

Open borders is not a common position, and if your standard for "is this compatible with democracy" excludes every state in the world (some of them both widely considered democratic and with nakedly ethnic immigration laws) then it's a double standard for Israel specifically.

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(((Asa Zernik))) @asazernik.bsky.social · 1d

The iron triangle is the result of practice, not theory. There is nothing magic about the '67 lines except that 1) Palestinians on the other side of them are not Israeli citizens and and 2) demographics.

(((Asa Zernik))) @asazernik.bsky.social · 1d

As a practical matter, such a state it would be unlikely to continue to use Jewish symbols and the Hebrew language and have a Law of Return. So no.

Again, root cause vs content.

This is *why* that iron triangle exists - with the Territories, there is only the barest Jewish majority, if at all.

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(((Asa Zernik))) @asazernik.bsky.social · 1d

This is a ridiculous position that no democracy I know of actually holds.

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(((Asa Zernik))) @asazernik.bsky.social · 1d

That is the root cause of its Jewish nature, but not the content of that nature.

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(((Asa Zernik))) @asazernik.bsky.social · 1d

(The US also discriminates by nationality for immigration purposes - its lottery system forces demographic balance across different regions of the world, regardless of individual desire to enter the country. It just decided to do so in a way that's neutral in internal ethnic politics.)

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(((Asa Zernik))) @asazernik.bsky.social · 1d

Foreigners are not citizens of the state. They also do not have civil rights (notably the right to vote).

This goes double when they have not yet physically entered the country.

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shit-the-nyt-says.bsky.social @shit-the-nyt-says.bsky.social · 1d

Yours is actually less insane than what's written now.

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(((Asa Zernik))) @asazernik.bsky.social · 1d

Then the iron triangle no longer applies, because those horrific measures are not compatible with democracy.

That is not the world we live in, though.

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(((Asa Zernik))) @asazernik.bsky.social · 1d

...as long as minority rights (individual and collective) are preserved and an electoral majority still wants those things.

More substantively "Jewish" than just having a Jewish majority. Generally liberal Jewish Zionists (Israeli and American) mean this when they say the two are compatible. [2/2]

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